Authorship, form and narrative in the television plays of Alan Clarke, 1967-89

This thesis places the themes and approaches of the British director Alan Clarke within various contexts: the institutional contexts in which he worked, critical and theoretical debates on television form, and the methodological problems which are inherent in attributing authorship to a director working within the highly collaborative medium of television. This thesis constitutes the first full-length critical study of a director working within British television drama.Chapter 1 covers Clarke's background, his early theatre work, and several early television plays from his first, Shelter (1967) through to case studies of the drama-documentary To Encourage the Others (1972) and the fantasy Penda's Fen (1974). I demonstrate that his work in this period is more distinctive than its institutional and technological restrictions might suggest. My methodology features a fluid interplay between Television and Film Studies approaches, combining studies of his filmed work with analysis of his television plays in multi-camera studios and on Outside Broadcast, thereby considering vital issues of aesthetics. Chapter 2 explores various plays from the 1970s, sparse studies of institutionalisation like Sovereign's Company (1970) and Scum (1977, 1979). The banning of Scum was a turning point in his career; Chapter 2 contextualises this within academic writing on ideologically progressive form. Chapter 3 covers his work in his auteur period, the 1980s, by discussing the stylistic and narrative strategies of crucial productions like Made in Britain (1983) and his politically and aesthetically radical pieces on Northern Ireland and terrorism, Psy-Warriors (1981), Contact (1985) and Elephant (1989).Throughout this thesis, my interest in histories and aesthetics is predicated upon an ideological analysis, as I explore Clarke's work in terms of the politics of form, demonstrating his experimentation with narrative, his concern with discourse, and his questioning of the interaction between form and content

Authorship, form and narrative in the television plays of Alan Clarke, 1967-89

[From the introduction]: This thesis represents the first full-length critical study of the career of a director working in television drama. It combines a broadly chronological study of the dominant themes and approaches of the British director Alan Clarke with an awareness of various contexts: the institutional contexts in which he worked, critical debates on television form, and the methodological problems which confront critics when they attempt to attribute authorship to a television director. The central and interlinked issues which recur throughout this thesis are the politics of form, realism, narrative and authorship

'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)

Authorship, form and narrative in the television plays of Alan Clarke, 1967-89

This thesis represents the first full-length critical study of the career of a director working in television drama. It combines a broadly chronological study of the dominant themes and approaches of the British director Alan Clarke with an awareness of various contexts: the institutional contexts in which he worked, critical debates on television form, and the methodological problems which confront critics when they attempt to attribute authorship to a television director. The central and interlinked issues which recur throughout this thesis are the politics of form, realism, narrative and authorship.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceCarl Baron Memorial FundGBUnited Kingdo

From Pinter to Pimp:Danny Dyer, Class, Cultism and the Critics

Danny Dyer is one of Britain’s most prolific stars, with a career spanning both critically-acclaimed and critically-derided material, the latter exemplified by his work in exploitation movies. This article investigates Dyer’s film stardom, considering some of the central debates surrounding his status as an actor. Central to the discussion is the significance of Dyer within the contemporary cultural landscapes of gender and class, and the various complexities and contradictions that circulate around his persona. The article analyses, in the first instance, Dyer’s stardom in the wake of his role in the cult exploitation movie that consolidated his subsequent ‘hard man’ typecasting, The Football Factory (2004), and considers how the marketing of the majority of his subsequent films has been instrumental in perpetuating a particular construction of his stardom which, in turn, informs his reception by the critics. The article traces connections between Dyer’s popularity and recurrent critical derision aimed at him as an actor lacking artistic integrity and genuine talent. It contends that the politics of both Dyer’s star construction and his critical reception are linked to the renewed legitimacy of class hatred in British society, represented by media discourses surrounding the ‘chav’, which appositely reflects his ‘low’ cultural status as a ‘straight-to-DVD’ actor