Television and British Cinema

Convergence and Divergence Since 1990

Hannah Andrews

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137311177
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Undertaking a thorough and timely investigation of the relationship between television and cinema in Britain since 1990, Hannah Andrews explores the convergence between the two forms, at industrial, cultural and intermedial levels, and the ways in which the media have also been distinguished from one another through discourse and presentation.

Part I

Convergence/Divergence: The Relations between Television and Film at the End of the Analogue Era

1

Film and Television Drama: The Making of a Relationship

John Caughie offers this assessment of the historical coming together of television drama and cinema:

Channel 4 completed the long march of technology from live television to film – and to film not just as a technology (as it had been used since the 1960s) but as an aesthetic and a culture. Aesthetically, television drama increasingly aspired to look like cinematic film and, culturally, Channel 4 began a new alignment between cinema and television.¹

This neat summary encapsulates a broad shift in the relations between PSBs and film culture and the convergence between television drama and cinema. It was characterized by the movement of personnel between PSBs, changing institutional attitudes to film and subtle alterations in the discourses around single television drama. This chapter will unpick some of these intertwined strands, setting out the pre-history which shaped discourses around cinema and television prior to the 1990–2010 period in which this book is principally interested. First, I summarize the major developments in the use of film for television drama until the 1980s, fleshing out some of the detail contained within the timeline in Table 1.1. I then explore in more detail the career of a central figure in the change from television play to television film, Channel 4’s first Head of Fiction, David Rose. I outline his career and reputation as a producer, with particular reference to his management of the English Regions Drama (ERD) department at Pebble Mill, Birmingham, throughout the 1970s. Rose worked in interesting ways within the general remit of ERD, which was given the task of representing the various areas of England outside of London that had tended to be overlooked in the past because of BBC bureaucracy and metropolitan bias. I conclude the chapter by examining in detail two television films produced by Rose during his tenure at ERD, David Hare’s Licking Hitler and Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May, films with contradictory use of spaces and locations, considering how the use of film’s materiality produces a particular kind of aesthetic. These textual analyses display in microcosm many of the themes and issues that this book will go on to explore: material specificity, the discursive aspect of film’s ontology and its connection with the institutional.

Table 1.1 Film and television drama: Key moments

February 1937	BBC rejects mechanical film/television hybrid Baird broadcasting system in favour of more flexible electronic EMI/Marconi device.
14 August 1938	BBC broadcasts first-ever feature film: The Student of Prague (Germany, 1926).
1947	Telerecording emerges, a process of recording a live broadcast programme on film, allowing for programmes to be repeated (and also exported) without producing a second live performance. The expense of the process, as well as disagreements with acting and technicians’ unions, prevents it from becoming common practice for drama production.
1948	BBC Film Unit established, to organize filming on 35mm and 16mm film cameras. Though usually used for documentary programming, film was also used as ‘inserts’ in dramas, for scene-changes and to show exterior locations. Film was converted for broadcast through a technique called ‘telecine’.
December 1952	BBC establishes Television Transcription Unit, which telerecords programmes (including television drama) in order to sell to English-speaking foreign territories. The use of the technique is not widespread until the late 1950s.
July 1954	First filmed serial, US import I Am the Law, broadcast.
November 1954	First UK filmed serial, Fabian of Scotland Yard, broadcast.
22 September 1955	ITV launched, bringing competition to UK television for the first time.
April 1958	Sydney Newman becomes Head of Drama at ABC.
1958	BBC begins using videotape to pre-record studio-shot material. In the 1970s, the innovation of adding timecode to video material allows for more fluid editing.
January 1963	Sydney Newman takes up the post of Head of Drama at the BBC.
March 1964	Troy Kennedy Martin’s polemic ‘Nats Go Home’ published in theatre journal Encore.
August–September 1964	Diary of A Young Man broadcast, a six-part television series written by Troy Kennedy Martin and John McGrath, a manifestation of the ‘New Drama’ called for in ‘Nats go Home’.
October 1964	The Wednesday Play begins broadcasting.
12 December 1964	Diary of a Nobody (wr. George & Weedon Grossmith, dir. Ken Russell) is the first filmed single play shown on British television.
3 November 1965	The Wednesday Play: Up the Junction (wr. Nell Dunn, dir. Ken Loach) is the first feature-length filmed single play on British television.
October 1970	Play for Today, the new, dedicated single drama slot, begins broadcasting. It represents a more sustained commitment to the use of film for television drama, with 101 filmed plays as compared with 202 studio-shot plays.
November 1971	David Rose is recruited as Head of English Regions Drama, where produced a number of dramas shot on film.
May 1974	Armchair Cinema, the short-lived film drama replacement for Armchair Theatre, begins broadcasting on ITV.
10 January 1978	The Play for Today: Licking Hitler (wr. & dir. David Hare) is the first British television drama broadcast with the authorial credit ‘A Film By ... ’.
November 1980	Broadcasting Act passed, establishing Channel 4 as a publisher-broadcaster, which will commission all its programming from independent television companies.
1981	David Rose recruited as Commissioning Editor for Fiction at Channel 4.
2 November 1982	Channel 4 begins broadcasting. At 9pm, the first-ever Film on Four, Walter, is transmitted.

