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new BBC Television Centre near Shepherd’s Bush. In the 1950s and early 1960s the BBC’s regional production centres did not have the resources, the budget or the personnel to produce a long-running series like Z Cars. Instead the regional studios produced single plays for the national television service, such as Alan Plater’s first television plays, The Referees (1961) and A Smashing Day (1962), plays with a distinctly Northern COOKE PRINT.indd 30 05/07/2012 13:36 Regional broadcasting 31 flavour, which were produced at the BBC’s Dickenson Road studio in
the 1950s and early 1960s. In the meantime, French critics, who had been the first foreign critics to praise Fernández’ work, began to find his films repetitive (García Riera, 1987 : 121). Fernández and the Mexican film industry in the 1960s The ‘crisis’ in Mexican cinema worsened in the early 1960s. For the first time feature production decreased, kept up only by the production
ushered in what became the golden age of British radio comedy in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Danger! - Men at Work 1939-47) represented a break from the soporific comedy that still characterised much British music-hall-inspired radio comedy. Essentially a situation comedy, the show was set around the attempts of the formidable landlady and comic foil Anaesthesia Ponsonby to keep the Hotel Mimoar running
the Carry On films and the work of Benny Hill, examples primarily located in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, then move on to trace the origins and development of the gross-out movie from the abandonment of the Production Code in 1966 to the present. Finally we consider Borat (2006), a film that pushes at boundaries of ‘good taste’ and ‘political correctness’ but which has enjoyed considerable
trying to team him with Jimmy Durante) and fired him in 1933. Thereafter Keaton made a living as a gag man, thinking up slapstick bits for other comics, before making a very late comeback as a comic actor in the 1960s. Harold Lloyd’s career also suffered and in 1934 he stopped making films, until a brief 1940s comeback. Charlie Chaplin, on the other hand, sustained his career by making only three, essentially
Northern writers in the late 1950s and 1960s in order to offer contemporary regional drama from the North for both a local and a national television audience. Granada’s regional counterpart in the North, ABC Television, which shared the franchise for the North of England with Granada until 1968, also contributed to the New Wave of Northern drama during this period, most notably by commissioning Northern writers to contribute original plays to its prestigious Armchair Theatre series, a weekly networked anthology series which, along with Granada’s Coronation Street, helped
January 1957), Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (17 March 1959) and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (3 November 1959), among many others. The reliance upon American material is clearly evident in these early plays and the decision to bring in American and Canadian directors, rather than recruit directors from the BBC, may explain this leaning towards American drama in the early years at Granada. Recalling his days as a production trainee at Granada in the early 1960s, the theatre and television director Gordon McDougall recollects the impact of Narizzano’s 1957
moving into filmed drama in the late 1960s. For BBC English Regions Drama, producing its first drama in 1972, film was important from the beginning, with John Hopkins’s That Quiet Earth the first of many filmed dramas to be produced by the department. While English Regions Drama experimented with new lightweight video equipment in 1973–74 a film aesthetic was preferred for its ability to convey a ‘sense of place’ with greater verisimilitude, complementing and enhancing the regionality of the writing. By no means all of Granada’s drama was set in its own region. The
was that there was talent, craft and technical infrastructure of the highest, BBC-trained order: the situation was akin to that of Manchester in the early 1960s when Vivian Daniels produced the first plays of John Hopkins, John McGrath and Alan Plater. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Peter Dews, the eminent theatre COOKE PRINT.indd 111 05/07/2012 13:36 112 A Sense of Place director, had run a one-man drama department in Birmingham where, along with contemporary plays, he produced the magnificent Shakespeare history cycle, An Age of Kings. As the 1960s
attention to the regional organisation of the ITV network and the structure and organisation of regional broadcasting in the Midlands, using a Midlands-based theatre company as a case study in order to examine the relationship between regional theatre and regional television in the 1960s–70s. Chapter 3 provides a detailed examination of Granada Television’s drama output from 1956 to 1982, considering the company’s development from the mid1950s to its position as the biggest and most important regional ITV company at the beginning of the 1980s. Chapter 4 provides a