From the very beginning, British television has relied on literature and
drama for a significant proportion of its output. This has been variously
interpreted as evidence of artistic timidity or as a tactic employed by the BBC
to fulfil its Reithian public service remit to 'educate, inform and entertain'.
Less remarked upon is the role that technology has played amid such aesthetic,
political, cultural and ideological considerations.
The technical restrictions imposed both by live broadcasting and the use of
cumbersome, practically immobile cameras in the 1930s and '40s meant that the
BBC's drama output initially consisted entirely of short literary and stage play
extracts. One of the first was, appropriately, Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the
Looking Glass (tx. 22/1/1937), followed that year by extracts from thirteen
Shakespeare plays. The BBC was able to claim by 1960 that An Age of Kings, its
ambitious fifteen-part presentation of 'Richard II', 'Henry IV', 'Henry V',
'Henry VI' and 'Richard III', was its sixtieth Shakespeare production. In 1964, to celebrate the fourth centenary of Shakespeare's birth, the Corporation televised the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Wars of the Roses and the groundbreaking Hamlet at Elsinore (tx. 1/1/1964), made entirely on video on
location in Denmark.
In the 1950s, with the advent of video tape and telerecording, live drama was
phased out, while pressure to find new plays to produce was exhausting both
producers and the available works of such popular and prolific dramatists as
Ibsen, Priestley, Chekhov, Coward, Rattigan and George Bernard Shaw.
The arrival of commercial television in 1955 further emphasised the need to
build viewer loyalty and identification, which diminished the value of
stand-alone plays in favour of organic or themed collections and gave importance
to the serial format in literary adaptations. BBC Radio's Sunday evening
'classic' serial, was soon joined by its
television equivalent, a slot that still exists today, providing a steady diet
of cosy, faithful but generally rather bland transpositions of predominantly
Victorian and Edwardian novels. Thus the BBC became renowned for decades for its
ability to not so much interpret as discreetly embalm celebrated literary
properties, with the emphasis on textual fidelity and handsome décor.
Although this resulted in somewhat homogenised versions of favourite works by
the likes of Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë sisters, Jane
Austen and, especially, Charles Dickens, there have also been real gems, such as
Arthur Hopcraft's adaptations of Hard Times (ITV, 1977) and Bleak House (BBC,
1985) and the RSC's nine-hour The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
(Channel 4, 1982). Other works, more notable for the times they have been
adapted than for their intrinsic merit, include Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
(BBC, 1948; 1953; 1962; 1967; 1978; ITV, 1998) and her sister Charlotte's Jane
Eyre (BBC, 1956; 1963; 1973; 1983; ITV, 1997).
While the 'classics' were plundered for Sunday nights, other genres were also
popular as the basis for series, serials and anthologies, the latter voraciously
consuming vast quantities of literary material for decades. Detective stories
for instance were featured in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (ITV, 1971-73), The
Agatha Christie Hour (ITV, 1980), and more recently The Ruth Rendell Mysteries
(ITV, 1987-2000), while horror stories were featured in Mystery and Imagination
(ITV, 1966-70), as well as such stand alone efforts like Count Dracula (BBC,
1977), starring Louis Jourdan, and The Woman in Black (ITV, 1989), adapted by
Nigel Kneale from Susan Harris's novel, and later turned into a massive West End hit.
Although literary science fiction remains largely neglected on television,
Kneale's powerful adaptation of George Orwell's anti-Stalinist dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC, tx. 12/12/1954) made a huge impact, while Out of the Unknown
(BBC, 1965-1971) remains Britain's only significant SF anthology series.
Fantasy, especially when taken from children's literature, has often produced
popular results like C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia (BBC, 1988-90), John Masefield's The Box of Delights (BBC, 1984) and Mary Norton's The Borrowers (BBC, 1972; 1992-93). Among more adult fare, Gormenghast (BBC, 1999), from
Mervyn Peake's dense novel, was a notable disaster, while Fay Weldon's
challenging The Life and Loves of a She Devil (BBC, 1986) was hugely popular.
Weldon scripted the 1980 adaptation of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, one of the five serials made by the BBC from the novel between 1952 and 1995. The
importance of the 'classic serial' for the Corporation was confirmed in 1967,
when BBC2's colour service was launched with Thackeray's Vanity Fair and the
gigantic success of The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy's sequence of novels and
stories, brilliantly adapted by Donald Wilson into twenty-six parts. This set
the mould for decades, leading directly to efforts like the massive The
Pallisers (BBC, 1974), adapted by Simon Raven from Trollope. It also paved the way for Jack Pulman's 20-part serialisation of Tolstoy's War and Peace (BBC, 1973), and I, Claudius (BBC, 1976), adapted from Robert Graves' novels about ancient Rome.
