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Radical drama, radical theatre

Article in Media Culture & Society April 1980

DOI: 10.1177/016344378000200204

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 151

Radical drama, radical theatre

GRAHAM MURDOCK*

The last two decades or so have seen a more or less continuous debate on the nature
and prospects for radical drama. The emerging arguments have been fundamentally
shaped by the rise of television as the central dramatic medium and by its shifting
relationship to the theatre. As a result, a good deal of the debate has centred around
the relative merits of television and theatre as alternative sites for the development
of new forms of play-writing and presentation. This paper sets out to pull together
some of the major threads in the discussions to date and to re-examine the main

positions that have been taken up.

What is radical drama?

Since radical is one of the most slippery and contested terms in the whole vocabulary of
cultural and political commentary (see Williams, y j6: 209-2II), I should make it
clear that I am using it here in a particular way. For the purposes of the present
discussion I want to define radical drama in terms of four basic characteristics,
although not all of them are found together in all productions.
First, radical drama sets out to present a critical perspective on the present social
order. It aims to lay bare the structures of power and privilege and to show how they
permeate everyday life, limiting and curtailing opportunities for self realisation and
social change. This critique is developed in two basic ways, used either singly or
together. The first has affinities with expos6 journalism. It focuses on the uglier
faces of capitalism and the crimes of the powerful as in David Hares stage play
Kmcclzle which centres around a corrupt armaments tycoon. The second, and more
frequent device, has much in common with certain styles of sociology and social
history. It aims to present a view from below by recovering working class experience
and articulating the lived experience of domination. Recent examples in the theatre
include, Gotcha, Barrie Keefes passionate attack on secondary schooling, and on
television, Ken Loach and Tony Garnetts indictment of the welfare system,
Spongers (produccd for the BBC). The aim is to point up the links between personal
experience and political process and to uncover the social and institutional sources
of individual misery. In most instances these critiques are underpinned by a commit-
ment to socialism, although there is a significant current, particularly in the community
theatre movement, which draws on the libertarian tradition and a comparatively new
strand which draws on feminism.
Second, radical drama probes the idealisations and rationalisations that justify the
prcsent order. It challenges taken-for-granted assumptions and prises open the gaps
between ideological promise and institutional performance. Tony Garnetts television
* Centre for Mass Communications Research, University of Leicester, UK.

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I52

quartet for the BBC, Law and Order, which juxtaposes the ideal of justice with the
reality of corrupt policemen and bent lawyers provides perhaps the best known
recent example.
Third, radical drama investigates the dynamics of social change and transformation
and explores the politics of possibility. In this connection a good deal of recent
work has been concerned with interrogating the socialist tradition and re-examining
the twin legacies of Stalinism and social democracy. Notable examples include;
Howard Brentons play for the National Theatre, Weapotis of Happiness; Trevor
Griffiths stage plays, The Party and Occupations and his Thames Television serial,
Bill Brand; and Ken Loach and Tony Garnetts quartet of BBC television films,
Days of Hope.
And lastly, but certainly not least, radical drama challenges the institutions and
practices of conventional theatre. It opposes the cultural stratification which con-
centrates the theatre-going audience among non-manual groups and reaches out for
a working-class audience. It also aims to alter the established relationship between

audiences and performances. Where conventional drama fixes the spectator in the
role of consumer of other peoples problems, radical drama attempts to link sympathy
to struggle. As well as prompting people to reflect critically on the present situation,
it aims to encourage them to take action to change it.
The debate about how best to pursue these objectives has revolved around two
central issues. First, there is the question of form. On one side, Trcvor Griffith and
others have argued strongly in favour of working with existing popular forms on the
grounds that these provide the most effective means of reaching and touching working-
class audiences. If you use alienation techniques and the other weapons in the armoury
of counter-theatre, they argue, you only succeed in alienating the people you most
want to reach. However, this position is strongly opposed by those who maintain that
innovation in theatrical technique is as important as political content in the task
~f raising consciousness and radicalising audiences (~~4olff, r978: 58). If you attempt
to pour radical content into conservative forms they argue, your work will inevitably
be assimilated to conventional assumptions and modes of response. These argu-
ments about form are tied in turn to the issue of whether radical dramatists should
work in television or not. Tony Garnett, Trevor Griffith and other supporters of an
entreist strategy see television, for all its limitations, as the most effective means of
reaching a sizeable working class audience. Moreover they argue, because television
is far and away the most powerful and pervasive source of contemporary drama, it is
essential to contest its prevailing uses and to fight for the institutional space for radical
presentations. According to this view, television occupies the centre of the struggle
for radical drama with theatre positioned on the periphery. Those like David Edgar
and John McGrath, who work mainly in the theatre, reverse this model and insist
that the subsidised auditoriums and the socialist touring companies provide the major
sites for the development of a viable and genuinely radical dramatic culture. While
they are not opposed to working within television altogether, they see its potential
as limited since, for them, the radical thrust of television drama is inevitably blunted

by its accommodation to conventional forms and its incorporation into habitual

patterns of viewing and response.
The present paper sets out to trace the development of these arguments and to
explore the assumptions on which they rest. To do this at all adequately, however,
it is necessary to recover something of the history of radical initiatives in television
.drama and to indicate their shifting relationship to parallel developments in the

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 I53
theatre. These relations are part of a more complex and largely unwritten history of
the links between the two spheres. A full account would also need to look at the
interaction of television and theatre with radio drama and with the feature film
industry. I hope to return to these connections in a more substantial publication,
but for the present a bald outline will have to do.

