Television companies keep a “vault” of shows that were never broadcast due to censorship or concerns about quality. Perhaps the BBC’s archive will now include the pre-production papers for last weekend’s Match of the Day shows, which would have been prepared before Gary Lineker was taken off air and his colleagues refused to appear.
Those shows don’t strictly belong in a history of unseen TV as they did go out, more or less (mainly less). The nearest equivalent is the live MotD from 1977 in which the great commentator John Motson, who died last month, got his big chance – a debut FA Cup Final commentary – because David Coleman, the Lineker of his day, had been taken off air in a dispute with BBC Sport over his contract.
Some of the most controversial TV shows in history were actually transmitted unaltered. Real Lives (BBC One, 1985), a documentary about Northern Irish rivals Gregory Campbell and Martin McGuinness, was delayed but shown intact after a BBC staff protest. In 1988, ITV’s Death on the Rock overcame attempts at suppression by the Thatcher government to suggest that three IRA members who were shot by the SAS during a Gibraltar mission had been unlawfully killed.
But though the shows went out, so did the producers. Alasdair Milne, the BBC director general, was forced out in 1987 by the Tory-appointed chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, due to board concerns including the Real Lives documentary. Thames Television, the company behind Death on the Rock, lost its ITV licence in October 1991, in a bidding process constructed by the Thatcher government.
Here is a timeline of shows that were dumped or significantly disrupted.
Shows that went on (sort of)
Match of the Day/Match of the Day 2 (BBC One/Two, 2023)
This weekend’s Match of the Days – much shortened and shorn of the theme tune, commentary, presenter and pundits – have been described as unprecedented. They were certainly striking, but actually sit in a long line of schedule disruption caused by industrial action (of which the walk-out in support of Lineker is the latest example). During previous union disputes, a retired newsreader hosted Breakfast News for one day, while BBC managers falteringly operated cameras. This is never a good look and usually leads to swift restoration of normal broadcasting, as it has in the Lineker case.
Sunday Grandstand (BBC Two, 1997)
Hosted by Sue Barker, the Sunday edition of the magazine sports show was scheduled to start at noon on 31 August 1997 on BBC Two, including live action from the deciding round of the cricket Sunday League. But following the death of Princess Diana, the BBC screened the same live news service on both its TV channels, judging that any other coverage would be inappropriate. At lunchtime, as viewers realised they were being denied Jonathan Agnew and Geoffrey Boycott reporting on Lancashire v Yorkshire and Kent v Hampshire, copious calls and emails to the BBC led them – neither for the first nor last time overestimating interest in a royal story – to rapidly reinstate sport from 3pm, although Barker was warned to be “solemn and respectful”. It is not yet clear if the make-do MotDs have replaced this as the most complained about BBC sports scheduling.
Yesterday’s Men (BBC One, 1971)
On his last day in Number 10, after losing the 1970 election to Edward Heath’s Conservatives, the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, gave an interview to David Dimbleby, then a 32-year-old BBC reporter. Dimbleby had the idea for a documentary about the sudden loss of political power. But Wilson was not told the provocative title, Yesterday’s Men, or that his finances and property purchases would be explored. After the film was previewed, the Labour leader threatened a legal injunction. The BBC eventually showed the film, though it omitted a section in which Dimbleby asked about the money received for his memoirs and the politician demanded that the cameras be stopped. The incident caused long-term problems for the corporation because Wilson turned out to be tomorrow’s man, becoming PM again in 1974.
TV Eye: A Bitter Harvest (ITV, 1984)
At a time of especially intense rivalry between the BBC and ITV, both current affairs operations urgently worked on stories about the devastating Ethiopian famine. Peter Gill, a film-maker with expertise in international development, made a documentary that was meant to go out ahead of an equivalent BBC film. When an ITV technicians’ strike halted work, unions refused to make an exception even for such subject matter. Eventually, unpaid volunteers were allowed to edit an emergency version, but transmission slipped. The BBC’s film, by Michael Buerk, alerted the world to the crisis, which led to mass charity efforts including Live Aid.
Shows that didn’t go on
The War Game (1965, BBC)
On the first Thursday in September 1965, the BBC director general, Hugh Greene, and chairman, Lord Normanbrook, sat together to watch a drama-documentary about the imagined aftermath of a nuclear attack, made by a 29-year-old production assistant called Peter Watkins. It was highly unusual for the corporation’s top two to preview shows, but they had followed the project from outline stage, given its potential to appal with images of people’s eyeballs melting in an incinerated Britain. Normanbrook, a former cabinet secretary, was officially politically neutral, but behaved, the official history of the BBC notes, “like a government official”, organising a screening for the Home Office and Ministry of Defence, after which the BBC board banned the film. Though it was given limited cinematic screenings from 1966, The War Game was not shown by the BBC until 1985. There is a popular narrative that editorial interference in the BBC is essentially Tory, but that is partly because Conservative governments are more common; it was under the Labour administration of Wilson that The War Game was banned.
