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Hats off to On The Road

By Mary Rizza

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO IN THE INDUSTRIAL TOWN OF LOWELL in Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac published On The Road, a mesmerising account of the eventful journeys and road trips he and his friends took in the search for kicks, freedom and spiritual purpose and direction. This book and its writer became the touchstone for beat sensibility – not that we had actually read it, of course, but we regarded with awe and interest those who had, or who carried a copy in their jacket pocket. By a kind of osmosis, the spirit of the American road trip entered the psyche of our tribe, and with a bit of trepidation and more excitement, we entered the world of hitchhiking.
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Hats off to the Beat Girls

By Mary Rizza

WHAT WAS A BEAT GIRL? NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BEATLES but she exerted a powerful infuence on those of us whose teenage selves were formed by the legacy of the 1950s and the coming of the decade that swung. Those of us, that is, who wanted more than bubblegum pop music and the bland interactions of our peers who had bought into the stereotypes of mainstream culture.
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50 years of picking your favourite Beatle

By Mary Rizza

YES, IT’S 50 YEARS (OUCH!) SINCE THE CHALLENGE “JOHN OR PAUL?” started a million gymslip fights and feuds. From the beginning The Beatles belonged to everyone, unlike the rock’n’rollers and balladeers and popsters of previous eras. We all learnt to twist and shout, we all longed to be just 17, you know what I mean, and to say that we all had a favourite would be to diminish the intensity of the allegiances to individual Beatles which were as compulsory as long hair and mini-skirts.

Down in the Valley — How Jeannie C Riley Socked It to the Harper Valley PTA

It’s 50 years since a certain Mrs Johnson, resident of Harper Valley, USA, marched into her daughter’s school and disrupted a meeting of the Parent Teacher Association. In 1968, singer Jeannie C Riley took Tom T Hall’s song Harper Valley PTA to the top of the charts, and plunged us into a world made familiar […]

Sharp at Heart: Why We Should Resist the Appeal of Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp

Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp is a vibrant and compelling creation and we can admire her for many things, not least her ability to captivate and entertain us readers and viewers as well as those she manipulates for her own ends, but to admire her without acknowledging the moral emptiness at her core is to distort the totality of her creation.

European Existenialism Meets the Midlands of the 1950s in The Match by Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe’s short story The Match has often been likened to James Joyce’s short story Counterparts, and the French editors of the story were struck by its similarity to the work of Albert Camus.

How Schoolgirls’ Own Stories Showed the Way to a Wider World for Women

On the face of it, the books published by the Schoolgirls’ Own Library should have come with a warning sticker: ‘This book can seriously damage your enjoyment of reading’.

Looking Back at Look Back In Anger

The subject matter of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger was like a slap in the face to audiences used to a safe kind of British drama, epitomised by drawing rooms, French windows and ‘Anyone for tennis?’ The first slap came with the ironing board, which has pride of place in the opening scene.

What’s it Really All About, Alfie?

The 1966 British film Alfie is often described as a comedy, or even a romantic comedy-drama, but its depiction of the eponymous working class boy with the cheek of the devil sits uneasily in these categories.

Hello Dolly — How Widows TV series took women away from being gangsters’ molls and made them the gangsters

Widows was a ground-breaking 1983 British TV series, written by Lynda La Plante, featuring women as the main protagonists. But these women are not the stereotypical female staples of crime drama — gangsters’ molls, loyal wives, clingy girlfriends. These women become the gangsters.

Female Literary Detectives — The Penny Wanawake Series by Susan Moody

Penny Wanawake, the smart and sassy black offspring of an English aristocrat and an African diplomat, carves her confident path through seven novels by Susan Moody, all written in the 1980s. Penny is a wise-cracking amateur sleuth in the tradition of Philip Marlowe,

Is Arthur Seaton All Right? Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (Retro Films)

The 1960 film of Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, based on Alan Sillitoe’s fine novel, is an acclaimed example of British New Wave cinema which perfectly captures the working-class milieu of 1950s’ Nottingham in the East Midlands.

What Became of the People We Used to Be? The Timeless Tale of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads

The humour and the pathos of Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads? pivot on the contrast between the unreconstructed lad Terry and the aspirational Bob, and we find that the underlying themes explored through their relationship still resonate today.

A Brown Study — The Television Series of A Kind of Loving

The TV series of A Kind of Loving is an unpretentious depiction of three novels by Stan Barstow and, in the portrayal of the relationship between draughtsman Vic and typist Ingrid, explores contemporary attitudes to love, sex and marriage, and the claims of morality, responsibility and individual choice.

In the Theatre of Life with The Young Vic — A Kind Of Loving by Stan Barstow

The tone of the narration of Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving draws you in straight away. The mixture of the historic present tense and vernacular expressions make the the story leap off the page.