Trevor Griffiths is one of Britain's most politically incisive television dramatists. He has combined television and film writing with a highly regarded theater career because he has wanted to reach the maximum possible audience with his socialist values.

    Never a political propagandist or polemicist, Grif­fiths has been the leading international television proponent of "critical realism." This distinguishes between what Griffiths calls the "materialism of detail" (the surface appearance of the world) and the "materialism of forces" (the dynamic structure of a world determined by differences of power between genders, classes, and ethnicities). Thus, for example, in his miniseries The Last Place on Earth (or Scott of the Antarctic, screened on commercial television in Britain), Griffiths incorporated the familiar surface details of the competitive quest between Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen to reach the South Pole, within the deep structure of what his script calls the "historical conjuncture" of 1910. On the one hand, Griffiths imagines Scott's journey as among the dying throes of a failing British Empire (with parallels between the "heroic defeats" of Scott and the World War I fields of Flanders and Gallipoli). On the other hand, Amundsen's journey is related to the nationalism of a newly independent nation constructing its identity out of its successful explorers.

     Griffiths's commitment has always been to reinvent the form (the country house, hospital, and "high art" genres, for example), while at the same time revealing the real agencies and structures of history. This genuinely creative radicalism has led to many conflicts with Hollywood (he came close to taking his name off the feature film Reds after disagreements with co­ writer/producer/director/star Warren Beatty), as well as to differences of opinion with other socialist television workers (Ken Loach). However, in a group of extraordinarily and critically creative British television dramatists who began work in the I960s, Griffiths is unquestionably paramount in the systematic intelligence with which he has blended critical theory and popular television.

     The intellectual clarity of Griffiths's work has also offered television scholars the unusual opportunity of tracing the quite specific transformations this drama­tist's work undergoes as it encounters the generally more conservative and conventional work practices of set and costume designers, directors, producers, and so on. The analysis of the production of Griffiths's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers by Mike Poole and John Wyver, for example, indicates the way in which Griffiths's counter reading of Lawrence's classism was itself subverted by the unthinkingly naturalistic assumptions of costume design, as well as the "high art" visual flourishes of directors making "BBC classics" (see Poole and Wyver). Similarly, Tulloch, Burvill, and Hood have explored the problematic path of Griffiths's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through conventions of acting, light­ing, and set design.

     During the late 1980s and 1990s, an increasingly conservative British institutional establishment made it harder for Griffiths to bring his projects to air. Also, the fragmentation of television through pay-TV and the proliferation of channels led to some change in his view that television was the vehicle of mass public ed­ucation. In response, Griffiths worked less for televi­sion and made important returns to the theater (with formally innovative plays about the Gulf War and Margaret Thatcher's Britain). However, he continued to work in television, with a play on Danton, Hope in the Year Two, using the moment of the play's production (the breakdown of communism) as a stimulus to rethink issues of socialism by going back beyond "one revolutionary wave" (the Russian Revolution, where he focused some of his earlier works) to another, the French Revolution. This resistance to the stale "common sense" conventions of the media via new historical and formal exploration is typical of Griffiths. Like his unflinchingly tough lead character of Comedians, Gethin Price, Trevor Griffiths retains an undiminished energy for investing any interstices within popular culture with new and unsettling forms. As such, he continues to be a master of "strategic penetration" as politics, media institutions, and television genres continuously change their historical forms.