Business as before: theatre and television in the early 1950S

The decade immediately after the last war was a thin time for British drama. In the
absence of a developed subsidy system, the theatre remained firmly in the hands of
commercial interests. Provincial rep, which had provided a testing ground for new
talent, was retreating before the advancing counter attractions of television, while in
the West End it was business as before with managements tending to play safe and
relying on tried and tested formulae to fill the seats. The box office successes of 1954
provide a good indication of the prevailing climate. There was the farce, Dry Rot,
which was to run for almost 1500 performances; two musicals, Salad Days and The
Boy Frielld, which were to top well over 2000 shows apiece, and Agatha Christies
thriller The Mousetrap which had opened two years earlier and never looked like
closing. The only serious modern play in contention was Terence Rattigans Separate
Tables, which made some attempt to explore contemporary sexuality. But this was
an exception. Generally, the conservatism of the commercial managements combined
with the Lord Chamberlains censors pencil to ensure that the harsher edges of social
and political life seldom intruded. Consequently, most modem plays remained
firmly locked within a formulistic naturalism. It was a theatre of people (almost
invariably middle and upper class) talking in rooms (preferably drawing or dining
rooms). For radical critics like Kenneth Tynan attending West End premi~res in i954
felt a lot like going to a funeral. As he lamented at the time:

The bare fact is that, apart from revivals and imports there is nothing in the London theatre
that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for more than five minutes ... If you seek a
tombstone, look about you; survey the peculiar nullity of our dramas prevalent genre, the
Loamshire play. Its setting is a country house in what used to be called Loamshire but is now,
as a heroic tribute to realism, sometimes called Berkshire. The inhabitants belong to a social
class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwrights vision of the leisured
life he will lead after the play is a success-this being the only effort of imagination he is called
on to make ... Loamshire is a glibly codified fairy-tale world, of no more use to the student
of life than a dolls-house would be to a student of town planning. Its vice is to have engulfed
the theatre, thereby expelling better minds (Tynan, i g75 : 147-148).

The forms and techniques of conventional theatre also dominated the television
drama of the period for several reasons. In the first place, it was some time before
television began to attract a significant amount of new and original writing, and in
the interim the theatre provided the major source of material. Of the 99 full length
dramas the BBC transmitted in 1956, for example, almost two-thirds (62) derived
from stage productions. Secondly, most of the directors who entered television after
the War came from the theatre, prompted partly by the declining employment
prospects in provincial rep and partly by curiosity. Comparatively few moved over
from radio and even fewer from the film industry. Shaun Sutton, the BBCs current
Head of Drama, is a reasonably representative of this first generation. He had worked
as a stage manager in rep and directed in the West End before starting to direct for

television in 1952. As he recalls:

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I54
Most of us came from the theatre. Most of the directors had been at one time in the theatre.
That was our training ground. Once inside (television) one began to see that it wasnt just a
question of photographing stage plays, there was something else. But it was a new technique.
One just picked it up as one went along, a camera here a camera there. You had to learn why
you were cutting. I mean, at first we just cut from one camera to another because we seemed
to have been rather a long time on that camera, and so we cut to that one (interview with the
author).
This relative underdevelopment of visual techniques was reinforced by the
primitiveness of the production technology. Plays went out live from a studio and,
apart from the occasional insert for exterior scenes, there was little or no film.
Directors were generally limited to three very cumbersome cameras.
You had one camera that was motorised which had a chap on the back driving it, but very
jerky it was. You had one equivalent of a pedestal camera now, which couldnt elevate except
by working a crank, so you sort of had to do that when nobody was listening because it made
rather a noise. And you had one other camera. Very heavy they were (Shaun Sutton, op. cit.).
The relative immobility of the cameras and the lack of recording facilities had
important consequences for the style of productions.
You couldnt get so many shots in. Youd start with all three cameras on one scene, and about
half way through the scene you had to release at least one to go across to the next scene. A
lot of scenes used to end with the camera pushing in on whoever was left in the set, and hed
assume one of those all-purpose expressions while you could hear people running to the next
set in the background. And an awful lot of scenes began with close-ups of things like ashtrays
and you pulled back to give people time to get across (Shaun Sutton, op. cit.).

Occasionally these restriction were transcended and a more pow-erful visual impact
achieved, as in Nigel Kneales original Otratermass series of 1953 and his celebrated
adaptation of George Orwells I98.., the following ycar. But generally, the forces
operating on production combined to tug television drama back towards the dominant
modes of theatrical naturalism. Certainly the BBC was offering little to match the
drama that American and Canadian companies were producing at the same time.
Where the BBC leaned towards the classic and the genteel, the North American
networks were attracting writers committed to exploring contemporary life and
working class experience. The best known and most influential example of this
movement was undoubtedly Paddy Chayefskys ll~arty (CBS), ~hich centred on a
grocer from the Bronx. Its low-key contemporary naturalism pointed to untapped
possibilities for television drama and sparked off a renewed exploration of contemporary
life among British writers.
One of the earliest enthusiasts was Ted willies whose 1 homan io a Dressing Gown
(which Associated Rediffusion transmitted in the summer of 1956) was widely scen
as the first of the so-called kitchen-sink television dramas. By this time, however,
the American impetus was already fading. In 195S-56 the major sponsors withdrew
their support for single plays in favour of the new Hollywood produced adventure
series like Clieyentie, which offered a more attractive packaging for their products
(see Barnouw ig7~: io5-io7). Ironically, it was at this same moment that drama
in Britain was beginning to shift, with significant changes taking place more or less
simultaneously in television and the theatre. It is a truism, but nonetheless true, that
1956 marked a watershed. In April, the English Stage Company took up residence at
the Royal Court Theatre under the artistic directorship of George Devine, and by the
following month all the major new commercial television stations had begun broad-
casting. Both events were to have important consequences for the development of
drama.

