Mary Rizza

As Thomas Wolfe famously said, You Can’t Go Home Again. Re-reading Grace Metalious’s hugely successful 1956 blockbuster novel Peyton Place is an unsettling experience.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the novel was a byword for forbidden literature. It was read in secret, in private, and hidden from children. Well-thumbed copies were surreptitiously passed from hand to hand. Those who did not dare bring it into their homes made frequent visits to bookstores and read it (or the sexy bits at least) in instalments.

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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 by books, films and songs.

The song immediately creates the atmosphere of a close-knit community in a picket-fence town, with a church or two, a minister, a doctor, a diner, a bar, a milk bar, a high school, right and wrong sides of the tracks, and a cast of people, saints and sinners with quirks and oddities.

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SPOILER ALERT: This article references events in the novel Vanity Fair.

Becky Sharp is the central character in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1840 novel Vanity Fair. It’s not right to call her the heroine, because the author states that this work is a novel without a hero. Nevertheless, whenever Vanity Fair re-emerges in our consciousness, courtesy of a film or TV adaptation, the character of Becky is seized upon and positioned as a representative of the age and as a role model for women.

We love her pluckiness, her bad-assness, her determination. We admire the way she carves her own path from ignominious beginnings to mixing with the cream of society without needing a man to save her. She is ambitious, whip-smart, ultra-modern. See how she reinvents herself, creates her own brand! She would be all over social media. Just imagine her Instagram account! Hey, she would be a match for Kim Kardashian!

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The Match is a (very) short story, published in the UK in 1959 as part of Alan Sillitoe’s collection The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. The title refers to a Saturday afternoon football match between Notts County and Bristol, the setting and subject matter immediately linking Sillitoe to the ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, whose gritty, realistic depictions of post-war working-class life present their disillusion with the conservative values of the establishment and their refusal to accept the social conventions of a class-ridden society.

However, the breadth of Alan Sillitoe’s work and interests is not truly reflected in this positioning. The Match has often been likened to James Joyce’s short story Counterparts, published in the Dubliners collection, and the French editors of the story were struck by its similarity to the work of Albert Camus.

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Bill Naughton’s creation Alfie Elkins has had several outings since his first appearance in the 1962 radio play Alfie Elkins And His Little Life. In addition to the radio drama, this character has sustained a stage play, a novel and a sequel, a 1965 film and a 2004 remake.

Alfie Elkins turned out to have legs, the most notable being those of Michael Caine, the star of Lewis Gilbert’s 1965 movie Alfie, in which Caine’s long lean frame is stylishly clad in Mod-inspired duds such as low-rise grey tapered trousers and Chelsea boots. There’s also a double-breasted blazer bearing an RAF badge, worn without the irony with which military dress was adopted as a fashion later in the decade.

It begins with a classic Sweeney-type chase, as three armed robbers and their driver follow a security van across Waterloo Bridge in London. In the Kingsway Tunnel, now known as the Strand Underpass, the security van explodes and three men meet a horrific end.

Move away now, avert your eyes from their charred bodies and focus on the women who are left to grieve their demise — the Widows.

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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, a legacy which is honoured in the author’s staccato style and in the scattered references to crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and John D MacDonald. Penny is jokingly referred to as Samantha Spade and Philippa Marlowe.

Rachel Roberts as Brenda in Saturday Night Sunday Morning with Albert Finney

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. It perfectly captures the working-class milieu of 1950s’ Nottingham (which is in the East Midlands, not the North of England as is sometimes assumed).

The film is uncompromising, with no attempt to soften or romanticise working-class life and characters. The themes of adultery, drunkenness, abortion, violence are explored with unflinching realism, courtesy of director Karel Reisz’s documentary background.

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The recent death of Rodney Bewes, who played Bob in BBC TV’s Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, brings an additional poignancy to the wistful comedy classic.

The funny, sad, clever scripts of Dick Clement and Ian Le Fresnais are superbly brought to life by Bewes and by James Bolam as Bob’s mate Terry, both in the original series The Likely Lads and its sequel.