Manny Karp wrote:'m sure the documentary in the set details this a bit more, but I have to ask those of you in Britain: When Clarke's work was shown throughout his career, what were the TV options? In other words, was it all state run channels? How many?
None of the channels were "state run" in the way that you're implying - or rather, the status and funding of the BBC is a rather more complex issue than that.
Anyway, when Clarke started in 1967, there were three channels - BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, only the latter of which showed commercials. Clarke initially made programmes for ITV (which is why the
Half-Hour Stories are bisected into two halves, to allow for advertising breaks), but then switched to the BBC in 1969 and made the vast majority of his subsequent work for them. (
Made in Britain and the feature films are the most obvious exceptions.)
Channel Four started in 1982, but - perhaps surprisingly given that it was dedicated to catering for unconventional tastes and materials and actually stuck to that brief in its first decade - it seemed to have no impact on Clarke's career, aside from the fact that it was a film broadcast on C4's opening night,
Walter, that introduced him to the potential of the Steadicam: he hired both that and DOP Chris Menges to shoot
Made in Britain. The latter
feels like a Channel 4 production, but in fact it was made by ITV - although such a thing is utterly unimaginable today.
When (if ever) did what we in the states call "cable TV," with its relative myriad of channels, come into play? Have you ever had the equivalent of "cable access" (not that anything of value has ever appeared on it in the US)?
Clarke died in the year of the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which changed the television landscape completely - prior to that, there were basically four TV channels and cable/satellite reception was only for the well-heeled early adopter, and there wasn't much take-up because the four terrestrial (aka network) channels were so good*. The equivalents of what you're talking about only really became an issue in the 1990s and later.
(*circa 1990, Krzysztof Kieślowski said that British television wasn't quite as stupid as that in most other countries, which I think is precisely the right emphasis.)
Surely a great shame of Clarke's early death was that it occurred on the cusp of the introduction of the internet and long form TV and the various means of content distribution we have now. Not that he had difficultly having a career (did he?) but it certainly would have been interesting to see what he would have done in so many venues, and to see how much the subject of media and technology might have been included in the content of his films.
One of the great advantages of working mainly in television is that it was much easier to obtain continued employment. It was a rare year that didn't see two new Clarke productions, and sometimes there were even more than that.
An important cultural point is that back then there was much more focus on "the television play" - although that definition could span anything from something shot in the studio via the usual three-camera arrangement and edited "live" to something indistinguishable in terms of medium and approach from a cinema film (i.e. a lot of Clarke's late work). The BBC alone would broadcast something like one a week throughout the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, and this was an incredible opportunity for writers and directors - not least because the turnover and the comparatively low budget meant that they were given that all-important opportunity to fail, which encouraged genuine risk-taking. Some of the best British television ever made -
The War Game, Cathy Come Home, Penda's Fen, Nuts in May, Stephen Frears' collaborations with Alan Bennett and the overwhelming majority of Clarke's output - falls into this category.
When Channel Four started, they got much more involved in collaborations with theatrical production companies and distributors, and referred to their productions as "films" rather than "plays" - and rightly so, as this included the likes of
Angel, The Draughtsman's Contract and
My Beautiful Laundrette. And by the end of the 1980s the term "television play" was beginning to seem quaint and outdated - there was much more pressure to be "cinematic" (a challenge that Clarke more than rose to: he started using the Steadicam in 1983 and rarely stopped thereafter).
How Clarke would have coped with the post-1990 landscape, no-one knows - although at the time of his cancer diagnosis he was making his first serious attempt to get a US-backed feature film off the ground. Although he might equally have gone down the Ken Loach route of primarily making feature films funded by multiple production companies in several EU member states - Loach's films tend to be British/French/German/Spanish/Italian co-productions, which helps minimise any financial risk. (Loach's films presumably had very similar budgets to Clarke and are just as parochial in terms of unapologetically dealing with British subject matter without any concessions made to the international market.)
I was considering comparing him to Peter Watkins - maybe no so aptly - and noticed that Watkins and Clarke were born just one day apart.
Three years and one day apart. Although Watkins was far more precocious - by the time Clarke made his small-screen directing debut, Watkins had already abandoned British television.
