Television’s love of long-form dramas is easy to grasp. They suit the networks (who, with a hit, are guaranteed returning audiences), accountants (multiple episodes give value for money) and viewers, who find a visual equivalent to the immersive experience of a novel. Today’s television is dominated by multi-part dramas adapted from novels – War and Peace and The Night Manager – or stories with the potential to return for several runs: Line of Duty, Happy Valley.
Older consumers and creators of TV often lament that the standalone drama is dead. But now the pendulum is swinging back to those one-off dramas that once dominated our screens. After all, some subjects and storylines better suit a one-night stand. Channel 4’s The People Next Door tonight follows less than 24 hours after BBC1 screened another feature-length one-off about an honour killing, Murdered By My Father, first seen on BBC3.
The People Next Door is a great example of a drama that knows its ideal scope. Written by Ben Chanan, it concerns a young couple, expecting their first child, who become suspicious that their neighbours are guilty of child abuse. As their scrutiny leads to legal proceedings, the storyline could theoretically have occupied three or four episodes. But the compression into an hour maximises tension and claustrophobia, especially as every scene is shot from either a personal camera (phone or laptop) or an institutional one (CCTV, police video). Urgent and taut, it has the feel of a Play for Today for today.
In recent years, it must have been a struggle to construct even a respectable shortlist for the Bafta TV single-play category – but in 2016, there are strong contenders in BBC1’s The C Word and BBC3’s Don’t Take My Baby.
The resurrection of the one-off was helped by Marvellous, a 2014 bio-drama written by Peter Bowker about Neil Baldwin, a Staffordshire man who overcame learning disabilities to become a significant figure in football, higher education, clowning and the Church of England. Rave reviews for Toby Jones’s portrayal of Baldwin gave Marvellous an unusually healthy afterlife for a single play on iPlayer, DVD and streaming. Bowker has said that this success – and a Bafta victory last year, from nominees that included another much-watched one-off, BBC3’s Murdered By My Boyfriend – significantly changed the attitude of TV executives.
One concern for the genre is that Murdered By My Boyfriend, Murdered By My Father and Don’t Take My Baby all originated on BBC3, whose power to pack a punch with drama will presumably be reduced by its online-only redesign. Purists might also point out that two of those dramas can be deemed a series by default: are the producers already working on Murdered By My Mother or Murdered By My Aunt?
Still, it is good news that a form of drama that seemed dead or dying is showing such signs of health.
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