Just published by Spokesman Books, the imprint of The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, is a book of screenplays by Trevor Griffiths for his 1976 television series Bill Brand. This is an immensely welcome volume because the series was a significant television event and remains perhaps the most sustained attempt to bring leftist politics to popular drama. Yet Bill Brand is now almost forgotten, I can't think there are many fading VHS copies in the world, and no-one yet has released it on DVD. Even on the page, though, it's a compelling engagement with Labour politics in the mid-1970s and with broader themes of class, sexuality and the forms of democratic participation.

Even writing the final sentence of the previous paragraph, I realise how much it betrays the distance between mainsteam television from just over thirty years ago and today. Bill Brand was eleven hours of primetime television shown at 9pm each week on ITV. Imagine. The central character, wonderfully brought to life by Jack Shepherd, is a new MP at Westminster committed to bringing his left-wing principles to the parliamentary process. He is faced with obstruction and compromises at every turn, and his victories are eventually, and inevitably, only modest ones.

In 1984, the British Film Institute published Powerplays: Trevor Griffiths in Television, a critical study that I co-wrote with Mike Poole. We explored Griffiths' emergence as a major leftist playwright in the theatre of the 1970s but concentrated on his achievements for the small screen, including the television versions of his play Comedians, his adaptations of Sons and Lovers and The Cherry Orchard (which I want to return to here soon) and his astonishing film collaboration with Richard Eyre Country: A Tory Story.

Bill Brand was a major part of our interest, and the new volume of Bill Brand screenplays prints (with appropriate acknowledgement) a section from the book that details its genesis.

On election night [28 February 1984] Griffiths met for the first time the independent television drama producer Stella Richman, in the bar of Mayfair's 'White Elephant' restaurant, which she owned. [She had recently watched Griffiths' The Party at the National Theatre and had decided that he was someone she wanted to work with.] They watched television coverage of the election results together, and she later told the Daily Express: 'Suddenly the idea came and I asked him if he would like to a series about the beginnings of the life of a Labour MP. We sat up until three in the morning trying to get the bones of something. Within a week he had the notes on paper. The man has the mind of a filing cabinet. It is the equivalent of a novel.'

Richman shepherded the series to the screen, along with the vital support of the sympathetic executives at Thames, Verity Lambert (once producer of Doctor Who) and Jeremy isaacs (later the founding Chief Executive of Channel 4). The distinguished cast included Cherie Lunghi, Arthur Lowe (as the PM) and Alan Badel, and the directors were Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Stuart Burge and Roland Joffé. I remember watching episodes at university, and it was a key influence on my sense that television could truly, thrillingly engage with the concerns of the day -- and that, perhaps, politically, it could make a difference.

What is perhaps most immediately striking about Bill Brand [Mike Poole and I wrote, in a section from Powerplays not reprinted in the screenplays volume] over and above its blending pf the personal and the political, genre television and documentary realism, is its contemporaneity. Written in 1975-6, it contours itself closely on real events both inside and outside the Labour Party during the same period.

Its eleven parts span just over one year -- from the late winter by-election in Leighly, through the summer recess and autumn party conference, to the leadership battle in the spring of the following year -- and a number of 'references' make it clear that the year in question in in 1975-6: the reduced size of Labour's majority, the resignation of the Prime Minister, the IMF crisis. Griffiths, himself, however, no doubt partly for legal reasons, denied any specific contemporary parallels.

The series, on the page almost as much on the screen, is fascinating as political and social history, but it also has a broader resonance in the discussions -- which seemed much more urgent in the 1970s and 1980s than they do now -- about what potential there was for drama that was both political and popular. How, the series asks, could the ITV audience be moved and motivated to engage truly and deeply with their world and, ultimately, to bring about socialism in one country?

Another major playwright, David Edgar, responded to the series in Socialist Review. Attempting to survey socialist theatre at the time, Edgar

... argued in principle [this is also from Powerplays, although the direct quotes are Edgar's] against the strategy of of attempting 'to inject socialist content into mass-populist forms'. For Edgar television is simply not for turning. It addresses a subject permanently unavilable for mass struggle: the atomised individual in the domestic environment, 'the place where people are at their least critical, their most conservative and reactionary'.

(The easy and arrogant assumptions in some of the writing from this time, including my own, can be breath-taking.)

I know, I know. These questions and the passions they engendered seem absurd in a world of Simon Cowell and I'm a Celebrity... and indeed of Gordon Brown. But all of this was a project that was central to the creative and political lives of many of the brightest and best of a generation. These debates shaped the understandings of politics and of television that a few of us continue, in however transformed a manner, to live with today. Spokesman's publication of the Bill Brand Screenplays is a sharp (and productive) reminder of the contradictions, the ideals and of course the unrealised hopes.