TV Drama: Then and Now

Abstract

Forgive me if this talk is personal and anecdotal, but perhaps that will be a concrete way of examining the virtues and vices of television for a writer and director in the 1960s and 1970s.1 I ought to say at the outset that I was probably the main progenitor of the theory that the late fifties and the sixties were the ‘Golden Age’ of television, in an account I gave for the first MacTaggart lecture.2 I would love everybody who got that phrase from that lecture to read very carefully the reservations and disclaimers I put in as well: it was nothing like a Golden Age in its extreme backwardness, culturally, socially and politically; indeed, the BBC was rather like mainstream theatre. In fact most of its mores and most of its values came directly from the West End, and most of its drama as well. I remember in the 1950s watching three extremely cumbersome cameras, one on either side and one in the middle, shooting down the aisle, in a West End theatre, to make ‘television drama’. If that wasn’t being done, then plays which looked and sounded like West End plays were being put on studio floats in huge box sets which, to all intents and purposes, were proscenium arches. So, I would just like to begin by pointing that out to anyone who believes this idea that the sixties were a kind of ‘Golden Age’. On the other hand, there were various things about the late fifties and sixties which are worth remembering …