British TV Drama :: essays papers

British TV Drama To what extent has British television drama contributed to a public discourse on major political and social issues, both in the recent past and during the 1960s. Please draw on specific examples in presenting your argument. In this essay I will discuss how political and social issues have been raised in British television drama and also how they relate to public discourse in Britain. I will discuss TV dramas such as Our Friends in the North, Talking to a Stranger, Cathy Come Home, and Boys from the Blackstuff. There are various issues, which could be identified as social and political in a TV drama, some of them are race, ethnicity, class and gender. Most people are influenced by television, believing what they see to be ‘real’ so it is useful to make a successful programme on hard-hitting issues as it will have deep impact on the audience. From the mid-50s on there has been an increase in original TV drama with a broader appeal. The preference for original drama was a reaction to the theatre’s preoccupation with middle-class concerns. So the ‘angry young men’ playwrights were established. They wrote about ‘real’ issues, about ‘problems faced by the members of a broader audience in their daily lives’. This can be seen in the 1960s, with the arrival of innovative dramas such as Cathy Come Home and Talking to a Stranger. In the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s programmers were taking risks allowing new talent space to grow, but now TV drama tends to be more genre-based. Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home (1966) bought the issue of homelessness into the public’s eye by showing Cathy’s slide into poverty and despair. Cathy Come Home is ‘deeply concerned about aspects of our society and deals with the plight of the unfortunate, the misunderstood, the ignored’. Policies were promptly changed after this programme was aired; the homeless charity ‘Shelter’ formed four days after Cathy Come Home was screened. Cathy Come Home used an innovative documentary style by using lightweight cameras and by taking the action out of the studio. The director Ken Loach rejected the used of the studio and instead opted for 16mm film. Cathy Come Home offered ‘a harsh and jarring realism which depended on energetic editing, creative use of sound and dialogue, and techniques borrowed from documentary.