United Kingdom! Radical TV Drama, BFI Southbank

An overview of 40 years of the hardest-hitting drama on British television

by Adam SweetingTuesday, 03 November 2009

Tim Roth as Trevor the skinhead, in David Leland's Made in Britain

Nostalgists often hark back to a “golden age” of TV drama, referring to the likes of ITV’s Brideshead Revisited, or the BBC’s I Claudius or The Forsyte Saga. This week on the South Bank, the BFI launches a season which examines a lost age of a different kind, that of the radical TV dramatists who scorched across British screens from the mid-Sixties, through the Seventies and the Margaret Thatcher era, and finally into the ambiguous world of New Labour.

Radical dramas used to be one-offs, whereas now writers have to think about how they can get social or radical issues into a genre-led format.

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