Spokesman Books

Mike Harding , on his radio Folk Show , 10th April 2016, dedicated the track 'A Cut in Pay' (Rory McLeod) to Trevor Griffiths, who recently celebrated his 81st birthday. Harding billed him as ‘one of our greatest modern playwrights', extoll ing to listeners: 'You might know his work – Comedians ; Oy for England ; the film Reds ; the series Bill Brand – and he’s also written a wonderful piece for television, which I don’t think has been filmed yet, called March Time . And I do urge you to go and get hold of a magazine called Spokesman , which is a magazine of the Russell Foundation… In one of last year’s issues they’ve got the entire text ' A pod cast of the show (#172) is still avai lable on the following p a ge, with the mention of Trevor Griffiths just over six minutes in : http://www.mikehardingfolkshow.com/category/podcasts/ March Time was published in iss ue 118 of The Spokesman (ISBN 9780 85124 8202, £6), which is available to purchase HERE...

The Genesis of Bill Brand. “The political mini-series is by no means foreign to television as examples such as Washington Behind Closed Doors (1977), Blind Ambition (1979), The West Wing (1999-2006), and the 1975 Granada TV British television series The Nearly Man (featuring Tony Britton as a right-wing Labour MP) all show. But rather than interrogating political elements influencing individual lives they often focus upon personal melodramatic issues. In this way they fall within familiar conventions of the type of television drama that Griffiths sought both to utilize and subvert. Personal relationships do occupy key levels of Bill Brand but they are never divorced from the historical and political context of a society that attempts to control individual lives and from which some form of different alternative direction is needed. Since Griffiths has spoken of the significant “detail of the lives of the characters” in this series, it is important to analyze how each episode functi...

This latest volume in the Trevor Griffiths series contains all eleven episodes of the celebrated 1976 Thames TV series Bill Brand , which was the fictional account of a young left-wing Labour MP entering Parliament for the first time and attempting to influence the policies of his largely right-wing Labour government. The series was conceived on election night in 1974, written and produced over the following two years and transmitted in 1976. This was a time of great political and industrial unrest in Britain; it produced the first minority government (under Harold Wilson) since 1931, and Bill Brand was watched with extreme interest by both the political classes and the wider population. At times it seemed almost uncannily prophetic; and many of the issues it dealt with remain of great contemporary relevance. The series starred Jack Shepherd as Bill Brand, Arthur Lowe as the Prime Minister, Alan Badel, Peter Howell, Lynne Farleigh, Cherie Lunghi and many other distinguished actors. Bi...