John Hopkins was 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 critic as "the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television." Hopkins's career in television began first as a studio manager in the 1950s, but he was soon turning his attention to writing and putting his earlier experience to good use in his plays. Few other writers have exploited so effectively the potential of the multi-camera studio in their work. After serving an apprenticeship with single plays, Hopkins rapidly established himself as a key writer for the popular BBC crime series Z Cars and, between 1962 and 1964, he wrote 53 episodes for the program. 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 with the novelist (1982). The pinnacle of Hop­ kins's achievement, however, 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 1964 launch of BBC 2, 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 theater. Talking to a Stranger, especially in its free-floating use of time, sets up a similar experimental agenda, but in other respects this program 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 center 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-absorption 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's 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. As a family drama, Talking to a Stranger bears comparison to Eugene O'Neill's great stage play A Long Day's Journey into Night. In relation to the development of the art of television, Hopkins's successful pioneering of the short series for serious drama established an important precedent in Britain, and writers of the statue of Den­ nis Potter and Alan Bleasdale subsequently followed in his example to produce some of their most distinctive work.