Play for Today

Introductory Essay | Contents: Site updates | Contents: Features section |

Episode List Part 1: 1970-76 | Episode List Part 2: 1977-84 | Commercial availability

Introductory essay

by Dave Rolinson

The resource

This section of the Hull University Film Studies website is a resource dedicated to the study of the BBC's play strand Play for Today. In the first instance, this resource supports two of our modules - the third-year module British Television Drama and, in particular, the research-process module on the forthcoming MA in British Cinema. Further guidance on how this resource supports those modules, and specific education-related tasks, will be provided in classes. However, we have made elements of this resource public, partly so that other educational institutions may use it in their teaching (please get in touch if you would like further guidance) but also so that it can reach out and find an interested readership beyond academia.

This site starts with an episode guide listing every play and its writer and director - click here. Click on any underlined title or name to read an essay on that play or programme-maker.  At the time of launching, the site contains a handful of essays on early plays - over the next few years, the site will grow with material on each individual play, biographies of its major crew, and supporting material: original interviews, wider essays, photographs, classroom tasks and other features. (Anyone interested in contributing to the site is welcome to get in touch by e-mail with the content editors, Dave Rolinson and John Williams). Although this is mainly an academic resource for students of television drama, we would also like to mirror the eclecticism of the strand itself by encouraging a wide variety of approaches. You don't have to be a student or lecturer to contribute, and the pieces should show a variety of voices - some will be serious and academic, others will be lighter; some will focus on the writer, others on the director, others on actors, and so on. This resource will ultimately grow into a stand-alone web resource.

Play for Today: why does it warrant such attention?

Play for Today was a milestone in the history of British television, cinema and the wider culture. At its best, the strand combined a remit encouraging aesthetic experimentation and political radicalism with the potential to reach audiences of millions, free-to-air, on primetime BBC1 (at a time when there were far fewer channels to watch). This combination makes Play for Today a true ‘National Theatre'. One of the strand's contributors, the playwright David Hare, has argued that the single play in this period, as written by the likes of Dennis Potter and David Mercer, became ‘the most important new indigenous art form of the 20th century' (1). Hare added elsewhere that the form allowed the ‘freedom to say what you wanted, and the rare excitement of knowing that it was being talked about by people all over the country' (2).

This freedom was grasped by new and established writers and directors. In its first year alone, it employed such diverse practitioners as John Osborne, Ingmar Bergman, Philip Saville, Dennis Potter, Alan Clarke, Colin Welland and James Ferman. It allowed a space for development for future Hollywood directors like Michael Apted, Stephen Frears and Mike Newell, and such stalwarts of British and European cinema as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. As well as providing an outlet for writers, the strand's prestigious all-film slots afforded opportunities for directors - not just a ‘National Theatre', but a true national cinema at a time when British cinema was bogged down in sitcom spin-off hell. Many of the strand's contributors saw its overarching influence in terms of a studio system, which, as Andrew Clifford argues, rivals the celebrated developments within American cinema of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola: ‘In Britain, developments in another kind of studio system, the BBC's, enabled writers like Roy Minton, Colin Welland, Peter Terson, David Rudkin and David Hare... to flourish... [each director] could learn, make mistakes, do new things without his career resting on each new play' (3). This was helped by a system which gave autonomy to producers, and the dedicated figures who grabbed this autonomy with both hands: Margaret Matheson, David Rose, Irene Shubik and David Rose amongst others.

We're motivated by the fact that television plays, unlike cinema films, have little afterlife. Although its most famous productions - Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills - have been repeated fairly regularly and released on DVD, this represents only a fraction of Play for Today's output. For people interested in or studying these plays, access remains a major problem. Paradoxically, plays which drew audiences of millions dwarfing contemporaneous cinema audiences are less likely to be available to view than cinema works of the period. There is, therefore, a risk that these plays will be neglected, condemned by a short-sighted belief amongst critics in the medium's ‘inherent' ephemerality. There are movements to counteract this, including the British Film Institute's 'Mediatheque' initiative at their Southbank site in London. Since May 2007, there has been a Play for Today retrospective: every month, new titles from the National Archive are digitised and available to view for free to any visitor. Eventually, this will expand to cover every play. (Co-editor Dave Rolinson was invited to speak on a panel at the launch event at the National Film Theatre on Saturday 19 May 2007 alongside producer Irene Shubik, director Michael Tuchner and writer Trevor Griffiths, in a discussion chaired by Lez Cooke.) This initiative is very welcome, and hopefully will extend to include regional centres so that people outside London can also gain access. For more information on Mediatheque, see website.

We want to address television drama's own lack of history, not only by drawing attention to select masterpieces (though this is important enough given the emergence of a ‘canon' in academic writing on television), but by covering the entire series, to get closer to a real sense of what the culture has lost with the decline of the single play strand. These days, the play or film-for-television has been subsumed by cinema films financed by television, and writers and directors have fewer slots to fight for. Experimentation is hindered by the very form - the higher budget required for films renders each piece a greater risk, particularly when that work is politically-motivated, within a culture and an industry reluctant to engage with political opposition. Our attempt to cover every play in different forms - essays, interviews, supporting material, educational activities - is ambitious and will continue to develop over several years. We will include studio pieces so that we don't just import film studies terminology to discuss those filmed plays in cinema terms - we also want to engage with television on its own terms.  

