Original Climax Films: historicizing the British hardcore pornography film business

This article presents findings from my research into the British hardcore pornography business. Porn studies has given little coverage to the British pornography business, with much of the academic literature focusing on the American adult entertainment industry. Recently, there has been a rising interest in the historical framework of porn cinemas both in popular culture and in academic work. This article contributes to this debate, taking both a cultural and an economic approach to explore the conditions that led to the emergence of British hardcore production as an alternative economy in the 1960s. In this economy, entrepreneurs make use of new technologies to produce artefacts that are exchanged for an economic benefit, while circumventing laws to distribute their artefacts. To historicize this economy, I draw on ethnohistorical research, which includes interviews with people involved in the British hardcore business and archival research. I argue that a combination of glamour filmmaking, a relaxation of political and cultural attitudes towards sexuality, the location of Soho, London, and emerging technologies for producing films collectively contribute to the emergence of an alternative economy of British hardcore production. I focus specifically on the practices of two entrepreneurs within this economy, Ivor Cook and Mike Freeman, considering how their actions inadvertently created the British hardcore film business, and played a significant role in the development of hardcore production outside of the United Kingdom

'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

Stabbing News: Articulating Crime Statistics in the Newsroom

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime

Underworld England: Guy Ritchie och brittisk gangsterfilm

Analys av Guy Ritchies gangsterfilmer som en del av den brittiska genretraditione

Whitehead, Peter Lorrimer

Whitehead, Peter Lorrimer (1937–2019), film-maker, writer, and falconer, was born on 8 January 1937 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, the only child of William Whitehead (1903–1948), gas fitter, and his wife Zenia Madge, née Sutherland (1905–1996), factory worker, who had married in 1933

Dossier: \u3cem\u3eTonite Let\u27s All Make Love in London\u3c/em\u3e

Standing in the Shadow: Peter Whitehead, Swinging London\u27s Insider/OutsiderSteve ChibnallWhitehead\u27s London: Pop and the Ascendant CelebrityKevin M. FlanaganOther than Vérité: Sound and Moving Image in the Rock Music Documentaries of Peter WhiteheadThomas F. CohenTonite Let\u27s All Make Love in LondonFramework EditorsTonite Let\u27s All Make Love in London, New York Film Festival Press ReleaseFramework EditorsTonite Let\u27s All Make Love in London Review, Films and Filming, 1968Raymond DurgnatTonite Let\u27s All Make Love in London Review, Variety, 1967Framework EditorsNational Film Finance Letter on Tonite Let\u27s All Make Love in London, 1967Framework EditorsSolicitor Letter on Tonite Let\u27s All Make Love in London, 1967Framework Editor