Category: Film and history
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Underground lives: ‘Peaky Blinders’ and depicting histories of post-World War I Britain
With the finale of Peaky Blinders being aired recently, I thought I’d post this article draft on the history depicted in the television series. I had written this at the end of series three, but it was never published, so I am posting here. With the General Strike of 1926, the British Union of Fascists…
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#BlackPantherWoman: Black Power, gender and limits of transnationalism – a guest post by Jon Piccini
Once again, Jon Piccini (University of Queensland) has written a splendid piece on the recently shown documentary Black Panther Woman and I’m delighted that this blog is able to post it. Jon also wrote this piece on Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police a few months ago. The airing of Blackfella Film’s Black Panther…
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Crime, Masculinity and the Post-War Era in Peaky Blinders and Boardwalk Empire
WARNING: CONTAINS POTENTIAL SPOILERS I have recently finished watching the entire five series of the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire, set in the 1920s in Atlantic City, New Jersey during the era of prohibition, spanning the decade until 1932. Earlier this year, I also watched both series of the UK drama Peaky Blinders, which was…
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New article: Thatcherism and The Young Ones
This is just a short post to let everybody know that my new article on depictions of Thatcherite Britain in The Young Ones has been published in Agora. A version of the paper can be found here. If you can’t access it properly, send me an email and I’ll ping one your way. As usual,…
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The Conversation (UK) On Rik Mayall, The Young Ones and Thatcher
I just thought I’d mention that The Conversation (UK) has published a short piece by myself on The Young Ones as Mayall’s ground-breaking achievement and what the show reveals about Britain under Thatcher in the 1980s. You can read it here.
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In tribute to Rik Mayall: The Young Ones, Thatcherism and the People’s Poet
It is very saddening news to hear of the sudden death of Rik Mayall at the age of 56. As Rick, the lefty sociology student in The Young Ones, Mayall helped create one of the greatest contemporary portrayals of life in Thatcherite Britain, while indulging in surreal and off-the-wall comedy. The longevity of The Young…
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Mr Gove, film can never replicate historical ‘truth’
The last few days has seen a historiographical debate about the First World War played out in the media between Michael Gove, the Conservative Education Minister, and several different historians, including Richard J. Evans and Tristram Hunt, with plenty of others weighing in (see this article in The Guardian for a good summary). One of Gove’s…
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Why studying film helped me become a better historian
When I was an undergraduate, I planned to major in film studies, but I eventually switched to a double major in history and politics, keeping film studies as my minor. Although I didn’t keep up with my studies in film theory after I undertook my Honours and PhD in history, I look back on my…
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‘It’s a video nasty!’: Some background to the The Young Ones episode
Part of my research into my article on The Young Ones and Thatcherite Britain has involved looking at the moral panic concerning the ‘video nasties’ of the early 1980s. The boom in video sales in the first half of the 1980s provided a challenge to the authorities that classified film in the UK and there was…
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Research query: Did the UK left wing press cover ‘alternative comedy’?
I am currently turning my series of blog posts on The Young Ones and Thatcherism into a journal article and am trying to find an answer to the following question – did the left wing press in the UK (especially the CPGB’s Morning Star and Comment or the SWP’s Socialist Worker) feature any articles/reviews of ‘alternative comedy’ in the early-to-mid-1980s? While…
New Historical Express 