“TV was everything to me,” said British playwright James Graham at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival’s MacTaggart lecture on August 20. The dramatist used his recollections of the television he watched in his youth together with tales of his working-class background to discuss a possible future of TV – including the launch of a new scheme to get more people like him into the industry.
The James MacTaggart memorial lecture has been the centrepiece of the Edinburgh TV Festival since 1977. It is named after the Scottish writer, producer and director who died in 1974 after a career making groundbreaking TV such as Play for Today and Z Cars, an early British police drama.
The first lecture was given by John McGrath, founder of the radical Scottish theatre company 7:84. Since then the people chosen to deliver it have been a mixed bunch. When I was attending regularly, it was the domain of the industry big hitters – I remember the sense of icy dread as James Murdoch took to the stage. As Ken Loach memorably quipped to the Guardian: “The people giving the lecture are the authority that MacTaggart would have cut off at the knees.”
