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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warnings: Ethnic cleansing; Anti-Asian racism; Anti-Black racism; Death; AIDS; Bereavement.

I am currently working on a book chapter on Ugandan Asian narratives of expulsion and resettlement, focusing on a 2012 episode of BBC Radio 4’s programme The Reunion on the subject, and on the accounts of that episode participants on that programme have told more broadly across different media. You can read more of my writing on this topic here. The episode saw host Sue MacGregor in dialogue with a panel consisting of the writer and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, businessman and community organisation leader Manzoor Moghal; health practitioner and charity trustee, Tahera Aanchawan; Ravi Govindia, then the Conservative leader of Wandsworth Council; and the dentist and Hindu priest Chandrika Joshi.

In this two-part post, I want to focus specifically on Govindia, and on how his public image as a Conservative politician and as a Ugandan Asian refugee have interacted, and his own role in this presentation. In this first part I’ll briefly sketch out his biography, then discuss his contribution to the episode of The Reunion, and thereafter other instances when he has told his backstory as a refugee, and opined on the history of Ugandan Asian expulsion more broadly. In the second part, I will examine his time as leader of Wandsworth Council between 2011 and 2022, and how he articulated his politics, and how those politics were received, in relation to his status as a former refugee.

From Jinja to Wandsworth

Ravi Govindia was born (in 1954) and raised in the Ugandan city of Jinja to parents of Indian heritage (his mother having also been born in Uganda). He had been preparing to sit his A-Levels when Uganda’s military dictator Idi Amin announced in 1972 that the country would be expelling its relatively economically prosperous Asian minority, who had migrated there from the Indian subcontinent over previous decades under British colonial rule. Britain initially responded to the expulsion order by trying unsuccessfully to pressurise Amin into reversing his decision. It then persuaded India and Pakistan to accept some of the 50,000 British passport holders leaving Uganda, and for other states including Canada, West Germany, and Malawi to receive a portion as well, with Britain itself accepting 28,000 in total – one of whom was Ravi Govindia.

After a time at a refugee camp in Dartmoor, Govindia and his family moved to Plymouth, where he completed his schooling, before heading to study at Queen Mary University in London. There he became involved in the Conservative Party, eventually being elected to Wandsworth Council in 1982, and later serving as leader of the council from 2011 until 2022, receiving a CBE for services to local government in 2017. In addition to this, Govindia also spent a period during the 1990s and 2000s as a director with both Battersea Arts Centre and the Asian arts organisation Tara, as well as managing a property company from 2004.1

Ravi Govindia on The Reunion

I have discussed the ‘Ugandan Asian’ episode of The Reunion in greater depth in this previous piece, but will outline its content more summarily here. The discussion began firstly by exploring the nature of Asian life in Uganda prior to Amin’s ascent to power, and then the expulsion order, the panellists’ reaction to it, and their exit from Uganda. They then shared alternatively comical and poignant anecdotes from their experiences of settling in Britain, including naïve expectations and the difficulties of adjusting, the racism from some quarters Ugandan Asians had to negotiate, and the aptitude for education and hard work that they felt had stood them in good stead in their new country. The final portion dealt with their longer term reflections, the nature of their relationships with Uganda following the fall of Amin, and the extent to which they now felt at home in Britain.

The conversation was directed unobtrusively by Sue MacGregor as host, and further structured by interceding audio montages of archival news coverage and interviews that set the scene and facilitated transitions between different aspects of the discussion. There were commonalities across the panellists’ experiences and interpretations of them, but also distinctions between their perspectives that occasionally led to slight or overt tension, on issues such as anti-Black racism among Ugandan Asians, the British state’s response to expulsion, and Amin’s legacy.

In contrast to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Manzoor Moghal, who used the programme to try and articulate an account of the Ugandan Asian experience as a whole, Govindia’s contributions were predominantly personal in nature. He engaged only hesitantly and reactively with explicitly grander narratives, albeit while making broader implicit points through references to his own experience. When Alibhai-Brown raised the question of Asian ‘privilege’ in Uganda, he sought to disown the implications of this, at least as it applied to his own family: ‘As for the kind of, being well off…I’m not sure, really. We had a part-time servant who came for two hours to wash the clothes, and that’s it.’ In his view, it was more that they possessed ‘a middle-class outlook’.

Although he described Uganda retrospectively as ‘the only land I knew’ prior to his family’s expulsion, Govindia largely eschewed a continuing sense of attachment to the country, save for his former school and a cross-racial, socially elite, masculine identification with now decreased Black schoolmates, killed by a combination of state violence and the AIDS pandemic. This sense of personal loss only really surfaced towards the end of the episode, when he spoke about revisiting Uganda in later life:

…it was…incredibly distressing when I went to my school to see if anyone knew any of the people in my year. And the school had a diary, and a record of all the year, and their addresses…and I was told very categorically they didn’t find any of them. This is twenty-five…young men…with huge promise, who would have been part of Uganda’s future…completely not in that country, or in this world.

He otherwise distanced himself from Ugandan Asians’ continuing collective attachment to their former country post-expulsion, expressing barely veiled bewilderment when this question of nostalgia for Uganda came up in the discussion:

I think one of the oddest things I find…about Ugandan Asians is that the…how incredible emotional attachment to a country that kicked them out…and I try and connect, try and look for that feeling from people who left Kenya, or Tanzania, or Zanzibar…and I don’t get that emotional ah…hankering for a, for a…for a land of their birth, or…or their past.

Yet Govindia also adhered to elements of a Ugandan Asian subjectivity that fitted a conservative ideal of ‘the model minority’, in their ambition, work-rate, and resilience. When asked by MacGregor whether he had been aware of the severity of the racist sentiment awaiting Ugandan Asians in Britain, he replied:

Yes, well I mean– local papers had covered some of it, and we’d heard it on the [BBC] World Service, and so on…[adopting a slightly more dismissive tone] I don’t think it was enough to dissuade us to make the decision that…my father made – I was too young to make that on my own. But he did make the decision of coming here, or going to India, and his choice of coming here was largely to say, I have a young family, their prospects are going to be better in the UK than they would be in India.

Govindia’s response did not simply play down the question of British racism; he actively sought to restore agency to his father, primarily, albeit while speaking for him, in making a responsible, aspirational choice to relocate to Britain and, by implication, adopt British-ness (over Indian-ness) as a national identity. He also expressed his own positive attachment to Britain, particularly the Southwest where his family had originally relocated to. Between finishing his A-Levels and beginning his degree at Queen Mary, Govindia had spent eight months working as a bus conductor for Western National Buses, ‘travelling all over the Southwest, er, counties…I loved it. I really, really loved it.’ Though there were a handful of other Ugandan Asian conductors on the route, ‘I was the youngest kind of clippie in town, spoke differently, and when the bus was quiet read books that most of the passengers would not think of reading’.

Though Govindia did not discuss his own passage into politics on the programme, his attachment specifically to Edward Heath’s Conservative government of the time manifested, again reactively, when Moghal criticised it for its handling of the crisis:

MOGHAL: When I came to Leicester [clearing throat], I deliberately avoided the er, refugee camps, because I had been quite disillusioned with the attitude of the British government, and I did not want to be a dependent on their handouts. Of course, they did some valuable work, but that was much later after they had been upbraided for their…callousness from the logistic point of view, and they were trying to dump us on countries like Canada, and the European countries, where the Asians went.

GOVINDIA: Manzoor –

MOGHAL: Yes.

GOVINDIA: I perhaps have lived in a parallel world…

MOGHAL: Yes.

GOVINDIA: Er, my recall certainly is that, um, there was an attempt through the Commonwealth to deal with people who were deemed stateless. There are people who were taken in sum to Australia, New Zealand, they went to Canada, the various Scandinavian countries…that was a deal arranged through the Foreign Office with other Commonwealth partners to support the people who were stateless.

This reply, couched in a slightly mocking differentiation between his and Moghal’s concurrent realities, reasserted a version of expulsion that recast Britain’s role and response from postimperial to humanitarian, using diplomatic channels to address a problem he defined in legalistic terms, his reference to ‘Commonwealth partners’ invoking international relationships between equals. It also illustrated his own sense of identification with the British state, particularly in its Conservative-helmed guise.

Further accounts of expulsion and resettlement

Govindia has spoken about his experiences as a refugee across other public fora too, although it has not comprised as central a component of his public persona as for some of the other panellists, such as Moghal. Shortly after becoming Wandsworth Council leader in 2011, and a year before his appearance on The Reunion, he was interviewed by the Plymouth Herald about his time in the Southwest. The article stressed his sense of continued attachment to Plymouth, despite his having moved to London several decades ago, mentioning the practical guidance offered by his neighbours to help them settle:

I have warm regard for the city and the people. It must be something in the air in the city that makes them disposed to being warm and friendly.

What any person goes through leaves its mark into the future.2

Govindia made wry observations in the interview about the social and climatic differences between life in Jinja and in Plymouth, but also – again recalling his time as a bus conductor – noted the ‘beauty and charm’ of Devon’s moors as he witnessed them on his travels.3

On the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of Amin’s expulsion order, in August 2022, Govindia was interviewed via video call on the BBC News channel about his experience of leaving Uganda for Britain. In line with dominant framings of this episode, he characterised expulsion as a moment of unexpected rupture and betrayal:

You know, I was a Ugandan national, because I was born in the country, as was my mother, and so, legally, we were all fine…or that’s what it looked like, until that fateful day on the fifth of August, [correcting himself] fourth of August, when we learnt that, ah, we were no longer wanted. And everything changed.

Asked as to how ‘traumatic’ being expelled was, he noted that it took time for the realisation set in that Amin was sincere, and that the order had the support of the African majority, ‘and therefore a degree of hostility started building up in the towns, and so on’. He highlighted his sense of loss in terms of the personal relationships interrupted, again echoing the sense of scholastic identity, and recognition of the worse suffering that was to come for the African majority, that he had also evoked on The Reunion a decade earlier:

I mean, I was at school where, I was one of the four Asian pupils, and all the others in my class of 28 were Ugandan Africans…I was going to leave them, they were not going to be able to – in a sense – withstand the Amin onslaught; I could get away…um, so that was a great wrench that, you know, all your ex- expectations suddenly…extinguished in a weft.

When asked ‘How welcome were you made to feel in the UK?’, he replied in a manner that re-emphasised his positive individual experience, knowingly closing down the possibility of implication of anti-Asian racism that was also a frequent common trope in broader discourses of resettlement, while leaning heavily into another, that of the shock of climatic difference:

Well my experience is, you know, whether- whether that’s genuinely everybody else’s or not, I don’t know, but my experience was…that the weather was more unkind than the people [laughter], people were warm, and er, actually landing in the middle of, ah, towards late October, in Dartmoor in about four ‘o’ clock in the afternoon was not a very nice thing to do [laughter]…er it was, rain driving into our faces, a kind of rain I’d never seen before. But you know, there was warmth in the local population, I joined the local comprehensive school at Tavistock, where I was made welcome…by my fellow sixth form students; several teachers took me and the other Ugandan Asian boys and girls er, under their wing…and sort of, took through the transition from a Ugandan curriculum to a, er UK curriculum.

Again, we see here the way Govindia voiced a sense of belonging and collective identity through the institution of the school, and the success of resettlement through the prism of educational achievement.

Re-evaluating Ugandan Asian life?

The following month, Govindia took part in a panel discussion entitled ‘The Uganda Asians Crisis 50 Years On: From Controversy to Success’ at Arundell’s, Edward Heath’s former residence in Salisbury. Chaired by Praveen Moman, the founder of Volcanoes Safaris – which sponsored the event – it also featured Nimisha Madhvani, Uganda’s ambassador to Britain; the former Conservative Cabinet minister Lord Hunt; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; and writer Giles Foden, author of the 1998 novel about Amin, The Last King of Scotland.

In his contributions to this discussion, Govindia reiterated many of the themes from his previous public commentary on his experience of expulsion and resettlement: the importance placed on education and attainment; his sadness at learning of the deaths of his former schoolmates (at which point he was audibly emotional), and the broader suffering of Ugandan Africans under Amin; the shock of the British weather; and the warmth of the reception, and absence of racism, he encountered in Plymouth (suggesting this might have owed to its ‘internationality’ as a naval town).

Yet in the first instance, asked directly by Moman about what life was like in Jinja, Govindia discussed life pre-expulsion in much greater depth, and generality. He highlighted rather matter-of-factly the way Uganda’s racial hierarchy was built into colonial Jinja’s urban geography, with the white colonial elite occupying the most desirable locations along Lake Victoria and the White Nile, the Indian population in the centre of the town, and the African Township a little further out.

…you could walk from one end to the other, but you couldn’t necessarily live in each of its three bits; you had to be of one type to live wherever, and in fact if we visited the European townships in the middle of the afternoon, the chances are that you would get chased, because you were then seen as unwelcome visitor…and yet in the evening, we would walk through it, drive through it, and sit by the Sunset Point looking- overlooking the lake, and eat our peanuts and mogo chips, and that was the kind of lifestyle that a lot of Asians had.

Govindia emphasised Jinja’s Asian-ness: the Indian style of architecture, their key roles in its local industries, and above all, the vibrancy of its community, within which he located his own family:

…my own- you know, my father worked in the Ministry of Works, he was a carpenter, he worked in two jobs to make ends meet with a large family, we lived in a small house…but all of that that, kind of, being not-so-rich didn’t seem to matter, we were an absolutely happy family in a very happy community, we looked after each other, we played with each other…in fact a lot of the community, within a very divided Asian community with- in terms of caste, and religion, and so on, none of those matter in your neighbourhood; you played as one, you were as one, and you went out as one, lots of rules and rituals respected and honoured, and…we lived out of each other’s homes. Every difficulty was supported by somebody who could help you out, so poverty was there, maybe, was supported by the wider community, in which we lived and that was the warmth of the community which got shattered in ‘72. And that shattering of that warmth and togetherness is what old Asians still talk about with deep, deep regrets…

This was substantially more sympathetic to, perhaps even engaged in, the Ugandan Asian nostalgia he had spoken dismissively of on The Reunion ten years earlier. Nonetheless, it also fed rather logically back into the aspirational values he routinely emphasised in his autobiographical narratives:

…so this was a very happy, very satisfied community: rich, poor, middle-class, and a lot- and all of them investing huge effort into educating their children; they sacrificed a lot to make sure that the children were as well-educated as they could be. But then they saw education as the ladder; and that is the virt- virtue which they have brought to, with them to this country, which is- which is instilled in every Asian household: do well, and you will do well for you, for your future.

This was present in his own ambition as an A-Level student in Uganda, to go on and study at Makare University in Kampala, as:

…I thought if I got a degree I would carry on doing something important, better than a carpenter would be…[rapidly] which is in fact exactly what my father would say, that if you fail at- at school, you’ll come- come to the workshop with me, and help me in the workshop; that’s your choice.

When then asked directly by Moman what he thought had led to the expulsion order, Govindia replied:

My own reflection- my- my maternal side of the family, for four generations were in Uganda…and each of them I can go back and say they were more adapt- more able to able to adapt to local- my grandmother spoke perfect Luganda when she was in- in- because she lived in a place where it was necessary to speak it, and she was perfectly happy to mix with the people she had to mix with, and as Yasmin [Alibhai-Brown] says we were obviously a generation with a wider outlook, and so of course, if we had carried on that would have made the change of route. So the pace of change perhaps was too slow, our economic success was clearly a- some- a problem, and the fact we occupied a lot of the middle layers of both administration, the professions, and so on made it very difficult to share the proceeds of independence equitably and easier.

This then was perhaps a rather whiggish account of Ugandan Asian settlement: a story of greater integration and enlightenment over time (albeit still rooted in their own communal identity). It was also something of a lament for a doomed counterfactual, regretful that their part in a perhaps-too-gradual process of erosion of racial segregation and unfair distribution of wealth was interrupted by a greater, more ruinous historical break.

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Content warnings: Chronic illness; Institutional ableism.

I’ve written previously for this newsletter about my all-time favourite novel, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), about a San Francisco detective, Samuel Spade, who becomes entangled in an international heist of the hugely valuable titular statuette. It is, as I wrote then, a book that presents a perilous moral and legal order, in which its hero strives to control the narrative around the events he finds himself caught up in, and a code by which to justify his personal and professional conduct.

This got me thinking about how Hammett himself had narrated the multiple professional identities he held in the decade or so prior to The Maltese Falcon’s success: as a private detective himself, then as a soldier and subsequently disabled veteran, and finally as a writer for hire, firstly of short crime stories, and later novels. In this two-part post, I will explore these themes, including Hammett’s attitude to money, to detective work, and to writing, as set out in:

• His correspondence during the 1920s and early 1930s, a selection of which was compiled by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett for publication in 2001.1

• His article ‘From the Memoirs of a Private Detective’, published by Black Mask in 1923.2

• His two-part article ‘Suggestions to Detective Story Writers’, published by The New York Post (for whom he briefly served as a crime fiction reviewer) in 1930.3

I will discuss Hammett’s professional identities more specifically in the second part. Here, I want to set out his career trajectory and the personal circumstances that intertwined with it, focusing in particular on how he navigated and narrated the financial challenges he faced during the 1920s.

Dashiell Hammett’s life and career

Hammett was born in 1894 and grew up mostly in Baltimore. In 1915, he joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as an operative based in the city. Following the US’s entry into the First World War, he took leave from Pinkerton to enlist in the US Army in 1918, being stationed with the Ambulance Service at Camp Mead in Maryland, with the role of transporting wounded soldiers returned from Europe. During this time Hammett contracted influenza, and subsequently tuberculosis, which would have a detrimental impact on his health through to his death in 1961.

Having left the Army, Hammett returned to working for Pinkerton in Baltimore, later transferring to Spokane in Washington, where in 1921 his tuberculosis flared up again and resulted in his being hospitalised. This was how he met his future wife, Josephine Dolan, who was a nurse in the Tacoma hospital where he was sent to recuperate; they married in 1921, and had two children. The potentially contagious nature of his illness required Hammett to live apart from his family in San Francisco; his marriage soon broke down, although he and Josephine did not divorce until 1937, and he continued to support his family financially.

Hammett’s poor health compelled him to give up his work as a detective for good, and in 1922, he began writing crime stories for publication. He became an especially regular contributor to the pulp magazine, Black Mask, which during the mid-1920s carved out a particularly strong reputation for hard-boiled fiction under the editorship of Philip C. Cody. Hammett fell out with Cody in 1926 over money he was owed for previous stories, and took a hiatus from writing for the magazine to work full-time as an advertisement copywriter for the Albert S. Samuels, but returned to write for Black Mask under Cody’s successor Joseph Thompson Shaw.

