This book explores a ‘lost history’ of British television drama by discussing a range of dramas produced between 1946, when the television service resumed after the Second World War, and 1982, when the arrival of Channel 4 marked the end of the BBC/ITV duopoly and the beginning of a new era in broadcasting.
The book addresses a number of questions: What has happened to the many lesser-known plays, series and serials produced from 1946-82 that are not mentioned in television histories and which have not had subsequent screenings? Do these dramas still exist? If not, does their lack of existence, or their unavailability if they do exist, account for their ‘invisibility’ in histories of television drama? What constitutes ‘forgotten drama’ and by what criteria might a drama be designated as forgotten? To what extent were these ‘forgotten’ dramas produced by regional BBC production centres and regional ITV companies? Is there a correlation between ‘forgotten’ drama and regional production? 
The book maps the main contours of forgotten British television drama through several case studies, including an extended analysis of dramas produced by regional television companies from 1956-82, an analysis of ‘live’ dramas produced by the BBC in the early 1950s, a study of a ‘forgotten’ writer who was responsible for some of the most popular dramas on British television in the 1960s-70s, a reassessment of some innovative filmed dramas made for BBC2 in the mid-1960s, four television plays produced by a regional theatre company in the 1960s-70s, and an extended history of the half-hour play, which brings this study of forgotten and neglected forms of television drama up to the present.

Lez Cooke is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. From 2013-17 he was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK. His PhD, ‘Television Drama in the English Regions, 1956-1982’ (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2007) was published as A Sense of Place: Regional British Television Drama, 1956-82 (MUP, 2012) and he is the author of British Television Drama: A History (BFI, 2nd edition, 2015), Style in British Television Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Troy Kennedy Martin (MUP, 2007).