Anthony, I'd like to give a short paper on Television and the home in the
40s-50s. I'll think through an appropriate outline and send it through to
you or Alison in the next week or so.

Best wishes,

Tim.

Tim O'Sullivan
Head of School of Media & Cultural Production
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH

0116-2577392.


-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony McNicholas [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 02 April 2004 13:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [BBC-HISTORY] Conference at Westminster/ Obituary for Ted Walker


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.
      · Edward Joseph Walker, poet, dramatist and author, born November 28
1934; died March 19 2004