he most disconcerting aspect of the BBC Four documentary Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today is that it makes it sound as if the 1970s and 1980s were history. Of course they weren’t – I was there, I remember them. They were … just life. But “the consensus politics that had governed the UK since the end of the second world war was unravelling”, Martina Laird’s voiceover informs us. “Britain was struggling with the end of empire.” Time makes fools of us all, especially when you don’t notice it passing. Forty or fifty years ago is the past and, although we’re still technically in the same country, they did do things very differently there. They put on an original (usually) play every week on one of three mainstream channels, for a start, which garnered audiences of millions. In the 1940s, television drama, in essence, consisted of theatrical plays relocated to a BBC studio and filmed with minimal intervention or alteration. If you didn’t like it, you could stare at the wall instead. In the late 50s, the upstart network ITV introduced a series of new dramas about British life called Armchair Theatre, produced by the wunderkind Sydney Newman. When poached by the BBC in 1963, Newman created The Wednesday Play series – which became Play for Today in 1970 when sports forced a move to Thursdays. He brought in the likes of Tony Garnett as story editor, James McTaggart as producer, and Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Dennis Potter, Richard Eyre, Nell Dunn, Moira Armstrong and David Hare to write and direct what would by 1984 amount to more than 300 single dramas designed “to rattle the cages of the establishment”. “What a brief!” grins Loach now, remembering. Clips of the results abounded, each one short and closely illustrative enough of the memories, moments, evolutions and revolutions being cited by the era’s writers, producers and script editors still with us to thicken rather than dilute the story. You don’t tread water or waste a scene, I guess, when you’re marshalling your production round contributions from Eyre et al. Jokes at the time and the simplifying forces of collective memory since have given prominence and pre-eminence to the social realism strain of the dramas produced, but the clips and commentary gave due time and insight into the comedies (most memorably Leigh’s Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, along with everything the great Jack Rosenthal ever touched) and the cult splendours (everything the icily-shrewd-in-every-frame-of-old-interview-footage Potter laid agonised hand on). But it was undoubtedly the dramas that covered contemporary issues that caused the most controversy and so shaped the series itself at the time and our collective memory of it since. Cathy Come Home has become a byword – or byphrase – for art that draws public attention to emerging injustices and horrors, but the documentary reminded us of Roy Minton’s Scum, about the violence and cruelty endemic to borstals and a plethora of others that brought long-hidden suffering into the light (Up the Junction concerned a backstreet abortion) or told the story of past struggles in an attempt to thwart Britain’s apparent desire to repeat them. All Good Men, Licking Hitler, Brassneck and their ilk were a response to two decades (and counting) of perceived betrayal of Labour’s postwar promise of socialist progress – a feeling, and a series of dramas, that didn’t get any less intense when Margaret Thatcher arrived. It was a celebration (particularly of a creative freedom that most contributors could not help but shake their misty-eyed heads at in disbelief) that didn’t stray into hagiography. Divided into eight rough sections, one was devoted to the absence of women from the series’ ranks (just a dozen or so of the 300 plays were directed by women – five of those by just one of them, Moira Armstrong) and a dearth of people of colour throughout. Just three of the 300 plays were even part-scripted by non-white authors, and it was chastening to hear the Trinidad-born director Horace Ové in a 40-year-old interview noting that he was expected only to work on pieces about racism. “White directors have a wider canvas. I think black directors would like the same opportunity,” he said – a point that is necessarily still being made. Nevertheless, you could not help but feel the loss of a time when the production of great, funny, politically engaged drama for the masses was thought a priority, when controversy was generated for a reason, not for its own sake, and when a stance could be taken and debated rather than crushed by an online mob. That kind of play, you have to believe, was the thing.