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- Author: Jonathan Bignell x
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This study analyses Samuel Beckett's television plays in relation to the history and theory of television, arguing that they are in dialogue with innovative television traditions connected to Modernism in television, film, radio, theatre, literature and the visual arts. Using original research from BBC archives and manuscript sources, it provides new perspectives on the relationships between Beckett's television dramas and the wider television culture of Britain and Europe. The book also compares and contrasts the plays for television with Beckett's Film and broadcasts of his theatre work including the Beckett on Film season. Chapters deal with the production process of the plays, the broadcasting contexts in which they were screened, institutions and authorship, the plays' relationships with comparable programmes and films, and reaction to Beckett's screen work by audiences and critics.
This introductory chapter discusses Samuel Beckett and his works that were adapted for British television and radio. It considers the question of whether Beckett's television plays are single ‘literary’ dramas or part of a larger series. It also identifies some critical traditions in Television Studies. The final section of the chapter presents an overview of the following chapters.
This chapter discusses the importance of the technologies that were used in making the five dramas Beckett wrote for British television. It studies television adaptations of Beckett's theatre plays, which were recorded in a television studio. It examines the work done on the aesthetics of television and also notes how changes on production technologies affected Beckett's work and other productions. This chapter also discusses the aesthetic significance of studio production and the plays' uses of film recording technology in the television studio.
This chapter discusses the broadcasting contexts where Beckett's television plays were made and shown. It examines some archival sources, which places the scheduling and promotional contexts of the plays in comparison with and in contrast to other television drama forms. It shows that Beckett's dramas for British television were screened in arts programming slots on BBC2, instead of the customary scheduling positions and drama series of the time. It also mentions BBC radio, which was committed to broadcasting original experimental drama in the Third Programme (now known as Radio 3), including Beckett's radio plays. This chapter also shows that his plays work both with and against television cultures, and draw attention to their distinctiveness.
This chapter takes a look at the institutional frameworks where Beckett gained access to television personnel and what his authorship meant to them. It identifies the role of the authorial signature in his television work, and notes that some of the programmes studied in this chapter were directed by Beckett himself. This chapter also evaluates Beckett's authorship in relation to the particular conflicts and divergent assumptions around authorship in television institutions.
This chapter takes a look at the most sustained work on the intertextual relationships between Beckett's television drama and other work by him and by others. It examines the association between authored television drama with discourses of ‘quality’, and discusses some matters of visual design, music and literary reference in television plays. It discusses the relationship between uses of visual space in Beckett's television plays and Film and his theatrical works. It also addresses some questions of performance related to ‘theatricality’ and the prevalent motif identified by Beckett critics of increasing formal simplicity or minimalism in his theatre.
This chapter discusses the formation of and the critical response to a canon of British television drama in terms of a conflict between aesthetic modernism and critical realism. It notes that some of the critics' responses to Beckett's work in the 1970s reflected the critical debate of the time over the politics of naturalistic versus avant-garde form. It determines that Beckett's television plays are placed within a complex dialectic of critical discourses around the aesthetics and politics of television drama, and part of this debate is about the address to the television audience. Finally, this chapter tries to link critical work on Beckett's television plays with discursive models of how television audiences were imagined by critics, television institutions and authors.
This chapter reviews the arguments addressed in this study and the issues that were raised about their relationship with critical traditions in Television Studies and in Beckett scholarship. It then suggests how some of the limits of this study might be opened in future work. Finally, this chapter determines this book's contribution to the historiography of Beckett's work as part of the historiography of television.
In the context of a tradition of critical discussion that characterises Samuel Beckett's plays for television as attempts to engage with nothingness, absence and death, this chapter argues that the television plays are critical explorations of the problematics of presence and absence inherent in the conceptions and histories of broadcasting. Television as a medium and a physical apparatus sets up spatial and temporal relationships between programmes and their viewers, relationships with which Beckett's television plays are in dialogue. The conceptions of medium and audience that Beckett's television plays suggest can be understood in terms of the contrasting implications of broadcasting as dissemination. Broadcasting is dissemination in good faith, despite its haunting by the prospect that some of what is broadcast will turn out to be a dead letter sent into the void.
This chapter analyses the aesthetics of Beckett’s dramas for TV, in relation to theorisations of the significance of texture in television and film, and histories of television production and reception technologies. It compares Walter Asmus’s 1986 television version of Was Wo [What Where] with his 2013 reworking of the same drama for the screen. The earlier version was broadcast in 625-line video, limiting contrasts between light and dark, whereas the 2013 What Where is in HD digital format, enhancing image clarity but stretching the limits of TV technology for the representation of black. These technical and aesthetic comparisons are placed in the context of Beckett’s earlier screen dramas of the 1960s and 1970s, which also exploited and challenged the video and film technologies used to produce them. By focusing on black, the chapter explores the significance of unlit space and texture in Beckett’s screen work. It argues that Beckett’s TV work uses the apparent nullity of black to draw attention to the representational capabilities of the TV screen, and links visual style to the materiality of television technologies.