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Variety Dec 15, 1997
Creativity counts for producer Garnett. (television producer
Tony Garnett's decision to end his hit television program
'This Life')(A Week in the Life of U.K. Showbiz)
Author/s: Adam Dawtrey
LONDON Only in Britain would the producer of the year's hottest
drama series decide to ax his own show just as it became
a media sensation. But Tony Garnett just didn't want to make
another series of BBC2's "This Life," and that was that.
The show, which laid bare
the private lives of young lawyers sharing a London house,
became a cult hit this summer in its second series after
a quiet first run last year.
News of the show's demise,
when it was confirmed last month, was greeted as a minor
tragedy - the latest in Brit TV's great tradition of
programs killed off in their prime by their creators.
The list includes "Absolutely Fabulous" and stretches
all the way back to John Cleese's "Fawlty Towers."
Despite the increase in competitive
pressures since the arrival of cable and satellite channels,
the U.K. still is a culture in which the creative agenda
of a program-maker can outweigh other considerations,
certainly on influential minority webs BBC2 and Channel
4.
Tony Garnett, chairman of
World Prods., is widely regarded as the most creative
drama producer working in British television. With his
roots in the left-wing social-realist TV plays of the
'60s and '70s - he partnered with helmer Ken Loach on
several of Loach's most acclaimed films, including "Kes" and "Family
Life" - Garnett learned the lessons of a difficult decade
in Hollywood.
Blending the pace and the
mission to entertain that mark the best American work
with his own passionate social commitment, Garnett has
turned out a succession of original and subversive twists
on mainstream drama genres. "Between the Lines" was an
anti-cop cop show, about the police's internal investigators; "Cardiac
Arrest," a medical drama satirizing the failures of the
hospital system; and "This Life" started where legal
dramas leave off. Each time, he killed the shows when
he felt they had nothing left to say.
In a rare public speech last
month, the usually reticent Garnett slammed British network
bosses for the "impoverishing narrow" range of "depressingly
conformist and correct" drama.
But Garnett still manages
to break new ground. Next year, he and fellow drama producer
Sophie Balhetchet are shooting two new series - "Crossing
the Line" for Channel 4, about a police squad dedicated
to catching vampires, and "Cops" for the BBC, a fresh
take on the bobby-on-the-beat genre.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Cahners Publishing Company in association
with The Gale Group and LookSmart.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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