Tony Garnett, producer, was a central figure in the group (including writer Dennis Potter and director Ken Loach) that revolutionized British television drama in the 1960s, creating something of a golden age.

Originally an actor, Garnett was recruited by Sidney Newman in 1963 as a script editor for a new BBC drama series, The Wednesday Play. British television drama in the 1950s had been dominated by classic theatrical tests done in the studio, normally live, with oc­casional 35 mm film inserts. The coming of videotape meant only that these productions were done live-to­ tape. The Wednesday Play, with a commitment to new talent and new techniques, changed all this. Influenced by the theater of Joan Littlewood (Oh What a Lovely War) and the cinema of Jean-Luc Goddard (A bout de souffle), Garnett sought contemporary, overtly radical scripts for the series, which he was producing by 1964. In 1966 he produced, with Loach directing, Cathy Come Home. Many British viewers were complacent that their nation's welfare system was among the best in the world, and this documentary-style film of the devastating effects of homelessness on one young family had enormous impact. It was the first of many controversies. Between 1967 and 1969, Garnett mounted 11 productions ranging in subject from the plight of contemporary casualized building workers (The Lump by Jim Allen, directed by Ken Loach) to aristocratic corruption in Nazi-era Germany (The Parachute by David Mercer, directed by Anthony Page). Garnett's productions became TV "events."

In the 1970s the pace slowed but not the combative quality of the work. In 1975 Days of Hope, a Jim Allen miniseries, rewrote the history of the decade before the 1926 General Strike as a betrayal of the working class by its own leaders. In 1978 another Allen miniseries, Law and Order, caused an uproar by treating professional criminals as just another group of capitalist entrepreneurs trying to turn a profit.

The Cockney criminal slang in Law and Order was so authentic that the BBC program guide had to provide a glossary. The language and northern accents in Kes, Garnett's first feature script, produced in 1969, were also so authentic that this story of a disadvantaged boy and a kestrel (small falcon) had to be subtitled.

Uncompromising politics ("self-righteous idealism" as Garnett recalls it) and rigorous authenticity created a passionate, if completely uncommercial, oeuvre. But Garnett then discovered the critical importance, the "disciplines," of popular genres during the 1980s, a decade he spent in Hollywood. Here he learned "a movie should never be about what it's about." Thus, for example, in Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird (1985) and Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), he produced two films about racial prejudice disguised as, respectively, a Sesame Street adventure and a comedy about space aliens.

In the 1990s, back in England, Garnett revisited the subjects of earlier work, but now in popular genre form. Between the Lines was a hit crime series that focused on police corruption and set in the internal investigation department of the force. Cardiac Arrest was a bitter examination of the state of Britain's socialized medical system but in the form of a black situation comedy series. Garnett, characteristically, continued to rely heavily on new talent.

Tony Garnett has been, and remains, one of the ma­jor shaping intelligences of British television drama.