The welcome return of Play for Today

When Channel 5 first launched, back in 1997, its informal remit was, notoriously, “films, football and f**king”. Since then, it has travelled upmarket to become perhaps the nation’s premier purveyor of historical and true-life documentaries, broadcasting the kind of shows and topics that would once have been the natural purview of BBC and Channel 4, but which have largely vanished from those channels due to changing tastes. Now, it has boldly announced that it will go a step further than nonfiction programming with what amounts to a full-scale revival of the Play for Today drama slot, which will return to our screens from next year onwards.

Admittedly, the announcement did not say outright that this was a new Play for Today series, which ran on BBC One from 1970 until 1984. Instead, Channel 5 are calling the new strand “Drama of the Week”. They suggest that it will be an opportunity for emerging talent to make low-budget films, often with social issues at their heart, and to bring new voices onto television screens. Sebastian Cardwell, Channel 5’s head of drama, said that “The launch of this new drama strand is our response to an increasingly worrying and wider economic situation impacting our industry. From well-loved soaps closing to funding disappearing, it’s becoming even more difficult for people from low-income backgrounds to break through via traditional methods.”

As anyone who has seen the increasingly baroque (read: absurd) storylines in Eastenders will know, long running serial dramas, aka soaps, are becoming increasingly strapped for good new ideas and audiences are becoming weary. Eastenders used to draw in tens of millions of viewers; it’s now fortunate if it can summon a couple of million for the average episode, meaning that even the country’s best known and (once) most popular shows are not immune from the threat of cancellation.

Which makes Channel 5’s initiative both timely and hugely welcome. There are endless social issues that it’s impossible to imagine the residents of Albert Square dealing with—somehow, I cannot imagine an Eastenders storyline in which Phil Mitchell gets to grips with the career-threatening implications of AI—and the chance to see them showcased in dramatic form is exciting.

Yet there is greater potential than simple agitprop here, too. Play for Today continues to be beloved by aficionados of British drama because of the exposure and opportunities that it gave to a whole generation of actors, directors and, in particular, writers, who have readily acknowledged that their careers would not exist without it. Mike Leigh, who debuted Abigail’s Party and the brilliant Nuts in May on it, called the series “an inspiration for anybody that’s thinking about the nature of what film or drama is or should be”. And David Hare, who learnt his craft as a writer-director watching Leigh work, said in 2020 that “Play for Today had an agility and suppleness born of courage. That courage later got mislaid in all the tedious second-guessing which now passes for film and television producing.”

Of course, not everything that appeared on Play for Today was golden, whether at the time or in retrospect. There were a vast number of tedious, single-issue led dramas that dated immediately and are all but unwatchable today, unless one has a particular penchant for shouty accounts of trade unions and socialism in the mid-1970s. Similarly, there were once-modish writers, such as NF Simpson, whose work has not aged well, and it is now almost embarrassing to watch the indulgence with which they were treated by television commissioners. However, set against that is a remarkable amount of worthwhile and interesting work, featuring some terrific and interesting writers from all wings of political persuasion; you might have Hare and Leigh, but you also have the far-from-socialist likes of Simon Gray.

While all the Play for Today episodes were commissioned as one-offs, there were occasional crossovers into full series. The much-loved (although now distinctly old hat) Rumpole of the Bailey began as a single show in 1975, became popular, and was turned into a six-episode run on ITV three years later, eventually extending to 44 episodes. And Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff started its life as a self-contained drama, too, introducing audiences to the late Bernard Hill’s iconic Yosser Hughes. It can only be hoped that Channel 5 finds some similarly sharp and original writing to commission, and that some of its dramas take on a life of their own.

It’s unfair to say that television drama in Britain is not currently thriving. Unfortunately, many of the most interesting shows, such as Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer and Slow Horses, are airing on streaming services, rather than terrestrial TV. The arrival of an innovative and forward-looking initiative such as this, albeit conceived on a vastly lower budget than Netflix or Apple would be able to provide, is an invigorating vote of confidence in the potential of currently overlooked British talent. Anyone with any interest in the future of drama will be wishing Channel 5 and their Play for Today redux well; fingers crossed that it runs for at least another 14 years.