As one of British television’s most successful dramatists, Jack Rosenthal has received British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards for The Evacuees, Bar Mitzvah Boy, P’tang Yang Kipperbang, and Ready When You Are, Mr. McGill, an Emmy Award for The Evacuees, and the Prix Italia for Spend, Spend, Spend, and The Knowledge. He has written for the big screen with The Chain and The Knowledge, and has also authored five plays for the live stage, notably Smash!

Rosenthal learned the craft of writing for the medium of television in the 1960s, at a time when television drama in Britain (particularly on the BBC) was still dominated by writers schooled in theatrical conventions and overly concerned with being taken seriously. This resulted in a preoccupation with adaptations of theatrical successes, revivals of classics (e.g., Shakespeare, Dickens), and writing that exploited literary rather than visual resources. Independent television in the late 1950s was looking to develop more popular forms of drama to attract wider audiences and brought in Sydney Newman from Canada, who fostered new dramatists and initiated new series. It was against this background that Rosenthal started work in Granada, where he served his apprenticeship by creating more than 150 scripts for the popular TV soap Coronation Street. The experience of writing for a popular genre prepared him for originating such comedy serials as The Dustbinmen, The Lovers, and Sadie, It’s Cold Outside. His growing reputation in the 1970s as a reliable professional writer led to his being entrusted with the prestigious single play: a form that Rosenthal himself prefers because of the freedom it offers the artist to explore his own vision.

Rosenthal was born in Manchester to Jewish parents, and he drew on his experiences to write Bar Mitzvah Boy and The Evacuees. But his interest lies in observing the interactions of individuals in diverse social networks, and the Jewish community is merely one of the many institutions that he explores: schools (P’tang Yang Kippperbang), taxi drivers (The Knowledge), the army (Bootse and Snudge), fire fighters (London’s Burning), and TV drama (Ready When You Are, Mr. McGill). He is also interested in the common experiences that many face at particular moments in life: moving (The Chain), growing up (Bar Mitzvah Boy, P’tang Yang Kippperbang), falling in love (The Lovers), and forgetfulness and old age (A Day to Remember).

The strength of Rosenthal’s comedy lies in its closeness to tragedy; from another perspective, the petty cruelties of the stepmother in The Evacuees could have blighted the lives of the children, but both plot and psychological insight combine to restore harmony and recognize the cruelty as misplaced possessiveness. So too, in A Day to Remember, the terror and pain of short-term memory loss, attendant on a stroke in old age, are contained and balanced by the comic presentation of the gaps and imperfections that beset the middle-aged. If the comic vision is shown as perceptive about the frailties of the human condition, it is not sentimentalized. The insight that comes through comedy is one that is often painfully achieved. The schoolboy hero of P’tang Yang Kipperbang is only able to kiss his first love; he enters upon adult sexuality by recognizing the fantasy element of that anticipated delight. To fulfill his desire means abandoning private fantasy and entering the real world in which people are both less than we would wish and more diverse than we could expect. Similarly, when the aspirant cabby in The Knowledge finally achieves his ambition to be a London taxi driver, he discovers his girlfriend, the initial driving force behind his application, has fallen for somebody else. He neglected her to focus on the discipline of acquiring “the knowledge” (learning by heart the streets and landmarks of London by perpetually driving around them). Knowledge of chaps rather than maps turns out to be that which is most difficult to acquire.

Although the comedy of Jack Rosenthal is invariably rooted in a recognizable social setting that has been carefully researched, the characters are not deeply explored. The story is, instead, focused on the themes: in Another Sunday and Sweet FA, the frustrations of refereeing a football match provide the opportunity for a comic disquisition on the competing claims of power and justice; in P’tang Yang Kipperbang, imagination and reality struggle for an accommodation; in The Chain, the seven deadly sins provide the motivation for Fortuna’s wheel of house-hunting. If there is a thread that underlies most of Rosenthal’s work, it is that our desire as individuals to do good in order to be liked and admired is at variance with our role as social beings to impose order, our order, on others. Wisdom comes when we learn to accommodate these competing demands and accept responsibility for fulfilling our desires.