JOHN PETER MCGRATH. Born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, 1 June 1935. Attended Alun Grammar School, Mold, Wales; St John's College, Oxford (Open Exhibitioner), 1955-59, Dip. Ed. Served in British Army (national service), 1953-55. Married: Elizabeth MacLennan in 1962; two sons and one daughter. Worked on farm in Neston, Cheshire, 1951; play reader, Royal Court Theatre, London, and writer for the theater, 1958-61; writer and director for BBC Television, 1960-65; founder and artistic director, 7:84 Theatre Company, 1971-88; continued to write for stage, television and films; director, Freeway Films, since 1983; Channel Four Television, London, since 1989. Judith E. Wilson Fellow, Cambridge University, 1979. Address: Freeway Films, 67 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2JG, Scotland.

TELEVISION SERIES

1961 Bookstand (also director)
1962 Z Cars (also director)
1963 Tempo
1964 Diary of a Young Man (with Troy Kennedy Martin)

TELEVISION SPECIALS (selection)

1961 The Compartment (director)
1963 The Fly Sham (director)
1963 The Wedding Dress (director)
1964 The Entertainers (also director)
1965 The Day of Ragnarok (also director)
1965 Mo (also director)
1966 Shotgun (with Christopher Williams; also director) 1966 Diary of a Nobody (with Ken Russell)
1971 Orkney
1972 Double Bill (director)
1972 Bouncing Boy
1977 Once Upon a Union
1978 Z Cars: The Final Episode (director)
1979 The Adventures of Frank (also director)
1983 Come to Mecca (director)
1984 Sweetwater Memories
1986 Blood Red Roses (also director)
1987 There Is a Happy Land

FILMS

Billion Dollar Brain, 1967; The Bofors Gun, 1968; The Virgin Soldiers (with John Hopkins and Ian La Frenais), 1969; The Reckoning, 1970; Blood Red Roses, 1986 (director); The Dressmaker, 1989; Carrington, 1995 (producer).

STAGE

A Man Has Two Fathers, 1958; The Invasion, with Barbara Cannings, 1958; The Tent, 1958; Why the Chicken, 1959; Tell Me Tell Me, 1960; Take It, 1960; The Seagull, 1961; Basement in Bangkok, 1963; Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun, 1966; Bakke's Night of Fame, 1968; Comrade Jacob, 1969; Random Happenings in the Hebrides, 1970; Sharpeville Crackers, 1970; Unruly Elements, 1971; Trees in the Wind, 1971; Soft or a Girl, 1971; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1972l; Prisoners of the War, 1972; Underneath, 1972 (also director); Sergeant Musgrave Dances On, 1972; Fish in the Sea, 1972; The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, 1973 (also director); The Game's a Bogey, 1974 (also director); Boom, 1974 (also director); Lay Off, 1975 (also director); Little Red Hen, 1975 (also director); Oranges and Lemons, 1975 (also director); Yobbo Nowt, 1975 (also director); The Rat Trap, 1976 (also director); Out of Our Heads, 1976 (also director); Trembling Giant, 1977; The Life and Times of Joe of England, 1977 (also director); Big Square Fields, 1979; Joe's Drum, 1979 (also director); Bitter Apples, 1979; If You Want to Know the Time, 1979; Swings and Roundabouts, 1980 (also director); Blood Red Roses, 1980 (also director); Nightclass, 1981 (also director); The Catch, 1981; Rejoice!, 1982; On the Pig's Back, with David MacLennan, 1983; The Women of the Dunes, 1983; Women in Power, 1983; Six Men of Dorset, 1984; The Baby and the Bathwater: The Imperial Policeman, 1984; The Albannach, 1985; Behold the Sun, 1985; All the Fun of the Fair, with others, 1986; Border Warfare, 1989; John Brown's Body, 1990; Watching for Dolphins, 1991; The Wicked Old Man, 1992; The Silver Darlings, 1994.

PUBLICATIONS

Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun. London: Methuen, 1966.

Random Happenings in the Hebrides. London: Davis Poynter, 1972.

Bakke's Night of Fame. London: Davis Poynter, 1973.

The Game's a Bogey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Student Publications, 1975.

Little Red Hen. London: Pluto Press, 1977.

Fish in the Sea. London: Pluto Press, 1977.

Yobbo Nowt. London: Pluto Press, 1978.

Joe's Drum. Aberdeen: People's Press, 1979.

Two Plays for the Eighties. Aberdeen: People's Press, 1981.

The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil. London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.

A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form. London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.

The Bone Won't Break: On Theatre and Hope in Hard Times. London: Methuen, 1990.

