Angry, Sexy and Working Class : Urgent!

[julian_craster]

On BBC Radio Two today !

Friday 19:00PM

Angry, Sexy and Working Class: documentary

Christopher Eccleston pays tribute to the working-class heroes and anti-heroes who defined the golden age of British films in the late Fifties and early Sixties. They appeared in classics such as Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life and Billy Liar.

Featuring interviews with Rita Tushingham, Shirley Anne Field, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Dora Bryan, Albert Finney, David Storey, Wendy Craig, Ken Loach and legendary cinematographer Walter Lassally, among others.

[dylan]

Originally Posted by julian_craster On BBC Radio Two today ! Friday 19:00PM Angry, Sexy and Working Class: documentary Christopher Eccleston pays tribute to the working-class heroes and anti-heroes who defined the golden age of British films in the late Fifties and early Sixties. They appeared in classics such as Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life and Billy Liar. Featuring interviews with Rita Tushingham, Shirley Anne Field, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Dora Bryan, Albert Finney, David Storey, Wendy Craig, Ken Loach and legendary cinematographer Walter Lassally, among others.

Richard Rodney Bennett? Didn't he work down pit in Barnsley?

D.

[julian_craster]

Angry, Sexy and Working Class
Fridays, 22 June - 13 July
BBC RADIO TWO 1900-1930 PM

The four episodes are titled
1. Angry Young Men
2. Up North
3. Love and Sex (NOW ONLINE)
4. Free at Last? (FRIDAY 13th JULY)

BBC - Radio 2 - Music Club - Docs - Angry, Sexy and Working Class

Presented by Christopher Eccleston , this series is a tribute to the sexy 'angry young men', the working class heroes and anti-heroes who defined the golden age of British films from the late 50s and early 60s….films such as Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life and Billy Liar. The series is shot through with many film clips and soundtracks plus interviews with Rita Tushingham, Shirley-Anne Field, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Dora Bryan, Albert Finney, David Storey, Wendy Craig, Ken Loach, the legendary cinematographer Walter Lassally and many more.

Sex and class came to the big screen around fifty years ago and changed British movie making (and British television) for ever. John Osborne's anti- establishment movie Look Back in Anger rocked the world of traditional culture in 1956. It questioned the class structure of England. It gave a voice to the post war generation who rebelled against the 'Establishment' and the stifling snobberies and sexual hypocrisies of the 1950s. Suddenly 'kitchen sink' dramas, the stories of (outspoken, cheeky, ambitious, sexy) working class heroes and their lives revolutionized cinema in Britain. Relaxation of censorship meant audiences could see, for the first time, that characters had sex lives, money worries and social problems. Our young heroes dealt with poverty, prostitution, pregnant girlfriends, homosexuality, loneliness, racial prejudice and the marriage trap. Those subjects spawned at wonderful decade of film; not just dramas, but comedies and musicals. These four programmes deal with that decade. - the films and their musical settings .

[ChristineCB]

JC, thanks for this link! I've done one this Monday, and I'll finish the others later this week. Thank you.

[ChristineCB]

One aspect I'm hoping that will be addressed wil be the attempted homogenization of society after WWII, where survivors' tolerance toward realism (if not a longing for) may have given license to filmmakers and their story, and then the acting, dialog, etc. snowballed along with it.

The TV Musical Varieties could certainly spell doom for the Cinema Musical Variety shows, but did film become the adult-centric vision while TV was geared toward Families? And was this obvious in 1950 (when I presume this 'direction' was solidified in thought, if not action)? Were filmmakers given license to create the more adult stories for films, and left the lighter fare for the TV? Certainly this was done by the end of the '50s (to some degree) but was this a conscious decision by any group of studios or filmmakers?

I'm hoping to hear about audience patterns and the perceived changes that the films would then respond to, because the financing of films had to be ready to step forward before films get started, so someone had to agree, "Yes, this is now an appropriate topic or style for today's audiences, when in the past, it wasn't."

Yes? No?

[dylan]

There was also radical drama on British TV from the mid-50s onwards, particulary Armchair Theatre which featured plays by Harold Pinter and Alun Owen among others.

Armchair Theatre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D