The eighth title in our ‘Forgotten TV Drama’ range has been announced. For Maddie With Love (ATV 1980) is released by Network on April 15. Hard-hitting and unsentimental, For Maddie With Love is the story of a woman who knows she is dying and, in doing so, rediscovers the love she has for her husband […]
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 […]
Love Story (ATV/ ITV 1963-74) is probably the most popular and long-running British television drama programme to have subsequently suffered from total obscurity and neglect after its broadcast life. To my knowledge, none of the 128 plays made for the series have been subsequently released, repeated or screened since transmission, and no writing – either […]
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 […]
We are pleased to be able to announce details of the ‘Drama She Wrote’ season, held at BFI Southbank this September and October, curated by Dick Fiddy and Billy Smart. The season presents a range of neglected TV dramas by women writers from the ’50s to the ’70s. The full line-up is: Drama She Wrote: […]
The second ‘Television’s Forgotten Dramas’ season at BFI Southbank was launched on 2 February 2017 with a screening of John Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam, followed by a discussion about the play, John Osborne, and forgotten television drama more generally, with Anthony Page (the play’s original director, of both stage and TV versions) and playwright […]
Our second ‘Forgotten Television Dramas’ season launches at 6.00 this evening with a screening of John Osborne’s ‘The Hotel in Amsterdam’, unseen since 1971. A full article about this play (and a later 2004 BBC production) can be found on our blog here. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the play’s […]
We are pleased to be able to announce details of the second ‘Forgotten Dramas: Rediscovering British Television’s Neglected Plays’ season, held at BFI Southbank this February, curated by Lez Cooke, John Hill and Billy Smart as a part of the AHRC-funded ‘History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK’ project at Royal Holloway College, University […]
Today’s post considers the specific nature of performance in multi-camera studio television drama of the 1970s, through textual analysis and production context of Hunters Walk (ITV/ATV 1973-76), a now-forgotten ITV police series that was popular in its day.
This post suggests how changing approaches to making television drama have emphasised different aspects of John Osborne’s dramaturgy, and the particular strengths of multi-camera, ‘as live’ studio production in establishing and evoking a play’s inner meaning.
Forgotten Television Drama