It was odd that one of the most interesting and significant cultural occasions of 2008 received almost no newspaper or television coverage at all. On the afternoon of Saturday, July 5, the stage of the National Film Theatre on the South Bank was handed over to David Rose, the former head of television drama at BBC Birmingham. Over the course of a memorable session, he used film clips and his own recollections to explain how 30 years ago he had managed to employ, and in some cases introduce to the medium, such people as Mike Leigh, Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell, Neville Smith, Stephen Frears, Alan Clarke, David Rudkin and Peter Terson.
It was, to all public knowledge, the first time that Rose had given such a talk. He outlined the intriguing passage of a life that took him from being the first producer of Z-Cars to becoming the man who initiated the brilliantly successful policy of making cinema-destined feature films for the new Channel 4 in the 1980s.
Not only did the press disdain to attend an event that illustrated the work of such a distinguished producer, but television itself seemed curiously abashed. Invitations to the present Director-General of the BBC and all those who work alongside him were refused. Television is always keen to celebrate itself in facetious or pompous ways, most of all as a sort of errant puppy forever fouling itself in the corner of your living room (One Thousand Worst Bloopers, etc). But it seems much less interested in the fascinating challenges of its own history. Everyone understands that contemporary BBC executives are far too busy jargonising to each other about delivery platforms and multichoice environments to watch the actual programmes.
Once dedicated to finding house-room for other people's vision, they prefer nowadays to obsess lengthily about their own. In their public pronouncements the question of “how” has largely superseded the question of “what”. But even so, you might think it would be worth a couple of hours on a warm Saturday afternoon to learn how one gifted individual was once able to set up an empire within the empire, in which, for once, the artist was king.
There is no question here of talking about a golden age. Such talk is not only worthless but actively misleading. Many of us who today own a bus pass once spent an average proportion of excruciating evenings watching Wednesday Plays and Plays for Today. But nevertheless it is curious that there has been so little comment about how the BBC and Channel 4 have together quietly murdered one of the two forms which may be said to have been distinctively pioneered and championed in this country. The nature documentary survives, glorious as ever. But mention of the single play, in which one writer is given the opportunity to make his or her own fiction at will, seems to evoke the past more powerfully than Green Shield Stamps or Craven A.
It would take more than one short newspaper article to work out how and why this happened. The BBC is a fundamentally journalistic organisation that understands facts better than it understands the imagination. Mandated by its Charter to advance the supposedly identifiable causes of balance and truth, it has from the very start been uneasy with the trickier procedures of the living dramatist.
Even in the days when single plays were allowed on majority channels, drama was identified as a conspicuous source of mischief and expense. How could anything which cost so much be so infuriatingly unpredictable in quality? Little wonder, then, that controllers chose to steer their investment away from individual stories that could never be repeated into long-running series with familiar characters and cliff-edge endings that would keep the ratings ticking over nicely.
It is, of course, for these same sour commercial reasons that fiction has responded to its own demotion by increasingly choosing to pass itself off as fact. More and more single films, if they happen at all, seem merely to reconstruct events about which we have already read. Figures such as Margaret Thatcher, Christine Keeler, Frankie Howerd and Lord Longford are mimicked and lent motives in a stuttering flow of biopics, behind which lies some depressingly tame thinking: “Oh, they'll be interested in this; they already know about it.”
Those of us who have long argued that drama should represent society as well as reflect it are delighted when light is thrown into dark places. There are exemplary films such as Channel 4's Omagh that are deeply felt and mounted with an extraordinary sense of search and discovery. But too many such ventures have an obvious air of cynicism, as if the makers are standing at the side of the road with their thumbs out, looking to hitch a ride on current affairs. The place for waxworks is Madame Tussaud's.
Another way of describing the same problem is to say that everywhere we see the triumph of genre. It is no coincidence that the eclipse of the single play has coincided with a period of ever-more centralised road-testing at Television Centre. For a publicly funded body, submitted scripts take a scandalously long time to read, while anecdotally programme-makers find their programmes more and more wearying to justify. Executive input overwhelms artistic output - to mind-numbing effect.
The back burner has become the place where much of television drama's most nourishing stew bubbles, ignored. The BBC has become more and more like a newspaper, strongly edited from the top, and less and less like a publishing house, seeking to release talent rather than to control it. Worst of all, BBC Four is being used as a mafia graveyard - an alibi channel invented to excuse the controllers' cowardly loss of confidence in mixed majority programming.
Again, in such an environment, it is hardly surprising that already existent formulae are prioritised. The revival of Doctor Who sends the BBC into a well-merited orgy of delight, precisely because it inherits a known form and succeeds in regenerating it. It conforms, if you like, to the Trojan Horse model of drama, by taking something already familiar and cleverly smuggling in some exciting new ideas.
But with very few exceptions - inevitably, you think of Paul Abbott, the author of State of Play and Shameless - it is very hard to see the same commitment being brought to bear on wholly original work. The Wire and Heimat remain in their scale and ambition the two global television series the corporation seems least keen to emulate.
Now, anyway, there is to be a baby-step towards making amends, and two theatre adaptations, My Zinc Bed and A Number, and one original film, God on Trial, have been chosen to be aired on BBC Two in successive weeks, with no shared theme and no obvious support from yesterday's headlines. But this tentative experiment will not disguise a troubling paradox. The two reasons why the audience care so much about the BBC is, first, because they pay for it, but secondly, because they expect it to offer all sorts of things that nobody else can afford to produce.
The greater part of the BBC's campaign for licence renewal was directed towards presenting itself as a news-gathering organisation. The plan was that MPs, back home from a hard day's work at Westminster, would slump down in front of Newsnight and declare it the world's greatest current affairs programme. Thereby it was hoped that they might be persuaded to offer their backing to the continuation of the BBC at an increasing level of subsidy. But most of us get home earlier. We want a range of television. We want art as well as information and we would like artists to work in forms of their own choosing. By sidelining the single play, the BBC has removed one of the most powerful arguments for its own survival.
My Zinc Bed, by David Hare, is on BBC Two on Wed at 9pm
