began a run of producing every single Shakespeare play, a run which Sutton himself would later take over the producer's role on following his departure from the Head of Drama position in the early 1980s. Popular dramas such as Doctor Who and Z-Cars continued into the new decade, and were joined by costume dramas following The Forsyte Saga such as The Pallisers, The Onedin Line and Poldark. Family-audience based period dramas, often adaptations such as The Eagle of the Ninth (1977), were popular on Sunday afternoons, with the 'Classic Serial' strand which ran there becoming something of an institution until the early 1990s. Another success between 1973 and 1977 was the popular Warship drama series, filmed with a documentary-like look for forty-five episodes over four seasons on a Royal Navy frigate. Along with many BBC dramas of the decade, Warship was also very successful in countries such as Ireland and Australia. There were also failures, however. The epic Churchill's People, twenty-six fifty-minute episodes based around Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, was deemed unbroadcastable by Sutton after he had viewed the initial episodes, but so much time and money had been invested in huge pre-transmission publicity that the BBC had no choice but to show the plays, to critical derision and tiny viewing figures. Never again would a fifty-minute series be given a run as long as twenty-six episodes, for fear of being too committed to a project: runs of thirteen became the norm, although in later years even this began to be considered quite long. Plays such as Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle and Roy Minton's Scum were not broadcast at all due to fears over their content at the highest levels of the BBC, although despite this Potter continued to write landmark drama serials and one-offs for the Corporation throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1980s. Both Brimstone and Treacle and Scum were eventually transmitted some years later. Whenever writers and media analysts criticise the current state of British and particularly BBC television drama, it is frequently the 1960s and 1970s period which they cite as being the most important and influential, with a vast variety of genres (science fiction, crime, historical, family based) and types of programme (series, serials, one-offs, anthologies) being produced. "What may justly be rated as the golden age of television drama reached its zenith," as The Guardian described