Reflecting on the impact of the BBC drama series Play for Today, for which he was a producer and director in the late 1970s, Richard Eyre described its weekly broadcast as a “social occasion” that was hard to ignore. “You could resent it, you could look forward to it,” he commented in a book chronicling the series’ early years, “but it had a place in the broad cultural life of the nation.”
In a fragmented landscape transformed by streamers and social media, many modern writers and directors can only dream of that kind of influence for their work. Adolescence, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, was an exception. But the globalising tendencies, and rising costs, of the Netflix age have made it increasingly hard for public service broadcasters to produce original programming with a distinctively British feel and focus. ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office made a £1m loss, and Mark Rylance took a pay cut to ensure that the second series of the BBC’s Wolf Hall actually got made.
