Troy Kennedy Martin picks up the cudgels first wielded by John McGrath a decade earlier in his ‘swingeing attack on naturalism’. He defines naturalism in television as ‘actors talking in contemporary dress against a contemporaneous background’ intended to offer ‘a replication of real life. In dramatic terms it is the mediation of story through dialogue’; he concludes that naturalism is ‘basically phoney’.

Kennedy Martin proposes to open up a ‘fourth front’ alongside plays, series and serials, which would deal with ‘micro drama’ composed of ‘dozens of fragments of drama, shards of experience made and put out very quickly’. Micro drama should embrace three key elements of advertising commercials which contrast sharply with television drama. First, ad copywriters condense information while playwrights tend to expand it. Second, in television drama the budget contracts with the length of the piece but in adverts there is no necessary connection between cost and duration. Finally, adverts reinforce their message through repetition whereas in television drama a repeat is a failure to provide something new. Kennedy Martin envisages a number of advantages to these micro dramas: repetition reinforces impact but also defrays costs. But the micro dramas should also employ similar styles ‘in which time itself is altered and naturalism goes out of the window’.