THE relationship between film and television drama is a fluid and constantly shifting one. In Britain, the investment policies of Channel 4 (and, more recently, the BBC) have formed the backbone of the country's film industry for the past 15 years, while British broadcasters have also been responsible for funding such successful Irish films as My Left Foot, The Crying Game and December Bride. In an era in which feature films make most of their profits from video and television sales, television has become the prime reason to make films.
It's a two way process - just as film finds itself increasingly in thrall to the demands of television, so television drama since the early 1980s has increasingly come to resemble the feature film - the studio bound plays shot on video, which used to be such a staple of television schedules, have been replaced by expensively mounted dramas which aspire to the high production standards of the movies.
The complex relationship between film and television drama in the 1990s is mirrored in the differing and sometimes overlapping involvement of the broadcasters on this island in drama production, both for cinema and for television. BBC Northern Ireland is by far the most significant player in terms of the money at its disposal - the station's Head of Television Drama, Robert Cooper, anticipates his department will be spending up to £20 million in 1997, a huge rise from expenditure a few years ago.
RTE's drama budget has also increased in the 1990s, albeit from a vary low level. According to RTE's Assistant Director of Television Programmes, David Blake Knox, the station's annual TV drama expenditure has risen from just £1 million in 1989 to more than £8 million now.
Critics of RTE's drama policy argue that the lion's share of that drama budget is devoted to sitcom and soap, but Blake Knox does not accept a divide between soap and other forms of TV drama. "I don't regard the two as separate - soap is a legitimate form of drama' specific to television. What we would hope to do, and have been moving towards (albeit slowly) is a broader range of drama. Doing soaps does not take money away from other kinds of programming. If you have a successful and active soap, it tends to feed into other drama."
Anne McCabe, Commissioning Editor at Telifis na Gaeilge, is operating on a much tighter budget than the other two broadcasters, and the new station's priority is in establishing its soap opera, Ros na Run. But TnaG has also commissioned a number of single dramas, including Gabriel Byrne's Draoicht, shown on the channel's opening night, and the more recent series of half hour films from new writers and directors.
"Our whole philosophy is to provide a showcase for new talent and a platform for writers," says McCabe, who describes TnaG's policy as "Suil eile", providing a different perspective from different voices on Irish culture and society.
It has arguably been RTE's misfortune to share much of its audience with the best television drama service in the world. The differences of scale between Ireland and the UK are huge RTE's annual drama budget is roughly equivalent to the cost of one series of Ballykissangel, which is now firmly established as a prime time hit in Britain. Next month in Dublin, BBC NI begins shooting another primetime series, The Ambassador.
It's been pointed out disapprovingly in some quarters in the North that most BBC productions have been set and shot in the South. One obvious reason for this is the more attractive financial incentives available in the Republic, but Robert Cooper acknowledges that a Southern setting is also more amenable to popular serials, while citing the importance of single television dramas set in Northern Ireland such as Graham Reid's The Precious Blood and Ronan Bennett's Love Lies Bleeding.
"The fact is that it's tough making these projects in Northern Ireland. Not in the more challenging end of drama like the Graham Reid and Ronan Bennett films, but in popular drama it's a hard nut to crack. Audiences want to feel comfortable with the material, and the world of Northern Ireland brings with it certain realities that a popular audience doesn't want to understand at 7.30 on a Sunday evening.
Until very recently, responsibility for drama within RTE was scattered, but last year the station finally appointed a drama development editor, Greg Dinner. "Development is the key," says Blake Knox. "Historically it's the area in which RTE has been weakest. When you work with very small budgets, there's always pressure to see the result of what's been spent, so there's never been sufficient commitment to the developmental process.
So what kind of new dramas can we hope to see from RTE over the next year? "I'm reluctant to make promises until the ink is dry and we're ready to go," Blake Knox, admits, but he mentions RTE's plans to make a further series of its Two Lives half hour dramas, this time in association with international broadcasters.
Other projects in development include a one off feature film coproduced with BBC Scotland, and two co produced mini series. A six hour crime series, The Cut, is planned for broadcast in 1997, as is a single "high impact" drama.
RTE has acted as co financier or co producer on many of the feature films produced here recently, including most of those currently showing in the channel's Ireland On Screen series, and is also collaborating with the Film Board on the Short Cuts programme of half hour films and on Reel Time, a series of one hour dramas.
"We have always invested in film production, even if it's not to the extent that some producers would wish," says Blake Knox. "However, our primary interest is in the production of drama specifically for television. One of the functions of Reel Time is to encourage writers to think of television drama, which I genuinely believe has a fantastic impact. The way Family connected so directly with the Irish people was quite extraordinary - it's difficult to think of any film that could have done that."
ANNE McCabe believes the specific skills of writing for television are still lacking in Ireland, and hopes to see more attention paid to the development of experienced writers. "That's the main problem we've found. It isn't easy to write scripts, and if it ain't in the script, it ain't on the screen," she says.
Among the projects in development at BBC NI, meanwhile are a new six part series written by Graham Reid, an adaptation of Deirdre Purcell's novel Falling For A Dancer, a Peter Sheridan script about the Magdalen Laundries, a six part historical drama set in Ireland between 1916 and 1923, and a four part adaptation of John McGahern's Amongst Women.
Such scripts will obviously be of direct interest to an audience in the Republic, and Cooper believes there is considerable scope for cooperation with RTE. Blake Knox agrees - hut points out that the requirements of British and Irish audiences can often differ. Family, for example, had a middling reception in the UK, but in Ireland it scored phenomenal ratings.
Ballykissangel though, is proportionately more popular in the UK than in Ireland."
Certainly, both Ballykissangel and The Ambassador adopt a familiar mechanism for making an Irish setting recognisable and acceptable to a prime time UK audience. Both series feature a central English character arriving in Ireland and experiencing its "peculiarities" (in Stranger, another BBC series currently in development, an English policeman takes a job in a rural RUC station). It's an understandable strategy, but arguably not the sort of "mediated" approach appropriate to the Irish national broadcaster.
For Robert Cooper, the relationship between British and Irish television is mutually dependent and potentially productive. "The two cultures are hugely linked, and also very separate. I suppose part of my job is in seeing which parts of Irish culture are going to be attractive or interesting to a British audience, but I'm also very concerned that that drama should appeal to an Irish audience as well."
He sees his remit with the BBC as being to Ireland as a whole, and not just to Northern Ireland and Britain. "There are a number of Northern Irish cultures, and of Irish cultures, and it's just too simplistic to separate them out. Also, the shared histories of Britain and Ireland are fascinatingly and painfully interwoven, which is the source of an enormous amount of drama."
