Download or read book The A to Z of British Radio written by Seán Street and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-08-04 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation is probably the most well-known national radio corporation in the world, but the BBC is just part of the British radio picture. There are 'pirate' radio stations, community radio, commercial radio, and more recently, experimentation and development in the digital arena. All aspects of the 85 years of UK radio, from issues of regulation to the role played by commercial operators prior to World War II, are covered in this new book by SeOn Street. The A to Z of British Radio relates the history of this medium through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on the BBC and other companies, many of the specific stations, the more memorable programs and those who wrote for or appeared on them, and the administrative and technical aspects. This quick reference tool's structure and ease of navigation will have scholars, students, radio industry professionals, journalists, and critics turning to it again and again.
Download or read book Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy written by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century--by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating "Fall Guy" character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack's pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering "showrunners" combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors' products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932's depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Life On Air written by David Hendy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radio Four has been described as 'the greatest broadcasting channel in the world', the 'heartbeat of the BBC', a cultural icon of Britishness, and the voice of Middle England. Defined by its rich mix, encompassing everything from journalism and drama to comedy, quizzes, and short-stories. Many of its programmes - such as Today ,The Archers, Woman's Hour, The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, Gardeners' Question Time, and The Shipping Forecast - have been part of British life for decades. Others, less successful, have caused offence and prompted derision. Born as it was in the Swinging Sixties, Radio Four's central challenge has been to change with the times, while trying not to lose faith with those who see it as a standard-bearer for quality, authoritativeness, or simply 'old-fashioned' BBC values. In this first major behind-the-scenes account of the station's history, David Hendy - a former producer for Radio Four - draws on privileged access to the BBC's own archives and new interviews with key personnel to illuminate the arguments and controversies behind the creation of some of its most popular programmes. He reveals the station's struggle to justify itself in a television age, favouring clear branding and tightly-targeted audiences, with bitter disputes between the BBC and its fiercely loyal listeners. The story of these struggles is about more than the survival of one radio network: Radio Four has been a lightning rod for all sorts of wider social anxieties over the past forty years. A kaleidoscopic view of the changing nature of the BBC, the book provides a gripping insight into the very nature of British life and culture in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Fully Authorised History of I m Sorry I Haven t A Clue written by Jem Roberts and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It's a great missing piece of the jigsaw - people go on endlessly about Python and Peter Cook, which is all well and good but there's basically this great corpus of work stretching for decades - and consistently good ... A major piece of work, and universally loved.' So says John Lloyd, brains behind Blackadder, QI, Spitting Image, and so much besides - all shows with a massive debt to I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Together they form a body of work stretching across five decades, from Cambridge in 1960 to today's world-beating Antidote to Panel Games, a laughter-bringer which has inspired unparalleled adoration in millions over fifty series. This book tells the whole story, from Footlights to Broadway to the ferret-filled madness of Radio Prune - comedy's answer to the rock & roll revolution of the sixties. Offering an exhaustive guide to the comedy world that brought us Mornington Crescent, besides episode guides, glossaries and rare facsimiles, Jem Roberts will take the story right up to the present day, celebrating the lives of Willie Rushton, Sir David Hatch and of course, the irreplaceable Humphrey Lyttelton. With exclusive input from the Teams, plus Bill Oddie, Stephen Fry, Bill Bailey, Neil Innes and many more, this is the long-overdue authoritative, entertaining and, above all, very silly lasting celebration of an unsung comic legacy that both shows so richly deserve.
