   #copyright

BBC television drama

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Television

   The British Broadcasting Corporation has been a producer and
   broadcaster of television drama since even before it had an officially
   established television broadcasting network in the United Kingdom. As
   with any major broadcast network, drama forms an important part of its
   schedule, with many of the BBC's top-rated programmes being from this
   genre.

   From the 1950s through to the 1980s the BBC received much acclaim for
   the range and scope of its drama productions, producing series, serials
   and plays across a range of genres, from soap opera to science-fiction
   to costume drama, with the 1970s in particular being regarded as a
   critical and cultural high point in terms of the quality of dramas
   being produced. In the 1990s, a time of change in the British
   television industry, the department went through much internal
   confusion and external criticism, but since the beginning of the 21st
   century has begun to return to form with a run of critical and popular
   successes, despite continual accusations of the drama output and the
   BBC in general dumbing down.

   Many BBC productions have also been exported to and screened in other
   countries, particularly in the United States PBS network's Masterpiece
   Theatre strand and latterly on the BBC's own BBC America cable channel.
   Other major purchasers of BBC dramas include the BBC's equivalents in
   other Commonwealth nations, such as Australia's ABC and Canada's CBC.

Experimental broadcasting and the 1930s

   Already an established national radio broadcaster, the BBC began test
   transmissions with the new technology of television as early as 1929,
   working with John Logie Baird and using his primitive early apparatus.
   The following year, as part of one of these test transmissions, the BBC
   produced what is believed to be the first piece of television drama
   ever to have been screened, an adaptation of the Italian playwright
   Luigi Pirandello's short play The Man With the Flower in His Mouth.

   Broadcast live on the evening of July 14, 1930, the play was produced
   from a small studio in the Baird Company headquarters at 133 Long Acre,
   London. The play was chosen because of its confined setting, small cast
   and short length, and was directed by Val Gielgud, who was at the time
   the BBC's senior producer of radio drama, a pioneer in that field and a
   hugely respected broadcaster. Because of the primitive 30-line camera
   technology, only one figure could be shown on screen at a time and the
   field of vision of the cameras was extremely restricted. Nonetheless,
   the production was regarded as a success, and even the Prime Minister
   of the day, Ramsay MacDonald, watched the play with his family on the
   Baird Televisor Baird had previously installed at their 10 Downing
   Street home.

   The BBC's test broadcasts continued throughout the early part of the
   decade as the quality of the medium improved, until in 1936 they
   launched the world's first regular high-definition television channel,
   the BBC Television Service, from studios in a specially converted wing
   of Alexandra Palace in London. At the time of the network's debut on
   November 2 that year, there were only five television producers
   responsible for the entire output: the producer selected to oversee
   drama productions was George More O'Ferrall, a former assistant
   director of feature films who at least had some experience with
   producing in a visual medium, unlike many of his colleagues who came
   across from the BBC's radio services.

   The first drama production to be mounted as a part of the new, regular
   service was entitled Marigold, broadcast live from the Alexandra Palace
   studios on the evening of Friday November 6 1936. "It was probably
   little more than a photographed version of the stage production," later
   Head of Drama Shaun Sutton wrote in The Times some thirty-six years
   later, "with the camera lying well back to preserve the picture-frame
   convention of the theatre." ↑  Most initial drama efforts were of a
   similar scale: productions of selected dramatised 'scenes' or excerpts
   from popular novels and adaptations of stage plays, and a programme
   entitled Theatre Parade would regularly use original London theatre
   casts for re-enacting selected scenes. However, as the theatres began
   to fear that such practice would take away their audiences, an
   increasing number of full-length dramatised productions began to take
   place in the Alexandra Palace studios. Plays of as long as ninety
   minutes became regular features of the schedule, with full-length
   adaptations of novels and stage plays, although original plays written
   for television were still very rare at this stage. There was also what
   could be deemed the first regular television drama series – entitled
   Telecrime, the series of ten and twenty-minute plays presented various
   crimes, which the viewers were given enough clues to be able to solve
   themselves using the evidence shown on screen.

