Fay Weldon, who died on Wednesday, was an exceptionally prolific writer of television drama up until the end of the last century. Two programmes have regularly been mentioned in the coverage of her life – her work on Upstairs, Downstairs (LWT/ ITV 1971-75), including writing the first episode, and her sensational serial adaptation of her […]
Shortly before he died in December 2020 Brian Parker had started to write his memoirs, encouraged apparently by my suggesting it during the course of several months’ correspondence, coupled with the fact that, because of the Coronavirus pandemic, he was sheltering in the Trossachs with no television! If that was the case I wish I’d […]
I had the good fortune to interview the actor Maurice Roëves (who has died at the age of 83) on two occasions. Maurice had an extraordinarily prolific 55-year career in film, theatre and especially television, the span and range of which (“beginning with an episode of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook in 1966 and concluding with a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Not every archive rediscovery is a dramatic recovery from an outside source such as a film collector selling a print on, or an original programme maker mentioning that they made an off-air recording of one of their shows. Many, perhaps the majority, of recovered programmes never actually left the archives, but have existed as mislabelled […]
One of the four plays included on Armchair Theatre Archive: Volume Two, (one of the titles in our ‘Forgotten TV Drama’ DVD range) is The Invasion (31 March 1963) written by Angus Wilson and directed by Charles Jarrott. Since I wrote the Viewing Notes for the play last year, a few more details have come […]
A new biography written by Michael Seely, Directed by Douglas Camfield, is published this week by Miwk Books. Camfield (1931-84) was one of British television’s great directors, but the combined factors of his early death and the unavailability of many of his productions have left both the man and his works being only partially […]
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the BBC’s internal Audience Research Unit compiled up to 700 television Audience Research reports per year, attempting to cover the complete spectrum of BBC TV programming. What I’m going to do today is consider the value of this material, in relation to my own work on the development of […]
Forgotten Television Drama