The forgotten female writers of Play for Today: 'If you failed, it was pretty public'

From Paula Milne to Rose Tremain, the women who wrote for the BBC’s famous drama strand, which ran from 1970 to 1984, have been denied their place in the programme’s historyEstablished by the start of the 1980s as a writer for Coronation Street and the creator of the nursing series Angels, Paula Milne was pleased but fearful to be invited to write her first single play. A Sudden Wrench, in which a woman fights to be taken seriously in the male world of plumbing, went out in March 1982 as a Play for Today, a BBC One strand that could reach audiences of up to 12 million in its heyday, and averaged 5 million.“There’s a line in the script,” Milne remembers, “where the husband says to his wife, when she goes to work on a construction site: ‘Just remember, there’s no allowance for failure out there.’ And that pretty well sums up how I felt about writing for Play for Today. If you failed in that slot, it was pretty damn public.” Continue reading…
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