Single Drama: commentary

A commentary on the top 20 in this genre

It is hard to imagine today the prestige position in TV schedules once occupied by single drama. Strands such as ABC's Armchair Theatre (subsequently revived by Thames) and the BBC's The Wednesday Play and Play for Today were held in equal esteem by writers, producers, critics and viewers, regularly pulling huge audiences. By the early 1980s, however, the TV play was in decline, and by the late 1990s it had largely disappeared from our screens.

But judging from our poll, the single drama is fondly remembered. Two examples, Cathy Come Home and The Naked Civil Servant, feature in the top five of the overall list, while a total of 14 made it into the 100, with several others missing the cut by just a few votes. There might have been more - since the late 19'70s, single drama has been the bullied little brother to the series, and something of this relationship creeps into this list. Alan Bennett's two late 1990s series for the BBC, Talking Heads and Talking Heads 2, find themselves in the drama series category on a technicality, while Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff - which grabbed the number one slot in its category - began its life as a single play.

Nevertheless, it is a strong list, and one which rewards some of the most ambitious and innovative television of the past half-century. Of the titles that made the 100, all but three were original scripts written for television. To look over the list of writers represented is to trace the evolution of television drama over more than forty years: from Nigel Kneale in the 1950s through to Jimmy McGovern in the 1990s, via Jeremy Sandford, Peter Watkins, Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh and Jack Rosenthal. (Of course, any true portrait would have to take into account those writers whose work has been largely or exclusively in series - names like Troy Kennedy Martin, Alan Bleasdale, John Hopkins and, more recently, Paula Milne).

Disappointingly, the list of writers is exclusively male, although women producers, including Irene Shubik (Edna, The Inebriate Woman), Nicola Shindler (Hillsborough) and especially Margaret Matheson (Abigail's Party, Made in Britain, Scum) hold their own in the company of male counterparts like Jimmy MacTaggart, Kenith Trodd, Barry Hanson and Tony Garnett. Actresses, on the other hand, do quite well. This seems to confirm the suspicion that actresses have in general been better served by the single play than by other forms of drama (except perhaps soap opera). Carol White in Cathy Come Home, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party and Patricia Hayes in Edna, the Inebriate Woman all took full advantage of the opportunity given by a strong script and a sympathetic director. More recently, Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues gave similar opportunities to actresses like Thora Hird, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton.

Clearly, performance is a factor in keeping a drama in the mind: Philip Mackie's The Naked Civil Servant owes most of its success to John Hurt's exuberant and moving evocation of Quentin Crisp (which delighted its subject), just as Bennett's An Englishman Abroad benefited from Alan Bates' charismatic but depressed Guy Burgess (as well as fine support from Coral Browne) and Tim Roth's fiercely articulate skinhead added an extra edge to David Leland's potent Made in Britain.

Several titles on the list testify to drama's power to provoke. The earliest entry, Nigel Kneale's Nineteen Eighty-Four, led to complaints in Parliament of its excessive brutality. Roy Minton's terrifying Borstal exposé, Scum, directed, like Made in Britain, by Alan Clarke, suffered a similar fate to The War Game, being suppressed for some 14 years until finally broadcast in 1985. Charles Wood's Falklands drama, Tumbledown, caused quite a stir in 1988.

The list also suggests a continued appetite for campaigning drama. The transmission of Cathy Come Home in November 1966 gave a welcome boost to the homelessness charity Shelter, formed, by a happy coincidence, just four days later. The War Game became a totem of the peace movement, both at the time of its limited cinema release in 1966 and its eventual broadcast in 1985. McGovern's Hillsborough had a similarly potent effect in expressing and fomenting public outrage.

Another notable feature is the domination of BBC output. Only four of the top 20 originated on ITV, which surely reflects the channel's more extreme shift towards ratings-pulling series in the 1980s (although, ironically, the most modern single drama on the list, Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough, was broadcast on ITV, in 1996). Channel 4 can probably thank its early decision to favour film production over single drama for its failure to register in the list, but it feels a little harsh that ITV's ground-breaking Armchair Theatre, closely associated with producer Sidney Newman at ABC after 1958, should go unrewarded. This may of course be due to its age; equally plausible is the sense that, despite its importance in kickstarting the so-called 'golden age' of single drama, the series, as its name suggests, remained tied to a stage tradition.

Appointed BBC's Head of Drama in 1963, it was Newman who launched The Wednesday Play, the series widely credited with reinvigorating TV drama. The most celebrated of these tops our list as the all-time favourite television drama, coming an impressive second in the overall 100. This comes as little surprise: Jeremy Sandford's Cathy Come Home has done well in such polls in the past. The play has lost little of its furious impact some 35 years after its first appearance. That heartbreaking finale, in which Cathy loses her children, is as memorable as any moment in television, while Cathy's terrible slide into poverty and despair calls to mind Hardy's Tess, or some other tragic heroine of nineteenth-century fiction.