Hammett’s most commonly recurring character was a nameless detective, the Continental Op, who would subsequently become the central figure in his first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both published by A. Knopf in 1929, having previously been serialised in Black Mask in 1927–28 and 1928–29 respectively. Knopf would subsequently publish Hammett’s novels The Maltese Falcon in 1930 and The Glass Key in 1931 (serialised in Black Mask in 1929–30 and 1930 respectively), and finally The Thin Man in 1934. Hammett’s work was also routinely adapted for cinema and radio during the 1930s and 1940s. However, he ceased to write fiction from the mid-1930s, dedicating himself instead to left-wing activism and the Communist Party of the USA, along with his long-term partner, playwright Lillian Hellman. This would result in Hammett being blacklisted, and for a time imprisoned, during the Cold War.4

Hammett, disability, and financial insecurity

Hammett’s tuberculosis left him increasingly dependent on an Army pension that partly compensated him for the chronic health problems he had incurred during his service. Upon his discharge in 1919, he was allocated only $7.50 a month, which acted as supplement to the $105 a month he received upon his return to working for Pinkerton. Six months later, the continued deterioration in his health meant he was hospitalised again, and assessed as 50% disabled, resulting in him being provided with a pension of $40 a month, which he was to complement with his wages from this continued work for Pinkerton, although he could now only perform this work part-time. After his 1921 hospitalisation in Tacoma, he was reassessed as 100% disabled, entitling him to the full $80 a month pension which, even with additional income from occasional detective work, was scarcely sufficient to sustain a family of three.5

This precarity was exacerbated by the fluctuating nature of his illness and therefore of his disabled status, requiring him to perform his disability in deed and word. In May 1923, Hammett was deemed following a physical assessment to have been rehabilitated, and his pension stopped. He promptly wrote to Allan Carter at the US Veterans Board to protest this decision:

I do not feel that my condition at this time—which is certainly no better than it was before I entered training—justifies this rating and I wish to appeal from it.

If possible I should like another examination, preferably by a lung specialist, so that we may know definitely where we stand without putting me to the expense of getting the opinions of outside specialists.6

Having commenced work as an advertising manager at Albert Samuels in 1926, Hammett collapsed in the office, haemorrhaging blood from his lungs. He wrote again to the Veterans Board to ask them to reconsider restoring his pension, which had been stopped again two years previously.

Hemorrhages, weakness and the rest of the things that go with tuberculosis forced me to give up my work a couple of months ago.

I enclose an affidavit to that effect from my former employer.

I should like to have my case reopened so that I may be awarded compensation again.7

He insisted in a letter to Josephine shortly after that he was confident his pension would be reinstated, and downplayed the severity of the situation:

And don’t be worrying about my financial affairs. God knows we always staggered through somehow in the past, and I still can. I haven’t missed any meals.8

Making writing pay

Money was, however, a recurring theme of his letters to Josephine, albeit in a usually offhand manner, in keeping with their broader tone. Financial considerations clearly drove Hammett’s writing career, even if he at times feigned disinterest in them. When Shaw asked him in late 1926 to return to writing from Black Mask, he insisted on being repaid the £300 he felt he was owed from Cody’s time at the magazine. Shaw sent a telegram agreeing to this request, of which Hammett wrote to his wife:

It was all about how glad he was to have me back in the flock and so on. The only important thing in it was that he’s sending me $300. That’s what the fight was about in the first place, and so I won after all.9

He was hopeful that the regular work meant ‘you won’t have to be economical any more. We’ll pay off the debts gradually and everything will be great until I decide to quit again.’10 The following year, having received several letters from Black Mask staff praising his recent work for the magazine, he bluntly remarked to her: ‘Overwhelmed by this applesauce I’m wiring them to shoot me some dough and I’ll do them some more of the shots-in-the-dark.’11

Hammett by now perceived possibilities in more lucrative literary ventures. Musing in 1926 on his idea for a novel, he told Josephine: ‘It’s time we were trying prosperity for a while.’12 Having had Red Harvest and The Dain Curse accepted and published by Alfred A. Knopf in quick succession, Hammett was eager to secure the monetary gains from the relationship as swiftly as possible. After completing The Maltese Falcon, he asked Knopf editor Harry Block:

Like most of the world most of the time I am just now rather desperately in need of all the money I can scrape up. If there is any truth in these rumors that one hears about advances against royalties, will you do the best you can for me? If my appreciation equals my need I can promise to quite overwhelm you with gratitude.13

In the same letter, he peppered Block with an assortment of other ideas, including a theatrical adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, another novelisation of previous series of short stories, and a compendium of existing short stories about the Continental Op, justifying the latter in crudely economic terms:

I know you’re not likely to be wildly enthusiastic about the short-story idea; but don’t you think that something profitable for both of us could be done with them by making a quite bulky collection of them—selling it by the pound, as it were? I don’t know anything about the manufacturing costs—how far bulkiness could be carried at a fairly low price without eating up the profits.14

A month later, Hammett told Block he had abandoned most of these ideas to focus on what would be his fourth novel, The Glass Key. He somewhat coolly received Block’s offer of a three-book contract with Knopf with a £1,000 advance, unabashedly telling the editor:

About the advance: I’ve no objections at all, of course, to drawing up a new contract for three more books, but I need more than a thousand dollars. As a matter of fact I’d like to have twenty-five hundred. This doesn’t seem an at all unreasonable figure to me, since, after all, it would be actually, from my standpoint, an advance against six books.15

The author had also already identified the remunerative opportunities offered by another medium. His correspondence in 1928 with Blanche Knopf – who also worked as an editor for husband Alfred’s firm – around the impending publication of Red Harvest illustrates that he was simultaneously trying to shop the rights to the novel to the Fox Film Corporation.16 While this did not come to anything, the advent of the sound film favoured cinematic treatment of Hammett’s works, with their snappy, argot-heavy dialogue. He subsequently received a share of royalties when Paramount drew loosely on Red Harvest for the 1930 film Roadhouse Nights, which he jokingly told Alfred Knopf ‘arrived at a time when I was considering hocking my typewriter’.17 He was equally active in trying to get film deals for both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, adapted by Warner Bros in 1931 and Paramount in 1935 respectively.18

Beset by debilitating illness and the financial precarity that accompanied it, Dashiell Hammett adopted differing rhetoric strategies in discussing money matters in his letters and telegrams. He moved between registers of indifference, gratitude, neediness, and entitlement, depending upon both the identity of the recipient and the specificity of the circumstances. While these were clearly motivated by material considerations, they also signalled something affective and ideological beyond that: a mode of emotional management and self-possession, of meaningfully calculating one’s own worth at the fragile apex of American free-market liberalism.

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Otherwise, please show your appreciation by sharing this post more widely, and referring the newsletter to friends.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warnings: Murder; PTSD; Narcotics.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the films The Living Daylights and Rambo III and their themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

As far as action heroes go, James Bond and Rambo could not seem more different. Suave, sophisticated, womanising secret agent versus traumatised outcast veteran commando. A suit and bowtie versus a tank-top and khaki trousers. A fantasy of continued British influence in contemporary global affairs versus a dystopian product of America’s actual pre-eminence in them.

Yet when the two latest instalments in these film series appeared in 1987 and 1988 respectively, they featured one strong parallel. The Living Daylights was set partly, and Rambo III mostly, in Afghanistan – the site of a by then drawn-out, hugely destructive conflict between occupying Soviet forces and Islamist guerrilla fighters, the Mujahideen, who sought to expel them and their ideological influence from the country.

These two films then, viewed side by side, are valuable for the insights they offer into how the war and its combatants were viewed within the West. Yet more than this, the way both films integrate this conflict into their own wider, imagined worlds sheds light on the respective series’ narrative conventions and protagonists, and the way these were steeped within particular understandings of the Cold War.

The Soviet-Afghan War

In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), with Soviet support, overthrew the autocratic regime of Mohammad Daoud Khan and established a new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan along Marxist-Leninist lines. The PDPA were, however, riven by factional infighting, lacked broader legitimacy in Afghan society, and faced staunch opposition from influential Islamist groups. In September 1979, president Nur Muhammad Taraki was deposed by his second-in-command Hafizullah Amin, who sought rapprochement with the US and with the Islamists. Alarmed by these developments just across the border, the Soviets invaded in December, deposing Amin, and replacing him with the more moderate Babrak Karmal.1

The invasion sounded the death knell for the already waning détente that had existed between the US and the Soviet Union during the 1970s. The situation was further exacerbated by domestic economic and ideological malaise and political instability in the Soviet Union – which had three elderly leaders die in office between 1982 and 1985 – and the election of the hawkish Ronald Reagan as US president. Tensions in the early 1980s reached their severest levels in two decades.

Reagan’s government channelled aid via Pakistan to various Mujahideen groups – who were themselves divided on ethnic, tribal, and personal (and to a lesser extent religious) lines – as well as funding the transportation of Islamist fighters from elsewhere in the world to Afghanistan, and (with Saudi Arabia) the education of Pakistanis and Afghan refugees in jihadist Islam. They fought a hugely effective guerrilla war against the Soviets and the Afghan government, who failed to win the support of either the Afghan people or the international community, and to maintain effective control of territory. Civilian casualties and displacement occurred on a huge scale, while death toll among military personnel was also high.

As with so much else, Mikhail Gorbachev’s appointment as Soviet leader in 1985 proved a watershed for the conflict. Committed to implementing economic and political reforms in the ailing Soviet Union and establishing far more harmonious relations with the US, he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan as soon as possible, albeit while saving Soviet face. He signed the 1988 Geneva Accords, which set the timeframe for Soviet withdrawal. In their absence, the (now renamed) Republic of Afghanistan only survived until 1992, when the Islamic State of Afghanistan was established by some of the Mujahideen groups. With the Soviets gone and the Cold War coming to an end, the US was disinterested in the transition process, but Pakistan and other neighbouring states backed different Mujahideen factions who continued to battle for control of the country throughout the 1990s.

The Living Daylights

Partly based on a short story of the same name, The Living Daylights was Timothy Dalton’s first of two outings as Bond. It begins with him overseeing the defection to the West of the Soviet General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé), who warns MI6 that the KGB is adopting an increasingly harsh counterespionage policy, before apparently being snatched from his safehouse in England by the KGB. Bond tracks down Koskov’s girlfriend in Bratislava, Kara Milovy (Maryam D’Abo), who escapes with Bond to Vienna, where the two become closer. Learning that Koskov has been working with US arms dealer Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), Bond travels to Tangier, again accompanied by Kara, to meet with new KGB head General Leonid Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) and find out more about Koskov’s and Whitaker’s relationship.

Koskov and his henchman Necros (Andreas Wisniewski) then kidnap Bond and Kara from Tangier and transport them to a Soviet base in Afghanistan, from which they subsequently escape along with Oxford-educated local Mujahideen leader, Kamran Shah (Art Malik). Shah and his men are selling opium to Koskov to fund their anti-Soviet activities, but Bond explains to him that Koskov is buying the opium with embezzled Soviet funds, selling it at a profit, and then using the proceeds to buy arms from Whitaker for Soviet usage in Afghanistan, enriching both men. Bond, with the assistance of Kara and the belatedly arriving Mujahideen, manages to infiltrate the Soviet base and abscond with Koskov’s purchased opium purchase, while also helping his Afghan allies to escape the pursuing Soviet Army. Bond travels back to Tangier, where he confronts and – after a fight between the two – kills Whitaker; Pushkin then arrives and arrests Koskov.

Rambo III

Rambo III completed the original trilogy of Rambo films, following First Blood (1982) – adapted from David Morell’s 1972 novel of the same name – and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), centred on PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone). In the third film, Rambo is tracked down in Thailand by his former commanding officer, Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna), who tries unsuccessfully to persuade him to join him on a mission to Afghanistan to supply the Mujahideen with weaponry to help their resistance against the Soviets. When Trautman is himself captured by the brutal Soviet Colonel Alexei Zaysen (Marc De Jonge), Rambo travels to Pakistan to meet arms dealer Mousa Ghani (Sasson Ghabbi), with whom he travels over to Afghanistan to make contact with the Mujahideen themselves, and secure their help in rescuing Trautman.

Rambo swiftly makes himself at home among and ingratiates himself with the Afghan fighters and their community, especially orphaned child soldier Hamid (Doudi Shoua). However, their leader, Chieftain Masoud (Spiros Fokas), is reluctant to commit scant resources to aid Rambo’s mission. After witnessing and helping repel a brutal Soviet attack on the Afghan camp, Rambo travels to the Soviet camp, from which he frees Trautman and some Afghan captives. Having ensured the other prisoners’ safe escape, Rambo and Trautman successfully kill the Soviet commandos sent in pursuit of them, but then find themselves faced by Zayden and the rest of his men. At that point, however, the Mujahideen arrive and defeat the Soviets in a pitched battle, in which Rambo kills Zayden. Mousa and Hamid try to persuade Rambo to stay and help them fight the Soviets, but he reluctantly departs the camp along with Trautman. The film ends with a dedication to ‘the gallant people of Afghanistan’.

Bond, Rambo, and the Cold War in the 1980s

Though the qualities Bond and Rambo embody are starkly different – one suave, wisecracking, and subtle in his methods; the other unpolished, terse, and unrestrained in his violence – they function in similar ways as national heroes, particularly in The Living Daylights and Rambo III. Their characteristics are patently associated with the cultures they are born from, and yet they are required to epitomise those cultures almost entirely in foreign contexts. They ostensibly operate in the service of their national governments, and yet do so with only limited obedience and untrammelled independence, and where they form alliances, these cut across national lines.

There are also marked differences between the films’ principal antagonists. Where Koskov is charming and duplicitous, Zaysen is just straightforwardly cruel. Moreover, Koskov is explicitly treacherous towards the Soviet Union, and Bond ultimately collaborates with Koskov’s superior, Pushkin, the head of the KGB, to defeat him. Yet just as Koskov is motivated entirely by greed, there is no indication in Rambo III that Zaysen is ideologically motivated, and there is at least the implication that he operates zealously free from any chain of command.

The Soviet-Afghan War is the most obvious common thread between the two films, and yet there are distinctions here too. Rambo III is far more centrally about that conflict, and most of the action takes place in Afghanistan. In Living Daylights, Bond only arrives in Afghanistan in the second half of the film, and the conflict’s topicality is rather at odds not only with the wider Bond oeuvre to that point, but also somewhat with the preceding scenes. The viewer is introduced far more fully to several Afghan characters in Rambo III, compared to just Kamran Shah in The Living Daylights, and is invited to care far more deeply about their plight, and identify far more fully with them against the Soviets.

Yet there are parallels with how the films’ plots play out once the protagonists are in Afghanistan. There are processes of mutual recognition. The audience is shown similar qualities in the Afghans as in British and American culture, as exhibited by Bond and Rambo respectively, and from this a sense of respect and camaraderie emerges. Then Bond/Rambo and the Mujahideen recognise the compatibility of their respective missions, in both cases culminating in the Mujahideen coming to Bond’s/Rambo’s aid. Thereafter follow remarkably similar battles against the Soviet forces, who – detached in this particular setting from any broader geopolitical, geographical, or humanistic mooring – can be safely slaughtered.

Film, genre, and the war in Afghanistan

The presence of the conflict in the two films demonstrates something of how the relationship between the Cold War and popular culture worked. There is a degree of delay between an event and its representation. By the time these films were released, regional and global dynamics were shifting. Under Gorbachev’s leadership, the Soviet Union was moving towards withdrawal from Afghanistan. More generally, and with cautious but reciprocal moves from counterparts like Reagan and Thatcher, he was also rapidly moving the Soviet Union towards genuine rapprochement. The Cold War frameworks depicted in The Living Daylights and Rambo III were rapidly coming apart.

The way that the Soviet-Afghan War was worked into the films’ plots also illustrates how they operated according to their own cinematic logics, with their own histories. There are the particular requirements of the action thriller (albeit in quite different iterations in these cases) that the conflict fitted well: exotic locations; high suspense; unlikely masculine alliances; spectacular violence.

On the other hand, the James Bond and Rambo film franchises had developed out of and away from their literary source material into very different beasts tonally. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the Bond films, albeit more restrained in The Living Daylights than in earlier iterations, was less suited to dealing in depth with as horrendous a war as that occurring in Afghanistan than the more relentlessly dark Rambo ones.

Moreover, whereas the Bond films were ideologically rooted in the relaxation of East-West tensions that eventually culminated in détente, the Rambo ones were the product of both the humiliation and trauma of America’s Vietnam experience and its rightward, anti-communist turn of the early 1980s. Paradoxically, being much less of its time in this way also meant The Living Daylights captured the coming zeitgeist, looking towards a post-Cold War world, less centred on ideological and moral divides, in a manner that Rambo III certainly did not.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warning: Death.

I have written previously for this newsletter about Ealing Studios generally, and Passport to Pimlico (1949) in particular. This includes a post I wrote a little while ago on Passport to Pimlico’s immediate reception, and the way it was perceived as embodying both a specifically British type of comedy, and also as articulating a libertarian, even anti-statist politics.

In the following piece, I want to follow Passport’s longer afterlife through to the end of the 1950s, as discussed both by Ealing personnel and film reviewers. In particular, I want to outline the way it came to be incorporated in this discourse as a cornerstone of four different cinematic canons: of the Ealing comedy specifically; of Ealing’s output across genres; of the films made at Ealing by its scriptwriter, T. E. B. Clarke; and of the films made by its director, Henry Cornelius, after his departure from the studio.

Passport to Pimlico and the Ealing comedy

As 1949 proceeded, and Ealing also released Whisky Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and A Run for Your Money, Passport to Pimlico offered a key referent in reviews of those films, sometimes compared favourably to them and sometimes less so, but nonetheless in ways that emphasised the studio’s developing specialism in comedy, treated in turn as a new model for British film comedy more generally.1 Michael Balcon himself opined on the matter in an article for Picturegoer that August, stating that good comedies were especially difficult for studios to make, given the necessarily cooperative nature of film production on one hand, and the inherently individual nature of what a person does or does not find funny. Nonetheless, he explained that Ealing had made a conscious decision to specialise in comedy:

I believe strongly that the cinema reflects the mood, the character and the aspirations of every country which produces films. I suppose we could become very serious about it and hazard the theory that a nation so highly taxed as ours seeks a natural relief in laughter: in other words that comedy is most welcome when life itself offers the least opportunity to laugh.

