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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.
metonymous for eye tests in the wake of memes mocking Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings’s improbable account of his trip there during lockdown; culture wars erupted over face masks; statues were toppled; and ahead of the US election, the streets broiled with unrest. In the trickster discourse, all things, from the trivial to the existentially grave, can look like omens. Notes 1 Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Yes Minister , 1980. 2 Amber A’Lee Frost, ‘The necessity of political vulgarity’, Current Affairs , 25 August 2016, https
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
or Paul in The Chain; Ted Margolies (Jonathan Lynn) is the scion of a dynasty of Jewish cabbies; while the oldest character, ‘Titanic’ Walters (David Ryall), so nicknamed because he is a ‘disaster’, proceeds chaotically towards the goal of the cabby’s Green Badge on an ancient bicycle he can hardly ride. For each man, the notion of ‘knowledge’ deliberately and comically transcends the 468 taxi-runs they must learn. Rosenthal describes his realisation that there was a second crucial element to a story about London cabbies: ‘It was to people the story with