Style, Technology and Innovation in British Television Drama

Visual style in television drama has been paid relatively little attention, compared to the body of work on style in film. One reason for this may be that television studies has its origins in a sociology of the media which has privileged institution, representation and effects rather than aesthetics. There is some indication that this is changing as television drama, in particular, continues to attract academic interest, with a number of recent books and articles beginning to engage with questions of aesthetics and the relationship between style and technology in television drama (Caughie 2000; Jacobs 2000; Salt 2001; Sexton 2003). This article explores further some of the issues raised in British Television Drama: a History (Cooke 2003) regarding the characteristics of a televisual style and the relationship between style, technology and innovation in British television between the early 1950s and the mid 1990s. As I shall show, far from being the poor relation of the cinema in the field of visual style, television drama has developed its own visual rhetoric at different historical moments, often in response to new developments in technology. In certain cases, such as the examples here from the 1960s and the 1990s, British television has produced dramas which have been distinctive not only for their content but also for their formal and stylistic innovations.