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Radical initiatives in theatre

The Royal Court in i 954 looked a somewhat unlikely place for the rebirth of British
theatre. It had just been leased to Laurie Lister who used it to stage a highly successful
revue, Airs on a Shoestring, which eventually ran for well over 700 performances.
Even after Devine took over, there were few signs of what was to come. His advertise-
ments in The Stage calling for new scripts ha.d produced a disappointing crop and
only one, John Osbornes Look Back in Anger, looked worth staging. It opened in
May and for the first eight weeks of its solo run failed to cover its costs. The break-
through only came after an excerpt had been shown on television. The effect was
immediate and takings almost doubled in two weeks, jumping from ~950 to ~1700
(see Taylor, 1975: 178).
Although it represented a decisive break with the dominant Loamshire genre of
stage drama, Look Back in Anger was radical only up to a point. The qualities that
Ken Tynan so much admired, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of
&dquo;official&dquo; attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Tynan, i975: 178) has as much
to do with middle class bohemianism as with socialist politics. Jimmy Porter spoke
for all the scholarship boys marooned in provincial towns, caught between the twin
fantasies of Sartres literary Left Bank and Louis Armstrongs New- Orleans. He
spoke for the Beats rather than the Teds, for the grammar and art school rebels
rather than the secondary modern drop-outs. He was contemporary certainly, but
hardly proletarian. As Tynan conceded, it was a minority affair, operating within
an art that exerts, at best, no more than a minority appeal (Tynan, 1975: 271).
Even the film version which Devines assistant, Tony Richardson, made in 1958,
failed to attract a significant working class audience and bombed at the box office. In
the words of Harry Saltzman, the producer, it was a disaster ... I never made a
film that got such good reviews and was seen by so few people (Walker, 1974: 56
and 75). In contrast, the cinema version of Alan Sillitoes novel, Saturday Night and
Sunday lV]ornzg, which Richardsons Woodfall company produced two years later,
did reach a mass audience and made over half a million pounds profit as a result.
Sillitoes Arthur Seaton spoke from and to a working class experience that had been
almost totally suppressed in the British commercial theatre and fictional film. This
experience was surfacing elsewhere in the theatre however, most notably at Joan
Littlew-oods Theatre Workshop which since 1953 had found a permanent home at
the Theatre Royal in the heart of the East End.
Theatre Workshop was a continuation of the Theatre of Action which Littlewood
and Ewan McColl had started in Manchester in 1934 with the declared aim of
performing mainly in working class districts, plays which express the life and struggles
of the workers (Bradby and McCormick, 1976: 146), and this remained a major
aim of the Workshop productions. They included, Shelagh Delaneys, A Taste of
Honey (1958) which spoke for working-class girls as Sillitoe had spoken for boys, and
Oh TV/at a Lo<efi< Har (1963) which excavated something of the unofficial popular
history of the First World War. Both productions were later to enjoy considerable
popular success as films.
The theatrical recovery of working class experience was not confined entirely to
London however. In 1958, the Belgrade opened in Coventry. It was the first new
theatre to be built in Britain since the war and the forerunner of the new generation
of subsidised provincial playhouses. One of the first productions was Arnold iveskers
Chicken Soup with Barley which had been sent up by Royal Court who promised the

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I56
production a weeks run in London if the Belgrade would launch it. Chicken Soup

was the first in a trilogy (the others being Roots and Im Talking about .Jerusalem)
which charted changes in working class life since 1936 and probed the emerging
tensions between mobility and community. The Belgrade was later joined by other
subsidised theatres prepared to stage new radical drama. In i 962 the Victoria Theatre
opened in Stoke-on-Trent and under Peter Chccsemans direction, began an explor-
ation of local working class history starting with The Jolly Potters (1964) which
focused on the insurrectionary Chartist era. Radical drama was also to become a
regular part of the repertoire at the Nottingham Playhouse and the Edinburgh
Traverse which both opened in 1963, and the Liverpool Everyman launched the
following year.
These movements within the theatre were part of a morc broadly based attempt
to recover and re-examine working class experience which was evident in the folk
song revival, the upsurge of interest in local and labour history, the community
studies of Wilmott and Young and others, and the radio ballads which Charles Parker
began recording in 19S7 (together with Joan Littlewoods old collaborator, Ewan
McColl). But even at their best, these initiatives were confined to relative minorities,
and it was left to television to present the emerging themes to a mass audience.

New men, new directions : television drama takes off

In many ways it was ironic that the decisive breakthrough should have come in the
commercial sector. The ITV service opened in the autumn of i956 amid dire warnings
of Americanisation, a prediction that was partly fulfilled. Popular programming did
lean heavily on the American action-adventure series and game shows. But in the
field of the single play, the companies continued to rely on the British theatre for
their material. Until the early ig6os, for example, all of ATVs drama output was
managed by the well-known theatrical organisation of H. M. Tennent and consisted
mainly of West End productions. Other companies were moie adventurous and drew
on the new wave of contemporary theatre. Granada, for example, mountcd a pro-
duction of Look Back in Anger. But it soon became evident that there was not enough
good theatre material, particularly contemporary plays, to fill the drama slots on
both channels.
The companies were therefore obliged to begin looking elsewhere. In 1957, the
BBC made good the shortfall in domestic material by importing 35 television dramas
from Canadian Broadcasting. These productions, like their American counterparts,
had a pace and a touch on the times that was unfamiliar and exciting to British
viewers. They also served to underline televisions enormous potential as a vehicle
for original contemporary plays, and in the spring of 1958, ABC Television hired
one of the best knowm Canadian producers, Sidney Newman, to revamp their drama

output along the same lines. He stayed until 1963 when he moved ovcr to run the
BBCs drama department.
Newman was a confirmed populist who arrived declaring that too many television
plays are merely converted rehashes of pass6 West End hits. Their style and verbosity
are too big for the 17-inch screen and, just as important, the subject-matter of the

plays themselves rarely has anything to say to the Bradford mill-worker, the Clydeside
shipwright or the Welsh miner (Newman, i 959 ~ 18). He was determined to change
this situation and to reach out to a mass audience with plays that were going to be
about the very people who owned TV sets-which is mainly the working class

