EXECUTIVE DECISIONS
JONATHAN POWELL
His changes to the Drama Department in the 1980s helped bring the BBC huge acclaim… but left Doctor Who high and dry.
By EDDIE ROBSON
Jonathan Powell was BBC Head of Drama from 1983-87.
The Radio Times for 8-14 September 1979 promoted Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, produced by Powell.
During the 1970s, an aesthetic gulf began to open up in British TV drama. At the BBC, the standard mode of production – which had evolved from the days of live broadcast – was still largely on videotape and in studio. BBC dramas made entirely on film were mostly single plays, not series or serials. Meanwhile, at ITV, drama on film was increasingly the norm, with Euston Films productions like The Sweeney (1974-78) achieving a gritty, dynamic style.
Jonathan Powell, a producer at ITV franchise holder Granada, was still mostly working on videotape, on series such as the daytime drama Crown Court (1972-84) and the award-winning The Nearly Man (1974-75). But when he moved to the BBC and took over its ‘classic serials’ strand, he was keen for these dramas to make the leap to film. When the BBC lost out to Granada in a bid to adapt Brideshead Revisited, Powell argued that part of the reason was that Granada had committed to make it on film. He presented John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as a back-up plan, and got to make it his way. The result, screened in 1979, was very much the shape of things to come – in terms of its finances (it was a co-production with America’s PBS), its casting of a cinema star in the lead role (namely Sir Alec Guinness), its pacing and structure, and its production values.