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conventions. Furthermore, ‘Each age has its own idea of what is natural and lifelike’ (Davis and Postlewait, 2003 : 20), and the development of performance styles is at least partly a consequence of the range of media in which acting can now take place. Comedy acting - and television sitcom acting that arises from it - is marked by its distinctiveness from such naturalist or realist performance, often employing larger movements, a wider vocal range, and
Given the relative lack of attention to specific TV programmes and episodes in interviews with surviving blacklistees until recently, given the relative lack of availability of 1950s and 1960s TV shows on video, on DVD or even in archives, given the relative lack of complete or reliable information on the credits of many TV series and shows, and given the sheer number of episodes (closer to a thousand than to hundred) requiring research, attention and study, the difficulties facing those interested in researching the blacklistees and TV are all the more formidable. This article begins the task of listing blacklistee‘s television credits.
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.
, yet the laugh track in comedy programmes - it is standard sitcom practice - signals the quotation marks around the ‘live’ nature of the experience (Mills 2005 : 50). The laugh track is both a cue to individual viewers and a way of placing those viewers in a larger regional or national audience. Mills notes the way in which comedy can ‘bind groups together at the moment of consumption’ (2005: 142
The question of what counts as an innovative feature in the development of a sitcom is difficult because in some ways we are talking about a framework so simple and so easy to recognise that the sitcom is, literally, child’s play. (Feuer 2001 :69) This essay takes a second look at the apparent simplicities of the situation comedy, comparing some ‘classic’ 1960s and 1970s British sitcoms with a more recent example, The Office (BBC 2001–3), with the aim of clarifying the relationship of narrative form to ideological and historical content. I have
3885 Cult British TV Comedy:Layout 1 14/12/12 07:52 Page 69 3 ‘Careful now’: Graham Linehan – a case study in post-alternative sitcom For the alternative comics of the 1980s, the sitcom seemed to particularly represent all that was bland and conservative about TV comedy – something to be deconstructed in The Young Ones or extended more imaginatively in the different incarnations of Blackadder. However, in some ways, the genre underwent more significant changes in the late 1990s and early 2000s – the heightened naturalism of The Royle Family, The Office and
patient and pearl-necklace-wearing parenthood that real-life moms would try, often with frustration, to emulate.’ 1 Of course, Leave it to Beaver was not the only sitcom to feature that ever-smiling mother and a brief historical overview of the way mothers have been represented on US network television arguably reveals much about how the viewing experience ‘gets determined
Ozon’s oeuvre. Ozon’s films to date have oscillated between the exuberant and satirical send-ups of bourgeois family life Sitcom (1998) and 8 Femmes (8 Women, 2001), and the contrastingly sober Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000) and 5 x 2 (2004), both of which address that staple theme of French drama ‘le couple’ – an oscillation that sets Ozon apart from the kind of stylistic unity usually associated with being
by the vehemence of Ria’s frustration with her comfortable lifestyle; by comparison with other British domestic sitcoms of the day, such as Bless This House (ITV 1971–76) and Terry and June (BBC1 1979–87), Butterflies ’ focus on the point of view of a female character was uncharacteristic. Usually in these sitcoms, the wife was the butt of her husband’s discontent and disappointment; themes of ageing, domestic entrapment and frustrated desire are fertile ground for verbal gags and one-liners delivered at her expense. In Butterflies , writer Carla Lane breaks
boundaries, the usefulness of this generic category is revealed, as is the extent of the Gothic’s popularity on television. This chapter centres on a discussion of two hybrid forms of Gothic drama in the 1960s, firstly the Gothic family sitcoms The Munsters (Kayro-Vue Productions, 1964–66) and The Addams Family (Filmways, 1964–66), and secondly the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis