The Forgotten Television Drama season, ‘Rediscovering the Half-Hour Play’, continues at BFI Southbank on Sunday 7 May 2023 with a session looking at early work by three writers who went on to produce landmark television drama: John Mortimer, Dennis Potter and Andrew Davies. As with directors, producers and script editors the half-hour play provided a […]
A new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations starts at nine o’clock on BBC One tonight. This will be the seventh time that the novel has been serialized for British television, with previous versions in 1959, 1967, 1981, 1991, 1999 and 2011 (all BBC productions apart from HTV/ ITV in 1991). One interesting feature of […]
By Tom May During its run from 1970 until 1984, the one-off drama series Play for Today employed seven different title sequences. In my article for the Special Issue on ‘Play for Today at 50’ for the Journal of British Cinema and Television , I provide a historical analysis of these. Focusing on how the […]
This is the conclusion of a series of posts in which we have published selections of ‘top’ Plays for Today by a range of writers, researchers and media professionals. The brief was that such lists should not necessarily consist of what were considered to be the ‘best’ Plays for Today but could also include personal […]
This is the last in a series of posts in which we publish the ‘top’ Plays for Today identified by a range of writers, researchers and media professionals. The brief was that such lists should not necessarily consist of what were considered to be the ‘best’ Plays for Today but could also include personal favourites, or […]
By Simon Farquhar Written by Wilson John Haire, produced by Ann Scott and directed by John Bruce. Broadcast at 9.25pm on Thursday, 15 May 1975. Despite being one of the first television dramas to be set amidst the Troubles, Wilson John Haire’s simple and sincere The Dandelion Clock, broadcast on 15 May 1975, has been […]
In February 1980, The South Bank Show featured an item, presented by Richard Hoggart, on the scarcity of television drama concerned with the conflict in Northern Ireland. There were probably two main reasons for this. The BBC in Northern Ireland had little experience of drama production and, unlike English Regions Drama in Birmingham and BBC […]
By Ben Lamb Arguably The Cops is a forgotten television drama. For television aficionados such as ourselves it feels only yesterday that the programme’s signature handheld Jason Bourne-style shaky cameras dragged the British police procedural kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century – starkly daring to suggest, as it did, that some coppers and detectives […]
By Simon Farquhar Written by John Hopkins, directed by Herbert Wise and produced by Graeme McDonald. Broadcast on BBC1 at 9.25pm on Tuesday 3 February 1976 On a good day, no television playwright could churn up emotional nausea quite as mercilessly as John Hopkins. Originally a floor manager at Granada television, in 1957 his life […]
Wednesday 14th and Thursday 15th October 2020 Beginning on BBC1 on Thursday 15 October 1970, and continuing until 1984, Play for Today was one of the most important series ever of British television drama. Running to over 300 individual plays and regularly commanding audiences of several millions, the series won a reputation for artistic experiment […]
Forgotten Television Drama