Authorship and Organisation

Abstract

Commentators who have considered the role of the writer in television drama have tended to start either from notions of authorship and creativity, or from the organisation of production. The first approach stresses the writers’ relative autonomy and their pre-eminent role in shaping the final text. In this version they are assimilated to the romantic stereotype of the artist ‘working alone to carve a personal vision out of the marble of his sensibility’.¹ Organisationally-oriented approaches, on the other hand, present writers as relatively powerless and enmeshed in a web of ideological and economic pressures which curtail their choices and channel their work in certain directions. In these accounts they appear as craftsmen rather than creators, professionals on a par with journalists and copy-writers, working within well-understood constraints to turn saleable ideas into shootable scripts. The text is no longer the unique expression of the author’s sensibilities, but a collective product manufactured by an industrial process and subject to the insistent pressures of time, resources and market competition.

Screen Education, no. 35, Summer 1980.