SCREEN PLAYS
ITV Schools
More Synge on the small screen
Following on from my last blog post on the 1960 BBC production of J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea which was originally broadcast in a schools television strand and later that year repeated one evening for an adult audience, I offer a brief survey of other plays by Synge which are known to have been produced on British television, including two more schools productions. This survey takes us from three of Synge’s works which were produced by Dubliner Fred O’Donovan in the decade from 1938 up to the 1985 BBC production of The Playboy of the West Indies, Mustapha Matura’s re-working of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in a 1950s Trinidadian setting. Continue reading
Greek plays: Medea (A-R for ITV Schools, 1963)
In 1963 Associated-Rediffusion produced an unabridged version of Euripides’ Medea, the story of a woman who takes revenge on her husband by murdering their children, which ITV Schools transmitted over three programmes as part of an eleven-part series entitled Theatres and Temples: The Greeks. The series included re-transmissions of earlier productions of severely abridged Greek tragedies but Medea seems to have had a particularly high status in the series and amongst ITV Schools productions of theatre plays more generally, being sold to New Zealand and CBS in America, and being one of eleven exemplary television programmes which Associated-Rediffusion selected as marking it out as a serious cultural rival of the BBC. Continue reading
For Schools: Hamlet (A-R for ITV Schools, 1961)
Tonight I was back at BFI Southbank for a showing of a 1961 Hamlet made for schools television by Associated Rediffusion. Until some two years ago this was thought lost, but a print was among those discovered by archivists at the Library of Congress. It would be pleasing to report that a masterpiece has been restored to us, but such critical honesty as I own to forces me to acknowledge that the production really is not very good. Continue reading
The Angry Gods, comprising Iphigenia at Aulis, Oresteia and The Winter’s Tale (A-R for ITV Schools, 1961)
I’ve been slowly working up my second case study for Screen Plays which concerns stage plays produced on television in educational contexts. Recently I’ve been continuing my research into The Open University’s A307 Drama distance-learning course which was transmitted on television each year for five years from 1977: there were sixteen productions in all; I’ve … Continue reading
SCREEN PLAYS 