Boxed in
William Trevor
Play for Today: the evolution of television drama Irene Shubik (Davis-Poynter £3.75) One Spring afternoon in 1968 I walked out of a restaurant in Charlotte Street with Irene Shubik, the BBC producer. I'd been telling her about a wife who believed her husband was having an affair with the kind of supple young girl who features in the Sunday colour supplements — a creature as fresh and as beautiful as a Martini person. I knew to some extent what I was talking about because I'd already written the short story: the wife has become tedious about her middle-aged status, her childlessness and her sagging flesh, the husband is an inadequate comforter. The wife, waiting for the husband to arrive at a smart London party, has got it into her head that when he does come he's going to be accompanied by the Martini girl, already chalked up as his Mark-Two wife. To everyone's embarrassment she announces this fantasy, adding that here, in public, a marriage is about to come to an end. For her pains she is regarded as more than a little insane. In an upstairs room she engages in a lengthy telephone conversation with her psychiatrist, which doesn't at all help matters.
I had related this nightmare over our kebabs and houmus, sketching in subsidiary characters to the throb of taped Bouzouki music. It would all be very difficult to do, Miss Shubik was saying as we stepped out into the sunlight. She was saying something else — about how impossible it was on television to make a party look like a party — when we were joined in a rather intimate fashion by a third party. This was a tall man who approached us from behind, swinging himself between us as we walked and putting one arm around Miss Shubik's shoulders and the other around mine. I was not introduced to him, which was understandable because his flow of conversation did not permit it. He had just come from an Out Patients' up the street, he said: he was glad to report that he did not have VD. That morning he'd believed he might have VD because of his activities the night before with a policewoman from the Isle of Man. "We're all definitely going to have a drink," he said. "We're going to celebrate this damn thing."
In the back bar of the first public house we came to he showed us a medical card he'd been given in the Out Patients' department. He also rolled up a shirt-sleeve and pointed at the place where a blood sample had been taken. He went into detail about the fun he and the policewoman from the Isle of Man had had. So this is television, I thought as I purchased a Drambuie for Miss Shubik and brandy for her friend: one minute you're quietly relating a story you've written and the next you're being shown a man's arm. I had had two other plays produced by Irene Shubik, but I didn't know her very well. I had never had lunch with her before. What very odd friends she has, I thought.
In fact he was not a tnend of Irene Shubik's, nor was he, as she had thought, a friend of mine. He was just a man in Charlotte Street who'd wanted two people to have a drink with. He has since remained a mystery, and every time I hand Irene Shubik the script of another play I feel I'm letting her down by not giving him a part. But eccentricity, like parties, is hard to do on television.
Miss Shubik's Play for Today does not contain that story, but there is much of a similar nature, such as the chaos that reigned throughout the making of Edna, the Inebriate Woman and early days at ABC with Sydney Newman. I cannot fairly review this book since feature in it myself, playing the part of a gerontocrat. But at least I can report that what it amounts to is a behind-the-scenes account of how television plays reach the screen, with dates, viewing figures, directors' hang-ups, nail-biting, stomach-heaving and all the rest of it. And since television drama appears to be here to stay, none of it is irrelevant.
In my own view the television play as such — belonging to and existing only for the medium — hasn't yet arrived, in the way that the radio play at its best has. You tune in for coal-face drama with revolutionary overtones or a snairsLpace day. in the life of this black boy in love with this = white girl, or an hour of camera-play and kisses down on the canal-bank, or total bewilderment as assorted intellectuals dine in Hampstead. You avoid cliches if you watch the plays of Dennis Potter, Rhys Adrian, Douglas Livingstone, Tony Parker, Peter Terson, Peter Nichols, John Bowen, and a handful of others. You wish — or at least I do — that more television plays were funny, like Michael Frayn's, or that occasionally a good thriller appeared (The Hanged Man would have made a sensible seventy-five minutes; strunc, out over so many dreary weeks, it was absurd).
But if the indigenous form of television drama isn't yet apparent, its writers are. Potter, Adrian, Livingstone and Terson are part of the medium. They are pure television writers (I'm impure myself because I take my plays from my short stories) who have the knack of making cameras, directors, producers, actors and technicians seem malleable in the hand that holds the script. It is from them, and those who follow them in the future, that the shape of television drama will eventually emerge — as precise, as disciplined and as structured as the classic short story or the Victorian novel. Potter once said that he raeferred the idea of people eating oranges while they watched his plays to the reverential hush of the theatre. That is a starting point, but it is also a problem. It's far less easy than it seems to produce drama for six million orange-eaters who glance now at the screen and now at the juice that's dripping on to the carpet, who at the drop of a whim can reach out a sticky finger and turn the whole thing off. The audience is the least trapped there has ever been, and it isn't a solution to employ Messrs Sex and Violence, or otherwise to shock, bludgeon and offend in order to grab any attention that's going. For the television dramatist the telephone will always ring to destroy his purple passages, the oranges will always drip. The biggest audience in the world has him by the throat, and it's part of his craft to be aware of it.
William Trevor, the novelist arid playwright, has most recently written Elizabeth Alone
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