Don Taylor, the ‘Old-Fashioned Populist’? The Theban Plays (1986) and Iphigenia at Aulis (1990): Production Choices and Audience Responses

This chapter explores the production contexts for and audience responses to The Theban Plays (BBC, 1986), a trilogy of plays by Sophocles, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (BBC, 1990), the last productions of Greek tragedy that would be broadcast on British television for twenty years. These four plays were directed by Don Taylor at the end of a long career in television from 1960. Taylor’s commitment to studio-bound drama, shot as if live on multiple cameras, could be seen as old-fashioned by the mid-1980s, as could his ‘Reithian’ commitment to democratizing works from the dramatic canon via television. Nevertheless these productions garnered enthusiastic as well as critical comments from both newspaper reviewers and the audience sample surveyed by the BBC. This chapter demonstrates how various features of the productions, including an anti-realistic mise-en-scène and the uses made of the multiple cameras, align with and reflect Taylor’s published views on television drama. Close analysis of the wide variety of opinions expressed by those watching underline the complex social, political and aesthetic issues involved in judging attempts to put ancient drama before a modern television audience.

Tragedy for Teens: Ancient Greek Tragedy on BBC and ITV Schools Television in the 1960s

This chapter offers a comparative impression of how the BBC and the independent television company Associated-Rediffusion produced Greek tragedy for non-specialist teen audiences via schools drama strands in the early 1960s, considering the different ways in which these dramas were presented in order to address the potency of teenagers and their imagined role in society at the beginning of this socially and culturally progressive decade. An assessment of the archival evidence for a number of schools productions of Greek tragedy in this period, together with textual analysis of extant programmes, suggests characteristic differences in pedagogic style and broader motivations between the BBC and Associated-Rediffusion, with the BBC focusing on the modernity of the theatrical canon and the independent company being primarily concerned with the imaginative and emotional engagement of the teen viewer. The evidence for audience engagement (pupils and teachers) bears out the greater success of the ITV broadcasts in communicating with teenagers in 1960s secondary moderns (where these ‘off-syllabus’ programmes were most often viewed), especially via the documentary framing techniques which integrated welcome contextual and historical information within the dramatic presentation.

The Beginnings of Civilisation: Television Travels to Greece with Mortimer Wheeler and Compton Mackenzie

This chapter considers two early BBC television documentary series about ancient Greece and its legacy: Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise (1958) written and presented by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and Sir Compton Mackenzie’s The Glory that was Greece (1959). Making use of archival documentation from the BBC Written Archives Centre, including audience research reports, the chapter details the network of influences on the series. It is argued that these series draw on earlier forms of encounters with and depictions of the sites of ancient Greece, including the Grand Tour, 19th-century photography, tourism, film travelogues and radio programming. In addition, the chapter details the ways in which these two series contributed centrally to establishing the fundamentals of the emerging form of the presenter-led documentary. This approach to documentary flourished a decade later in the BBC series Civilisation (1969), with Sir Kenneth Clark. Similar series centred on a journey with a presenter who acts as a surrogate for the viewer remain dominant in history and arts programming for television.

Broadcasting Greece: An Introduction to Greek Antiquity on the Small Screen

This chapter offers an introduction to the subject of ancient Greece on British television from the mid-20th century to the present and to the particular topics and debates addressed in the volume. An opening analysis of The Drinking Party (BBC, 1965), a ‘modern recreation’ of Plato’s Symposium by Leo Aylen and Jonathan Miller, establishes the value of examining television’s engagement with ancient Greece and identifies avenues for wider investigation. In particular, it points to the significance of such televisual constructions of ancient Greece as part of wider historical conversations about British culture, society and politics; and it highlights tensions between education and entertainment, on the one hand, and ‘authenticity’ and authority, on the other, exploring what dominant ideas about national identity are being communicated. Earlier engagements with ancient Greece on British radio and television are broadly sketched out and set against relevant contours in the socio-cultural and televisual landscape, and wider cultural engagements with Hellenic antiquity. With the socio-historical and intellectual context mapped out, the contents and directions of individual chapters are outlined, with attention paid to their methods and approaches as well as their motivating questions and conclusions regarding the encounters with the Hellenic past on British television.

Greek Myth in the Whoniverse

Along with 21st-century spinoffs The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, the iconic British science fiction series Doctor Who has engaged with Greek mythological characters and storylines across five decades. This chapter explores trends in this engagement. Troy and Atlantis are settings for the time-travelling Doctor inadvertently to set in motion events leading to their fall (‘The Myth Makers’, 1965, ‘Time Monster’, 1972), Medusa and the Minotaur are creatures in a fantasy world (‘The Mind Robber’, 1968) and stories of the Argonauts, the Minotaur and the Trojan War are set in space (‘Underworld’, 1978, ‘The Armageddon Factor’, 1979 and ‘The Horns of Nimon’, 1979-80). More recently, Greek mythological objects are cast as alien: e.g. Philoctetes (‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’, 2006), the Gorgon (‘The Eye of the Gorgon’, 2007), Pandora’s box (‘The Pandorica Opens’, 2010), the Minotaur (‘The God Complex’, 2011), and the Siren (‘The Curse of the Black Spot’, 2011). Evidence for the popularity of Greek mythology amongst contemporary viewers is discussed. By tracing shifting intersections between Greek myth and the ever-developing mythology of Doctor Who, this chapter considers how the long-running series anticipates, plays with and informs audience knowledge of Greek mythology, and spurs them on towards criticism and invention.

