The shamefully muted response of the press to the death of Jack Rosenthal tells us a great deal about our continued failure to take television seriously. Apart from the obituaries, there have been almost no serious critical evaluations of his work. Yet Rosenthal was one of the great television dramatists. He wrote a dozen television plays which are among the best yet written. No one else has won the Bafta best play award three years running. The death of any comparable figure from the theatre or cinema would have received more notice.
Rosenthal's career also tells us a lot about the television culture we have lost, single plays most conspicuously. Although Rosenthal cut his teeth writing for Coronation Street in the early 1960s (he wrote 129 episodes and produced a further 104), and although he wrote a number of comedy series, including The Dustbinmen (1969) and The Lovers (1971), he will be best remembered for the television plays he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Alan Bennett and Mike Leigh, he had perfect pitch when he wrote about the mortifying world of lower middle-class and working-class embarrassments and aspirations. He had a Chekhovian ear for the way people live by clinging to verbal tics and mannerisms: the schoolboy slang in P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982) and Eliot's use of Latin and French phrases in Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976). Few television writers have created such compelling minor characters (Harold and Mr Wax in Bar Mitzvah Boy, the sadistic examiner in The Knowledge, the grasping Mr Thorn in The Chain). And no one has matched the economy of means of Rosenthal's ensemble plays, marking a character out with just a name or in a single, short scene. Think of the removal men in The Chain (1985), the firemen in London's Burning (1986) the Knowledge boys in The Knowledge (1979).
Born in Manchester, Rosenthal was one of a generation of northern working-class writers who came of age just as television was beginning: Keith Waterhouse and Alan Bennett, born in Leeds; Trevor Griffiths, also from Manchester; and Alan Plater, who grew up in Hull. They had a huge impact on the television drama that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Rosenthal wrote about taxi drivers and firemen, removal men and minor officials. There are relatively few middle-class or rich characters in his plays, and they are often treated with suspicion, as nasty, pretentious or snobbish. His sympathies were clearly with "ordinary people," their hopes and frustrations. They are mostly white, occasionally feckless, but basically decent. The idealism of 1945 isn't far away.
"There's a great big world out there!" Janet tells her unmotivated boyfriend in The Knowledge, and many of his plays are about the contrast between the small world of lower middle-class Willesden or working-class Manchester and another world elsewhere. It may be a place: Cambridge (Eskimo Day, 1996) or London (Spend, Spend, Spend, 1977). More often, though, it's a set of ideas or ideals - Bamber's philosophy studies in The Chain, Eliot's ideas of manhood in Bar Mitzvah Boy or Alan's vision of a just war in P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang. That is why so many of his plays are about a special day when a group of people come together, for a wedding, a bar mitzvah or a football match. Most will be absorbed in their daily routine, seeing it as an everyday occasion. But Rosenthal's real heroes are motivated by a larger vision, by ideals, and are capable of transforming themselves.
For Eliot's family in Bar Mitzvah Boy, a bar mitzvah is a source of anxiety, a moment when they will be judged socially. But for Eliot it raises questions about what it is to be a man, and as he looks around at his sister's shmendrik boyfriend, his taxi-driver father and his grandfather, he sees that none of them have passed this bigger test.
There is a fascinating moment in the script for Bar Mitzvah Boy. Harold has been photographing the occasion. Typically, it has all gone wrong. "All double exposures," he laments. "Every one of them. Double exposure." The lines never made it into the filmed version. It's a shame, because they perfectly capture the play's sense of doubleness. Are Eliot's family the respectable, happy people they try to seem, or are they shmucks, trapped by routine? Such doubleness gives Rosenthal's comedies their bittersweet feel.
At times, the mood darkens. Many of his characters are lonely. "People made (internally) lonely by the unconcern of others (who are equally lonely) is what interests me," Rosenthal wrote once. The romantic young couple is one of his recurring types, and there are happy endings, but human relationships often resemble the Somme: a war of attrition leading to outright bloodshed.
Much of Rosenthal's best work was commissioned by ITV, especially Granada. It enabled him to reach huge audiences, and bring Jewish themes and experiences to a larger culture with plays like Bar Mitzvah Boy and The Evacuees (1975). Perhaps that explains why the Jewish Chronicle was the only paper to do him justice when he died. But Rosenthal was never just a Jewish writer. In his compassion for the lonely, his rich sense of possibility and his bittersweet comedies of triumph and failure, he was one of the great literary voices of the age of television.
