The bfi TV 100: an introduction

by Christopher Dunkley

The Italians had neo-realism, the French the nouvelle vague, and the Americans just about everything else from film noir to the western and the musical. And the British? Well, Britain produced the Ealing comedies and four of them were really quite good. Powell and Pressburger? They made three or four impressive films too. And the sixties' new wave? It was more of a ripple, really, wasn't it, and if Laurence Harvey and Rita Tushingham didn't appeal to you, then you were left with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life. Yet the notion that there was a paucity of British screen talent in the second half of the twentieth century could hardly be wider off the mark; it was just that the screen was a different size. Instead of working for the cinema, British talent went into television.

The results can be seen in the wonderful richness of the bfi TV 100. Run your eye down the list from Abigail's Party to Z Cars and you find tough social realism such as Cathy Come Home, an angry and polemical drama about homelessness and the inhumanity of social services; Made In Britain with Tim Roth delivering a mesmerisingly powerful portrait of an intelligent but disaffected skinhead; and Edna, The Inebriate Woman, about a difficult old bag lady, each of which can stand comparison with Bicycle Thieves or La Terra Trema.

Other sorts of drama on the other side of the spectrum combine light entertainment techniques with serious social concern to create unique works such as The Naked Civil Servant; hymning the life of the irrepressibly exhibitionistic homosexual Quentin Crisp; and Pennies From Heaven, in which Dennis Potter first fully exploited his bizarre yet peculiarly effective technique of having his actors mime to the songs of crooners from the 1930s. There are comedies from Steptoe and Son to Monty Python's Flying Circus which were as funny and original - more so - than anything anybody was attempting in cinema anywhere in the world. And because television is such an all-embracing medium you also find arts programmes (Arena, Monitor), political satire (That Was The Week That Was, Spitting Image) and current affairs, the like of which is rarely if ever found in the cinema (in various forms: journalism as in Death on the Rock from ITV's This Week, for instance, and drama documentary as in Hillsborough, also from ITV).

Many of the titles are predictable. It would have been astonishing, not to say scandalous, if Potter's masterpiece, The Singing Detective, which so successfully combined autobiography, thriller and - again - the popular songs of the 1930s, had been left out; and a great surprise if Fawlty Towers or The World At War had not been included. On the other hand, some titles may raise eyebrows, and it is hard to avoid the feeling that their inclusion results to some extent from the vagaries of list making. The producers, critics and other 'opinion formers' invited to vote were sent a booklet containing some 650 titles arranged under various headings such as 'Drama Serial', 'Light Entertainment' and 'Children's', and told that a certain number of their choices had to be distributed in each category. Given that obligation, it may have seemed reasonable enough to choose Michael Moore's TV Nation or Thunderbirds rather than the alternatives.

However, even though we had the chance to write in some of our own choices, several of the programmes which would feature in my personal top 20 of all time had no chance of getting into this top 100 because they did not appear on the lists sent out. There is, surely, something a bit odd about a list which includes Tiswas and Blind Date but excludes Tumbledown, The Voyage of Charles Darwin, Decade of Destruction, The Making of a Natural History Film and From Moscow to Pietushki. That last title may not be among the most famous of all time, yet the programme was a brilliantly clever combination of arts documentary, satire and travelogue which deservedly won top honours at the Prix Italia, Grierson and RTS awards of 1991. It is just the sort of production that - like Blade Runner or Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the cinema - merits reconsideration so that it can begin to acquire the wider reputation that it deserves. If only British television would develop a policy of serious repertory instead of its miserable habit of using repeats as fillers...

Yet indignant as we may be at finding a few of our own favourites missing, the general reaction to this list must surely be of pride bordering on awe. So many of these titles live vividly in the memory because of the pleasure they gave (The Morecambe and Wise Show), the quality of the writing (Alan Bennett's Talking Heads), of the acting (Boys From The Blackstuff), the journalism (The Death of Yugoslavia) and the sheer originality at a time when it was theatre and cinema which were supposedly revolutionising the performing arts (Talking To A Stranger, with its four versions of the same family events; Blue Remembered Hills, with adults playing children; 28 Up, exploiting television's ability to draw its audience back again and again, in this case at seven year intervals to follow the development of a whole generation of children).

The statistics are significant. You have to be getting on a bit now to remember programmes from the 1950s, television's first significant decade, and there were, in any case, not all that many programmes being made. So it is no great surprise to find that only five of the programmes on the list date from the 1950s. What does seem amazing is that two are still running: Blue Peter and This Is Your Life. Some may find it more surprising that the other four decades get such nearly equal representation: 25 from the 1960s, 22 from the 1970s, 23 from the 1980s and 25 from the 1990s. No doubt this will be used as ammunition by those keen to attack the notion that there was ever a golden age in British television. If the bfi panel opts for such an evenly distributed list, how can the argument hold water?