   By 1939, the drama department had grown to such an extent that there
   were now fifteen producers working in it, as opposed to nine covering
   production in all of the other genres of the television service. The
   number of people with the capability to view the broadcasts – still
   technically restricted to the London area but in practice viewable a
   good distance further away – had also grown to an estimated
   25,000–40,000 sets in use by the outbreak of the Second World War in
   September that year. Production methods had become increasingly
   advanced, with Outside Broadcast cameras often being employed to, for
   instance, show thirty territorial army troops with two howitzers in the
   Alexandra Palace grounds for added effect in The White Chateau, and
   boats on the Palace lake for scenes depicting the battle of Zeebrugge
   in another war-set play. Alfred Hitchcock once stated that he had been
   so impressed with a 1939 BBC production of Rope that he had
   incorporated ideas from its depiction on screen into his later, more
   famous, film version.

   As with every other television programme of the era, live broadcast
   meant that no record of the drama productions, barring photographs,
   scripts and press reviews, were kept, and there is no record of how
   they looked. BBC producer Cecil Madden later claimed that they had
   experimented with an early telerecording of a production of The Scarlet
   Pimpernel, but were ordered by film director Alexander Korda to destroy
   the print as he felt it infringed his film rights. However, there is no
   official record either of any 1930s telerecording experiments, or a BBC
   production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during the pre-war era. BBC
   television broadcasting ceased on September 1 1939, and the station
   remained off-air for the duration of the war, with the technicians and
   engineers needed for war efforts such as the RADAR programme, and the
   government afraid that the VHF transmission signals would act as a
   guiding beacon for German bombers targeting central London.

The return of television and the 1950s

   BBC Television resumed broadcasting in June 1946, and the service began
   in much the same way it had ceased in 1939. However, in 1949 there was
   a major development in drama when Val Gielgud was installed as the new
   Head of Drama, a position he had previously and highly successfully
   occupied at BBC Radio. Since producing the first television play in
   1930, Gielgud had worked in television again, serving on attachment to
   the service at Alexandra Palace in 1939 and directing a half-hour
   adaptation of his own short story Ending It, starring John Robinson and
   Joan Marion and broadcast on August 25, 1939, less than a week before
   the service was placed on hiatus.

   Now he returned to control the genre on television, and was determined
   to bring his own very firm ideas about how dramatic stories should be
   told from radio into the new medium. Gielgud was not a particular fan
   of television and tolerated the medium rather than embracing it, making
   him unpopular with several of the producers working under him, many of
   whom felt that he would have been happier simply televising the
   recordings of radio plays than making out-and-out television
   productions. He was also an unpopular choice with the Controller of the
   television service, Norman Collins, who wrote that "Anything less than
   complete familiarity with all aspects of television production will
   mean... that the Head of Television Drama is an amateur." Gielgud
   eventually returned to radio, being replaced as Head of Drama by
   experienced producer Michael Barry in 1952.

   One important move that had occurred under Gielgud was the
   establishment in 1950 of the Script Department, and the hiring of the
   television service's first in-house staff drama writers, Nigel Kneale
   and Philip Mackie. Barry later expanded the Script Department and
   installed the experienced film producer Donald Wilson as its head in
   1955. Television was now developing beyond simply adapting stories from
   other media into creating its own originally written productions. It
   was also becoming a high-profile medium, with national coverage and
   viewing figures now running into the millions, helped by the explosion
   of interest due to the live televising of the coronation of Queen
   Elizabeth II in the summer of 1953.

   That same year, Barry invested the majority of his original scripting
   budget into a six-part science-fiction serial written by Kneale and
   directed by Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian-born director who was
   establishing a reputation as the television service's most inventive
   practitioner. Entitled The Quatermass Experiment, the serial (
   miniseries in American terminology) was a huge success and went a long
   way towards popularising the form, where one story is told over a short
   number of episodes, on British television: it is still one of the most
   popular drama formats in the medium to this day. Kneale and Cartier
   went on to be responsible for two sequel serials and many other highly
   successful and popular productions over the course of the decade,
   drawing many viewers to their programmes with their characteristic
   blend of horror and allegorical science fiction.

