When Rudolph Cartier died in June 1994, his obituaries unanimously credited him as the “inventor of television drama” and “a television pioneer.” He was a television drama director at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 1952 to the late 1960s (although the BBC preferred the title “producer” for their directors until the 1960s), and he was one of the first innovative television stylists working in British television during this period. The range of his 120 television productions (all for the BBC) stretched from the science fiction serial (The Quatermass Experiment, 1953; Quatermass II, 1955; Quatermass and the Pit, 1958), drama documentary (Lee Oswald—Assassin, 1966), and adaptations of classics (Wuthering Heights, 1953; Anna Karenina, 1961) to crime serials (Maigret, 1961, and Z Cars, 1963) and opera.

He was born Rudolph Katscher in Vienna in 1904 and studied to be an architect before attending classes given by Max Reinhardt, which had an important impact on him. In 1929 he submitted a script to a film company in Berlin, which accepted it, and he was enrolled as a staff writer (paired with Egon Eis) scripting low-budget crime movies. He later moved on to writing for UFA and directed his first movie, Unsichtbare Gegner, in 1931. Cartier immigrated to Britain in 1935, but it was not until 1952 that he began work as a BBC television drama director. From this point until the mid-1960s, he directed more than 120 separate productions, most of them live studio plays, although he also had a penchant for televised opera adaptations.

Cartier did not expand the spectrum of BBC TV drama single-handedly, but he did offer some innovations both stylistically and thematically. BBC TV drama production has been perceived as consisting largely of adaptations of West End successes—theatrical, static stage performances respectfully and passively relayed by efficient BBC personnel—before Cartier’s arrival on the scene. This is a false perception, although it captures the sense of impasse felt by a drama department that during the late 1940s was starved of funds, studio space, and equipment. The transformation of BBC drama in the early 1950s was the result of various factors, not simply Cartier’s fortuitous arrival. By 1951 the expansion of television was under way: threats of a commercial competitor and increased funding for the TV department led to the acquisition of new studios, which were fitted with fresh equipment (new camera mountings, cranes, and so on). The largely ad hoc manner of production and training was formalized as training manuals and production courses were established.

The appointment of Michael Barry (a former drama director and an innovator in his own way, he had directed the first documentary-drama for the BBC) as head of drama established a continuity of drama policy that was to last a decade until Barry was replaced by Sydney Newman. Unlike his predecessors, Barry was convinced that TV drama had to rely less on dialogue and more on the “power of the image”; he contended that television had to be visibly televisual, not a discrete, passive relay medium. It was into this new, fertile environment that Cartier was employed, and he quickly took full advantage: “I said [to Barry] that the BBC needed new scripts, a new approach, a whole new spirit, rather than endlessly televising classics like Dickens or familiar London stage plays.” Barry was initially receptive to these suggestions (drama directors were given a relative amount of freedom in the selection of their material).

One way of changing traditional approaches to drama direction was to change the material; instead of using current or recent West End successes, Cartier drew upon the science fiction genre and European modernist theater as well as the pulp-detective genres he had worked on in Germany. Initially, Cartier directed more unconventional, European modernist drama: Berthold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouihl; later, he developed a partnership with the newly appointed BBC staff writer Nigel Kneale and directed works specifically written by Kneale for the medium, including the three Quatermass serials. Kneale later adapted George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for television and Cartier directed.

The impact of that play (transmitted live and repeated live a few days later, as was the norm) cannot be overstated. Produced in 1954, as cold war ideologies were being constructed and reinforced, the play’s landscapes of totalitarian control resonated strongly with the public—some viewed the program as celebratory, as an anti-Soviet piece (an editorial in The Times praised the play for clarifying for the British public the “Communist practice of making words stand on their heads”); others were disgusted by the graphic depiction of torture (one letter to the BBC reads, “Dear Sir, Nineteen Eighty-Four was unspeakably putrid and depraved”). Questions were asked in Parliament about the tendency for BBC drama to “pander to sexual and sadistic tastes,” and Cartier himself received death threats from those who considered the play antifascist (the BBC provided bodyguards for him).

