Leah Panos

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sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px"}In our 'post-television' age
when the appearance of television drama and film, both shot on digital
camera, is increasingly homogenous, 'old' multi-camera studio drama must
seem like more of an oddity than ever before. I say that it 'must' seem
odd because, as someone who watches quite a lot of it (especially plays
of the 1970s and early 1980s) the studio drama has become somewhat
normalized for me, the shock of its difference lessened through my
submergence in that era and mode. However, the experience of co-curating
with Dr Billy Smart of Royal Holloway, University of London, a season
dedicated to studio plays at BFI Southbank -- 'Dramatic Spaces: The
Imaginative World of the Television Studio' -- which ran throughout
February 2014, suddenly forced me to become more conscious of
contemporary viewers' perceptions of the form, something that I am not
usually required to do, especially as I do not teach my research in this
field. I want to reflect here on some of the issues that arose during
the process of publicly screening old studio plays, focusing in
particular on questions about how we presented our theme of the studio's
possibilities, and the value of such drama now.

The dated qualities of analogue video, the harshness of studio lighting,
the falseness of setting and the imprecision of live vision-mixing all
contribute to what Don Taylor referred to as studio drama's 'less
complete' compromise with naturalism which, particularly in single
plays, is often also borne out through a more scripted mode of dialogue,
and 'theatrical' performances. But even though I am aware of how
different studio drama is from contemporary drama, I'm used to how it
looks and feels -- up to a point. Because of the astounding
heterogeneity of the single play, in both subject and form, there are
always surprises to be found, specific conceits, sets, lines, moments
that jump out at you as being unusual even for so eclectic a format,
and, as John Ellis (2010) has written about, all old TV seems weird due
to 'the intimate connections between its programmes and the moment of
their intended broadcast', in subject matter, cultural assumptions and
production techniques. I wondered how a contemporary audience would find
this, and how the experience of members of the audience who had watched
the first time would compare to their memories.

A 'concept-led' TV Season

As well as the issue of how the peculiarities of old studio form would
stand up to contemporary scrutiny, there was a further question mark
over our season's theme. The BFI's ever-supportive and helpful
Television Programmer, Marcus Prince, informed us ours was the first
ever 'concept-led' television season that the BFI had put on, and
therefore something of a test-case. He was not entirely sure that the
audience would 'get' the notion of celebrating the studio as an
organizing principle. This made it particularly hard to predict (a)
whether we would attract an audience, (b) who the audience would be and
(c) how they would respond to the plays being shown --
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and (c) are admittedly always hard to call). Unlike other recent archive
television seasons at the BFI, ours was not tackling a particular genre
(such as the Experimental TV season in 2012 and the ... [Continue
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, but to sophisticated modern eyes well familiar with flexi-narratives,
it is quite apparent what is happening and easy to keep up (my husband,
viewing the play for the first time in NFT2, looked at me as if I was
mad when I asked him if he'd 'got it').

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Similarly, one suspects that the cartoonish CSO world of the 1978 play
The After Dinner Joke which a number of respondents found 'intrusive and
distracting, and the colours so bright that at times they interfered
with the outline of the performers' (BBC WAC ARR: VR/78/83) may be less
disorientating to our own post-MTV generation. Some original viewers of
Desert of Lies, perhaps switching over from the expensive,
location-filmed classic period drama serial Jewel in the Crown on ITV
which ended half an hour into the play, complained that the studio
desert appeared fake and unconvincing, but even when shown on a large
cinema screen, I found it utterly convincing -- a masterful piece of set
design and direction by Stuart Walker and Piers Haggard, and several BFI
audience members commented upon how well-achieved it was (see images
above and below).

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It surprised me, then, that it is possible for a studio play to be more
convincing now than in its original moment, (if anything one would
expect it to be less so) perhaps indicating the growing unpopularity of
the studio during the 80s as film gradually became the dominant mode, as
well as the enthusiasm of a self-selecting BFI audience for a television
play, bringing very different expectations and perhaps greater
'sympathy' for an old text, than the general TV-viewing public of 1984
could. Another surprise was how well all of our plays stood up to
enlargement on the cinema screen. Although the limitations of early CSO
technology meant that the captions of Censored Scenes From King Kong
were a bit blurry, compositionally they were stunning, and the later CSO
play The Journal of Bridget Hitler was a bold tour-de-force when writ
large (image below).