   It was they who were responsible for the 1954 adaptation of George
   Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the second performance of which drew the
   largest television audience since the coronation, some seven million
   viewers, and is one of the earliest surviving dramas in the archive.
   The telerecording process had by now been perfected for capturing live
   broadcasts for repeat and overseas sales, although it was not until the
   early 1960s that the majority of BBC dramas were prerecorded on the new
   technology of videotape. The BBC, unlike American broadcasters and
   their commercial British rivals, did not produce dramas entirely on
   film stock on any regular basis until the 1980s, preferring their
   traditional electronic studio methods, which gave much of the drama
   produced by the Corporation a somewhat unique – although some argue
   cheaper-looking – feel. Film would, however, be used to mount scenes
   unachievable in a live television environment or on location, which
   would be pre-shot and inserted into live productions at relevant
   points, later being inserted into videotaped shows at the editing
   stage. "These sequences bought time for the more elaborate costume
   changes or scene set-ups, but also served to 'open out' the action,"^
   as the British Film Institute explained on its Screenonline website in
   2004.

   The BBC suffered during the second half of the 1950s from the rise of
   the ITV network, which had debuted in 1955 and rapidly begun to take
   away audience share from the Corporation as its coverage spread
   nationally. Despite popular hits such as the police drama series Dixon
   of Dock Green and soap opera The Grove Family, the BBC was seen as
   being more highbrow, lacking the popular common touch of the commercial
   network. One of the major figures in commercial television drama of the
   late 1950s and early 1960s was Canadian producer Sydney Newman, the
   Head of Drama at ABC Television responsible for such programmes as
   Armchair Theatre and The Avengers. In December 1962, keen to turn
   around the fortunes of their own drama department, the BBC invited
   Newman to replace the retiring Barry as Head of Drama, and he accepted,
   keen on the idea of transforming what he saw as the staid, docile image
   of BBC drama.

The 'golden age' of BBC drama

   Even before Newman's arrival, some BBC producers were attempting to
   break the mould, with Elwyn Jones, Troy Kennedy Martin and Allan
   Prior's landmark police drama series Z-Cars shaking up the image of
   television police dramas and becoming an enormous popular success from
   1962 onwards. Newman, however, restructured the entire department,
   dividing the unwieldy drama group into three separate divisions:
   Series, for on-going continuing dramas with self-contained episodes;
   Serials, for stories told over multi-episode runs, or programmes which
   were made up of a series of serials; and Plays, for any kind of drama
   one-offs, an area Newman was especially keen on following the success
   of Armchair Theatre at ABC.

   Newman followed BBC Managing Director of Television Sir Huw Wheldon's
   famous edict to "make the good popular and the popular good," once
   stating: "damn the upper classes! They don't even own televisions!"
   While he did personally create populist family-entertainment-based
   dramas such as Adam Adamant Lives! and the incredibly long-running
   science-fiction series Doctor Who, he also attempted to create drama
   that was socially relevant to those who were watching, initiating The
   Wednesday Play anthology strand to present contemporary dramas with a
   social background the resonance. Says Screenonline of this development,
   "It was from this artistic high of the 'golden age' of British TV drama
   (this 'agitational contemporaneity', as Newman coined it) that a new
   generation of TV playwrights emerged."^

   The Wednesday Play proved to be a breeding ground for acclaimed and
   sometimes controversial writers such as Dennis Potter and directors
   such as Ken Loach, but sometimes Newman's desire to create biting,
   cutting drama could land the Corporation in trouble. This was
   particularly the case with 1965's The War Game by Peter Watkins, which
   depicted a fictional nuclear attack on the UK and the consequences of
   such, and was banned by the BBC under pressure from the government. It
   was eventually screened on television in 1985.

   Newman's reign saw a large number of popular and critically acclaimed
   dramas go out on the BBC, with Doctor Who, Z-Cars, Doctor Finlay's
   Casebook and the epic The Forsyte Saga picking up viewers while the
   likes of The Wednesday Play and Theatre 625 presented challenging ideas
   to the audience. Newman left the staff of the BBC once his five-year
   contract expired in 1967, departing for an unsuccessful attempt to
   break into the film industry. He was replaced by Head of Serials Shaun
   Sutton, initially on an acting basis combined with his existing role,
   but permanently from 1969.

