Mary Rizza

The novel A Kind Of Loving by Stan Barstow was made into a 1962 film directed by John Schlesinger but Barstow went on to write two more books about the characters and the Vic Brown trilogy was made into an absorbing 10-part television series 20 years later in 1982.

The TV series, which is called A Kind of Loving, is an unpretentious depiction of the three novels 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.

[Read more…]

Who still sends postcards anyway? That must have been a widespread response to the news that Britain’s oldest postcard publishing firm, J Salmon, established in 1880, is closing down.

The habit of sending postcards to people at home from your holiday destination may well now seem quaint, a convention belonging to the dark ages before social media made communication so easy and so immediate.

[Read more…]

The stellar combination of Clive James’ witty, erudite, masterfully crafted poignant lyrics and Pete Atkin’s agile, subtle, eclectic music and understated vocal delivery produced a body of work which belongs in the finest songbook tradition.

Each song has its own delights, and each is moving and captivating in its own way. I particularly relish those which present a cameo of a person, a character who is immediately and vividly created through pithy phrases and sharp dialogue, whose story could be the basis of a novel or a film.

[Read more…]

Nearly 25 years separate Ken Loach’s 1993 film Raining Stones and the first episode of Jimmy McGovern’s 2017 television series Broken but they are united by the questions they raise about individual and collective responsibility, the relationship between people and society, and the struggle to maintain humanity and dignity in the face of a system which threatens to destroy hope and self-respect.

Despite Ken Loach being a humanist and a secularist and Jimmy McGovern being a former Catholic, both dramas feature priests as key figures, and in both the struggle to buy a little girl’s First Holy Communion dress provides a focus for observations about class, society and human dignity.

[Read more…]

The whole dating scene has changed immeasurably since the singers and songwriters of the 1950s and 1960s explored the terrain of teenage love. Our younger selves had to negotiate the pleasures and heartbreaks of relationships and what used to be quaintly known as ‘going out’ or ‘courting’ without the benefits and ease of high-tech communications.

Take the humiliating experience of being ‘stood up’. There you are, at the appointed time, standing outside the cinema or dancehall, or waiting at the corner or the bus stop or railway station or wherever you arranged to meet, and your date doesn’t show.

[Read more…]

Bitter Harvest is a film version of Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, which is a collection of three novels set in London at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s.

Its setting is The Midnight Bell pub in Fitzrovia in the West End of London, where the lives of three characters, Bob, Jenny and Ella, intertwine.

[Read more…]

Watching the TV version of Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh 40 years after its debut on stage at the Hampstead Theatre in 1977, followed by the televised version as a Play For Today on the BBC later that year, is an unnerving experience.

The things that seemed funny back then have acquired a darker edge, and the work has become a play for this day in ways that we couldn’t have anticipated.

[Read more…]

‘We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.’ So goes the Springsteen song. True as ever, Boss.

Furthermore, some of us also learned a lot from the single’s big sister, the LP, and in particular from the notes on the record sleeve, which is what the cover encasing the vinyl was called.

[Read more…]