John McGrath shapes his recollections of working with James MacTaggart in London in the early 1960s into what Troy Kennedy Martin (1986) described as a ‘swingeing attack on naturalism’. Naturalism he argues imposes a certain ‘neutrality about life on the writer, the actor and the audience’: it presents a world that is ‘static, implied and ambivalent’.

McGrath argued that the television image is not conducive to naturalist drama because it lacks sensuality. While a cinema screen can ‘flood the senses’, a ‘television shot is at best nice’: it is akin to listening ‘to a symphony over the telephone’. Also, it lacks empathy: viewers are ‘looking at the screen, not being drawn into it’. Finally, television images are situated in the context of reported reality: viewers watching television drama will have witnessed, ‘napalmed women in Vietnam running about on fire’.

The ‘new drama’ which emerged required a style of ‘writing, directing, designing, sound plotting and lighting which was specifically for the lens of a television camera, not for the opera house’. James MacTaggart who produced and directed a series called Storyboard, The Wednesday Play and Diary of a Young Man was crucial to its development: his ingenuity in ‘attacking the directorial problems that the narrative drama raised was truly remarkable’.