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 I57

(Wyver, 1979: His views on drama were shaped by his background in docu-
14).
mentary film-making. He wanted plays that were lively, topical and agitational, and
which drew on the techniques of popular journalism rather than the styles of the
conventional theatre. He set out to find new young talent capable of coming up with
the goods.
From the beginning he was determined to rely as little as possible on theatrical
material. Of the 48 ABC Arriachair Theatre productions in the 1958-59 season, only
a quarter were adaptations of stage plays, and 60% were original television plays. This

search for drama that would have the immediacy and impact of documentary was
helped by two technological innovations. The first was the development of the new
mobile studio cameras which greatly increased both the range of possible shots and
the options for cutting from one to another. The second was the introduction of
videotape recording in 1958-59, although the old procedures died hard and for some
time afterwards it was still usual for productions to be recorded straight through as
though they v~Tere live.
Newmans strategy was a marked success in audience terms with productions
averaging i i million viewers (and this was well before set ownership had reached its
ceiling). However, the ratings were helped considerably by the fact that Armchair
Theatre was preceded by the massively popular variety show, Sunday Night at the
London Palladium, and followed by a feature film. The figures for his early BBC
single play productions were generally lower partly because of the difference in
scheduling and partly because of the BBCs image as a more highbrow channel, but
they still included a sizeable working class audience. It was this ability to deliver a
mass popular audience that attracted the rising generation of writers and directors to

television. As John McGrath, one of the best known members of this new wave has
recalled:
I decided it was stupid trying to write for a Royal Court audience, or for a West End audience.
It seemed to me perfectly obvious that all the people I knew and cared about at the time were
watching television, so I thought, fuck it, Ill go and write for television and try to use the
popular medium in my own way and contribute through that to peoples lives (McGrath,
I975 ~ 43).

The prospect of breaking out of the theatres social ghetto was particularly attractive
to writers like Denis Potter who wanted to deal with class antagonisms. As he ex-
plained, his first television play, Stand Up Nigel Barton,
was largely concerned with the stresses and adventures of a miners son who, by accident and

examination, had fetched up in that medieval enclave called Oxford. In the theatre or at least
in the West End, the audience would have been largely on only one side of this particular
fence ... But with television, I knew that both coalminers and Oxford dons would probably
see this play. To know this in advance when actually getting the dialogue down on paper
offers a peculiar and extremely dangerous sort of excitement (Potter, i977: i9~-i98).

This rejection of the theatres social closure tended to go along with a rejection of
theatrical forms and conventions per- se. As Troy Kennedy Martin put it in his
manifesto for a new drama for television-all drama that owes its form or substance
to theatre plays is OUT (Kennedy Martin, i964: 23). Televisions new wave defined
themselves decisively against the Loamshire naturalism of the West End. As Tony
Garnett has recalled, they were:
pissed off with the way television drama almost exclusively used the kind of naturalism that
emerged in the i8gos in the theatre. It was drama seen as a group of people who would

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I58
occasionally walk in or walk out of a door, but while they were together they would sit around
and have a conversation. Occasionally, because you wanted a bit of action, they would pour
a drink. It was just people talking to each other, away from the real world (Hudson, i97z: i9).

Not surprisingly this adamant rejection met with an equally adamant defence on
the part of the theatrical establishment. Doyens like Tyrone Guthrie had nothing
but disdain for televisions ncw populist thrust. Plays written especially for tele-
vision, he declared loftily in 1966, have about as much future as had radio plays
20 or 30 years ago. The public for them is immense but they are no more than a
useful substitute for people who cannot, or will not, make the considerably greater
effort to see a play in the theatre (Guthrie, i966: 55).
Underneath these polemical exchanges, however, there were important if un-
recognised continuities between theatrical forms and the emerging practices of the
new television drama. Despite their militant rejection of naturalism, many of the

new wave productions were in fact eatending the original naturalist project of
exploring contemporary life in all its aspects and of showing the determining pressures
of environment on character and action. Although they opposed the restricted
naturalism of the West End with its narrowing of social focus, they remained firmly
within the naturalist tradition more broadly conceived and were subject to its
limitations-a point I shall return to presently (see Williams, 1977 and 1979).

Exploring popular forms : Z Cars and after

In their search for alternatives to the prevailing forms of theatrical naturalism,

writers and directors turned increasingly to other areas of television, notably the
new documentary and current affairs programmes. They were particularly impressed

by the quality of immediacy that came from filming on the new 16 mm stock, although
it was some time before this was used on drama productions. The breakthrough
came in the BBC in r964, when the additional pressure on recording facilities imposed

by the opening of the second channel made filming a feasible option. It was also
relatively economic since the union agreements only required a minimum crew for
16 mm as against the full film crew demanded for shooting on 35 mm. The gain in
impact was evident in Ken Loachs production of Up the Jun<tio>1 ( i 965) which was
shot entirely on 16 mm, mainly on location. Although most drama productions
remained studio-based they still aimed for the style of the documentaries. The first
series of Z Cars is probably the best known example.
As one of the originators, John McGrath, has explained, they set out to make a
kind of documentary about peoples lives ... the cops were incidental-they were
the means of finding out about peoples lives (McGrath, i975: 43)- ~~e thought ...
use cops, OK, but as a device for getting into the small but important realities of the
lives of the people who are going to be watching. No master-criminals, super-sleuths,
gentlemen experts, cunning detectives-the police are not our heroes: the people are
the heroes (McGrath, 1977: 103). At the same time they wanted to capture the
panache of the American police series. As McGrath remembers, they were fascinated
by an American super-cop series called Highway Patrol. It had action, pace, narrative
drivre ... it was the pace that grabbed us (McGrath, I977: 103)-
The aim was to take the popular form of the American series and, as McGrath
has put it, try to bang it into some reality by aiming for the actuality feel of docu-
mentary (McGrath,, i975 v 43)- The result was what Trevor Griffith has called speeded-

