JOHN RICHARD HOPKINS. Born in London, England, 27 January 1931. Attended Raynes Park County Grammar School; St Catherine's College, Cambridge, B.A. in English. Served in the British Army, 1950-51. Married: 1) Prudence Balchin, 1954; 2) Shirley Knight, 1970; two daughters. Began career as television studio manager; worked as writer for BBC Television, initially as first scriptwriter of Z Cars, 1962-64; freelance since 1964. Recipient: two Screenwriters Guild Awards. Address: William Morris Agency, 31=-32 Soho Square, London W1V 6AP, England.

TELEVISION SERIES

1961      A Chance of Thunder
1962-65 Z Cars
1964     Parade's End
1966     Talking to a Stranger
1968     The Gambler
1977     Fathers and Families
1982     Smiley's People (co-writer, with John Le Carré)

TELEVISION SPECIALS

1958 Break Up
1958 After the Party
1959 The Small Back Room
1959 Dancers in Mourning
1960 Death of a Ghost
1961 A Woman Comes Home
1961 By Invitation Only
1962 The Second Curtain
1962 Look Who's Talking
1963 A Place of Safety
1964 The Pretty English Girls
1964 I Took My Little World Away
1964 Time Out of Mind
1964 Houseparty
1965 The Make-Believe Man
1965 Fable
1965 Horror of Darkness
1965 A Man Like Orpheus
1966 Some Place of Darkness
1966 A Game--Like--Only a Game
1969 Beyond the Sunrise
1970 The Dolly Scene
1971 Some Distant Shadow
1972 That Quiet Earth
1972 Walk into the Dark
1972 The Greeks and Their Gifts
1976 A Story to Frighten the Children
1976 Double Dare
1987 Codename Kyril

FILMS

Two Left Feet, with Roy Baker, 1963; Thunderball, with Richard Maibaum, 1965; The Virgin Soldiers, with John McGrath and Ian La Frenais, 1969; Divorce--His, Divorce--Hers, 1972; The Offence, 1973; Murder by Decree, 1980; The Power, with John Carpenter and Gerald Brach, 1983; The Holcroft Covenant, with George Axelrod and Edward Anhalt, 1985.

STAGE

This Story of Yours, 1968; Find Your Way Home, 1970; Economic Necessity, 1973; Next of Kin, 1974; Losing Time, 1979; Valedictorian, 1982; Absent Forever, 1987.

PUBLICATIONS

Talking to a Stranger: Four Television Plays. London: Penguin, 1967.

"A Place of Safety," published in Z Cars: Four Scripts From the Television Series, edited by Michael Marland. London: Longman, 1968.

"A Game--Like--Only a Game," published in Conflicting Generations: Five Television Plays, edited by Michael Marland. London: Longman, 1968.

This Story of Yours. London: Penguin, 1969.

Find Your Way Home. London: Penguin, 1971; New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Losing Time. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1983.

John Hopkins is one of the great pioneers of British television drama, whose considerable output as a writer includes the award-winning play quartet, Talking to a Stranger, described by one contemporary critic as "the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television". Hopkins' career in television began first as a studio manager in the 1950s, but he was soon turning his attention to writing and putting this earlier experience to good use in his plays, and there are few other writers who have exploited so effectively the potential of the multi-camera studio in their work. After serving an apprenticeship with single plays he rapidly established himself as a key writer for the popular BBC crime series, Z-Cars, and between 1962-64 wrote 53 episodes for the programme. He went on to write noted single plays such as Horror of Darkness (1965) and A Story to Frighten the Children (1976) and also to adapt Dostoevsky's The Gambler (1968) and John Le Carre's Smiley's People (1982) with the novelist. The pinnacle of his achievement though is undoubtedly his 1966 series, Talking to a Stranger, directed by Christopher Morahan and shown on BBC-2.

The 1960s in Britain provided a golden age for writers of TV drama with well over 300 hours a year available in the schedules for original work. The launch of BBC-2 in 1964, in particular, opened up opportunities for serious TV drama and exploration of television as an Art. Experimentation with form was being discussed openly by writers and Troy Kennedy-Martin, the originator of the Z-Cars series, produced a manifesto for a new TV drama free from the conventional spatial and temporal constraints of naturalist theatre. Talking to a Stranger, especially in its free-floating use of time, sets up a similar experimental agenda, but in other respects remains rooted in a familiar naturalism and the close-up observation of ordinary people.

Nothing could be more mundane than the basic situation at the centre of this family drama. A grown-up daughter and her brother go back home to visit their aging father and mother, but the emotional collisions that arise provoke unexpected tragedy--the suicide of the mother. Some of the same events, are repeated from one play to the next, but the viewpoint changes as each play focuses on a different character. In this way the series provides a sustained opportunity to explore subjective experience. The self-aborption of the characters is enhanced by the use of experimental devices that include extended monologues, overlapping dialogue, lingering reaction shots, and film flashbacks in time.

Hopkins vision of human loneliness and alienation may be an uncompromisingly bleak and pessimistic one, but it is made compelling through his artistic manipulation of the television medium. Talking To a Stranger as a family drama bears comparison with Eugene O'Neill's great stage play A Long Day's Journey into Night. In relation to the development of art television, Hopkins' successful pioneering of the short series for serious drama established an important precedent in Britain, and writers of the stature of Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale have subsequently followed in his example to produce some of their most distinctive work.

-Bob Millington