   Sutton became the BBC's longest-serving Head of Drama, serving as such
   until 1981 and presiding over the BBC's move from black and white into
   colour broadcasting. His era took in the whole of the 1970s, a time
   when the BBC enjoyed large viewing figures, positive audience reaction
   and generally high production values across a range of programmes, with
   drama enjoying a particularly well-received spell. The Wednesday Play
   transformed into the equally famous and long-running Play for Today in
   1970; later in the decade the BBC began a run of producing every single
   Shakespeare play, a run which Sutton himself would later take over the
   producer's role on following his departure from the Head of Drama
   position in the early 1980s. Popular dramas such as Doctor Who and
   Z-Cars continued into the new decade, and were joined by costume dramas
   such as The Pallisers, The Onedin Line and Poldark, carrying on from
   the successes of The Forsyte Saga, which had been set in the past and
   been a major success in the late 1960s. Family-audience based period
   dramas, often adaptations such as The Eagle of the Ninth (1977), were
   popular on Sunday afternoons, with the Classic Serial strand which ran
   there becoming something of an institution until the early 1990s.

   There were also failures, however. The epic Churchill's People,
   twenty-six fifty-minute episodes based around Winston Churchill's A
   History of the English-Speaking Peoples, was deemed unbroadcastable by
   Sutton after he had viewed the initial episodes, but so much time and
   money had been invested in huge pre-transmission publicity that the BBC
   had no choice but to show the plays, to critical derision and tiny
   viewing figures. Never again would a fifty-minute series be given a run
   as long as twenty-six episodes, for fear of being too committed to a
   project: runs of thirteen became the norm, although in later years even
   this began to be considered quite long. Plays such as Dennis Potter's
   Brimstone and Treacle and Roy Minton's Scum were not broadcast at all
   due to fears over their content at the highest levels of the BBC,
   although despite this Potter continued to write landmark drama serials
   and one-offs for the Corporation throughout the rest of the decade and
   into the 1980s. Both Brimstone and Treacle and Scum were eventually
   transmitted several years later.

   Whenever writers and media analysts criticise the current state of
   British and particularly BBC television drama, it is frequently the
   1960s and 1970s period which they cite as being the most important and
   influential, with a vast variety of genres (science fiction, crime,
   historical, family based) and types of programme (series, serials,
   one-offs, anthologies) being produced. "What may justly be rated as the
   golden age of television drama reached its zenith,"^ as The Guardian
   described it in their 2004 obituary of Sutton. Or in the words of the
   Royal Television Society, "...an era that championed new writers, young
   directors and challenging drama. The amazing diversity... helped to
   make it the golden age of broadcasting."^

   However, despite this high esteem, the television drama of the era does
   not fully exist in the archives. Most of the live output up until the
   1950s was not recorded at all, and a large amount of material from the
   1960s and early 1970s was wiped once it had been repeated the number of
   times contractually allowed, or when it was of no further use for
   overseas sales. The transfer from black and white to colour
   broadcasting led to an increase in the destruction of older material
   which was now regarded as redundant, although by 1978 the BBC had
   realised the historical value of its archive and ceased the wiping
   process. However, by this stage many series were completely missing –
   United!, a football-based soap opera which ran from 1965 to 1967 has no
   episodes existing at all. Others have large gaps – Doctor Who, for
   example, has 108 missing episodes.

Changing attitudes in the 1980s and beyond

   Following Sutton's departure from the Head of Drama role in 1981 and
   his return to front-line producing duties in Shakespeare plays, his
   place as Head of Drama was taken by Graeme MacDonald. MacDonald had
   been Head of Serials and later Head of Series & Serials under Sutton,
   with the two departments having been merged in 1980, remaining so for
   most of the decade before separating again at the end of it. MacDonald
   maintained the status quo, and was only Head of Drama for a short time
   before he was promoted again to run a channel as Controller of BBC Two.
   He was succeeded in turn by his own Head of Series & Serials, Jonathan
   Powell.

