I have recently been doing some work on Raymond Williams' 'Culture and Society' and was struck by how much his ideas influenced the Wilson Government of the late 60s and rather surprised to realize just how much they have shaped (unconsciously) my revolutionary career. As an artist you think of yourself very much as an individual and don't realize how much your work is influenced by the zeitgeist. I have always thought my career to be a chaotic mess but looking back over the past forty years I see there is an interesting pattern to it after all.
1960s
I was fairly typical of the rising working-class of the late 60s that Raymond Williams concerned himself with and who made up the backbone of the support for the Wilson government. I grew up on a London council estate. My grandfathers were respectively a miner/Labour councillor and a master craftsman from the Midlands. My parents were both in the caring professions, Dad a social worker and Mum a nurse and subsequently a primary school teacher. I was the first girl in my family to go to university, aided by the introduction of the maintenance grant. As I had three brothers I would probably not have been able to go otherwise. It was still usual to educate the boys first.
1970s
Although not a rabid feminist I was not immune to the upsurge in feminism in the late 60s and early 70s encouraged by the fact that on leaving university I was unable to find a really suitable job because at every interview the (then usually male) Personnel Officer would take one look at me and say 'You'll be married in six months'. I think the fact that I have never married has something to do with the fact I wanted to prove them wrong. I eventually succumbed to social pressure and settled for a secretarial post with the BBC (almost the only path into production for a girl at that time) in their Further Education Department. This in itself was very Wilsonian. The emphasis on universal accessible education meant that, just after I left, the department gave way to the Open University. I left the BBC to go into another innovation of the 1970s, subsidised regional theatre and joined the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent to work on a pioneering community theatre project which typified the idea of publicly subsidised art taking culture to the people. (It was funded by the Department of the Environment). I then spent three years as a housing officer writing in my spare time, both plays with a regional/dialect slant.
1980s
At the very start of this decade I was one of the first wave of new women playwrights who began making a mark. Prior to that I had been told I could not be a playwright quote "because there are no women playwrights". Actually there were three, Pam Gems, Caryl Churchill and in radio Jennifer Phillips but that was about it. David Edgar writing in 1999 remarks with some wonder there are now two dozen. I don't think he was counting me so that makes one more. I had two radio plays produced by the BBC then moved on to writing novels and had three published in the decade - not a lot but I was also very ill which held me back a bit. The second one was in itself a bit revolutionary being a detective story that featured a software designer as the detective. In 1983 personal computers were in their infancy and the internet had not yet been heard of so this was one of the first detective stories to feature computers of which I am quite proud. I was influenced by Thatcherism insofar as I bought a flat and moved to Milton Keynes.
1990s
The big innovation in the 1990s was the move to independent production in an attempt to break up the big arts insitutions and commercialize the arts. I set up 'New City Films' and tried my hand at this but without much success as the dream of small independent producers swiftly faded over the decade as independent production became the province of larger companies with more capital.
2000s
Returning to London I moved to Richmond and took up painting. When my mother fell ill I returned to live with her and look after her and unconsciously following another theatrical trend began writing plays and books exploring national identity and gender politics.
So looking back my career has been pretty much a model of artistic trends of the last forty years. In this new decade I am again at the forefront of a new revolution, embracing new technology and trying my hand at direct publishing both in books and short films. Who knows where this will lead?
I can't say my career has been financially very successful although I have managed to keep going, always a bit of a feat for an independently minded artist, but it has been revolutionary and looking back more on the money (figuratively speaking) than I thought at the time.