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 I59
up naturalism (Thomas, ig76: 13). By dispensing with the usual link shots, getting
rid of the incidental music and having three scenes on a page instead of one scene
on three pages, the Z Cars team created
something distinctly new in British popular
television drama and caused a mild sensation. However, by working within the familiar
form of the police series they opened the way for audiences to identify with the
central characters and, as McGrath has admitted, this seriously undermined the
original intention of presenting a critical view of contemporary working class life.
Because the cops kept appearing week after week, people began to fall in love with
them and they became stars. So the pressure was on to make them the subjects,
rathcr than the device. And when the BBC finally decided thats wiiat they were
going to do, then Troy (Kennedy Martin) and I decided wed had enough (McGrath,
I97s ~ 43).
This instance raises the central problem of how far radical drama can utilise popular
forms without detonating audience responses which move towards empathy and
spectatorship rather than critique and mobilisation. Opponents of the entreist
position (which now include McGrath) arguc that this process is inevitable and, by
way of example, they cite the two most important attempts to work within the series
form-Trevor Griffiths Bill Brand, and Ken Loach and Tony Garnetts Days of
Hope.
Bill Brand uses the career of a newly elected Left-wing Labour NIP as a device
for exploring the limits of electoral party politics and the potentialities and problems
of extra-parliamentary Socialist activity. It was produced by a major commercial
company (Thames Television) and transmitted in a peak time slot. It took themes
that Griffith had dealt with in his stage plays (notably The Party and All Good i11en)
and used the serial form to present them to a mass audience. However, critics argue,
by working within this form and making Brand the hub of the plot, Griffith implicitly
encourages the audience to identify with him, thereby limiting their critical engage-
ment with the wider political themes. As David Edgar has put it:

The danger of a project like Brand is that, by the end of i i episodes, the audience is identifying
with Brand exclusively as the pivot of the story (my hero right or wrong), and sympathising
with his views and actions only insofar as it is necessary to a satisfactory dramatic experience ...
The audience is prepared to share Brands socialism for the duration of the play, but no longer
(Edgar, 1978: 36).
The same criticism has been levelled at Days of Hope, a quartet of television
films that explore the history of British socialism between 1916 and i926 by following
the fortunes of three central characters-Philip, who becomes a Labour MP, and his
sister Sarah and brother-in-law Ben who are drawn towards the Communist Party.
As Jim Allen, the writer, has explained,

through our three main characters, we attempt to show the various forces at work during that
crucial and revolutionary decade. It was also meant to be relevant to what is happening now.
What happened in the 1920S is again happening today (Allen, 1977: i5~-i59).

But critics argue, by placing a family at the centre of the action and failing to draw
out the connections between past and present, Days of Hope is easily viewed by
audiences as just another historical drama, a sort of Family at Class War or Two
Up, Two Downstairs. Once again, they insist, the radical intention is compre-
hensively undermined by the conservatism of the form (see McCabe, t9 j6). This is an
important argument, and one I shall return to presently, but for the moment I want

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 I60

to suggest that it rests on an over simple view of audience response. According to

the BBCs specially commissioned report on reactions to Days of Hope, two-thirds of
those who followed the series were prompted to think they should be more active
in trying to make this country a better place in which to live. At the same time, a
substantial minority of viewers saw the events portrayed as having little or no
relevance to the contemporary situation or to current political practice. However, .
this refusal of relevance seemed to have more to do with their objections to the Left-
wing bias they perceived in the series than with the form of presentation (BBC,
1977b). As the authors of this research are careful to point out, these findings are
limited by the sampling and eliciting procedures employed and should therefore be
seen as tentative. Even so, they do at least indicate that audience reactions are likely
to be more complex and varied than critics like Colin McCabe allow for, and that
content may have pertinent effects independently of form.

Moments of modernism

Alongside the attempt to use popular forms and to try to bang them into some kind
of reality, the radicals who entered television in the Newman era were also interested
in employing the technical possibilities of the medium to create new non-naturalistic
forms. But, as David Mercer has recalled, it was a struggle against the tide.
In 59, 60, 61, I think I was probably dimly aware that for me naturalism wasnt enough.
Naturalism was in many ways an exhausted form, although it seemed at the time that television
drama was a naturalistic medium par exccllence (quoted in Madden, i976: no page number).

Mercer did go on to experiment with non-naturalistic forms, most notably in A

Suitable Case for Treatment ( i 962) which was later filmed as Horgan. But the most
ambitious call for new forms came from one of the disillusioned Z Cars originators,
Troy Kennedy Martin. As he put it in his manifesto of i964:
The new (television) drama will be based on story rather than plot. Its action will be much more
personal in style. It will compress information, emphasise fluidity, free the structure from the
naturalist tyranny of time. Through stream of consciousness and diary form it will lead to
interior thought, interior characterisation (Kennedy Martin, 1964: 3i).

He attempted to put these ideas into practice the following year in a six-part series
called Diary of a rOllllg Man, which took the contemporary clich6 of two provincial
youths coming to London but presented it in a semi-surrealistic way using a fixture
of narration, music, stills, film, stylised speech and naturalistic dialogue. The visual
presentation drew heavily on the techniques of the French New Wave filmakers
who were just then beginning to have an impact in England. As the director of the
series, Ken Loach recalls:
It was just at the time of the French film-anarchic sort of film-making-and a lot of it rubbed
off. If you thought a picture of the Albert Hall would look good youd slip it in and enjoy
being able to. Basically we got away from the idea of the &dquo;well-made&dquo; play, opened up the
screen and got rid of the idea that there must be a crisis, some sort of denouement (West and

Stitt, 1966: 24).

