had by now been perfected for capturing live broadcasts for repeat and overseas sales, although it was not until the early 1960s that the majority of BBC dramas were prerecorded on the new technology of videotape. The BBC, unlike American broadcasters, only gradually produced dramas shot entirely on film from the 1960s onwards; ITV's filmed series were in the minority, and most of the commercial channel's drama productions were made in the same 'hybrid' form as those of the BBC. Filmed sequences would be mounted for external scenes which would be pre-shot and inserted into productions at relevant points, later being inserted into shows at the video editing stage. "These sequences bought time for the more elaborate costume changes or scene set-ups, but also served to 'open out' the action," as the British Film Institute explained on its Screenonline website in 2004. The BBC suffered during the second half of the 1950s from the rise of the ITV network, which had debuted in 1955 and rapidly begun to take away audience share from the Corporation as its coverage spread nationally. Despite popular hits such as the police drama series Dixon of Dock Green and soap opera The Grove Family, the BBC was seen as being more highbrow, lacking the popular common touch of the commercial network. One of the major figures in commercial television drama of the late 1950s and early 1960s was Canadian producer Sydney Newman, the Head of Drama at ABC Weekend TV responsible for such programmes as Armchair Theatre and The Avengers. In December 1962, keen to turn around the fortunes of their own drama department, the BBC invited Newman to replace the retiring Barry as Head of Drama, and he accepted, keen on the idea of transforming what he saw as the staid, docile image of BBC drama. The 'golden age' of BBC drama Even before Newman's arrival, some BBC producers were attempting to break the mould, with Elwyn Jones, Troy Kennedy Martin and Allan Prior's landmark police drama series Z-Cars shaking up the image of television police dramas and becoming an enormous popular success from 1962 onwards. Newman, however, restructured the entire department, dividing the unwieldy drama group into three separate divisions: series, for on-going continuing dramas with self-contained episodes; serials, for stories told over multi-episode runs, or programmes which were made up of a series of serials; and plays, for any kind of drama