The four comedies Ealing had turned out so far that year were in his view highly distinctive from each other and experimental in approach, being varieties of comedy that Britain had not previously specialised in. Passport to Pimlico he described as a satire that had disproven the idea that this type of comedy could not succeed commercially; Whisky Galore! and A Run for Your Money were folk comedies, while Kind Hearts and Coronets was a sophisticated comedy that he felt was the best of them all. He contrasted them with the relatively formulaic approach of the earlier Will Hay and George Formby vehicles his studio had turned out, following instead a more innovative example first set by Hue and Cry.2

During the 1950s, when Ealing continued to make comedies but at a less regular rate than before, the notion of comedy as a particular Ealing specialism persisted. For example, Forsyth Hardy, in a lengthy 1952 feature for The Sphere on the state of the British film industry, identified two distinctive traditions in Ealing: the recognisably British realist dramas that had their origins in the Documentary Movement and the studio’s wartime films, and:

…the light, satiric social comedy, which has made the name of Ealing known all over the world. The note was first struck tentatively in Hue cand Cry, written by T. E. B. Clarke. In Passport to Pimlico, by the same author, it was firm and clear. Here was comedy drawn from everyday life, comedy related as unmistakably to the British scene as any of the dramas or documentaries which preceded it. At last someone had found how to bring the British genius for civilised humour to the screen.3

Passport to Pimlico also remained a comparator for newer entrants into Ealing’s comedy oeuvre. It was mentioned, for example, in several reviews of The Titfield Thunderbolt, the T. E. B. Clarke-written 1953 comedy about villagers taking over their local rail branch line after British Rail had decided to close it. The consensus was that Ealing’s return to comedy was welcome, if on this occasion not quite up to the standard of Passport and its predecessors.4 There also remained a perception in the reviews that the Ealing comedy as a type of film was inherently antiauthoritarian, even anti-statist, in nature. This was most explicitly stated in Jane Stockwood’s review of Titfield Thunderbolt for the British edition of Good Housekeeping, which commenced:

The more we are bullied and bothered by bureaucrats, the more we dream of lost freedoms and the rugged, independent spirit which once made England great. And the Ealing film comedies (Passport to Pimlico and its successors) which are now our most admired achievement abroad, are consecrated to the unconquerable pockets of resistance that, according to them, still exist in these browbeaten islands.5

Likewise, Margaret Hinxman’s review of the same film for Picturegoer noted that the film had ‘undertones of Passport to Pimlico’, possessing ‘a gentle humour, but not so gentle that it can’t make the most of a satirical sideline, or a quip at the expense of government, people or even the nationalised industries’.6

Passport to Pimlico and the Ealing film

Yet Passport was also equally part of a developing sense of what Ealing’s more general, genre-crossing oeuvre was. When the studio released police drama The Blue Lamp in early 1950, reviewers frequently listed it alongside Passport, Whisky Galore!, and Kind Hearts as exemplifying the high calibre of film Ealing routinely produced.7 After the film was given a second general release later that same year, Jympson Harman, in a laudatory article, attributed this latest success as exemplary of the studio’s ‘pet-formula’: its continual production of films that are ‘British in flavour’; its refusal to make star vehicles; its democratic, collaborative, and supportive approach to filmmaking; and its restraint in the volume and cost of films it made. Regarding Balcon’s eschewing of contract stars, he explained:

The result is that The Blue Lamp is not about Jack Warner as a policeman. It is a film about policemen with Jack Warner as one of them. Passport to Pimlico was a film about cockneys, not about a Cockney played by Stanley Holloway. And so on.8

By contrast, Frank Enley’s unsympathetic review of Blue Lamp for Sight and Sound described it as exemplifying ‘a particularly specious brand of mediocrity, which, to put it mildly, is having a fine run for its money’, and as ‘typical of the British cinema and of the studio which produced it’. He lamented its preference for depicting social types representative of certain social orders or regions, rather than characters with recognisable emotions, and yet acknowledged this might have something to do with its commercial success:

The Blue Lamp is popular because it follows in a tradition of popularity, the tradition of In Which We Serve, The Captive Heart, The Way to the Stars, Passport to Pimlico and others. These films are popular because they subscribe to certain myths; they appeal, I suspect, to a vanity in the national temperament. They are all conceived as tributes to the navy, to p.o.w’s, to the air force, to Londoners and to policemen.9

What Harman saw as the positive thread that carried through Ealing’s films, through comedy and drama, through Passport to Pimlico and The Blue Lamp, Enley saw as a negative one, but perceived it, nonetheless.

The notion of a particular Ealing approach that crossed genre boundaries persisted in subsequent commentary and reportage on the studio. In a 1951 feature for Sight and Sound that centred on his attendance of one of Ealing’s roundtable meetings, Francis Koval remarked:

From the realistic punch derived from an almost documentary approach in San Demetrio, London, The Overlanders, or Scott of the Antarctic, to fantasy at its best in Dead of Night: from the slightly romanticised subjects like Johnny Frenchman or Frieda to the unabashed freshness of Hue and Cry, and the variously shaded humour of Whisky Galore, Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets―all the Ealing films (even the occasional bad ones) had something distinctive about them, a signature immediately recognisable not only by the specialised film critic, but by the public at large, here and later abroad.

He questioned those present at the meeting as to the reasons for this unity, at which various answers were given including creative freedom, shared generational experience, the importance of unique concepts to each film, refusal to consider socially objectionable themes, and the open exchange of ideas (although Charles Crichton demurred, rejecting the idea that their films all possessed a single ‘signature tune’).10

Marking the studio’s 21^st anniversary later that same year, Kinematograph Weekly published a supplement, in which Josh Billings listed Hue and Cry, It Always Rains on a Sunday, Passport to Pimlico, Scott of the Antarctic, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Blue Lamp, and The Lavender Hill Mob as ‘pure Ealing’ and ‘golden testimony to Michael Balcon’s vision, integrity, perception, drive and business acumen’, while also noting the producer’s emphasis on balancing comedy and drama.11

A longer feature in the same supplement, entitled ‘The History of a Tradition’, detailed how during the Second World War, Ealing ‘had reacted to the stimulus of great events and its films had acquired a journalistic touch’, and that upon the conflict’s end, ‘The pattern formed in the past few years was to be continued, with the problems of peace taking the place of the problems of war’. This commenced with The Captive Heart, and was followed by Hue and Cry, Frieda, It Always Rains on a Sunday, Scott of the Antarctic, Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Whisky Galore!, The Blue Lamp, The Magnet, Pool of London, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Man in the White Suit, all of which embodied ‘a tradition of sustained, consistent story-telling that is familiar, respected and welcomed wherever the free kinema exists’.12

Balcon was especially prominent in reorienting the narrative of what Ealing did away from its embrace of comedy, so pronounced in his public comments in the late 1940s, back towards re-emphasising its commitment to realism and a connection between its wartime and post-war output. He told Koval in 1951:

The period of the second World War became a turning point in the history of Ealing Studios. Only then we started realising the true significance of the cinema as a mass medium and the enormous power entrusted to film-makers. The documentary-cum-fiction technique that we then developed was to a certain extent dictated by requirements of propaganda. Still, it has proved its value and its great possibilities in the post-war years.13

In his own contribution to Kinematograph Weekly’s anniversary supplement on Ealing, Balcon explained that he had decided from the outset of his time at Ealing that to compete with Hollywood domestically, they needed to make ‘essentially “native” films, films about people and events similar to those familiar to our audience’, whether through a dramatic or comic lens – an approach he said that Ealing’s wartime output had vindicated and set the parameters for future success:

With the end of the war there was a slight shift over from strict realism to a more fictional treatment of reality, and from the difficulties of war-time life to the lighter side of the national character. Nevertheless, clearly the same beliefs underlie the war films and such works as, on the one hand, “The Captive Heart,” “The Overlanders,” “It Always Rains on Sunday” and “The Blue Lamp,” and, on the other hand, “Hue and Cry,” “Whisky Galore,” “Passport to Pimlico,” and the rest of the so-called “Ealing comedies.”

He argued that ‘“Ealing” has become less the name of a studio than a generic term to describe a certain type of film and a certain approach to the material’, attributing this to ‘the underlying conception of a native kinema’ that united the studio’s creative staff despite their own distinctive styles and subject preferences, and to their own strong sense of the studio’s identity.14

Passport to Pimlico and the T. E. B. Clarke film

Passport to Pimlico also bolstered the celebrity of its scriptwriter, contributing to a sense of his own developing body of work within the broader Ealing tradition. Accompanying a May 1949 instalment of Freda Bruce Lockhart’s ‘At the Pictures’ column, Tatler and Bystander included the photo feature at the top of this post, entitled ‘A Very Funny Film, and its Chief Begetter’, in which several stills from Passport were juxtaposed with a larger portrait photo of Clarke. It explained that:

T. F. B. [sic] Clarke, the author of Passport to Pimlico, has performed a feat which is rare, if not unique, among scenario writers—that of “stealing the picture.” A unanimous chorus of critics has greeted his work as being the first genuinely funny creation in British films for many years.15

Off the back of Passport’s success, Picturegoer commissioned Clarke to write several guest columns in July entitled ‘A Screenwriter’s Notebook’, which comprised a sequence of short, gossipy, comic anecdotes from the contemporary transatlantic film world, in which the humour arose from the situations his associates found themselves in.16 This animation of his own world as a basis for comic creation strengthened Clarke’s own personal brand (albeit strongly connected to Ealing’s) as a filmmaker in his own right and helped define his approach to scriptwriting rooted in gleaning ideas from everyday life, rather than adapting existing fictional material – spelt out in a 1951 chapter he contributed to Roger Manvel’s annual The Cinema book series, in which he provided an account of how he came up with the plot for Passport and several other films.17

As Clarke’s output grew, the specific appreciation of his own distinctive approach within (though also embodying) Ealing heightened in reviews, with Passport to Pimlico remaining a constant reference point. In a 1951 profile for Sight and Sound, John Morley detailed how the scriptwriter drew upon anecdotes he heard and his own observations, particularly of London life, for the individual films Clarke made. While he included The Blue Lamp in this list, his focus was on explaining Clarke’s ‘individual style of screen comedy’:

In a wider sense the particular flavour of Clarke’s stories reflects his temperament. Genial, tolerant, full of curiosity about all kinds of human beings, he is nearly always stumbling upon an odd, fantastic story in a newspaper or magazine, and telling it with a relish that makes an immediate impact. The type of subject that appeals to him is not one of psychological complexity, and, as he conceives his characters in simple, direct terms, he is free to develop incidents that twist themselves into flights of fancy without being held back by the need for serious explanations.18

When The Lavender Hill Mob – the comedy about a mild-mannered bank clerk who pulls off a gold bullion robbery, for which Clarke would win an Academy Award – was released later that year, Freda Bruce Lockhart wrote in her review of the film that ‘Mr. Clarke is blessed with two gifts for want of which films ail sadly: fertility of imagination and a sense of fun’. While acknowledging the calibre of comedies made by others at Ealing such as Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets, she emphasised his ‘extraordinarily consistent’ record even by the studio’s high standard.19 Another of Clarke’s champions, C. A. Lejeune, wrote of the film:

The Lavender Hill Mob is one of Ealing’s and Mr. Clarke’ s London particulars, like Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico; films that make their way into busy City streets and quiet suburban backwaters; push into tube trains at the rush hour and catch the life of the real Londoner with quite unerring accuracy.20

This captures something of why Clarke came to enjoy such a cache among British film critics. Firstly, while they and filmmakers had something of a shared project in elevating cinema, and specifically British cinema, as artistically and culturally valuable, Clarke as a former journalist and writer himself commanded an especially high degree of their professional affinity. Secondly, if – to paraphrase Charles Barr – Clarke epitomised a version of ‘mainstream’ Ealing (though one comprised overwhelmingly of comedies, in contrast to the studio’s more balanced output), it was one that, with some exceptions, then held a particularly high appeal to the London-centric trade press in its Anglocentrism and affectionate depiction of recognisable social types.21

Passport to Pimlico and the Henry Cornelius film

Unlike Clarke, who remained with Ealing until its demise in the late 1950s, Passport to Pimlico marked the conclusion of Henry Cornelius’s association with the studio. When Michael Balcon rejected his request for a raise after Passport’s success, Cornelius immediately quit – rather mirroring the antiauthoritarian sentiment he voiced in his exegesis of the film’s plot. He would make four more comedies: The Galloping Major (1951), Genevieve (1953), I Am a Camera (1955), and Next to No Time (1958), before dying that same year aged only 46, before his last film had been released.22

Cornelius’s chafing against some central components of what came to be seen as the Ealing ethos was evident from his comments during his participation in a roundtable on British film organised by Sight and Sound in April 1950, chaired by the documentary-maker Basil Wright.23 By this point, Cornelius had set up an independent partnership with another former Ealing colleague, Monja Danischewsky, with whom he was in the process of making The Galloping Major. Echoing some of the earlier criticisms Balcon had himself made of the British cinema industry, the director lamented during the roundtable the difficulties facing independent film producers given the dominance and conservatism of exhibitors and distributors.24 Yet he also emphasised the burdens imposed upon filmmakers by the trade union rules and other regulations they had themselves pushed for, which he claimed hindered experimentation and drastically raised costs.25

On the question of whether there was sufficient realism in British films, Cornelius opined that ‘the post-war mood in this country is merely symptomatic of the general apathy and staleness’, and that ‘there is, as yet, no sign of anyone here being particularly dynamic in expressing the apathy, the muddle or the confusion. So there is not a great deal of “message” content in the good films’, although he added that cinema had nonetheless ‘achieved a great deal in expressing realism’.[23]26

He subsequently asserted that, while he entirely agreed that they should be making realistic pictures, ‘the standard which everybody acclaimed and which arose from the merging of documentary into fiction—but now we have to progress beyond the documentary thing, and go on to style. This is remarkably lacking in most of our pictures.’ When another participant, distributor and producer James George Minter, countered with the example that ‘each Ealing picture still looks like an Ealing picture’, Cornelius pointedly remarked that ‘we must not confuse the collective brand or stamp of a studio with a director’s personal style’.27

Yet when The Galloping Major was released the following year, even the most positive reviews compared it to the previous Ealing comedies and usually expressed the view that while very much in that vein, it did not quite have the same level of polish and inventiveness.28 Jane Stockford in Good Housekeeping specifically compared it to Passport to Pimlico by way of emphasising its limitations, including its lack of the very libertarian quality Cornelius had highlighted in the latter film:

The Galloping Major, made by the man who directed and produced Passport to Pimlico, was evidently intended to be a successor to that essay on the English character and customs. But it is not so good. The idea of all the horse-fanciers in a London suburb (Lambs Green) clubbing together for a horse and entering him for the Grand National is disarming, but less fruitful than the conception of a little bit of Burgundy on English soil; and the sunny picture of the animal’s last-minute rush to the course, aided by benevolent officials and traffic cops, is less cathartic than the brief orgy of freedom (ration-books torn up and pubs open all night) indulged in by the Burgundian Cockneys.29

After The Galloping Major’s disappointing performance, Cornelius hoped to follow Danischewsky back to Ealing to make his next planned film, Genevieve, a comedy about two young couples competing against each other in a vintage care race, written by American screenwriter William Rose (who would later script several Ealing films). However, Balcon was unwilling to accede, given both Ealing’s existing production schedule and the nature of Cornelius’s departure, but instead recommended it to the Rank Organisation, who eventually put up most of the film’s funding.30 By contrast with The Galloping Major, Genevieve, which proved a major critical and commercial success, heralded a shift in Cornelius’s approach towards comedies rooted more in individual character studies. Reviewing the film for Sight and Sound, Penelope Houston described it as having ‘a hard, urban flavour more familiar from France or America than from a British comedy’, thus defying conventions that had gotten stale:

What may, perhaps, be called the school of T. E. B. Clarke—a really clever writer who has, inevitably, been none too happily imitated—has enjoyed a long run, and it seems time, if not for a change, at least for a variation. With Genevieve this comes from a slightly unexpected quarter, since the director, Henry Cornelius, made his name with Passport to Pimlico and then disappointed with the artless The Galloping Major.31

Cornelius continued to stress the need for innovation in filmmaking, especially given drastic changes in the industry. Writing for Kinematograph Weekly in 1957, he warned that the growing popularity of television did not sound the death knell for cinema as a social institution, but that it did mean cinemagoers were much more discriminating in what they watched. The very nature of television as a medium placed a premium on dramatic study of individuals, a theme that filmmakers also ought to be able to explore, rather than being compelled by producers and distributors to rehash ‘old and hackneyed formula themes’.32

Following Cornelius’s untimely death the following year, Monja Danischewsky identified an evolving strand through his friend’s work, in a letter to Sight and Sound. The great film comedians, he explained, had always been preoccupied by the figure of ‘The Little Guy’, a sentimental, long-suffering figure who provoked the audience’s pity but not admiration. Cornelius’s comedies, however, offered ‘a less palliative and a more urgent message to The Little Guy himself’, to take action to change his circumstances. In Passport to Pimlico, ‘his approach was broad: he dealt with a group of Little Guys’. Yet as he became more confident as a director, Cornelius increasingly focused more searchingly on narrower sets of characters, culminating in Next to No Time’s selection of only ‘one Little Guy for detailed examination’, which he hoped ‘for all its trappings of comedy, would give help and encouragement to the millions of Little Guys who would be given an opportunity to see it’.

This perhaps serves best to illustrate his overall attitude towards film-making. From boyhood, he saw the medium as a means of disseminating ideas. And the idea that seemed most to excite him is that in our world, The Big Guy is only The Little Guy who has crossed the rubicon by his belief in himself. His death robs the British cinema of its most serious comedy maker.33

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warning: Antisemitism.

I am currently in the process of finishing an article about Passport to Pimlico, Ealing Studios, comedy, and post-war Britain. This is well-trodden ground, but what (I hope!) is innovative about my approach is a focus on both the development of the film from concept to screen through different stages of production, and the subsequent public interpretation of the film by both the film’s makers and its reviewers. I’ve already covered some of this ground in previous posts for this newsletter:

This process of narrative and metanarrative-building need to be understood as part of a broader twofold process in play at Ealing under the leadership of Michael Balcon, who was head of the studio from 1938 until the final films were released under the Ealing brand in the late 1950s. Under Balcon, Ealing focused predominantly (though not solely) on making films about contemporary Britain, with a socially realist dimension, firstly with a principal focus on the Second World War as it was being fought, and subsequently shifting its attention to a wider array of subject matter, albeit among which socially concerned comedies and dramas were especially preeminent. Again, I have previously written about the generic and narrative dimensions of Ealing’s core output for this newsletter too:

The thematic and ideological continuities in this output were shaped by Ealing’s particular collective working structure, in which Balcon was an integral figure. This takes us onto the second component of Ealing’s storytelling, which I want to talk about in this post, which is the way the studio – and Balcon in particular – told a story through the press (and other avenues) about Ealing itself, as an institution and cast of characters, and its place both within British cinema as a national artform, and within Britain as a nation. Indeed, as I’ll highlight below, this story was frequently and deliberately analogous to and symbiotic with the stories being told in Ealing’s films at the same time.

Ealing at war

In her survey of Balcon’s own personal archive, Janet Moat argued that, with the outbreak of war a year after he had taken over at Ealing, Balcon was eager for British film production to avoid the problems that had beset it during the First World War, enabling Hollywood to irreversibly dominate the British domestic market, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the new Ministry of Information to rationalise the industry.

During the war, Balcon was keener to make films based on original stories rather than adaptations, and that could appeal to US audiences, in part to persuade them to support the British war effort. He exercised extensive control over the production process at Ealing, and even while inevitably having to outsource work, monitored all details of film production. Balcon paid particular attention to audience and critical reception and stressed the importance of film beyond its mere ‘commodity’ value. He also continued to work on behalf of small producers, while opposing the Rank Organisation’s dominance of production, distribution, and exhibition.1

Within this context, the studio came to specialise especially in a particular type of war film, presenting a social realist representation of the conflict, such as The Foreman Went to France, The Next of Kin (both 1942), Nine Men, The Bells Go Down, Went the Day Well?, San Demetrio London (all 1943), For Those in Peril (1944), and Johnny Frenchman (1945). These films possessed a plot structure pertaining to the narrative logic imposed upon the war experience as it unfolded. They began with a period of complacency – sometimes concurrent with the ‘phoney war’ period of the conflict – and a group marked by petty divisions and gripes, responding initially lethargically and uncertainly to war conditions. Then a genuine crisis would compel the group to mobilise, develop and display proficiency, put aside differences, endure deprivations, and make sacrifices. The films usually (though not always) ended optimistically with the promise of victory and a better future for a transformed community.