Although the production had few direct successors, there has been a fairly con-
sistent
minority current of opposition to the dominant naturalistic forms of television
drama, stretching from David Mercers work to Denis Potters Pennies from Heave~t.
One of the main barriers to formal experimentation is the assumption that popular

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 I6I

audiences cant cope with modernist devices. There is a certain amount of truth in
this. To the extent that experiments draw on avant-garde film and the stream of
consciousness novel they are likely to prove unpopular with working class audiences.
At the same time, however, a close examination of popular comedy shows from The
Goons to ll~onty Python reveals a plethora of modernist devices. Both shows are full
of shock effects, discontinuities of narrative, abrupt changes of level and the com-
prehensile undermining of illusionism, which open up the question of how far this
everyday modernism provides a basis for dramatic forms that would break with
naturalism while holding on to a mass audience. I shall return to this possibility
presently, but before I do, it is necessary to briefly sketch in the context to the current
debates.

Subsidised spaces : openings and closings

There is widespread agreement among writers and creative personnel that the spaces
available for radical drama within television have begun to close since the late ig6os.
The general hardening of political attitudes it is argued, has been mirrored in a
greater caution and conservatism among the companies and a marked unwillingness
to take risks on productions in politically sensitive areas of content such as Northern
Ireland (see for example, Goodwin, 1977, and Trodd, 1978). This tendency to play
safe, it is suggested, has been further reinforced by the economic pressures imposed
by the intensified battle for viewers and rapidly escalating labour and production
costs. In response, the companies have increasingly looked towards international sales
and co-financing and this, it is argued, has nudged production towards the uncon-
tentious and the already familiar, and towards costume drama rather than the con-
temporary play. While these arguments carry a good deal of force, they can be over-
stated. Despite the intensified political and economic pressures, space still remains
for radical presentations in television and the last decade has seen some notable .

productions, including Days of Hope, Law and Order, Spongers and Bill Brand.
Moreover, radical drama is still being made.
At the time of writing for example, the BBC are about to transmit Jennifer Johnstons
Shadows on Our Skin which looks at the Northern Ireland situation from the point
of view of a rank-and-file Catholic family, and Trevor Griffith is working on his
critical history of the post-war English ruling class, Tory Tales, also for the BBC.
However, opponents of entreism maintain, because the spaces are fewer and more
restricted and the battles longer and more exhausing, television is a much less
attractive place to work than it was. This sense of a tightening circle and of the
inherent limits of television as a radical medium has prompted several leading
members of the original New Wave to move back to the theatre. John McGrath is
probably the best known. After a stint in the film industry he set up the Socialist
touring company, 7: 8-/-. The viability of this movement out of television has been
markedly reinforced by the fact that the spaces available for radical drama within the
theatre have increased considerably over the last decade.
In 1968, the Lord Chamberlains historical right to censor plays for public per-
formance was finally abolished, thereby clearing the way for the presentation of areas
of political and private life that had previously been banned from the stage, or at
best confined to restricted club performances. As late as 1965, Henry Fieldings
Tom Jones had to be performed without the bedroom scenes, and a licence was refused
to John Osbornes play A Patriot for Ale (about a homosexual Austrian army

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I62
officer who is blackmailed into spying for the Russians), despite the fact that it had
won the prestigious Evening Standard drama award when prcsented as a club per-
formance (see Robertson, z9~9: 247-248).
The 197os also saw a marked increase in the scale of public funding for radical
theatre through the Arts Council and the Regional Arts Associations. Towards the
end of the decade, several of the major Socialist touring groups were attracting very
substantial subsidies. In 1978, for example, John 1YlcGraths 7: 8.~ company received
over ~50,000 from the English Arts Council and a further ~8,000 from its Scottish

equivalent. Much to the surprise of many of the recipients, these grants were given,
without political strings, as Ronald Muldoon, the founder of the best known agitprop
group, CAST, recalls : ~ . -

When we got our first Arts Council grant we were totally frightened because the first play we
did was a half hour play against the Prevention of Terrorism Act. We live in an area of London
where all the bombs were going off and we had the States money, and we were going round
telling audiences that the State locked people up without trial. We thought-three months
and theyll fucking come round and thats it. But the great thing was, the Arts Council never
came to see us at all. They didnt know. Ihey just kept giving us the money (Craig, 1978: i9).

Money has become a good deal tighter over the last two years or so however, and
political attitudes have begun to harden, particularly among local Conservative
Councils. The Greater Manchester Council, for example, recently cut their grant to
the North West Arts Association by the amount earmarked for the radical theatre
group, North lf,est,5paiiiie)-, as a protest against their Marxist orientation. Nevertheless,
socialist touring companies continue to operate and to attract support, which has
led John McGrath among others to see them as the major vehicle for the development
of radical drama offering:
The possibility of a highly principled, creative Marxist cultural intervention, giving back to
the public something valuable for a small amount of public money, organised in a genuine
democracy, demanding new skills and imaginative efforts to create a new kind of culture of
the highest standards, for and of the working class (McGrath, ig79: 45)~

Given this possibility, why should radicals still wish to work within television?