   Powell had been a producer of high-quality all-film drama serials such
   as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) and its sequel Smiley's People
   (1982), and he very much favoured this form of short-run,
   self-contained filmed serial over longer-running videotaped drama
   series. It was under his aegis, therefore, that the BBC produced some
   of its highest-quality examples of this type of drama, of particular
   note being 1985's Edge of Darkness by Troy Kennedy Martin, and the
   following year's Dennis Potter piece The Singing Detective, both
   regarded as seminal BBC drama productions. "A gripping, innovative
   six-part drama which fully deserves its cult status and many awards,"^
   was the British Film Institute's verdict on Edge of Darkness in 2000.

   Powell also oversaw the rise of more populist continuing drama series,
   however, encouraged by the ratings-chasing strategy of the then
   Controller of BBC One, his friend Michael Grade. It was during Powell's
   tenure that the BBC launched the twice-weekly soap opera EastEnders
   (1985–present) and the medical drama Casualty (1986–present), both of
   which remain lynchpins of the BBC One schedule to this day and the
   highest-rated drama productions on BBC television. Indeed, EastEnders
   achieved phenomenal success in its early years, its Christmas Day 1986
   episode earning a massive 30.15 million viewers, the highest British
   television audience of the 1980s^ .Aside from these continuing dramas,
   based in one major location and shot entirely on videotape and thus
   comparatively cheap to make, longer runs of drama series became rare,
   with short series of six or eight episodes becoming the norm.

   The single play, in its original studio-based form, also began to
   disappear from the schedules, with the final series of Play for Today
   airing in 1984. The BBC was envious of the success of its rival Channel
   4's newly formed film arm, which had seen made-for-television one-offs
   such as Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette gain cinematic releases
   to considerable success. New strands such as Screen One and Screen Two
   concentrated on short runs of all-film, cinematic-style one-off dramas,
   with the most successful of these being Anthony Minghella's Truly,
   Madly, Deeply (Screen One, 1990) which became a successful film
   released to cinemas. The Plays department eventually disappeared
   altogether, being replaced latterly with a 'Head of Film & Single
   Drama' position with autonomous powers for investing in feature film
   production, co-commissioning television one-offs with the Head of
   Drama. This interest in film production is perhaps best demonstrated by
   the fact that both of Powell's successors as Head of Drama, Mark Shivas
   (1988–93) and Charles Denton (1993–96), went on to work in the film
   industry after leaving the position.

   Another major change to BBC production methods in all areas, but
   particularly affecting drama, occurred in 1990 with the passing of the
   new Broadcasting Act, which amongst other things obliged the BBC to
   commission 25% of its output from independent production companies.
   Many BBC drama productions were subsequently outsourced to and
   commissioned from independent companies, although the BBC's in-house
   production arm continued to contribute heavily, with the separate Drama
   Series and Serials departments remaining intact. Production arms such
   as costumes, make-up and special effects were all closed by the early
   21st century, however, with these services now being bought in from
   outside even for in-house programmes.

   Jonathan Powell's attempt to repeat the success of EastEnders in 1992,
   when he had become Controller of BBC One, led to one of the BBC's most
   notorious and costly failures. Eldorado was set in the British
   expatriate community in Spain, created by the same team of Julia Smith
   and Tony Holland who had come up with EastEnders. The costly soap
   opera, hugely maligned by critics and the victim of a viewer backlash
   against the massive advertising campaign the BBC had undertaken to
   promote it, was scrapped by Powell's successor Alan Yentob after less
   than a year's run, under pressure from the Director-General of the BBC
   John Birt.

   The 1990s saw a rise in the popularity of costume drama adaptations of
   literary classics, mostly adapted by the acclaimed screenwriter Andrew
   Davies. One of the most successful of these was a 1995 adaptation of
   Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer
   Ehle. Contemporary social drama, a BBC signature style since the 1960s,
   remained in the form of landmark productions such as Our Friends in the
   North (1996), but it was notable that this was transmitted on the more
   niche BBC Two channel rather than the mainstream BBC One as might well
   have been the case in previous decades.

