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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.
unfurls to full glory when Salander is facing away 137 Swedish crime fiction from the camera, from us. Paradoxically, the sight of the tattoo marks an act of asserted identity even as, especially when, the character withdraws from us, remaining unknown and unknowable. Sex and sexuality The body in Swedish crime fiction is also the site onto which treatises about sex and sexuality are written, often in blood. Historically, Sweden has a stereotypical image as a place of advanced sexual liberation. It is imagined as a permissive society, a liberal utopia with free love
cinema of the nouvelle vague , arguing that such works are inevitably shaped, even in their formal aspects, by the political events and ideas of the period (ibid.: 2). In Robbe-Grillet’s case, this was in particular the climate of sexual politics that dominated the 1970s and 1980s. The films he made in those decades both take advantage of a more permissive society and contain themes that help us to understand the sexual
Love stories 4 The Lovers (1970), Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975) and Wide-Eyed and Legless (1993) The two situation comedies and one play analysed in this chapter are about love, romance and marriage. The generic differences between The Lovers and Sadie, It’s Cold Outside on the one hand, and Wide-Eyed and Legless on the other, are matched by the different kinds of relationship represented in each. The comically unresolved courtship of the young protagonists in The Lovers, set at a moment at the end of the 1960s when it seemed that ‘the Permissive Society’ had
In 1960–62, a large number of white autochthonous parents in Southall became very concerned that the sudden influx of largely non-Anglophone Indian immigrant children in local schools would hold back their children’s education. It was primarily to placate such fears that ‘dispersal’ (or ‘bussing’) was introduced in areas such as Southall and Bradford, as well as to promote the integration of mostly Asian children. It consisted in sending busloads of immigrant children to predominantly white suburban schools, in an effort to ‘spread the burden’. This form of social engineering went on until the early 1980s. This book, by mobilising local and national archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals the extent to which dispersal was a flawed policy, mostly because thousands of Asian pupils were faced with racist bullying on the playgrounds of Ealing, Bradford, etc. It also investigates the debate around dispersal and the integration of immigrant children, e.g. by analysing the way some Local Education Authorities (Birmingham, London) refused to introduce bussing. It studies the various forms that dispersal took in the dozen or so LEAs where it operated. Finally, it studies local mobilisations against dispersal by ethnic associations and individuals. It provides an analysis of debates around ‘ghetto schools’, ‘integration’, ‘separation’, ‘segregation’ where quite often the US serves as a cognitive map to make sense of the English situation.
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
This book is a social history of northern soul. It examines the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices, by locating it in the shifting economic and social contexts of the English midlands and north in the 1970s. The popularity of northern soul emerged in a period when industrial working-class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. The book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, popular music and everyday life in post-war Britain. The authors draw on an expansive range of sources including magazines/fanzines, diaries, letters, and a comprehensive oral history project to produce a detailed, analytical and empathetic reading of an aspect of working-class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young men and women in the 1970s. A range of voices appear throughout the book to highlight the complexity of the role of class, race and gender, locality and how such identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dance floors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel (Manchester), the Torch (Stoke-on-Trent), the Catacombs (Wolverhampton) and the Casino (Wigan).
-expanding profession. At the Silver Jubilee conference of the Institute of Public Relations in 1973, to take an illustrative example, Prime Minister Edward Heath was joined by Professor H. J. Eysenck (who spoke on the social implications of the permissive society), the broadcaster Mary Stott (‘What power do women have now?’) and the theatrical impresario Sam Wanamaker. Meanwhile, the IPR President, Geoff Lewis, lectured delegates of the necessity of a ‘collective, deliberate, planned and 202 Public relations in Britain sustained effort to maintain mutual understanding between all
legislation on the statute book. Rejection of the permissive society and the adoption of more austere ‘Victorian values’ were an essential element of the New Right’s politics and found backing and succour among the right-wing print media and from the long-standing moral watchdog, Mary Whitehouse. Espousing the nostrums of family values and an aversion to the promotion of minority rights (most infamously in the case of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act), the Conservative government of the 1980s set out to return Britain to the 1950s. David Marquand described this
. For both right- and left-wing cultural and political commentators, the central feature of this story lies in the association of utopian progressivism with non-utopian progressive or child-centred education, and of both with ‘the permissive society’. Sympathisers defend child-centred education by arguing that children need freedom and autonomy to learn; detractors claim that child-centred education led to