Mary Rizza, Author at Mary Rizza

1963, the Profumo Scandal and the Trial of Christine Keeler — Rumours by Colin Shindler on Radio 4

By Mary Rizza

Rumours by Colin Shindler is an entertaining radio play about a defining 1960s’ political scandal. The play, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, is structured on the part played by the satirical magazine Private Eye in the Profumo Affair in 1963 and it catches perfectly the mood of the period.

We see the press awash with gossip and rumours, everyone looking over their shoulder to see which publication will stick its head above the parapet and print what everyone was saying but for which there was no solid evidence.
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Retro reads: Autumn Term by Antonia Forest

By Mary Rizza

Autumn Term by Antonia Forest (published 1948)

Decades before the genre of Young Adult fiction was identified, Antonia Forest’s series of books about the Marlows, a family of six girls (one set of twins) and two boys, explores the world of young people with clarity and a sometimes shocking lack of sentimentality.

The characters’ intense inner lives are put under a microscope which reveals moral ambiguities, shifts and compromises, self-interest, conflicting loyalties, jealousies and tensions in a prose style which is lucid and entertaining.

Little wonder that critic Victor Watson said that Forest was Jane Austen for the young. She even uses Austen’s technique of free indirect speech, where the reader is brought straight into the characters’ heads and identifies with their interior monologues.
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Poirot’s back on the case as Sophie Hannah takes up Agatha Christie challenge

By Mary Rizza

Crime writer Sophie Hannah’s novel, The Monogram Murders, featuring Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot has just been published and is getting a good reception.

Hannah says reading Christie as a young teenager made her fall in love with mystery fiction. You and me both, Sophie.

The first Agatha Christie novel I read was Death on the Nile, which plunged me into a grown-up world of passion, sex, jealousy, greed, exotic places, even more exotic characters and, of course, murder.

I gasped at the ingenious plot and the clever twist. I marvelled at the audacity with which the author baffled my expectations and assumptions.
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1963 and all that: Hats Off to David Frost and That Was The Week That Was

By Mary Rizza

weekthatwas2 David Frost was a TV pioneer who was one of the major forces behind the ground-breaking satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was, or TW3 as it was quickly dubbed.

The show could be seen as defining the spirit of 1963. Its first outing was at the tail-end of the previous year, and the second series ran throughout 1963 before being halted because of the forthcoming general election. At any rate, that was the reason the BBC gave.

The show had a pop at politicians, the Prime Minister, public figures, Britain’s declining global power, farmers, restaurateurs, public relations people. It satirised religion and class and social attitudes. The programme delighted in puncturing stuffiness and pomposity. Ted Heath blamed the show for ‘the death of deference’. You couldn’t give it a better compliment.
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1963 and all that: The Beatles’ first two LPs

By Mary Rizza

Hats In The Ring for The Beatles’ first LPs:
Please Please Me
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With The Beatles

THE PHRASE ‘YOU HAD TO BE THERE’ IS often used as a tag to excuse a lame anecdote and is tedious to hear for those who weren’t there. But for teenage music fans in 1963, the impact of early Beatles music is impossible to describe without reliving the context in which the group’s first two albums were experienced.

They were the soundtrack and background to first romances, to parties (preferably in houses which had vacated by parents), to homework, to dancing, to showing off and growing up. These records were the thrilling indication that the 1960s had arrived and everyone could join in.
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Wishing upon a flaming star: Songs about Elvis

By Mary Rizza

Hats in the ring for songs
about Elvis Presley:

The Colonel and The King
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Elvis Presley Blues
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Apparition in Las Vegas

MANY SONGS NAME-CHECK OTHER SINGERS. SOMETIMES THIS is done convincingly, sometimes it seems an easy way to become part of a mythology that belongs to someone else, or a blatant piggyback on to someone else’s fame and achievement.

Elvis, who died 36 years ago this week, must hold the record for the number of songs that have been written about him, that name him or that reference him explicitly or implicitly. All these years after he finally left the building, Elvis’s name still resonates and tugs at our imaginations.
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Hats off to 1963 and all that: Paddy Roberts, singer and songwriter

By Mary Rizza

Paddy Roberts’ album Strictly for Grown-Ups is a satirical look at the British character

YOU MIGHT SAY – ACTUALLY PHILIP LARKIN MORE OR less did – that the 1960s as they are popularly perceived didn’t start until 1963.

