Part Two: Drama
By Jack Kibble-White and Steve Williams
First published June 2007
British television’s long and distinguished line of Saturday night drama commenced with men in tights, and in fact began on a Sunday. Before ITV’s The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1955, television drama had largely consisted of live studio performances of theatrical productions. In part this was due to the technical limitations of the medium, but it also reflected the then prevailing attitude the primary purpose of television drama should be to bring already established plays to a wider audience.
One notable exception was BBC television’s science-fiction thriller The Quatermass Experiment. This six-part series, broadcast in 1953, combined live studio performances with pre-recorded film footage to create a production that could never have been achieved on the stage. While it proved to be not just groundbreaking but hugely popular, by and large, the BBC’s drama department remained committed to single plays performed in the accepted mould. Technical innovations in the form of deep-focus camera work (first used by the BBC back in 1954 in Tovarich) and increased camera mobility (that enabled extreme close-ups in dramas such as The Deep Blue Sea also 1954) served mainly to compliment, and not revolutionize, the existing dramatic model.
The arrival of commercial television in the form of ITV in 1955 injected a new set of priorities into British television. Surviving on whatever advertising revenue it was able to generate, the newcomer could not afford to adhere too closely to the BBC’s unfettered aspirations towards informing and educating. Instead, its job was to secure the largest audience possible. Like the BBC, its dramatic output featured a high percentage of single plays performed live, yet while some of the BBC’s output was seen as too challenging and complex for the average television viewer, ITV made a virtue out of the fact their plays could be understood and enjoyed by everyone. While this was all well and good for weekday transmissions, it was clear Saturday nights – being the biggest night of the week – demanded a far more sensational solution.
Although only sometimes shown on Saturday evenings, it was The Adventures of Robin Hood that established the hugely successful template for action-orientated family drama which would serve Saturday so well. Over in America, television drama series shot on film had become pretty much standard as the varying time-zones across the States meant nationwide live broadcasts weren’t always a palatable option. With one eye on sales to the US market, ITV eschewed the BBC’s standard live broadcast format in favour of producing its own British filmed dramas in the mould of the high-octane US adventure series. However many in the industry sneered at such a proposal, suggesting the British public had actually grown to enjoy live television, taking particular pleasure from seeing actors occasionally fluff their lines.
Nonetheless, recognising the BBC didn’t make any historical adventure series, ITV were quick to exploit the gap and commissioned a slew of derring-do dramas. The Adventures of Sir Lancelot was an early Saturday night favourite that rigidly stuck to the Robin Hood formula of alternating between action sequences and interior scenes, and earned the distinction of being the first ever British series to be shot in colour (thanks to being sold into the American market). Like Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot was produced by the newly formed Incorporated Television Company. This organisation quickly established historical adventure supremacy producing The Buccaneers and The Count of Monte Cristo – both of which played on Saturday nights.
The BBC found it almost impossible to compete with ITC’s home-grown exotica and although adventure stories were described in the Corporation’s 1958 yearbook as an established feature of the Saturday night schedules, the truth of it was programmes such as the popular but parochial Dixon of Dock Green, well characterised the difference between the BBC’s down-to-Earth approach versus ITV’s glitz and glamour.
1960s
By the 1960s, ITV’s historical adventure series had given way to contemporary dramas built in a similarly action-orientated mould. Danger Man was another production from the house of ITC and occasionally played on Saturday nights. So too did The Avengers and Man in a Suitcase. Increasingly it seemed the British public looked to the worlds of espionage and law enforcement for their fix of Saturday night adventure. Yet there was also space for good old-fashioned imported Westerns in the form of Bonanza, as well as, more enduringly, anthology series such as Errol Flynn Theatre and later Thriller.
Over at the BBC, the epic 1961 series Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years continued to offer viewers worthy fare rather than thrills and spills. Nonetheless it attracted over 10 million viewers. A far better composite of education and entertainment came in 1963 with the arrival of Doctor Who. Although the series seemed to have little or no aspirations for mass appeal it became a success thanks largely to the arrival of the Daleks. Meanwhile from 1965 to 1968 The Man From UNCLE gave the BBC a truly modern proposition, and even a foursquare opposition to the litany of adventure dramas being shown on the other side. However its uncharacteristic contemporaneousness was due to the fact the Corporation didn’t actually make it themselves but instead imported it from – where else? – America. In fact in the 1960s and into the ’70s, the BBC relied heavily on imported material for action and adventure and, in particular, American movies (often as part of a themed series such as the “Saturday Thriller Film”) were shown almost every Saturday evening.