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A vanished form

It is precisely the diversity and eclecticism of the studio play that
makes it so fascinating, and, of course, in a short curated season you
can select the best, choice cuts and ignore the huge volume of more
mundane offerings. And while I acknowledge that there were plenty of
very mediocre and sub-mediocre studio plays, the experience of
presenting these plays publicly, briefly introducing them and watching
them together with a viewing audience (much larger than that of the
individual domestic context of course) really impressed on me the civic
value of the studio single play in television history as a heterogeneous
form. Although our selection could never be, and was never aiming to be,
representative of all studio drama, the variety it encompassed was not
atypical. The expectance that there would be original, risk-taking, and
frequently 'rough-around-the edges' one-off plays regularly transmitted
into your home is something very far from today's situation where slick
series and box sets dominate. The value of the single play, like our
season, lies not in the particular production but in the cumulative
effect of the many different approaches and styles in form, set,
dialogue, performance. But as well as that diversity (a quality which
extends across filmed plays of the era) there is a further attribute,
more specific to studio dramas, that has been lost, which, in our final
panel discussion, Piers Haggard (director of Desert of Lies and,
famously, Pennies From Heaven) referred to as 'poeticism'. Returning to
my original paraphrasing of Don Taylor, studio drama's 'less complete'
compromise with naturalism opened up possibilities of using dramatic
conventions in a context that allowed, indeed expected, a level of
'theatricality', lyricism, visible crafting, a modernist exposure of
form itself, that has all but disappeared now. Watching these plays with
an appreciative audience therefore seemed to vindicate the system of
television-making that facilitated such an approach. The fact that such
a range of texts was on offer, including those that were never going to
be popular, is something that it is hard to comprehend in today's
risk-averse context.

Dr Leah Panos is a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Spaces of Television
project based at the University of Reading. Recent case studies for the
project include work on the use of the Steadicam in Brookside, the
television plays of Howard Schuman, aesthetics in the TV studio musical
Rock Follies, and the role of the designer in 1970s dramas using Colour
Separation Overlay.