As Mark Duguid and Katy McGahan have argued, this generic specialisation and standardisation owed much to the arrival of the Brazilian documentary-maker Alberto Cavalcanti, previously of the hugely influential General Post Office Film Unit, to oversee the studio’s own documentary-making arm, the Ealing Shorts Unit, in 1940. He and the young directors under his tutelage, as well as another arrival from the GPO, Harry Watt, pioneered a more inventive approach to documentary-making that they would subsequently incorporate into Ealing’s feature films as they supplanted the studio’s existing roster of directors now engaged in war work elsewhere.2

At the same time, Ealing was also developing a clear brand identity, as Nathalie Morris has demonstrated. Publicity director Monja Danischewsky, who had previously worked as a press publicist, used his connections to ensure press coverage captured Ealing’s idiosyncratic image as a studio, and the public personas of Balcon and other key personnel, as well as utilising showmanship, hospitality, and sentimental appeal to ensure positive write-ups of Ealing’s films. Ealing also hired noted artists to produce posters and other publicity artwork, epitomised by Barnett Freedman’s ‘Ealing Studios’ logo, which captured its distinctive and much less overtly showy public image.3

Balcon’s wartime narrative

Balcon too was extremely adept at using the press and other public fora to tell a story about the type of studio Ealing was and the type of films it made. He was a regular critic, in both the British and American film press, of the disadvantageous relationship between the British and American film industries, especially in the context of the wartime conditions facing British filmmakers. He also routinely criticised British directors and actors who had left for Hollywood in this period rather than do their duty by their country and the film industry that had nourished their earlier careers.4 Balcon was even more scathing about the British state’s approach to the country’s commercial filmmaking sector, lamenting the lack of resources available, the high level of entertainment tax, ongoing uncertainty over the future of quotas for British film exhibition and distribution, and encroachment by the various organs of state in film production.5

This was intrinsically connected to the role Balcon saw film as playing in the context of the war. Addressing the Workers Film Association in 1943, he conceded the effectiveness of German film propaganda and argued the British film industry likewise needed to project ‘our own ideas, our strength and our resources’ and provide ‘instruction’.6 Writing in the film press, he strongly defended Ealing’s practice of focusing on making war films on patriotic, aesthetic, and commercial grounds. More generally, he championed the calibre of British films and argued that they could succeed domestically in the first instance and subsequently in the US market on their own terms, if given fair coverage by reviewers and granted sufficient market access.7

The overlap between characterisation in Ealing’s wartime films and Balcon’s characterisation of Ealing in the wartime film industry, albeit with an eye towards a post-war era, was encapsulated in an article he wrote for Kinematograph Weekly in April 1945, entitled ‘Let British Films be Ambassadors to the World’. He argued that British film needed to counter Germany’s presentation of Britain as ‘blood-soaked Imperialists, punch-drunk degenerates, betrayers of our Allies, grovelling servants of fabulous Jewish plutocrats’:

The man in the street in New York, Paris, Brussels, Athens, Brussels and Rome must know something more of our country than the immediate foreign policy of its present Government. The Spanish Republican who has escaped the [Spanish fascist] Falangist cell should know that [the 18^th and 19^th-century radicals] William Cobbett and Tom Paine were as English as the non-Interventionists of the 1930s.

He chafed that Britain’s film industry had been ‘sneered at as a pastime of peace by Blimps in Service departments, frowned on as a frivolity by government departments vital to its wellbeing’.8

Ealing and the post-war British film industry

With the incoming Labour government drawing partly on precedents set during the War, and partly constrained by its persisting material legacies, Britain’s nascent post-war political economy centred on full employment, state welfare, worker unionisation, nationalisation of industry, initially stringent rationing and import restrictions, and imperial trade.9

Circumstances facing the British film industry in this period were rather perilous, with admissions beginning to decline from a peak in 1946, while access to finance for filmmaking was uneven; conditions were thus insufficient to support existing scale of production, while the strategy pursued by the likes of Alexander Korda of making bigger budget films with an eye to reaching the lucrative American market also backfired. In response to these challenges, the government implemented a series of policies intended to support the industry, including tinkering with quota levels, and introducing new vehicles for directing finance into production, but its own broader economic agenda also put it at odds with the sector at times, epitomised by a 1947 tax on film imports, intended to stem the outflow of dollars, to which Hollywood responded by cutting off film exports to Britain entirely until the tax was repealed the following year.10

In 1944, the Rank Organisation – Balcon’s former bête noire - acquired a major stake in Ealing that granted the studio greater financial security and enhanced distribution channels. Although the relationship between the two organisations remained uneasy at times, it granted Ealing the autonomy to continue with its mid-scale (both in volume and cost) production roster that enabled it to recoup its expenditure domestically. Within this context, Balcon fostered a working environment in which talented, in-demand staff sacrificed higher salaries available elsewhere for greater security, career development opportunities, and maintenance of artistic integrity. Film production at Ealing was remarkably collective, with decisions made through ‘round table’ discussions in which creative staff contributed ideas to films they were not directly involved in – though Balcon remained the key gatekeeper within this system.11

Again, this served to maintain considerable thematic specialisation and replication within the studio’s output, albeit alongside some generic experimentation. Ealing did make some war films after the conflict had finished, such as The Captive Heart (1946), Against the Wind (1948), The Cruel Sea (1953), and Dunkirk (1958). Yet its broader output after 1945, though it included some historical films – including literary adaptations like Nicholas Nickleby (1947), and biopics like Scott of the Antarctic (1948) – tended to be set in the present. These films also tended, again with exceptions like Harry Watts’ Australian and East African-focused films, to be set mainly in Britain.

These contemporary, British-set films fell primarily into two broad categories. One was dramas, often concerned with some form of social problem, such as crime, delinquency, or racism, although at times with a more personal or psychological source to the conflicts at the film’s centre. The other was comedies, particularly the subtler, socially observant ones that would come to be classified as the ‘Ealing comedy’, but also broader or more stylised varieties as well, as Tim O’Sullivan has highlighted.12

Balcon and the political economy of post-war cinema

Ealing, and Balcon especially, continued during this time to tell a story about Ealing as a studio, British film more generally, and their place in the nation somewhat analogous to the stories it told about Britain more generally in its films. In a letter to Tribune in November 1945, Balcon took issue with the magazine’s recent claim that Ealing had lost a degree of its independence under its arrangement with Rank, adding by way of final riposte: ‘It is not money which makes films, but brain-power’ – something he claimed was evinced by the misguided pre-war financial splurge on filmmaking that had facilitated Rank’s dominance in the first instance – while promising that ‘whoever holds the purse will always find it devilish difficult to control what creative people with integrity want to say’.13

Meanwhile, writing for The Daily Film Renter at the start of 1947, Balcon characterised the recent history of British cinema as one where the frivolity and overly commercial focus of the pre-war period was shaken out of the industry by the shock of war, during which time it lost personnel both to the Services, and more gallingly in the flight of some to ‘sunnier climes’ far removed from the conflict. He argued that, ‘Out of the turmoil the new British film emerged, produced under bombardment and probably deodorised thereby of the clinging perfumes of artificiality and superficiality’, and found its audience with a domestic audience that under the strains of war, sought not escapism, but ‘something that told the truth and yet held out a hope for the future, and this could be naturally produced from a country with a great history and a great tradition behind it’.14

Given the unequal position of the British film industry relative to its American counterpart, and with Britain’s own weak currency position mitigating against a prompt return to freer trade, Balcon argued in 1945 that, for the time being, film imports should be limited by legislation. He opined that in the longer term expanding British film production might generate enough competition with US films in domestic, Dominion, and European markets as to compel Hollywood to reduce its own production levels and thus make a more reciprocal exchange of films between the two countries eventually possible.15

Just over a year later, with a government report on the film industry prompting revived rumours about it being potentially nationalised, Balcon argued that state control over an artistic medium like film was neither desirable nor possible, remarking ‘that we can learn from other countries the stultifying effect of bureaucracy on creative impulses’; nonetheless he also stressed that ‘the State through legislation can assure protection to the art-form when its existence is jeopardised (because it is also an industry) by normal industrial practices and competition’. He framed this as a partnership rooted in reciprocal obligations: ‘…for the State to take an intelligent and even participating interest in any and all of the arts is a healthy thing; and for the film producer to have an intelligent appreciation of his responsibilities towards the State is a moral obligation which he cannot side-step’.16

By the end of 1947, however, with the impasse over American film imports seriously jeopardising the viability of the industry entirely, Balcon was more explicitly critical of the government, arguing its Hollywood import duty had proven counterproductive in design and delivery, and was also sceptical that there was sufficient domestic film production capacity to meet the shortfall in supply. Instead, he told Edward Lanchberry of Answers:

An immediate saving of dollars could have been effected by raising the quota of British films…that would have meant a reduction at once in the number of American films shown and would have left an opening for the best of Hollywood’s productions. Art is international and I do not think we should prevent a reasonable circulation of foreign films, do you?17

Balcon and the turn to comedy

Lanchberry’s piece also captured the shift in Ealing’s thinking around how to represent Britain. Asked why British film had achieved greater prestige in recent years, Balcon initially told a familiar story about how the war had demonstrated the public appetite for weightier fare, but then he signalled his interest in what he saw as a lacuna in its current areas of specialism:

One thing we do lack so badly in British films is comedy. It has been completely neglected, but that is understandable as a consequence of the times we are living in. No one feels like being funny these days.18

This perspective was reiterated by Ealing’s literary editor Stella Jonckhèere, tasked with overseeing the approximately 40–50 plays, books, and typescripts the studio received for consideration each week (compared to approximately just six films made by the studio per year). She described the need for her department to anticipate trends some two years in advance, asserting that those with psychological themes had been played out, while costume dramas were now in vogue.19 Wary the very mention of her department would probably result in even greater inundation with manuscripts, she told Lanchberry:

If you must publish anything, do please stress that it is only comedies, preferably with some social theme, that we are interested in seeing. Hue and Cry is a good example. Although primarily a comedy it showed also how post-war youth was living in the blitzed areas and adapting itself to the conditions.20

The question of comedy arose again in an exchange, reported by Lanchberry, between scenario director Angus McPhail and Henry Cornelius, who had been associate producer on Hue and Cry (and would subsequently direct Passport to Pimlico). When McPhail lamented that British cinema did not possess comedians of the calibre of their American counterparts, Cornelius countered:

No, we haven’t, but do we want them? We lack comedy, I agree, but I don’t think we want slapstick. Our line of comedy is the humour of situation. Personally, I should like to do another Hue and Cry, but they come along once in a thousand times.21

This heavy signalling of a new direction for the studio was also evident in a piece published nearly simultaneously in the Daily Renter, announcing that ‘Comedy will be the Theme at Ealing’, and that Balcon’s planned programme for 1948 comprised ‘a series of pictures which will break away from the dramatic subjects which have marked most of Ealing’s recent schedules’. It listed three films that the studio was working on: Another Shore (usually considered retrospectively as outside of the specific Ealing comedy subgenre), Kind Hearts and Coronets, and Passport to Pimlico.22

Ealing’s switch to comedy was, however, only partial, coexisting with a continued production of dramatic films.23 Writing for a special Kinematograph Weekly supplement on the studio in 1951, Balcon again told a story of how he had decided from the outset of his time at Ealing that to compete with American films, they needed to make ‘essentially “native” films, films about people and events similar to those familiar to our audience’, whether through a dramatic or comic lens – an approach he said that Ealing’s wartime output had vindicated and set the parameters for future success:

This meant that, after the war, instead of having to fight to have our standards accepted, we could continue, adapt and widen our policy of native realism on the firm foundation of the popularity and international standing of the British output of the war years.

With the end of the war there was a slight shift over from strict realism to a more fictional treatment of reality, and from the difficulties of war-time life to the lighter side of the national character. Nevertheless, clearly the same beliefs underlie the war films and such works as, on the one hand, “The Captive Heart,” “The Overlanders,” “It Always Rains on Sunday” and “The Blue Lamp,” and, on the other hand, “Hue and Cry,” “Whisky Galore,” “Passport to Pimlico,” and the rest of the so-called “Ealing comedies.”

That brings me to what is probably the most important point: that slowly, over these years “Ealing” has become less the name of a studio than a generic term to describe a certain type of film and a certain approach to the material.

Balcon attributed this to ‘the underlying conception of a native kinema’ that united the studio’s creative staff despite their own distinctive styles and subject preferences. He explained that Ealing’s smallness meant that ‘none of the impersonality of a large organisation can creep in’, and that they had made ‘a deliberate attempt to create stable employment and thus train men on a long-term policy’, culminating in their possessing ‘an outstanding loyalty to the idea of “Ealing”’.24

Balcon, institutional identity, and storytelling

Thus, from wartime through to peace, and through shifting tendencies in the studio’s output, Balcon told a coherent story about the types of films Ealing made, the types of people who worked there, and where this fitted in within an environment of uncertainty for both the film industry and Britain as a whole He equated not only the types of films Ealing made with the character and experiences of British society, but also Ealing itself as emblematic of that same national community. Ealing and the British people, in this telling, were both imbued with a spirit of togetherness and public-spiritedness. They had to negotiate a state that largely partly shared these qualities, but that was also frequently heavy-handed or conservative in its instincts. They also had to protect themselves and their values from the frequently predatory and self-regarding behaviour of larger businesses, necessitating the constraint of unregulated capitalism.

This infusing of creative and commercial decisions with moral and political significances was more than just a public relations exercise. It was a particularly slick, idealistic articulation of Ealing’s workings as an institution and the organisational identity that underpinned it, within which Balcon was lynchpin. And it helps to explain why Ealing in the late 1940s made a comedy like Passport to Pimlico, again for commercial and creative as well as ideological reasons; and why the film and the generic conventions it followed and honed were likewise received in such explicitly ideological terms.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warning: The Holocaust; Domestic abuse; Bereavement; Racism; Gendered Violence.

I’ve previously written for this newsletter about BBC Radio 4’s The Reunion – or more specifically an 2012 episode of the show on ‘Ugandan Asians’. The Reunion, produced for the BBC by Whistledown Productions, has been broadcast on Radio 4 since 2003, with its presenter – originally Susan MacGregor, and then, since 2020, Kirsty Wark – hosting a panel discussion bringing together several people to discuss their experiences of a particular historical event in which they were all involved in some capacity.

The ‘Ugandan Asians’ episode marked forty years since the expulsion of Uganda’s South Asian population in 1972 by dictator General Idi Amin. MacGregor was joined by a group of guests who had subsequently relocated from Uganda to Britain: businessman Manzoor Moghal, physiotherapist Tahera Aanchawan, Conservative councillor Ravi Govindia, dentist Chandrika Joshi, and writer and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. With the exception of Moghal, they had all been teenagers or young adults at the point of expulsion.

My previous post on this episode was the second half of a two-part piece comparing it with a discussion on another BBC radio programme and initiative, The Listening Project, between Leek-based retired publisher Prakash Samani and his son Sunil, a solicitor, about Prakash’s experience of fleeing Uganda with his family as a teenager and subsequently resettling in Britain. What I want to do in this current post is set the ‘Ugandan Asians’ episode of the programme in comparison with two other episodes of The Reunion that focused on the experiences of refugees who resettled in Britain.

The first is a 2010 episode on the Kindertransport, with five guests who had left Nazi Germany for Britain in 1938, as part of the sponsorship scheme to give Jewish children sanctuary from worsening state antisemitism: the Labour politician Lord Alf Dubs, entrepreneur Sir Eric Reich, former journalist Hella Pick, campaigner Ruth Humphries, and teacher and psychotherapist Ruth Barnett. The second is a 2017 episode on the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, who fled by sea from the communist regime that took power across the country following the Vietnam War. This discussion reunited Dr Philip Huynh, Diep Quan, Dr Dao Nguyen, and James Huynh, who were among 346 Vietnamese refugees rescued in 1978 by British cargo ship MV Wellpark from a sinking fishing boat in the South China Sea, with the Wellpark’s former training officer Graham MacQueen.

In comparing these episodes, I want to explore how The Reunion’s format as a programme shaped the way former refugees related their experiences of fleeing political and racist persecution to resettle in Britain. I also want to consider – at a time of increasingly vocal general anti-migrant and especially anti-refugee sentiment in Britain – which ostensibly liberal institutions have served to amplify and legitimise, which positively framed histories of refugees in Britain still do get a hearing? In particular, how does this depend upon the identities of their persecutors, and upon their relationships with their new host country?

The Reunion

While there have been variations in the precise structure of the programme over time, the general format of The Reunion has been for the host to be joined by four or five people to discuss an historical event in which they were all involved in some capacity, their discussion being bookended and often interspersed with archive BBC coverage of those events, as well as sometimes additional pre-recorded contributions from other participants or expert commentators.

The nature of the events covered has varied broadly, including scientific breakthroughs, the making of landmark television programmes and films, major political watersheds and campaigns, and often tragic and traumatic instances of historical injustice. These include events that occurred with Britain and beyond (albeit often with a British involvement, represented among the guests), such as high-fatality disasters, medical scandals, imprisonment, miscarriages of justice, humanitarian crises, terror attacks, killing sprees, targeted assassinations, and genocides; some particularly egregious conflicts and regimes were revisited from different angles, including the Second World War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Bosnian War, Apartheid in South Africa, and the War on Terror.

The selection of guests for these episodes has at times been intended to ensure a balance of views on controversial events, such as the 2010 episode on the Maze Prison hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, for which McGregor was joined by both Republican and Loyalist ex-prisoners, and a former prison officer. On other occasions, especially where there is more consensus on the nature of the injustice and the lines between perpetrators and victims are, on the face of it more clearly drawn – and the former usually not specifically the British state – it has been more common to centre the experience of the ostensible ‘victim’ group.

‘Kindertransport’

In the case of ‘Kindertransport’, after some scene-setting (involving a combination of archive BBC news radio coverage, and excerpted interviews with other children evacuated through the initiative, as well as with historian Sir Martin Gilbert), the panellists themselves relayed their own fragmented recollections – both first-hand and gleaned from surviving relatives – of worsening authoritarian rule and antisemitism in Germany and annexed neighbouring territories prior to their departure. They spoke of painful separation from their parents, recalling vividly their and their parents’ emotional responses in the moment of parting, and the subsequently harrowing journey to Britain, amid the callousness and harassment of the German soldiers they encountered. They also remembered the unfamiliarity of the sights they encountered upon arriving in London, such as red buses, and their subsequent relocation to varying parts of the country.

The overall tone of the discussion was one of gratitude to Britain for admitting them, avoiding the question of Britain’s own culpability, through restrictive migration rules, in preventing greater numbers of persecuted Jews escaping there from the continent before the outbreak of war. Yet the panellists’ accounts of life in foster care during the war were more mixed, with Eric Reich remembering fondly the care and affection he received from the family with whom he was placed, whereas Ruth Barnett described her cruel, ill treatment by her first foster-mother. They also reflected upon the paradoxical position of being refugees at a time when they were also classified as enemy aliens and sometimes abused for being Germans, the challenge of negotiating their own Jewish identities when they were too young to clearly understand what being Jewish meant, and the difficulties of learning English while also losing proficiency in their first languages.

While Alf Dubs and Hella Pick were joined by parents during the war, others were only able to maintain limited contact via written correspondence. Ruth Barnett, who was reunited with her parents after the war ended, spoke of her feelings of estrangement from them, and the legal battle that ensued over custody to her between her birth parents and foster parents. Erich Reich and Ruth Humphreys meanwhile recounted their delayed realisation that their parents had been murdered in the Holocaust. The temporal focus of the conversation then shifted from the early post-war years to the 50^th anniversary of the Kindertransport in 1989, and how they negotiated this the prism of having themselves become parents and grandparents, compelling them to recognise the sacrifice that their parents had made, and to reckon with the question of whether they could have done the same.

They also debated and disagreed over the question of their identities as members of the Kindertransport, and especially over whether they should consider themselves to be ‘survivors’, with Hella Pick arguing the term should be reserved for those who had made it out from the camps, whereas Ruth Barnett rejected the idea of such a hierarchy of suffering. The episode concluded with the panellists expressing a shared agreement, however, that they had been fortunate to come to Britain and to have had wonderful lives, although Lord Dubs made a pointed remark about the need for Britain to treat current asylum seekers in the same way as they had been treated.

