(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

[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.