Screen Two at 40: Television Drama and Film, NFT3, BFI Southbank, London, 12 November 2025, 11:00 – 17:00
Tickets for the symposium may be purchased here.
Tickets for the screening of Priest may be purchased here.
Overview
Launched by the BBC in 1985 as a successor to Play for Today, Screen Two featured an eclectic range of over 150 single dramas, including The Burston Rebellion, Brothers in Trouble, The Grass Arena, The Firm, Edward II, Persuasion, O Mary This London, My Sister-Wife, Small Faces, Truly, Madly, Deeply and Priest.
On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, this symposium brings together television professionals and scholars to assess the contribution of Screen Two to television and film production, examine the more general transition from the single play to the television film that occurred during this period and assess the legacy of both Screen Two and the ‘television film’.
In doing so, the symposium will not only seek to reflect on the achievements of Screen Two but also consider their relevance to current UK film and television production.
Schedule
11.00 – 11.10 Welcome: John Hill, Xavier Pillai
11:10 – 11:55 Introduction: Lillian Crawford
This presentation, including clips, will cover the span of Screen Two, from Alan Clarke’s Contact in 1985 to Stephen Poliakoff’s The Tribe in 1998, and discuss the reasons for re-assessing the strand during its 40th anniversary year.
12:00 – 13:00 Panel 1: Television Drama in Transition
Panellists: Ruth Caleb, Andrea Calderwood, George Faber, David Thompson Chair: John Hill
This panel will consider the beginnings of Screen Two, the shift in BBC policy it manifested and the transition from the single television play to the ‘television film’ it involved. The panel will consider why and how this occurred and with what results.
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 14:55 Panel 2: A Generation of Women
Panellists: Ruth Baumgarten, Lesley Manning, Nia Childs Chair: Lillian Crawford
The number of women working in film and television significantly increased during the run of Screen Two. This panel will include some of those involved and consider issues of access to the industry and the types of opportunities offered by the BBC and Film on Four during this period.
15:00 – 15:55 Panel 3: The Artistic and Cultural Legacy
Panellists: Suri Krishnamma, Christine Geraghty, David Thompson, John Wyver Chair: Lisa Kerrigan
This panel will reflect on the achievements of Screen Two, its model of making television single drama and films, and the fusion of film and television aesthetic to which it led. It will consider what the legacy of the series is 40 years on and assess its relevance for today’s film and television landscape.
16:00 – 17:00 Keynote Q&A: Jimmy McGovern Chair: Mark Duguid
18:00 Screening: Priest + introduction (Jimmy McGovern and George Faber with Lillian Crawford) (Booking separately)
Notes on Participants
Ruth Baumgarten was a critic before joining the BBC where she produced films, series and serials across the Television Drama department. Among many other productions, she is best-known for The Grass Arena, which among other awards, won the Michael Powell Prize for Best Film as well as being nominated for a BAFTA Best Film. Ghostwatch was the first fake factual horror film, taken for real by large parts of the record-breaking audience and has since gained a cult following. The Screen Two film My Sister Wife, and the serial A Respectable Trade, both won The Race in the Media Award and the latter was also nominated for a BAFTA for Best Drama Serial. The detective series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries ran for eight seasons and is still being screened.
Andrea Calderwood is an independent producer and partner in Potboiler Productions. Andrea was previously Head of Drama at BBC Scotland, where she commissioned numerous drama series and award-winning films, including Ratcatcher and Mrs Brown; she was then Head of Production at Pathé Pictures where she commissioned several films including Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim, and Oliver Parker’s An Ideal Husband. Establishing her own company Slate Films in 2000, and joining forces with Potboiler in 2009, Andrea has produced and executive-produced over 60 award-winning feature films and TV series to date, with highlights including the John Le Carré adaptation A Most Wanted Man, the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie adaptation Half of a Yellow Sun, Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos, Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Andrea won the BAFTA for Best British Film for The Last King of Scotland as well as receiving an Emmy Award nomination for the acclaimed HBO series Generation Kill with David Simon. Recent projects include two seasons of the award-winning comedy drama Funny Woman, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s second feature Rob Peace and K’naan Warsame’s debut feature Mother Mother as well as Lynne Ramsay’s feature film Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, which has just released worldwide.