John McGrath has had a career marked by absolute commitment to working-class politics in theatre, film, and television. McGrath's theatrical career spans London's Royal Court and the Liverpool Everyman to his own 7:84 Company ("7% of the population own 84% of the wealth"), while his film credits extend from Russell's Billion Dollar Brain to rewrites on Fox's Adventures of Robin Hood. His TV career opened with Kenneth Tynan's formative arts programme Tempo, while his 1963 Granada documentary The Entertainers won critical plaudits. With Troy Kennedy Martin and John Hopkins, McGrath stamped BBC's Z Cars as the breakthrough cop drama of the 1960s, fired by moral uncertainty and Royal Court grittiness. McGrath hallmarked the series with a profound compassion for his protagonists, instituting a concern for real lives among the social problems that were already, however comfortably, addressed by earlier genre offerings. The use of 16mm film allowed for actual locations, and the shift from received pronunciation to the vernacular of his native Merseyside opened the way, notably in Stratford Johns' performance as Inspector Barlow, for subsequent generations of tough cop stories. McGrath took the combination of entertainment formula and social concern which distinguished much of the best of the BBC's output in the 1960s to his work as producer and director for BBC2 experimental dramas by, among others, Johnny Speight, Edna O'Brien and his own adaptation, with Ken Russell, of The Diary of a Nobody in the style of a silent comedy. Continuing to work in theatre, he eventually amassed over 40 scripts, one of which became a successful movie, The Bofors Gun, directed by Jack Gold, a chilling account of class war and military service.

McGrath's contribution to a militant, populist theatre is documented in his first book, A Good Night Out, and in the remarkable 1974 The Cheviot, the Stage and the Black Black Oil, documenting 7:84's Scottish tour of a play about the history of British colonialism in Scotland. One of the most surprisingly successful TV dramas of its time, The Cheviot uses the stage play's combination of farce, communal singing, and sketches, intercut with location reconstructions of historical episodes of both oppression and resistance to convey the stages of British rule from the clearances of the peasantry to make way for the wool-bearing cheviot sheep, through the further depredations made to clear land for hunting, concluding with interviews, documentary footage and more dramatic interludes to draw parallels with the contemporary exploitation of Scottish oil-fields by international interests. The programme, like the stage version, ends with more singing, and an invitation to the on-screen audience to join in traditional dancing, an embrace of community which characterises his work over the last twenty years.

Appalled by bureaucracy and mismanagement in the arts, he resigned from the 7:84 theatre company, which he had founded, in 1981. In 1984, he started Freeway Films, dedicated to producing programmes and features for his adopted homeland in Scotland. Characteristically committed to social causes, to political entertainment and to the immediacy of performance (whose demise with the rise of videotape he has not ceased to mourn), Freeway began to produce, largely for Channel 4, a series of programmes including Poets and People, in which leading poets read their work to audiences with whom they felt particular affinities, in housing estates and clubs. Sweetwater Memories, based on McGrath's military service in Suez, opened a more personal vein in his writing, expanded upon in the 1986 three-part series Blood Red Roses, co-produced with Lorimar and subsequently cut for theatrical release. Roses follows the life of Bessie MacGuigan from life in the rural hinterlands with her disabled father, through unsuccessful marriage to a Communist Party activist, to trades unionism among the women workers of East Kilbride. Played with passionate conviction by two lead actresses, the narrative, typically for McGrath, does not mourn the victim but celebrates the fighter.

The remarkable trilogy on Scottish history and English colonialism comprising There is a Happy Land, Border Warfare and John Brown's Body is a record of the epic productions performed at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre. Like The Cheviot, the trilogy transfers startlingly from stage to screen. In the 1974 McTaggart lecture to the Edinburgh Television Festival, McGrath had attacked naturalism as the mainstay of British television: the constructivist sets, audience interaction and melodramatic acting styles of the trilogy devoted to "the story of 1,000 years of invasion, suppression, massacre, pillage, attempted annihilation, betrayal and treachery" proves McGrath's case that popular art does not demand realist narration. In 1992, McGrath provided an election broadcast for the Labour Party, some of whose themes are picked up in 1993's The Long Roads, a picaresque romance which, like Ozu's Tokyo Story, anchors a dissection of contemporary mores in the reviving romance of an elderly couple visiting their children, scattered through Thatcher's Britain. As the parents visit in turn the policemen, the massage-parlour hostess, the technologist without social conscience, the kept wife of a financial wheeler-dealer and a despairing sociologist, the decency of a world denied by the consumer boom and individualist policies of the 1980s is portrayed in warm colours. In Tristram Powell's direction, the story centres on the relationship between the old people, giving back to McGrath's small-screen work a personal touch not seen since Sweetwater ten years before.

Despite major illness, McGrath completed the feature Mairi Mhor in 1994 and remains fiercely active in theatre and film as well as television. Unlike some of his more famous theatrical contemporaries, he has retained a commitment to regionalism, and to nationalism in the case of Scotland, turning to television as the most effective way of bringing the power of drama to the widest audience. Perhaps his career is best summed up in the subtitle to his book The Bone Won't Break: Theatre and Hope in Hard Times.

-Sean Cubitt