Drama on the box

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Since 2000 there has been a significant historical turn in television drama studies. Previously, books on British television drama were either edited collections about writers, such as George Brandt’s British Television Drama (1981) and Frank Pike’s Ah! Mischief: The Writer and Television (1982); books by people who had worked in the industry, such as Irene Shubik’s Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama (1975) and Shaun Sutton’s The Largest Theatre in the World: Thirty Years of Television Drama (1982); or academic volumes such as John Tulloch’s Television Drama: Agency, Audiences and Myth (1990) and Robin Nelson’s TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (1997). In 2000, however, several books were published which collectively marked animportant development in television drama studies. Jason Jacobs’ The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (2000) was the first full-length study of what might be described as the ‘first age’ of British television drama, the period of the BBC’s monopoly from 1936-55. John Caughie’s Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (2000) was a rigorous analysis of significant moments in British television drama from the 1930s to the 1990s and the collection edited by Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey and Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (2000), brought together academics and practitioners who had contributed to a ground-breaking conference, ‘“On the Boundary”: Turning Points in Television Drama, 1965-2000’, at the University of Reading in 1998. Other books published in 2001-3, such as Giddings and Selby (2001), Cardwell(2002), Chapman (2002), Sydney-Smith (2002), Cooke (2003) and Finch, Cox and Giles (2003) confirmed the renewed interest in television historiography, 20 years after the publication of Brandt’s (1981) foundational work. Since 2003 there have been several AHRC-funded research projects and conferences on British television drama history which have resulted in further publications, including Bignell and Lacey (2005), Wheatley (2007) and Cooke (2012). This process of the historiographical reassessment of British television drama shows no sign of abating, with the University of Westminster undertaking a three-year research project from 2012 to 2015 on ‘Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television’, which includes the production of a database of all theater plays produced on British television since 1936, and Royal Holloway University of London also undertaking a three-year project from 2013 to 2016 on ‘The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK’.