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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 +
