Oldal 71 [71]
JONATHAN BIGNELL
BBC had been led by its paternalistic and moralistic first Director General,
Lord Reith. Ihe Ihird Programme was envisaged as an elite service which
sought to fight against popularization, Americanization and mass culture
and to expand the audience for high literary and musical culture in its English
and (mainly West) European forms. However, the Third Programmes
listenership never reached the 10 percent share of the national audience that
was originally intended.
TELEVISION: ROOM FOR PINTER
Pinter’s first television play was a version of The Birthday Party made by
Associated-Rediffusion, a commercial television company that broadcast
to the London region and contributed to the ITV (Independent Television)
channel. ITV was a national network with different companies based in
regional areas of the country. These franchise holders supplied programs
for their own local audiences and also competed to place programs on the
national ITV schedule. While BBC had been broadcasting television since
1936 (interrupted by war from 1939-45), the ITV channel was launched
only in 1955, but rapidly became popular for its entertainment programs.
However, its remit to produce a full spectrum of genres including original
and adapted drama was very similar to BBC’s, and the wealthier companies
holding regional franchises (like Associated-Rediffusion [A-R], ABC and
Granada) were keen to demonstrate their cultural credentials by making
prestige drama. A-R’s producer Peter Willes read The Birthday Party and
invited Pinter to meet him, greeting him with the words: “How dare you?”
When Pinter looked puzzled by this remark, Willes explained: “I’ve read
your bloody play and I haven’t had a wink of sleep for four nights.”** A-R
commissioned a television version of The Birthday Party and assigned the
highly skilled director Joan Kemp-Welch to the task. She was a former actress
and one of the few women directors working in British television, and she
made a great success of the play. It was broadcast on the national ITV network
on 22 March 1960, from 9.35-11.05 pm, in the regular series Play of the Week,
when it was watched by an audience of 11 million.”
Both ITV and BBC could draw on a pool of star performers from stage
productions, usually in London, for plays that had gained significant public
profile through featuring in upmarket broadsheet newspapers and in radio
and television arts broadcasting. Stage productions of the plays were seen
only by a tiny sector of the British population, but broadcasts — on the BBC’s
23° Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy, London, Chatto & Windus, 1957, 238-241.
24 Ellis: The Birthday Party, 4.
25 Billington: Harold Pinter, 110.
+ 70 +