‘Vietnamese Boat People’

The ‘Vietnamese Boat People’ episode began by emphasising the suffering of the South Vietnamese, and especially the ethnic Chinese population, following the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. It focused on the indoctrinatory nature of the communist regime they found themselves under and portrayed its subsequent war with Cambodia as a product of intra-communist fighting, evading questions as to South Vietnam’s own previous history of political repression, the consequences of the US’s long military campaign in Vietnam, and the role of the West in the Third Indochina War.

There were generational inflections to how the Vietnamese panellists related life under communist rule and the run-up to their eventual departures. Diep Quan and James Huynh, both children at the time of the communist takeover, recalled experiencing authoritarian changes in schooling and their parents being persecuted as capitalists, with James being temporarily imprisoned with the rest of his family. The older passengers were also ardently critical of the ideological nature of the regime, with Philip Huynh emphasising his own existing deepfelt anticommunism, while Dao Nguyen described the inhumane changes she witnessed working in maternity care, including prioritisation of party members for treatment, and forced sterilisation of women with large families. When it came to the escape itself, the then children described realising something was afoot from the conduct of their parents, whereas the adults had previously made foiled escape attempts.

The episode highlighted the general dangerousness of the journeys made by the boatpeople, with news clips from the time detailing attacks by pirates and pushbacks by neighbouring countries’ coastguards. The Vietnamese panellists themselves emphasised the peril they were in, given the unseaworthiness of the vessel they were on, how overcrowded it was, the shortage of supplies, and the rifeness of disease onboard. They remembered the joy and relief they felt upon sighting the Wellpark, and a mixture of gratitude and amazement that they survived. Graham McQueen, for his part, conveyed the desperation he had witnessed during the rescue, including the volume of children sent over on the first lifeboat.

The story of their arrival in Britain, and being temporarily billeted at a barracks in Kensington and Chelsea, was recounted in part through news recordings from the time, with a particular focus on the children attending a tea party held by the comedian Frankie Howerd; it also contextualised their arrival within the broader dispersal of boatpeople from Vietnam, and political wrangling as to who would take how many. The former refugees remembered the shock of the cold weather, but also the pleasure of finally having a relatively nice place to eat and sleep. Graham McQueen spoke about visiting them afterwards at the barracks and his pleasure at seeing them doing so well, as well as his own satisfaction in having helped people in dire need.

Further archive news clips also captured the racism the refugees faced against a backdrop of economic problems and the rise of the National Front, and how the dispersal policy, intended to prevent racism, instead led to them experiencing feelings of isolation. Diep Quan and James Huynh spoke of their experiences of racism at school and in public, although both also stressed the even greater challenge facing their parents’ generation in adapting to the different language and culture, and in finding work. Philip Huynh and Dao Nguyen meanwhile discussed rebuilding their careers in medicine, but also the way they had come to feel at home in Britain, with Nguyen crying upon recalling the act of kindness by a registrar at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where she was attending medical school, who gave her £10 in a card as a Christmas present.

Asked, given the present controversy over asylum and immigration, about the responsibility of countries to host refugees, the former boatpeople expressed differing opinions: Philip Huynh expressed sympathy, but said hosting refugees was costly and should be limited to cases of genuine need, whereas James Huynh countered that there should be no restrictions at all, emphasising how he now paid into the system that he had once benefited from. Diep Quan stressed her sense of a strong bond with the people who rescued them, and with the other passengers in their shared quest for a freedom unavailable to them in Vietnam. Both Dao Nguyen and Philip Huynh also expressed their gratitude to the Wellpark’s crew, while Graham McQueen affirmed his own lasting sense of connection with the people he helped rescue.

Narratives of escape and resettlement

There are several useful parallels and comparisons to highlight between these two episodes of The Reunion, and that on ‘Ugandan Asians’. All three followed an overarching narrative structure of an increasingly persecutory totalitarian regime, a harrowing escape, and the challenge of resettling in an unfamiliar new home in Britain, followed by a gradual process of acclimatisation. This was underpinned by its usage of contemporary BBC news coverage and excerpted interviews and the underlying structure provided by MacGregor’s questions, as well as the panellists’ relative commonality of experience. Nonetheless, there were specificities to each episode, shaped by the history being related and the cohort represented. Episodes also illustrated differences in individual experiences shaped by factors such as variations in age or places of settlement. Moreover, panellists at times interpreted the meanings of their experiences in different ways, often with political connotations.

The broader narratives these episodes carried were ones in which popular racism was present in both archival clips and the interviewees’ recollections, albeit historically contextualised, and coexistent with acts of kindness and bonds of lasting affection. Panellists’ accounts of settling in Britain and the challenges involved centred on the traumas not just of racism but also negotiating their identities and coming to terms with loss, in a manner that was often intergenerational in nature. For the most part, however, they expressed their general sense of gratitude to Britain for offering them a haven, in contrast to the regimes they had fled from.

On one level, then, The Reunion represents a liberal democratic, pluralistic, educative form of programming, in keeping with the agenda of a broadcaster that is state-funded but (to a degree) operationally autonomous. In presenting the histories of refugees coming to Britain, it offered members of those cohorts of refugees the opportunity to individually and collectively narrate that story, endorsing their authority and authenticity in doing so. These were not narratives shorn of racism against refugees either, and indeed the existence of racism was highlighted in the contextual passages of archival recordings, with MacGregor as host directly questioning the panellists about it. Guests also had opportunities – again, sometimes arising from MacGregor’s questioning – to make the case for the British government and public to be more open to and supportive of refugees, and migrants more generally.

Yet The Reunion as a programme set distinct parameters to this dialogue. Choices were made as to which instances of refugees coming to Britain would be the subject of episodes (in all three cases highlighted, the persecutory states in question were antagonists rather than allies of Britain); as to whom was invited onto the show to speak as a representative of those refugees; as to what periodisation would be employed in telling these stories (shaped by the usage of archival material and MacGregor’s line of questioning). The BBC lent their accounts legitimacy, as a public broadcaster with a proximity to the state, and yet also drew legitimacy for both as neutral and fair arbiters from precisely this kind of programming. A further underlying dynamic was the fact Radio 4’s audience remained disproportionately white, older, and middle-class at this time, which guests on the programmes were likely at least partly cognizant of, and perhaps inclined to self-censor accordingly.

The outcome was that these programmes, while containing opportunities for and instances of dissent, allowed for relatively sharp delineations between victims, perpetrators, and benefactors. Sanctuary for refugees was treated as primarily a question of benevolence or at most moral compulsion, and its recipients responded with gratitude as a default response (though again, not without ambivalence from at least some guests). As a result, the British state – though not always individual governments or politicians – served throughout as an essentially benign actor, distinct from the popular racism of its citizens. Its choice to admit refugees from Germany in the 1930s, and Uganda and Vietnam in the 1970s, was presented shorn of complicating factors in those stories about Britain’s own culpability for the humanitarian crises presented, whether through its existing racially restrictive immigration regimes, or its role in shaping the postcolonial conflicts that led to displacement.

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Content warning: Bereavement; Alcoholism; Transphobia and misgendering.

This is the final (long-delayed – mea culpa!) third part of a trilogy of posts on the American Samoan men’s team’s 31-0 defeat to Australia in Coffs Harbour in 2001, and the consequences of that defeat for Oceanian football and the discourse around it over the next decade. Part One reflected upon the build-up to the match, with coach Tuona Lui being forced by changes in eligibility rules to select a side of mostly uncapped teenagers; and the way the result was interpreted by both the American Samoans and in Australia, as well as internationally:

Part Two, meanwhile, examined the longer aftermath of the game from the Australian perspective. The damage results like this did to Oceanian football’s reputation, and accompanying lack of a direct qualification route from the continent, culminated in Football Federation Australia successfully applying to join the Asian Football Confederation instead in 2005:

This final post in the series completes the story by detailing how American Samoa eventually overcame the legacy of setting such an unwanted record, and escaped their position at the bottom of the FIFA rankings. In 2011, a decade after that humiliating defeat to Australia, they managed their first ever victory in international football with a 2-1 win over Tonga during the first-round group stage of qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup, under Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen.

Rongen’s time with the American Samoan team was subsequently the subject of the award-winning 2014 documentary Next Goal Wins, adapted for the 2023 Hollywood feature film of the same name. However, I want to focus here on the media narrative that developed around this match even prior to the documentary’s release, as the conclusion of a redemption arc narrative. It was a narrative with a particular set of heroes, most prominently the journeyman coach Rongen, veteran goalkeeper Nicky Salapu (who had been in goal during the 31-0 defeat to Australia), and young centre back Jaiyah Saelua, a faʻafafine and trans woman who broke ground for transgender representation in the sport.1

A legacy of humiliation

Absent subsequent encounters with the likes of Australia due to the modifications to qualification to keep the continent’s weakest and strongest sides from playing each other, American Samoa nonetheless continued to suffer heavy defeats to other Oceania Football Confederation members during the 2000s, albeit not quite of the scale of that nadir in Coffs Park. Their record in subsequent tournaments over the next decade was as follows:

• OFC Nations Cup qualifiers (2002): Played 4, lost 4. Scored 2, conceded 29.

• OFC Nations Cup first round (2004): Played 4, lost 4. Scored 1, conceded 34.2

• South Pacific Games (2007): Played 4, lost 4. Scored 1, conceded 38.3

• Pacific Games (2011): Played 5, lost 5. Scored 0, conceded 26.4

During that time, the team unsurprisingly remained close to or at the very bottom of the FIFA rankings, the worst or near-worst rated of the Federation’s 200 or so members. Football in the country was also badly affected by the 2009 Samoa earthquake and tsunami, which killed 189 people across Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga, and also destroyed recently built football facilities in American Samoa’s capital Pago Pago.

In the decade after the 31-0 defeat, American Samoa retained a presence in the global football imaginary principally as a punchline, a byword for footballing ineptitude or insignificance. Writing detrimentally for the Financial Times about the hosts’ prospects ahead of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, Simon Kuper remarked:

The Germans have dropped to 22^nd in football’s world rankings. This may seem disappointing for a country that has won three World Cups, whose football association claims to be the world’s largest sports body with 6.3m members. But again, looking on the bright side as Klinsmann always does, they still remain well ahead of American Samoa in 205^th place. And looking back a generation from now, when Germany’s collapsing birthrate will have left it almost without inhabitants, 22^nd will seem quite commendable.5

Later that same year, Jeff Powell, in an article for the Daily Mail that was otherwise positive about the right of smaller European national sides to play teams like England and Scotland despite the gulf in quality between them – both because ‘yesterday’s whipping boy can become tomorrow’s task master’ and ‘Football should not be the private preserve of the rich and powerful’ – nonetheless still included the aside: ‘Mercifully, England are unlikely ever to play American Samoa, against whom one Archie Thompson set an all-time high of 13 goals in Australia’s World Cup record victory of 31-0.’6

British interest in American Samoan football was briefly piqued again a year later, when Mancunian David Brand oversaw the team’s unsuccessful 2007 South Pacific Games campaign. Simon Bird profiled Brand for the Daily Mirror, again using American Samoa as a device for placing England’s travails into perspective, in language that carried heavy echoes of British imperialism in the region. He described Brand as ‘a footballing missionary’, who was bringing football to, in Brand’s own words, ‘a volcanic rock in the Pacific Ocean’. Bird noted that the coach had only forty available players to select a squad from, was personally responsible for ensuring the team’s kits were washed, and that the island had only just opened its first set of proper pitches. Brand also jokingly compared his and then England coach Steve McLaren’s lots, remarking: ‘While England will be put up in a great hotel, my lads are sleeping in bunk beds in a school classroom in 32C heat and being eaten by mosquitoes.’7

In 2008, The Guardian followed up with Brand’s predecessor – and at this point Football Federation American Samoa’s development officer – Tuona Lui about his experience of being in charge for the Australia game seven years earlier. While Lui and his peers in American Samoan football had been publicly upbeat in the aftermath of that defeat, on this occasion he was more open about what he felt was Australia purposefully humiliating his makeshift team: ‘I couldn’t see any reason why they wanted to score that many goals.’ He also spoke about his discomfort with the wider scrutiny brought about by the result:

There was a lot of attention after the game. The media came to our hotel, we were all interviewed. I didn’t enjoy that at all. We just wanted to get on with our job. People still talk to me about that game now but the past is the past. We need to move forward.8

Victory at long last

Under the newly amended structure of qualifying for the 2014 World Cup, the four lowest ranked sides in the OFC would play each other in a single round-robin tournament held in Samoa in November 2011. These teams were Samoa themselves, Tonga, Cook Islands, and American Samoa. The side that topped this group would then qualify for the eight-team OFC Nations Cup. The four teams that qualified for the semi-finals from the group stage of the Nations Cup would, separate from those matches and the final, play each other home and away in another round-robin group. The winner of this third qualifying stage would reach another dreaded inter-confederation playoff, this time against the fourth-placed from the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football qualification tournament.

All of this was a distant prospect for the American Samoan team as they embarked to neighbouring Samoa. They did so under the tutelage of recently appointed coach Thomas Rongen. Born in Amsterdam, Rongen played for local club Amsterdamsche FC during the 1970s, before moving to the US at the end of the decade. While continuing to play football, he transitioned to a career in coaching at high school and then college level (with a brief stint in the short-lived American Soccer League in between), before then taking the helm at several clubs in the newly established Major League Soccer from the mid-1990s. He spent most of the 2000s coaching the US men’s Under-20s across two spells, but when the side failed to qualify for 2011 Under-20 World Cup, the United States Soccer Federation decided not to renew his contract. Instead, Rongen accepted a short-term stint in one of the US’s overseas territories, training the American Samoa team for three weeks ahead of the qualifying round.

They kicked off the OFC World Cup qualifying process with their opening match against Tonga at the National Soccer Stadium in Apia at 3:00pm on Tuesday, 22 November, in front of just 150 people (the crowd would quadruple in size for host Samoa’s match with the Cook Islands that evening). American Samoa took the lead just before half-time when New Zealand-based striker Ramin Ott, who had featured for the national side since 2004, hit a shot from distance that Tongan goalkeeper Kaneti Felela misjudged and spilt into the net. In the 74^th minute, teenage forward Shalom Luani – who had only made his full debut in that summer’s Pacific Cup, and would subsequently switch codes to play American Football at college and then National Football League level – ran onto a pass and lobbed the onrushing Felela for a second. Tonga’s Unaloto Feao headed past Nicky Salapu for a late goal back, but American Samoa clung on for their first ever win in a FIFA-sanctioned international.

Given American Samoa’s long-held status as the world’s worst team, the result captured international attention. Reporting on the game made much of the length of the team’s barren run, and the contrast between the drama of the moment and the lowliness of the setting for it. An Associated Press piece carried by the Canadian Press opened in exemplary fashion:

American Samoa’s players raised their arms and fell to the ground, as if they had won a major championship.

It was only a 2-1 victory over Tonga in the start of Oceania World Cup qualifying Tuesday night, but for soccer’s worst national team it was a triumph like no other.9

Writing for The Times, Sophie Tedmanson struck a similar note, remarking: ‘The Pacific island nation celebrated as if they had won the World Cup, even though they had only beaten the neighbouring island of Tonga by one goal in the start of the Oceania regional qualifying rounds.’10 These reports routinely mentioned by way of context the duration of American Samoa’s wait for a victory after 30 straight defeats, their lengthy status as FIFA’s bottom-ranked side, and the ignominious 31-0 defeat to Australia a decade earlier. The emotional significance of the match was encapsulated by a quote from Rongen, carried by a number of reports, that ‘This is going to be part of soccer history, like the 31-0 against Australia was part of history’.11

That evening, Samoa beat Cook Islands 3-2 with an injury-time goal. Two days later, American Samoa would make it two consecutive matches without defeat with a 1-1 draw with Cook Islands, Shalom Luani scoring again in the first half, before their opponents levelled in the second with an own goal by Tala Luvu. Samoa’s ensuing 1-1 draw with Tonga, the hosts conceding a late equaliser this time, left the two neighbours level on points and goal difference at the top of the group, albeit with Samoa ahead on goals scored.

On 26 November, after Tonga had beat Cook Islands 2-1, Samoa and American Samoa played the group decider in front of 800 fans. A tight game was ultimately decided by a Silao Malo goal for Samoa in the 89^th minute, taking the hosts through to the OFC Nations Cup and the next round of qualifying, at American Samoa’s expense. Despite that disappointment, their performances in Apia earned them a great deal of credit, including OFC General Secretary Tai Nicholas nominating them the following month for a FIFA Fair Play Award, on account of the spirit in which they always played the game despite their long prior losing record and unenviable reputation.12

Thomas Rongen and a European perspective on American Samoa

Among the American Samoan squad and coaching team, international news media picked three people in particular to elevate above the rest of this cast of characters as encapsulating the moment. The first of these was Rongen, whose own journeyman background, quotability, and status as European-American insider/outsider figure within the American Samoan setup made him an ideal interlocutor for their campaign from the perspective of the Global North’s press. Much was made of the fact he apparently had no idea where the country was when the FFAS approached the USSF about his services. He was cast in the vein of a white saviour figure, the coach whose very Europeanness and accompanying professionalism was taken as inherently contrasting with but capable of transforming the ineptitude and amateurism of his new charges.

In a piece for the Observer on the team and the documentary then in production about them, for example, Rob Bagchi remarked: ‘Within a week of the arrival of the ‘Palagi’ – the Samoan word for white off-islanders which translates literally as ‘cloud-burster’ – the improvements in organisation and discipline were extraordinary.’13 Rongen himself had previously been quoted as stating ‘When I got here, I had never seen a lower standard of international football.’14 He subsequently explained how, while ‘steeped in the Dutch football tradition’ and committed to a ‘technical brand of football’, he had adopted more cautious tactics with American Samoa to address the glut of goals they had been conceding. ‘It’s easier to teach inexperienced players how to defend than to attack but we’ve made great strides in organisation and communication.’ Yet he also insisted that the psychological transition the players had had to make was the greater challenge:

Even in training games they lacked confidence. We’ve had meditation, yoga sessions, trying to instil in them that they have to live in the now not the past, a process of continuous positive reinforcement. There’s a traditional hierarchy, too, which is a delicate matter. I have tried to break through a cultural barrier so they can solve problems without looking to me, their elder on the sidelines and asking: ‘Coach, what do we have to do?’15

Yet Rongen was also vocal in his admiration for the players’ commitment, which he saw as capturing something of the sport at its purest:

They’re not getting anything to be here and some are spending time away from their jobs and are losing money because of that.