Film and television production: From telecine to television films

‘They Think It’s All Over’, Charles Barr’s essay on liveness and early television drama, cites several technological changes in television drama which ‘progressively reduce[d] the technological and aesthetic difference between television and film’.² These include cutting between cameras, with the result of shortening takes, recording on film (as in recording live performances for repeated transmission), shooting on film (with the resultant capacity for editing), and finally recording and editing on videotape. Barr’s is one of a number of histories that, as Jason Jacobs argues, positions the history of early television drama as ‘a development from a static, theatrical visual style to a mobile, cinematic one’.³ I do not wish to suggest a teleological progression from the naivety of broadcast ‘theatre’ to the sophistication of television films. Nevertheless, for various institutional, technological and economic reasons, there was a development in the history of television drama that led to the relationship between television and film in which this book is interested. In what follows, I examine in more detail these various shifts, setting out a historical context that underpins the arguments of the book. I will unpick some of the strands of this convergence, and discuss how the institutional desire to construct a rhetorical divergence, to keep film and television drama separate, in fact, has just as long a history as the material and aesthetic coming together of the two forms.

Early television drama: Technologies and aesthetics

In The Intimate Screen, his study of television drama’s early style and aesthetics, Jacobs seeks to move beyond reductive ideas that drama was, until the 1950s, merely photographed theatre. He argued, however, that this reputation might have been deserved had the important decision not been made in February 1937 to discontinue the use of the Baird ‘Intermediate Film’ broadcasting system in favour of the more flexible electromagnetic EMI-Marconi one. Baird’s system involved recording to 17.5mm film, which was rapidly processed then converted into a signal to be transmitted, and was thus a hybrid film–television technology. The decision to use the EMI system created a technological necessity for liveness, which, as Barr noted, created the aesthetic conditions that dominated television in its early period and beyond. Jacobs summarized the aesthetic effects of liveness in early television as ‘intimacy’ and ‘immediacy’. Most television drama production in these early years would derive from popular West End plays, which were either broadcast directly from the theatre as outside broadcasts – giving them the status of special ‘events’ – or arranged in BBC television studios for live broadcast. As with radio broadcasting before it, televised theatre was designed to add prestige and respectability to the schedules of the new service. Jacobs argues that the liveness of studio drama, the ‘continuous, live nature of the segmentation of space and time’, required production methods fundamentally different from those of film:

Usually the period of principle photography in making a film involves a short period of shooting a set-up, lit and miked for that particular shot before the camera is stopped, the actors, lights and mikes repositioned, and the process continued. Live television production is a continuous process of selection, choosing the appropriate shots from a planned performance in the studio: cameras, lighting, and sound have to be coordinated for the entire performance, in planned order, rather than for each particular shot.⁴

The techniques associated with television drama, because they were continuous and contingent, meant that production had more in common with theatre than with film. Theatre was not only the basis for the growing cultural legitimacy of television; it was also a practical touchstone for production.

Broadcasts were not kept for posterity, even though a process called ‘telerecording’, available from 1947, allowed broadcast television to be recorded on film. Film ‘inserts’, produced separately and cued into the live recording of the drama, were used with increasing regularity throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, converted to television signal through a process called ‘telecine’. Between ‘telerecording’ and ‘telecine’, the technical possibilities for television drama to be ‘filmic’ were already in place by the early 1950s. As John Caughie noted, the invention of recording techniques (added to greatly by the development of videotape in the late 1950s) fundamentally changed the nature of the television drama: ‘they brought an end to its essential ephemerality, and transformed immediacy and liveness from technological necessities into residual aesthetic aims’.⁵ This change also allowed television to gain a ‘commodity form’, to be repurposed, kept, and, most importantly, exported. In 1953, the BBC set up a ‘Television Transcription Unit’ with the express purpose of exploring options for export. The commercial possibilities associated with export became a key factor in the recording of television on film. This had not gone unnoticed by some of the ITV companies, who produced a number of drama series on film (some in co-production with US partners) for export, such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (ATV, 1955–1959).

