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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.
05-chap04 26/2/07 10:14 am Page 123 Independence and dependency 4 And all this talk about being an independent producer: I say there’s no such thing. I’m a dependent producer, because there are very few buyers and there are a lot of sellers. (Interview with the author, 16 January 2006) When Tony Garnett returned to Britain he did not go back to the BBC but entered the arena of independent production. He was approached by an old friend and associate, John Heyman, to become the head of a new production venture in British television, Island World Productions
confidence to examine their truths. (Garnett 1998: unpaginated) Tony Garnett has been telling his truths for over forty year, as an actor, story editor and then producer, within the context of British television, film and Hollywood cinema. It is as a television producer that he is best known, of course, but his earlier experience as an actor was important to the particular working practices that he later developed when, as he put it, he became the one making the phone calls (2000a: 13). Garnett has been responsible for a considerable variety of work, including some of the
drama’ strand of original plays for television, often by writers new to the medium. Its main producer was James MacTaggart, who had produced Teletale and other new play anthologies for the BBC in the early 1960s. MacTaggart was also an ally of Sydney Newman’s and of the new radicals, such as Ken Loach, John McGrath and Tony Garnett. The tension between different cultural standpoints that was represented in Festival and First Night continued into The Wednesday Play, and was contained in the latter’s mode of operation. Each season was broken down into ‘mini-seasons’ of
02-chap 01 26/2/07 10:12 am Page 11 From actor to producer: into the driving seat 1 On 15 June 1966, Sidney Newman, the Head of the Drama Group at the BBC, wrote a memo to Kenneth Adam, the Commissioner of Programmes, entitled ‘The Wednesday Play’. The memo, which Newman thought ‘short on fact and long on thought’ (Newman 1966b: 2), was an articulate defence of the anthology series (1964–70), with which he (and later Tony Garnett) had become closely identified. The memo is mainly about the need to attract – and keep – good writers committed to working in
were anxious to open up political territory to the left of the Labour Party that was not occupied by the Communists. This was essentially the same project as an earlier generation of post-war socialist intellectuals, ‘New Left’ writers and thinkers such as Raymond Williams and the historian E.P. Thompson, but pursued in a new, more openly militant context. Garnett offered a room at his offices, where he was also living, for regular open meetings on a Friday night. As Garnett explained: 04-chap 03 26/2/07 76 10:14 am Page 76 Tony Garnett I said we will have
, made for BBC Northern Ireland by Tony Garnett’s Island World Productions. The 1990 Broadcasting Act’s imposition on both the BBC and ITV of a quota system for independent production had introduced what Lez Cooke terms ‘a postmodern shift away from the idea of a producer-led culture . . . towards a consumer-led culture where the broadcasters were forced to compete with an increasing number of competitors for a share of the audience’ (Cooke 2003 : 162). Ballykissangel is, on the face of it, a classic product of such a shift, though Cooke goes on to identify Tony
he rarely strayed from his native South Yorkshire for source material. As the Barnsley-born poet Ian McMillan reflects, Hines challenged the notion that the working classes were not ‘fit for literature … [by] placing us centre stage’, and for Tony Garnett, Hines ‘only ever wrote about what he knew’ and was ‘the voice for his community’.4 This might suggest that today such voices are silenced or that they no longer exist. For Hines, the local was a site replete with poetic and political energy and inspiration, in his own words: the view from my window is very
makes “elitist or arty” films.’ 18 Indeed, as we will see, Loach has retrospectively decried the self-consciously ‘arty’ nature of Looks and Smiles , the final film in his collaboration with Hines. We should also note the words of another of Loach’s long-time collaborators, Tony Garnett, when discussing the pair’s early work: ‘We were very firmly not doing art, right? We were just trying to make sense of the world.’ 19 While realist film-makers consciously resist labels which might detract from their ethical and political endeavours, the
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