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This is a critical work on Jack Rosenthal, the highly regarded British television dramatist. His career began with Coronation Street in the 1960s and he became famous for his popular sitcoms, including The Lovers and The Dustbinmen. During what is often known as the ‘golden age’ of British television drama, Rosenthal wrote such plays as The Knowledge, The Chain, Spend, Spend, Spend and P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang, as well as the pilot for the series London's Burning. This study offers a close analysis of all his best-known works, drawing on archival material as well as interviews with his collaborators, including Jonathan Lynn and Don Black. The book places Rosenthal's plays in their historical and televisual context, and does so by tracing the events that informed his writing – ranging from his comic take on the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s, to recession in the 1970s and Thatcherism in the 1980s. His distinctive brand of melancholy humour is contrasted throughout with the work of contemporaries such as Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale and Johnny Speight, and his influence on contemporary television and film is analysed. Rosenthal is not usually placed in the canon of Anglo-Jewish writing, but the book argues this case by focusing on his prize-winning Plays for Today, The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy.
cities and engaging with ceremonial mayors for whom the visiting premier was a highlight. But in Manchester ‘The Lady’ was snubbed by the lord mayor, councillor Kath Robinson, another of the left-wing group, who sent her apologies to organisers the Chamber of Commerce, at short notice on the night of the event. Chambers of Commerce were bastions of free enterprise and Manchester’s captains of industry had paid £50 a head to don black tie for a reception and dinner in the Peacock Room of the Piccadilly Hotel, a
Louis Beam, who developed Aryan Liberty Net, an online forum linked to the Aryan Nations neo-Nazi group; and the White Aryan Resistance BBS, created by Tom Metzger using his Commodore 64 computer. 3 As Heidi Bierich highlights, a key development came in 1996, when a former Ku Klux Klan activist Don Black set up a new website on the internet, Stormfront , which is still active today. Since its formation
internet widened and deepened the cultural collaboration that music, magazines, and books had enabled in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, white power groups had built a social network of websites and message boards which, like the skinhead music industry, enabled them to push their ideas globally without leaving their home countries. As one member of WAR put it, cyberspace allowed white supremacists to “spread ourselves across the planet” since no one could “arrest our thoughts.” 78 Former Klansman Don Black, who spent three years in prison in the 1980s for his role in a
donning black shirts, giving Roman salutes and accepting the accoutrements of the Fascist cultural revolution’, doubts remain about ‘the profundity and ubiquity of the conversion’.208 Unfortunately, when Italy declared war on Britain, all those who were named on the membership lists, compiled by the security services by September 1938, would be rounded up because of their Fascist associations, however innocuous.209 The blackshirted attendance at commemorative occasions and indulgence in Fascist pageantry by a minority of Fasci members contributed to the Italians
’s terrifying. These are some funny kinds of freedom that society teaches us’. 112 catherine breillat libres’).24 The more brazenly ‘liberated’ Solange is in expressing her desires, the more she feels she needs to be punished for them, in an increasingly vicious cycle of sexual expression and violent repression, leading to ever greater degrees of humiliation, scarification and degradation. Solange can don black leather pants in order to seduce Bruno, but it is he who must remove them while she lies passively in bed, barely able to look at her own ‘shameful’ sex. The kind