Trevor Griffiths has been a critical force in British television writing
for over three decades. His successes have included the series Bill
Brand (1976), his adaptations of Sons and Lovers and The Cherry Orchard
(1981) and his television plays, The Comedians (1979), Hope in the Year
Two (1994) and Food for Ravens (1997). During his creative life he has
negotiated the issues of genre, politics, identity, class, history,
memory and televisual form with a sustained creativity and integrity
second to none. And he has parallelled this career with one as equally
as eminent in the theatre, as well as the slightly more problematic
forays into film-writing for Warren Beatty's Reds and Ken Loach's
Fatherland. John Tulloch's Trevor Griffiths is also, however, a work
that looks at such a creative and successful career from a number of
different angles. For example, Griffith's televisual work coincides with
the emergence of media and cultural studies and so Tulloch reflects on
how critical citation moves from Marx to Derrida from the 70s throught
to the 90s, mirroring the increased theorisation of media studies. He
also looks at the dialogic relationship of Griffiths as the radical
critic and the radical critique of cultural studies. Both a canny work
on Griffiths, as well as a pertinent work for students introducing them
to to broader concepts, theories and methods within the field, Tulloch's
work will be read widely by students and academics in a range of
disciplines.
