This site aims to provide a database on every play screened by the BBC under the Play for Today banner. Click here for an episode guide listing every play and its writer and director, then click on each individual title to find an essay on each play, illustrated with pictures and scans from the Radio Times – click on the sidebar images to view that magazine’s listings, previews and a wealth of original interviews. At the time of launching, the site contains a handful of essays on the earliest plays and scans on many of the rest – over the next few years, the site will grow with material on each individual play, biographies of its major crew, and supporting original interview and essay material. (Anyone interested in contributing to the site is welcome to get in touch by e-mail. To mirror the eclecticism of the strand itself, we're looking for a wide variety of approaches, for contributors to speak in their own voices - some will be serious and academic, others will be much lighter; some will focus on the writer, others on the director, others on stars; you make the rules.) This is the first concerted attempt to provide a fully searchable database of any British television single play strand.

Why does it warrant such attention? Play for Today was quite simply a milestone in the history of British television, cinema and the wider culture. At its best, the strand combined a remit encouraging aesthetic experimentation and political radicalism with the potential to reach audiences of millions, free-to-air, on primetime BBC1 (at a time when there were far fewer channels to watch). This combination makes Play for Today a true ‘National Theatre’. One of the strand’s contributors, the playwright David Hare, has argued that the single play in this period, as written by the likes of Dennis Potter and David Mercer, became ‘the most important new indigenous art form of the 20th century’.[i] He added elsewhere that the form allowed the ‘freedom to say what you wanted, and the rare excitement of knowing that it was being talked about by people all over the country’.[ii]  

This freedom was grasped by new and established writers and directors. In its first year alone, it employed such diverse talents as John Osborne, Ingmar Bergman, Philip Saville, Dennis Potter, Alan Clarke, Colin Welland and James Ferman. (The sidebars on the left allow you to browse each year at leisure, as well as the main chronological episode guide listing.) It allowed a space for development for future Hollywood directors like Michael Apted, Stephen Frears and Mike Newell, and such stalwarts of British and European cinema as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Take a look at the crew listing, and the names leap out at you (again, we’d welcome anyone wanting to help us provide biographies and/or interviews of each of these). As well as providing an outlet for writers, the strand’s prestigious all-film slots afforded opportunities for directors – not just a ‘National Theatre’, but a true national cinema at a time when British cinema was bogged down in sitcom spin-off hell. Many of the strand’s contributors saw its overarching influence in terms of a studio system, which, as Andrew Clifford argues, rivals the celebrated developments within American cinema of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola: ‘In Britain, developments in another kind of studio system, the BBC’s, enabled writers like Roy Minton, Colin Welland, Peter Terson, David Rudkin and David Hare… to flourish… [each director] could learn, make mistakes, do new things without his career resting on each new play’.[iii] This was helped by a system which gave autonomy to producers, and the dedicated figures who grabbed this autonomy with both hands: David Rose, Kenith Trodd and Margaret Matheson among others. 

We’re motivated by the fact that television plays, unlike cinema films, have little afterlife – only a fraction of these plays have been repeated in the last decade, even fewer released commercially. This results in a central paradox: plays which drew audiences of millions dwarfing contemporaneous cinema audiences are now forgotten, condemned by a short-sighted belief amongst critics in the medium’s ‘inherent’ ephemerality. We want to address television drama’s own lack of history, not only by drawing attention to select masterpieces (though this is important enough given the emergence of a ‘canon’ in academic writing on television), but by covering the entire series, to get closer to a real sense of what the culture has lost with the decline of the single play strand. These days, the play or film-for-television has been subsumed by cinema films financed by television, and writers and directors have fewer slots to fight for. Experimentation is hindered by the very form – film’s higher budget renders each piece a greater risk. This also explains our ambitious attempt to cover every play including studio pieces, so that we don’t just import film studies terminology to discuss those filmed plays in cinema terms – we also want to engage with television on its own terms.  