Although the technological capability to produce television drama in a more ‘cinematic’ fashion was in place, there were a number of obstacles. Prime among these was cost: the use of film remained a last option, as studio recording was more economical. There were also legal wrangles in the recording and subsequent dissemination of filmed television, both in terms of the copyright for dramas based on pre-sold properties like plays or novels, and from acting and technicians’ unions, which looked unfavourably on the work of their members being reproduced electronically without sufficient compensation for their original work. The former problem was resolved by commissioning writing specifically for television. As early as 1950, the BBC commissioned new plays from a ‘Script Unit’, which sowed the seeds that would later flower into the ‘Golden Age’ of original television drama from new writers. The most important impediment to the uptake of cinema as a model for television drama was the attitude of television producers. As Jacobs and Caughie have noted, many BBC personnel the 1940s and early 1950s, including Head of Drama Val Gielgud and technicians like George More O’Ferrall, were passionately committed to finding a unique aesthetic for television. O’Ferrall wrote, in 1950, that: ‘having to use film at all is a confession of failure ... Television with its small screen and intimate presentation does not lend itself ... to the same vastness of approach that the film can achieve.’⁶ Cinema-style presentation was by no means a preferred aesthetic option. Jacobs’s work shows that early television pioneers were much more interested in endowing drama with ‘televisual’ aesthetics than they have previously been given credit for. On closer inspection, he found there was a range of options available for expressive presentation of drama on television:

... producers were able to choose from a range of stylistic features, some of them associated with theatre, some with film styles, and some with the narrative forms of literature, such as the serial or novelistic.⁷

The rejection of film style and techniques, then, was a choice, born of a combination of institutional expediency, legal impediments against recording performances and copyrighted material, and, most importantly, the desire to innovate and create a style appropriate and specific to television.

FIDO: The film industry’s response

Television drama was establishing its aesthetic parameters, drawing on works of theatre and literature for material. Another possibility for dramatic entertainment on television could have been feature films. However, the BBC was prevented from transmitting theatrically released films by a film industry that, understandably, had a mistrustful attitude to its new rival. Film distributors initially withheld the rights to show their films on television, which meant that, as Edward Buscombe notes, ‘virtually the only films the BBC could get in the pre-war and immediate post-war period were foreign; that is, non-English speaking’.⁸ There was also little enthusiasm among BBC employees for film broadcasts, since there were ‘aesthetic reservations about ... the appropriateness of film to the conditions of reception and the forms of attention particular to television’.⁹ An internal memo sent to the BBC Board of Governors in July 1948 stated explicitly that ‘it is no part of the Corporation’s intention to convert the BBC Television Service into a home cinema, showing mainly commercial films. It has a far more serious responsibility.’¹⁰ This sniffy response to cinema was as much about the BBC’s Reithian suspicion of entertainment broadcasting as it was about the misaligned aesthetics of television and film. Moreover, with only between £400 and £500 per film available in the budget, the corporation was usually priced out of the market for anything but older, foreign-language films. There was, then, an ambivalent relationship between film industry and broadcasters from the very beginning.

It was undeniable that the growing popularity of television as a medium, and the rising number of private homes with their own set, corresponded with dwindling returns at cinema box offices (see Figure 1.1). From a peak of 1.6 billion admissions to British cinemas in 1946, by the time the ITV network was established throughout the UK in 1959, attendances had dropped by 65 per cent. There were early attempts to hold back competition through collaboration: J. Arthur Rank held a number of meetings with BBC staff to discuss the possibility of showing television material in his cinemas, but was met with unease from the BBC, and no cooperation was agreed. Rank presumably felt that BBC televisi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on FilmFour
• Introduction: The Contexts of Convergence
• Part I: Convergence/Divergence: The Relations between Television and Film at the End of the Analogue Era
• Part II: Convergence and Divergence in the Digital Age
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index