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This chapter draws on cognitive approaches within stylistics (and with incidental reference to related work in media research) to further consider the concept of character in relation to television drama in particular. The use of schema theory is particularly noted as one of the ways that existing social knowledge and understanding interacts with textual cues to create meaningful characterizations. British television productions in which social class identities have been important offer an important foundation for the development of this account, which is extended into an examination of characters that are represented as being themselves playful with their own identities.

This chapter tries to portray that the British drama's canon illustrates the stubborn “otherness” of Africa, permitting the repetition of stereotypical, historically incurious representations of Africa by British dramatists—whether conservative or progressive—while still holding Anglophone African writers at arm's length. The chapter scrutinizes three plays: The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot, Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka, and Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill. All these novels re-create a moment in colonial history as per the author's modern point of view.

This chapter discusses some instances of a sustained singularity in British TV drama to reflect upon how traditions may successfully adapt to new circumstances without altogether abandoning cultural heritage. It considers three examples of recent British TV drama which reflect notable strands in British television and develop them for new times—Blackpool, Casanova and State of Play. Though each drama is distinctive, there are some links between them in terms of the personnel involved. The three examples suggest that, despite the pull of global marketing in TV3, British TV drama sustains a distinct identity. None of these would have been made in the USA and, although they are potentially exportable, their production has not been led primarily by transnational commercial imperatives. With the worldwide industry tending towards quality programming, particularly at the ‘high end’ of TV drama, and with the key restraints on the dissolution of British television identity in place, the prospect for the future of drama on television looks reasonably bright.

This chapter provides a profile of the television-series writer and creator Jack Rosenthal, who was born in 1931 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the second son of Sam and Leah. His parents were working class and Jewish, elements of his background that characterised all his work. Rosenthal was delighted to be commissioned in 1961 to write for Coronation Street, a soap opera set in a milieu he knew well. Almost everything for which his writing became famous stems from Coronation Street, including his interest in the underprivileged and the underdog, and their salty, everyday discourse and Englishness. Rosenthal's career paralleled and was integral to a formative period in the history of British television drama and he worked for the independent television company Granada before becoming a freelance writer in 1962. Throughout his career, his writing was characterised by the same kinds of comic verbal trope. Despite his many industry awards and nominations, Rosenthal's archive contains several examples of plays that were never televised or filmed.

This chapter discusses the formation of and the critical response to a canon of British television drama in terms of a conflict between aesthetic modernism and critical realism. It notes that some of the critics' responses to Beckett's work in the 1970s reflected the critical debate of the time over the politics of naturalistic versus avant-garde form. It determines that Beckett's television plays are placed within a complex dialectic of critical discourses around the aesthetics and politics of television drama, and part of this debate is about the address to the television audience. Finally, this chapter tries to link critical work on Beckett's television plays with discursive models of how television audiences were imagined by critics, television institutions and authors.

This chapter examines several of Clarke's productions from the 1980s, exploring how his crucial themes, including the gap between personal narratives and state discourses, repetition and the restriction of movement, are employed in his questioning of Thatcherite values. It covers various productions in the period between Beloved Enemy and Road, specifically his plays on terrorism and Northern Ireland, Psy-Warriors, Contact and Elephant. Throughout the chapter, emphasis is placed on the way Clarke dissected the political climate of the 1980s, particularly the discourses of Thatcherism, to discuss British television drama in the 1980s. It becomes imperative to take some account of how he was engaged in an ongoing dialogue with Thatcherite ideas, meanings and values.

Burlesque drama—arguably the most widespread form of theatrical entertainment in nineteenth-century Britain—brought the Iliad and Aeneid to a wider range of spectators than those who traditionally encountered ancient literature and mythology at school. These entertainments both exploited contemporary performance culture and enacted the tensions between their composite ancient and modern sources. This chapter focuses on four successful examples of epic repackaged for the London stage, by renowned playwrights at leading theatres, who particularly revelled in negotiating the transformation of classical epic into popular drama: Thomas Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! or, The Siege of Troy (1819, Surrey Theatre), Charles Selby’s Judgment of Paris; or, The Pas de Pippins (1856, Adelphi), Francis Cowley Burnand’s Dido (1860, St James’s), and his Paris, or Vive Lemprière! (1866, Strand). Analysis of these burlesques reveals deliberate anachronistic juxtapositions which turned the epic performances into complex games of identifying—or overlooking—their varied references.