And while we're on Jack Rosenthal...

For those who haven’t come across his work, Jack Rosenthal was a British television writer from the 1960s until the 2000s, one of the finest of a generation which included Jim Allen, Alan Bennett, Alan Plater and Dennis Potter. A unique mixture of poignancy and humour, the overriding theme of his work (The Evacuees, Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Knowledge, P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang, Eskimo Day etc) was a journey of self discovery; often the protagonist or protagonists were teenagers or children going through a rite of passage: having to leave home for the first time, going to war, facing puberty, carving out a career. His subject was life and the fact that it is largely bittersweet. Rosenthal never offered simple archetypes; his characters could be said to echo Jean Renoir’s assertion that ‘everybody has his reasons'. On a personal note, I became intensely and emotionally involved in the world he created, which is perhaps why I felt his death in 2004 as keenly if I had known him. The work should still be seen and his autobiography is one of the best of its kind.

Rosenthal’s status as an artist raises some interesting questions, however, which are worth pausing over. He wrote his plays for television and the debate over whether the small or the large screen is the best continues to this day. Meanwhile there is also the issue of authorship; whose voice can we say is the overriding one within a work? In theatre and television, that person is, for the most part, the writer, in film, the director. The Knowledge believes that Rosenthal was certainly the auteur of his art and that the boundaries between ‘the box’ and the cinema have never been as rigid as has been made out. In terms of motion pictures, the masterpieces of the past ten years are just as likely to be judged The Wire, The Sopranos or Doctor Who as they are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hidden or The Lives of Others. Of the last thirty perhaps we can add P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Eskimo Day?