This study provides a contribution to the developing debate on the arts in contemporary society. A range of critical approaches are applied and key perspectives have also been provided by practitioners from the theatre and television industries. Since its beginnings in the 1930s, television in Britain has had a close relationship with the institution of the theatre, and with the process of dramatic production. The essays in this collection provide a wide-ranging examination of the way in which drama and theatre are represented on British broadcast television. It considers how dramatic literature and existing stage productions have been re-interpreted through the technologies and production practices of television and reconstructed for a radically-different audience. Celebrated television adaptations (Alan Clarke's version of Road and Channel 4's reworking of the National Theatre's Mysteries, for example) are examined in detail, and there are wider investigations of the ways in which the classical canon and the work of Shakespeare have been mediated by television programming.