THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

drama, it ought to be conceded that modern television companies were only continuing practices actively espoused by
the theatrical contemporaries of Scott and Dickens. New serialized versions
[p. 632]
of novels by Dickens (originally a serial novelist, of course) and Jane Austen were the classic staples of early
television, their evident appeal to viewers encouraging now celebrated, sometimes lushly visualized, adaptations of
works by Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga, BBC 1969), Trollope, Graves, and Waugh. These versions have had an
extraordinary success outside Britain, notably so in America and when they were shown on Soviet and Eastern
European state television. Both the BBC and Independent television have proved enterprising patrons of more run-of
the-mill, but none the less thoughtful and socially responsive, serials in the form of vastly popular, long-running soapoperas,
the most established of which is Granada Television’s Coronation Street (which began in December 1960).
It is, however, as a patron of new drama that British television has performed an invaluable service to working
writers and to their prospective audiences. Although at one stage the BBC prudishly decided that Osborne’s Look
Back in Anger was ‘not suitable for a television audience’ (the play was, however, transmitted by Granada), it later
made honourable amends by commissioning new work by Beckett, Pinter, and Stoppard. Nevertheless, television’s
most solid contribution to artistic innovation has been through the evolution of a specific kind of drama shaped by the
special resources of the medium. This innovation has been especially associated with Alan Bennett (b. 1934) and
Dennis Potter (b. 1935). Bennett, who has also maintained an active involvement with the theatre (his play The
Madness of George III was produced by the National Theatre in 1991), has been adept at working with particular
actors and particular themes. His An Englishman Abroad (BBC 1983), a piquant re-creation of the brief encounter in
Moscow of the British spy, Guy Burgess, with the actress Coral Browne (who appeared in the production), uses both
small and large spaces, cramped rooms and suggestions of Moscow theatres, streets, and churches. His series of
monologues, Talking Heads (BBC 1990), however, concentrated on intimacy, on suggestive camera angles, and,
above all, on physiognomies, glances, and revelatory turns of phrase. Potter is far more exclusively associated with
television. His Alice, a version of Lewis Carroll’s stories, was the first of a series of relatively shocking ‘Wednesday
Plays’ broadcast by the BBC from December 1962, and his paired dramas about the career of an upwardly mobile
Member of Parliament (Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton and Stand Up for Nigel Barton, both 1965) suggested a
quite new, far from deferential response to Establishment politics. Potter’s later works — notably the six-part drama
Pennies from Heaven (1978), the intense evocation of childhood disaster (in which the children’s parts were played by
ungainly adults), Blue Remembered Hills (1979), and the supremely ingenious intermixture of music, fantasy, sex,
crime, and physical disease, The Singing Detective (1989) — suggest how profoundly television has been able to
contribute to a still developing dramatic literature.
[p. 633]
Fin de siècle: Some Notes of Late-Century Fiction
‘Each moment seems more urgent than all preceding ones’, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in his study
The Thirties (1940), ‘each generation of men are convinced that their difficulties and achievements are unparalleled’.
It would be presumptuous to attempt to draw any firm or precise conclusions about the state of literature in the last
decade of the twentieth century. Assuming the privilege of a historian, it is possible to draw loose parallels, not
necessarily with the 1930s, but with two other decades, the closing years of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and thereby to observe that it would probably be foolish to attempt to be either categorical or prophetic. Our present,
as Muggeridge observed, makes us myopic. How literature might have developed twenty years hence is the business of
the writers who will make it develop, not of prescriptive critics. In common with the 1790s and the 1890s, the 1990s
looks set to be a decade of uncertainties and redefinitions, of false starts, blind alleys, reiterations, and tired
reaffirmations. There are certain periods (the 1930s was one) when the Zeitgeist declares itself; there are many others
when contemporaries signally miss the point about what really matters to later generations in how they thought, acted,
and wrote. If it was clear enough to the men and women of the 1790s that the period would have to come to terms
with the political implications of the French Revolution, relatively few contemporary British critics and readers
clearly identified what seem to us to be the leading literary spirits of the time. The British 1890s were dominated by
already established writers, but, with the exception of W. B. Yeats, very few of the new and supposedly avant garde
younger writers of the decade did in fact determine how the Modernist revolution of the early twentieth century would
be realized or even influenced the development of the non-Modernist Edwardian novel. What seem to be leading
cultural lines lead nowhere. What strikes some observers as conservative may in fact be radical. What looks like a