Women writers and writing women into histories of Play for Today

This article emerges from a research project which explores the contribution women writers have made to Play for Today. The project seeks to use the flagship series as a case study, to highlight the significance of the single play in the histories of women’s work in television drama; identify the attendant gender politics of television production which have contributed to the high levels of inequality therein and to critically analyse women’s creative contributions to the television play. There has been very little sustained research of these issues, to a great extent because of the association of single play with masculinity. This sphere of drama production has, as this flagship series illustrates, been male-dominated; only 13% of the Play for Today series were written by women, 23% produced by women and only 4% directed by women. The critical neglect of women’s contributions to the single play has largely been attributed to the male-dominance of the industry and the attendant invisibility of women in archives (Moseley and Wheatley, 2008) and television drama histories (Caughie, 2000; Cooke, 2003, 2015). The aim of this article is to use Play for Today as a case study to cast new light on the contributions women have made to the single play, and concomitantly, the significance of Play for Today and the single play in historiographies of women writers and British television drama.