Tony Garnett - Work With Ken Loach and Others

Work With Ken Loach and Others

Appointed by Roger Smith, he became an assistant story editor at the BBC working on The Wednesday Play The plays he worked on included the "very, very personal" Up the Junction (1965), directed by Loach, which features a then still illegal abortion, but he was soon under contract as a producer. The best known of his contributions to The Wednesday Play series in this role is the docudrama Cathy Come Home (1966), again directed by Ken Loach. Garnett in 1967 introduced Loach to writer Jim Allen, who would be one of the director's collaborators for a quarter of a century. Garnett worked with Allen too, sometimes independently of Loach (The Lump, 1967), but also with him on such works as Allen's The Big Flame (1969), which had been shot in February and March 1968, but was withheld from transmission by the BBC.

Garnett, together with dramatist David Mercer, fellow producers Kenith Trodd and James MacTaggart, and literary agent Clive Goodwin, founded Kestrel Productions, which was conceived as an autonomous unit connected with London Weekend Television. The arrangement led to the production of seventeen television dramas within two years. Garnett and his colleagues though, found the experience as limiting as they had their period at the BBC. LWT required Garnett and his colleagues to use their television studio facilities, and video tape mainly, only allowing them to shoot on film and on location occasionally. Despite this, as Kestrel Films, the production company had an interest in the feature films Kes (1969), based on a Barry Hines novel, and Family Life (1971), from a television play by David Mercer. Both were produced by Garnett and directed by Loach,

In 1969, Tony Garnett was the producer of Loach's The Save the Children Fund Film. Commissioned by the charity itself, and originally intended for screening by LWT, it was suppressed for forty years after Save the Children disowned it, and only finally screened in 2011 at BFI Southbank. Days of Hope (1975) was a four-part serial for the BBC written by Jim Allen and directed by Loach. It recounts events from the Great War to the General Strike of 1926. A two part Play for Today, The Price of Coal (1977), reunited Garnett and Loach with Barry Hines, and was their response to the silver jubilee of the Queen, mixing that celebration with a fatal accident involving two miners. The Spongers (1978), written by Jim Allen and directed by Roland Joffé, also used the background of the silver jubilee, this time in the context of government spending cuts in the welfare state, in particular the closure of facilities used by a child with learning difficulties. The last production from Garnett's association with Loach was the children's film, Black Jack (1979).