Abstract
This article takes as its starting point the statistics surrounding female authorship on the BBC Wednesday Play: these statistics reveal that women writers, always under-represented in the strand, gradually contributed fewer and fewer plays to it until female authorship was finally eliminated from the series entirely. The debate presented here analyses this situation, intersecting archive material and textual examples with theoretical debate. Considering issues such as androcentric discourses propagated by television as an institutional and cultural hegemony, television drama as a male-defined cultural practice, and film technology as an expression of the dominant ideology, the debate culminates in a comparative analysis of two dramas presented in The Wednesday Play series. This analysis provides evidence of the impulses detected throughout the discussion by demonstrating that the strand prioritized a specifically gendered vision of dramatic and representational `relevance' that effectively eliminated female articulation in this influential genre.
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