Jeremy Sandford is the writer of Cathy Come Home and Edna the Inebriate Woman; his oeuvre may be one of the smallest yet most famous in the history of British television drama. Cathy Come Home is surely the most-talked-about television play ever, an iconic text in the radical canon of the 1960s Wednesday Play, which has become overshadowed by the association with its director, Ken Loach, and producer, Tony Garnett. Following Cathy Come Home, Sandford intended to write a trilogy on homelessness titled In the Time of Cathy, but Edna the Inebriate Woman was the only play completed. This story of an itinerant "down-and­ out" moved the focus from the cruelty inflicted on families to the lives of the single homeless-the sort of person, Sandford suggested, that Cathy had become as she walked away from the railway station, stripped of her family.

After more or less disappearing from television, Sandford surfaced in 1980 with a play commissioned for the series Lady Killers and then in 1990, as the homeless population in Britain began once again to be a topic of public debate, with a documentary for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Cathy, Where Are You Now?

When Cathy Come Home was reshown in 1993 as part of a season commemorating the establishment of the housing charity Shelter, Sandford wrote to the In­ dependent, taking issue with a claim that doubts had been raised over the accuracy of the homelessness and family-separation statistics given at the end of the play. "I work as a journalist as well as an author," he wrote, "and it would be professional suicide to be inaccu­ rate." Sandford has never wholly identified himself as a television dramatist. At one time a poet and artist, he had nursed an early ambition to be a professional mu­ sician and played the clarinet in an Royal Air Force band during his national service. One of his first plays, Dreaming Bandsmen, broadcast by BBC Radio in 1956 and later staged in Coventry, seemed to confirm his early reputation as a surrealist, but at the same time he was recording radio documentaries about working­ class life in the East End, and it was as a journalist and activist that he began writing about homelessness in the early I 960s. As he told an interviewer in 1990, he had always sought to play his role on the stage of life rather than simply reflecting it. Thus, he not only sub­ merged himself in the netherworld of the down-and­ out for his research on Edna but also went on to arm himself with his written work as part of an active crusade on behalf of the dispossessed. A special showing of Cathy Come Home was arranged for Parliament, and Sandford himself toured the country screening and talking about both plays at public meetings.

Homelessness, itinerancy, and housing policy have been particular obsessions of Sandford. His Anglo­ Irish grandmother, Lady Mary Carbery, was a member of the Gypsy Lore Society, and he has campaigned on behalf of gypsies as well as editing their newspaper, Romano Drum. A play about gypsies, Till the End of the Plums, was to complete a trilogy about the home­ less but was never produced.

Born of wealthy parents (his father owned a private printing press) and educated at Eton and Oxford, Sand­ ford was brought up in a stately Herefordshire home. In the late 1980s, after a long association with the al­ternative communities of folk festivals and camps, he moved into a large country house and opened it up as a study center for New Age travelers.

A further play, Smiling David, about the case of a Nigerian drowned in a Leeds river and the agencies implicated in the events, was commissioned for radio and broadcast in 1972 but never made it to the televi­ sion screen. Sandford's often-noted status as a docu­mentarist and social advocate rather than a natural television dramatist is emphasized by the fact that the scripts for Cathy and Edna are published in a series of political and social treatises. His polemical and factual writing, such as Down and Out in Britain, which ac­ companied Edna, far exceeds the amount he has writ­ ten for television. However, the importance of his two major works in defining the cultural role of television drama in Britain as an intrinsic part rather than simply a mirror of sociopolitical actuality cannot be ignored. Cathy Come Home remains a landmark in this sense. "If any writer ever hoped that an idea of his would be accepted by the public as valid and taken to their hearts," Sandford wrote in 1968, "then he would have hoped for the reaction that has followed my Cathy Come Home." Sandford's exchange with Paul Able­ man in the pages of Theatre Quarterly over the ethics of fictional form in Edna the Inebriate Woman set the agenda for a debate about the aesthetics and politics of drama-documentary that was to dominate television drama criticism through the 1970s and 1980s.