David Mercer, an innovative and controversial writer for television, stage, and film, was a key figure in the development of television drama in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Although he often said he got into television by accident, his television plays first established his reputation and offered a powerful and personal exploration of the possibilities of the medium. Published soon after transmission, Mercer’s screenplays sparked lively critical and political debates.

Mercer came from a northern working-class family, but his interest in the arts and in politics began after World War II, when he was able to take advantage of the extension of new educational opportunities. This experience was central to his first television play, Where the Difference Begins (1961), originally written for the stage but accepted for broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The “difference” in the title referred to the younger generation’s break with traditional socialist values. Mercer followed up with two more plays, A Climate of Fear (1962) and The Birth of a Private Man (1963), which dealt with characters struggling to sustain a left-wing political vision in the new “affluent” society.

Although Mercer’s early work showed the influence of the “kitchen sink” realism that had swept through British theater, literature, and cinema in the late 1950s, he soon joined other BBC writers and producers to challenge what Troy Kennedy-Martin called the prevailing “naturalism” of television drama. In Mercer’s case, the result was a new verbal and visual freedom: instead of talking heads and colloquial speech patterns, the plays used condensed, witty, articulate dialogue with striking, often subjective or allegorical images. An example of such imagery occurs at the end of The Birth of a Private Man, when Colin Waring, whose private life had disintegrated in the face of his political uncertainties, dies at the Berlin Wall in a hail of bullets from both sides.

This antinaturalist style was recognized as an imaginative use of the medium but disturbed critics of all political persuasions. Conservatives objected to Mercer’s self-professed Marxist position, liberals found the plays too explicit and lacking in subtlety, while orthodox left-wing critics questioned the emphasis on the problems of Socialism—the compromises of the British postwar Labour governments, the revelations about Stalin’s atrocities, and the failures of Communism in Eastern Europe. The plays may be Marxist in their stress on the need for a political revolution, but the revolutionary impulse is usually blocked and becomes internalized as psychological breakdown. However, the impulse also emerges in Mercer’s pleasure in breaking the rules of television drama, as he did emphatically in A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962), a broad farce in which the main character indulges in “mad” visions of a retreat to the jungle away from the complexities of his political and personal life. Mercer later wrote the screenplay for the successful film version of this play, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), directed by Karel Reisz.

The motif of “madness” in Mercer’s plays has much in common with the antipsychiatry philosophy of R.D. Laing, who claimed that schizophrenia is an essentially sane response to a mad society. Laing was extremely influential in the 1960s, and he expressed great interest in Mercer’s work, acting as consultant on one of his most powerful television plays, In Two Minds (1967), a documentary-style drama that traces the causes of a young woman’s schizophrenia to her oppressive family life. The play was directed by Ken Loach, who also directed the 1971 film version Family Life (Wednesday’s Child in the United States), based on Mercer’s screenplay.

Mercer himself likened his plays to rituals exploring the tensions and contradictions of fragmented personalities and ambiguous truths. They explore the relationships of the political and the personal in a society that encourages conformity, inhibiting individual expression. He felt that television gave him greater freedom of expression than was possible in the commercial theater or cinema, but he did continue to work in other media. His influence can be seen in the work of a younger generation of writers, such as Trevor Griffiths, David Hare, and Stephen Poliakoff, who have also drawn on the resources of television, theater, and film to produce a powerful body of work dealing with the intersection of personal and political pressures in contemporary Britain.