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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.
Versions of autobiography 7 P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982), Bye, Bye, Baby (1992), Eskimo Day (1996) and Cold Enough for Snow (1997) Many of Jack Rosenthal’s television plays contain autobiographical elements, particularly the early films The Evacuees (1975) and P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982). Bye, Bye Baby (1992) was described on its release as the third in an informal trilogy consisting of these plays, and was followed ten years later by two further autobiographically based films, Eskimo Day (1996) and its sequel, Cold Enough for Snow (1997). Rosenthal
Structure and plot 5 Spend, Spend, Spend (1977), The Chain (1984), Moving Story (1994) and Bag Lady (1989) In this chapter, I will analyse those of Jack Rosenthal’s plays where an unusual dramatic structure matches the plot. In Spend, Spend, Spend and The Chain, structural experimentation arises from the plays’ concern with British class formations. Class-related elements of both shocking contrast and surprising interrelation are represented at the level of form and content. Moving Story and Bag Lady are both dramatic offshoots of The Chain, in which the
Anglo-Jewish plays 8 The Evacuees (1975) and Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) In the Timeshift documentary Jack Rosenthal, broadcast on BBC1, 30 September 2004, four months after Rosenthal’s death, Jonathan Lynn argued that Rosenthal’s personal identifications were threefold: northern, working-class and Jewish. In this chapter I will explore the third of these elements. There are Jewish incidents and characters in many of Rosenthal’s television plays. These sometimes exist at the level of small details – a removal man bringing Miss Shepherd her long-awaited desk in Well
Introduction Jack Rosenthal once claimed that writing ‘starts with the realisation that eccentric means absolutely normal, that comedy comes from pain, and that every day is drama’.1 His plays were fêted during his lifetime and after his death for their gentle comedy,2 and taken to typify the kind of ‘golden age’ social comedy that is no longer in vogue with television networks. Yet, as his own statement suggests, Rosenthal did not shy away from less ‘gentle’ themes, including self-delusion, loneliness, misunderstanding, regret, cruelty and death. His long
effects of the campaign are perceptible in the series itself and in alterations to the rehearsal scripts for the series.3 Vice_04_Chap 3.indd 59 20/10/08 13:59:18 60 Jack Rosenthal The pilot There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah was filmed in 16mm black and white film. Its mise-en-scène is characterised by a mixture of comically bleak exterior scenes – of back-to-back houses with housewives dressed in aprons and turbans awaiting the refuse collection, pub yards, figures dwarfed by acres of refuse at rubbish tips, as well as brutalist 1960s architecture – and
television in the new millennium, particularly the control exerted over broadcasting by producers Vice_07_Chap 6.indd 135 20/10/08 14:00:58 136 Jack Rosenthal and television networks. Lipman sums up the focus of the second version of the play: ‘”Jack’s thinking was that TV had become producer’s choice and star-driven. He wanted to say what this had done to writers and the quality of TV.”’9 The differences between the two versions range from changes in camera-work, characters’ names, and topical references, to details of dialogue and the roles of central characters. An
, half past seven and I shall be in paradise.’2 It was Jack Rosenthal’s great good fortune to be employed by Granada, as a graduate trainee working in research and promotions, at just the time the production company launched their groundbreaking serial. He had ‘the biggest, luckiest break a hopeful writer could have dreamt of’ when he was invited to write his first-ever script for Coronation Street.3 Rosenthal’s first foray into dramatic writing was episode 30 of this, the world’s longest-running continuous television serial, broadcast on 17 March 1961. The serial was
disenchantment with the process of voting is represented in Mr Ellis Versus the People in a way well suited to its mid-1970s context. Vice_03_Chap 2.indd 33 20/10/08 13:58:52 34 Jack Rosenthal Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar was directed by Michael Apted and shown on ITV Playhouse on 9 December 1968. It is about the fortunes of Edgar Lunt (Alfred Lynch), who works as a train-carriage cleaner in Colne, Lancashire. The plot concerns his comically exaggerated sense of sin and punishment, particularly for sexual misdemeanours. As Edgar puts it
to relate to each other. The Lovers The Lovers was a Granada comedy series of six episodes broadcast in 1970, written and produced by Jack Rosenthal and directed by Michael Apted. Rosenthal won the Writers’ Guild Best Comedy Series Award in 1971 for The Lovers and the series was so popular that a second one followed a year later, but by this time Rosenthal was no longer involved. Geoffrey Lancashire, a colleague of Rosenthal’s on Coronation Street and also his landlord for five years, wrote the scripts for the second series, while Les Chatfield directed. Rosenthal