30th September is the 40th anniversary of The Wednesday Play, one of the great achievements of British television: 172 plays shown over six years by authors like Dennis Potter, David Mercer and Michael Frayn, Simon Gray, Alan Plater and Johnny Speight. Among the directors were John Schlesinger and Jack Gold, Peter Watkins, John Mackenzie and Ken Loach.
Forty years on, not only have we nothing to match it, we can't even work out what happened to it. In a recent documentary, The Truth About Sixties TV (BBC4), Mark Lawson suggested that the golden age of television drama was a product of technology. Lumbering old cameras, he argued, meant that most television drama was confined to the studio. It was therefore "too difficult and expensive to shoot film drama on location." This gave 1960s television drama a more theatrical feel, making it easier for stage writers like Pinter and Gray to adapt to the new medium. "What looks like a creative decision was actually a technical one," says Lawson. "Content is a result of the available technology."
Like most of Lawson's propositions in the programme, this was pithy, simple and wrong. Some of the best television drama of the 1960s was shot on location, like the scene from Jonathan Miller's Alice shown in Lawson's programme, or Miller's ghost story, Whistle and I'll Come to You. Garnett and Loach famously used lightweight 16mm filming equipment to shoot on location to achieve the feel of documentary realism. Playwrights continued to write some of the best television drama through the 1970s and 1980s, after camera technology had changed - Alan Bennett, David Hare, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Stephen Poliakoff and Christopher Hampton among them.
There is no relationship between camera technology and the quality of television writing. Much television drama was filmed in the studio and a lot of it was clunky, cheap and uninteresting. The best television drama was written by great writers, working with talented directors, encouraged by a larger culture interested in complex and lively drama. Potter's Nigel Barton plays (1965) were watched by over 7m viewers, and his Where the Buffalo Roam (1966) by over 8m. The changes which killed off the single play in the 1980s were cultural, not technological.
Although The Wednesday Play ended in 1970, the golden age of television drama did not. You could even argue that the true golden age of the single play came in the late 1970s: Potter's Where Adam Stood (1976), Jack Rosenthal's Barmitzvah Boy (1976) and The Knowledge (1979), Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party (1977), Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul (1977), Hare's Licking Hitler (1978), Pinter's Langrishe, Go Down (1978), Bennett's six single plays for LWT (1978-79) and Potter's Blue Remembered Hills (1979). The watershed didn't come between the 1960s single play (shot in studios) and the 1970s single play (shot on location). The break came later, after 1980. There were a handful of outstanding single plays in the early 1980s, but the numbers dwindled and then fell away.
There was no single cause but a number of factors. First, the television play gave way to the television movie. Film on Four started in 1982 and changed the form decisively. The early 1980s saw a brief revival in the British movie business - which was where the money and prestige went. The BBC followed, deciding that they too wanted to make movies. But films are expensive. There were 172 Wednesday Plays made in six years. Play For Today put out 430 plays in 14 years. In each case, that was nearly 30 plays a year, meaning you could give new playwrights and directors a chance. With film, the stakes are higher; it is harder to take a risk.
Another key reason was political. Was it chance that the decline of the television play coincided almost exactly with the rise of Thatcherism? The television play, from Cathy Come Home and War Game to The Price of Coal, Destiny and Country, was notoriously left-wing. After the Falklands and the 1983 election, when the Conservatives went gunning for the BBC, the BBC did not dare put on such plays.
Television drama was too political, but it was also often too complex, ambitious, experimental and dark for a culture which had been dumbing down for the last 20 years. Both John McGrath and Troy Kennedy Martin used their MacTaggart lectures to attack naturalism. Today, who could imagine such a thing? In television drama, the battle seems lost. We want costume dramas and sex among the crinolines, detectives chasing psychopaths and yuppie romances. Our Friends in the North, almost a decade ago, was perhaps the last attempt at an ambitious state of the nation drama series. Potter's last plays, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, were a final, failed attempt to rethink the television play.
However, as British television drama has run away from complexity and innovation, American television has chosen a different direction. In just over a decade it has produced Twin Peaks, Murder One, The Sopranos, The West Wing and Six Feet Under, as well as weird, over the top dramas like Angels in America, and superb single plays like Conspiracy and The Gathering Storm. This is not about technology. It is about valuing different kinds of drama.
