Not in Front of the Viewers

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 […]

Audience hostility: ‘Play for Today: Circle Line’ (BBC, 1971)

 I’m spending much of the first two months of the Forgotten Television Drama project in the BBC Written Archives in Caversham, taking the opportunity to systematically go through all of the files of Audience Research Reports that the BBC compiled between 1950 and 1982 (well over 500 per annum for most of those years!).