Lazzard - are you quite willing to admit that your writing contains no element of poetry, no politics, no discourse?
Dennis Potter, Trevor Griffiths, David Hare, David Edgar, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill - all writers with poetic and political vision whose work was, at one time, often seen on television.
Yes indeed I do think that this is currently a black and white issue - the issue that writing which is either overtly political eg; Berkoff, Bond, and/or uniquely idiosyncratic and poetic i.e.non-naturalistic is censored from appearing on television because drama has been determined by the television establishment which has structured itself to eliminate possible dissent and its expression. Though we might be able to point to one or two examples where this is not the case (in comedy perhaps but rarely drama) it has, in comparision to a time when we had 8 new plays per week, been exiled from television largely, but not exclusively, due to the demise of the single play which, as with theatre, provides for the expression of the voice of the individual writer.
I would maintain that this decision is expressly political and it is the weight of funding/commmissioning which largely falls against the expression of the individual voice which has seen the best of our writers such as Howard Barker or Edward Bond in exile or excluded from the means to express themselves in television.
It would be obtuse of (some) writers to claim that the purveying of drama e.g. soaps which explicitly negates the idea of political discourse/dissent in its content has not deliteriously affected writers and the writing culture by establishing a paradigm which writers must conform to in order to get compromised writing seen. Soaps do not represent the individual voice and certainly not that of the dissenter - they represent the power of the ruling media executive.
