Irene Shubik - Career With The British Broadcasting Corporation

Career With The British Broadcasting Corporation

When Sydney Newman was poached by the BBC to head up their drama department in late 1962, he invited Shubik to join him. Accepting the offer, on the condition that she be promoted to producer within a year, Shubik joined the BBC in 1963 and was put to work as story editor on Story Parade, an anthology series of adaptations of modern novels that was intended to be the main drama strand for the new channel BBC2 due to be launched in 1964. One of the best received installments of Story Parade that Shubik worked was an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's 1954 novel The Caves of Steel starring Peter Cushing. Just as the success of “Murder Club” had enabled Shubik to persuade Newman to commission Out of this World, so The Caves of Steel’s positive reception opened the door for Shubik to devise a similar anthology series for BBC2 called Out of the Unknown, on which Shubik acted as story editor and producer. Like Out of this World, under Shubik's stewardship Out of the Unknown concentrated mainly on adaptations of science fiction stories including works by Frederik Pohl, Ray Bradbury, J.G. Ballard and Isaac Asimov (of whom Shubik was a particular fan, commissioning adaptations of six of his works for Out of the Unknown, once commenting that he was “one of the most interesting and amusing men I have ever met”). Among the most notable productions were adaptations of Kate Wilhelm’s Andover and the Android, John Brunner’s Some Lapse of Time, E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops and Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7. The adaptation of The Machine Stops won the first prize at the Fifth Festival Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza (International Science Fiction Film Festival) in Trieste on 17 July 1967.

In parallel with producing the second season of Out of the Unknown, Shubik produced Thirteen Against Fate, a series of adaptations of short crime stories by Maigret creator Georges Simenon broadcast between 19 June 1966 and 11 September 1966.

In 1967, as she began work assembling scripts for the third season of Out of the Unknown, Shubik accepted the chance to take over as co-producer (with Graeme MacDonald) of The Wednesday Play, BBC1’s premier drama slot, producing such notable plays as Tony Parker's “Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It”, William Trevor's “A Night With Mrs Ta Danka” and Peter Terson's “The Last Train Through the Harecastle Tunnel”. In 1970 she oversaw the transition of The Wednesday Play into the equally well regarded Play for Today. The most well received play she oversaw for Play for Today was Jeremy Sandford’s “Edna, the Inebriate Woman”, which was later ranked 57th in the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes published in 2000.

Moving on from Play for Today she oversaw an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales in 1973 before taking on the role of producer on another anthology series called The Mind Beyond, a spin-off from the Playhouse (TV series) anthology series.