Download or read book Radio Fun and the BBC Variety Department 1922 67 written by Martin Dibbs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a narrative history of the BBC Radio Variety Department exploring, along chronological lines, the workings of, tensions within and the impact of BBC policies on the programme-making department which generated the organisation’s largest audiences. It provides an insight into key events, personalities, programmes, internal politics and trends in popular entertainment, censorship and anti-American policy as they individually or collectively affected the Department. Martin Dibbs examines how the Department's programmes became markers in the daily and weekly lives of millions of listeners, and helped shape the nation's listening habits when radio was the dominant source of domestic entertainment. The book explores events and topics which, while not directly forming part of the Variety Department’s history, nevertheless intersected with or had an impact on it. Such topics include the BBC’s attitude to jazz and rock and roll, the arrival of television with its impact on radio, the pirate radio stations, and the Popular Music and Gramophone Departments, both of whom worked closely with the Variety Department.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age written by Louise Peacock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
Download or read book Crossing the Ether written by Sean Street and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of British broadcasting suggest that the BBC monopoly was never seriously challenged until the coming of ITV in 1955. Crossing the Ether counters this view, telling the story of commercial radio's first challenge to the Public Service monopoly between 1930 and 1939. In the telling, this account provides substantial primary evidence that radio in Britain during the 1930s was a battleground between continental-based stations, run by British and American commercial interests, and the BBC, beset by paternalistic and sabbatarian principles.
Download or read book Cinema and Radio in Britain and America 1920 60 written by Jeffrey Richards and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema and radio in Britain and America, 1920-60 charts the evolving relationship between the two principal mass media of the period. It explores the creative symbiosis that developed between the two, including regular film versions of popular radio series as well as radio versions of hit films. This fascinating volume examines specific genres (comedy and detective stories) to identify similarities and differences in their media appearances, and in particular issues arising from the nature of film as predominantly visual and radio as exclusively aural. Richards also highlights the interchange of personnel, such as Orson Welles, between the two media. Throughout the book runs the theme of comparison and contrast between the experiences of the two media in Britain and America. The book culminates with an in-depth analysis of the media appearances of three enduring mythic figures in popular culture: Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Students, scholars and lay enthusiasts of cinema history, cultural history and media studies will find this an accessible yet scholarly read.
Download or read book The British Sitcom Spinoff Film written by Stephen Glynn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of theatrically-released spinoff films derived from British radio and television sitcoms. Regularly maligned as the nadir of British film production and marginalised as a last resort for the financially-bereft industry during the 1970s, this study demonstrates that the sitcom spinoff film has instead been a persistent and important presence in British cinema from the 1940s to the present day, and includes (occasional) works with distinct artistic merit. Alongside an investigation of the economic imperative underpinning these productions, i.e. the exploitation of proven product with a ready-made audience, it is argued that, with a longevity stretching from Arthur Askey and his wartime Band Waggon (1940) to the crew of Kurupt FM and their recent People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan (2021), the British sitcom spinoff can be interpreted as following a full generic ‘life cycle’. Starting with the ‘formative’ stage where works from Hi Gang! (1941) to I Only Arsked! (1958) establish the genre’s characteristics, the spinoff genre moves to its ‘classic’ stage where, secure for form and content, it enjoys considerable popular success with films like Till Death Us Do Part (1969), On the Buses (1971), The Likely Lads (1976) and Rising Damp (1980); the genre’s revival since the late-1990s reveals a more ‘parodic’ final stage, with films like The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse (2005) adopting a consciously self-reflective mode. It is also posited that the sitcom spinoff film is a viable source for social history, with the often-stereotypical re-presentations of characters and events an (often blatant) ideological metonym for the concerns of wider British society, notably in issues of class, race, gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Laughing matters written by John Mundy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laughing Matters takes an analytic approach to film, television and radio comedy and provides an accessible overview of its forms and contexts. The introduction explains the value of studying comedy, concisely outlines the approach taken and summarises the relevant theories. The subsequent chapters are divided into two parts. The first part examines the specific forms comedy has taken as a constant and key element in film and broadcast comedy from their origins to the present. The second part shows how the genre gravitates towards contentious issues in British and American culture as it finds humour in the boundaries of class, gender, sexuality, race and logic. The authors cover silent cinema comedy including Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, sound film comedies including the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, Romantic film comedy, radio, television situation and sketch comedy, comedy and genre (including parody and spoof), animations from cartoons to CGI, issues of gender and sexuality from drag comedy to queer reading, issues of taste and humour from Carry On to contemporary 'gross-out' , and issues of race and ethnicity including a case study of African-American screen comedy. Numerous opportunities for following up are highlighted and advice on further reading, writing academically about comedy and an extensive bibliography add to the value of this textbook.
