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This is a critical work on Jack Rosenthal, the highly regarded British television dramatist. His career began with Coronation Street in the 1960s and he became famous for his popular sitcoms, including The Lovers and The Dustbinmen. During what is often known as the ‘golden age’ of British television drama, Rosenthal wrote such plays as The Knowledge, The Chain, Spend, Spend, Spend and P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang, as well as the pilot for the series London's Burning. This study offers a close analysis of all his best-known works, drawing on archival material as well as interviews with his collaborators, including Jonathan Lynn and Don Black. The book places Rosenthal's plays in their historical and televisual context, and does so by tracing the events that informed his writing – ranging from his comic take on the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s, to recession in the 1970s and Thatcherism in the 1980s. His distinctive brand of melancholy humour is contrasted throughout with the work of contemporaries such as Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale and Johnny Speight, and his influence on contemporary television and film is analysed. Rosenthal is not usually placed in the canon of Anglo-Jewish writing, but the book argues this case by focusing on his prize-winning Plays for Today, The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy.
Paul Abbott is one of the most profound, passionate and political television screenwriters and showrunners of the twenty-first century. At the 2004 British Academy Television Awards, Abbott was presented with an honorary Award for Outstanding Writing in Television and later stated as 'the Most Powerful People in Television Drama'. This book presents an aesthetic analysis of televisual case studies. It elucidates, decodes and discusses key examples of Abbott's output, exhibiting a vital evaluation of Abbott's work over the past three decades and assessing his contribution to British television. Demonstrating both Abbott's career development and his early talents, the book considers Abbott's early life. The three projects that saw Abbott work for the first time as a television writer, television-series drama creator and finally, a television producer were: Coronation Street, Children's Ward and Cracker. The book explores Reckless: a drama written by Abbott broadcast on ITV in the UK and on PBS in the USA. It then illuminates the televisual aesthetics of Clocking Off, looking at the exploration of space, place and location to highlight personal perspectives and the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives around the northern English Mackintosh Textiles factory. Abbott created a text that critiques and partially refuses (via comedic undermining) traditional gender expectations in relation to the thirty-something single British woman in the comedy serial Linda Green. Next, the book explores the spectacular drama series State of Play and the ongoing and highly successful drama series Shameless. Finally, Abbott's production company 'AbbottVision' is considered.
The beginnings 1 Coronation Street (1961–69) The television presenter Russell Harty once observed, ‘There was life before Coronation Street. But it didn’t add up to much’, while the Labour politician Roy Hattersley called the serial ‘a national institution which has won its way into the hearts of eighteen million viewers’,1 one of whom is famously the Queen. The late poet laureate John Betjeman likened Coronation Street to Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and added, in reference to its broadcasting schedule, ‘Mondays and Wednesdays, I live for them. Thank God
career as a prizewinning television playwright began with a Coronation Street script, the first of 129, for an episode broadcast in March 1961, and carried on until the early years of the present millennium. Rosenthal’s plays attracted directors such as Alan Parker, Mike Newell, Michael Apted – who was responsible for five plays, not counting several of Rosenthal’s Coronation Street episodes – and Jack Gold. The actors who appeared in his work are a roll-call of fifty years of British talent, ranging from Alec Guinness to Ron Moody, Richard Griffiths to Ben Whishaw
, 1981: 17). The success of Coronation Street, a twice-weekly drama serial closely identified with Salford and recorded on a purpose-built studio set at Granada’s headquarters in Manchester, was no doubt partly responsible for establishing Granada as a Manchester-based, Lancashire company. By the time John Finch created A Family at War (1970– 72), a popular drama serial about a Liverpool family set during the Second World War, the association of Granada with Manchester and Lancashire, rather than Liverpool and Merseyside, was already well established. Furthermore
Biographical sketch: Abbott as writer, producer and creator 1 When I worked on Coronation Street and Children’s Ward first off, I remember spotting what other writers did, and thinking I will never ever be that kind of writer, and being determined not to be someone who just wrote for money. Because people do write for money, and it’s the fastest death of any writer. They might get wages, but they’re going to lose their writer credentials and just become a typist. Petulance and subversion, I think, are my highest driving forces. Being told I can’t makes me
phone) Salman Rushdie, Vanessa Feltz and Lily Savage, met several times with celebrated author and occasional returnee Anthony Burgess, and began to befriend some Coronation Street actors and Manchester City players. I was also gaining a certain amount of influence, as my senior colleagues started to respect my view on the value of a story or a tip-off. I owed my opening on the paper to the newish editor. Wirral-raised Mike Unger had come from the Liverpool Echo in 1983, an incendiary appointment at the time
The Factory), Paul Abbott recognised that the BBC was the more likely home for such an unfashionable concept than ITV, for whom he had previously worked as a writer on Coronation Street (from 1989 to 1994), Cracker (two stories in 1995), Reckless (1997) and Touching Evil (1997). Not only did the BBC have a track record of producing social realist drama but the series needed a backer prepared to spend enough money to ensure it was both stylish and original: ‘I took the idea to the BBC because at that time, if you mentioned northern working-class textile
programmes as varied as Coronation Street (1960–), Children’s Ward (1989–2000), Cracker (1993–96), Reckless (1997), Royal Television Society-nominated Touching Evil (1997–99), Linda Green (2001–2), BAFTA- and RTS-winning Clock Âing Off (2000–3), Broadcasting Press Guild Award-winning State of Play (2003) and BAFTA- and RTS-winning comedy-drama, Shameless (2004–). At the 2004 British Academy Television Awards, Abbott was presented with an honorary Award for Outstanding Writing in Television, and, that same summer was positioned by Radio Times magazine at number 5 in a poll
careers on Coronation Street; meanwhile BBC English Regions Drama commissioned writers such as Alan Bleasdale, Henry Livings, Alan Plater, Janey Preger, David Rudkin, Willy Russell and Peter Terson from a variety of different English regions, not just the North, in an attempt to promote a diversity of regional voices and counter the metropolitan hegemony of London. Both Granada and BBC English Regions Drama produced a mixture of studio-based drama and location-based drama. Granada pioneered drama production on location using Outside Broadcast units, initially, before