The Serpent Son (1979): A Science Fiction Aesthetic?

This chapter discusses the aesthetics of the BBC’s 1979 production of Frederick Raphael and Kenneth McLeish’s The Serpent Son, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, which critics at the time associated with science fiction. Certainly, the design of costumes, sets, props and lighting, together with the direction and camerawork, gave this trilogy a non-realist studio-bound visual style familiar to contemporary British television science fiction series, such as Doctor Who, Blake’s Seven and The Tomorrow People. By examining elements of the mise-en-scène, this chapter assesses whether this was a deliberate choice. It argues that, whilst the similarities are there, the aesthetic is as much the result of production methods employed at the time by the BBC, and general non-mimetic approaches to the production of Greek drama on screen, as it is any deliberate attempt to recall the science fiction genre. But the choice of a non-realist aesthetic for Greek tragedy is also a clear statement about the producers’ view of the connection between the modern audience and ancient Greek texts. This is the dominant visual aesthetic of productions of Greek tragedy on British television around this time, many of which employed similar distancing effects.

Louis MacNeice and ‘The Paragons of Hellas’: Ancient Greece as Radio Propaganda

With television shut down for the duration of World War II, BBC radio became an essential medium for the transmission of information and propaganda. This chapter surveys the wartime radio features of the poet and scriptwriter-producer, Louis MacNeice, analysing a series of broadcasts (including The March of the 10,000, The Four Freedoms and The Sacred Band) designed to maintain public awareness of and sympathy for the plight of Nazi-occupied Greece. MacNeice develops themes and incidents drawn from the country’s ancient history which are analogous to the contemporary situation. The ironic phrase ‘paragons of Hellas’, from his long poem Autumn Journal (1939), implies a scepticism over the use of ancient allusions. Even so, drawing important parallels in his radio-dramatic writing between the famed glories of Greece’s ancient civilisation – including Xenophon, Periclean democracy, the Sacred Band, and the military victories at Salamis, Thermopylae, Chaeronea – MacNeice seeks to underline ancient echoes of the resistance and resilience modern Greeks were finding was necessary in attempts to withstand Nazi brutality.

The Digital Aesthetic in ‘Atlantis: The Evidence’ (2010)

This chapter examines ‘Atlantis: The Evidence’ – a 2010 episode of Timewatch, the BBC2 historical documentary series – as an example of digital ekphrasis. Facilitated by digital techniques that generate a distinctive aesthetic, the evocative audiovisual representation contributes in significant ways to the programme’s demonstration and interpretation of the ‘evidence’ used to justify the hypothesis that the Platonic myth of the lost city of Atlantis corresponds to the Bronze Age town of Thera. Experimental, interactive and collaborative CGI techniques familiar to drama productions in film and television and to contemporary practices in virtual and cyber-archaeology serve to construct the events and people of the distant past within a distinctive posthuman world. At a moment when digital tools are increasingly central to how the imagined past is rendered and received via the television screen, this analysis demonstrates the validating and authenticating effects of synthetic representation in depicting historical realities.

Are We the Greeks? Understanding Antiquity and Ourselves in Television Documentaries

The notion that the West has its cultural and political roots in ancient Greece has long been a mainstay of discourses on national identity in Britain, as in other countries (primarily in Europe and North America) that imagine themselves as belonging to ‘the West’. This chapter examines how this supposition of a ‘Greek legacy’ or ‘Greek inheritance’ has been mediated through British television documentaries. Whether the legacy is used as a framing device for wider assessments of ancient Greek society, or is the focus of direct investigation, the notion of a legacy is sustained. However, at every turn the proposition is undercut. Assertions of similarity between ‘us’ and ‘them’ coexist alongside demonstrations of difference; or the legacy is a modern invention that serves social, political and psychological needs; or it can be problematic and undesirable. At the same time as its existence is maintained, the ‘Greek legacy’ is revealed to be a fiction, or even a fetish: a fantasy that hides its own lack. In a Britain (and Europe) marked by cultural diversity and political division, television exposes the untenability of an ideology that elides such differences by making us all ancient Greeks, whilst continuing to ascribe it power.

The Odyssey in the ‘Broom Cupboard’: Ulysses 31 and Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All on Children’s BBC, 1985–1986

The chapter examines two 1980s children’s television series – Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All (hereafter Odysseus) and Ulysses 31 – which reworked the myths of the Greek hero Odysseus which derive from Homer’s Odyssey, an epic poem. The discussion demonstrates how each programme was shaped by contemporary culture, particularly film, television and animation. In particular, they combined: innovative storytelling techniques (e.g. Odysseus was a Jackanory-style story to camera, written and performed by Tony Robinson with Richard Curtis as co-writer) with creative use of the mode of television and televisual animation (e.g. Ulysses 31 was created by key names in animation and anime: Jean Chalopin, Bernard Deyriès, Nagahama Tadao) and detailed knowledge of The Odyssey and wider Greek myth. The series provide contrasting localised (British) and international (Franco-Japanese) production contexts, but in the UK both programmes were first broadcast in 1985-1986 via the newly created children’s programming format, Children’s BBC, known affectionately as the ‘Broom Cupboard’, in which a studio-presenter addressed child-audiences directly. Odysseus and Ulysses 31 therefore offered sustained engagements with the myths of Odysseus for UK-based children in this decade.