Non-Naturalist Realism: Sound and Image in Alan Clarke’s Road (BBC, 1987)

'Chapter in a book about Sound and Image'
In 1964 Troy Kennedy Martin’s article for the theatre magazine Encore declared that “Television [was] going nowhere fast.” British drama, he asserted, had entered a cul-de-sac of naturalism. Low budgets, time constraints, and a lack of cultural permanency had resulted in television drama being drained of aesthetic experimentation and modernist flair. The answer, he said, was to break the link between theatre and the screen and to view television drama as an art form in and of itself, encouraging writers and directors to defamiliarise its forms, its structures, and its aesthetics. The impact of this important call to arms on the part of Kennedy Martin was immediate and far-reaching and throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, TV producers, writers, and directors would stretch the artistic boundaries of television creating dramas that were both challenging and socially relevant. The form at the heart of this popular aesthetic revolution was the TV play. Both the BBC and ITV committed resources to fostering new writing and directing talent through the one-off tv play and it quickly came to be regarded as the ideal vehicle for both social realism and formalist experimentation.
It is against this background that this chapter examines Alan Clarke’s TV version of Jim Cartwright’s play Road (BBC, 1987). Part of the BBC’s Screenplay series, Road was both harshly realist and non-naturalist; especially in its deployment of sounds and images. Heavily dependent on its soundtrack and its use of Steadicam, Road is a searing indictment of Thatcherite Britain but also an assertion of the aesthetic possibilities of television, in what was perhaps for Britain at least, the last period of popular experimentation. Importantly (given Kennedy Martin’s assertions), Clarke turned a piece of theatre into a memorable piece of TV.