Michael Billington on TV plays

I like plays. I've spent my life reviewing them, reading them and even, on one or two occasions, directing them. But my belief that there are millions of people like me is clearly not shared by TV companies. Drama, for them, means soaps, serials or the odd prestige film. Nothing wrong with those; but the appetite for the single play has in recent years gone largely unsatisfied. Now, judging by a couple of conversations I've had in the past week, change is in the air. Sandi Toksvig tells me that she intends to produce a second season of live dramas on Sky Arts; this time, however, the plays will be longer (45 minutes instead of 30). Soon after, I had coffee with Marla Rubin, a go-ahead producer who told me she is in active talks with the BBC about a projected season of plays drawn from the world of off-West End theatre. All this is good news, but it still leaves gaps in the market. I count myself lucky to be part of a generation that saw the great stage classics on television. Astonishing, also, to think how widely TV once ranged. Researching Bulgakov's The White Guard this week, I discovered that it was shown on BBC TV in 1960. To those who argue that tastes have changed and we no longer want to see studio-bound versions of stage classics, I'd argue that it's perfectly possible to adapt theatre work to TV: the best recent example was Gregory Doran's Tennant-led Hamlet, which brilliantly combined the mirrored intimacy of Elsinore with excursions into windswept graveyards. In short, anything is possible if the will is there. What bugs me is that the great classics, if seen at all, are regarded as one-off Christmas events, and that the best of modern drama goes unseen. It wasn't always so. I first discovered Pinter by seeing The Birthday Party, savagedly kicked into touch by the critics, on ITV. It seems sad that today's audiences don't get a similar chance to see the best of contemporary theatre on the box. Imagine Sarah Kane's Blasted or Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking showing on the mainstream channels. They would, of course, cause ructions. But they would also restore to TV a dramatic excitement it's long since lost.