BBC television drama

Already an established national radio broadcaster, the BBC began test transmissions with the new technology of television in 1929, working with John Logie Baird and using his primitive early apparatus.

[1] The following year, as part of one of these test transmissions, the BBC screened their first television drama production, an adaptation of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's short play The Man With the Flower in His Mouth.

[4] The play was chosen because of its confined setting, small cast and short length, and was directed by Val Gielgud, who was at the time the BBC's senior producer of radio drama.

[7] The first drama production to be mounted as a part of the new, regular service was a twenty-five-minute selection of scenes from the West End play Marigold by L. Allen Harker and F. R. Pryor,[8] produced by O'Ferrall with the original London Royalty Theatre cast.

[11] An increasing number of full-length dramatised productions began to take place in the Alexandra Palace studios during 1937, with Journey's End in November 1937 being a notable full-scale adaptation of a play.

[13] Productions also become more technically advanced, with the use of film inserts on telecine and more ambitious shooting, cutting and mixing, as opposed to televising the equivalent of a standard theatrical performance with unmoving cameras.

[16] The Times credited the ambition of BBC television drama in its review of a July 1938 modern dress version of Julius Caesar, while also criticising some of the production's technical failings.

"From the moment when Mr. Sebastian Shaw and Mr. Anthony Ireland were discovered sitting at a café table, discussing the political situation over a glass of beer, looking like two Fascist officers, yet speaking the lines assigned to Brutus and Cassius, the attention of the audience was riveted...

[20] There was also Telecrime, a series of ten- and twenty-minute plays which presented various crimes, with the viewers given enough clues to be able to solve themselves using the evidence shown on screen[16] and the specially-written drama Condemned To Be Shot (1939).

The British Government were afraid that the VHF transmission signals would act as a guiding beacon for German bombers targeting central London,[26] and the technicians and engineers of the service would in any case be needed for war efforts such as the radar programme.

It was also becoming a high-profile medium, with national coverage and viewing figures now running into the millions, helped by the explosion of interest due to the live televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the summer of 1953.

5 That same year, Barry invested the majority of his original scripting budget into a six-part science-fiction serial written by Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian-born director who was establishing a reputation as the television service's most inventive practitioner.

Entitled The Quatermass Experiment, the serial (miniseries in American terminology) was a huge success and went a long way towards popularising the form, where one story is told over a short number of episodes, on British television: it is still one of the most popular drama formats in the medium to this day.

Kneale and Cartier went on to be responsible for two sequel serials and many other highly successful and popular productions over the course of the decade, drawing many viewers to their programmes with their characteristic blend of horror and allegorical science fiction.

It was they who were responsible for the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the second performance of which drew the largest television audience since the coronation, some seven million viewers, and is one of the earliest surviving dramas in the archive.

The telerecording process had by now been perfected for capturing live broadcasts for repeat and overseas sales, although it was not until the early 1960s that the majority of BBC dramas were prerecorded on the new technology of videotape.

"These sequences bought time for the more elaborate costume changes or scene set-ups, but also served to 'open out' the action," as the British Film Institute explained on its Screenonline website in 2004.

[36] The BBC suffered during the second half of the 1950s from the rise of the ITV network, which had debuted in 1955 and rapidly begun to take away audience share from the Corporation as its coverage spread nationally.

"[37] The Wednesday Play proved to be a breeding ground for acclaimed and sometimes controversial writers such as Dennis Potter and directors such as Ken Loach, but sometimes Newman's desire to create biting, cutting drama could land the Corporation in trouble.

This was particularly the case with 1965's The War Game by Peter Watkins, which depicted a fictional nuclear attack on the UK and the consequences of such, and was banned by the BBC under pressure from the government.

Whenever writers and media analysts criticise the current state of British and particularly BBC television drama, it is frequently the 1960s and 1970s period which they cite as being the most important and influential, with a vast variety of genres (science fiction, crime, historical, family based) and types of programme (series, serials, one-offs, anthologies) being produced.

"A gripping, innovative six-part drama which fully deserves its cult status and many awards," was the British Film Institute's verdict on Edge of Darkness in 2000.

Indeed, EastEnders achieved phenomenal success in its early years, its Christmas Day 1986 episode earning a massive 30.15 million viewers, the highest British television audience of the 1980s.

As The Independent described: "Lengthy agonising over whether the BBC1 saga Seaforth would be given a second series (eventually, it wasn't) further encouraged the view that the BBC's management floor is full of desks where the buck does not so much stop as hang around for a few months."

"Many in the drama business, and not just BBC insiders, are worried about the hand-over of creative say to the controllers, low morale and the lack of a head," ^ The Guardian reported in December 1996.

"The decision to show EastEnders four nights a week, followed by Holby City has left the corporation open to accusations that the BBC1 schedule has been cleared for a diet of 'precinct pulp',"[2] reported The Guardian in 2003.

Recent years have also seen a huge increase in continuing drama output, with EastEnders gaining a fourth weekly episode to add to the third added during the mid-1990s, and Casualty and its spin-off series Holby City (1999–present) turning from regular seasonal shows to year-round soap opera-style productions.

As far back at 1962, the makers of Z-Cars had deliberately set their programme near Liverpool in the North of England to break away from the perceived London bias (although, ironically, it was shot in the BBC's London studios), and in 1971 an English Regions Drama Department had been established at BBC Birmingham headed by David Rose with a remit for making 'regional drama', gaining a major success with Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982.

Notable Fictionlab productions for BBC Four included The Alan Clark Diaries (2003), a live re-make of The Quatermass Experiment (2005) and the biopic Kenneth Tynan - In Praise of Hardcore (2005).

Co-productions with foreign broadcasters are also common, with BBC Scotland's successful 2004 fantasy drama Shoebox Zoo being made in collaboration with the Canadian company Blueprint Entertainment.