Ruth Caleb is a multi-award winning producer/ executive producer. She joined the BBC in 1965 from the theatre as an Assistant Floor Manager and stayed for the next 48 years, first on staff and then contract. She was the BBC’s first female head of drama as Head of BBC Wales Drama in the early 1990s. Her production credits include many award-winning television and film dramas, including Sweet As You Are, The Lost Language of Cranes, Pat and Margaret, Genghis Cohn, Tomorrow La Scala, Care (which won a Prix Italia and a BAFTA), A Short Stay in Switzerland and A Poet in New York. Theatrical releases include Last Resort, Bullet Boy, Stonewall and Shooting Dogs. Ruth won the Alan Clarke BAFTA Award for outstanding creative contribution to TV and, in 2012, the Women in Film and Television Eon Productions Lifetime Achievement Award. She was also awarded an OBE n the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for her services to Drama. Ruth herself comments that ‘there is such a rich seam of talent in the UK – writers, directors, actors, talent at all levels of the production process – and it has been my great good fortune and privilege to work with the best’.
Nia Childs is a writer / director and curator. Her short films have played at a number of festivals including The BFI London Film Festival, The London Short Film Festival and BFI Flare. She is also a curator of contemporary British cinema, particularly those focusing on working-class stories. She has curated projects for the BFI, Bechdel Test Fest, The London Short Film Festival and others.
Lillian Crawford is a writer and curator. She is currently researching a PhD on Screen Two at Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with BBC History for whom she has curated the Screen Two at 40 Canvas story: https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/screentwo/. She is co-founder of Stims Collective which curates relaxed screenings for neurodivergent audiences, including monthly at the BFI. Her lead essay on Priest is included in a BFI Blu-ray published on 17 November.
Mark Duguid is senior curator of archive projects in the BFI National Archive, responsible for the representation of archival film and television on digital and other channels, including BFI Player, BFI Screenonline, YouTube and the BFI Mediatheques across the UK. He programmed the BFI Southbank seasons ‘Second Coming: The rebirth of UK TV drama’ in 2010 and ‘The Wednesday Play at 50’ in 2014, and was lead programmer of the 2012 season ‘Ealing: Light and Dark. He is the author of the BFI Classic Cracker (Palgrave/BFI, 2010) and co-editor of Ealing Revisited (Palgrave/BFI, 2012), and also contributes to Sight and Sound and various DVD releases. His essay on Jimmy McGovern for BFI Screenonline may be found here: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/510555/index.html
George Faber began his career in the BBC Drama department at the BBC where he worked for 10 years until 1997. During that time he ran the Screenplay, Screen Two and Screen One strands before heading up the Single Drama division. As an independent producer George was twice winner of Best Independent Production Company at the Broadcast Awards and also winner of Best European Production Company at the Monte Carlo TV Festival. He is the recipient of multiple Golden Globes, EMMYs, BAFTAs and RTS Awards for his wide-ranging independent productions including Shameless, Skins, Elizabeth I, Generation Kill, The Shadow Line, The Devil’s Whore, The Village, Wild at Heart, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, A Room for Romeo Brass and Morvern Callar. More recent productions include The Buccaneers for Apple TV+, Shardlake for Disney+, National Treasure and Help for Channel 4, and Collateral for Netflix/BBC.
Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She publishes on film and television with a particular interest in fiction and form. Her books include Coronation Street (BFI, 1981), Women and Soap Opera (Polity, 1991), My Beautiful Laundrette (Bloomsbury, 2004), Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Bleak House (Palgrave/BFI, 2012). More recently, her work has included essays on Dennis Potter’s version of Tender is the Night (BBC 1985) and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (BBC 2020). She is an editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and is Book Reviews editor for Critical Studies in Television.
John Hill is Professor of Media and Director of the TV Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of a number of books including Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (co-ed 1996), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (co-ed 1998), British Cinema in the 1980s (1999), Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (2006), Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (2011) and Global Film Policies: New Perspectives (co-ed 2025). John was also the Chair of the Northern Ireland Film Council, a Governor of the British Film Institute and a founding Director of the UK Film Council as well as the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, The History of Forgotten TV Drama in the UK.
Lisa Kerrigan is the Senior Curator of Television at the BFI National Archive, leading the team responsible for selecting contemporary acquisitions from partner public service broadcasters and streaming companies to the national television archive. She has supervised research access for PhD students on BFI projects including ‘Play for Today at 50’ and ‘Visions of Change: TV Documentary of the 1950s-1960s’, and has contributed to journals including Critical Studies in Television and VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture. Lisa advises on academic research into the Archive’s television collections and is a member of the FIAT/IFTA (International Federation of Television Archives) Media Studies Commission.