So, what has the culture lost? In one of the best books ever written about television, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, John Cook summarises the single play as television's cutting edge, ‘a special place for the expression of the individual, dissident or questioning voice' (4). Political radicalism was a keynote, resulting in controversies over bias and didactic realism: take Days of Hope, Leeds - United!, The Legion Hall Bombing, Psy-Warriors and pieces by renowned playwrights including Hare, Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths. In an obituary for Jim Allen, who wrote such strong pieces as The Rank and File, Days of Hope, The Spongers and United Kingdom, Kenith Trodd summed up the ‘heady fantasy' of many that such plays ‘could maybe start a walkout around the country on a Thursday morning' (5). Such ambitions came under increasing attack from other areas, and one of our aims with this site is to explore the extent to which radical space became contested, with controversies over screened plays and the banning of plays like Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle and Roy Minton's Scum.  

But inherent in this are two interlinked dangers - that critics only describe Play for Today as an outlet for 'issues' and 'realism', and that the strand be over-emphasised, rather than acting as a banner for a variety of disparate pieces. These concerns were combined in an audience research department report published in 1977, which sought 'to discover if viewers see any common features in the plays shown under the title Play for Today and, if so, is there any evidence that the title has acquired an unintended image?' (6). Certainly there was more to the strand than issue-based realism. Its broad output included fantasy pieces like Z For Zachariah, comedies and genre pieces; Rumpole of the Bailey started here, as did Philip Martin's extraordinary Gangsters, and David Rudkin and Alan Clarke's Penda's Fen, one of British television's masterpieces. Gangsters and Penda's Fen were the product of BBC English Regions Drama based at BBC Birmingham (Pebble Mill) who, under David Rose, formed a formidable outpost of BBC Drama.  

On the other hand, while mentioning such plays, it's worth drawing attention to a little phrase above: ‘At its best'. We are aware of the danger of sinking into rhetoric about a ‘golden age'. As the BBC's current Head of Films, David M Thompson, warns about The Wednesday Play and Play for Today, ‘the truth is it that wasn't all rosy under the old system, there were a lot of low points as well as high points. People only ever remember Cathy Come Home, they don't remember all the dross' (7). These days, he adds, the ‘tradition of original, authored drama with a strong vision is as alive and kicking as it's ever been... What is true is that there's less of it' (8). Some of the forgotten plays were forgotten for very good reasons, and if there were four or five classics a year then, well, we get those now - panic over standards of drama is clearly nonsensical when, since 2000, we've had Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, As the Beast Sleeps, Perfect Strangers, The Lost Prince, The Navigators, The Gathering Storm, Buried, Gideon's Daughter, The Mark of Cain... However, the impact of each new piece by a Stephen Poliakoff, William Ivory or Jimmy McGovern is an almost defiant stand-alone blast - what is lacking without that overarching strand identity is a regular institutional space within which writers and directors could develop, and through which the space was maintained within the culture. This is not simply a nostalgic study of the history of television drama but also a reminder of television drama's potential in the present and future, for those studying, watching or working in television today.

The loss is emphasised by the sheer number of play strands from this period: a by no means exhaustive list could include Armchair Theatre, Half Hour Story, Saturday Night Theatre, The Wednesday Play (the predecessor of Play for Today), Story Parade, Playhouse, Out of the Unknown, Plays of Today, Thirty Minute Theatre, Theatre 625, Second City Firsts, Play of the Week, Plays for Britain, Screenplay, Stages and, as television moved closer to film production, Screen One, Screen Two and the Film on Four films which continued much of single drama's ambitions.

These are just a few reasons for this strand's importance, and the driving force behind this site..

(A version of this page was used as a handout at the National Film Theatre's introduction to Play for Today on 19 May 2007.)

Further reading

Screenonline includes a section on Play for Today with contributions from some of our writers. Visit here.

For the site in general, thanks to:

Alan Andres, Becky Barrett, 'Bent Halo' (for a crucial role in development and continuing editorial advice), Ian Beard, Shaun Brennan, David Bromley, John Brown, Gavin Collinson, Lez Cooke, Nick Cooper, Peter Cregeen, Simon Farquhar, Darren Giddings, Simon Harries, Michael Hirst, Stephen W Lacey, Martin Marshall, Jonathan Mohun, Andy Murray, Alan Plater, David Rose, David Rudkin, Andrew Screen, Steven Stapleton, Colin Welland, Herbert Wise.

All our contributors and interviewees, BBC Written Archives Centre (Caversham, Reading), BFI Library and Viewing Services (London), BBC Worldwide, BFI Southbank/Mediatheque, the British Film Institute (including Dick Fiddy, Phil Wickham and Alex Hogg) and the Mausoleum Club website for a crucial role in development.

References

(1) David Hare, 'Theatre's great malcontent', The Guardian 'Review', 8 June 2002, p. 6.

(2) David Hare, interviewed in Alan Clarke - 'His Own Man', 400 Blows Productions, tx Film Four, 18 September 2000.

(3) Andrew Clifford, 'The Scum manifesto', The Guardian, 16 July 1991, p. 30.

(4) John Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 6. 2nd edition.

(5) Kenith Trodd, 'Jim Allen',The Independent 'Review', 6 July 1999, p. 16.

(6) Anonymous, 'Viewers' reaction to BBC drama and comedy', The Stage and Television Today, 7 April 1977, p. 13.

(7) David M Thompson, interviewed by Dave Rolinson at BBC Films, 7 November 2002.

(8) Steve Clarke, 'The screen saver', Broadcast, 21 January 2000, p. 22.