Brimstone and Treacle (BBC, 1976)
In the late 70s, several of BBC One’s Play for Today dramas were dumped due to “sex and violence” (or both), the taboos popularised by morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle – in which a stranger who may be Satan rapes a tetraplegic young woman and appears to improve her condition – was written, filmed and scheduled for 6 April 1976. But a worried manager “referred upwards” and Alasdair Milne, then director of programmes (television), who found the play “repugnant”, banned it. After private screenings, both the Guardian and Daily Telegraph acclaimed the play as a complex fable about faith and evil, but the BBC would not resile, and Brimstone and Treacle was not screened until 1987. A film adaptation starring Sting was released in 1982.
Scum (BBC, 1977)
The Brimstone and Treacle debacle encouraged an “early warning synopsis system”, in which bosses were advised of contentious content. It next led Milne to bin Scum, a play about the brutal borstal system for young offenders, with David Threlfall, Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels in early roles. Scum wasn’t screened by the BBC until 1991, although its writer, Roy Minton, and director, Alan Clarke, remade it as a movie in 1979.
Solid Geometry (BBC, 1979)
A triple bill of deletions was completed by the “halting of production” on Solid Geometry, Ian McEwan’s adaptation of his short story featuring nude sex scenes and a man whose great-grandfather bought at auction a prodigious penis preserved in formaldehyde. The producer, W Stephen Gilbert, was sacked for speaking to the press, then reinstated but demoted. As McEwan wrote in a preface to the published text, Gilbert “ascended to headlines as TV SEX BOSS (ON CARPET). I sped in taxis to urgent conferences.” These three cancellations occurred under the Labour government of James Callaghan. But it is clear that the killed scripts of this era reflect an apprehension about the impending premiership of Margaret Thatcher, whose first term began two months after Solid Geometry’s cancellation. The legend is that a BBC manager yelled: “Margaret Thatcher is about to become prime minister and you’re trying to make a play with a fucking 12-inch pickled penis in a bottle!”
Sin on Saturday (1982, BBC One)
Bernard Falk, a perky reporter, sold himself as the host of a “summer replacement” late-Saturday-night studio show, in which one of the seven deadly sins would be discussed each week by studio guests, with an eighth edition debating the modern concept of transgression. Songs and sketches about temptation featured a young comedian called Robbie Coltrane. Editions on lust, covetousness and envy notably failed to rouse those feelings in viewers or reviewers, who saw the show as vulgar and cheap, and, after pushing back envy as close to closedown as possible, the BBC – where Milne was now director general – pulled the plug on gluttony, ending the series five shows short.
Secret Society: The Secret Constitution (BBC One, 1986)
The government was alarmed to discover that a BBC Scotland series made by the reporter Duncan Campbell included details of a secret satellite surveillance project called Zircon. Thatcher ordered a police raid on BBC Scotland to seize the films. After the dispute contributed to Milne’s removal, the BBC eventually screened the Zircon film in 1988, but an episode about cabinet committees – called The Secret Constitution – remains in a deep BBC vault, 36 years after it was made.
Hardwicke House (ITV, 1987)
This seven-part sitcom was set in a comprehensive school with a paedophile deputy head and a pupil who was a serial killer. Two episodes ran in February 1987, but viewer, media and political fury about such strong content in a comedy made this another victim of the Thatcherite culture wars. The final five episodes have never been shown.
Gerry Adams (BBC, 1988-94)
In an attempt to switch off what Thatcher called the “oxygen of publicity”, the British government banned from being broadcast the voices of allegedly pro-terrorist nationalist leaders in Northern Ireland. The BBC got round this by using actors to dub the words of Gerry Adams and others, bringing a usefully lucrative income stream for soundalike actors including Stephen Rea.
Shows that went on … digitally
Viewpoint (ITV Hub, 2021)
Starring Noel Clarke as a surveillance detective, this five-parter was scheduled to fill ITV primetime from Monday to Friday, starting on 26 April 2021. But after the Guardian reported multiple allegations of sexual assault and intimidation against Clarke (which he denied), ITV pulled the fifth episode from the schedules, although made it available on the catch-up service ITV Hub – a pioneering use of having your censorship and cheating it.
David Attenborough documentary (BBC iPlayer, 2023)
Another use of this “split screen” approach will see Sir David Attenborough’s five-part series Wild Isles supplemented by a documentary about “re-wilding” that will only be available on iPlayer. Some BBC staff have suggested that a “sixth episode” was censored in case it upset rightwing anti-ecologists in government and elsewhere. But the film would irritate them just as much digitally, and the paper trail seems to show that the documentary was made separately and bought by the BBC as extra content for iPlayer, driving audiences there in line with its digital-first policy.
• This article was amended on 14 March 2023. The caption of an image embedded in the story said it was Dennis Potter with Sting, “who co-starred in Brimstone and Treacle, in 1976”. Sting was not in the pulled television drama, but starred in the film version, released in 1982. The BBC documentary Real Lives was about Martin McGuinness and Gregory Campbell, not Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams as an earlier version said.
