This book analyses the representation of North-East England in film and television. It is a response to the way a number of important British films and programmes—for example, Get Carter (1971), Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (1973-74), Our Friends in the North (1996) and Billy Elliot (2000)—have used this particular setting to explore questions of class, identity and history. It argues for the significance and coherence of a North-East corpus of film and television through a series of case studies relating to specific eras or types of representation. These include regional writers working for television in the 1970s, the achievements of the workshop movement in the 1980s and works produced within the genres of documentary, crime drama, comedy, period drama and reality television. The book discusses how the communities and landscapes of the region have been used to explore processes of cultural change, and legacies of de-industrialisation.

British Film and Television Industries--Decline or Opportunity?, Volume II: Evidence

This collection presents a number of films and television programmes set in the North of England in an investigation of how northern identity imbricates with class, race, gender, rural and urban identities. Heading North considers famous screen images of the North, such as Coronation Street and Kes (1969), but the main purpose is to examine its lesser known facets. From Mitchell and Kenyon’s ‘Factory Gate’ films to recent horror series In the Flesh, the authors analyse how the dominant narrative of the North of England as an ‘oppressed region’ subordinated to the economically and politically powerful South of England is challenged. The book discusses the relationship between the North of England and the rest of the world and should be of interest to students of British cinema and television, as well as to those broadly interested in its history and culture.

Over half a century on, the 1960s continue to generate strong intellectual and emotional responses - both positive and negative - and this is no less true in the arena of film. Making substantial use of new and underexplored archive resources that provide a wealth of information and insight on the period in question, this book offers a fresh perspective on the major resurgence of creativity and international appeal experienced by British cinema in that dramatic decade. Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema is the first scholarly volume on this period of British cinema for more than twenty-five years. It provides a major reconsideration of the period by focusing on the central tensions and contradiction between novelty/revolution and continuity/tradition during what remains a highly contentious period of cultural production and consumption.

No Marketing Blurb

Published in 1995, "Film & Television" is an important contribution to Film and Media.

This book looks at television comedy, drawn from across the UK and Ireland, and ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. It explores depictions of distinctive geographical, historical and cultural communities presented from the insiders’ perspective, simultaneously interrogating the particularity of the lived experience of time, and place, embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives, experiences and sensibilities, which the collected individual chapters offer. Comedies considered include Victoria Wood’s work on ‘the north’, Ireland’s Father Ted and Derry Girls, Michaela Coel’s east London set Chewing Gum, and Wales’ Gavin and Stacey. There are chapters on Scottish sketch and animation comedy, and on series set in the Midlands, the North East, the South West and London’s home counties. The book offers thoughtful reflection on funny and engaging representations of the diverse, fragmented complexity of UK and Irish identity explored through the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.