Hidden behind the furor is an important point. If the 1953 BBC live broadcast of the coronation proved that television had a mass audience that could be united by a spectacle of national rebirth, Cartier’s Nineteen Eighty-Four proved television’s ability to influence, and frighten, a mass audience (one Daily Express headline read, “Wife Dies as She Watches”). It was the beginning of television’s role as an agency of pernicious influence.

The power of that production rests with Cartier’s explicit desire to influence and manipulate the television audience. Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exemplary instance of his technique: the mixture of powerful close-ups and expanded studio space. Writing in 1958, Cartier cited the close-up as a key tool of the TV director: “When the viewer was watching these ‘horrific’ TV productions of mine, he was completely in my power.”

Another important element was his use of filmed inserts. The restrictive space of the Lime Grove studios meant that filmed inserts were usually location scenes introduced into the live studio action. In this way, scenery, camera, and costume changes could be made in the studio. But Cartier took this approach further; instead of filmed inserts for entire scenes, he often used telecine inserts (transfer of film to video) between shots, hence expanding the apparent studio space.

For example, a minor, almost unnoticeable case in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Winston Smith (Peter Cushing) is walking down a corridor past another employee working at a console. This movement consists of three shots: In the first, live in the studio, Winston walks past. In the second, a filmed insert, Winston walks past another console (in fact, the same one, filmed earlier with another actor). In the third—with Cushing having the chance to reposition—Winston walks past the same console again: the corridor appears to be long, but takes only a few steps to complete! This is a minor example of how confidently Cartier combined both live and telecine material seamlessly.

One criticism of this technique made by television purists at the time was that the expansion of space gave the plays a cinematic, rather than a strictly televisual, feel. One critic described Cartier’s plays as “the trick of making a picture on a TV screen seem as wide and deep as Cinemascope.”

Furthermore, Cartier’s desire to expand the scale of television often brought him into conflict with Barry. In 1954 Barry sent Cartier a warning that his productions were becoming ambitious and, more important, expensive. He cited Cartier’s recent version of Rebecca:

I am unable to defend at a time when departmental costs and scene loads are in an acute state the load imposed by Rebecca on Design and Supply and the expenditure upon extras and costumes . . . . The leading performances were stagey and very often the actors were lost in the setting. Occasionally there were fine shots such as when Max was playing the piano with his wife beside him, and the composition of figures, piano top and vase made a good frame, but the vast area of the hall and the stairway never justified the great expenditure of effort required in building and one is left with a very clear impression of reaching a point where the department must be accused of not knowing what it is doing. (Michael Barry to Rudolph Cartier, memo, October 12, 1954, BBC Written Archives Centre, File number T5/424)

In effect, Barry was judging Cartier by the model of the small-scale “intimate style” espoused by many critics and television producers of the time—for them, television plays should be small with few characters, and nice close shots (“Max playing the piano with his wife beside him”). Cartier’s television style was radically different: large spaces, long shots, and close-ups. Cartier responded to Barry: “the set should be large enough so that the small Mrs. de Winter should feel ‘lost’ enough and not ‘cosy.’ ” Packed into this observation is the contrast between the early BBC drama style of directors such as Fred O’Donovan, George More O’Ferrall, Jan Bussell, and Royston Morley (longer-running shots, close-ups, the study of one or two characters), on the one hand, and Cartier and Kneale’s conception of a wider canvas of shooting styles, a more integrated mixture of studio and film, larger sets, and multicharacter productions, on the other.

Cartier’s difference from other directors did not simply lie in a greater use of film. His was a refusal to confine television within one essentialist style that required constant reference to its material base (intimate because the screen was small, the audience was at home, urgent because it was live, etc.). His use of film was not primarily dependent on the limitations of what could be achieved during live studio production; he used film as a material that could expand the space of the production.

Cartier never saw himself as a film director constrained by an imperfect medium; he preferred television production (although he returned once to cinema in 1958 to direct a striking melodrama, The Passionate Summer). Writing in 1958, when his stature was confirmed, he noted, “If the TV director knows his medium well and handles it skillfully, he can wield almost unlimited power over his mass audience; a power no other form of entertainment can give him—not even cinema.”