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‘Cathy Come Home’ and ‘Accuracy’ in British Television Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Derek Paget
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Abstract

When, back in 1971, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6, 1972) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner, Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966). As this article bears witness, the debate still rages, and here its leading historian, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – explores some of the ways in which myth has contributed as much as analysis to the argument. He goes back to contemporary documentation to explore the nature of the BBC's own sometimes timorous attitude to the creature it had spawned, its context within the developing aesthetics and technology of television drama, the reactions of politicians and local government agencies – and the way in which repeat transmissions were (and were not) hedged about with paranoia.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 1999 , pp. 75 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes and References

1. Bakewell, Joan and Garnham, Nicholas, The Nezv Priesthood: British Television Today (London: Allen Lane, 1970), p. 78Google Scholar.

2. Worsley, T. C., ‘Life on the Wing’, Financial Times, 8 03 1967Google Scholar; Ansorge, Peter, From Liverpool to Los Angeles: on Writing for Theatre, Film, and Television (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 97Google Scholar.

3. Roots, of course, has had more problems than Cathy Come Home. A huge success in its time, it became the subject of a plagiarism law suit in 1978, and Alex Haley has been accused of over-reliance on oral testimony by academic genealogists. See Sawyers, Pascoe, ‘Black and White’, The Guardian, 13 09 1997Google Scholar. See also Note 31 on the British academic debate about documentary drama.

4. Tulloch, John notes the propensity of television forms to function publicly ‘like ancient oral myth’; see Television Drama: Agency, Audience, and Myth (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 64Google Scholar. Plantinga, Carl R. develops his idea of ‘assertive analogy’ in Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 22Google Scholar. Like Tulloch, he also writes of the ‘bardic function’ of modern society's technological forms of representation (p. 191).

5. Interviews with Jeremy Sandford, 24 November 1995 and 28 September 1998.

6. In the text of Cathy Come Home (London: Marion Boyars, 1976), ‘Act 1’ is p. 21–49; ‘Act 2’, p. 49–93; ‘Act 3’, p. 94–139. These three ‘acts’ meant that when the film was shown on Channel 4 in 1993, advertising breaks were simple to place.

7. Interestingly, the director Ted Kotcheff called Sandford ‘our contemporary Mayhew’ in a piece written in May 1978 and originally intended for the published text of Edna, the Inebriate Woman.

25. Petley, op. cit., p. 39. Other co-signatories of the letter were Jim Allen, Roy Battersby, Give Goodwin, James MacTaggart, Roger Smith, and Kenith Trodd.

26. Phone conversation of 12 June 1998, in which Garnett commented on an early draft of this paper.

27. Peter Watkins, ‘The Future of Television’, lecture at University of Bristol, 15 February 1996.

28. See Rosenthal, Alan, The New Documentary in Action: a Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1971), p. 174Google Scholar.

29. Interview, 7 November 1996. One requisition slip at Caversham shows that Loach used the 16 mm sound synch Eclair film camera which had been the founding hardware for US ‘direct cinema’ in the early 1960s. Another requisition is for the tape recorder used subsequently by Sandford for ‘wildtrack’.

30. John McGrath spoke at the conference, ‘On the Boundary: Turning Points in TV Drama 1965–2000’, at the University of Reading, 4 April 1998. The Sandford quotation comes from his Worcester lecture (see Note 22).

31. The articles in Theatre Quarterly were: Roger Hudson, ‘Television in Britain: Description and Dissent’, II, No. 6 (1972), p. 18–25; Paul Ableman, ‘Edna and Sheila: Two Kinds of Truth’, II, No. 7 (1972), p. 45–8; and Jeremy Sandford, ‘Edna and Cathy: Just Huge Commercials’, III, No. 10 (1973), p. 79–85. For the debate about ‘progressive drama’ and documentary forms, see Andrew Goodwin and Kerr, Paul, BFI Dossier 19: Drama-Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 1983)Google Scholar. See also John Caughie's seminal article ‘Progressive Tele-vision and Documentary Drama’, Screen, XXI, No. 3, p. 9–33. For further discussion, see my No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1998).

32. Ableman, op. cit., p. 45, 47; Sandford, 1973, op. cit., p. 80.

33. Irene Shubik produced nearly 50 plays for ‘The Wednesday Play’ and ‘Play for Today’. She later originated both Rumpole of the Bailey and Jewel in the Crown.

34. See p. 30, 37, 64, 76–80, 89, 99, 106, 124–38 (this is Chapter 10, actually about Edna, the Inebriate Woman), 140, 180.

35. On the provenance of this methodology, see Swinson, Arthur, Writing for Television (London: Black, 1955)Google Scholar; and Doncaster, Caryl, ‘The Story Documentary’, in Rotha, Paul ed., Television in the Making (London: Focal Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

36. Like most producers, she was never a BBC staff member, but worked on short-term contracts. Tony Garnett recalled that his first BBC contract was for nine months (phone conversation, 12 June 1998).

37. Banham, op. cit., p. 202.

38. In a phone conversation of 11 June 1998, she maintained that her intention had been to celebrate difference rather than to denigrate.

39. In a letter, undated but received the day after our phone conversation of 11 June 1998.

40. Interview, 28 September 1998.

41. Swallow, Norman, ‘Television: the Integrity of Fact and Fiction’. This originally appeared in Sight and Sound, XL, No.3 (Summer 1976)Google Scholar, but his argument was re-circulated in Goodwin and Kerr, op. cit., p. 57–61; Banham, op. cit., p. 194–216; Paget, Derek, True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen, and Stage (Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 91–6Google Scholar; Corner, John, The Art of Record: a Critical Introduction to Documentary (Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 90–107Google Scholar; Julian Petley, op. cit., p. 30–2.

42. See Banham, op. cit., p. 197; Paget, op. cit., p. 96.

43. , Christie's first starring role, in Billy Liar, was in 1963Google Scholar.

44. Letter, 7 June 1994.

45. Corner, op. cit., p. 106; Petley, op. cit., p. 30. John Corner tells me he has revised his use of Shubik in the reprinted Art of Record.

46. Interview, 7 November 1996. Garnett acknowledges one alteration to the original film, the result of a missing release form. The scene in which Cathy is rebuffed by prospective landladies had one cut made (see text, p. 63–4). Such problems were not unusual when television was adapting to what were essentially ‘direct cinema’ film techniques. Irene Shubik told me that some-thing similar happened on Edna the Inebriate Woman.

47. Lane, Stewart, Morning Star, 14 01 1967Google Scholar.

48. Rosenthal, Alan, The Documentary Conscience: a Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley; London, 1980), p. 161Google Scholar.

49. See Mays, Zibba, The Guardian, 2 03 1972. Sandford's letter was published on 10 May 1972Google Scholar.

50. Sandford, op. cit., p. 17.

51. In those days, Times reviews were anonymously written by ‘Our Television Critic’, but the reviewer was Robert Wright Cooper (1904–92) who took the role for the final period (1966–69) of his 45 years as a Times journalist. Irene Shubik said to me: ‘I'm absolutely certain that was said in a number of papers’, but I can find no other evidence. She used press cuttings and other material in BBC files when writing her book and I have checked these at Caversham. I have also looked more widely, at Colindale Newspaper Library and in her files at the BFI. These files, donated in 1985, consist of 39 box files of which only three relate to the arguments of this article (Boxes 3, 30, and 37 – on Sandford's plays, her book, and general press cuttings).

52. See ‘Cathy's Message Still Comes Home’, Evening Standard, 12 August 1976.