Television in Britain has long inserted liberal social themes into its drama
programming. Like some television-age Charles Dickens (whose serialised works
aroused the Victorian conscience), Julia Smith has always brought a moral
element to her work, discussing social issues without artificiality and often
blurring the dividing line between fiction and reality. Her ultimate
achievement, EastEnders (BBC, 1985- ), conveyed the Dickens gift of combining
serialised entertainment with a sense of forum drama.
She trained at RADA before learning stage management with repertory companies
around the country. Her break came when the BBC asked her to stage manage
Menotti's The Consul (tx. 28/5/1951) for television. She returned to the
theatre, working for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon,
but was called back to BBC television in 1963 to direct her first play, 'Letter
to a Soldier' (tx. 11/2/1963) for the anthology Suspense (BBC, 1962-63).
Her first taste of soap serial as director was on Compact (BBC, 1962-65), set
in a women's magazine publishing house, and The Newcomers (BBC, 1965-69), about
a London family who relocate to a country town. She directed multiple episodes
of the popular Dr. Finlay's Casebook (BBC, 1962-71) saga, Patrick Troughton's
early days as Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-89), and the BBC's popular seven-part
serialisation of Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children (1968).
Working on long-running police drama Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78) in the early
1970s, she met the series' script editor, Tony Holland, beginning a long and
fruitful collaboration. The pair worked together (a producer-script editor
partnership) on the hospital series Angels (BBC, 1975-83) and on The District
Nurse (BBC, 1984; 1987) before their joint creation of EastEnders.
Providing the BBC with its first long-running soap serial since the rather
lightweight, radio-styled series of the 1960s, EastEnders reflected a modern-day
social realism, with storylines focusing on such unpalatable aspects of life as
Aids, cot death, drug addiction, racism, abortion and many other controversial
issues rarely examined in episodic television.
The Smith-Holland team was asked to devise another BBC serial and, in 1992,
they launched Eldorado, a 'Eurosoap' set on the Spanish Riviera. Unfortunately,
it was a ratings disaster from the beginning and was cancelled in 1993. It
seemed an unfitting close to a career remarkable for breaching the safe and the
sedate with a determination to confront the real-life experience.
She won the Desmond Davis Award for Outstanding Creative contribution to
Television, 1987.
Tise Vahimagi
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FILM & TV CREDITS
