1. Raking over the Asylum: the television drama of Donna Franceschild
Jonny Murray
(Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh)

2. Introduction She-Play: The Necklace (Short) (1990)
The Play on One: And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon (1991)
Takin’ Over the Asylum (6 parts) (1994)
A Mug’s Game (4 parts ) (1996)
Eureka Street ( 4 parts) (1999)
Donovan Quick (2000)
The Key (3 parts) (2003)

3. Female Scottish identity and experience
“Glasgow is rapidly becoming the Scottish dramatist’s Liverpool, full of gritty working-class characters battling against the odds and never saying die. And sure enough everyone was here – the old, poor, alcoholic, cohabiting with an alcoholic, dying dead or depressed. However bad things were at any one moment, you always knew they would get much worse.”
Marcus Berkmann, ‘Laugh? It was enough to make you weep’, Daily Mail (16/8/91), p. 34.

4. Female Scottish identity and experience
“Donna Franceschild’s play doesn’t offer much new insight into much new insight into coping with cancer or with insufferable fellow patients, but that’s not the job of drama. It does offer four eminently grabbable parts for women…”
Anon, ‘And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon’, The Guardian (16/8/91), p. 30.
“A human story that’s more about women than disease. As playwright Donna Franceschild says, “It’s about things that have been eating women up for many years – the cancer is just a manifestation of that.”
Richard Johnson, ‘Last laughs’, Time Out (London) (14/8/91), p. 132.

5. Female Scottish identity and experience
“As a play about friendship between women, if succeeded”
Pam Francis, ‘Last Night’s View’, Today (16/8/91), p. 26.
“A play which… explores the very basis of how women view their bodies and themselves”
Producer Aileen Forsyth quoted in BBC, ‘Play on One: And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon press release’, BFI Reading Room microfiche.

6. Female Scottish identity and experience
And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon:
Opens with a knowing, realistically motivated act of uncovering particular forms of female identity and attempted non-conformity.
Uses its hospital setting to articulate a similarly plausible and symbolically pointed, focus on female entrapment, externally and/or internally driven.
Uses its hospital setting to suggest that multiple forms of ostensibly non-gendered forms of institutional power and authority are in fact profoundly gendered, patriarchal phenomena.
Attempts to play out such politicised and public thematic matter in profoundly intimate, interpersonal and embodied ways.

7. Female Scottish identity and experience
And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon:
Climaxes with a preferred self-image of itself as a work that quite literally giving public airtime to a previously suppressed and depressed female voice.

8. Non-normative modes of human perception and social behaviour
“I had some knowledge of psychiatric hospitals before through visiting people but when you get closer to the subject you realise that preconceived ideas have to be set aside… what I’m certainly against though is medicating people so that they don’t embarrass us.”
Franceschild quoted in Peter Barnard, ‘Helping one another cope’, The Times (24/9/94), p. 6.

9. Non-normative modes of human perception and social behaviour
“A lot of people now are politically cynical, as Labour have turned out to be Tories, Mark II. But when true opposition comes back, it will be because of a few lunatics who are never going to win but who make us think that things can be different.”
Franceschild quoted in James Rampton “A tilt at far more than mere windmills”, The Independent (27/12/00), p. 9

10. Popular formats, radical address
“Contemporary drama is the impoverished cousin of the entire TV scene and needs encouragement.”
Franceschild quoted in Sue Summers, ‘Takin’ Over the Asylum’, Daily Telegraph (21/7/95), p. 21.

11. Popular formats, radical address
The Key:
Systematic prioritisation of female private experience and public protest.
Strategic use of popular televisual dramatic traditions and formats for pointedly precise political ends.
Pronounced interest in wholesale multinational privatisation of public services and elements of the public sphere as especially symptomatic and problematic aspects of late c20th neoliberalism.

12. Conclusion Reasons for studying Franceschild further:
“Although I lead a very different life from my mother and grandmother, there are lots of strands connecting us. I’m angry that current events are always interpreted as if we have no history. The past explains how we got here. We have to understand it in order to know where we’re going.”
Franceschild quoted in The Key: A major new drama from BBC Scotland, BBC press release, BFI Reading Room microfiche, p. 3.
Reasons for studying Franceschild further:
Gaps in the national history
Gaps in the national imaginary
Gaps in the national industry