Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- 25 Culture, class and education
- 26 Post-war broadcast drama
- 27 Drama and the new theatre companies
- 28 Modernism and anti-Modernism in British poetry
- 29 Nation, region, place: devolving cultures
- 30 The sixties: realism and experiment
- 31 ‘Voyaging in’: colonialism and migration
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
26 - Post-war broadcast drama
from PART FOUR - POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- 25 Culture, class and education
- 26 Post-war broadcast drama
- 27 Drama and the new theatre companies
- 28 Modernism and anti-Modernism in British poetry
- 29 Nation, region, place: devolving cultures
- 30 The sixties: realism and experiment
- 31 ‘Voyaging in’: colonialism and migration
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Broadcasting was just as responsible as cinema, if not more so, for opening up the established theatrical tradition to mass audiences, firstly on radio as what J. C. Trewin dubbed ‘the National Theatre of the Air’, then on television as potentially ‘The Largest Theatre in the World’, in Shaun Sutton’s famous phrase. Simultaneously, drama also underwent its own radical transformation within these new media. They served not just to revitalise older genres, but to open genuinely new creative possibilities for dramatic form. It is the leading contours of such innovations and their evolving social and cultural significance which this essay endeavours to sketch.
By 1945 BBC radio had built up a listenership with the necessary habits and skills to broadcast some four hundred plays annually, in addition to ‘microphone serials’, Dick Barton Special Agent becoming the most popular. Of broadcast genres, serialisation and the series are arguably the most distinctive, with television developing radio’s pattern. Radio’s principal narrative and ‘textural’ techniques, genres and methods were pioneered in pre-war drama and features by ‘producer–directors’ and writers such as Lance Sieveking, Tyrone Guthrie, Olive Shapley and D. G. Bridson. These developed a ‘radiophonic’ space–time fluidity comparable to cinema’s, through montage, association or superimposition of acoustic images, by fade-ups/outs, ‘dissolves’ and so on, cross-cutting between locations for simultaneity and dramatic contrast, breaking down conventional scenes into ‘shots’, ‘zooms’ and ‘close-ups’. Radio’s ‘basic grammar’ borrowed terminology from film, music and psychology as much as the stage.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 474 - 493Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
References
and . Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.Google Scholar
, et al. Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. London and New York: Verso, 1989.Google Scholar
. Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and Its Background, 1939–1960. Oxford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
, and , eds. British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.Google Scholar
, and . England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth Century Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 5 vols., new edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture. Oxford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
‘The Autobiography of a Nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain. (Manchester University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
, ed. The History of Scottish Literature. 4 vols. Vol. IV: The Twentieth CenturyAberdeen University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
. ‘Resting on Laurels’. In and , eds., British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945–1999. London: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
. ‘Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism’. In , ed., Society and Literature, 1945–1970. London: Methuen, 1983.Google Scholar
. Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. 1955; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.Google Scholar
. Purity of Diction in English Verse. 1952 rpt. with postscript, London: Routledge, 1967.Google Scholar
. Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain, 1960–1988. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989.Google Scholar
. Talk of Drama: Views of the Television Dramatist Now and Then. Luton: John Libbey Press, 1998.Google Scholar
, ed. Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1983.Google Scholar
, and , eds. Voices of the Crossing: The Impact on Britain of Writers From Asia, the Caribbean and Africa. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000.Google Scholar
Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers. Bombay: Padma Publications, 1947.Google Scholar
. The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003.Google Scholar
. Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. Manchester University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
and , ‘The Single Play: from Reithian Reverence to Cost-Accounting and Censorship’, Official Programme of the Edinburgh Television Festival (1980).Google Scholar
The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
, and . The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
, and , eds. British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958. Buckingam: Open University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. ‘England’s Climate’. In Towards a Modern Art World, ed. . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
. Symptoms of Tomorrow: Letters from a Sociologist on the Present State of Society. London: Plume Press/Ward Lock, 1973.Google Scholar
. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
and , eds., Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television(University of Luton Press, 1997)Google Scholar
. Binkie Beaumont, Eminence Grise of the West End Theatre 1933–1973, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984.Google Scholar
A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000. Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
. A Guide to Welsh Literature. 6 vols. Vol. VI: c. 1900-1996. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998.Google Scholar
. The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995.Google Scholar
. The Oxford English Literary History. 13 vols. Vol. XIII: 1948–2000: The Internationalization of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger. London: Longman, 1996.Google Scholar
. Moderns and Contemporaries: Novelists, Poets, Critics. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1985.Google Scholar
, ‘Nats Go Home: First Statement of a New Drama for Television’, Encore, 11, 2 (1964).Google Scholar
, and . Boys from the Blackstuff: The Making of a Television Drama. London: Comedia, 1986.Google Scholar
. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford University Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change. London: Macmillan, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television. Manchester University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
. True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage. Manchester University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
, and . Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. London: HarperCollins, 1998.Google Scholar
, ‘Realism and Non-Naturalism 2’, The Official Programme of the Edinburgh International Television Festival 1977, August 1977.Google Scholar
. The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony. Stanford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage. Cambridge University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ed. Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity. 3 vols. Vol. 1: History and Politics. London: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
, and , eds. British Poetry Since 1960: A Critical Survey. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1972.Google Scholar
. Arts and Cultures: The History of the Fifty Years of the Arts Council of Great Britain. London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995.Google Scholar
. On Screen Rivals: Cinema and Television in the United States and Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
‘The Peculiarity of the English’ (1965). In The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press, 1978.Google Scholar
. The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English, and Irish Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
. British Television: An Illustrated Guide, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press/British Film Institute, 1996.Google Scholar
. The British Dissonance: Essays on Ten Contemporary Poets. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1983.Google Scholar
, ‘Word into Image: Reflections on the Television Dramatist’, in , ed., Ah! Mischief: Ien Ang’s Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar
, Drama in a Dramatised Society: An Inaugural Lecture (Cambridge University Press, 1974).Google Scholar