Cultural archive

Here's an idea for a season: a selection of the plays produced by Richard Broke for the BBC. Richard died this week at the age of 70.  His catalogue is immense, and reminds you how different drama was at the BBC before it became a "brand". I'm not sure it's necessarily remarkable because Richard did his job from a wheelchair, after a car crash while working as a BBC trainee. Here are a fewer nuggets...

In 1979 he produced The Serpent Son, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy (translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish). The three parts ran at 9.25 on BBC1 on successive Wednesdays - a tad more cultural than a four-parter, say, about car parking. The cast included Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Flora Robson, Denis Quilley, Claire Bloom, Billie Whitelaw and Sian Phillips. Costumes were by Barbara Kidd, taking a break from Dr Who. There was also a follow-up mickey-take, as was a tradition in Greek drama, from Raphael and McLeish, starring Diana Dors as Helen, Freddie Jones as Menelaus, and Bob Hoskins as the servant Mr Taramasalatatopoulos.

In 1986 he produced The Monocled Mutineer, a four-part dramatisation by Alan Bleasdale of a book about the Etaples Mutiny, and the story of deserter Percy Toplis. No-one disagreed about the fact that there were mutinies in the 1914-18 war, but they did about the scale of them, and whether they mattered - particularly at the Telegraph and Mail. Here's also an early example of the BBC getting into trouble over marketing - in newspaper ads, this drama was branded a "true life story". DG Alasdair Milne blamed the agency - but it added to his woes, and he was forced out the next year.

In 1991, Richard produced a tv version of A Question of Attribution, originally a one-act stage play by Alan Bennett, starring James Fox and Prunella Scales, and directed by John Schlesinger. Schedulers can pick from more than 20 plays produced by Richard in the Screen One series that ran from 1989 to 1993 - one of the more recent attempts to bring back the great days of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today.