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). … Continue reading
Our Forgotten Dramas season continues on Friday 10 February at 8.40 pm in NFT2 with a double bill of two Granada dramas from 1968. It’s Dearer After Midnight and The House That Jigger Built were both written by John Finch, a writer probably best-known for A Family at War (Granada, 1970-72) and Sam (Granada, 1973-75), … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Although BBC Television began broadcasting in the London area in 1936, television did not come to the Midlands until December 1949 when the Sutton Coldfield transmitter was opened. Initially television programmes transmitted in the Midlands came from London and it was not until late 1951 that TV programmes started to be produced by BBC Midland.
BBC North East & Cumbria is not known for its drama productions, yet between 1971 and 1986 at least eleven dramatised documentaries were produced by this regional BBC production centre, two of them in three parts, making 15 half-hour programmes altogether.
Of the BBC’s regional production centres BBC East is not known for its television drama productions.
This paper looks at a British children’s television drama serial of the late 1960s, Tom Grattan’s War, and tries to establish its significance by asking a simple question: Who was this series made for?
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 … Continue reading
by Lez Cooke In recent years, there has been a degree of return to empirically-based television history that seeks to ‘revise’ the conventional ways in which television’s past has been understood.