The answer could be that interestingly different sorts of programmes crop up in the different decades. For instance, one third of the programmes from the 1990s turn out to be comedies of one sort or another: Absolutely Fabulous, Drop the Dead Donkey, Father Ted, Have I Got News For You, I'm Alan Partridge, One Foot in the Grave, The Royle Family and The Wrong Trousers. There are also two children's programmes, The Borrowers and Teletubbies; a prize quiz, the only one on the list, Who Wants to be a Millionaire; and some well made but pretty undemanding entertainment series such as Later with Jools Holland and Michael Moore's TV Nation.

Look at the programmes from the 1960s and, although here, too, you see comedies such as Dad's Army and The Likely Lads, you also find Kenneth Clark's 13-part series on the history of western art, Civilisation; two dramas from Peter Watkins: Culloden, an account of the 18th-century battle shot like a newsreel, which will never be forgotten by anyone who saw it, and The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain, which was considered so effective that it was suppressed for decades; Ken Russell's lyrical monochrome essay on Elgar; the BBC's first great worldwide drama success, The Forsyte Saga; Granada's long-running and influential half-hour current affairs series World in Action; the two seminal comedy series Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part, both of which were sold to the US under format deals; ratings giants such as The Avengers, Top of the Pops, Morecambe and Wise, Z Cars, Coronation Street and Doctor Who; and two of the most controversial and imitated series in the entire history of television: TW3 and Monty Python.

Move on to the 1970s and although, again, you find comedies on the list - the splendidly idiosyncratic Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Porridge, containing Ronnie Barker's best work, and Fawlty Towers, which many viewers consider the funniest British television comedy ever made - once more there are also series of a type and quality which do not appear in today's schedules. The late night repeat in the spring of 2000 of BBC2's outstanding 1972 series The Ascent of Man, in which Jacob Bronowski endeavoured to go one better than Clark in mapping out mankind's intellectual development, illustrated the point graphically by creating an alarming contrast with everything around it. Other Top 100 titles from the seventies include the dramas I, Claudius and Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, and two of the best pieces of work ever done by Mike Leigh: Nuts in May and Abigail's Party. Among the factual programmes are David Attenborough's Life on Earth, and one of the biggest blockbuster documentary series ever made: The World At War, which established a formula combining memoir-interview and archive film that has been copied countless times.

So if this list bears out the belief that there was a golden age, the first question is why it occurred when it did, and the second is how we can induce the British television industry to resume laying the golden eggs. As to why it occurred when it did, there appear to be three answers: history, structure and personality. Thanks more to luck than judgement, between 1964 when BBC2 opened and 1982 when Channel 4 was launched, British viewers benefitted from the benevolent effects of what became known as the duopoly: the BBC with two networks competing with ITV which had a monopoly on commercial television. Thanks to its history in public service radio, the BBC had a tradition of commissioning work from musicians, dramatists, poets and others who were the best of their generation, and when the corporation expanded into television that tradition was extended to the new medium.

By 1955 when the government opened the airwaves to commercial television, the BBC was a perilously complacent middlebrow organisation that considered itself inherently superior to any catchpenny showbiz outfit which might try seducing its audience. So the shock when ITV, within a couple of years, managed to use prize game shows such as Double Your Money and imported American dramas such as Gunsmoke to take a 79 per cent share of that audience was profound. The BBC suddenly realised that its academic studio quiz, Animal Vegetable Mineral, might not, after all, be the epitome of light entertainment, and that it might have to start making very different series attractive to a wider social spectrum. Like a religious convert, the corporation learned fast and was soon developing ideas that enabled it to leapfrog ITV. The early evening Tonight programme, launched by Grace Wyndham Goldie early in 1957 with half the staff from Britain's most famous illustrated news magazine, Picture Post, began the year with a million viewers and ended it with five million.

In what was to become a long and successful habit, the BBC raided its own popular radio shows and moved Tony Hancock over to television. Within a few years Hancock's writers, Galton and Simpson, were launching Steptoe and Son, which was to become one of the biggest ratings winners in the history of British television. Just as the BBC felt the need to learn to fight ITV on its own ground, so ITV wanted to win for itself some of the respect and prestige which attached to the BBC. During the campaign to launch commercial television in Britain, its proponents had often been treated with contempt, the BBC's Lord Reith even likening the introduction of 'sponsored broadcasting' to the introduction of bubonic plague. ITV's founders were keen to prove the injustice of such insults and began projects such as Armchair Theatre which could add kudos to what was already proving a ratings success.