Download or read book Looking North written by Dave Russell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2004-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating areas as diverse as travel literature, fiction, dialect, the stage, radio, television, feature film, music and sport, this book assesses the portrayal of the North of England within the national culture and how this has impacted upon attitudes to the region and its place within notions of Englishness. The relationship between these cultural forms and the construction of regional identity has received only limited consideration and this fascinating work provides not only much new information, but also a map for future writers. The North, although seen ultimately as other and the subject of much critical comment, is also shown here as capable of stimulating the creative imagination and invigorating English culture in sometimes surprising ways.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of British Radio written by Seán Street and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of British radio begins long before the birth of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 1922. This book aims to tell this story through its component parts: the makers, the programs, and the policies that together shaped the development of a system of broadcasting, grounded initially in a public service ethic, and subsequently struggling toward an, at times, uneasy balance of public and commercial radio. The last ten years of UK radio history have contained more drama, change and development than in all its previous history. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of British Radio covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 800 cross-referenced entries on issues, characters, movements and policies that have shaped radio in the United Kingdom. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about British Radio.
Download or read book Music Hall Mimesis in British Film 1895 1960 written by Paul Matthew St. Pierre and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Music Hall Mimesis in British Film, 1895-1960, Dr. St. Pierre examines strategies of representing British music hall performance (1854-1919) and the performance of the body in British cinema in the silent era (1895-1927) and the sound era (1927-60). The focus is on films of Fred and Joe Evans, Frank Randle, Will Hay, George Formby, Arthur Lucan and Kitty McShane, Cicely Courtneidge, Jessie Matthews, Norman Evans, Max Miller, Stanley Holloway, Jack Warner, Gracie Fields, and Charles Chaplin. Consideration is given to themes such as war propaganda and gender impersonation.
Download or read book British Humour and the Second World War written by Juliette Pattinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book skilfully combines cutting-edge historical research by leading and emerging researchers in the field to investigate the utilization of British humour during the Second World War as well as its legacy in British popular culture. Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb bring together case studies that address a variety of situations in which humour was generated, including wartime jokes, films, radio, cartoons and private drawings, as well as post-war recollections, museum exhibitions and television comedy. By adopting an original interpretative framework of various wartime and post-war sites, this books opens up the possibility for a more variegated, richer analysis of Britain's wartime experience and its place thereafter in the cultural imagination. Through the lens of humour, this book promises to add critical nuance to our understanding of the functioning of British wartime society. Covering sources such as The British Cartoon Archive, BBC World War II People's War Archive and The Ministry of Information, and including analysis of the lasting role of comedy in Britain's memories and depictions of the war, the result is a rich addition to existing literature of use to students and scholars studying the cultural history of war.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Television written by Horace Newcomb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 2732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Television, second edtion is the first major reference work to provide description, history, analysis, and information on more than 1100 subjects related to television in its international context. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclo pedia of Television, 2nd edition website.
Download or read book Fawlty Towers written by Graham Mccann and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fawlty Towers was only on our screens for 12 half-hour episodes, but it has stayed in our lives ever since. The Major; 'Don't mention the war!'; 'He's from Barcelona'; Basil the Rat -- everyone has a favourite line, moment or character. In this, the first biography of the show, Graham McCann holds up to the light each of the unpredictable elements - the demented brilliance of John Cleese, his creative partnership with Connie Booth - that added up to an immortal sitcom, beloved all over the world, even in Barcelona.
Download or read book The Unsilvered Screen written by Graeme Harper and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics from the UK, US, Australia, Canada and Japan discuss views on canonical surrealist works , and the role of surrealism in modern cinema, animation, digital cinema and documentary.
