United Kingdom! Radical TV Drama, BFI Southbank

Nostalgists often hark back to a “golden age” of TV drama, referring to the likes of ITV’s Brideshead Revisited, or the BBC’s I Claudius or The Forsyte Saga. This week on the South Bank, the BFI launches a season which examines a lost age of a different kind, that of the radical TV dramatists who scorched across British screens from the mid-Sixties, through the Seventies and the Margaret Thatcher era, and finally into the ambiguous world of New Labour.

The two-part season, United Kingdom!, stretches across November and December, and en route will take in such abrasive televisual benchmarks as Up the Junction, The Black Stuff, Scum, Oi for England, Made in Britain, Our Friends in the North and United Kingdom itself. Talks and panel discussions will probe some of the underlying political and dramatic issues thrown up by the programmes.

United Kingdom! has been assembled by the BFI’s Marcus Prince, who took as his main trigger the fact that this year marks the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher coming to power. The early pieces in the season - such as The Big Flame (Ken Loach’s 1969 film about striking Liverpool dockers) or Dennis Potter’s acidic demolition of party politics in Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (1965) – pre-date Thatcher’s arrival, and she was long gone by the time Our Friends in the North or The Government Inspector were aired. Nonetheless, Prince regards the changes she brought to the television industry, coupled with her uncompromising political identity, as transforming factors in the development of TV drama.

“One of the key debates we’re holding is on November 18, with Michael Grade, Tony Garnett [veteran drama producer] and others, and the reason for that is precisely to look at the seismic changes in broadcasting that she brought about in the Eighties,” says Prince. “With the Broadcasting Act, she changed the ITV franchises from a quality threshold to simply being sold to the company that bid the most money, which of course was a massive change. For instance, that led to Thames losing its franchise and becoming Carlton. Then at the BBC, there was almost a Conservative paranoia that it was run by a pinko leftist conspiracy, so there was the very political appointment of Marmaduke Hussey. Then in the John Birt years the agenda was to run the BBC as a business.”
(Patricia Hodge as Margaret Thatcher in The Falklands Play, right)

The Left blamed the Broadcasting Act for a subsequent dumbing down of television and for lowering the drawbridge to multichannel TV and, especially, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite operations, while Douglas Hurd was among Tories who also believed the Act was ill-judged. But is it too glib to blame everything on the Wicked Witch of Finchley? Even Tony Garnett, whose name is virtually synonymous with left-leaning political drama after he produced the likes of Up The Junction, Cathy Come Home and The Price of Coal, suspects the influence of Thatcher is exaggerated.

In a piece for The Guardian in July this year, Garnett called for "a change of culture at the very top" of the BBC to reverse the lack of nerve and suffocating bureaucracy he believes is strangling its drama output, and he put the blame on executives who are "so afraid of mistakes, they would rather paralyse creativity." He wasn't talking about ITV or the commercial sector, but focused on the BBC because: "It is the guardian and generator of the cultural life of our society. It is time for the senior executives to wake up and take their responsibilities seriously."

But the looming shadow of Mrs T serves very well as a device for evoking the fierce sense of opposition that drove the best of the radical dramas. It's an impulse which was damped down under New Labour's spurious "Big Tent", though who's to say it isn't due for a comeback.

"In the 1960s and Seventies, there was still very much a sense of a working class identity," says Prince, "whereas now we tend to play down the whole class issue." Well, only if you overlook Labour's jibes about "Tory Toffs" and obsession with foxhunting, but never mind that now. "But those left wing writers like Trevor Griffiths passionately believed that the working classes were put down by the Establishment, and there was a duty to show that through the theatre and through television."

That link from theatre to television is very much the point. Many of the writers represented in the United Kingdom! season started their careers in the theatre, including Griffiths, Stephen Poliakoff, Alan Bleasdale, Colin Welland and Dennis Potter, and it's no coincidence that some of their most memorable TV pieces were first broadcast in the BBC's Wednesday Play or Play For Today slots. The notion of a single, self-contained dramatic event was central to their thinking, but it's a format that can no longer catch the eye of TV commissioning editors in today's transformed media. With competition from the internet and an almost infinite number of channels, it's a Himalayan task for any single piece of drama to grab the kind of ratings that were possible in the days of three TV channels, when people would gather in the living room for so-called "appointment to view" television.

"We're trying to look at the way radical drama has had to adapt and change across the decades," says Prince, "and yes, the environment is now very different in the multichannel age. The other big change is that programmers are genre-led now. Originally, radical dramas were generally one-offs in the Play For Today type of slot, whereas now writers have to think about how they can get social or radical issues into a genre-led format. You've got your absolute masters of this like Jimmy McGovern with The Street and Paul Abbott with Clocking Off and Shameless, where they deal with quite difficult and radical issues but in a far less overtly political way than their predecessors did. It's more character- and psychologically-led drama than some of the old hard-left playwrights like Jim Allen, for instance."

In other words, the idea of an angry writer bellowing into the viewer's ear with the full force of his ideological convictions has become quaint and possibly rather offensive. On the other hand, a writer like Abbott can insinuate a point of view into the fabric of an ongoing serial, which may be less spectacular, but in the long run may prove far more influential.

Nonetheless, the BFI season will offer reminders that a powerful, perceptive piece of drama can still resonate despite the passage of time. United Kingdom itself (showing on November 29) is the story of a left-wing council at war with the government for overspending on public services, the kind of theme likely to rear its head at the forthcoming general election. On November 26 there's a screening of Trevor Griffiths' Oi for England, a 1982 play about the National Front (forerunner of the BNP) and disaffected white working class youths. In the wake of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time - probably the BBC's most radical piece of drama in years - the timing is serendipitous.

"At that point in the early Eighties, unemployment was rising rapidly as it is at the moment, and there was exactly the same sort of backlash going on," says Prince. "The play is about very discontented young white males feeling completely alienated from the society around them and being tempted to turn to extremism. It's amazing how a lot of these plays keep their relevance."

Events of the Season

The Black Stuff (Alan Bleasdale, 1980)

"It led to The Boys from the Black Stuff, and that series tapped into the anger a lot of communities were feeling about being alienated and about people who couldn't find work. The character of Yosser Hughes became a sort of Everyman figure that symbolised the failure of the Thatcher government to deal with unemployment."
(screened on November 18)

Our Friends in the North (Peter Flannery, 1996)

"I think what made it so important was that Flannery had the time and space to take these very young characters and see what happened to them all through the 1980s and Nineties, and in doing so he was able to comment on the whole political atmosphere of the times and what it did to them."
(screened on December 11, followed by panel discussion with Christopher Eccleston, Peter Flannery, executive producer Michael Wearing and producer Charles Pattinson)

The Government Inspector (Peter Kosminsky, 2005)

"I'd pick this as a single play from recent times because it was a drama that used an actual event and reacted to that event quite quickly [the death of weapons inspector Dr David Kelly]. It was devastatingly embarrassing for the government and did that wonderful thing of showing the personal tragedy behind the political headlines." (Mark Rylance as Dr David Kelly in The Government Inspector, pictured left). (Screened on December 6 & December 9)

Debates:

TV Sold to the Highest Bidder (November 18 8.45pm)
With Michael Grade, Alasdair Milne, Tony Garnett and David Rose, chaired by Raymond Snoddy
After Thatcher - The New Radical Drama (December 8. Follows 6.30pm screening of Shameless)
With Peter Kosminsky, Paul Abbott, Ken Trodd, Brian Elsley and Liza Marshall, chaired by Jonathan Powell


United Kingdom! runs from November 4 - December 11. To buy tickets click here