And so the scene was set for a period in which the BBC learned how to make more popular programmes to withstand ITV's onslaught on the ratings, while ITV taught itself how to win not just big audiences but the sort of prestige which had hitherto been the monopoly of the BBC. History and structure came together to encourage both organisations to pursue the ideal which I first heard expressed by Bill Cotton when he was still only assistant head of light entertainment at the BBC in the early 1960s: "To make the good popular and the popular good". It was probably not an original expression even then, but nor was it empty. The effect of this philosophy upon the British television industry as a whole started to look pretty clear when you travelled abroad to international festivals and competitions and compared the results with what was being achieved elsewhere.

The most heartening development was the way in which the ratings contest, so familiar from other countries, was extended to a contest to be first with the new and the daring. In response to ITV's Armchair Theatre, the BBC launched The Wednesday Play and then Play For Today, and began the richest period in English drama since the decline of the Jacobean theatre. In Europe and even the US people with creative flair were heading instinctively for a career in the theatre or cinema, but in Britain writers such as David Mercer, Ronald Eyre, John Hopkins, Dennis Potter, Troy Kennedy Martin, John Mortimer, Simon Gray and many more were congregating in television. So were directors such as Christopher Morahan, Ken Loach, James MacTaggart, Waris Hussein and Jack Gold. Cathy Come Home, written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach, was a Wednesday Play. Edna, The Inebriate Woman, again written by Sandford, produced by Irene Shubik and directed by Ted Kotcheff, was a Play For Today. Even when somebody's courage failed, the system tended to save the day. The script for The Naked Civil Servant was offered originally to the BBC where it was turned down as unscreenable, but Verity Lambert at Thames TV took it on, and - though there were difficulties and lines were cut - not only brought it to the screen but did so with triumph, ending up garlanded with awards.

In 1960 the appointment was made which did most to inspire and facilitate the golden age: Hugh Greene was made Director General of the BBC. Greene saw it as his job to open up the still somewhat fusty organisation and ventilate it with great blasts of fresh air. Sure enough, within a couple of years he had transformed BBC television. TW3 had been spun off from the Tonight programme and was, quite literally, causing entire dinner parties to leave the table and crowd in front of the television to see which politicians would be hung out to dry this week. BBC1 had launched Z Cars with its realistic portrayals of policemen, an approach which changed popular serial drama for ever. And Steptoe and Son, set in a rag-and-bone yard and featuring a whining old man and his absurdly ambitious son, was similarly changing BBC attitudes to comedy once and for all.

In ITV, too, programme makers and their programmes benefited by being led from the front in a manner that would astonish the teams of accountants who are in charge today. When the body controlling ITV companies (then the IBA) decreed that an edition of This Week about brutal police questioning in Northern Ireland should not be screened, Jeremy Isaacs, then Director of Programmes at Thames, handed the six minutes of offending footage to his rivals at the BBC who accommodatingly broadcast them on Nationwide, announcing 'The Programme the IBA bosses wouldn't let you see'. Without Isaacs' encouragement and protection, Lambert would never have been able to bring The Naked Civil Servant to the screen. Even more remarkably, when Granada's World in Action was taken to court in an attempt to force the company to reveal its sources for a story about British Steel, the company refused to give way and the chairman, Denis Forman, and David Plowright, with whom he was Joint Managing Director, stood by to go to jail. When I checked with Forman for the sake of this article whether there was ever really any prospect of prison he said, perfectly seriously, "Certainly. It reached the point where I was worrying about whether you had to take pyjamas". No doubt the same worry would afflict Gerry Robinson or Michael Green today.

The importance of the trickle-down effect in having people such as these leading the industry can hardly be over-estimated. True, change was already occurring at the BBC before Hugh Greene arrived, because of the coming of commercial television, but without him those changes could easily have come to be concentrated on a ratings contest. With Greene at the top, deliberately and openly encouraging innovation and even mischief (his own word), and fiercely protecting his staff from the forces of reaction - he flatly refused even to talk to the chief clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse, which was probably a tactical error though it cheered the staff no end - a real revolution became possible. In programme terms it was the most effective the corporation has ever experienced. If you were to demand one name to explain why the bfi TV 100 contains 70 BBC programmes as against 21 from ITV and 7 from Channel 4 (the missing two titles are This Is Your Life and University Challenge which have been screened by both ITV and the BBC at different times), that name would have to be Hugh Greene's.

And how do we persuade British television in the twenty-first century to get back on the gold standard? We don't. The period of the duopoly which is so powerfully and impressively represented in the bfi TV 100 was a historical anomaly. Thanks to wavelength scarcity and socio-political attitudes largely inspired by the second world war - attitudes which led to universal free education and the development of the National Health Service as well as public service television - the British found themselves with a television system which, for a while, matched and even topped the achievements of cinema and theatre industries in other countries. Today, with cable, satellite and digital technology bringing super abundance to television, and after two revolutions in socio-political attitudes - Thatcherism and The Third Way - the television universe has been transformed. Gold has given way to plastic: endlessly available, serviceable, classless and cheap.