Richard Hewett

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London

This title is an historical overview and a then-and-now comparison of performing for British television drama. By examining changing acting styles from distinct eras of television production - studio realism and location realism - it makes a unique contribution to both television and performance studies, unpacking the various determinants that have...

The importance of copyright with regard to television versions of literary works has only recently begun to be considered in adaptations studies, but offers an intriguing perspective not only on what can be transferred, but how. Few characters have been adapted more frequently than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, yet the majority of his s...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, currently enjoying renewed popularity on television via the BBC's Sherlock (2010-), have been adapted for the screen countless times around the world. Arguably the best remembered are Granada's long-running strand with Jeremy Brett (1984-94) and the Universal film series of the 1940s featuring Basil...

Although spaces of television drama performance have increasingly come under scrutiny in recent years, of arguably equal importance are those sites utilised for the purpose of preparation - the nature of which has altered radically in British television since the 1990s. The shift to single-camera location filming that now came to predominate saw a...

This chapter utilises three small screen adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Hound of the Baskervilles, from 1968, 1988 and 2011, to explore the evolution of acting for British television. These case studies are employed to illustrate the developing styles represented by the models of studio realism and location realism, which coinc...

A notable feature of Channel 4’s scheduling in the 1980s was the extent to which it drew upon repeats of archive television, long-unseen US and UK sitcoms and cult dramas either providing a nostalgic reminder of yesteryear or being discovered afresh by new generations. In addition, the themed archive evenings that began at Christmas 1982, culminati...

Despite their renown as one of the most successful double acts in British television history, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise have received scant academic attention. However, they have been celebrated in numerous biographies and documentaries, as result of which various narratives have come to be constructed around them: namely, that their success at...

This article investigates the impact of production process upon character agency in early Doctor Who, focusing on the period between 1963 and 1966, during which time William Hartnell starred as the Doctor. As originally conceived by Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert and David Whitaker, it is debatable to what extent the Doctor could be regarded as the...

Harold Pinter worked successfully for many decades as an actor, making numerous, albeit intermittent, appearances on television, on stage and in film in addition to his distinguished writing career. Pinter’s acting spanned the television eras I have identified as studio realism and location realism. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, his s...

Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who – unpredictable, embattled, mercurial – has raised many fresh issues for followers of the Time Lord. In this book, the first to address the Capaldi era in depth, international experts on the show explore Capaldi's portrayal of the Doctor, and Steven Moffat's role as show writer and executive producer. They evaluate the ef...

While location realism would seem to predominate in the 2010s, live drama continues to be popular in the form of ‘one-off’ specials and ‘event’ television. Special anniversary episodes of soap operas EastEnders (BBC, 1985- ) and Coronation Street (ITV, 1960- ) in 2015, plus the 2005 re-mount of The Quatermass Experiment and the combination of theat...

The huge shift that has taken place in British television drama production in the 2000s, away from multi-camera studio and towards single camera location (and occasional soundstage) work, has been mirrored in performance style. Television now having supplanted theatre as the medium in which actors are now most likely to gain their first professiona...

Just as studio realism reached its apotheosis in the 1970s, BBC television drama showed signs of moving away from the multi-camera practices of Television Centre and out onto location. While technologically primitive compared to the cameras used today, the early employment of Outside Broadcast videotape equipment for drama (as opposed to live sport...

The methodological approaches employed herein offer as complete a picture as possible of the determinants of British television acting, and cover distinct historical periods. In the live era, from the mid-1930s up to the early 1960s, the type of experience gained by actors was arguably of greater importance than duration. Many were unaccustomed to...

Though still commonly referred to as the ‘early’ era of television, by 1953 it was possible for actors working in the medium to have acquired over a decade of experience. The Quatermass Experiment features a cast taken from a variety of backgrounds, with differing amounts of television experience. The ways in which this informs performance style ar...

By the early 1960s television was more established and widespread, and its conventions were beginning to be tacitly understood by audiences and performers alike. While the introduction of videotape pre-recording, as employed on Doctor Who , did little to change the ‘outside’ rehearsal and multi-camera studio performance template of the live era, it...

While acting for television has, over the last decade, come to form a major part of the training provided by most British drama academies, this was not in fact the first attempt to address the issue of preparing students for small screen work. In the 1960s and 70s RADA and the Central School of Speech and Drama were among several schools to begin t...

Currently enjoying a renewed lease of television life in the form of Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock Holmes is one of literature’s most adapted figures. The detective has, however, featured in comparatively few British television series (as opposed to singles and serials), the best remembered of which are arguably Granada’s productions of the 1980s...

While textual analysis provides a useful tool for examining archive screen performances, purely immanent readings often ignore the contextualising factors which help shape them; this article therefore sets out to examine the various determinants of television acting and how they have changed between the live, multi-camera studio era and the present...

It is only comparatively recently that performance in arenas other than theatre and cinema has begun to receive serious academic attention. The ‘Spaces of Television’ project and the University of York’s ‘Playing the Small Screen’ symposium have each opened up discussions regarding the impact of production process and space upon television acting,...

In terms of lead characters, the Doctor is unique in television drama. Possessed of the ability to physically ‘regenerate’ his body, he can be portrayed by actors who are both physically dissimilar and – perhaps more significantly – personologically distinct, each actor cast in the role having provided a marked contrast with his predecessor. Howeve...

While the development of British television drama has been well charted, comparatively little work has been conducted with regard to the medium's impact on acting style. This article is intended to address that lack, evolving a framework of 'studio realism' and 'location realism' to examine how changes in production can affect acting in television...

Since its re-launch in 2005 Doctor Who has become one of the BBC’s flagship dramas, as representative of modern television production techniques as its predecessor was of the traditional studio system employed by the Corporation until the early 1990s. The two versions of the programme present marked contrasts in terms of both production process and...

My paper will investigate how changes in location and mode of production affect acting in television drama, using Survivors (BBC, 1975-77) as a case study. The series was originally produced along the same lines as other 1970s BBC telefantasy series such as Doctor Who and Blake’s 7: filmed location work, followed by rehearsal at the purpose-built ‘...

My paper will investigate how changes in location and mode of production affect acting in television drama, using Survivors (BBC, 1975-77) as a case study. Originally produced along the traditional BBC lines of filmed location work followed by rehearsal at the purpose-built Acton rooms (typically two weeks for a 50-minute episode of drama) and two...

My paper will investigate how changes in location and mode of production affect acting in television drama, using Survivors (BBC, 1975-77) as a case study. Originally produced along the traditional BBC lines of filmed location work followed by rehearsal at the purpose-built Acton rooms (typically two weeks for a 50-minute episode of drama) and two...

My paper will investigate how changes in location and mode of production affect acting in television drama, using Survivors (BBC, 1975-77) as a case study. Originally produced along the traditional BBC lines of filmed location work followed by rehearsal at the purpose-built Acton rooms (typically two weeks for a 50-minute episode of drama) and two...