What follows is a transcript of a Q&A session with director Roy Battersby, following a screening of two episodes of Home and Away (Granada, 1972) at HOME, Manchester on Monday 27 March 2017, shown as part of a short season of Forgotten TV Drama. Home and Away is a 7-part serial written by Julia … Continue reading
Michael Wearing, who died on 5 May 2017, was one of the talented people David Rose brought into television in the 1970s. Following the recent deaths of Barry Hanson, also recruited by Rose, Philip Saville, with whom Wearing worked on Boys from the Blackstuff, Rose himself in January and Christopher Morahan in April, the last few months … Continue reading
The Day of Ragnarok (BBC2, 2 January 1965) and Exit 19 (BBC2, 8 August 1966) are showing in a double bill as part of the Forgotten Dramas season at BFI Southbank on Wednesday 22 February at 6.20 pm. This is a rare opportunity to see two remarkable short films which have not been seen … Continue reading
Stephen Bourne looks at some of the early black writers of British television drama. The recent losses of Michael Abbensetts (1938-2016) and Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017) are a reminder that they were among the early black writers of British television drama. When they began writing for television in the 1970s there had already been several … Continue reading
Our Forgotten Dramas season continues on Friday 10 February at 8.40 pm in NFT2 with a double bill of two Granada dramas from 1968. It’s Dearer After Midnight and The House That Jigger Built were both written by John Finch, a writer probably best-known for A Family at War (Granada, 1970-72) and Sam (Granada, 1973-75), … Continue reading
Our second ‘Forgotten Television Dramas’ season continues at 8.40 pm on Wednesday 8 February with a screening of one of the earliest surviving British television dramas, The Passionate Pilgrim from 1953. Only two earlier plays survive before The Passionate Pilgrim which was broadcast live in the same week as the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and has … Continue reading
I first met David Rose, who died on 26 January 2017 at the age of 92, at a conference celebrating the work of John McGrath, at Royal Holloway, University of London in April 2002. David had, of course, worked with John McGrath and Troy Kennedy Martin, who was also at the conference, on Z Cars … Continue reading
Stephen Bourne looks at how gay men were portrayed in British television drama from 1939 to 1979. Until Queer as Folk hit British television screens on Channel 4 in 1999, a television drama about gay men as revealing and sexually explicit as this would not have been possible. In Queer as Folk its openly gay … Continue reading
Philip Saville’s remarkable career as an actor, director, writer and producer in film and television spanned 60 years, his first credits as an actor dating from 1948, while his last credit as a director was 2009. He made his first appearances on stage and screen while studying at RADA and University College London, after … Continue reading
When the film and television producer Barry Hanson died in June 2016 Christopher Hampton wrote an obituary for the Guardian which highlighted Hanson’s best-known productions: The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and The Long Good Friday (1980), referring also to Hanson’s work at the Royal Court Theatre and Hull Arts Centre in the late 1960s, but … Continue reading