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<table class="footnotes_table footnote-reference-container">
<caption>References</caption>
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<td class="footnote_plugin_text">b) and (c) are admittedly always hard
to call). Unlike other recent archive television seasons at the BFI,
ours was not tackling a particular genre (such as the Experimental TV
season in 2012 and the Gothic season in 2013) or theatrical source (such
as Greek Tragedy in 2012 or Jacobean Tragedy in 2013), but brought an
intentionally diverse range of texts together under the studio umbrella
to demonstrate the variety of what could be achieved there. Without an
obvious common factor – a genre, person or production company- informing
our selections (although, by coincidence, all of our screenings ended up
being BBC-made), a lot of thought went into getting the title and
strapline of our season right, and it was refined from ‘Spaces of
Television’ to ‘Dramatic Spaces: The Unlimited Possibilities of the
Television Studio’ (too long-winded) to the final, more inspiring,
‘Imaginative World of the Television Studio’.
It was also decided that we ought to emphasize, in our publicity, the
inclusion of famous play-wrights and writers (eg: David Mercer, Howard
Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Beryl Bainbridge) and plays (Miss Julie)
rather than the involvement of lesser-known directors and designers,
(with the exception of Alan Clarke who is more familiar), even though
our reasons for selecting the plays primarily concerned how the plays
were realised in the studio production process rather than who had
written them. It strikes me, though, that our selections were entirely
in line with the values that have defined canonical status within
television studies, identified by Jonathan Bignell (2005: 19) as
‘programmes that are based on cultural forms that have been accorded
greater prestige, such as the adaptation of “classic” literature and
theatre, or have assimilated the related value given to authorship in
the prestige television play’ and ‘drama that claims, or can be argued
to claim, political engagement or to work on the aesthetics of
television by adopting new formal conventions’. However, that said,
fewer than half of the plays we showed have had scholarly writing on
them or are part of the established television canon, a fact that
suggests the vast quantity of television that still ‘deserves’ to be
rediscovered and our aim of pushing the boundaries of the canon.
One difficulty with a season of our type is that the central idea of
studio possibilities could only really be borne out across a number of
screenings as a single screening could not exemplify all of the many
trends that we covered. We selected what we considered to be some of the
best examples of various distinct approaches and techniques, and
presented them under their own headings:
The Unlimited Possibility of the TV Studio (with general introductory
lecture)
Entrapment &amp; Confrontation in the Studio
Studio Trickery
Mixing Genres in the Studio
The Stripped Down Studio Space
Landscape in the Studio
This extra layer of curatorial framing allowed the season to develop
as almost a course about the variety of studio form, but we knew that it
was unlikely that anyone would fully experience it as such, as generally
people would make it to only one or two screenings and many would make
their selections for different reasons than the particular spatial point
of interest we were suggesting: they remember watching a particular play
when it first went out; they are studying Brecht; they like Alan
Clarke’s work.
Our publicity blurb stressed variety and innovation, suggesting that
the season demonstrated ‘how the television studio was a site of intense
dramatic performance, expressive mise-en-scene and extraordinary
imagined worlds’.
Reception
So, how did the season go? The ticket sales were pretty good,
(‘better than expected’ I was told, with all screenings at least half
full and some significantly more, but no sell-outs. We were extremely
fortunate to have various distinguished production members join us as
guests, and their contributions added immeasurably to each screening.
These included director Philip Saville, who introduced The Journal of
Bridget Hitler, writer Caryl Churchill and producer Margaret Matheson,
who gave a short interview before The After-Dinner Joke, and the actors
Edward Petherbridge and Clive Swift who joined in the discussion after
The Exorcism. Our closing Desert of Lies panel comprised playwright
Howard Brenton, director Piers Haggard, and actor Mick Ford, who each
offered some illuminating insights on the production and historical
perspectives on studio form (a transcript of which will appear soon on
the Spaces of Television blog).
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Probably the most ‘challenging’ play to a modern sensibility that we
showed was the never-transmitted Censored Scenes From King Kong (image
above) combining an unusual tone of dialogue, musical numbers and the
use of colour separation overlay in some scenes and it was telling that
afterwards its writer, Howard Schuman, present at the screening said he
felt the reception of the play was ‘polite, if not enthusiastic’,
reflecting the tangible sense that viewers were finding it hard to take
it all in. One audience-member, (who watches and knows a lot about old
television) remarked afterwards that the next play on the double-bill,
an epic all-CSO play about the politics of charity by Caryl Churchill,
The After-Dinner Joke, was ‘more satisfying, particularly with the
benefit of only a single viewing, by virtue of it having a more linear
and straightforward narrative’.
In other screenings it was clear that the plays were hitting the
mark: you could feel a build up of tension in NFT3 during The Saliva
Milkshake and Psy-Warriors and hear laughter in all the right places
during Desert of Lies. Most importantly, I didn’t hear any laughter in
the wrong places – which often belies how badly a text has aged – in any
of the screenings. I was also pleasantly surprised to see many more
young people in the audiences than I had expected, suggesting that a new
generation was exploring this era.
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350w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /&gt;
BBC Audience Research Reports show that the formally unconventional
Plays for Today: Desert of Lies and The After Dinner Joke were liked
only by relatively small sections of their contemporary audiences, and
the re-presentation of these texts in our season raised some interesting
issues around the context of television schedules, changes in viewing
capacities and the retrospective accordance of value. For example the
non-linear time structure of Howard Brenton’s Play for Today: Desert of
Lies confused many viewers at its original transmission in 1984 (‘they
could not follow what was going on and the story was too “mixed-up” and
disorientating’ (BBC WAC ARR: TV/84/52</td>
</tr>
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References
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In our ‘post-television’ age when the appearance of television drama and film, both shot on digital camera, is increasingly homogenous, ‘old’ multi-camera studio drama must seem like more of an oddity than ever before.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

IN MEMORY OF STUDIO DRAMA: CURATING AND PRESENTING THE BFI SOUTHBANK ‘DRAMATIC SPACES’ SEASON