   There was criticism of the department's commissioning process in some
   quarters, which was seen as being overly intricate and bureaucratic. As
   The Independent described: "Lengthy agonising over whether the BBC1
   saga Seaforth would be given a second series (eventually, it wasn't)
   further encouraged the view that the BBC's management floor is full of
   desks where the buck does not so much stop as hang around for a few
   months." ↑  Further problems emerged for the drama department after the
   departure of Charles Denton as its Head in May 1996. He was briefly
   replaced on a temporary basis by Ruth Caleb, the Head of Drama at BBC
   Wales. However, Caleb had no interest in taking the job on a permanent
   basis, and after a six-month attachment left the post at the end of the
   year. With no suitable candidate to take the job on a full-time basis
   having been found, Director of Television Alan Yentob was forced to
   oversee the department, again on a temporary basis.

   There was much criticism in the press over the inability of the BBC to
   find a full-time Head of Drama, with even the BBC Chairman Sir
   Christopher Bland criticising the amount of time it was taking to find
   a new Head of Department, stating publicly that: "There aren't a lot of
   people who are pre-eminently qualified and able to do the biggest job
   in drama. That's the difficulty." ↑ . Experienced BBC Drama staff such
   as Michael Wearing (Head of Serials) were leaving the department, which
   was seen to be in trouble after the failure of hugely expensive
   productions such as the historical drama Rhodes in 1996. "Many in the
   drama business, and not just BBC insiders, are worried about the
   hand-over of creative say to the controllers, low morale and the lack
   of a head," ↑  The Guardian reported in December 1996. Finally in June
   1997 Colin Adams was appointed as the new Head of Drama. Adams was a
   surprising choice, his previous role at the Corporation having been as
   Head of Northern Broadcasting. However, he was essentially an
   administrator and seen by Drama staff as a temporary appointment.

   In 1997 the BBC approached Mal Young, best known for producing
   Liverpool-set Channel 4 soap Brookside, to head up the Drama Series
   section of the in-house Drama Department, which had become something of
   a poisoned chalice with many Controllers departing in quick succession.
   As Controller of Continuing Drama Series, Young oversaw the move to
   volume production and also commissioned a new medical Series, Holby
   City. By the time Young left the BBC to join 19 Television Limited as
   head of Drama in December 2004, the BBC had increased Series production
   to nearly 300 hours per annum, including EastEnders at four times a
   week, Holby City x 52 episodes, Casualty x 48 episodes. Volume Series
   production was a controversial move because it took a large part of the
   Drama budget away from original production and contributed to
   accusations of "dumbing down" its programming. "The decision to show
   EastEnders four nights a week, followed by Holby City has left the
   corporation open to accusations that the BBC1 schedule has been cleared
   for a diet of 'precinct pulp',"^ reported The Guardian in 2003.

The modern era

   As of September 2006, the current Commissioner of Drama at the BBC is
   Julie Gardner. She reports directly to Jane Tranter, who held the role
   from 2000–06 and was then promoted to the newly-established Head of
   Fiction position. Working with Gardner are: Head of Series & Serials
   Kate Harwood and Controller of Continuing (i.e. year-round) Drama
   Series John Yorke (who also acts as Head of Drama for the BBC's
   in-house production arm), with David Thompson of Film & Single Drama
   overseeing one-offs. Sarah Brandist and Polly Hill are the
   commissioning editors for independently-produced drama programming.
   Gardner is also Head of Drama for BBC Wales, with Patrick Spence Head
   of Drama for BBC Northern Ireland and Anne Mensah Head of Drama for BBC
   Scotland.

   Tranter's era from 2000–06 saw a return to longer-run episode series,
   with programmes such as Spooks being given longer second runs following
   successful debut seasons. Recent years have also seen a huge increase
   in continuing drama output, with EastEnders gaining a fourth weekly
   episode to add to the third added during the mid-1990s, and Casualty
   and its spin-off series Holby City (1999–present) turning from regular
   seasonal shows to year-round soap opera-style productions. These moves
   have been criticised in some quarters for filling the market with
   insubstantial populist dramas at the expense of 'quality' prestige
   pieces, although there have been several notable drama serial
   successes, such as Paul Abbott's State of Play (2003) and the
   historical drama Charles II: The Power and The Passion ( BBC Northern
   Ireland - 2004).

