Burton and Taylor signals end of the affair for BBC4 homegrown drama Jul 21st 2013, 13:21
Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter biopic is last BBC4 film as homegrown drama axed as part of £700m BBC cuts
The keenly anticipated TV biopic starring Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor will be a bittersweet affair for BBC4.
Burton and Taylor, which will air on the channel on Monday will be the last of BBC4's homegrown dramas, as it absorbs its share of the £700m of cuts being made across the corporation.
The digital channel, which celebrated its 10th birthday last year, has won a string of awards and some of its biggest audiences for biopics about Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Kenny Everett, Fanny Craddock and Enid Blyton (coincidentally also played by Bonham Carter).
Burton and Taylor is likely to be no exception with West and Bonham Carter – in particular – impeccable portraying the 20th century's most famous celebrity couple during their ill-fated 1983 revival of Noel Coward's stage play, Private Lives.
"We were aware that the last BBC4 film was due and we wanted to make a splash with it," said the progamme's executive producer, Jessica Pope.
"They were such ultimately glamorous people but there's a flaw in each of them that you respond to so well … They were magnetic people. The charisma, even now when you go back and watch their old movies, is astonishing. You literally can't take your eyes off them."
BBC4 was lavished with praise by the BBC Trust in last week's BBC annual report, which said it had a "very successful year" off the back of arts programmes tied to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It said its programmes were regarded as fresh and new with "much higher reach and a growing reputation" among viewers.
But it will have to further that reputation without homegrown drama, which has been axed, with big cuts to its history, entertainment, documentary and science programming as part of the Delivering Quality First savings enforced after the licence fee was frozen in 2010.
Instead the channel will focus on music, arts and culture as it looks to make its lineup more distinctive from BBC2, home to acclaimed dramas such as The Fall and Jane Campion's Top of the Lake.
BBC4 will still, however, hang on to the Scandinavian crime dramas it pioneered -– single-handedely generating an appetite for subtitled shows among UK viewers – with new series of The Bridge and political thriller Borgen to come later this year.
Bonham Carter, speaking last week at a preview of Burton and Taylor, said her mother had told her not to touch the project with a barge pole. "It's a movie icon. Are you stupid or what?"
But the actor said the script, by William Ivory, which was filmed in just 18 days, had won her over. "It was very moving and touching and it was a love story. And it was almost to me incidental that it was about these two most famous people and most famous lovers."
West, star of another BBC period drama, The Hour, said in portraying Burton he "was always in danger of trying to be too Welsh".
"I sort of worked out that there's Welsh and then it was over-layered with mainly 50s Oxford University. And then I've suddenly realised he's Olivier's Richard III a lot of the time … I don't know what happened."
* Burton and Taylor is on BBC4 at 9pm on Monday.
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