As well as being in the audience for talks by luminaries such as Tony Garnett and Timothy West, I was among the students sat for dinner with Kenneth Trodd — who, on being told I was studying science-fiction, wanted reassurance that Cold Lazarus hadn’t looked and felt like Blake’s 7. A group of academics who seemed so ancient and wise — and were probably younger than me now — were patient when I interrupted their conversation about Dennis Potter to ask what they knew about him pitching to write Doctor Who.
The whole event was overshadowed by the recent death of Sydney Newman, effectively becoming a conference about his legacy as Head of Drama at the BBC, 1963-67. But a recurring topic in the bar was the public response to the death of Princess Diana the previous summer — how it affected viewing figures of drama at the time, how it would shape drama to come. One producer said she thought that increasingly risk-averse broadcasters would veto any drama that was not sufficiently respectful to the public mood.
When, the following year, Queer as Folk contained a scene of characters talking about the death of Diana, it was rude and funny, yet at heart about a shared sense of grief — and the closing joke was about not Diana but Elton John. The friend I watched with was shocked; I could see it navigating the sensibilities I’d heard that producer raise.
Reading the book now has made me acutely aware of what I missed while at the event all those years ago. I had not heard of, let alone seen, many of the dramas cited. I did not know the names of many people there or whose work was being discussed. Now I see I was rubbing shoulders with, perhaps even serving wine to, John McGrath, Irene Shubik and a whole host of others whose work I now know so well through my various bits of research. The things I wish I could go back and ask!
But telly has always been ephemeral; it is made and then you move on.
There’s lots of fascinating, insightful stuff in the book, both from the conference in 1998 and added new for the second edition (2014). There is lots on the ideology behind what makes it to the screen, the move from schooling the audience in culture to trailing after them as consumers, as well as the respective value accorded to different kinds of drama by a male-dominated, male-centred industry. That’s informed my viewing of the BBC’s Vanity Fair (1987), on which I’ll have more to say in due course.
I was also engrossed by accounts of how developments in technology changed what we see on TV, and its look and feel. Phil Redmond explains how Brookside made use of developments in computer technology and word processing to streamline writing and recording, and dovetails this with the aim of the programme to reflect a fast-changing world. Victoria Byard’s chapter on The Sarah Jane Adventures addresses the way it worked across traditional broadcast TV as well as new digital platforms, and there’s a concluding chapter by the editors on time-shifted viewing and the changing ways that the audience — or audiences plural — are consuming media. Or were, given how much things have moved on in the past decade.
Sarah Cardwell’s chapter compares three different TV versions of Persuasion made over a 36-year period (1971, 1995 and 2007), though I’m not sure I entirely agree that the 1971 one was slow-moving and wordy because of “the technological and institutional context” (p. 86). Compare it to Upstairs, Downstairs or The Stalls of Barchester from the same year and you’d get a very different sense of the way the past could be realised. I think Persuasion was made within a tradition of serialised dramatisations of “classic” novels, what Screening the Novel referred to as a “house style”, resulting in an old-fashioned mode of TV drama even for 1971. The question, I think, is how consciously the people who made it resisted the wider technological and institutional context.
That’s got me thinking about the way any new dramatisation of a classic novel must balance making the old story relevant to a modern-day audience without feeling too “new”. A common objection to the 2022 Netflix version of Persuasion was that protagonist Anne Eliot directly addresses the audience in the style of Fleabag (2016-19). Obviously, Fleabag didn’t invent talking-to-camera, but that particular series is mentioned in much of the criticism. Such “gimmicks” (Variety) are “jarring” (Vanity Fair) in drama set in the past, resulting in a “disaster of anachronistic dialogue and annoyingly wry glances at the camera” (the Guardian).
We could point to other anachronisms — the teeth and skin of the actors are too perfect, their costumes look brand new, the whole world on screen is too picturesque, clean and healthy — but that’s the same in most other costume dramas of this sort. That, I think is at the heart of the objection: it’s not about whether it authentically presents the early 19th century, but the expectations we have built up from previous screen dramatisations. Persuasion (2022) does not sufficiently look and feel like old TV.
In fact, I’d argue that the direct address to camera is a neat way of tackling a perennial issue in dramatisation: how to transpose both the content and flavour of narration in the book into dialogue used on screen. In this case, the direct address conveys something of Jane Austen’s use of free indirect speech, which gives the book an intimate, informal, even gossipy style. In that sense, it’s authentic.
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