   Another move of recent years has been the regionalisation of BBC drama,
   in response to criticisms that the majority of programmes were made and
   set in and around London and the surrounding areas, with the BBC's
   central drama department currently being based at Television Centre in
   West London. As far back at 1962, the makers of Z-Cars had deliberately
   set their programme near Liverpool in the North of England to break
   away from the perceived London bias, and in 1976 an English Regions
   Drama Department had been established at BBC Birmingham with a remit
   for making 'regional drama', gaining a major success with Alan
   Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982. In the modern era,
   however, the separate BBC branches in Scotland, Wales and Northern
   Ireland all have their own drama departments with Heads of Drama who
   have autonomous commissioning powers, both for in-house production and
   co-production with or commissioning from independents.

   Although some of these shows are purely for regional consumption, such
   as BBC Scotland's River City and BBC Wales' Belonging, many programmes
   networked nationally on BBC One and Two are made in 'the nations', with
   perhaps the highest profile being the current BBC Wales revival of
   Doctor Who. The larger English regions also produce drama productions
   of their own, with BBC Birmingham providing the detective drama Dalziel
   and Pascoe, daytime soap opera Doctors and anthology series The
   Afternoon Play for national consumption, for example.

   From 1999 until 2006, the BBC also had a new in-house drama division,
   BBC Fictionlab, which specialised in producing dramas for the
   corporation's digital stations, particularly BBC Four. Notable
   Fictionlab productions for BBC Four included The Alan Clark Diaries
   (2003), a live re-make of The Quatermass Experiment (2005) and the
   biopic Kenneth Tynan - In Praise of Hardcore (2005). Several of these
   have later seen analogue transmission on BBC Two. However, in January
   2006 the BBC announced that Fictionlab was to be dispanded, as the
   digital channels now well established and no longer needed a
   specialised drama production unit.

Children's drama

   The BBC has established a strong reputation in the field of children's
   drama, although children's dramas are almost universally commissioned
   and / or produced by the BBC's Children's Department rather than the
   Drama Department itself. There are however occasional crossovers -
   Doctor Who, for example, would commonly be regarded as a children's or
   family programme, but has always been produced by the main Drama
   Department.

   Throughout much of the department's history, the epmhasis has been on
   continuing productions of short-run drama serials, including
   adaptations of classic children's literature such as Little Lord
   Fauntleroy, as well as made-for-television prductions. Science-fiction
   has been a popular theme, from Stranger from Space (1951-52) through to
   the likes of Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). Since the
   middle of the 1980s, children's dramas - with the exception of the
   Sunday evening 'classics' slot - have almost always been screened in
   the weekday BBC One 3pm-5.30pm Children's BBC (CBBC) strand.

   Longer continuing drama series became common from the late 1970s,
   spearheaded by the 1978 launch of the popular school-set drama series
   Grange Hill. Created by Liverpudlian dramatist Phil Redmond, the
   intention of the programme was to present issues relevant to children
   in a realistic manner, showing characters in a modern Comprehensive
   school and concentrating on the issues facing children in such schools.
   The series was a huge success, and in 1989 a similar programme, Byker
   Grove, set in a youth club, was launched by the BBC's North-Eastern arm
   and screened on Children's BBC.

   From the 1990s onwards, in common with BBC programming in other genres,
   children's drama has often been commissioned from independent producers
   as well as being made in-house. Grange Hill switched to independent
   production after twenty-five years as an in-house programme in 2003,
   when production was taken over by Mersey Television, the company
   established by the programme's creator Phil Redmond in the early 1980s.
   Co-productions with foreign broadcasters are also common, with BBC
   Scotland's successful 2004 fantasy drama Shoebox Zoo being made in
   collaboration with the Canadian company Blueprint Entertainment ^.

   As of 2005, the BBC continues to broadcast children's drama, usually in
   the weekday afternoon CBBC slot, but also occasional Sunday early
   evening / late afternoon prestige productions such as the adaptation of
   Kidnapped (April 2005). As of July 2005, the Head of Children's Drama
   is Jon East.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_television_drama"
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