‘It was political’: John McGrath and Radical Television Drama

Abstract

John McGrath is perhaps best known for his work with the radical theatre company 7:84, which he founded in 1971, but he also had a parallel career in film and television which has not received the attention it deserves. He joined the Script Department at the BBC in 1959 as a scriptwriter/adaptor, working alongside other enthusiastic young writers, including Troy Kennedy Martin. He adapted work such as Eugene O’Neill’s Three One-Act Plays of the Sea (1960), and also took a BBC Director’s Course which enabled him to undertake directing assignments for Bookstand (1961) and for dramas such as The Compartment (1961) by Johnny Speight, featuring Michael Caine and Frank Finlay, which he remade for The Wednesday Play in 1969. But it was Z-Cars (1962–78), on which he worked with Troy Kennedy Martin, that demonstrated his talent for directing fast-paced, sociallyconscious popular drama. He and Kennedy Martin wanted to use the police genre to explore the lives of ordinary people in Liverpool, where McGrath was born, and some of the early Z-Cars episodes were indeed radical, both stylistically and in terms of their sometimes critical representations of the police. But the constraints of series drama eventually militated against this kind of radical approach, and both he and Kennedy Martin left before the first series ended. Over the next four years, McGrath combined directing such productions as The Fly Sham (BBC, 1963), The Wedding Dress (Granada, 1963) and The Entertainers (Granada, 1964), with working on the arts programme Tempo (ABC, 1963) as director and interviewer (his interviewees included R. D. Laing and Joan Littlewood). In 1964, he collaborated with Kennedy Martin on the non-naturalistic series Diary