Ian McEwan writes about his television plays

I first wrote a television play in 1974 because I wanted to break the isolation of writing fiction. I had no other job and I was far less reconciled than I am now to the essentially crackpot activity of sitting down alone several hours a day with an assortment of ghosts. I envied people who, even while they often complained about each other, collaborated, sped in taxis to urgent conferences; they appeared (I begin to doubt this now) saner and happier for having to do with each other. I thought of writing for television rather than for the stage because, like most people, I had spent far more hours in front of television sets than in theatres; I felt familiar with television’s ‘grammar’, with its conventions and how they might be broken. As a short-story writer I was attracted by its scale, its intimacy. The possibilities and limitations presented by the 30, 50 or even 75-minute television play seemed very close in some ways to those presented by the short story: the need for highly selective detail and for the rapid establishment of people and situations, the possibility of chasing one or two ideas to logical, or even illogical, conclusions, the dangers of becoming merely anecdotal.

Finally, television was, and is, dominated by the powerful, cohesive conventions of its naturalism. The programme-maker who departs radically from these conventions can be sure of at least irritating or surprising the audience – there is a baseline of expectation. Literary fiction, on the other hand, as the older form, is not similarly dominated: there are authors writing comfortably inside the narrative conventions of the 19th century and publishing alongside writers of ‘postmodernist’ pastiches of 18th-century novels. Naturalism is the common language of television – not the language we speak, but one we are accustomed to listen to. Simply by association it has become the language of the state, of an illusory consensus, and prone to all its contradictions. The centrality of television naturalism suggested, or so I thought, that formal experiment could therefore really matter, that by calling into question the rules of the common language the viewer could be disoriented and tempted to regard the world afresh. These, of course, were grand expectations. The non-stop omnivorousness of television, aided by the tone of vacuous after-dinner chat of much television reviewing, tends to make such pronouncements of intent sound a little reedy.

Of the three plays now published, the first two were attempts, however weak, to kick over the traces. The third, The Imitation Game, is not formally experimental at all. I had begun to think there might be more effective, if well-tried, means of trying to regard the world afresh.

Jack Flea’s Birthday Celebration was written in 1974, shortly after I had finished writing the last of the stories that were to make up my first collection, First Love, Last Rites, and I think of this play as really belonging in that volume. It was commissioned originally by Barry Hanson, who was producing from Birmingham half-hour plays by new writers – hence the series title, ‘Second City Firsts’. A standard procedure in the commissioning of a play, especially one by an unknown author, is for a synopsis to be written and then, once the producer is satisfied that the writer’s ‘idea’ is sound and feasible, for a contract to be offered. It seemed to me a deadening process. I duly presented my ‘idea’, discussed it at length with the producer, signed a contract and wrote a play whose every line was stillborn. Rewrites failed to rescue it. I explained to Barry Hanson that I could not know what I was writing about until I had written it. He promptly sent a second contract for a play entitled Blind Date, and, encouraged by his willingness to take a chance on me, I set to work. When Hanson left Birmingham, Tara Prem inherited the project. She and Pedr James, the script editor, made numerous suggestions for improvement and the play’s final shape owes a lot to them.

My intention was to take a television cliché – a kind of family reunion, a dinner party – and to transform it by degrees and by logical extension to a point where fantasy had become reality. The self-reflecting fiction at the centre of the play is perhaps one of those conceits that many writers new to a form are tempted to exploit. As it turned out, it was not, as I had feared, too literary or undramatic. It simply became a feature of the central character’s illusory sense of control.

The play was helped enormously by the fact that the actors thought it very funny. Producing the play in Birmingham had one distinct advantage: at the end of a day’s rehearsal the four actors – who all came from far away – could not go home. They had to hang about together in restaurants or in the hotel bar. No one could quite escape his or her part. By the end of ten days a very odd and gratifying level of controlled hysteria had been reached and this suited the claustrophobic nature of the play perfectly, as did the detached quality of Mike Newell’s camera script.