Stylistically, British television was still intensely theatrical, at least
partly for technical reasons. Most television drama was still made rather flatly
on video in the studio using multiple cameras, with long scenes shot straight
through. This privileged performance and encouraged scripts to be
dialogue-heavy, while minimising location shooting. Video shot on location,
using equipment designed for sporting occasions, was criticised as technically
inferior, a criticism levelled at such all-video productions as Raffles (ITV,
1977), based on the stories by E.W. Hornung, and Dennis Potter's adaptation of
Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (BBC, 1978), starring Alan Bates.
The monumental adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981),
shot entirely on 16mm, proved a watershed in this regard, creating a uniquely
televisual event that combined typically slow TV pacing with the glossy sheen of
a cinema production, helping oversees sales. Its success led to the even longer
and more expensive The Jewel in the Crown (ITV, 1984), adapted from Paul Scott's
tetralogy about the Indian Raj. In 1987 the BBC, feeling usurped, formally
retired its Sunday tea-time classic serial slot and briefly recouped some lost
ground with Fortunes of War, Alan Plater's handsome adaptation of Olivia Manning's twinned trilogies, starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.
Soaring production costs soon made these glossy period serials increasingly
rare, and ITV abandoned the format, concentrating instead on making
feature-length adaptations of novels by such commercially successful authors as
Colin Dexter, Bernard Cornwell and, especially, Catherine Cookson, fifteen of whose novels were adapted by the network during the 1990s.
Andrew Davies helped revive the fortunes of the classic serial with scripts
for Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (BBC, 1993),
ratings winners that made significant breaks with the traditional style
popularised by Forsyte (BBC, 1967), with their revisionist tendency towards
respected literary properties and their stressing of modern attitudes towards
sex, class and female emancipation. The subsequent avalanche of 'classic'
adaptations included Davies' versions of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (ITV,
1996), Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (BBC, 1999), Trollope's The Way
We Live Now (BBC, 2001) and He Knew He Was Right (BBC, 2004), Eliot's Daniel
Deronda (BBC, 2002) and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (ITV, 2002).
Nowadays, contemporary novels are rarely treated as well as these in
budgetary and scheduling terms, but significant successes include adaptations of
Iain Banks' The Crow Road (BBC, 1996), Zadie Smith's White Teeth (Channel 4,
2002) and, more recently, Jake Arnott's The Long Firm (BBC, 2004).
The BBC Shakespeare Plays (1978-1985) represents the apex of the
Corporation's cultural commitment to Shakespeare, with the entire canon of 37
plays made especially to be shown at primetime on Sunday evenings. Although
somewhat unadventurous, it remains an extraordinary feat, the productions
proving invaluable in teaching. The best remembered include The Taming of the
Shrew (tx. 23/10/1980), starring John Cleese, and a magnificent The Winter's
Tale (BBC, tx. 8/2/1981). Even better, though, was Granada's King Lear (ITV, tx.
3/4/1983), one of ITV's few Shakespeare excursions, starring Laurence Olivier. More recently it also made the highly rewarding Othello (tx. 23/12/2001),
adapted by Andrew Davies and set in the modern Metropolitan Police Force, with
Christopher Eccleston as 'Ben Jago'.
Stage plays were otherwise mostly reserved for such anthologies as Festival
(BBC, 1963-64) and Play of the Month (BBC, 1965-1983) and Performance (BBC,
1991-97), the last regularly scheduled anthology series. It included an original
production of Rodney Ackland's Absolute Hell (tx. 5/10/1991), directed by
Anthony Page and starring Judi Dench, which, in a reversal of normal practice, was later re-staged at the National Theatre.
Although stage play productions have become rarer and largely restricted to
the minority channels, there have been some notable successes, including Peter
Brook's The Mahabharata (Channel 4, tx. 1989) and the audacious Beckett on Film
(Channel 4, 2001), an umbrella title covering the entirety of the playwright's
stage work. To help launch BBC4, its flagship digital channel, the BBC returned
to its roots by presenting television versions of such recent West End successes
as Peter Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (tx. 13/3/2002) and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen (tx. 26/9/2002).
Sergio Angelini
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