(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

The first gay TV drama, rediscovered?

It's an ITV television play, set in the South of the US, immediately before the Civil War. It's said to hold up well to a modern audience, though there is no word on whether the accents would cause American viewers to wince...

Comments

[kindkit]

Oh, wow. *hopes it shows up online before too long* That's amazing. Thanks for the link!

[tree_and_leaf]

I thought it would be relevant to your interests! As well as other people on the flist, of course.

And yes, I hope you're able to get access to it soon.

[cloudsinvenice]

That's amazing! I would never have thought a TV company would be bold enough to present something tackling those themes at that time. Thank goodness they've rediscovered it (and you never know what else may turn up)...

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, I was stunned too. Particularly as ITV was (and is) the commercial channel and dependent on advertising revenues.

[sir_guinglain]

Having a monopoly (or near-monopoly in some areas where signals overlapped) of television advertising revenue made a great difference to the early years of ITV...

[tree_and_leaf]

Good point.

[legionseagle]

Also, it's Granada. One of the things about Granada which people don't remember and should is just how much ground-breaking stuff they did - there are lots of things that people remember as "classic BBC series" which are, in fact, Granada: Brideshead Revisted, The Jewel in the Crown and the documentary Seven-UP. And this is the founder's vision:

I think that what Manchester sees today, London will see eventually.
—Sidney Bernstein on his hopes that Granada will eventually prove itself as a key player in British broadcasting in the 1950s.

[sir_guinglain]

Though in the late 1950s and early and mid-1960s Granada had competition in the ground-breaking stakes from ABC, whose single plays have received much more attention from television historians than any other ITV company's. Granada were somewhat hobbled until 1968 because they were only a weekday company and didn't have access to the prestigious and lucrative weekend slots. I hope that attention to South leads to Granada's early dramatic output being reevaluated and more titles discovered and indeed released on DVD, as much of ABC's Armchair Theatre has been.

[queen_ypolita]

As the article says, it's showing at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the moment, and will be added to the things you can watch at BFI mediatheques—I saw it at the festival yesterday afternoon, and it was definitely worth seeing.

Accents will probably make people wince; I don't have a very good ear for accents but it seemed to me there seemed to be a bit of a variable effort going on with that.