Many successful British TV series of the 1960s “Golden Age” imitated US aesthetics and production methods, especially filmed television made for the Independent Television network. Distinctively British stylishness and quality made British TV exports attractive to US TV networks, but this attractiveness was, paradoxically, dependent on creating transatlantic hybrid forms rather than uniquely British ones. Production facilities and technologies for making filmed television in Britain were modelled on US studios. Many British series featured US actors, or were written, directed or produced by American émigrés. British distinctiveness was a successful strategy of differentiation, but it concealed transnational influence and exchange.

A focus on the details of how TV drama scripts were commissioned, edited and realised offers insight into the relationships between writers and television institutions. This study of the early years of the BBC’s popular science fiction series Doctor Who is based on archival documents from the 1960s and shows how the role of the screenwriter was negotiated in relation to the opportunities and constraints of format, genre, cost and intended audience, at a time of rapid and dynamic change in British television culture. The decisions about screenwriting analysed in this chapter affected how Doctor Who developed in the 60 years that followed, and also impacted how the BBC thought about its cultural and social mission of Public Service Broadcasting.

A focus on the details of how TV dramascripts were commissioned, edited and realised offers insight into the relationships between writers and television institutions. This study of the early years of the BBC's popular science fiction series Doctor Who is based on archival documents from the 1960s and shows how the role of the screenwriter was negotiated inrelation to the opportunities and constraints of format, genre, cost and intended audience, at atime of rapid and dynamic change in British television culture. The decisions about screenwriting analysed inthis chapter affected how Doctor Who developed inthe 60years that followed, and also impacted how the BBC thought about its cultural and social mission of Public Service Broadcasting.

This chapter asks what the response of the BBC to the beginning of the Second World War reveals about British broadcasting, regarded as what the media theorist Raymond Williams (1974) called a technology and a cultural form. It investigates how the reasons for stopping BBC television and reconfiguring radio were intertwined with ideas about the cultural role of broadcasting as a socially inclusive medium, the technological development of radio and television technologies for military uses, and the ways that Britain deployed broadcasting in ways both similar to and different from other nations. After the discovery of the properties of electromagnetic waves and their implementation for radio and television at the end of the 19th century, the evolutionary paths of these technologies were by no means determined. That radio and television became separate domestic broadcast technologies was merely one line of development, as their roles in the Second World War show. Both civilian and military uses of radio thrived, while television was relatively marginal and mutated instead into its sister technology, radar. Competition between individual inventors, nations and corporations was harnessed to push technologies of transmission and reception very quickly, and the ideological character of the different warring powers produced radio and television cultures that were relatively distinct. The absence of television in Britain from 1939 to 1945 offers, paradoxically, an effective focus on the significance of broadcast media in the period.

The British science fiction television series Doctor Who (1963–89) interwove the epic with the everyday, and this was a key component of its popularity and continuing cultural significance. This chapter examines the Doctor Who serial 'The Chase' (1965), an epic journey in which the TARDIS time machine is chased by the evil Daleks to a desert planet, then to the Empire State Building, the sailing ship Mary Celeste, a Gothic haunted house and finally to a futuristic metal city. By 1965 Doctor Who was losing its initial appeal; it had become everyday, and 'The Chase' is in some ways an attempt to raise the stakes by using ambitious special effects and exotic locations despite the restrictions of the programme's rapid, low-budget production. At the same time as it proclaims Doctor Who's epic ambitions, the serial's journey begins from, and includes extended scenes in, the TARDIS, a time-travel machine that is also the everyday home of the protagonists. Studio-bound drama, characterised by talk and not action, alternates with jumps between exotic, other-worldly settings. In 'The Chase', Doctor Who explores the alternatives for what television science fiction can be. The serial's epic journey ends by bringing the Doctor's human companions home to the London of 1965, to look askance at their and their viewers' everyday present. The chapter argues that 'The Chase' interrogates the value of long-running television programmes to domesticate the epic's seriousness and scale, and to explore its alignment with everyday human experience.

The US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966-7) is about television. It's about the capabilities of the medium, its technologies and the experience of watching it. The series has a grandiose, excessive visual style, characterised by scale and spectacle, and it served to advertise colour television as colour sets became more affordable in the 1960s.

I have been writing about Samuel Beckett's film and television plays for over 20 years, but until recently I had not studied screen adaptations of his theatre plays. A new collection of essays about adaptations of Beckett's work after his death in 1989 gave me an opportunity to write about the Beckett on Film project (2001) that adapted all 19 of his theatre plays.

Fig. 1: This is our BBC. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0bln3nw This week is the 100th anniversary of the BBC, and the schedules offer various programmes that celebrate it, picking moments, objects and people from across the institution's history. Rather than giving another selection of important bits of the BBC's story, I decided this blog should be about some of my own relationships with BBC programmes and people.

This chapter argues that the US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966-7) is about television: about the capabilities of the medium, the experience of watching it and the technological apparatus that television comprises. Visually, the series often adopts a grandiose, excessive visual style, especially in the opening episode focused on here. Key images are characterised by a sense of scale and visual spectacle, and the format seems calculated to advertise the attractions of colour television and the episodic adventure narratives that television offered in the USA in the mid-1960s. The opening episode introduces the viewer to a massive underground base hidden beneath an American desert, in which an extraordinarily costly government project is being secretly carried out. At the heart of this technological facility, a physical apparatus, the massive Time Tunnel itself, acts as a portal for the protagonists to move to any moment in the past or the future, though without control over their destination. This premise is a self-reflexive representation of what television can do, transporting its viewer to real or simulated places and times beyond his or her experience, and engaging the viewer in thrilling narratives of exploration and peril. The style of the series, I suggest, articulates the substance of what television might be.