So with ITV having all but wrapped up the home-grown adventure series market, the BBC were forced to develop their own style of Saturday night drama. By 1967, Doctor Who seemed to be slipping in popularity, and such was the idiosyncratic nature of the concept it didn’t offer a useful template for future Saturday night successes anyway (one attempt at a vaguely Doctor Who-esque show, Adam Adamant Lives! only lasted two series). Salvation, when it came, arrived from a strand of drama that must at first have seemed entirely unsuited to Saturday night television.
The Forsyte Saga was not just another common-or-garden entrant into the BBC pantheon of period literary dramatisations. Its storylines engaged in then contemporary debates such as marital rape, and featured big business machinations aplenty that pre-dated the “power soaps” such as Dallas by 10 ten years. Certainly, this was a different kettle of fish from the aforementioned Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years and it would prove to be something of a forerunner for a slew of similarly contemporary slanted classic adaptations that peppered the BBC’s schedules for much of the ’70s. However, the germ of The Forsyte Saga evolved somewhat differently on Saturday nights.
1970s and 80s
From The Duchess of Duke Street through to All Creatures Great and Small, the BBC developed a line in populist period-based dramas. Here the historical setting provided little more than a colourful, opulent or picturesque backdrop to stories that focussed only on satiating a growing public appetite for a curious longing to go back to a time that had never really existed in the first place.
In fact, by the ’80s and Juliet Bravo, a period setting wasn’t even required. Instead a smattering of rural folk, and a comforting reliance on old-fashioned values was all that was needed to elicit in the viewer that warm “BBC Saturday drama” feeling. Although a bedrock of the schedules for 20 years or so, ultimately these “nostalgia for the never-was” dramas would find themselves jettisoned off onto Sundays, and what’s more over to ITV, as the likes of Heartbeat and Where the Heart Is finely honed the formula until all that was left was arguably an anodyne perfection, hewn entirely of any interestingly rough edges.
Although ITV had shown it too could successfully break into the Saturday night historical racket (some episodes of the hugely popular Upstairs, Downstairs were broadcast on television’s glitziest night of the week), in the main a diet of action and adventure still prevailed. By the late ’70s and early ’80s, though, ITV were showing an increasing reliance on imported American series and feature films. This was in part because the US shows looked far glitzier than their British counterparts, but it was also a matter of economics. Throughout the mid-to-late ’70s, the BBC had come to dominate the Saturday night schedules, with programmes such as The Generation Game, annihilating the ITV opposition. Clearly there was little sense in scheduling home-grown drama up against ratings big-hitters, particularly when it was such an expensive genre to produce (in the early ’80s it was estimated it cost over £110,000 to shoot one hour’s worth of drama versus somewhere in the region of £15,000 to simply buy it in).
As a result, it became customary for ITV to start off its Saturday night schedule with a slice of Americana – be it the highway patrol men of CHiPs (shown on ITV from 1979 to 1983), the intergalactic adventures of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1980 to 1982), or perhaps best of all The A-Team (which started on ITV in 1983 and ran for four years). While such fodder may have been simply an exercise in damage limitation, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century proved to be convincing competition when scheduled against Doctor Who, while The A-Team was actually one of the most popular programmes of its day.
By the mid-’80s, the dominance between the BBC and ITV had completely flipped. Series such as Game for a Laugh and Blind Date were pulling in massive ratings, while the BBC’s Saturday night output was looking none too convincing. Their dramas such as The Tripods failed to connect with the audience, while Driving Ambition, One By One and The Collectors all somehow managed to be competent but forgettable, and crucially, lack any sense of Saturday night appeal. Of course, Casualty was a different story altogether, but even that required a lot of support in its early years, plus a temporary move to Friday nights, before it was able to establish itself as the Saturday institution we know today.
