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 […]
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: […]
Stephen Bourne looks at how gay men were portrayed in British television drama from 1939 to 1979. Until Queer as Folk hit British television screens on Channel 4 in 1999, a television drama about gay men as revealing and sexually explicit as this would not have been possible. In Queer as Folk its openly gay […]
Even when you work as an assiduous researcher of television drama history, it’s rare that you make a genuinely major discovery, but watching Patricia Hooker’s 1973 Armchair Theatre play, ‘The Golden Road’ (to be screened at BFI Southbank on February 23 as part of our ‘TV’s Forgotten Dramas’ season), I had the tremendously exciting sensation […]
Forgotten Television Drama