For television
The first and most important argument is that for all its limitations, television still
provides the only means of reaching a mass working class audience. Even w-ith an
average audience of around four million, a single Play for Today still attracts more
working class viewers than most theatre productions could hope to reach in a decade
or more of continuous performances. In Tony Garnetts view-, by working in the

theatre radicals are relegating their activity to the periphery of the cultural industries.
If it is at all possible, he argues, they should work within television since it is television
that commands the centre. As he recently told an interviewer:

The BBC owns the means for us to talk to people, so somehow weve got to be in there fighting
to get things on the air. Because if you make underground films, where you dont depend on
big organisations, you are in danger of making inadequate films, and youre showing them to
your friends who are convinced anyway. If we were driven out, then we would have to do that,
but its not a solution (Orbanz, 1977: 63). ,

Or, as Trevor Griffith has put it, echoing the enthusiasm of the first wave of
television writers:

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 I63
Its just thunderingly exciting to be able to talk to large numbers of people in the working
class, and I just cant understand why everybody doesnt want to do it. I am not interested in
talking to 38 university graduates in a cellar in Soho (Thomas, 1976: 12).
But,argue opponents of this entrcist position, it is not just a matter of reaching
large numbers of working class people, it is also a question of what kind of dramatic
experience you offer them, and here television is crucially limited by its tendency to
pull everything back towards naturalistic forms which rely on well-rounded characters
justifying everything they do and investigating in scences of observable reality what
the world is actually like (Goodwin, 1977: 39). These characteristics, it is argued,
make naturalism a virile tool for mediating reality for softening and toning it down
(Goodwin, 1977: 39) and inhibit radical responses in a variety of ways.
In the first place, by encouraging the audience to identify with the central characters
and their struggles, naturalism prevents people from reflecting critically on the
structural forces that have generated their problems. It therefore disconnects the
personal from the political. Second, because locale and setting have to be made
specific, the audience tends not to make connections between the situation dramatised,
and other similar situations (Birchall, 1978: 27). Third, and most important, by
borrowing the techniques of journalism and documentary to present a convincing
slice of life, naturalism is seen as surreptitiously taking over the canons of objectivity
that underpin these forms. As a result, John McGrath argues, naturalism necessarily
imposes,
a certain neutrality about life on the audience. It says, heres the way things are for these
people-isnt it sad, if a tragedy; isnt it funny, if a comedy; isnt it interesting, if by a good
writer; God its boring if by a bad one. It encapsulates the status quo, ossifies the dynamics of
society into a moment of perception (McGrath. Ig77 : 101-102).
This conservatism inherent in naturalist forms is further reinforced, so the argu-
ment goes, by the privatised conditions of television reception. According to David
Edgar for example:
the television audience, approached in the midst of their private and personal existence, are
much more likely than collectively-addressed audiences to take an individual, personalised
(and therefore psychological rather than social) view of the behaviour demonstrated to them
(Edgar, 1978: 35).
This assumption that the collective nature of the theatre experience encourages
an active and critical response on the part of audiences, is central to the critique of
radical television drama. The fact that a theatre play is in Sartres phrase a jam
session (1976: 38), a live event that changes each time it is performed, is seen as
making it potentially more open to its audience, potentially more democratic
(Gooch, 1978: 26). Moreover, because the theatre audience can feel it has the power
collectively to shape the performance, it is assumed that the audience as much as
performers create it (Rawlence, 1979: 63). While these arguments are plausible they
rest on a series of unsubstantiated assumptions about the nature of responses to both
television and the theatre.
In the first place, they overestimate the passivity of the television audience. Vie
still need to know a great deal more about how people relate to television drama,
but the general evidence from audience studies strongly indicates that viewers
have an active relationship to the programmes they watch. They are constantly
measuring the images against their own experience and knowledge and reflecting
on them critically in conversations and arguments with friends and family. On balance

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I64
the available research bears out Trevor Gril~ths contention that responses are multi-
layered, uneven and often contradictory, with plays resonating at different levels in
the same person and immediate responses being reworked later on and connected to
buried and half forgotten images and experiences (Thomas, i 976 : i 3).
In addition the prevailing argument against television takes for granted the present
dominance of the broadcast mode. The coming expansion of home video recording
opens up new possibilities for breaking down the privatised viewing situation and
initiating collective viewing and criticism among community and trade union
groups. Nevertheless, the fact remains that because television drama comes already
finished and canned, the audience is powerless to alter it. They can only react.
However, it is debatable how much power theatre audiences actually have. They
can certainly alter the quality of the performance by the nature of their response, but

they cannot normally alter the text or the final outcome. In this sense the theatre is
no more participatory than television. Nor is it necessarily less privatised. The fact

that people are physically grouped together does not make them a collective. On the
contrary, the normal theatre audience is a succession of what Satre calls serial groups,
consisting of ranked rows of strangers in which people usually only talk to the people
they came with. Admittedly the situation is substantially different in the case of
touring groups who play to audiences on their home ground, in factories, clubs and
community centres, encouraging members of the audience to discuss the performance
with the actors in the bar afterwards. But even at their best, these shows only reach
small numbers on relatively rare occasions, whereas television reaches large numbers
on a regular basis. A touring company would need to be on the road from now until
the end of the century to gather the kind of working class audience that watched
Days of Hope or Bill Brand.
At this point however, the discussion returns to the question of form. Despite its
popularity and massive penetration, radical television drama is crucially limited, so
the argument goes, because it cannot utilise the techniques of shock and disruption
and still hold onto a mass audience. But, without these techniques, able to disturb and
deny expectations, writers have no way of jolting audiences out of their stock responses
(see Edgar, 1978).
There is certainly evidence that television audiences are put off by the shock
effects and alienation techniques that are the stock-in-trade of radical theatre.
According to the BBCs own research for example, the majority of viewers found
the television production of Brechts Caucasian Chalk Circle weird and obscure,
and almost the entire audience was hostile to Brenton and Hares Brassneck, one of
the key works of modern British political theatre. They were particularly confused
by the fact that the production was billed as a comedy and felt cheated when their
expectations were violated (BBC, I974, 1977a). In the face of this kind of evidence
there seems little doubt that radicals working in television need to operate within
rather than against popular forms (see Kellner, 1979). But does this mean that they
are inevitably obliged to fall back on naturalism? I want to argue that the answer is

no, and to suggest three possible ways of developing an alternative radical practice
within the existing forms and structures of television.

