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In the autumn of 2000 the original cast of Carla Lane’s Butterflies (BBC 1978–83), Wendy Craig (Ria Parkinson), Geoffrey Palmer (Ben Parkinson), Nicholas Lyndhust (Adam Parkinson) and Andrew Hall (Russell Parkinson), reassembled to celebrate Ria’s sixtieth birthday as part of the BBC’s annual charity appeal Comic Relief . Butterflies was a domestic situation comedy centred on the boredom and frustration of a ‘typical’ 1970s suburban housewife (white, middle-class and southern English) who teeters on the brink of having an affair but, overcome by guilt
This book aims to provide resources for critical thinking on key aspects of television drama in Britain since 1960, including institutional, textual, cultural and audience-centred modes of study. It explores the continuing popularity of the situation comedy, and makes a convincing case for considering sitcom as a key popular genre. By offering a sense of how 'real' audiences respond to, and engage with, actual programmes in specific social situations, dominant conceptions of the social meanings of Carla Lane's Butterflies and Jimmy Perry and David Croft's Dad's Army are challenged and renegotiated. The book takes up Queer As Folk to focus on its status as an authored intervention in debates about the representation of homosexuality. It demonstrates that The Prisoner series inhabits contradictions by unpacking the complex question of the series's authorship, and the inadequacy of attributing its meanings to its creator, star performer or production team, for example. The book argues that The Demon Headmaster makes a significant contribution to the project of exploring and defining questions of ethics and justice in social organisation, in part, by claiming children's culture as a space of experimentation, resistance and subversion. It looks at the ways in which television drama embodies assumptions about its audience, and pursues this in a sophisticated way in relation to late twentieth-century television adaptations of 'the female Gothic'. The struggle between the BBC power-base in London and its satellite Departments in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales is also dealt with.
crossed with amour fou in Butterfly Kiss , for instance). It may also be that intertextual references to European filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard and others, as well as to some US directors, will contribute to the understanding of genre in Winterbottom’s films. For, more than most British directors, Winterbottom seems as much a European filmmaker as a British – let alone English – one
budgets for it to not be too high a risk. That’s especially true of In This World and The Road to Guantánamo , which were made from such low budgets that people made money from them. 1 As the preceding chapters have indicated, the reviews, since the days of Butterfly Kiss and Jude , have tended to praise Winterbottom and the Revolution
comporting themselves before listed buildings. However they start out, they end up as Winterbottom films. Those who admired his first cinema feature, Butterfly Kiss or the subsequent telemovie Go Now , a wracking study in degenerative illness, would not have been likely to expect him next to turn his interests and talents to adapting Thomas Hardy’s late Victorian tragic novel, Jude the Obscure . Since then, of course, one has
resisting the process of which García Márquez warns. In July 2000 I wrote an article for the Guardian on the history of the Spanish Civil War in cinema (Archibald, 2000 ) to coincide with the UK release of Butterfly’s Tongue. The newspaper’s editors headlined the article ‘The war that won’t die’, alluding to the increased number of films dealing with the period. Over a decade on, this process continues apace, congruent with increased levels of open and public debate as Spain struggles to come to terms with the memory of its bloody past. This book has outlined how the
. In stark contrast with the previous scene, now it is almost night, which makes the sublime landscape gloomier. A constant and prolonged musical note, from a Hammond organ, adds intensity to the mise-en-scène. The camera zooms in towards and then into a house in the foothills of the mountain. The melody intensifies, still with the same note, generating suspense due to its duration. The camera moves in closer, and subsequent editing dissolves into a close-up of a butterfly pinned in a shadow box. The musical crescendo continues, adding a rhythmic drumming that
about Direct Cinema, and how that movement might be distinguished from classic cinéma vérité. While Klein’s early Muhammad Ali documentaries, Cassius, le grand (1964, b&w, 42 min.) and Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee (1969, b&w, 94 min.), or his Maydays/Grand soirs et petits matins (1968/1978, b&w, 97 min.), for example, deploy observational techniques similar to those of Robert Drew, Frederick Wiseman, D. A. Pennebaker, or the Maysles brothers in their Direct Cinema heyday, his approach is never faithful to some naive notion of rigorous objectivity
McArthur, Colin 24 McCambridge, Mercedes 150 McCann, Graham 11 McDonald, Paul 70 McQueen, Butterfly 149–50 Madame Figaro 165 Magimel, Benoît 121
. It might be by gall, stealth or favour, but if you let the audience see that you are taking care of that, you get away with murder. Murder, blood and gall literally became explicit themes in Abbott’s work, themes that ran into his next three projects; the scripting of an original two-part drama called Butterfly Collectors (Granada, April 1999), the creation of a new drama series entitled Children’s Ward (ITV, 1989– 2000) and later, the production of the second series of Cracker (ITV, 1993–96), as well as the writing of three episodes of the third series. The first