TREVOR GRIFFITHS. Born in Manchester, Lancashire, England. 4 April 1935. Attended St Bede's College, Manchester, 1945-52; Manchester University, 1952-55, B.A. in English and literature, 1955; studied for external M.A. from 1961. Served in the Manchester Regiment, British Army, 1955-57. Married Janice Elaine Stansfield in 1960 (died 1977); one son and two daughters. Taught English and games at private school in Oldham, Lancashire, 1957-61; lectured in liberal studies at Stockport Technical College, Cheshire, 1962-65; co-editor, Labour's Northern Voice, 1962-65, and series editor for Workers Northern Publishing Society; further education officer, BBC, Leeds, 1965-72; debut as writer for stage, 1969; television debut, 1972. Recipient: British Academy of Film and Television Arts Writer's Award, 1981. Address: Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, 503/4, The Chambers, Chelsea Harbour, Lots Road, London SW10 0XF, England.

TELEVISION SERIES

1972 Adam Smith (under pseudonym Ben Rae)
1976 Bill Brand

TELEVISION PLAYS

1973 The Silver Mask (part of Between the Wars series)
1974 All Good Men
1974 Absolute Beginners (part of Fall of Eagles series)
1975 Don't Make Waves (part of Eleventh Hour series, with Snoo Wilson)
1975 Through the Night
1977 Such Impossibilities
1979 Comedians
1981 Sons and Lovers
1981 The Cherry Orchard (adapted from Chekhov) 1981 Country: A Tory Story
1982 Oi for England
1985 The Last Place on Earth
1988 The Party

FILMS

Reds, with Warren Beatty, 1981; Fatherland, 1987.

RADIO

The Big House, 1969; Jake's Brigade, 1971.

STAGE

The Wages of Thin, 1969; The Big House, 1975; Occupations, 1970; Apricots, 1971; Thermidor, 1971; Lay By (with others), 1971; Sam, Sam, 1972; Gun, 1973; The Party, 1973; Comedians, 1975; All Good Men, 1975; The Cherry Orchard, 1977; Deeds (with others), 1978; Oi for England, 1982; Real Dreams, 1984; Piano, 1990; The Gulf Between Us: The Truth and Other Fictions, 1992.

PUBLICATIONS (selection)

The Big House/Occupations. London: Calder and Boyars, 1972.

The Party. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

Comedians. London: Faber and Faber, 1976, 1979.

All Good Men/Absolute Beginners. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.

Through the Night/Such Impossibilities. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.

The Cherry Orchard. London: Pluto, 1978.

Apricots/Thermidor. London: Pluto, 1978.

Occupations. London: Faber and Faber, 1980.

Sons and Lovers. Nottingham: Spokesman, 1981.

Oi for England. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

Judgement Over the Dead: The Screenplay of the Last Place on Earth. London: Verso, 1986.

Fatherland. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.

Real Dreams. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.

Collected Plays for Television. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

Piano. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

The Gulf Between Us: The Truth and Other Fictions. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Hope in the Year Two. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Thatcher's Children. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Trevor Griffiths is one of Britain's most politically incisive television dramatists. He has combined television and film writing with a highly regarded theatre career because he has wanted to reach the maximum possible audience with his Socialist values.

Never a political propagandist or polemicist, Griffiths has been the leading international television proponent of "critical realism". This distinguishes between what Griffiths calls the "materialism of detail" (the surface appearance of the world) and the "materialism of forces" (the dynamic "deep structure" of a world determined by differences of power between genders, classes and ethnicities). Thus, for example, in his miniseries The Last Place On Earth (or Scott of the Antarctic, screened on commercial television in Britain) Griffiths incorporated the familiar surface details of the Scott/Amundsen competitive quest within the deep structure of what his script calls the "historical conjuncture" of 1910. On the one hand, Griffiths' imagines Scott's journey as among the dying throes of a failing British Empire (with parallels between the "heroic defeats" of Scott and the World War I fields of Flanders and Gallipoli). On the other hand, Amundsen's journey is related to the nationalism of a newly independent nation constructing its identity out of its successful explorers.

Griffiths' commitment has always been to reinventing form (the country house, hospital and "high art" genres, for example) at the same time as revealing the real agencies and structures of history. This genuinely creative radicalism has led to many conflicts with Hollywood (he came close to taking his name off Reds after disagreements with Warren Beatty), as well as to differences of view with other Socialist television workers (Ken Loach). But in a group of extraordinarily and critically creative British television dramatists who began work in the 1960s, Trevor Griffiths is unquestionably paramount in the systematic intelligence with which he has blended critical theory and popular television.

The intellectual clarity of his work has also offered the television scholar the unusual opportunity of tracing the quite specific transformations his work undergoes as it encounters the generally more conservative and conventional work practices of television set and costume designers, directors, producers, and so on. The analysis of the production of Griffiths' Sons and Lovers by Poole and Wyver, for example, indicates the way in which his counter-reading of Lawrence's classism was itself subverted by the unthinkingly naturalistic assumptions of costume design, as well as the "high art" visual flourishes of directors making "BBC classics." Similarly, Tulloch, Burvill and Hood have explored the problematic path of Griffiths' The Cherry Orchard through conventions of acting, lighting and set design.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, as an increasingly conservative British institutional establishment made it harder for Griffiths to bring his projects to air. Also, the fragmentation of television through pay TV and the proliferation of channels led to some change in his view that television was the vehicle of mass public education. In response, Griffiths has worked less for television and made important returns to the theatre (with formally innovative plays about the Gulf War and Thatcher's Britain). However, he continued to work in television, with a play on Danton, Hope in the Year Two, using the moment of the play's production (the breakdown of Communism) as a stimulus to rethink issues of Socialism by going back beyond "one revolutionary wave" (the Russian, where he focused some of his earlier works) to another, the French Revolution. This resistance to the stale "common sense" conventions of the media via new historical and formal exploration is typical of Griffiths. Like his unflinchingly tough lead character of Comedians, Gethin Price, Trevor Griffiths retains an undiminished energy for investing any interstices within popular culture with new and unsettling forms. As such he continues to be a master of "strategic penetration" as politics, media institutions and television genres continuously change their historical forms.

-John Tulloch