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This is a book-length study of one of the most respected and prolific producers working in British television. From ground-breaking dramas from the 1960s such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home to the ‘must-see’ series in the 1990s and 2000s such as This Life and The Cops, Tony Garnett has produced some of the most important and influential British television drama. This book charts his career from his early days as an actor to his position as executive producer and head of World Productions, focusing on the ways in which he has helped to define the role of the creative producer, shaping the distinctive politics and aesthetics of the drama he has produced, and enabling and facilitating the contributions of others. Garnett's distinctive contribution to the development of a social realist aesthetic is also examined, through the documentary-inspired early single plays to the subversion of genre within popular drama series.
significant television events, plays such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home – were produced for it. As MacMurraugh-Kavanagh has observed, from the viewpoint of a de-regulated, multi-channel age, ‘it is taken to connote both the Golden Age of British television drama and a lost era of public service vision and integrity’ (1997a: 367). Commencing in October 1964, The Wednesday Play ran in seasons in a regular Wednesday evening slot on BBC 1 until October 1970, when it switched to Thursday and was re-titled Play for Today. There is a danger, as MacMurraugh-Kavanagh has
s set up this reputation for opposition to the status quo. Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966) and In Two Minds (1968), were all made for the BBC and set a benchmark for the factually-based teleplay.2 Programmed in the anthology series The Wednesday Play (1964–69 – the brainchild of Canadian producer Sydney Newman), the series was conceived as television’s contribution to a new contemporary taste for realistic social drama.3 Newman’s resonant phrase for what he wanted in his drama series was ‘agitational contemporaneity’ (see Sendall and Potter, 1982: I
, whose collaboration with Jim Cartwright on Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise (2001) resulted in a modern classic. It is also possible to romanticise the past, as David M. Thompson warned in interview: ‘People only ever remember Cathy Come Home, they don’t remember all the dross.’ However, there is little doubt that the kind of Rolinson_AC_05_Conclusion 152 17/5/05, 9:07 am Conclusion 153 broadcasting structures which I have outlined in this book have been eroded, leaving the conspicuous absence in contemporary television of the regular institutional space
most influential plays/films of British television history. His first play as producer was Cathy Come Home (BBC 1966), which was the first television drama that was also a social and political event (possibly one of the most auspicious debuts in television history). It is still regarded as part of the essential iconography of the decade. In the 1970s, he was part of the team that produced Days of Hope (BBC 1975), a four-part series on the 1926 British General Strike, which, despite its historical theme, created a strong contemporary political resonance. In the 1990s
. Viewing social realism from a different angle, Lacey argues that it is not simply a series of conventions but is frequently a political and cultural ‘project’ that owes a lot to postwar British theatre, in its naturalist and ‘non-naturalist’ forms, for its shape and trajectory. From this perspective, the (largely) filmed dramas of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett for The Wednesday Play ( Up the Junction (BBC 1965) and Cathy Come Home (BBC 1966) in particular) owed their use of techniques drawn from documentary and current affairs to a conscious strategy to create a
BBC1 was significant given the BBC’s track record in producing realist, issue-based drama, from Up the Junction (BBC 1965) and Cathy Come Home (BBC 1966) to Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC 1982). That there had been little such drama produced since Boys from the Blackstuff was a result of the shift towards a more commercial, competitive climate in television in the late 1980s and 1990s, resulting in an aversion to risk-taking on behalf of the television companies and a preference for drama series and serials designed primarily to maximise audiences. This led
poverty in Cathy Come Home, 1966), contemporary history and international affairs (Soviet foreign policy and the Cold War in Invasion, 1980). In the USA, in its ‘made-for-TV movie’ form, it has similarly approached aspects of American history in series such as Roots (1977) and difficult ‘human’ issues such as cancer (Brian’s Song, 1971), and AIDS (And The Band Played On, 1993). Television programmes and films that mix fact and fiction are now so commonplace throughout the world that to attempt to list even those made in the UK and the USA since the genre acquired its
1965), written by Nell Dunn (with Tony Garnett as script editor), produced by James McTaggart and directed by Ken Loach, and Cathy Come Home (BBC 1966) (written by Jeremy Sandford, directed by Loach with Garnett as producer). In broad terms, social realism is not so much a form (and certainly not a specific dramatic method) but a project. It was not exactly the same project across theatre and television, but there were key elements in common; the concern to find ways of engaging directly with contemporary Britain, especially the social experience of those
well over 60’.4 In many inner-London boroughs ‘Old Labour’ really was old by the 1970s. It was also a party with old attitudes. London in the 1960s had seen a ‘discovery’ of social problems comparable with that of the 1880s. The race issue became prominent – and critical – after the 1958 disturbances in Notting Hill; housing conditions and the problem of exploitative landlordism became a matter of public concern after the exposure of Peter Rachman in 1963 as did homelessness after the sensational impact of the TV drama Cathy Come Home in 1966. Labour councils were