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Sir David Warren is a retired British diplomat, who served as British Ambassador to Japan from 2008 to 2012. He has had a long interest in the history of 20th century theatre, and presented an earlier version of this paper at a University of Westminster conference in February 2015 to mark the conclusion of the AHRC-supported project, in his capacity as a Visiting Professor at De Montfort University linked to the Theatre Archive. He is also Chair of Council at the University of Kent, and a Visiting Professor of East Asian Studies at Sheffield University.
The wide range of productions of stage plays on British television, both in the brief period of BBC television broadcasting before the Second World War, and between the resumption of the television service in 19461 and the 1980s is a neglected aspect of theatre history. However, a University of Westminster project, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has created a database of all television drama since 1930 that originated in the theatre.
In the post-war period, on both BBC and commercial television channels, the broad repertoire of such plays gave television audiences exposure to the full spectrum of classical and modern world drama. In some productions surviving in the archives, styles of performance of considerable historical interest (and on occasion important individual performances) have been preserved. Literally thousands of plays originating in the theatre were performed on television during this period. In this essay, I have chosen individual examples, of both plays and drama seasons, to give an impression of the themes and values underpinning the development of this genre. The Westminster project provides a crucial information resource, in the absence of easy access to most visual archival material (where indeed the latter exists), and can be accessed by searching the web for "Screen Plays: The Theatre Plays on British Television Database".
What is "television drama"?
In this paper, the term "television drama" describes a studio-based style of continuous (or apparently continuous) performance, sometimes with filmed inserts. Some early studio dramas were electronically recorded for repeat showings, or to be retained in the archive for other reasons, but it was not until the 1960s that the practice of prior telerecording of plays became the norm.
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