Learning on ScreenThe History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK
Origins of the project
The project had its origins in research I carried out for a previous AHRC project, Cultures of British Television Drama, 1960-82, involving Manchester Metropolitan University, Royal Holloway and the University of Reading. My contribution to that project was to research regional British television drama, with a particular focus on Granada Television in Manchester and BBC English Regions Drama, based at Pebble Mill in Birmingham. The research was written up as a PhD and subsequently published as A Sense of Place: Regional British television drama, 1956-82 (Manchester University Press, 2012). While Granada and BBC English Regions Drama were responsible for some very well-known dramas, such as Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited, Penda’s Fen and Boys from the Blackstuff, those ‘canonic’ dramas were only the tip of an iceberg. Both Granada and English Regions Drama produced literally dozens of dramas that are much less well-known, many of which exist in the archives but have been forgotten about.
I began to think about a follow-up project that would involve further exploration of the back catalogues of Granada and BBC English Regions Drama and also to extend the research to other regional BBC production centres, such as Bristol and Manchester, and other regional ITV companies, such as Anglia, Southern, Tyne Tees, Westward and Yorkshire. These ideas evolved further when I teamed up with Professor John Hill to prepare an AHRC application specifically on the history of ‘forgotten TV drama’. The scale of the project grew and the focus on the English regions was extended to include Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as a means of assessing whether there might be a correlation between the ‘forgotten’ and the ‘regional’ in television drama.
Objectives
The specific objectives of the project are:
to uncover a ‘lost’ history of forgotten television drama in the UK
to produce an alternative history of television drama in the UK that will add to our knowledge of television history, challenge ideas concerning the television drama ‘canon’ and encourage awareness of the regional diversity of television drama production
to collaborate with regional and national archives in order to establish the existence and availability of regionally-produced dramas in regional and national archives and to make this drama better-known and more accessible (through publications, public screenings and special events)
to produce case-studies of dramas (either single plays, series or serials) from regional ITV companies and regional BBC production centres in order to examine more closely the production, scheduling, reception and archiving of regionally-produced drama
to record interviews with selected production personnel who worked on regionally produced dramas that have since been ‘forgotten’.
