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Drama series 4 By the early 1960s series drama was the most popular form of drama on British television. ITV had largely been responsible for this, for while the BBC had two very popular series, Dixon of Dock Green and Maigret, ITV dominated the ratings with a combination of imported American series, such as Dragnet, Rawhide and Wagon Train, and homegrown series, such as Emergency – Ward 10, No Hiding Place and Coronation Street. Such was ITV’s popularity as the new decade dawned that BBC programmes rarely appeared in the twenty top-rated programmes. In 1960
This chapter looks at the gang wars that were ripping through Manchester at the end of the century. Here David speaks to addicts, dealers and police officers to investigate why so many young people were caught up in the gang culture, and how a change in culture resulted in a shift from ecstasy to cocaine use.David details how this drug epidemic resulted in the fatalities of his friends.
This is the first book-length study of one of the most significant of all British television writers, Jimmy McGovern. The book provides comprehensive coverage of all his work for television including early writing on Brookside, major documentary dramas such as Hillsborough and Sunday and more recent series such as The Street and Accused.
Whilst the book is firmly focused on McGovern’s own work, the range of his output over the period in which he has been working also provides something of an overview of the radical changes in television drama commissioning that have taken place during this time. Without compromising his deeply-held convictions McGovern has managed to adapt to an ever changing environment, often using his position as a sought-after writer to defy industry trends.
The book also challenges the notion of McGovern as an uncomplicated social realist in stylistic terms. Looking particularly at his later work, a case is made for McGovern employing a greater range of narrative approaches, albeit subtly and within boundaries that allow him to continue to write for large popular audiences.
Finally it is worth pointing to the book’s examination of McGovern’s role in recent years as a mentor to new voices, frequently acting as a creative producer on series that he part-writes and part brings through different less-experienced names.
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.
message to the audience as part of the format. The expansion in entertainment programming occurred at the expense of informative programmes, whose share fell significantly (Schubert and Stiehler, 2004, 2009). Although these changes occurred across the entire programming output, they were especially prominent in prime time. Table 9.1, which lists the number of television drama series in general and family drama series in particular across different periods, shows an astonishing increase in the number of each. Table 9.1 Numbers of GDR television drama series and family
The first episode of Clocking Off , the factory-based drama series created by Paul Abbott, was transmitted on 23 January 2000 at 9.00 pm on BBC1. A new drama series for a new century, yet Clocking Off was an unlikely success with its northern industrial setting, its focus on working-class relations in a Manchester textiles factory and its issue-based storylines. This description might, in fact, suggest a ‘serious’ television drama from the 1960s or 1970s, written perhaps by Jim Allen or Jeremy Sandford and directed by the likes of Jack Gold or Ken Loach, the
from the late 1960s and early 1970s), the theory and practice of experimental and non-naturalistic television drama, the creation of and contributions to popular drama series, the major drama serials of the 1980s, and the ‘hostile waters’ of British television since the late 1980s, as television entered a more competitive, deregulated era in which the creative role of the writer, especially the writer used to the relative freedoms of the 1960s, became increasingly circumscribed. The eclecticism of Troy Kennedy Martin’s oeuvre raises an inevitable question of
Linda Green 4 Linda Green was based on one of my female friends who could drink any bloke under the table. She ransacked three of them in one night and they weren’t even thinking about it and didn’t know what’d happened until she’d banged them in the toilets. So, I wrote a little postcard to myself in 1 a scrapbook saying, ‘fat bird with a pint – and what’s wrong with that?’ Paul Abbott Created by Paul Abbott and produced by the independent production company, Red, the Television and Radio Industries Club award-winning drama series Linda Green was broadcast in
movie of State of Play and Shameless going to America.’ Abbott’s brand or vision has also been evidenced in his recent creation of the six-part drama series Hit & Miss. Backed by FremantleMedia Enterprises, produced by AbbottVision and Red Company Productions, written by Sean Conway (a prime example of another young writer mentored by Abbott through the AbbottVision writing studio) and broadcast in May and June 2012, Hit & Miss was Sky Atlantic’s first UK drama commission. Starring Chloë Sevigny (nominee for Academy Award and Golden Globe Best Supporting Actress in
walking through the sets of 1960s and 1970s preschool television programmes – a supposed reassuringly old-fashioned appeal to public service nostalgia. On the other hand, Nickelodeon championed the cause of cable subscription through its ‘wicked cartoons’, ‘brilliant live shows’ and ‘fantastic comedy’ – a primarily commercial American landscape. In this essay I want to suggest that the BBC drama series The Demon Headmaster (1995–96, 1997, 1998) managed to combine the contrasting terrains of ‘quality’ children’s television drama – book-based, literate and filmic