British Tv Drama Essay, Research Paper
To what extent has British television drama contributed to a public discourse on major political and social issues, both in the recent past and during the 1960s. Please draw on specific examples in presenting your argument.
In this essay I will discuss how political and social issues have been raised in British television drama and also how they relate to public discourse in Britain. I will discuss TV dramas such as Our Friends in the North, Talking to a Stranger, Cathy Come Home, and Boys from the Blackstuff.
There are various issues, which could be identified as social and political in a TV drama, some of them are race, ethnicity, class and gender. Most people are influenced by television, believing what they see to be ‘real’ so it is useful to make a successful programme on hard-hitting issues as it will have deep impact on the audience.
From the mid-50s on there has been an increase in original TV drama with a broader appeal. The preference for original drama was a reaction to the theatre’s preoccupation with middle-class concerns. So the ‘angry young men’ playwrights were established. They wrote about ‘real’ issues, about ‘problems faced by the members of a broader audience in their daily lives’ . This can be seen in the 1960s, with the arrival of innovative dramas such as Cathy Come Home and Talking to a Stranger. In the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s programmers were taking risks allowing new talent space to grow, but now TV drama tends to be more genre-based.
Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home (1966) bought the issue of homelessness into the public’s eye by showing Cathy’s slide into poverty and despair. Cathy Come Home is ‘deeply concerned about aspects of our society and deals with the plight of the unfortunate, the misunderstood, the ignored’ . Policies were promptly changed after this programme was aired; the homeless charity ‘Shelter’ formed four days after Cathy Come Home was screened. Cathy Come Home used an innovative documentary style by using lightweight cameras and by taking the action out of the studio. The director Ken Loach rejected the used of the studio and instead opted for 16mm film. Cathy Come Home offered ‘a harsh and jarring realism which depended on energetic editing, creative use of sound and dialogue, and techniques borrowed from documentary.’ However Mary Holland wrote for The Observer about the TV drama Cathy Come Home, “Cathy’ did make people pause; did make homelessness for a time a fashionable cause; did extract some money for charity. But it failed to make any meaningful assault on the fundamental causes of the problem or to draw any conclusions’ . However it still showed the ‘overwhelming concern with the outcasts of society’ ; the inadequacy of society’s care for the disadvantaged, much like Boys from the Blackstuff did in the 1980s.
Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff was first shown in November 1982 and made a huge impact on British television. It highlighted the unemployment crisis in Britain in the eighties at the time when Thatcher was in power, showing that there was no hope under the Thatcherite government. Boys from the Blackstuff used a realist style to reflect the problems of the unemployed. It combined realism, black humour and surrealism to successfully portray the desperateness of the situation. Bleasdale used distanciation to make the drama even more powerful by presenting the truth but moving away from ‘pure realism’. It challenged the dominant idea that the unemployed are a burden on society and showed that they were actually suffering people. It is a serious drama, which challenges conventional perceptions of society. Boys from the Blackstuff rests in its engagement with the over-riding concerns of the day in a highly imaginative dramatic form. As a TV drama Boys from the Blackstuff is pessimistic, but the audience at the time read it positively and it had a positive effect on their outlook. After the first BBC2 broadcast on Sunday evenings the series was repeated on primetime BBC1. The second broadcasts attracted 30 million viewers over the five episodes.
Talking to a Stranger (1966) by John Hopkins centers around the lives of a dysfunctional family. It deals with social issues such as family relationships, pregnancy and old age. Talking to a Stranger was very original in its day, as in each episode it showed the view of another family member. To show this the camera uses close-up shots for emphasis on facial expressions and the camera gives the audience the ‘privilege look’, where no-one else can see the characters view except for the camera/audience.
Our Friends in the North (1996) by Peter Flannery is an evocative nine-part drama series, which follows the lives of four friends from the early 60s to the mid 90s. The characters are placed in a social and political context that allows an exploration of how Britain has changed during this period. Our Friends in the North also uses cultural references, for example they show The Beatles and Harold Wilson, which adds elements of realism to the text by using real people. Furthermore, Our Friends in the North uses real social/political problems like the 1984 mines strike. Other social/political issues that are employed in Our Friends in the North are police corruption, porn industry, drugs and alcoholism.
All these TV dramas used issues that could be considered as personal problems such as single parenthood, marital breakdown, unemployment, and placed them into a political framework, thus turning the personal into the political, allowing the viewers to identify with the characters problems.
At present, there is criticism that TV drama is playing safe with an even narrower of subjects, some of them being police, hospitals and detectives. However now there are soaps instead of TV dramas that deal with social issues like Eastenders, Coronation Street and Brookside. Dramas like Eastenders have a diverse range of issues, both political and social. For example Eastenders has dealt with crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy and AIDS.
Phil Redmond, the creator of Brookside, said that he ‘wanted to use the twice weekly form to explore social issues, and, hopefully, contribute to any continuing social debate’. He also said that he ‘sought to reflect Britain in the 1980s’ and ‘tackle relevant social issues’ . Most soap operas arose from the economic, social and political concerns of their time, which suggests that these soap operas were made to tackle relevant issues in society at the time that they were made.
Television, through drama, has the ability to educate people about certain issues e.g. health, family planning, crime etc, this is because drama is about everyday issues which provides ideas and solutions that people can relate to.
Undeniably, TV drama does bring to light social and political issues in society, however, I agree with Mary Holland that, ‘it makes people aware not of a situation which is within their power to change…but of a social problem out there in the distance, arousing us perhaps to compassion, but not to action’ .
George W Brandt British Television Drama in the 1980s Cambridge University Press 1993
George W Brandt British Television Drama Cambridge University Press 1981
Millington and Nelson ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ The Making of TV Drama Comedia 1986
Filmography
Alan Beasdale Boys from the Blackstuff BBC Enterprises Ltd 1989
John Hopkins Talking to a Stranger
Jeremy Sandford Cathy Come Home
Peter Flannery Our Friends in the North