Members might be interested in the following conference either as
attendees or as contributors. If anyone is interested in doing a paper on
any aspect of BBC history of the period, please contact me Anthony
McNicholas at [log in to unmask]
Media in Post-war Britain: Film, Television and Radio in the 1950s/1960s
19th June 2004
University of Westminster (London, UK)
309 Regent Street
Call For Papers
The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University
of Westminster is hosting a one day conference on Media in Post-war
Britain: Film, Television and Radio in the 1950s/1960s, in honour of
Professor Vincent Porter.
The topic of Media in Post-war Britain addresses a range of research in
film, television, radio, and print media. Topics to be discussed include,
but are not restricted to, censorship, horror films, the domestic 'Cold
War' front, Britain and Hollywood, The Angry Young Men, permissiveness,
British national identity in film, television and radio, metropolitan
versus provincial cultures in film, television and radio, the
satire 'boom', counterculture, the sense of national 'decline'. There
will be an opening plenary on media history, and a closing plenary on the
decline of deference in post-war Britain. There will also be a panel
devoted to BBC history. Key speakers include Richard Collins (Open
University), James Curran (Goldsmith's College, London), Su Harper
(University of Portsmouth), David Hendy (University of Westminster),
Annette Kuhn (Lancaster University), Tom O'Malley (University of Wales at
Aberystwyth), Paddy Scannell (University of Westminster), and Jean Seaton
(University of Westminster). The conference will take place at the
University of Westminster, Regent Street Campus, 9.30-5.30pm, followed by
a wine reception.
The conference co-coordinators are David Hendy, Annette Hill and Paddy
Scannell (University of Westminster). Please contact Alison Sorrell
(telephone: +44 (0)20 7911 5000, email: [log in to unmask]) for further
details, and for submission of abstracts. Abstracts (300 words) should be
sent to Alison Sorrell by May 10th 2004.
Obituary
Ted Walker
English poet, author and dramatist who rediscovered his muse after a
15-year hiatus - and produced the most affecting work of his career
Colin Rose
Friday April 2, 2004
The Guardian
Ted Walker, who has died aged 69, was one of the foremost English
poets of his generation, with five critically acclaimed books published
between 1965 and 1977, beginning with Fox On A Barn Door.His work
eventually encompassed short stories, radio and television drama,travel
writing, and two volumes of autobiography - notably The Last Of England,
which he read in serialised form on BBC Radio 4 in 1992.
In a parallel career as a teacher and interpreter of literature, he
fulfilled roles as diverse as creative-writing tutor in prisons, writer-in-
residence in primary schools and longstanding lecturer at the British
campus of a private American college. In 1979, the BBC put me forward to
direct a film of a Ted Walker short story. That encounter launched us into
several years of raucously intense collaboration leading to Big Jim And
The Figaro Club (1981) and A Family Man (1983). Big Jim, a series of
comedy films set during the postwar building boom, extolled the
comradeship which, for Ted, epitomised working-class life "in them far-off
days of the Figaro Club before the world turned lax and sour". The writing
was driven by a nostalgia furiosa, a rage against the grasping deceit and
insincerity which he believed was devouring his England, yet his ebullient
love of life swept the films clean of carping or cavil.
A Family Man - more a TV novel than a drama - dealt with several
generations of father/son relationships, drawing deeply on Ted's own
family history. The broadcast brought quantities of correspondence from
viewers who, it seemed, had gone through genuine catharsis and wanted to
say thank you. Ted revelled in the nomadic life of a film unit on location
and was a dab hand at editing his scripts in response to circumstances on
set or in the cutting room, but although he also wrote a number of plays
for Shaun McLaughlin in BBC radio drama and adapted The Wind in the
Willows (1995) for an animated version with a voice cast including Alan
Bennett, the true heart of his work had always been and is still to be
found in his poetry, short stories and autobiography.
Ted was born in Lancing, west Sussex, the son of a Birmingham-born
carpenter who had found work in the south-coast construction industry.
Educated at Steyning grammar school and St John's College, Cambridge,
where he read modern languages, he became a teacher in London. Success as
a poet came early to Ted Walker, and he and wife Lorna were able to move
to Hunston, in his beloved Sussex. Characterised as a nature poet, in his
sharp-focussed depictions of the natural world he utilised nature to place
our human concerns in proper perspective. Accruing major awards in his
20s, he had published five collections of poetry by his early 40s and
then, as he put it in a poem, "My muse went AWOL." "I haven't had a poem
in years," he would say. Fifteen years in the end.
Then, moving into his 60s, he began again - short poems of
breathtaking fluency and economy, many devastating in their insight, the
most delicate and difficult concerning his love of two women - Lorna, his
childhood sweetheart and mother of his four children, who died prematurely
yet tragically slowly of a disfiguring cancer, and Audrey, Lorna's close
friend, who, widowed herself, became his second wife. Collected in the
volume Mangoes On The Moon (1999), these poems represent a man who, ever
mindful of his own dignity, had the courage always to wear his heart on
his sleeve.
In the 1960s, Ted's short stories began to appear in The New Yorker,
which paid well. With a young family, and living on a teacher's salary, he
found this arrangement a godsend. "I could sit down of an evening when the
kids were in bed and literally write them new winter coats or even a
second-hand family car," he said. Those stories and others came together
in two books: You've Never Heard Me Sing (1985) and He Danced With A Chair
(2001).
Ted Walker invented very little as a writer. He had an infallible
ear for dialogue, and a piercing eye for the dynamics of personal
relationships, especially within families. It is not surprising that his
most substantial works are his autobiographical volumes: The High Path
(1983) and The Last Of England. The first vividly evokes the wartime
childhood of one (in George MacBeth's phrase) "too young to fight and too
old to forget". The second is a profoundly confessional account of his
first wife's illness and his coming to terms with her loss. Even his
venture into travel writing, In Spain (1989), is at least as much an inner
journey as an exploration of the country he came to love more than any
other, and where he and Audrey moved in 1997.
Shortly after they settled in their house in Alcalalí, near
Alicante, Ted made me a present of 38 clerihews based on the names of
eminent Spaniards. In its sophistication it was typical of his love affair
with language. Ted Walker relished language like another man might relish
real ale. He is survived by Audrey, the four children of his first
marriage, Edward, Susan, Margaret and William, and two step-children,
Jenny and Debbie.
ˇ Edward Joseph Walker, poet, dramatist and author, born November 28
1934; died March 19 2004
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