It’s amateur football at its best. The game at the highest level can be very cynical, but this is just about 23 guys making sacrifices.16

He explicitly drew out the romantic identification between small state nation sides and the European grassroots game, which had underpinned many of the more sympathetic earlier media accounts of American Samoa’s football team, noting: ‘This reminds me of my roots in the Netherlands, when you played for love, not money. You don’t see much of that in football any more, so it’s very refreshing.’17

Moreover, Rongen portrayed himself as someone with an inclination towards the qualities American Samoa possessed as a type of place:

I live in Florida and own some property in the Bahamas, so I’m an island kind of guy. I looked at a map and said to my wife, ‘Hey, it’s an island. Do you want to do it?’ She said, ‘Let’s go’. So we headed down.18

What he found there, he stressed, was something both distinct from his own heritage and nature and yet therefore all the more transformative and improving of him too. This was especially the case given his own personal traumas – his stepdaughter Nicole having been killed in a car crash aged 19 seven years earlier – and the strenuous and disenchanted nature of Western life (and of coaching as a career within that):

Back home in DC I’d blast to work past the Pentagon, thinking I’d got to lead my team into battle because if I didn’t I would lose my job. Here there is a methodical, pure, slow way and I have slowed down and thought about my daughter a lot more than I have recently. It’s reconnected me with the things that are important in life. I am an atheist but the religion and culture here are so strong it’s like a spiritual experience. I don’t believe in God. But there is a connection I feel, something special.19

Nicky Salapu and the passage from trauma to vindication

Of the players themselves, the one who most naturally embodied the sort of redemption arc media outlets presented was keeper Nicky Salapu, because it was he who had conceded those 31 goals against Australia. Rongen himself was quoted as saying of Salapu after the 2-1 win over Tonga:

This guy’s got major demons going on. He’s totally driven by the 31-0 score and erasing it for himself and his family. When he mentions American Samoa, people say, ‘You’re the guy that gave up 31 goals.’ There are incredible scars.20

The Irish Times made light-hearted reference to this in naming Salapu as ‘Star of the Week’ after his exploits, concluding:

Still, Salapu has an even bigger ambition: ‘For me personally, after that (31-0) experience, I really want to go back and play Australia one more time before I die.’ Nicky? Don’t do it.21

This effort to turn American Samoa’s win into a feel-good narrative about the underdog finally having it day, with fluffy human interest stories attached, meant partly eliding just how genuinely damaging an experience the defeat to Australia had been for Salapu. Rob Bagchi noted more candidly in his piece for The Observer:

He admits he found it difficult to cope with the shame and turned to drink for a while, but a friend’s gift of a PlayStation allowed him to undergo a unique form of self-diagnosed therapy. Sadly, American Samoa, the bottom-ranked team since 1998, are not one of the teams available on the FIFA series of games. He loaded a match between Samoa and Australia instead, left one controller idle and guided Samoa to a 50-0 victory which, he says, helped him get the real defeat out of his system.22

Salapu himself publicly remarked after the Tonga game ‘I feel like a champ right now. Finally I’m going to put the past behind me.’23 A few days later he was given a more extensive profile and interview by the New Zealand Herald, which again framed Salapu’s career as a perennial loser-turned-hero narrative, one of overcoming adversity through perseverance:

Imagine the worst day of your working life. Then imagine the whole world knowing about it and being reminded about it constantly over a decade. Nicky Salapu was the goalkeeper for American Samoa when they were beaten 31-0 by Australia in 2001, which remains the record defeat in international competition.

Salapu didn’t quit. He ignored the barbs and the constant jibes and kept on playing. In one of the feel good sporting stories of the year – move over Stephen Donald – Salapu has found redemption.24

Salapu himself reiterated the sense of shame he had carried with him, not least being repeatedly reminded about the Australia game whenever people learned that he played football for American Samoa, which he described as ‘frustrating and embarrassing’. He felt their performances in this qualifying round had established a clear distinction between the team thrashed that day and the American Samoan team now: ‘It makes me excited because the younger generation is going to look up and say I want to be a part of that team.’25

The story also dealt with a relatively underreported aspect of the American Samoan football side: that these were not players who had spent their lives on relative seclusion on the island, but often part of a substantial diaspora, based especially frequently in the US, yet retaining connections with and regularly returning to their country of origin. In Salapu’s case, the story of his international career and the early disappointment he strove to overcome was also one of emigration and repeated return. He had moved some eight years previously to Seattle, where he still played football several times a week ‘mainly for fun and to maintain my fitness’, yet continued to travel back to play for American Samoa’s national team when called upon. This time he would be able to go back to the US without bearing the burden of repeated defeats: ‘I’ll bury that over here and go back to Seattle and everything will be perfect.’26

Jaiyah Saelua as faʻafafine star

The other American Samoa player to capture media attention was some eight years Salapu’s junior and had in fact been coached by him as a youth. Jaiyah Saelua, previously named Johnny, is faʻafafine: though born male-presenting, she had from childhood identified as and was raised as a girl. Her presence in the side was treated as something of an additional curiosity to go with the unlikelihood of American Samoa’s long-awaited victory, being described in various outlets as the first appearance of a transgender athlete in World Cup football.27 Several articles carried Rongen’s own quote about the player: ‘I’ve really got a female starting at centre back. Can you imagine that in England or Spain?’28 Again, the coach served here as interlocutor to the exoticism of American Samoan culture and football, to emphasise its distinctness from its European counterparts.

Mostly, this interest in Saelua was fairly shallow, rather than treating her as especially ground-breaking or more widely significant. Sophie Tedmanson, writing for The Times, referred to the player as Johnny ‘Jayieh’ Saelua, explaining: ‘He is considered to be a fa’afafine, a biological male with feminine traits, widely recognised in Polynesian culture as a third sex.’29 Kathy Marks remarked in the Independent: ‘Among the players savouring the unaccustomed taste of success was Johnny Saelua, a man who considers himself a woman, or rather a fa’afafine - a ‘third sex’ common in Polynesia.’30 This misgendering of Saelua, and accompanying location of her gender identity specifically within its local context, as well as at odds with biological reality, was a common undercurrent in this reporting.

The Sun, meanwhile, remarked of Saelua’s appearance: ‘An amazing story like a scene from cult movie classic The Crying Game is emerging from the farthest reaches of the international footballing world.’ Yet while also calling the player ‘a transgender’ and stating that in Western culture she would be called ‘a ladyboy’, the piece did also consistently refer to Saelua as ‘she’. It also pointed out that ‘Far from being a delicate winger, Jayieh ‘Johnny’ Saelua plays centre half’, and seemed to take pleasure in the possibility that her appearance in Apia would discomfort then FIFA President Sepp Blatter, ‘who has reactionary views on almost everything, and especially women in football’.31

Saelua herself was also widely quoted as asserting after the match: ‘The team accept me and we have that mutual respect. Which is great. It’s all part of the culture.’32 More in-depth pieces on the player and team gave her further scope to explain her position as a fa’afafine in American Samoa and in its football team, stressing the inclusivity of both. A piece by Michael Cockerill for Australia’s The Age quoted her as follows:

When I go out into the game, I put aside the fact that I’m a girl, or a boy, or whatever, and just concentrate on representing my country…

In my country, we’re very open-minded about transgender, we can do whatever we want, play whatever sport we want. There is no discrimination. I’ve played American football, but now I’m playing soccer, because people told me I was good at it. And now we’re making history. I’m so proud of the team, it’s very exciting.33

James Montague’s lengthier profile of Saelua for the New York Times featured a more extensive explanation of the fa’afafine’s status in the country, including interviewing Alex Su’a, head of the Samoa Fa’afafine Society, about their important role in Samoan society, separate to those of men and women, such as caring for elders. Saelua herself told Montague: ‘I just go out and play soccer as a soccer player…Not as transgender, not as a boy and not as a girl. Just as a soccer player.’ Yet she also implicitly acknowledged an element of jeopardy, that it was not a given that she be accepted, and that she appreciated that her teammates ‘don’t make me feel different because I am the way I am’. She was also cognisant that as a fa’afafine, she could serve as a possible role model beyond her own country:

I hope I can inspire people. Not only transgender but anybody who feels different in their society or community. If there’s something you love to do, go out and don’t let anybody stop you from chasing after your dreams.34

This ambiguity as to whether her gender identity did not matter, or in fact gave her a particular part to play, also surfaced in Rob Bagchi’s Observer article, which quoted her as saying:

I put aside whether I’m a girl or a boy and just concentrate on playing. I think I add a third dimension to the team, collect my energies and keep the team together, that’s my responsibility as the fa’afafine.35

The reported responses of others in the American Samoan camp to Saelua also illustrated this ambiguity and the possible fragility of her acceptance. Bagchi noted that her teammates called the player ‘sister’.36 Yet Salapu’s comments to Montague about his younger teammate suggested a slightly more live-and-let-live attitude, adopted self-consciously in response to wider prejudice:

He’s like a brother to us and he’s like a sister to us. In the Samoan way, lots of people are making jokes about [the fa’afafine]. It’s difficult for their situation. I let people do whatever they want. It’s their life. He’s part of our family right now.37

Meanwhile, the FFAS’s general secretary Tavita Taumua couched Saelua’s strengths as a player in masculinist terms, telling the Associated Press: ‘He’s been a member of the team for a number of years. Yes, he’s fa’afafine but he’s a man and he plays as a man.’38

From the vantage point of nearly a decade-and-a-half later, what is quite striking about the international coverage of Saelua at the time is that, while littered with ignorance and stereotypes, it lacked the ideological charge of present-day discourse around transgender sporting participation. Perhaps that owed much to the Samoan specificity of her gender identity, perhaps even more so to her playing in men’s rather than women’s football – that Taumua’s perception that ‘he’s fa’afafine but he’s a man and he plays as a man’ held wider purchase. Nonetheless, it is also a reminder of how much explicitly ideological work, beyond simply everyday prejudices, have gone into making trans-exclusionary positions normative in sports media and administration in that time, and that this was neither inevitable, nor now irreversible.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s regular ‘Research and Reflections’ series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

I recently wrote a piece on Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service, the updated version of Postman Pat – whose first series ran way back in 1981 – screened on CBeebies between 2008 and 2017. I got a lot of excited responses to it, which I’ll attribute to being part of a generation that grew up on that first series of Postman Pat, and then watched the SDS series with their kids (and liked it a whole lot less).

One of the things that struck me is how many of those responses centred on the matter of the programme’s theme tune, or rather, its closing theme. The opening theme tune is an only slightly (but significantly!) altered version of the original. Yet it is the entirely different closing song that now functions as an unwelcome earworm for beleaguered millennial parents.

This got me thinking about how alterations to the theme tunes and credit sequences in new versions of older children’s programmes demonstrate broader thematic changes between those original and later series, and their underlying accompanying ideological shifts. There are plenty of examples of this trend, but I wanted to focus on three in particular: Postman Pat; Fireman Sam; and Thomas & Friends. This is because these were three programmes that all were first made and aired in the 1980s, set in rural communities, depicted public services – the postal service, the fire brigade, and (talking) railway engines – and yes, very popular with one particular small boy born in North London midway through that decade.1

Postman Pat

The opening credits to the original series of Postman Pat simply featured Pat and Jess driving around Greendale in Pat’s van (with Pat getting out at one point to deliver letters). The theme was written by composer Bryan Daly and sung by Ken Barrie – who also narrated the programme and voiced all of its characters – accompanied primarily only by acoustic guitar. This simple folksiness matched Postman Pat’s rural setting.

Lyrically, the theme tune captured the familiarity of workday routine and rural community life, and Pat’s contentedness with his lot, both emphasised in the episodes themselves. It also invited the child viewer into this world as a potential recipient of the post, a ritual given an added degree of enchantment and drama by its being referenced in the bridge:

Postman Pat, Postman Pat
Postman Pat, and his black-and-white cat
Early in the morning
Just as day is dawning
He picks up all the postbags in his van

Postman Pat, Postman Pat
Postman Pat, and his black-and-white cat
All the birds are singing
And the day is just beginning
Pat feels he’s a really happy man

Everybody knows his bright red van
All his friends will smile as he waves to greet them
Maybe, you can never be sure…
There’ll be knock (knocking sound)
Ring (doorbell sound)
Letters through your door (heh-heh)

Postman Pat, Postman Pat
Postman Pat, and his black-and-white cat
All the birds are singing
And the day is just beginning
Pat feels he’s a really happy man
Pat feels he’s a really happy man
Pat feels he’s a really happy man

By the mid-2000s, that opening credit sequence had changed, beginning with an opening shot of Greendale from above and showing Pat actually interacting with other characters on his rounds. However, visually it followed essentially the same narrational logic of the original credits, while the theme music itself was unchanged.

Series 3 to 5, however, did feature a different closing theme and credits sequence. The original had simply shown Pat looking at a series of letters while Barrie performed a mostly wordless version of the theme tune. The new closing song, written by Simon Woodgate, sounded more contemporary in its production, its fuller sound rounded out with female backing vocals:

However, with an envelope in the background featuring the programme’s credits and lyrics concerned principally with what might be in Pat’s bag (a letter, a parcel, a postcard, or, of course, Jess the cat), it connoted little by the way of change in the idea as to what the postal service (or a job delivering the mail) was.

Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service’s opening credits drew upon the earlier motif of Pat doing his rounds, making deliveries to familiar faces. However, the sequence – set off with an early close-up of Pat’s gleaming SDS badge – now displayed the expanded geography of his world, incorporating not only the village of Greendale, but the nearby larger town of Pencaster too. It also showed off the broader array of transport he had for getting around it, including his motorcycle and helicopter, at one point parachuting parcels to the children below. Musically, it began with a new version of that famous theme tune, with synthesised strings instead of sparse acoustic guitar. There was one small but integral lyrical change on the song’s bridge, however, with it now being ‘parcels to’ rather than ‘letters through’ your door; a line visually accompanied by Pat completing a somersault to rescue a startled Jess.

This encapsulated the transformed idea of postal work as a public service at the heart of Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service compared to its predecessor. To quote my earlier piece:

Special Delivery Service, by contrast, reflected two major shifts that had occurred since the outset of the twenty-first century. Under New Labour (and subsequently the Coalition government), Britain’s postal services underwent a process of incremental privatisation and marketisation, including the differentiation of the ‘Royal Mail’ brand from the ‘Post Office’ one, and then the end of its monopoly on postal deliveries. SDS likewise functions as a distinguishing occupational identity for Pat, connecting him to the Pencaster mail centre, and involving far less interaction with Mrs Goggins and Greendale’s own Post Office. Secondly, with the rising advent of the internet, the volume of letters being handled by the postal services declined, in contrast to the increasing delivery of goods being ordered online, as highlighted in a 2008 government-commissioned review of the sector. Pat’s shift to standalone deliveries of big-ticket items with particular rationales behind them likewise reflected this change.

The closing credits sequence visually echoed earlier ones, a single shot focusing on Pat and Jess in front of Pat’s new larger van (and one of farmer Alf Thompson’s cows). Yet its new accompanying theme, again written by Simon Woodgate, reinforced the branded differentiation of these series from their predecessors, and the SDS from the older Royal Mail, whose logo does not adorn the sides of Pat’s newer vehicles.

Again, there is a far fuller, more contemporary sound to this tune, with synthesised strings and childlike shouted backing vocals. Lyrically, the self-consciously transformed idea of postal work evident in the programme is fully evoked:

Special Delivery Service
Pat’s on his way
Special Delivery Service (S-D-S!)
What’s it going to be today?

(Postman Pat, S-D-S
We all know that he’s the best!
Mission accomplished!)

Not only does this reinforce the idea of the SDS brand; it also reiterates that Pat is not simply an ordinary postman, but a superlative example of one, and that his work is not routine but bespoke, focused on a single high-profile delivery and its completion.

Fireman Sam

Fireman Sam (or Sam Tân, to give it its original Welsh-language title) was originally commissioned by Wales’s S4C, and produced by Weston-Super-Mare-based Bumper Films. The first series was broadcast in 1987, episodes appearing in Welsh on S4C and in English on BBC 1 shortly afterwards. Three further series appeared in 1988, 1990, and – after a brief hiatus – 1994.

The programme, shot using stop-motion animation, focused on Sam, a firefighter in the fictional Welsh village of Pontypandy, and his fellow firefighters Elvis Criddlington, Station Officer Steele, auxiliary Trevor Evans, and later, Penny Morris. They served a community including shopkeeper Dilys Price and her mischievous son Norman, Italian café owner Bella Lasagne, and Sam’s twin nephew and niece, Sarah and James.2

The opening credits sequence shows Sam waking up in the morning, showcasing a couple of the budding amateur inventor’s household gadgets, before he is picked up and taken to work in a fire engine by Elvis, with brief interactions with other community members along the way.

The famous theme tune is jaunty and up-beat, synthesisers accompanied by electric guitar, with Welsh singer Mal Pope joined by backing vocalists on the chorus. Whereas musically, the original Postman Pat theme sounded like it might have been recorded a decade earlier than it was, Fireman Sam’s was very much of its time, and also captured the spirit and rhythm of Sam’s more dramatic working life. Lyrically, however, there were many parallels. The original Welsh-language version translates as follows:

Another day has come
Sam as prompt as ever
Getting ready to go to work
Start out on his journey

Drive the red engine
Sam, Fireman Sam
Ring, ring the bell
Sam, Fireman Sam
Sam from Pontypandy
The hero of our little village

All waiting on the street
Sam comes every day at the same time
This is Sam, oh, there he is
“Good morning”, “Goodbye”, “Good morning”

Drive the red engine
Sam, Fireman Sam
Ring, ring the bell
Sam, Fireman Sam
Sam from Pontypandy
The hero of our little village

The English-language version (which Pope also sang), was as follows:

When he hears that fire-bell chime
Fireman Sam is there on time
Putting on his coat and hat
In less than seven seconds flat

He’s always on the scene
Fireman Sam
And his engine’s bright and clean
Fireman Sam
You cannot ignore
Sam is the hero next door

Driving down the busy streets
Greeting people that he meets
Someone could be in a jam
So, hurry, hurry, Fireman Sam

He’s always on the scene
Fireman Sam
And his engine’s bright and clean
Fireman Sam
You cannot ignore
Sam is the hero next door

The English language version is less place-specific, with a greater emphasis on the speed and excitement of his work. Yet they both root Sam’s heroism in his proximity to the viewer and, along with the scenes portrayed in the opening sequence, emphasised his familiarity with the community he serves.

In 2005, Fireman Sam returned on S4C and BBC. S4C had sold half of its stake to Gullane Entertainment – formerly the Britt Allcroft company, which originally brought Thomas & Friends to the screen (more anon) – which was itself subsequently bought by American conglomerate HiT! Entertainment. This fifth series introduced an updated version of the original stop-motion style, and was animated by Siriol, a longstanding producer of animated programming for S4C that was now a subsidiary of the British media conglomerate Entertainment Rights. It featured a handful of new characters, including Australian rescue pilot Tom Thomas, and interracial couple Mike and Helen Flood and their daughter Mandy, a continuation of the show’s tendency towards portraying diversity in rural Wales.

The series also introduced a new set of opening credits, over a montage sequence mainly comprising action shots of Sam and his colleagues (and the local brigade’s vehicles) performing an assortment of rescues.

These were accompanied with an updated version of the theme tune, featuring a rockier instrumental and vocals, and different lyrics. In English, these were as follows:

When he hears that fire alarm,
Sam is always cool and calm
If you’re stuck, give him a shout
He’ll be there to help you out

So move aside and make way
For Fireman Sam
‘Cause he’s gonna save the day
Fireman Sam
‘Cause he’s brave to the core
Sam is the hero next door

If there’s trouble, he’ll be there
Underground or in the air
Fireman Sam and all the crew
They’ll be there to rescue you

So move aside and make way
For Fireman Sam
‘Cause he’s gonna save the day
Fireman Sam
‘Cause he’s brave to the core
Sam is the hero next door

The Welsh-language version translated roughly as follows:

Another call, away with Sam
In his red engine like a flame
Driving through the area to save everyone
From the house, or down from the roof

Look, here he comes
Sam, Fireman Sam
Because the goal is to help everyone,
Sam, Fireman Sam
There is no one like you,
The hero of our little village

It doesn’t matter where you are
In a black pit, or up high
Sam and his crew will come racing
They are sure to get you out

Look, here he comes
Sam, Fireman Sam
Because the goal is to help everyone,
Sam, Fireman Sam
There is no one like you,
The hero of our little village

These different lyrics (and the new opening credits) implied a shift to a different type of heroism: more all-action, more out of the ordinary, less emphasis on his reciprocal relationship with the village community (whereas Bella provided him with his wrapped lunch in the original version, now she blew kisses after him).

