Drama and the Media in Britain

Drama and the Media in Britain MARTIN ESSLIN 1 The renaissance of play-writing in Britain, usually dated from the opening in May 1956 of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and the astonishing number ofimportant dramatists it has brought to the fore, are among the most intriguing phenomena of the English-speaking world's recent cultural history. Undoubtedly the Education Act of 1945 was a contributing factor: it opened up the educational ladder for talented young people from social classes that had hitherto been barred from institutions of higher learning. But another, perhaps equally important, element that may have played a part in setting this "new wave" in motion was certainly the emergence of the electronic media, radio and television, and their availability as outlets for the production and diffusion ofdrama. By what was perhaps no more than an accident ofhistory, Britain was spared, at least initially, the linkage between the mass media and advertising which has turned radio and television into cultural wastelands in the United States. When radio first became available as a medium for entertainment after World War I, programmes were originally provided by the manufacturers of sets who felt that they had to give their purchasers something to listen to. In 1922 those manufacturers formed a co-operative, the British Broadcasting Company, whose first general manager was John Reith, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. As programmes grew more ambitious and costly, the question of how they were to be financed became ever more pressing. In the United States, advertising provided the answer. In Britain, the puritan Reith felt that this would put the most important new cultural medium of the century into the wrong hands; and so he devised the concept of "the public corporation," a body set up by a Royal Charter and entrusted with the monopoly of broadcasting. The Sovereign was to appoint its "governors," who would be 100 MARTIN ESSLIN independent of political interference and empowered to raise an annual "licence fee" from all households operating a receiver. 1 This "board of governors" (which in fact is the British Broadcasting Corporation [B.B.C.]) is directed by its charter to use the medium of broadcasting for "information, education and entertainment" in the national interest. The B.B.C. started to operate under its new charter on I January 1927. Thus, from the very beginning, the maximizing of audiences was never the sole objective of British broadcasting, although it remained very important. The spread of cultural values, the raising of taste, the diffusion of important works of art, the fostering of new talent - these were among the aims comprehended by its general heading of serving the national interest. II By the time the B.B.C. was constituted as a public body, drama had already become an integral part of its programming. After much debate about whether plays would make sense without the visual element, the first "reading" ofa play - Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - took place on 25 May 1923 and proved an immediate success. The first drama written specially for radio followed on 15 January 1924: Danger, by the Welsh novelist Richard Hughes (1900-1976). Hughes solved the problem of the absence of visuals by setting the play deep down in a coal-mine and starting at the moment when an accident extinguishes all lights, so that the entire action takes place in total darkness. By the time Val Gielgud (1900-1983), an elder brother of Sir John Gielgud, took over as head of the radio-drama department on 1 January 1929 (a position he held for thirty-four years, until April 1963), the technique ofproducing radio plays had made vast strides. Plays were broadcast live (recording techniques were still too primitive) from an array of different, acoustically sealed studios, so that orchestral music and different acoustic milieux could be effectively blended and cross-faded. And the actors no longer merely "read" the play, but moved their positions and developed techniques of subtle characterization and vocal expression. When World War II broke out in 1939 and greatly restricted the mobility of the population in the black-out, radio drama reached its highest peak of popUlarity. Val Gielgud had created...