Tony Marchant is one of British television’s most distinctive dramatic writers. Just one of his screenplays (the comedy of transsexual love, Different for Girls), has had a theatrical release; otherwise, throughout his career, he has maintained a commitment to television drama as both the equal of cinema and the “true writer’s medium.” He has also fought against the market-led ideology of drama commissioning in the 1990s and the drive to deliver audiences by means of standardized generic formulae. In 1999, the year that he received the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Dennis Potter Award for Television Drama, he spoke up for what he called “the singular and eccentric voice” of the writer. Two dramas broad- cast in that year perhaps embody the range encom- passed by that voice. In Kid in the Corner, he drew on his own experience as the parent of a boy with learning difficulties to deliver a deeply intimate account of a couple’s relationship with a son suffering from atten- tion deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), while in Bad Blood he traced the moral disintegration of a sur- geon, desperate to adopt a Romanian boy, through the increasingly surreal metaphor of vampirism.

Marchant began his career in the fringe theater at the start of the 1980s, when, inspired by the “do it yourself” directness of punk music, he produced a string of plays for the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East. Although rooted in his East End working-class experience, however, his was not the stereotypical voice of disaffected youth. Welcome Home, about soldiers returning from the Falklands conflict to attend a friend’s funeral, carefully juggled opposing ideological views, while Raspberry explored two women’s differing experiences on a hospital gynecological ward. While at Stratford East, Marchant first worked with Adrian Shergold, the director who was to become one of his principal collaborators on television and whose film- ing would bring to his work a potent rhythmic and vi- sual style.

It was with a screen version of Raspberry, produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1984, that Marchant moved into writing for television. The play was well received, and he followed it over the next five years with a string of single dramas on socially resonant topics ranging from money dealing in the London foreign exchange (The Moneymen) to the struggle by a mother to bring to justice the people responsible for her son’s death from a drug overdose (Death of a Son). In 1989 the BBC broadcast his first serial, the three-part Take Me Home. It is the story of a passionate and ultimately doomed affair between a middle-aged man, forced into redundancy and now working as a minicab driver, and the young wife of a successful computer programmer. Set against the high- tech sterility of a British “new town,” the story pro- vided a potent metaphor of social and spiritual isolation in a culture imbued with the apparent virtues of success and prosperity. This was followed by two further three-part dramas, Goodbye Cruel World, about a woman suffering from an unspecified and incurable form of motor neuron disease and her husband’s campaign to set a charity on her behalf, and Into the Fire, in which a hitherto upstanding businessman’s involvement in insurance fraud to save his company leads to the death of a young employee and a relationship with the boy’s mother. In each work, one can begin to recognize Marchant’s characteristic preoccupation with motives and principles and his engagement with serial drama as a means of following through the complex ethical ramifications of impulsive but socially induced actions.

It is this concern, amplified into a sweeping narrative of epic proportions, that permeates what could be considered Marchant’s masterpiece. The eight-episode serial Holding On was inspired by sources as diverse as Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Robert Altman’s multistranded film Short Cuts and was com- missioned by the BBC on the back of the success enjoyed by Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North. Its setting is London and its subject the city and the con- nections that lie, dark and unrecognized, between the disparate lives of its inhabitants. The violent death of a young woman at the hands of a schizophrenic provides the catalyst for a dark journey through cause and ef- fect, culpability and guilt, involving a range of charac- ters who either were linked to the victim and the perpetrator or witnessed the event. Marchant’s vision of corrupted social responsibility is embodied in the central story of a tax inspector lured into bribery by the millionaire whom he is investigating for fraud, while the London Underground replaces Dickens’s River Thames as the metaphoric thoroughfare ominously linking the lives of the characters.

Marchant was subsequently commissioned to dramatize Dickens’s Great Expectations, to which he brought a contemporary sense of the preoccupation with social class, and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Pun- ishment, another tale of unraveling guilt. For the BBC’s series of modern adaptations of The Canter- bury Tales, his version of The Knight’s Tale transposed Chaucer’s story of courtly love into a gripping account of the rivalry between two prisoner friends for the love of a continuing-education language tutor, revealing po- etic passion, tenderness, and honor in a seemingly bru- talized world. A similar reversal of expectation permeates Never, Never, a story of the relationship be- tween a loan shark debt collector and a young woman living on an inner-London estate. Here, as in Swallow, where a woman addicted to antidepressants battles with a pharmaceutical company, and Passer-By, which follows the terrible consequences of a man’s decision to ignore the appeal of a woman in distress, Marchant creates a modern social fable that has not only a wider political resonance but, at its core, a deeply intimate story of goodness and hope. His characters are on jour- neys, the ends of which are never predictable but that invariably entail an encounter with moral and social responsibility. “I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that I was brought up a Catholic,” he admits in an interview article by Louise Bishop, published in Television in May 1998. “I have to admit that a lot of the stuff I write is to do with redemption and guilt.”