Following the death of Tony Garnett, on 12 January 2020, obituary writers and those paying tribute to him understandably focused on his hugely influential career as a radical television producer, sometimes noting that he had begun his career as an actor in series such as An Age of Kings (BBC, 1960), Emergency – Ward 10 … Continue reading
The Forgotten Black TV Drama season at BFI Southbank ended on Monday 25 February with a double bill of plays from 1984. The Hope and the Glory (BBC2, 25 April 1984) was the first of two television plays by Caryl Phillips to be broadcast in 1984 (the other was The Record, Channel 4, 7 July … Continue reading
Our Forgotten Black TV Drama season at BFI Southbank continues on Saturday 23 February at 8.30pm with a double bill of plays from the mid-1970s. Black Feet in the Snow (BBC2, 8 April 1974) was made for the BBC’s Open Door series by the Radical Alliance of Poets and Players and was based on a … Continue reading
Our Forgotten Black TV Drama season continues at BFI Southbank on Friday 15 February at 6.00pm with a screening of The Museum Attendant (BBC2, 1973), the first play for television by Michael Abbensetts, plus a short programme from 1983 about the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, followed by her 1976 story for Crown Court: The Ju-Ju Landlord (Granada, 1976). … Continue reading
The third screening in our season of Forgotten Black TV Drama at BFI Southbank, on Monday 11 February at 6.00pm, is a double bill of plays written by Barry Reckord who came to Britain from Jamaica in 1950 to study at Cambridge University and wrote plays for the theatre and television from the early 50s … Continue reading
Our Forgotten Black TV Drama season at BFI Southbank continues at 5.20pm on Sunday 10 February with a double bill of two ATV Drama ’61 plays written by Jan Carew (the first with his wife, Sylvia Wynter), both directed by Herbert Wise. The Big Pride (28 May 1961) features William Marshall, Johnny Sekka, Barbara Assoon … Continue reading
Our Forgotten Black Television Drama season opens at BFI Southbank on Monday 4 February with a screening of Trix Worrell’s Just Like Mohicans (Channel 4, 1985) for which Worrell won Channel 4’s Debut ’84 prize for new writers. Directed by Faith Isiakpere, Just Like Mohicans features Mona Hammond as an elderly woman whose home is … Continue reading
We are pleased to announce a new season of Forgotten TV Drama at BFI Southbank in February 2019. Curated by Stephen Bourne and Lez Cooke ‘Forgotten Black TV Drama’ presents a selection of ground-breaking black British television dramas from 1961-1985, many of them not seen since they were first broadcast. The season showcases the work … Continue reading
A Life Found in a Skip [1] by Joel Finler Virtually forgotten today, Lionel Harris was one of the leading producer/directors of live television drama in the 1950s when adaptations of the most successful West End plays became a staple fare of both the BBC and ITV. He joined the newly formed ITV in 1955 and … Continue reading
Following the release of Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Armchair Theatre Archive in 2017 two more volumes have been released this year. Volume 3 presents four plays produced from 1959 to 1966. John Glennon’s The Bird, The Bear and the Actress (1959), directed by Ted Kotcheff, is about a chance meeting on the French … Continue reading
