From Issue 8, January 2003:

Singled Out

Who killed the single play?
Peter Ansorge investigates

How do shifts in the British film industry take place? How much influence do writers have on the film landscape in which so many writers aspire to work? In this article Peter Ansorge takes a journey back to the now notorious ‘single play’ to trace how we arrived at our present situation – no Film on 4, no Granada films and relatively few BBC films. Will we be able to say that we have learned from our history? Will we be able to reinvent both films for television and the passionate audiences who once watched them?

On a Sunday night in July 1997 the single play suddenly vanished from our screens. The BBC's final run of Screen Two proved to be the last occasion on which a UK broadcaster transmitted a series of single-authored pieces to its audience. Since then there have been occasional sightings, followed by rumours that one-off drama was about to wake from its big sleep, but these have proved to be wishful thinking on the part of both viewers and commissioning editors.

The circumstances surrounding the disappearance are still veiled in mystery. It is the purpose of this investigation to find out who 'killed' the single play and to track down and finally name the culprit. This is no easy task. We can't call on the services of Morse or Poirot, useful as they might have been, since both men owe their allegiance to another genre, the returnable series that has replaced the single play as the dominant form of television drama. The better-known detectives are in fact accomplices in the very crime under investigation. They are to a man (and the occasional woman) deeply uncomfortable about revisiting a time and place when the Single Play ruled the roost on television rather than Series and Serials. Yet for the purposes of this case, it is vital to remember that drama on television once meant the Wednesday Play rather than series ten of Silent Witness.

Under Sydney Newman, the man who ran BBC drama in the mid-1960s, an output flourished which was based purely on the imagination of the individual screenwriter. This was the now almost-forgotten era in which David Mercer, Dennis Potter, Jack Rosenthal, Alan Plater, Alan Bennett, Peter Terson and Hugh Whitemore were able to earn a satisfying living from writing single plays.

Interestingly, Newman championed the idea that television drama should take its lead from recent developments in theatre. The 1956 revolution at the Royal Court began with John Osborne's Look Back In Anger and continued with the shock introduction into theatre land of work by Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. Newman instinctively felt that the new drama had potential mass-appeal on television. It was work that reflected actual changes taking place in society as well challenging audiences by breaking down conventional categories of the established play. In its heyday, the Wednesday Play commanded weekly audiences of more than sixteen million viewers. Only politicians of the day, later supported by Mrs Whitehouse and her merry band, sought to bring about its end.

Nowadays the Wednesday Play is invariably associated with the kind of unsparing documentary realism pioneered by Ken Loach and Tony Garnett in Cathy Come Home. But the brief of the Wednesday Play, or Play For Today as it became known when it moved to a regular Tuesday night slot, was not exclusively hard or inexorably linked to 'miserable-ism’.  This misunderstanding is a key factor in the decline and eventual disappearance of single drama.

The appeal of the single play was far more varied than is often suggested. The best writers and directors knew how to entertain as well as shock. If I had to point to one work that illustrates what viewers have lost through the dismantlement of the single play on television, it would not be Loach's Cathy or Mike Leigh's Hard Labour, powerful as these works undoubtedly are. I'd single out the late Alan Clarke's directing of a 1974 Play For Today, Penda's Fen, written by David Rudkin.

Clarke is of course often identified as the hard man of British television drama and film. He is closely identified with his 1978 BBC-banned Borstal drama Scum (eventually turned into a feature film), as well as his studies of collapsing working-class cultures in dramas such as Jim Cartwright's Road and The Firm, a devastatingly bleak portrayal of soccer hooliganism.

Penda's Fen, however, reminds us of a different talent. It tells the story of a relatively privileged sixth-form boy Stephen, unforgettably played by Stephen Banks, who is brought up by adopted parents in the Midlands among the Malvern Hills. He is obsessed by Elgar's music, most specifically The Dream Of Gerontius and it is this work that enables Stephen to unlock his doubts and confusions about his identity. Elgar's music identifies two kinds of England for Stephen: one intellectually radical, which he fears, the other deeply conservative, to which he is drawn.

What was remarkable about the writing and directing was the sympathy with which the play treats Stephen's dilemma. Elgar's music in the film overwhelms us not as a seductive soundtrack but as the most vital of dramatic clues to Stephen's inner being and quest. It liberates and imprisons the boy. Cycling through the Malvern Hills, arms flung high in the days before the Walkman, Stephen is overjoyed to remember the Allegro For Strings. Playing the opening chords of The Dream of Gerontius on an organ in a tiny country church, the floor starts to crack open in front of the boy. Real demons are down there. This is a Play For Today, transmitted primetime on BBC1 to a large audience, which not only broke from naturalism, but acknowledged the power of fantasy and intellectual excitement in the growth of a human being.

Penda's Fen was produced by David Rose out of BBC Birmingham. It was Rose who went on to become Channel 4's first Head of Drama and to launch Film On Four in November 1982. Although Rose had always planned to promote some of the films through a limited release in cinemas, his prime concern was to revitalise the single play on television. At a time when the BBC was beginning to question the rising cost and raison d'etre of the single play, particularly those shot on celluloid, Rose committed his entire drama budget to the cause.

The subsequent brain-drain from the BBC was startling. Within a year of Channel 4's launch, Mike Leigh, David Hare, Alan Clarke, Philip Saville, Stephen Frears and Richard Eyre among many others had all but abandoned the BBC’s Television Centre for Channel 4’s Charlotte Street. They did so partly out of respect for Rose, but also because he was offering the possibility of a theatrical release for their films. Union agreements prohibited the BBC from undertaking such an experiment at the time.

CONT. in Issue 8.