Recovering realism
Raymond william has recently argued for a resumption of what he calls the classic
realist project of showing a man or woman making an effort to live a much fuller

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 I65
life and encountering the objective limits of a particular social order, and depicting
the creative contradictions between the impulse towards another life, seen not as an
individual but as a general aspiration, and the structural constraints of a society
(Williams, i97g: 221). However, as he rightly points out, this project will involve
the sharpest distinction from naturalism in the conventional sense in which it has
settled down (Williams, i9~9: 223). Where naturalist drama is limited to conveying
a sense of complaint and injustice the new realism needs to point to alternatives by

moving from the indicative sense of recording contemporary reality to the sub-
junctive sense of supposing a possible sequence of actions beyond it (william, 1979:
219).
Instead of encouraging audiences to ask how will the action turn out? the new
drama would prompt them to ask what would happen if ...? To this end, Williams,
proposes that the action be re-run several times showing how small changes in
circumstances could lead to substantially different outcomes. Where naturalism
stresses the way that peoplc are produced and often imprisoned by their situation,
the new realism would suggest how they could operate upon it to change it. This
proposal is not as far fetched as it first appears. There are several instances within the
existing corpus of television drama where the same action has been repeated from
different viewpoints over several weeks. The best known examples are probably
John Hopkins Talking to a Stranger and Alan Ayckbourns The Norman Conquest.
Although these deal with variations in individuals perceptions of the same set of
events, there is no reason in principle why this form could not be adapted to show
variations in collective possibility.

Everyday modernism
As we noted just now, there is a good deal of evidence that dramas employing
modernist devices are likely to alienate the bulk of the mass television audience.
But there is also evidence that this may have rather more to do with the context in
which they are presented than with the devices themselves. The television version of
John IVlcGraths Tlre Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, provides a case in
point. The play, which recounts the history of the English pillage of Scotland is one
of the most widely acclaimed productions to have come out of the Socialist touring
theatre. It is anti-naturalistic and offers no stable characters for identification, and
yet according to the BBCs research, the television version attracted an audience
that was well up to the average for a single play and largely enthusiastic (at least as
measured by the appreciation index). The production succeeded in holding the
audience because it drew on traditional entertainment forms-in this case the ceilidh
and the music hall-and because it had the qualities that working class audience
most admire-directness, comedy, music, emotion, variety, effects and immediacy
(see McGrath, 1979: 5 it
The same is true of Joan LittIc,yoods Oh H7zat a Loz>egi< 11a)-, the film version of
which enjoyed considerable success at the box office despite its use of modernist
devices. Denis Potters Penllies from Heaven provides another example. Although the
production fractured naturalist conventions by interrupting the narrative with semi-
surrealist song and dance numbers, the fact that it worked within the familiar popular
form of the musical enabled it to attract a considerable following. Non-naturalist
devices are also evident in the emergent cultures of youth. Punk performances are
full of shock effects while cult shows like 1110nty Python and the heiany Everett Video

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 I66

Show suffused with surrealist effects and attacks on illusionism. These diverse
are
sources provide the raw materials for what we can call everyday modernism. One
of the tasks of radical drama is to find ways of forging them into television forms that
will reach and engage the generation brought up on rock music and commercial
television as well as older working class audiences (see Schuman, 1977)-

From critical consumption to critical production

Television produces ideology not only in its programmes but also in the way it is
organised. By celebrating the unique expertise and professionalism of producers and
confining audiences to the roles of spectators and consumers, the prevailing structures
reinforce the central divisions between mental and manual labour and legitimate the
existing distribution of access to scarce productive resources. In the final analysis
then, developing a radical practice for television drama can never simply be a matter
of having a critical world view and of finding new and innovative forms through
which to express it. It must also involve a challenge to the dominant relations of
production and the assumptions on which they rest. As Walter Benjamin remarked in
.
his celebrated essay of 1934, The Author as Producer:
tosupply a production apparatus without trying, within the limits of the possible, to change it,
is highly disputable activity even when the material supplied appears to be of a revolutionary
a

nature (Benjamin 1973: 93-94)~

Without this effort, radical drama in all its forms will always run the risk of be-
coming another radical chic commodity whose consumption becomes a self-
sustaining activity-a substitute for action rather than a prelude to it. As the Brazilian
dramatist, Augusto Boal, has wryly observed:
We are used to plays in which characters make the revolution on stage and the spectators in
their seats feel themselves to be triumphant revolutionaries Why make a revolution in
...

reality if we have already made it in the theatre? (Boal, 1979: 141-142).

The attempt to break with this consumerist attitude to drama provides the basis for
Boals poetics of the oppressed in which any member of the audience is free to
interupt a performance at any point and to suggest changes which the actors then try
out. On a more modest scale there is the precedent of Danish televisions partici-
patory drama experiment where ordinary people get together to devise a play about
their lives and aspirations which is then rehearsed, performed and broadcast with the
help of professional directors and technicians (see Linne and Veirup, 1977). Here
again the development of community video facilities and the opening up of access
programming make this a more feasible proposition than it appears at first.
These three possibilities are complementary rather than exclusive but the likelihood
of any of them being attempted is ultimately an institutional and political question.
In the last instance, the future development of radical television drama is not only a
matter of devising new forms and ways of working, although these are essential. It
is also and crucially, a question of securing the resources and institutional spaces
in which to explore and test them.

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