While the development of British television drama has been well charted, comparatively little work has been conducted with regard to the medium's impact on acting style. This article is intended to address that lack, evolving a framework of ‘studio realism’ and ‘location realism’ to examine how changes in production can affect acting in television drama, using the BBC series Survivors (1975–7) as a case study. Originally produced along the traditional Corporation lines of filmed location work followed by rehearsal at the purpose-built Acton rooms (typically two weeks for a 50-minute episode of drama) and two days of studio recording at Television Centre, after its initial seven episodes the programme switched to an all-location model using Outside Broadcast video cameras. Instead of preparing in a separate space, the cast adopted an on-location rehearse/record process, a template that has endured, with certain modifications, to the present day. By employing a combination of original cast interviews and textual analysis, I examine what effects this altered mode of production had on acting, as pre-planned, ‘in continuity’, multi-camera studio work – itself a remnant of the live process imported from the stage in the 1930s – began to give way to the out-of-sequence, single-camera model – in which performances are evolved almost entirely on site – which predominates today. In this way the conditions and effects of studio and location realism are exemplified and investigated in an attempt to make an opening contribution to the hitherto largely neglected field of acting for television drama.

When considering the history of screen performance in academic studies, it is notable that leading contributors such as Charles Affron (1977), James Naremore (1988) and Andrew Klevan (2005) haveperhaps unsurprisinglycommonly utilised textual analysis as a means of unpacking either the signifiers and signified of selected scenes, or the particular styles of individual actors. Comparatively few, however, have chosen to focus on the contextualising background factors which combine to produce the performance ultimately seen on the screen, Roberta Pearson's Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (1992) and Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnickie's Reframing Screen Performance (2008) providing notable exceptions. While the majority of the above works focus on Hollywood 'star' performers, comparatively little work has been conducted with regard to their small-screen equivalents, and what has been written continues this primarily text-based approach. The fleeting attention paid to performance style in major works on British television history by John Caughie (2000) and Lez Cooke (2003) generally fails to consider the extent to which this was affected by production practice and historical context, changes in which have been so varied and significant over the intervening decades that some form of examination is surely now long overdue. Otherwise, any attempt at analysing the small screen acting of yesteryear risks being distorted by the passage of time, Caughie's reading of performance in Rudolph Cartier's Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC, 1954) being notably coloured by condemnatory phrases such as 'stagey' and 'stilted' (Caughie 2000, 49). In this way Caughie falls into the analytical trap

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