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“RANDOM DOTTINESS”...
Third Programme on radio, television versions and coverage on late-evening
discussion programs (like BBC’s Late Night Line-Up) as well as fully realized
productions of the plays — massively increased the reach of both Pinter’s and
Beckett’s work. Pinter and Beckett were packaged in 1960 among a group
of experimental dramatists — coming from both the European-influenced
avant-garde and also the emerging discourse of gritty British realism. The
BBC planned to produce Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot, Doris Lessing’s The Truth about Billy Newton, N. F. Simpson’s One
Way Pendulum, and Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen in their upcoming schedule
of drama production that year.” Each of these was a theatre play that would
be adapted for television.
Using theatre authors and adapting theatre texts provided readily available
television material that had already been proven in either subsidized theatre,
London’s West End theatre, or popular touring repertory theatre. This rationale
underlay the television broadcast of both “classics” from the British theatre
canon (by Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, for example)
and also “middlebrow” plays like murder mysteries. It was only later in the
1960s that BBC forged a successful relationship with Pinter for screen versions
of his plays, which appeared in its established drama series such as Theatre
625 or Theatre Night on the minority channel BBC2. Until 1965 it was on
the commercial ITV channel, rather than BBC, that Pinter’s theatre work was
produced. The Television Playhouse series showed Pinter’s The Room, made
by the ITV franchise holder for northern England, Granada, and screened on
5 October 1961. Pinter’s The Collection was another A-R production for ITV,
broadcast on 11 May 1961, and Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter was produced by
Granada and shown on ITV on 10 August 1961. When A-R screened The Lover
on ITV on 28 March 1963, the dramatization won the Prix Italia international
prize for television drama. Pinter’s A Night Out was screened by another ITV
company, ABC, for its Armchair Theatre episode of 24 April 1964. Pinter’s
work became relatively familiar to ITV’s national audience.
The new ITV channel had been immediately successful at drawing
and holding larger shares of the popular audience than BBC, and it was in
entertainment (rather than original authored drama) that ITV had the lead.
ITV captured each of the top ten positions in the audience ratings nearly every
week in the late 1950s and 1960s. One justification for the BBC’s role, and to
some extent an excuse for its poor audience ratings, was that the BBC provided
patronage for drama writers, supplied difficult and experimental dramatic work
for a small but socially powerful niche audience, and protected the national
heritage of theatrical excellence. For ITV to beat BBC, partly though screening
26 Jonathan Bignell: Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays, Manchester, Manchester
University, 2009, 129.
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