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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
. 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
1995 ). What is being discussed here is the moment of ‘Anger’ and ‘Working Class Realism’ in the theatre, symbolised by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), the plays of Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan, John Arden and Edward Bond, much of the work of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, and of Theatre Workshop at Stratford East: in television, it is it is largely, though by no means exclusively, the BBC Wednesday Play anthology that is the most visible symbol of this moment. The key texts are Up the Junction (BBC
that secure continuity of approach – political and aesthetic – across time. ‘What we try to do is to keep the cohesion of a working group of people to benefit everybody’s creative development’ Garnett commented in interview: ‘You help each other. You lever each other up and everybody gets better’ (Bream 1970: 38). His best known collaborator is the director Ken Loach, with whom he worked consistently, though not exclusively, between 1965 (Up the Junction) and 1978 (Black Jack). The tag ‘Loach and Garnett’ has come to define a particular style of class-based realism
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
television, and stands as a clear statement of the unique conditions of drama production in the mid-1960s when demand exceeded supply. It is also an early attempt to define what a television producer is and does. Newman introduced the role of the producer when he first took over the Drama Group in 1963, separating it from that of director. Noting that plays such as Up the Junction (1965) were ‘tricky’, Newman argued that to produce them required exceptional abilities: Individuals who are experienced enough to be wise, to win and not offend (too much) audiences: clever
them by taking creative and technical risks, actually on the screen. Thirdly, out of this work, a theory of television drama will gradually emerge which will provide terms of reference for the critical attention it will then deserve. (Garnett, 1964: 47) The following year Garnett, working with Ken Loach, was able to put some of this theory into practice with the groundbreaking Up the Junction (BBC1, 3 November 1965), the first Wednesday Play to make extensive use of 16mm film for location shooting and to apply film editing techniques to scenes recorded in the studio.31
composed music was used, as in cinema, typically to underscore emotion or to signal mood (e.g. romance or impending danger). Contemporary popular music was little used – Up the Junction (1965) being a notable exception in its use of 1960s pop music – until Dennis Potter used popular music extensively. Potter did not use music soundtrack merely to underscore mood; indeed, he developed a complex set of relations between songs and the characters or narrative moments to which they related. He famously had characters mime to a well-known recording of a popular song
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