Performing Right(s): Legal Constraints and Beckett's Plays on BBC Television

Abstract

Drawing on BBC archival documentation, this article outlines how BBC television versions of Beckett's plays were affected by copyright. Rights to record and broadcast original drama for the screen differ from those governing adaptations of existing theatre plays. Rights can be assigned for specific territories and periods of time, and are negotiated and traded via complex contractual agreements. Examining how Beckett's agents and the BBC dealt with rights sheds new light on the history of his work on television.

Black screens

“…Long before Asmus's adaptations of What Where, production methods on Beckett's television plays were unusual in their relationships between image and sound and in the technology used to realise them (Bignell, 2003). One of the similarities between the 1986 and 2013 versions is that both were shot as-live, with multiple cameras.…”

Pop Beckett

“…Television was the key popular medium of the second half of the twentieth century in the UK, and Beckett's work was consistently aired by the BBC, the British non-commercial TV broadcaster that had already featured his work on radio since the mid-1950s (Bignell 2009). Beckett had a consistent presence in the mass media; in that sense radio and television created a 'pop Beckett' simply by making some of his work accessible to a diverse national public.…”

“…But it was never popular in the sense that a lot of people liked it (Bignell 2009, 180-182). Popularity has several meanings in a television context (Bignell 2010), but in an industrial and commercial sense the term can refer either to sheer viewer numbers (the ratings for a specific programme), or to a broadcaster's performance relative to its competitors (the audience share that is attracted to one broadcaster's output rather than another's at a specific moment). To take the example of the first of Beckett's theatre plays adapted for television, Waiting for Godot (1957b) was broadcast on BBC TV in 1961 but attracted only 5 per cent of the UK population, compared to 22 per cent who watched the commercial ITV channel that evening instead (BBC 1961).…”

“…The drama was very popular, gaining an audience of 11 million, placing it among the most-watched programmes of the week (Billington 2007, 110). ABC made Pinter's A Night Out (1963) for Armchair Theatre in 1964, and A-R and another ITV company, Granada, commissioned five original drama and adapted theatre plays from Pinter in the years preceding The Present Stage (Bignell 2018). While there is no guarantee that Godot would have attracted audiences as large as those for Pinter's plays, which are less demanding formally than Beckett's, if A-R had been able to lure Beckett away from the BBC his work would perhaps have complemented ITV's largely successful strategies to make contemporary drama popular.…”

“…Of course, the possibility of making the programme depended on having rights to quote and perform extracts from Beckett's text. Beckett often refused permission to perform cut, altered or adapted versions of his plays, and this stance was vigorously enforced by his literary agent Curtis Brown (Bignell 2015). However, Beckett did agree to the use of extracts in programmes with an informal educational agenda, including The Present Stage.…”