The Forgotten Television Drama season, ‘Rediscovering the Half-Hour Play’, continues at BFI Southbank on Saturday 20 May 2023 with a selection of plays from the Regions. The smaller ITV companies and regional BBC production centres did not always have the budgets to produce full-length plays or series but they produced a significant number of half-hour […]
Category: BBC Pebble Mill
Introduction by Tom May While Philip Martin’s television drama work might be justifiably termed as non-naturalistic, experimental, postmodernism or popular modernism, his can also simply be described as a truly original voice.[1] I only encountered Philip near the end of his well-lived life, via the technological apparatus of Zoom I conducted two interviews in the summer […]
Philip Martin, who died last December, was the author of two Play for Todays – Gangsters (1975, which subsequently spun off into two BBC series, 1976-78) and The Remainder Man (1982). Forgotten Television Drama pays tribute by publishing an article in three parts, drawn from extensive interviews with Martin conducted by Tom May last year. […]
Along with Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play, Play for Today constitutes one of the most important series of British television drama. Beginning on BBC1 on Thursday 15 October 1970, it continued until 1984, running to over 300 individual plays and regularly commanding audiences of several millions. Launched as a successor to The Wednesday Play […]
Second City Firsts (BBC2, 1973-78) Panel Discussion with Philip Jackson (PJ), Tara Prem (TP), Philip Saville (PS) and Jack Shepherd (JS) chaired by Lez Cooke (LC) Television Drama: The Forgotten, the Lost and the Neglected Conference Royal Holloway, University of London 23 April 2015 LC: Welcome to this session on Second City Firsts (BBC2, 1973-78). […]
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 […]
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 which […]
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 […]
Our ‘TV’s Forgotten Dramas’ season at BFI Southbank opens on 3 February with a screening of two plays from the Second City Firsts series, Alan Bleasdale’s Early to Bed (1975) and Ian McEwan’s Jack Flea’s Birthday Celebration (1976), followed by a panel discussion with Alison Steadman, former Commisioning Editor of Drama at Channel 4 Peter […]
Forgotten Television Drama 