SCREEN PLAYS
Resources
End of part one
Were it not for unforeseen circumstances, today would have marked the halfway point of the Screen Plays research project. We are at the end of the eighteenth month of what was originally a three-year project. But thrillingly my colleague on the project Dr Amanda Wrigley is pregnant with twins, who are due in the middle of February, and so the project will be extended into early 2015. To mark this moment, I thought it might be interesting to detail which of the 150 previous posts have proved to be the most popular with readers. Continue reading
Bookshelf: The Wars of the Roses (1970) by John Barton with Peter Hall
In my earlier post about Michael Barry’s memoir From the Palace to the Grove which details his life in television from 1938 to 1952 I lamented that he did not twin this revealing volume with a personal account of his later career. That prompted me to pull from my shelf a handsome volume that, in part, is a commemoration of one of Barry’s greatest small-screen triumphs. The Wars of the Roses by John Barton with Peter Hall (and some assistance from William Shakespeare) was published by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1970. That date is rather odd since it is the script of an adaptation of four of Shakespeare’s History plays that was first seen in Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1963 and then shown in three parts on BBC Television on 8, 15 and 22 April 1965. Continue reading
Bookshelf: From the Palace to the Grove (1992) by Michael Barry
It has been a while since we contributed a volume to the Screen Plays virtual bookshelf, although previous reviews can be found here, here, here, here and here. I want to remedy the lack with a brief response to a fascinating memoir written in 1987 by Michael Barry who was BBC Head of Drama from 1952 to 1961. There is an excellent summary of his career at the British Television Drama website, including an outline of why he left the corporation in 1961 after disagreements over the direction of his department. From the Palace to the Grove, however, chronicles his years in television before he took up the executive position and covers his work as a producer from 1938 to 1951. Continue reading
A note about relying on Radio Times
Although most of our recent blog posts have been about particular productions of stage plays on television, and although we most definitely intend to continue contributing these, we also want to use the blog to reflect on the ways in which we are conducting our research. This post comes from my recognition this week that the central source from which Amanda and I are working, the weekly BBC publication Radio Times, is perhaps not quite as reliable, especially in the earliest years of television, as we might once have thought. Continue reading
Our 100th post: the 2011 top 10
As a way of saying goodbye to the old year, I thought it might be interesting to detail which of our previous 99 posts have attracted the most attention. This can be measured quite precisely in terms of the views for each individual post, and so the list that follows features the ten posts that received the most views between 1 June and 31 December this year. Amanda’s revelatory post on the Open University’s largely unknown Macbeth from 1977 was by some measure the most popular offering, and after that it was Amanda’s excellent series about Greek plays on television that were most appreciated. Continue reading
Bookshelf: Television Jubilee (1961) by Gordon Ross
Gordon Ross’s Television Jubilee: The Story of Twenty-Five Years of BBC Television (London: W. H. Allen, 1961) was published in the run-up to the quarter-century anniversary of the start of the BBC Television service from Alexandra Palace. Exactly fifty years on, the book is valuable both as an outline history of the first years and as a kind of self-portrait of the medium at that moment. Continue reading
Bookshelf: Television in the Making (1956) by Paul Rotha
Published in 1956, Television in the Making is an invaluable collection of essays edited by Paul Rotha. The book’s twenty essays, to which Rotha provides a substantial introduction (itself a key text for understanding his own view of the medium), are reflections by practitioners on specific aspects of television production. There are contributions from many of the key figures of the time. Continue reading
Memories are made of this
Monday was given over to Cine-Sisters, a richly interesting symposium about women working in the film and television industries. The event was organised by the Cinema and Television Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester and the School of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia. Continue reading
Bookshelf: Television: The Ephemeral Art (1970) by T. C. Worsley
T. C. Worsley’s Television: The Ephemeral Art belongs on the (very short) library shelf labelled ‘distinguished collections of television criticism’. It rounds up Worsley’s newspaper columns between 1964 and 1969 and as a consequence it is an unrivalled account of one person’s detailed responses to the supposed ‘golden age’ of the medium. Continue reading
Shakespeare and co.
One of the main outcomes of the Screen Plays research project in intended to be a freely accessible online database of all British television productions since 1930 of plays written for the theatre. Our main model for this resource – and in many ways the inspiration for the project — is Shakespeare: An International Database … Continue reading
