"Play for Today"

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’. 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’.

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 almost an alternative national cinema at a time when British cinema was often 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’.This was helped by a system which gave autonomy to such dedicated producers as Margaret Matheson, David Rose, Mark Shivas, Irene Shubik and Kenith Trodd.

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 R. Cook summarises the single play as television’s cutting edge, ‘a special place for the expression of the individual, dissident or questioning voice’. The feature that most critics emphasise is the keynote political radicalism (for example, querying the handling of trade disputes or terrorism) which resulted in controversies over bias and didactic realism in plays such as 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’. Such ambitions came under increasing attack from other areas as 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?’. 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. Before deregulation, television drama had a greater focus on reflecting life in Britain, and the strand does that across a range of regions and social backgrounds, and provided some (if not enough) outlets for the representation of different ethnic experiences, with plays about right-wing attitudes to immigration occupying the same strand as plays rooted in Black British or British Asian communities or, with the deceptively comic touch of Jack Rosenthal, pieces which have been celebrated as landmarks in representations of the British Jewish experience.

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’. 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’. 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, Buried, The Mark of Cain, God on Trial… 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 over to a greater emphasis on film productions, Screen One, Screen Two and the Film on Four films which continued much of single drama’s ambitions. We hope to study other strands in the same way as we have on this site.

The importance of researching television’s past is never clearer than when such a noted cultural commentator as Mark Lawson can write a piece on Play for Today that is full of factual errors which facilitate a straw-man argument. Lawson is entitled to reverse his previously-stated opinions about the decline of the TV play, but in an age of cultural amnesia and cutting-and-pasting from inaccurate web encyclopedia, it is important to do justice to the work that was produced – great, good, indifferent, bad – rather than regurgitating convenient stereotypes (be they positive or negative). The lack of Play for Today or other single plays in a 2010 Guardian writers’ poll of the best TV dramas – again featuring Lawson, and so poorly-researched that it claimed that Coronation Street was set in Yorkshire – shows the dangers of cultural amnesia.