Bill Brand the screenplays by Trevor Griffiths

Tribune - 8th January 2010

Bill Brand: The Screenplays
by Trevor Griffiths
Spokesman Books, £18

"Trevor Griffiths is best known for stage plays such as Thatcher’s Children, Oi for England and the recently revived Comedians, as well as his screenplays for such films as Reds and Fatherland. But 30-odd years ago he wrote Bill Brand, an ambitious television series broadcast on ITV at peak time – 9pm – in 1976. It starred Jack Shepherd as an idealistic young left-wing MP who finds himself at odds with the pragmatists in a party which wants to hang on to power. Bill Brand showed, once again, the ability of this talented political playwright to dramatise the ideological conflicts of the left during those tumultuous years. Here, in all their glory, are his original scripts."

Keith Richmond

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