"Do You Really Enjoy the Modern Play?”: Beckett on Commercial Television

Television was the key popular medium of the second half of the twentieth century in the UK, and Beckett’s work was consistently aired by BBC, the British non-commercial TV broadcaster that had already featured his work on radio since the mid-1950s. But Beckett’s work also appeared on Independent Television (ITV), the commercially-funded British television channel set up in 1955 to rival BBC. The commercial ABC TV company made the series The Present Stage for ITV in 1966. In its feature announcing the series, the TV Times listings magazine asked “Do you really enjoy the modern play like Look Back in Anger or Waiting for Godot? A new 13-week series, The Present Stage, starts next Sunday and is designed to help you enjoy and understand modern plays.” The series was based on a popular book by John Kershaw, and alongside Beckett’s drama it dealt with plays by the dramatists Arnold Wesker, Max Frisch, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter, each of which were landmarks in London theatre at the time. The series was broadcast on Sundays, following a home improvement programme, and this chapter asks what it meant for the ITV channel to screen a programme about Beckett’s drama amongst televised church services and home decor advice. The chapter places Beckett’s drama in the context of dynamic instability in British culture, when the categories of the popular and the elite were being contested, to argue that ITV’s programme contributed to a cultural revolution.