S4C subsequently sold its remaining 50% share to HiT!, and would thereafter be produced in CGI rather than stop-motion, with ten more series having been made since 2008. In the UK, these episodes have been shown firstly on pay TV channel Cartoonito, and terrestrially on ITV’s Fluffy Club programme, and then, since 2012, on Channel 5’s Milkshake set of programming for children.

As the programme entered the fully digital realm, so its characters became increasingly exaggerated into their characteristics: Elvis from mildly clumsy to nearly completely incompetent; Norman from a bit of a tearaway to budding pyromaniac.3 As for Sam, he became really, really buff. Pontypandy was turned into a coastal town (allowing for maritime as well as land-based adventures), and new characters were subsequently introduced in keeping with these geographical changes, such as Sam’s fisherman brother, Charlie.4 Aided by CGI, the fires and other disasters got bigger, and characters began responding to them by saying things like ‘I’ll call Fireman Sam’ specifically, rather in keeping with his transition from an everyday firefighter to some sort of quasi-superhero.

The opening credits sequence got shorter, comprising a digitised equivalent to the kinds of scenes shot using stop-motion for Series 5. Through until Series 13, it also used a truncated version of the same theme, comprising only the first verse and chorus. Sam kicking a door of a burning building open on the ‘Cause he’s brave to the core’ line neatly captured his character’s transformation.

Reflecting the widening remit of emergencies he and his (expanded) coterie of colleagues deal with, since Series 14 (in 2022) onwards Fireman Sam’s opening credits and accompanying theme have instead foregrounded ‘The Rescue Team’.

When they hear that fire alarm,
The Rescue Team stays cool and calm.
If you’re stuck, give them a shout
They’ll be there to help you out

Fireman Sam is on the way
With the Rescue Team
Sam is gonna save the day
With the Rescue Team
‘Cause they’re brave to the core
They are the heroes next door

This balancing of Sam’s protagonist status with a broader cast of characters performing a wider range of rescue is an interesting shift in the programme’s dynamic, between the logic of the hyper-heroic individual and of the all-encompassing corporate entity. If they now seem like a Welsh human equivalent of the Paw Patrol, that perhaps is an unsurprising by-product of the show’s marketing to a more global audience, making the institutional specificities of representing an individual rescue service as it operates in Wales or the UK more generally less relevant.

Thomas & Friends

Of the three franchises, Thomas & Friends is the one that dates back the furthest, having its origins in the Railway Series of books, the first 26 volumes of which were written by the Rev. W. Awdry from 1945 to 1972 (his son Christopher Awdry would later take up the mantle, writing a further 17 between 1983 and 2011). These stories, set in what would become the fictional Island of Sodor, depicted a world of (almost all-male) talking engines, and combined the Reverend’s railway enthusiasm with a Christian ethics centred on the importance of hard work, humility, and obedience, and a narrative structure focused around pride, fall, penitence, and redemption. Those often translated into quite conservative politics around questions of gender, labour, and modernisation.5

Thomas himself was something of a first among equals in this fictional universe, being numbered quite literally ‘1’ on the side of his cab. He did not appear in the first book, The Three Railway Engines (1945), but was the central protagonist of the second and forth, Thomas the Tank Engine (1946) and Tank Engine Thomas Again (1949). He was a significant, if only sometimes central, character in subsequent books as the range of engines and indeed railways operating on Sodor was broadened. Yet his relatively early appearance in the book series and his childlike cheekiness made him an obvious point of identification for young readers of and listeners to the stories.

There were several failed attempts to adapt the Railway Series for television from the 1950s onwards, before producer Britt Allcroft successfully purchased the television rights in the early 1980s. She worked with British animated productions firm Clearwater Features and Central Independent Television to make the first two series of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, mainly using real model trains, narrated by ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, and screened on ITV between 1984 and 1986. The first series was based almost entirely on first eight Railway Series books; the second mostly on subsequent volumes written by Wilbert Awdry that focused on the original railway (along with a handful of newer ones written by Christopher Awdry). This served to restrict the cast of engines involved, only slightly expanded in the second series; Thomas was often the main character in these episodes, but also did not feature much in others.

The wordless theme song, written by Mike O’Donnell and Junior Campbell, was performed on synthesisers but imitated a combination of piano keys with sounds like puffs and whistles. On the opening credits, it accompanied a sequence of shots of Thomas making his way across Sodor’s railway, emphasising his centrality to the show’s concept, even if the ‘Friends’ were more prominent in the ensuing episode.

There were also a broad range of other pieces of incidental music that accompanied other engines and were intended to encapsulate aspects of their character, such as Daisy, the ‘highly sprung’ diesel railcar whose disdainful laziness was communicated in part via a synth-heavy theme that is basically sexism in musical form.

A third series of Thomas & Friends, produced entirely by Britt Allcroft Company, appeared on VHS in 1991 and then was broadcast on ITV in 1992; the fourth similarly was released firstly to video in 1994 and 1995, before making its television debut instead on satellite channel Cartoon Network. The episodes, now narrated by Michael Angelis, were still more often than not based on stories from Wilbert Awdry’s Railway Series books, introducing a broader range of characters from them but also featured stories written by Andrew Brenner for the Tank Engine & Friends magazine and a handful of originals written by Allcroft and director David Mitton. This meant episodes capturing Wilbert Awdry’s concerns with issues, for example, of steam railway preservation, drawn straight from the 1960s, coexisted with ones addressing new issues such as environmentalism.6

From Series 5, which aired in 1998, no more of the stories were based on the original Railway Series, being comprised mostly of Allcroft and Mitton originals, with a broader team of writers contributing from Series 6 onwards. This also involved the introduction of new characters, including female ones such as tender engine Emily, who first appeared in Series 7 in 2003, somewhat redressing the heavy gender imbalance of Awdry’s original cast of engines. There were also changes in the programme’s broadcasting with episodes now being shown in the UK on Nick Jr, although they also would for the remainder of the 2000s also return to ITV as well. Behind the scenes, the aforementioned 2002 sale of Gullane (formerly Britt Allcroft Productions) to HiT! also meant the latter were now responsible for producing the show, renamed Thomas & Friends.

From Series 8 onwards, following the departures of O’Donnell and Campbell, a new theme was introduced: ‘Engine Roll Call’, composed by Ed Welch. Piano-led as compared to the synth-heavy original theme, it nonetheless had a steady rhythmical pace that captured the tempo of the trains in motion. An instrumental version played over the programme’s opening credits as Thomas once again made his way across Sodor’s railway.

Before the closing credits, which also featured the instrumental, a version of the theme with vocals (sung by a children’s choir) would play over a sing-along section showcasing all of the main engines at work.

The lyrics were played along the bottom of the screen, further emphasising the intended routinised participatory sing-a-long nature of the segment:

They’re two, they’re four, they’re six, they’re eight
Shunting trucks and hauling freight
Red and green and brown and blue
They’re the Really Useful crew
All with different roles to play
Round Tidmouth Sheds or far away
Down the hills and round the bends
Thomas and his friends

Thomas, he’s the cheeky one
James is vain, but lots of fun
Percy pulls the mail on time
Gordon thunders down the line
Emily really knows her stuff
Henry toots and huffs and puffs
Edward wants to help and share
Toby, well, let’s say, he’s square

They’re two, they’re four, they’re six, they’re eight
Shunting trucks and hauling freight
Red and green and brown and blue
They’re the Really Useful crew
All with different roles to play
Round Tidmouth Sheds or far away
Down the hills and round the bends
Thomas and his friends

‘Engine Roll Call’ thus captured the individuality of the different engines, with their particular recognisable characteristics and traits (note the emphasis on the only female engine mentioned, Emily’s, competence), and their diversity within a collective unit that echoed Wilbert Awdry’s original books’ mantra about proving themselves to be ‘Really Useful Engines’ (though with a slight change of emphasis that made their usefulness a given rather than a constant aspiration).

Further changes were afoot with a switch to partial usage of CGI from Series 12 in 2008, undertaken by HiT subsidiary HOT Animation; and then from Series 13, broadcast in 2010, the show would be fully digitally animated, firstly by Vancouver-based Nitrogen Studios, and subsequently Toronto-based Arc Productions (later renamed Jam Filled Productions). The private equity firm Apax, which had bought HiT! in 2005, would in turn sell it its roster of programmes (which, as mentioned, also included Fireman Sam) to the entertainment arm of American toy manufacturer Mattel in 2012. Like Fireman Sam, Thomas & Friends was now also a component of Channel 5’s Milkshake compendium of children’s programming for UK audiences (though the programme had long been broadcast internationally, with different narrators and in different languages).

The roster of engines continued to expand, allowing for a broader range of toy versions of the engines to be sold. Moreover, it also allowed for the introduction of engines from other countries, such as Hiro from Japan, Millie from France, and Victor from Cuba, illustrating a commitment to ethnic diversity as well as greater gender balance (and increasing the appeal of the programme and toys to overseas markets).

Despite the introduction of CGI, however, the visual logic of how the engines on Sodor operated still adhered broadly to that of earlier series when physical models were used, even as they had drifted away from Wilbert Awdry’s firmer grip on the actual workings of railways (which was itself peppered with a higher proportion of accidents and unusual incidents, albeit often drawn from real life examples, than would occur on a real railway). This is encapsulated by the digitised version of the ‘Engine Roll Call’ sequence, which to all intents and purposes is pretty similar to the model-based one:

A more substantial shift, albeit along lines already anticipated in earlier changes, occurred in the wake of the 2018 feature-length film, Thomas & Friends: Big World! Big Adventures!. In this, Thomas accompanied an Australian rally car named Ace to take part in a multicontinental race, and ends up (via several ocean-crossing ship journeys) travelling through Africa, the Americas, Asia, and finally back through Europe to Sodor, joined by a Kenyan female engine, named Nia.

The ensuing final three seasons of Thomas & Friends persisted with this theme. These now two-part episodes divided the action between Thomas’s adventures working on other railways in faraway countries (such as Australia, Brazil, China, and India) and his escapades alongside a more gender-balanced and ethnically diverse set of engines (some older characters like Edward and Henry having been discarded). The earlier third-person narration was now dropped, with Thomas instead directly addressing the audience during interspersed segments with introductions and reminiscences that reinforced the main stories’ moral takeaways. CGI was now used to give a more fantastical element to the stories, whether to capture the characters’ more ridiculous daydreams, or more physically unrealistic passages of action, like Thomas somehow doing jumps at the beginning of every episode.7

These transformations were encapsulated by a new opening credits sequence, in which Thomas travelled at high speed in an almost hyper-real fashion between multiple settings across the globe, before eventually passing through a more abstract and colourful series of shots to eventually be shown racing around the Earth flanked by several of his other engine friends. This was accompanied by a new equally fast-paced theme, with a much rockier vocal over a guitar-heavy instrumental.

The breakneck pace was also captured lyrically, through repeated use of the word ‘go’:

James, Percy, Nia, and Gordon,
Rebecca, and Emily,
And Thomas number one!

Let’s go, go, go
On a big world adventure
Let’s go, go, go
Explore with Thomas and his friends!
Let’s go, go, go
And meet new friendly faces
The world’s just a train ride away!

Big world
Big, big adventures!
Thomas & Friends
Big World! Big Adventures!

There are two other striking elements. Firstly, that accelerated pace underlines the promise of globalisation, which had heavily underpinned the programme’s development over the previous three decades. These new series evoked a connected world in which Thomas could sample adventures all over the world and back in Sodor, although his missing home and his friends and encountering difference while overseas was also a recurring theme. It’s a vision that feels remarkably pre-COVID (not least the stories set in China), and it is perhaps apt that the final episodes were first broadcast in 2020. The second is that that opening roll call echoed the cultivation of a far more representative cast of characters than had previously been the case, and yet leant even more towards giving Thomas ‘Number One’ himself pre-eminence, as a unifying presence between different settings and as the character who directly addresses the programme’s audience.

These episodes would still often conclude with sing-a-long song sequences along the lines of ‘Engine Roll Call’; indeed some with a slightly updated version of exactly that song. Others, however, bore out the newer spirit of these episodes, albeit with a gentler pace and more pensive lyrics than the opening theme. ‘The Journey Never Ends’, for example, continues the globetrotting theme but over a more sedate Afropop tune and with lyrics that emphasise specificity rather than dissolution of place.

We’ll go to China, Australia, Spain, Peru! (Yeah!)
Kenya, Mexico, the whole world through!
Check out the pandas, koalas, kangaroos
With Thomas and his friends
The journey never ends (Let’s go!)

‘Let’s Dream’, meanwhile, is an almost Disney-lite number, whose celebration of daydreaming – that foolish pastime which so often preceded engines getting a comeuppance in the Reverend Awdry’s original stories – accompanies a compilation of scenes from the engines’ flights of fancy in the episodes.

Let’s go, let’s dream
Come along with me
The big world is calling
All aboard for a fantasy
The world’s full of wonder
There’s so much we can be
Thanks to imagination and curiosity

We could be in a movie
Where we save the day
We could speed through the ocean
On the sun’s yellow rays
We could ride a roller coaster
And laugh all the way
Together we can
Do a million great things

This was not quite it for Thomas & Friends, however: Mattel launched a two-dimensional cartoon version, Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go, of which there have been four series since 2021. It continued the tendency towards being less representative of anything like real engines, and in which virtually all the characters are far more child-like, both trends neatly captured in the show’s opening credits and theme.

In contrast to the globalising tendency of the late 2010s series of Thomas & Friends, All Engines Go rather demonstrated a trend of wholesale Americanisation. Indeed, whereas the CGI episodes of Thomas & Friends continued to be conceived and written in the UK even as they were animated in Canada, All Engines Go is made entirely in North America.

Rolling the end credits

There are a few different trends comparable across the development of these three series that their changing musical accompaniments epitomised, which hopefully will have already become clear to the reader over the course of this piece:

1. The fairly concrete ideas of public services and their operational realities represented in those 1980s series of Postman Pat, Fireman Sam, and Thomas the Tank Engine had all but dissipated in the versions that aired in the 2010s and beyond. That hardly uncoincidentally occurred against a backdrop of widespread privatisation and a transformation of the brand identities of organisations undertaking those services (whether public or private). We can hear reverberations of these changes in the closing theme of Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service, or the evocation of the ‘Rescue Team’ in the latest version of the Fireman Sam opening theme.

2. There was likewise a drastic transformation in these programmes’ protagonists, from ordinary and representative figures to extraordinary ones undertaking remarkable forms of work. ‘We all know that [Pat’s] the best’; ‘Cause [Sam’s] brave to the core’; Thomas going from chuffing along his branch line to a steadily paced instrumental to speeding around the world while ‘Let’s go, go, go’ is sung in the background. Again, this is in keeping with the neoliberalisation of public services and an accompanying mutation in conceptualising what a public servant is.

3. The programmes continued to also champion ideas of community and working together, however, while also presenting community as increasingly diverse and greater parity of gender roles within the world of work, as evident from ‘Engine Roll Call’, for example. Yet, whereas ethnic diversity and women’s work was evident from the very beginning with Fireman Sam, in Thomas & Friends it rather turned some of the assumptions underpinning the original Railway Series on their heads.

4. There is obviously a tension between 2. and 3. The hero-collective relationship was clearly a live one from the very outset in the transformation of The Railway Series into Thomas & Friends. The hegemony of certain liberal politics in British children’s programming and the commercial logic of an expanded fictional universe with more episodes, more characters who can be turned into toys, favours the collective even as hyper-individuality is also accommodated. ‘James, Percy, Nia, and Gordon, Rebecca, and Emily, and Thomas number one!’ indeed.

5. Underpinning all of this is the neither even nor uniform process of globalisation that is integral to this story. These were programmes that were made by writers and institutions with inherently regional or national associations. The BBC. S4C. The Church of England. Central Independent Television. They created fictionalised but resonant rural localities in the Lake District, Wales, and the islands of the Irish Sea.

6. Greendale, Pontypandy, and Sodor remain integral to those fictional worlds, yet the geographies of production and broadcasting they rest upon have wholly shifted. Fireman Sam and Thomas & Friends originated with public and private broadcasting companies respectively, but both ended up owned by the British-American conglomerate HiT! by the 2000s, and American toy and entertainment manufacturer Mattel in the 2010s.

7. Postman Pat remained at the BBC, by contrast, but like the other two has also long been marketed to an international audience as well as a British one, being re-dubbed into multiple languages and broadcast across different countries (and of course, Sam Tân was bilingual from the very beginning). Concentration and marketisation carry a logic of homogenisation of programme content, and we can certainly see that in these shows; but equally, in these series’ conception, adaptation, and reception, logics of localisation and diversification are also at play.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s regular ‘Research and Reflections’ series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.

Content warning: Misogyny; Rape and sexual assault; Paedophilia; Antisemitism; Harassment; Eating disorders.

Spoiler alert: This piece explores themes of the film Beautiful Girls and its promotion, and as such reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

MO: Hey. Hey, was that Tracey?
WILLIE: Yep.
KEV: Is she hot?
WILLIE: She’s nice.
KEV: Ascribe a numerical value: face, body, personality.
WILLIE (scoffing): No, I’m not gonna do that.
KEV: Come on. Do it.
MO: Don’t be…Don’t be vile, guy–
KEV: (To Mo, interrupting him) Grow up, Mo. (To Willie) Do it.
MO (to Willie): You don’t have to.
WILLIE: Ahhhh, I don’t know, let’s see, uh, face...
MO: Hey, wait, wait. We need a frame of reference.
KEV (turning to Mo): I thought I was being vile guy?
MO: If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it proper.

This is a rather paradigmatic piece of dialogue from the 1996 film Beautiful Girls, which I previously wrote about as part of my piece on a short cycle of films about ten-year high school reunions made during the mid-to-late 1990s.

It is a film about a male group of friends – in the fictional town of Knights Ridge, Massachusetts – approaching thirty, reflecting upon their lives, and mostly floundering in their relationships with women, whom they alternately idealise, objectify, and mistreat. To recap my synopsis from that earlier piece:

…Beautiful Girls centred on the return of piano player Willie (Timothy Hutton) to his hometown for his tenth-anniversary high school reunion, at a point when he is at a crossroads in his career and in his personal life, being unsure as to whether to marry his long-term girlfriend Tracey (Annabeth Gish).

He finds one of his old schoolfriends, Mo (Noah Emmerich), happy in his life, being married with two children. Two others, Tommy (Matt Dillon) and Paul (Michael Rapaport), together running a snow-shovelling business (with a third former schoolfriend, easy-going Kev (Max Perlich), are discontented. Tommy, a former high school football star, is bitter about how his life had turned out since graduation. He is continuing an affair with married former high school girlfriend Darian (Lauren Holly), to the dismay of his current girlfriend, Sharon (Mira Sorvino). Paul, meanwhile, lives with Tommy, having become estranged from long-term girlfriend Jan (Martha Plimpton). It is hinted that Jan wants to have children, whereas Paul is in no rush to. Willie meanwhile also strikes up an unlikely friendship with his father’s 13-year-old neighbour, Marty (Natalie Portman), with whom he becomes increasingly infatuated.

