Sydney Newman has been seen as the most significant agent in the development of British television drama. He presided over the transformation of television drama from a dependence on theatrical material and forms to a significant art form in its own right. However, this achievement does not belong to Newman alone; his skill could be located in a successful ability to exploit the best of already favorable circumstances with an incorrigible enthusiasm and clarity of vision.

Born in Toronto in 1917, Newman trained initially as a commercial artist, before joining the National Film Board of Canada as film editor, director, and executive producer. While with the board, he made award-winning documentary films and worked with John Grierson. He subsequently spent a year as a working observer for NBC Television in New York, before becoming supervisor of Drama at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). It was there, working on General Motors Theatre, that he developed the policy of working with contemporary dramatists who attempted to confront current issues in their work.

In 1958 he moved to Britain to work for ABC Television Ltd., one of the commercial companies that made up the ITV network. In 1955, commercial television broke the broadcasting monopoly held by the BBC, and ABC was a regional company given the franchise for supplying weekend programming in the North and Midlands. Even before Newman’s arrival as head of Drama at ABC, the company had acquired a reputation for some of the best ITV drama. Its Armchair Theatre anthology was transmitted every Sunday evening, inheriting a large audience from the highly popular variety show Sunday Night at The London Palladium, which preceded it in the schedule.

Newman took over from Dennis Vance as drama head in April 1958. Like Rudolph Cartier at the BBC, Newman arrived in Britain unimpressed with the state of television drama. He also arrived during a sea change in ITV’s fortunes; after two years of loss, the new commercial ITV network companies were just beginning to make substantial profits, and by 1958 television audiences for their programs reached over 70 percent. At the same time, the renaissance of British theater was well underway. As Newman admitted to the Daily Express on January 5, 1963:

I came to Britain at a crucial time in 1958 when the seeds of Look Back in Anger were beginning to flower. I am proud that I played some part in the recognition that the working man was a fit subject for drama, and not just a comic foil in middle-class manners.

Inspired by his experience in drama at the CBC, and unimpressed by the BBC’s continuing policy of “mopping up” old theater scripts (according to Newman), he immediately set about organizing a policy of producing plays written for the medium, plays that would reflect and project the experience and concerns of a new working-class audience. As Newman put it in a 1979 interview, “I said we should have an original play policy with plays that were going to be about the very people who owned TV sets—which is really a working-class audience.”

This explicitly populist “theater of the people” quickly became characterized by the press as “kitchen sink” drama—an unfair appraisal considering the wide variety of plays and genres that Newman’s Armchair Theatre produced. What the programs did have in common was their ambition to capture contemporary trends and popular experience, and reflect these back to the television audience. To this end, Newman discovered and nurtured new writers, some of whom were to become the best of their generation, including Clive Exton, Alun Owen, and Harold Pinter.

Newman encouraged the transformation of the television landscape not only in terms of subject matter but also in terms of style. If the content of British television drama consisted of bourgeois theater and its limited concerns, then—according to Newman—the shooting style was also limited, constrained by a static respect for theatrical performance conventions. Newman collected a group of young directors from North America, such as Philip Saville, Ted Kotcheff, and Charles Jarrott, as well as poaching directors from the BBC. With these directors—in particular, Saville and Kotcheff—he encouraged stylistic as well as thematic changes, insisting on a new, self-conscious, mobile camera style for the drama productions. As Kotcheff recalled: “We wanted to push against the limitations of the medium, the way it was presently covered—to approach the freedom of film, and not to enslave it to the theatrical tradition in which we found it when we arrived here.”

The combination of fresh contemporary material and the freedom Newman gave to his directors (and set designers) to innovate with that material opened up the potential of television drama for all to see. Newman was never far behind them, often photographed on the studio set writing notes, his white-suited swagger suggesting a blazing showbiz evangelist. Contrast the early dramas of Reith’s BBC and their “photographed stage plays,” respectfully static and distant, with Newman’s Armchair Theatre drama productions: such plays as “Afternoon of a Nymph” (1961) have an ingenious mobility, with multiple cameras performing a frantic ballet, prodding their lenses into the action, spiraling in and between the sets and actors, until their movement itself becomes the significant performance. This new spectrum of theme and style can be seen in other plays such as “The Trouble with Our Ivy” (1961), “A Night Out” (Harold Pinter, 1959), and “No Trams to Lime Street” (Alun Owen, 1958).

Newman’s real insight—and the real difference between his work and that of the BBC of the late 1950s—was his estimation of the television audience as discerning, intelligent, and capable of handling new and innovative subject matter. As a producer, he saw himself as a “creative midwife” bringing together the best technical and creative skill.

In fact, Newman’s organizational abilities were to find a home at the BBC. In another well-timed move, Newman began work as the head of the BBC Drama Group in January 1963. At this point, the BBC under director-general Hugh Greene was beginning a period of modernization and liberalization. Newman, in a less hands-on, more executive capacity, reorganized the drama department and oversaw the production of the controversial Wednesday Play drama anthology. Here Newman was able to draw upon a creative team of writers including Dennis Potter, John Hopkins, Neil Dunn, and David Mercer, and directors such as Don Taylor, Ken Loach, and Gareth Davies. He left the BBC in 1967 and returned to Canada, where he worked again for the National Film Board and the National Film Finance Corporation.

In retrospect, Newman’s conscious characterization of BBC drama output as static and middlebrow is unfair. His counterpart at the BBC during the late 1950s, Michael Barry, also attracted new young original writers (including Paul Scott and John Mortimer) and hired young directors such as John Jacobs and Don Taylor. However, it was the newness and innovation that Newman encouraged in his drama output that is most significant: his concentration on the potential of television as television, for a mass, not a middle-brow, audience. g to flower. I am proud that I played some part in the recognition that the working man was a fit subject for drama, and not just a comic foil in middle-class manners.