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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
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
that dominant conceptions of the social meanings of Butterflies (BBC 1978–83) (Hallam) and Dad’s Army (BBC 1968–77) (Nelson) are challenged and renegotiated. Linking audience response to ideological or textual criticism and a nuanced account of modes of acting and performance, the analysis contained in both essays is complex and politically aware. For Hallam, Butterflies, for all the narrowness of the comfortable, affluent and middle-class social world it portrays, nevertheless engaged its (largely female) viewers with real-life dilemmas and was appreciated for
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
series of images which are intricate and often dazzling’ (Frieze 133) (figure 4.1). We watch as twelve-year-old Jana (Marie Brassard) meets and grows close to the opera singer Sarah Weber (Rebecca Blankenship). Sarah hangs herself at the end of the section, overcome, it seems, by the hopelessness of existence in the camp, from which Jana eventually escapes. As the section ends, the adult Jana sits up as Blankenship walks slowly forward behind the glass, singing the title character’s final aria from Madame Butterfly, in which she says goodbye to her child (‘Look closely
. 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