Redigerer Sydney Newman (avsnitt)

== Kritisk analyse ==

I boken ''The Largest Theatre in the World'', roste [[Shaun Sutton]] Newman for hans arbeid med å fornye drama-avdelingen. Han skrev: «Sydney galvanised television drama. «He was brusque, sardonic, and straightforward; stern when one made mistakes, fiercely supportive if anyone dared to suggest that you had. He was passionate about writers and writing, demanding new plays by the score. He was contemporary, irreverent, and a determined enemy of cant and pomposity ... Sydney's accomplishment was the creation of a climate in which boldness paid. He wanted contemporary drama; he wanted to raise rumpuses and get questions asked».

Newmans biografi på [[British Film Institute]] internettside (''[[Screenonline]]'') gjentar Suttons prisning av canadierens prestasjoner: «Newman's concerns, incidentally, were equally with the viewer: he recognised that television was a mass medium that needed to appeal across the social strata, from porters to professors. His policy, therefore, was to present plays about contemporary life in a contemporary idiom».

Kritikere og akademikere bemerker at det ikke er bare Newman som stod bak prestasjoner hos CBC, ABC og BBC. Museum of Broadcast Communications sier: «His skill can be located in an ability to successfully exploit the best of already favourable circumstances with an incorrigible enthusiasm and clarity of vision. In retrospect Newman's ... conscious characterisation of BBC drama output as static and middlebrow is unfair. His counterpart at the BBC during the late 1950s, [[Michael Barry (TV-produsent)|Michael Barry]], also attracted new young original writers ... and hired young directors ... However, it was the newness and innovation which Newman encouraged in his drama output that is most significant: his concentration on the potential of television as television, for a mass not a middlebrow audience».

Det var også noen innen britisk teater og TV som var åpent fiendtlig til Newmans innflytelse på sjangeren drama. Regissør Don Taylor sa: «Sydney was not formally educated ... He also had a contempt for 'intellectuals'... I was in a group lunching with him one day after [[Philip Saville]]'s production of ''[[Hamlet]]'' was screened ... It was clear that Syd didn't know the play, hadn't read it, and had seen it for the first time on screen ... To put it brutally, I was deeply offended that the premier position in television drama, at a time when it really was the [[Royal National Theatre|National Theatre]] of the Air, had been given to a man whose values were entirely commercial, and who had no more than a layman's knowledge of the English theatrical tradition, let alone the drama of Europe and the wider world».

[[John Caughie]] skrev i boken ''Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture'' (som analyserer britisk TV fra 1960- til 1990-årene) at det var Newmans ikke-teatralske natur som var hans største bidrag til sjangeren i Storbritannia: «Newman's insistence that the series would use only original material written for television made ''Armchair Theatre'' a decisive moment in the history of British television drama, and both he and Ted Kotcheff, the ambitious young director he brought with him from Canada, belonged to a television culture which had no particular reverence for the classics of theatre and literature».