The 40th anniversary of that tumultuous year is being marked by exhibitions and other revisitings, including a new musical from Andrew Lloyd-Weber called Stephen Ward, The Scandal That Shook Society.

The scandal is the Profumo Affair, and Stephen Ward was one of the key figures in, and the main victim of, the affair which shook and changed the British establishment. Until this point, Britain was stuck in a never-ending 1950s, and social concepts we take for granted, such as youth culture, sexual freedom, social mobility and equality, were disturbing and threatening undercurrents whose power was about to be unleashed.
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Bonnets off to Jane Austen on the £10 note

By Mary Rizza

THE CHOICE OF JANE AUSTEN TO GRACE THE Bank of England’s £10 note is a triumph for the representation of women on English currency and highlights Austen’s status as a great writer.

Jane Austen’s place in the galaxy of literary stars has always been secure and her popularity has increased in recent years with the production of hundreds of film and TV adaptations, spin-offs and reworkings of her novels. Some of these adaptations are excellent and offer lively and accessible approaches to the original texts.
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Hats off to Bruce Springsteen and girls called Mary

By Mary Rizza

Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road turned round the image of Marys in popular song.

THE NAME MARY COMES FROM THE HEBREW LANGUAGE and is said to mean bitter, beloved, wished-for child, or of the sea. It is the name of the Blessed Virgin and was bestowed liberally on female children until the 1960s.

In those years, if you called out the name in certain areas of town or in certain school playgrounds you would be swamped with responses. It’s a lovely name, I think now, resonant and timeless.

For girls named Mary growing up in my generation, though, the name lacked cool. There were admirable women in all walks of life who had the name but they didn’t cut much ice with those of us who wanted to be Beat Girls.

Female TV detectives: Cagney and Lacey v Scott and Bailey

By Mary Rizza

Precinct pioneers: Christine Cagney (right) and Mary-Beth Lacey set the pace for female TV cops.

THIS SHOWDOWN IS BETWEEN TWO COP SHOWS WHICH focus on strong female partnerships and friendships, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and a quarter of a century. Christine and Mary-Beth versus Janet and Rachel. Manhattan’s 14th Precinct versus the Manchester Metropolitan Police Force.

Tough act to follow: Rachel Bailey (left) and Janet Scott (right) with their guvnor, Gill Murray

The characters of Cagney and Lacey grew and developed over the course of seven series, from 1981 to 1988, whereas Scott and Bailey have had, so far, just three series in which to establish their characters and situations. In both shows, the women are tough professionals with contrasting personalities and home lives.
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TV female legals: The Good Wife (and Diane and Kalinda)

By Mary Rizza

IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE GOOD WIFE, GET a box set and give yourself a treat. This drama series is named after the ‘good wife’, Alicia Florrick, whose world changes when her politician husband Peter is sentenced to jail in a sex and corruption scandal.

Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife is a study in contradicting complexity.

After a career break of over a decade, Alicia goes back to work as a litigator in the law firm Lockhart Gardner.

One of the great things about The Good Wife, which has just finished its fourth season in the UK on More4, is the way it demonstrates how all aspects of life, the personal and the political, are suffused with ambiguity and contradictions.

Its multi-layered narrative engages and challenges as distinctions between right and wrong are blurred and we are led to consider if the ends justify the means, if it is OK to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Through story lines which are entertaining, provoking and amusing, the series tackles questions of honesty and deception in public and private lives.
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Female TV detectives: Gillian Anderson in The Fall v Patricia Hodge in Jemima Shore Investigates

By Mary Rizza

gilliananderson3 Patricia Hodge in Jemima Shore Investigates
The Fall is a gritty, disturbing contemporary drama and Jemima Shore Investigates is lightweight entertainment from the 1980s, violent in places but a world away from the toe-curling, stomach-grabbing atmosphere of The Fall.

In the first series of The Fall on BBC2, Gillian Anderson put in a bravura performance as DSI Stella Gibson, the scarily cool and steely head of the police hunt for a serial killer in Belfast. Allan Cubitt, writer of the cracking script, built the character on Jane Tennison from Prime Suspect, but develops a very distinctive persona.
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