Synopses & Reviews
Stage or film presentations of
Look Back in Anger,
A Taste of Honey,
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
Alfie, and
Darling were much changed, even transformed, by censorship between 1955-1965. Indeed, censorship altered the progression of the artistic and creative renaissance of the period, and John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Alan Sillitoe, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and John Schlesinger are just a few of the people who were forced to change their work.
Censorship and the Permissive Society explores the predicament writers and directors faced, and highlights the debate over the liberalizing or progressive aspects of the sea changes affecting British society at the time.
Review
"This is a careful, thoughtful, meticulously documented exploration of what Aldgate calls 'the slow, complex, and fraught problem of liberalization."--
Albion"[A] fascinating survey."--Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Review
"fascinating survey ... There are some hilarious quotes from the Lord Chamberlain's office."--Sunday Telegraph
"a fine account of how UK cinema and theatre fought the blue pencil, 1955-65"--New Statesman and Society
"Aldgate deftly charts the Establishment's reactions to the first rumblings of the post-war cultural revolution in the late fifties and early sixties"--History Today
"...a detailed account of a transitional period in the history of British Cinema and Theatre censorship...this book provides a fascinating insight into the process of censorship and the changes in British society which were reflected in the censor's decisions...will give perspective to anyone interested in current censorship issues."--Film Magazine
Synopsis
A key decade in the postwar social and cultural history of Britain, the period saw the country emerge from the "doldrums era" of the fifties, to the permissive society of the "swinging sixties." A noticeable move towards "decensorship" increasingly loosened the traditional constraints imposed on literature, stage, and films. Anthony Aldgate shows, however, that censorship impeded the progression of the artistic and creative renaissance of this period. Drawing upon a mass of recently released or hitherto unseen documentation, the author charts the impact of the censorship process between 1955 and 1965 upon playwrights and directors, many of whom endured the rigorous scrutiny of the film and theatre censors.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-168) and index.
About the Author
Anthony Aldgate is Senior Lecturer in History and Sub Dean in Arts at The Open University, Visiting Professor at the University of Luton, and Associate Tutor at Rewley House, Oxford.
He is author of Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War (Scolar Press, London, 1979); Best of British: Cinema and Society, 1930-1970 (Blackwell, 1983; Barnes and Noble, Totowa, NJ, 1983); Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Blackwell, 1986); The Common Touch: The Films of John Baxter (BFI, 1989); Between Two Wars (Open UP, 1990); World War II and Its Consequences (Open UP, 1990).