Category: Film
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“YOU DON’T WANNA MISS THIS WEEK’S FEATURE CREATURE”: BUFFY’S TOP TEN STAND ALONE EPISODES
It is 20 years since the debut of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As a show that has generated much academic and fan-generated writing, I thought I would post this piece that I wrote for All Slay zine back in 2003. So Scooby Gang fans, enjoy! There has been much analysis and debate…
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London Recruits: Please help fund doco on ‘secret war against Apartheid’
This is an appeal to help raise money to fund the completion of this documentary on the British activists who travelled to South Africa in the late 1960s to undertake secret missions to help the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Here’s a message from the film makers: New documentary feature London…
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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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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 