Television Drama Quotes

Whatever you do, whether you're doing a television drama or a romantic comedy, you want to be relevant, to some degree.

What directors of television drama constantly tell you is 'Don't act it. Don't try. Don't emphasise that word'. Whereas with someone like Blackadder, even though he's a relatively low key character in a way, he did relish the lines that he had and the words that he was given, with a lot of inflection.

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.

With a play, you do it and it's gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.

I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions.

Fake is not a word I like to use because there's nothing fake about what I do.  It's a show, it's a predetermined outcome; we're putting on a television drama, action, comedy, whatever you want to call it - but it's not fake.  Fake would be if I was just about to take a body slam, and my stuntman did it.  Fake would be if I was going to take a chair shot to the head, and the chair was made of rubber.  I'll tell the world that it's a show, but I hate the word fake.  It's such an unfair term to us.

It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation.

I was my class playwright and I wrote plays set in villages with kings and chiefs.My plays were about treason and betrayals. If they were influenced by Macbeth, they were also influenced by Nigerian plays I had seen and Village Headmaster, a television drama series I had watched as a child.

I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing.

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.