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long and alarmingly described by the BBC as “heart-warming, aspi- rational little films.” But perhaps there’s a recognition that there should still be room for the single drama and the single voice in among all the make-over shows.
Hang on though – maybe a decade ago wasn’t so golden. In Broadcast in 1996, William Phillips lamented that “single plays have been supplanted by choppy made-for-TV movies”, and went on to compare 1995 with 1983 when “the four nets put out 215 original single plays or films, occu- pying nearly 330 hours, 6.4 a week. By last year, the total was down to 116 productions filling 134 hours, 2.6 a week. On both systems, the drop in hours was 60 per cent.”
So the Golden Age was always a decade ago, was it? And things were always better in the Old Days, were they? No they weren’t. But let’s recognise what’s changed. And not pre- tend that nothing’s been lost.
Mark Shivas recently pro- duced Talking Heads and Talking Tales by Alan Bennett. A one-time Head of Drama then Head Of Films at the BBC, he also pro- duced the feature films A Private Function, Moonlighting and The Witches and the television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Casanova and The Glittering Prizes.
“Perhaps there’s a recognition that there should still be room for the single drama and the single voice in amongst all the make- over shows.”
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A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITIES
by 52%. But there’s been an increase of 40% in the number of soaps and long running series on BBC1, while ITV’s ‘soap land’ has increased by a fifth.
I decided to look back a decade at the BBC’s drama out- put and pulled out a brochure for 1991/1992 season. In the autumn of 1991, there were twelve hours and in the first half of 1992 twenty three hours of mini-series on BBC2, so thirty five in all.
But what really stood out was the number of single pieces – twelve Screen Twos, including Truly Madly Deeply, Enchanted April, The Green Arena, The Lost Language Of Cranes and Jack Clayton’s last film, Memento Mori.
There were five plays from the theatre under the title ‘Performance’, including Uncle Vanya, Old Times, Top Girls and Absolute Hell, by Rodney Ackland. There were ten ‘Screenplays’, shorter films and plays, plus five ten minute shorts and five fifty minute low-budget pieces called ‘Encounters’.
Over on BBC1, there was Screen One – nine feature length television films – and the Play on One, six pieces of 90 minutes or less, plus five mini-series and at least ten series of more than ten episodes each.
Now, no one’s pretending these were all good, but the dif- ference in kind of output is arrest- ing. BBC Films, responsible now for most of the single drama output, transmitted fourteen singles in 2002. Their yearly output is now about eight features and six tele- vision films. In 1992, there was much more room for the single and singular script.
As Ken Loach said at his David Lean BAFTA lecture, writers are straitjacketed in soap operas and series. “The single voice is lacking today. The writer must be respected and space given to what they have to say.”
Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope to be found in Afternoon Plays tried on BBC1 in the last week of January. They were extremely low-budget, an hour
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