The importance of Cathy Come Home in the history of TV drama is unquestionable. Director Ken Loach, in his rejection of the studio and his enthusiastic adoption of 16mm film, cemented a trend away from the perceived tyranny of the studio and live performance which were deemed to leave the teleplay chained to its theatrical heritage. At the same time, it signalled - or appeared to - the death of the lifeless naturalism that was famously condemned by Troy Kennedy Martin in a 1964 essay, offering instead a harsh and jarring realism, which depended on energetic editing, creative use of sound and dialogue, and techniques borrowed from documentary.

Not that Cathy Come Home was by any means the first to experiment with the form. Two years earlier, Peter Watkins' Culloden was revolutionary in its provocative use of documentary techniques (the programme was actually produced for BBC Documentary, not Drama), in its outraged reconstruction of the stripping of the Highlands by the English, and the disastrous ineptitude of 'Bonnie' Prince Charlie. Watkins developed his technique still further a year later with The War Game, whose power was such that the BBC took fright and refused to allow a television screening for twenty years (although it eventually relented to a cinema release in 1966).

The importance of The Wednesday Play in the 1960s is matched by that of Play for Today in the 1970s, and the largest chunk of the work selected here - five titles in the top 20 (six if you count Roy Minton's banned Scum) - emanated from that strand. Mike Leigh, who had a string of works performed in the slot between 1973 and 1982 is represented twice, with the satirical Nuts in May and the compulsively horrific Abigail's Party. Dennis Potter is recognised for 1979's Blue Remembered Hills, which used the innovative device of casting adult actors as children. With his entries for Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, Potter is confirmed in his position at the top of the pile of TV dramatists. The other two Plays for Today to feature are Jeremy Sandford's compelling Edna, The Inebriate Woman, which echoed the fury of Cathy Come Home at the inadequacy of society's care for the disadvantaged, and Jack Rosenthal's touching, insightful look at the life of a Jewish family in Bar Mitzvah Boy (Rosenthal's taxi-cab comedy for ITV, The Knowledge, also made the list).

The demise of Play for Today in 1982 was a death blow for the single play. The trend had already begun as ambitious writers began to yearn for the scope of the 'TV novel', exemplified by Potter's 1978 Pennies From Heaven. Any hopes that the new Channel 4 might lead a renaissance were dashed when its first Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs, announced that the Channel would be investing instead in feature film production. The success of its early ventures, in particular Stephen Frears' 1985 My Beautiful Laundrette, caught the BBC on the hop, and led to the establishment of the Screen Two and Screen One strands. By the mid-1980s, then, TV drama's flight from the stage had taken it into the cinema. This is reflected by the paucity of recent entries to the list - McGovern's harrowing 1996 play, Hillsborough, emerges as the only 19'90s offering to reach the 100. The next highest play from that decade, Nick Dear's Persuasion, was made for cinema.

No doubt some writers relished the opportunities offered by the bigger scale and larger budgets available to feature film production. But the other side of the coin was that there was a powerful disincentive to experiment and take the kind of risks which had been associated with small screen drama. Commercial imperatives dictated that tried-and-tested was preferable to fresh and innovative, and in any case the aesthetics of cinema are markedly different to television's. What's more, the high-pressure environment of a feature film production is far from ideal for the nurturing of untried talent.

It is often claimed that soap opera has assumed the role in developing young writers once performed by the single play. There is some evidence for this view - Jimmy McGovern served his apprenticeship on Brookside while, a generation earlier, Paula Milne, whose impressive credits include The Politician's Wife and The Fragile Heart, cut her teeth on Coronation Street - but there is a world of difference between working with existing characters and heavily prescribed storylines and the freedom of a 30, 60 or 90 minute slot.

It is revealing to examine the earliest and most recent entries in the top 20 plays. Without questioning the merits of Nigel Kneale's haunting Nineteen Eighty-Four or Nick Dear's impressive adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, the literary origins of both suggest that the TV drama has, at least in part, turned full circle. The BBC in particular has turned out some fine adaptations in recent years - Christmas 1999's two-part David Copperfield was a particularly striking example - but this has been at the expense of the space for original work that is crucial for the development of new talent.

Series like This Life, Holding On, The Cops and Queer as Folk demonstrate that there is still a place in the schedules - and an audience - for innovative and ambitious drama. But the results of the broadcasters' failure to invest in developing writers are all too easy to see in the surfeit of tired, genre-based drama that dominates today's schedules. During its 1960s and 1970s heyday, formal and stylistic innovations developed in the single play routinely invigorated the language of mainstream TV drama. The days when audiences of more than 20 million tuned in on a Sunday evening to Armchair Theatre are unlikely ever to return, but if television drama is to retain its distinctiveness, then programmers will need to learn to take risks again, and allow new talent space to grow.

Mark Duguid