Peter Nichols is one of many recent dramatists for whose work the developing medium of television was a major catalyst. His television career started in 1959 with A Walk on the Grass and Promenade. His first stage production, The Hooded Terror (1964)--concerned with the violence to be found in the apparently secure familial context--was first seen as a televised play a year earlier. The Continuity Man, an account of a generational battle in a family that Nichols had received an Arts Council bursary to create as a stage play, was turned into a television script instead and screened in 1963. Nichols found acceptance as a stage writer with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) but continued to write television scripts such as Daddy Kiss It Better (1968), The Gorge (1968), Hearts and Flowers (1970), and The Common (1973), all of which dissect the anxieties of family life.

Television encouraged and nurtured the...