Though Ken Loach is often characterised as having begun in television before
'graduating' to feature films, his television dramas are distinctive in their
own right, not just preparation for a cinema career, although they share themes,
techniques and collaborators with his films. His most famous dramas embraced the
space for creativity, radicalism and the airing of neglected voices to audiences
of millions offered by the BBC's The Wednesday Play (1964-70) and Play for Today
(1970-84), but also intriguingly tested that space's limits when interrogating
broadcasters' definition of balance.
After graduating from Oxford in 1960, Loach wrote and acted in theatre,
initially uninterested in television, though his year in Northampton rep was
financed by an ABC scheme to support budding TV directors. Loach acted in small
parts on That Was The Week That Was (BBC, 1962-63), but in late 1963 took the
BBC's directors' training course.
'Catherine' (BBC, tx. 24/1/1964), about a woman whose marriage had broken
down, marked Loach's debut. The play appeared in the experimental anthology
Teletale (BBC, 1963-64), one of a succession of attempts to challenge naturalism in television drama.
Teletale's producer, James MacTaggart, credited 'Catherine'
with "breaking most of the accepted rules of television" with its fluid
narration, experimental staging - without sets, lighting indicated scene changes
- and quick cutting. 'Catherine' partnered Loach with two of his most prolific
collaborators: actor Tony Garnett, who as a producer would oversee most of
Loach's work through the 1960s and 70s, and writer Roger Smith, who was a script
editor on several of Loach's earliest television works, and a script consultant
on many of his later films.
More conventional, though no less complex assignments included three live
episodes of police series Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78): 'Profit by Their Example' by John Hopkins
(tx. 12/2/1964) and Robert Barr's 'Straight Deal' (tx. 11/3/1964) and
'The Whole Truth' (tx. 8/4/1964). His three episodes of the more
experimental Diary of a Young Man (BBC, 1964; the other three were directed by
Peter Duguid) matched him with MacTaggart, John McGrath and Troy Kennedy Martin,
whose 1964 'Nats Go Home' article called for a new televisual grammar. Head
of drama Sydney Newman called Loach's first episode "a major breakthrough in
storytelling" for its combination of fractured narrative, studio material,
stills, montage, voice-overs, archive, music and location filming. Other early
Loach plays showed the influence of experimental television, the French New Wave
and Brechtian theatre - as Loach recalled, "exposing the mechanism of
drama".
In 1965 The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70) - produced, initially, by
MacTaggart and story-edited by Roger Smith - broadcast six Loach pieces,
including three written by James O'Connor: the amusing 'Tap on the Shoulder'
(BBC, tx. 6/1/1965), about criminals in the Establishment; '3 Clear Sundays'
(BBC, tx. 7/4/1965), with a victim's perspective of capital punishment; and 'The
Coming Out Party' (BBC, tx. 22/12/1965), featuring a youth with imprisoned
parents. Eric Coltart's 'Wear A Very Big Hat' (BBC, tx. 17/2/1965) featured
actor Neville Smith, who appeared in, and soon wrote, other Loach plays.
Although surreal musical 'The End of Arthur's Marriage' (BBC, tx. 17/11/1965)
seems uncharacteristic, montage and pop music recur in Loach's early work. They
are allied powerfully with documentary elements in 'Up the Junction' (BBC, tx.
3/11/1965), Nell Dunn's headline-making study of illegal abortion.
Loach and Garnett influenced the growth of all-filmed television plays,
confronting BBC reservations about 16mm and circumventing compulsory studio scenes by editing them on film. Loach's drama documentaries evolved a
style generating apparent immediacy, in particular aided by cinematographer Tony
Imi on 'Cathy Come Home' (BBC, tx. 16/11/1966), the study of homelessness which
remains one of Loach's most respected films and the best-remembered of all
1960s' television dramas. David Mercer's 'In Two Minds' (BBC, tx. 1/3/1967), on
schizophrenia and conformity, was Loach's first all-location production, while
'The Golden Vision' (BBC, tx. 17/4/1968) saw the director start to cast club
comedians in his search for authentic performance. Co-written by Neville Smith,
'The Golden Vision' included humour and football (recurring Loach elements) and
further fused drama and documentary. Smith also wrote the affecting After a
Lifetime (tx. 18/7/1971), about the funeral of a lifelong political activist,
made for LWT by Loach and Garnett's Kestrel Films.
Although dramadoc devices placed characters' stories in wider social
contexts, Loach worried that 'Cathy Come Home' "wasn't political enough" because
it didn't question structural causes such as land ownership. Collaborating with
Jim Allen made his subsequent work more explicitly political. 'The Big Flame'
(BBC, tx. 19/2/1969) depicted revolutionary occupation by Liverpool dockers,
while Loach's first Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84), 'The Rank and File' (BBC, tx.
20/5/1971), fictionalised a recent strike; both were political interventions,
articulating working-class interests which they charged trade unions with
betraying. Airing alternative viewpoints through techniques resembling the
non-fiction programmes that they followed in the schedules (a specifically
televisual concept), the plays questioned television's claims to objectivity.
For Loach and Garnett, complaints about drama documentary form disguised an
effort to suppress political content.
After a family tragedy, Loach returned gradually with the half-hour Chekhov
adaptation 'A Misfortune' (Full House, BBC, tx. 13/1/1973), before embarking on
Days of Hope (BBC, 1975). This high-profile Loach-Garnett-Allen four-parter
presented a 'people's history' from the First World War to the 1926 General
Strike, inviting comparisons between its labour movement treachery and
contemporary politics. Testament to television's radical film culture - cinema
financers backed away from the initial idea - it and 'Loach-Garnett-Allen'
techniques became central to academic debates in the film journal Screen about
politically impactful film form.
Since Chris Menges' cinematography on Kes (1969), Loach's style left behind
documentary devices in favour of sympathetic observation inspired by the Czech
'new wave'. This approach underpins two collaborations with Kes's writer, Barry
Hines: 'The Price of Coal' (BBC, 1977), a comic-tragic mining two-parter, and
The Gamekeeper (ITV, tx. 16/12/1980), which ambitiously crosses different
seasons while raising questions of land ownership, class and alienation.
However, feeling that his style lacked dynamism in Looks and Smiles (1981), and
wanting to respond urgently to Thatcherism, Loach focused on television
documentaries, sharing themes (such as unions failing members), techniques and
collaborators (including Menges, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and editor
Jonathan Morris) with his fiction.
Given that television still helps to finance many of his films, it's
difficult to state that Loach left television drama for cinema. However, Loach's
films receive limited distribution in Britain, lacking the "immediacy and real
exchange" that Loach and other filmmakers experienced when engaging mass
audiences and attentive critics. That engagement was invoked when cinema films
were broadcast early as, in effect, television dramas: The Navigators (Channel
4, tx. 2/12/2001), on privatisation and casualisation affecting rail workers,
and It's A Free World... (Channel 4, tx. 24/9/2007), on the exploitation of
economic migrants, were reminders that Loach brought topicality, humanity and
passion to television drama.
Dave Rolinson
Further reading
Hayward, Anthony, Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and his Films (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
Hill, John, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (London: BFI, 2011).
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