The middle years of the decade were largely happy ones for ITV. Shrewd management of London Weekend Television (the major supplier of ITV programming for Saturday nights), plus the rise of new ITV companies such as the South and South East of England provider, TVS, resulted in some new home-grown dramatic offerings. Although few would garner any critical plaudits, the likes of Dempsey and Makepeace and C.A.T.S. Eyes served a purpose and looked like the type of bold, brash series that could actually be sold into the American market. Meanwhile Robin of Sherwood not only satisfied the Saturday night appetite for spectacle and thrills, but was the exception that proved the rule by also being critically lauded. However, in the main, Saturday night drama’s importance diminished as the decade progressed, and cheaper forms of entertainment began to dominate the schedules. Series of Noel’s House Party and Blind Date each ran for almost half the year and with a plethora of new people shows hitting the screens, drama was becoming an expensive irrelevance.
1990s
By the time we hit the ’90s, even American dramas were struggling to retain their once familiar early-evening slot. Both Baywatch and The New Adventures of Superman made it through to the latter years of the decade, but once they wrapped up in 1997 there were no new imports to take their place. For the BBC, Casualty remained their most important Saturday night drama (even more so since the demise of Doctor Who in 1989), and it seemed sensible to commission new series that were constructed in a similar mould. However, neither 1990′s Waterfront Beat, nor its unofficial successor, City Central (which ran from 1998 to 2000) performed as well as the hospital drama (although the latter show did make it to three series and included a memorable, if slightly mawkish episode in which one of the regular characters was killed off).
Increasingly though, Sunday nights were becoming the day to tune in for ambitious drama, with the BBC even going so far in 1992 as switching the long-running Sunday night consumer series That’s Life! over to Saturdays to make space for more fiction. For a while it looked as if a combination of economics and viewing habits were conspiring to eliminate traditional Saturday night drama altogether. But then in 1995, seemingly out of the blue, came a bold return to unadulterated adventure series in the form of Bugs.
Billed as an “Avengers for the ’90s”, Bugs sparked a minor renaissance for action-packed adventures, with Crime Traveller and Jonathan Creek following in its wake – the latter to huge acclaim and buoyant ratings. But the audience’s appetite for outlandish drama seemed easily satiated with only Jonathan Creek making it in to the next decade. ITV, meanwhile checked out of the Saturday night drama business altogether. Speculation surfaced for a time that Coronation Street might find a berth at 7.30pm on Saturdays, but the idea was dismissed and Saturday’s drama output became distinguished by the simple fact it was now the only night of the week devoid of a first-run episode of a British soap opera.
2000s
As we entered the 21st century, pickings were slim indeed. The revived Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) was a brave attempt to push the envelope even further, both in terms of concept and scale, but it too could only muster a couple of series. Some commentators concluded there was simply no longer a public appetite for what they described as “family dramas”, yet despite the evidence, there remained a hope that the BBC were still edging towards something that might prove the doomsayers wrong. That series was definitely not Strange, which was a resolutely sombre but nonsensical series about a demon hunter, and again only able to sustain the shortest of runs. ITV’s Afterlife was a bit better, but it too seemed to lack that certain something that marked it out for greatness.
In March 2004, the Daily Star claimed on its front page that the “Beeb admits: We don’t know what to show on Saturday nights”, yet salvation of a sort was already on its way with the September 2003 announcement of the return of Doctor Who. The Time Lord’s eventual second coming in March 2005 was surrounded by a level of hype unprecedented for a Saturday night drama, but it proved to be deserved as the revived series changed the prevailing attitude towards adventure series almost overnight. In the hunt to find the next big Saturday night success, all manner of cult shows were scrutinised to ascertain their potential for a revamp with both Sapphire and Steel and Survivors, talked about as future revival possibilities. Over at ITV, their own version of Doctor Who, Primeval, surprised pretty much everyone by being actually not that bad.
Meanwhile, and with a pleasing cyclicality, Robin Hood has donned his Lincoln Green yet again to do battle for our viewing pleasure. However, while the original series was the first in a litany of similarly themed adventure dramas, this time around the famous outlaw finds himself just one of a chasing pack trying to topple the supremacy of Doctor Who as Saturday night’s top rated drama. Yet the true test of greatness is more than simply winning the short-term ratings battle. The aim of this new Robin Hood must be to establish itself as a regular fixture in the Saturday night schedule. And for any drama series that can achieve this goal, particularly in today’s television climate, immortality surely awaits.
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