So, what has the culture lost? In one of the best books ever written about television, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, John Cook summarises the single play as television’s cutting edge, ‘a special place for the expression of the individual, dissident or questioning voice’.[iv] Political radicalism was a keynote, resulting in controversies over bias and didactic realism: take Days of Hope, The Legion Hall Bombing, Psy-Warriors. Many controversial pieces – including The Rank and File, Days of Hope, The Spongers and United Kingdom - were written by Jim Allen; in an obituary for Allen, Kenith Trodd summed up the ‘heady fantasy’ of many that such plays ‘could maybe start a walkout around the country on a Thursday morning’.[v] Such ambitions came under increasing attack from other areas, and one of our aims with this site is to explore the extent to which radical space became contested, with controversies over screened plays and the banning of plays like Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle and Roy Minton’s Scum.  

But inherent in this are two interlinked dangers - that critics only describe Play for Today as an outlet for 'issues' and 'realism', and that the strand be over-emphasised, rather than acting as a banner for a variety of disparate pieces. These combined in an audience research department report published in 1977, which sought 'to discover if viewers see any common common features in the plays shown under the title Play for Today and, if so, is there any evidence that the title has acquired an unintended image?' [vi] Certainly there was more to the strand than issue-based realism. Its broad output included comedies, fantasy pieces like Z For Zachariah; Rumpole of the Bailey started here, as did Philip Martin’s extraordinary Gangsters, and David Rudkin and Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen, which we contend is one of British television’s (and, were it not for the pervasive anti-television attitude of film critics for so long, British cinema’s) masterpieces. The last two films were the product of BBC English Regions Drama based at Pebble Mill, who, under David Rose, formed a formidable outpost of BBC Drama, and a particular slice of television history which it is our pleasure to celebrate.  

On the other hand, while mentioning such plays, it’s worth drawing attention to a little phrase above: ‘At its best’. We are aware of the danger of sinking into rhetoric about a ‘golden age’. As the BBC’s current Head of Films, David M Thompson, warns about The Wednesday Play and Play for Today, ‘the truth is it that wasn’t all rosy under the old system, there were a lot of low points as well as high points. People only ever remember Cathy Come Home, they don’t remember all the dross’.[vii] These days, he adds, the ‘tradition of original, authored drama with a strong vision is as alive and kicking as it’s ever been… What is true is that there’s less of it’.[viii] Some of the forgotten plays were forgotten for very good reasons, and if there were four or five classics a year then, well, we get those now – panic over standards of drama is clearly nonsensical when, since 2000, we’ve had Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, As the Beast Sleeps, Perfect Strangers, The Lost Prince, The Navigators, The Gathering Storm, Buried, State of Play… However, the impact of each new piece by a Stephen Poliakoff, William Ivory or Jimmy McGovern is a defiant stand-alone blast – what is lacking without that overarching strand identity is a regular institutional space within which writers and directors could develop, and through which the space was maintained within the culture. This is the central reason for its importance, and the driving force behind the site you’re about to explore. Hope you enjoy it. 

Dave Rolinson

Editors: Dave Rolinson and Mr Wolf
Consulting Editor: Bent Halo

Thanks To:

Alan Andres
Ian Beard
Shaun Brennan
David Bromley
John Brown
Gavin Collinson
Nick Cooper
Peter Cregeen
Simon Farquhar
Darren Giddings
Simon Harries
Michael Hirst
Stephen W Lacey
Martin Marshall
Jonathan Mohun
David Rose
Andrew Screen
Steven Stapleton
Colin Welland
John Williams
Herbert Wise
All our contributors and interviewees
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, Reading
BBC Photographic Library
BFI Library and Viewing Services, London
All at the Mausoleum Club for criticism, comment, corrections and whatever else comes our way
And our friends at:-

Contributors so far:
Bent Halo, Dave Rolinson, John Williams, Mr Wolf