Suri Krishnamma is the winner of a Royal Television Society award in 2021 and three-time BAFTA nominee. He has a broad range of experience across television and feature film. He recently directed The Canterville Ghost for BBC Studios, The Librarians: The Next Chapter for Balkanic Media, as well as award-winning productions A Respectable Trade and The Cazalets. He has directed numerous prime-time dramas such as Waking the Dead, Blue Murder and Cold Blood as well continuing dramas Casualty, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Internationally acclaimed, Suri has directed seven feature films including the award-winning Dark Tourist and A Man of No Importance starring Albert Finney (which, along with O Mary This London, formed part of Screen Two). His film New Year’s Day was named Best UK Feature Film at Raindance.
He has led workshops in directing, screen acting, and writing, at the National Film and Television School, Norwich University of the Arts, The Arts University Bournemouth, and the University of the Arts, London. He has also served on a number of BAFTA juries and film festival juries and, in 2013, was appointed President of the Jury for the Munich International Festival of Film Schools. Suri is Professor of Film at Norwich University of the Arts and an Honorary Fellow of the Arts University Bournemouth.
Lesley Manning is an award-winning film and TV director and writer. After graduating from the National Film and TV School, Lesley directed films and serials for TV. These included My Sister Wife for Screen Two (Best Asian Film, CRE Best Drama), the seminal horror film Ghostwatch for Screen One (voted amongst the top 20 “Best British Horror Films of all Time” by Indiewire), and the series Blood Rights (written by Mike Phillips) and Drovers’ Gold (nominated for 3 x BAFTA Cymru). After a break from directing in order to bring up her children Molly Manning Walker (How to Have Sex) and Charlie Manning Walker (rock band The Chisel), she returned to directing with Curtain Call (best short film, Fort Lauderdale IFF), The Vest, Help and The Joke. Between 2019 – 2023 Lesley also directed original writing for theatre (The Agent, Delivery, Love Dance, and Happy Hour) and is at present in post-production on a multi-million SFX horror feature set in Antarctica.
Jimmy McGovern is the highly acclaimed writerof some of television’s greatest dramas. In Jimmy’s own summary: ‘He was born in postwar Liverpool. He joined the Scotland Road Writers’ Workshop in the early seventies, did a bit of theatre in the very early eighties and then got in at the very start of Brookside. He was there before the houses were finished. Since then he has written and created Cracker, Hillsborough, The Street, Accused, Time and many other films and series’. These include the single film Priest, made as part of Screen Two,and showing after the event. He and producer George Faber will provide a short introduction to the screening.
Xavier Pillai is TV Programmer at the BFI with previous experience of working on historical collections in the BFI National Archive. He is the curator of the current BFI ‘Cinema of Duty’ season looking back on global Black cinema.
David Thompson has executive-produced/produced over 150 film and TV projects, winning numerous awards including 3 BAFTAs, 2 Golden Globes, and 2 Emmys. He ran BBC Films and Single Television Drama at the BBC 1997 – 2007 where his credits included Billy Elliot, An Education, The Firm, Revolutionary Road and My Summer of Love. Over the years he’s been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to back much new and emerging talent including Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Paul Greengrass, Steven Knight, and Pawel Pawlikowski. He’s worked with numerous directors, such as Jane Campion, Stephen Frears, Danny Boyle, Woody Allen, Stephen Daldry, and David Cronenberg, and writers such as Peter Morgan, William Nicholson and Armando Ianucci. His latest film from his production company Origin, is 500 Miles starring Bill Nighy to be released next year. He is also Professor in Film and Television Production at Royal Holloway, University of London.
John Wyver is a writer and producer with the independent production company Illuminations, and Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster. His recent productions include Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of ‘Play for Today’ (BBC4, 2020) and Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain (BBC4, 2022). Other arts documentaries and screen adaptations of theatre and dance produced by him have been honoured with a BAFTA Award, an International Emmy and a Peabody. He is the author of Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (2007) and Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History (2019), and co-editor with Amanda Wrigley of Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television (2022). His cultural history of interwar television, Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, will be published in January 2026 by Bloomsbury and the BFI.
An event co-hosted by the BFI and the Centre for the History of Television Culture and Production, Royal Holloway, University of London (in association with the AHRC-funded Screen Two research project)