The night of the reunion provides a pivotal moment when Tommy, who has decided not to attend, is instead badly beaten up by Darian’s husband Steve (Sam Rothbard) and his friends. The incident not only prompts Tommy to reflect upon his disappointments and to reconcile with Sharon, but also for Paul to successfully propose to Jan, and Willie to recommit to both his career and to Tracey.

I recently watched a series of short interviews that veteran Texan reporter and critic Bobbie Wygant – who died last year at the age of 97 – did with the film’s director Ted Demme, and cast members Dillon, Holly, Hutton, Portman, Rapaport, and Sorvino, for NBC’s regional KXAS-TV affiliate on 20^th January 1996, a month before the film opened in American cinemas. The discussions I think really captured some fascinating gender politics around the film, as well as around contemporary Hollywood actors and the way they publicly presented themselves in relation to their work. The dynamics are heightened by the interviewer being an older woman, who had herself broken ground as a female journalist working in television since the late 1940s.

From a present-day perspective, the interviews are also thrown into sharper relief by the fact Beautiful Girls was made by Miramax, whose co-founder Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a lengthy jail term for rape and other sexual offences. Weinstein’s long-rumoured exploitation of his position as one of Hollywood’s leading producers to repeatedly assault women in the industry were eventually extensively reported by the New York Times and New Yorker in 2017. Among over one hundred women to have accused him of harassment and or assault were Mira Sorvino and Lauren Holly. Sorvino’s reported encounter with Weinstein took place only a few months before the interview with Wygant. Holly’s occurred later in the decade.1

In this post, I want to reflect on three recurring features of the interviews: the construction of the masculinity of the film’s male characters and cast; of the femininity of its female characters and cast; and of the age-inappropriate relationship between Willie and Marty.

‘Is that pretty much the way men are?’

Wygant spoke warmly about Beautiful Girls, especially in her conversations with Demme and Dillon, telling the latter, ‘I think that you can look at all, everything that's going on, and find in almost every character something to identify with in your own life.’ Dillon agreed, commenting:

That’s what appealed to me about the script, actually, is that you can– these characters are so kind of universal, in a way, you know, you can be from a small town in the South or big town up in the East, or you can be- Well I, uh, it’s not maybe urbane, it wouldn’t be like a– but in a neighbourhood, it’s a sense of community, of a group of guys and friendship and camaraderie and that, in that sense it’s very universal. It’s a small picture with big themes.

Demme similarly described Beautiful Girls as ‘a very small movie, um, about a small town and really kind of regular joes’. This emphasis on the small town capturing something essential and ordinary and truthful came through as Demme discussed his initial reluctance to cast Michael Rapaport for his role despite the latter’s enthusiasm for the project. He confessed to Wygant that he had thought Rapaport ‘a little too urban’ for the part, and joked about only agreeing to have him in the film on the grounds of fining him five dollars ‘every time I hear ‘New York’ [said in an exaggerated imitation of Rapaport’s accent]’. Given that Rapaport is Jewish and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (Demme and Dillon both hailed from smaller settlements within New York state), the comment carried slightly ethnic as well as geographical connotations as to what comprised authenticity.

As Demme’s and Dillon’s responses indicated, their notion of authenticity was also integrally connected to masculinity, something Wygant teased out in her questions. She asked Dillon, for example, ‘Do you have a group of guys you hang out with?’, to which he responded that he did have friends from high school ‘not unlike the characters in the film’. He expanded upon this by characterising both sets of relationships as a healthy example of male bonding:

WYGANT: And do you talk about the same things they talk about in the film, you know, who’s going with whom, and what’s happening and, you know, that kind of thing?

DILLON: Yeah and we, we talk about each other too, like what is, it– you know, we laugh, we joke around, I mean we joke around, the friends that I grew up with – my character isn’t like the funny character in the film, really, in this film – but the guys I grew up with, that’s all we do. We laugh, and we joke around, and we also talk about things. I mean, I have some friends, man, we talk about– we get into such deep stuff, you know, too, we can get really deep with each other and that’s important, you know, that’s what’s important, and I think hopefully that can come off a little bit in this film, is that these guys need each other. It’s not just that they’re hanging around just to kill time, but that there’s a real need to have the consistency of friendship, you know.

Yet Wygant also put Demme and Rapaport visibly less at ease when she shifted the conversation towards differences and relationships between men and women, which were so integral to the film and yet which rubbed uncomfortably against the claims, highlighted above, as to the universality and wholesomeness of the male characters’ experiences.

WYGANT: It seems to me that, uh, a group of guys, this is kind of the way they would be and– see, as women we never know how men really are when they’re just behind the curtain, the boys– we don’t, we don’t ever get to know that, right but, uh– is that pretty much the way men are?

DEMME (hesitantly and somewhat embarrassedly): At least the guys that I know, you know, I mean– and we never get to go behind your curtain either, you know, so it’s not like it’s a one-way street, you know.

Wygant was here in fact referencing a line by Paul to Willie in the film:

You never let them behind the curtain, Will. You never let them see the little old man behind the curtain working the levers of the great and powerful Oz. They are all sisters, Willie... they aren’t allowed back there...they mustn’t see.

Continuing with his rather defensive and halting answer, Demme stressed the collaborative nature of his approach to filmmaking. In working with male and female actors, and actively engaging them in the development of the film’s script, he explained, ‘…they’re going to bring realism to it; it’s not like a guy’s writing a script for a girl, which happens all the time usually…’

Rapaport, meanwhile, had stressed how he ‘identified’ with the character of Paul; and yet recoiled somewhat when Wygant invited him to engage in the kind of behaviour Paul does in the film. She told him, ‘your character in Beautiful Girls is always, uh, rating girls from one to ten’ (This was not actually the case: as noted above, the particular line about this was from the character of Paul’s friend and co-worker, Kev). The line of questioning in any case left Rapaport visibly embarrassed:

WYGANT: …but who do you consider ‘a ten’?

RAPAPORT: I could consider all, all the females in this movie, I think, um, uh, Rosie O’Donnell [who played a comic role as Sharon’s outspoken feminist friend, Gina], Natalie Portman, Lauren Holly, Uma Thurman [who also had a relatively small role in the film as Andera, one friend’s visiting cousin whom all the other male characters become briefly besotted with], Mira Sorvino, those are all tens. Those– those girls are all, you know, special and um, uh, you know, all of them, you know, they’re all special girls, um, so, all those girls did– Martha Plimpton is a ten, you know, so I had a bunch of them around on the set for inspiration.

WYGANT: All right, aside from the women in the film, then tell me who is the ‘ten’.

RAPAPORT: Besi-, beside…and not including you?

WYGANT: Uh, oh, please don’t include me.

RAPAPORT: Um, who’s a ten, who- who’s a ten, who’s – it’s my mother, June Brody, is a ten, she’s a ten.

WYGANT: I can’t win with you, I can see.

RAPAPORT: Yeah, I mean, you know those, these are the ones, you know, who- who were– who, uh, who were– who were special to me.

Demme responded similarly when Wygant put the question to him, first citing his wife and mother, and the friends he had made through his wife, and then listing Holly, Thurman, Portman, and O’Donnell:

…no, I mean I’m not being diplomatic, I mean, they all– I mean that’s why I cast them all, they’re all in their own way, they’re all tens, you know, it’s– it’s, you know, no one’s a ten across the board, you know, no one, thank God, but, um, you know they’re just– they’re…they’re all amazing women in this movie.

In this way, both Demme and Rapaport, asked by a significantly older female interviewer to participate in a mode of activity from the film, specifically objectifying and sexualising women, using a standardising mode of assessment, instead unconvincingly sought to portray it as celebratory of women and their qualities in all their variety. Wygant continued to ask Rapaport about another form of behaviour his character did engage in in the film:

WYGANT: Did you ever have pin up pictures in your room?

RAPAPORT: Um of– of models? Because I–

WYGANT: Any.

RAPAPORT: Yeah, well I had pin-up pictures of, like, you know…like sportspeople. I had pin-up pictures of Eddie Murphy, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be Ed, I wanted to be, you know, I’d pin up pictures of John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone, these are the people who I grew up, you know. Dr J and Larry Bird, these are people, you know…and then I would have like a few like uh, you know, from the Sports Illustrated, you know, swimsuit issue, I’d cut some of those pictures out and stuff like that, but I always like, you know, had the guys up there that I idolised, you know.

Rapaport thus sought to shift the portrayal of his own passage into young adulthood – he was one of the younger cast members, being only 25 at the time of the interview – away from parallels with Paul’s immature lechery and towards a more innocent aspiration to imitate male role models. He subsequently presented himself as moving wide-eyed between this adolescent boyishness and the healthy homosocial masculinity Dillon had also evoked in his interview:

Like, I remember one day, I was playing basketball with Tim Hutton, and I was like, I told him, I said, ‘I used to watch you when I was like, 15’, you know and, before I thought about acting, you know, and um, with Matt Dillon too, these are people that, you know, before I was, you know, interested in being in movies that I would just enjoy as a fan and, um…it was it was good to be in a movie with them and, you know– and I told Matt yesterday, I said, you know, just as a fan, not as a friend and not as a, you know, peer or anything, I said, ‘you’re so good in this movie’ and, you know…and I was proud of him, and I was happy for him, just as a fan, so…

A more uncomfortable parallel between Rapaport and his character, Paul, lay in the latter’s pestering of his ex, Jan, to eventually win her back – including aggressively proposing to her and at one point childishly dumping snow in her driveway. In real life, Rapaport would the following year be arrested for the aggravated harassment of his former girlfriend, the actor Lili Taylor; he subsequently pleaded guilty, with the judge issuing a protection order preventing him from contacting her.

‘She was everything in high school, wasn’t she?’

Wygant spoke to both Holly and Sorvino far less about the film as a whole, and much more specifically about the parts they played. In Holly’s case, Wygant identified the character of Darian as a particular type of woman, and wanted to know how far her passage from youth to adulthood resembled the actor’s own:

WYGANT: Congratulations to you on Beautiful Girls and your role in it, you play a very interesting woman, Darian.

HOLLY: Mmm-hmm.

WYGANT: She was everything in high school, wasn’t she…

HOLLY: Everything.

WYGANT: …beauty queen, cheerleader, I mean she was…

HOLLY (doing air quotes): ‘The Girl’.

WYGANT: The girl on campus, yes, and then she marries a guy and um, has a family and uh, but she’s still– there’s that high school sweetheart, she can’t get rid of him.

HOLLY: She can’t let go. I think he reminds her too much of her heyday, she wants to feel that, you know, a little bit, she likes being the queen. Like, I think she feels empowered, you know, by keeping Tommy on a string a little.

WYGANT: When you were in high school, were you Miss Everything?

HOLLY: No. Um, I– I certainly knew them, and all of that, but I was more kind of middle of the road. I mean, I was never homecoming queen or prom queen, or anything like that, and by the same token, you know, I wasn’t the wallflower or anything. I was– I had lots of friends and was involved in lots of things. I just wasn’t ‘The Girl’.

Both Wygant and Holly thus constructed girlhood and womanhood as inherently performative, in a manner parallel to that of acting in film, of there being certain defined roles available for them to play – a repertoire they could both identify with. This rather contrasted with Wygant’s affected display of mild incomprehension as to how men are.

Wygant interpreted Sorvino’s character, Sharon, as instead emblemising a particularly universal female experience, rather than a specific type of woman, with which the actor agreed, and expanded upon at length:

WYGANT: …This character is somebody that I think every woman maybe has had a touch of that in her life, don’t you think?

SORVINO: Oh, I think so, yes. I think it’s– it’s a sort of– the part that we don’t like to have happen, but it does, you know, that sort of a period where you’re really not being very good to yourself, you’re totally in love with somebody, it isn’t going right, you stick it out, you see, you think somehow it is going to change, you think, if you work hard enough, if you can just be better, they will love you back, it’s your fault, whatever and, you know, she doesn’t like herself, she doesn’t like her body image, she’s got an eating disorder, you know, and I think every woman has had a moment where they just hate the way God put them together and wishes that there was a different– a different pattern on the table, but- but the nice thing is– is that she starts realising that that mentality has to go, she has to start taking care of her own life and not put it in the hands of somebody else who at this point is not really able to give her any of the validation that she needs…she’s got to give it to herself, and whether or not he can come up with it is another story.

It is notable how sympathetically and deeply Holly and Sorvino here interpreted characters who, while both presented in Beautiful Girls as damaged, are not expanded upon in the film, their motives – beyond their respective pursuits of Tommy’s affection – not deeply explained, in the same way as the men’s in the film are. Sorvino subsequently praised the film in the interview, unprompted by Wygant, for the quality of the material it provided the cast to work with:

The great thing about Beautiful Girls is that I felt that when I read it, the dialogue just jumped up at me, and each of the individual characters really had strong personalities that we hadn’t seen before, and it was an ensemble that really wove together beautifully. So as a reader I said, this is a very good script, I’d be interested in doing this, even though it’s an ensemble, it doesn’t give you like the– the showy place to kind of do your thing and– but instead you kind of share it, it’s like a team, you know, so that’s– it was actually a great experience.

The rest of these interviews centred far more on the two actors’ careers and their intersections with their personal lives, and two particular men in those lives. Holly was at that time going out with Jim Carrey, whom she would later briefly marry. Wygant had previously interviewed both Holly and Carrey just two months earlier, when they were promoting the film Dumb and Dumber, in which they had both starred. Before this latest interview with Holly had formally commenced, Wygant whisperingly complimented her on her new blonde hairstyle, before asking her ‘Does Jim like it?’; Holly smiled and answered in the affirmative.

Wygant subsequently described Holly as about the ‘busiest actress I know’, given the number of films she had been cast in recently. Holly modestly expressed mild incomprehension at the momentum her career had achieved, attributing much of it to Dumb and Dumber, and to Carrey:

It’s amazing what a movie that cracks 100 million at the box office will do, and people see you and then they give you opportunities, and then next thing I know, you know, I’m on magazine covers because of my boyfriend.

Wygant was only too eager to pick up on this mention of Carrey, firstly asking whether there would be a sequel to Dumb and Dumber, before enquiring as to how the two of them managed to find time to spend together given their hectic careers:

WYGANT: Yeah, I wonder that you two can ever see one another.

HOLLY: It’s– we definitely ah– that’s a whole job in itself. We make a little calendar about when we can see each other and try to work it out and– but it’s important, and you make that happen. It’s priority.

WYGANT: But at the same time it is difficult, isn’t it?

HOLLY (nodding): Very difficult, very difficult. We– it’s not a normal, probably, relationship…I mean, we don’t have dinner together every night or anything like that.

WYGANT: But then when you are together, it must be just so special.

HOLLY (nodding again): Definitely, and– and…I think that that makes it nice too, because you appreciate one another.

WYGANT: How many times a day are you on the phone to Jim Carrey?

HOLLY (laughing nervously): Um, it depends on the day. There have been days where it’s been twenty, and there have been days when it’s…just once.

WYGANT: And he– then when you’re not calling him, he’s calling you?

HOLLY: Yeah, we– we know how to reach each other.

WYGANT (laughing hard): Your cell phone bill must be…

HOLLY (laughing): Yeah, yeah.

WYGANT: …astronomical.

HOLLY: Probably, yeah

WYGANT: I hope you’re buying stock in those companies.

HOLLY: Yeah, that’s what I should– (pointing at Wygant) That’s a good idea!

Wygant began her interview with Sorvino with a similar tone of familiarity, referring back to an interview from the previous year:

WYGANT: We talked when Mighty Aphrodite was coming out, and you have had such a fantastic reaction to that performance, even talking about Oscar nominations, and so forth. How do you feel about Oscar nominations?

SORVINO: Ahhhh, there’s– I– I try not to think about it, you know, the…I– they don’t come out for another month, and I– I would never want to assume that I would get one; it’s very flattering that people have said stuff like that, but I just had to, kind of, put it out of my mind.

WYGANT: What’s interesting is that, ah, your father [actor Paul Sorvino] well could be nominated for– for his performance as Kissinger in Nixon.

SORVINO: That would be great.

WYGANT: Wouldn’t that be something if you both were?

SORVINO: That would be…pretty wild.

WYGANT: …the Sorvino hour, but anyway.2

The interview subsequently turned to Sorvino’s part in Beautiful Girls, and then, as with Holly, as to how busy she was. Wygant asked: ‘I would guess that maybe you have more scripts tossed at you now than at any previous time, right?’ Sorvino concurred, and expanded upon the challenges of identifying the right roles when she was receiving so many scripts and had little time to read them properly. She explained that she had honed her skill for recognising quality projects while working as a script-reader for a year after graduating. At that point Wygant interjected again to ask if her father ever asked her to read scripts for him; Sorvino politely laughed, and remarked, ‘No, I don’t have enough time to read over mine!’

Wygant was therefore eager to ask both Holly and Sorvino about their careers – indeed, more so than their male co-stars, with whom she focused more on Beautiful Girls itself – but in a particularly gendered way that centred on questions of workload, in Holly’s case on the question of work-life balance, and in both cases framed their careers in relation to high-profile male actors in their lives. (She did also ask Demme about his uncle, the director Jonathan Demme, and his influence on Ted’s development as a filmmaker).

Watching these interviews back made me think about the role of intergenerational relationships between women – even those who have forged or are forging successful careers – in unintentionally maintaining patriarchal structures within industries: in setting expectations as to how to women ought to think and talk about work and its place in their lives; in blurring lines between the professional and the personal; in situating their aspirations and achievements as dependent upon men in the sector.

It was therefore interesting to consider Wygant’s line of questioning of Holly and Sorvino in relation to interviews conducted with Wygant in 2016 by students at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, as part of the ‘Women with Words’ oral history project on women journalists in the Dallas-Fort Worth. In the first and second of these conversations, Wygant reflected on various aspects of working in journalism as a woman, emphasising the strains involved in working in such a demanding profession, and how fortunate it was for her marriage that she and her husband were both in television and had an appreciation of each other’s workloads. She espoused a certain gender-blindness, insisting on the meritocracy of recruitment and working practices in television journalism:

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever experienced any kind of harassment in your career from any male people, men, or any fellow women, or whatnot?

WYGANT: I don’t know if I know what you mean by harassment.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, you know, like if they told you this isn’t a job for a woman, or had they commented on your appearance or, you know, sexist things like saying that you shouldn’t be here because you’re a woman, and blah blah blah.

WYGANT: Oh, you know, probably there were things like that. You know when you’re in the public eye, I don’t care you who are, you’re going to get that fringe of society that isn’t going to like anybody or anything. So you just know that’s going to happen and there will be complaints about the way you look, and wear your hair, and why did you say this and why don’t you do that. You just can’t let that stuff penetrate. You just gotta let that stuff wash over you.

This paradoxical concern for the strains of a career in media on women and learned indifference to, though hardly ignorance of, sexism in the industry both echoed through her interviews with Holly, Sorvino, and the others.

‘Because some people are sitting out there suspicious of everything’

One of the key subplots in Beautiful Girls is Willie’s growing fascination with Marty, which he confides in Mo about; Mo is clearly slightly troubled by this revelation, though Willie insists on there being nothing ‘sexual’ to his feelings. Nonetheless, Willie is subsequently clearly himself slightly perturbed when he encounters Marty while she is skating, and she precociously states her own affection for him (the unease is further heightened by a shot of Mo, himself out skating with his children, looking over concernedly). Willie ultimately defuses the situation:

WILLIE: So, um...So what do we do?

MARTY: Alas, poor Romeo, we can’t do diddly. You’ll go to penitentiary; I’ll be the laughing stock of the Brownies. But if your feelings for me are true, you’ll wait.

WILLIE: Wait?

MARTY: Yep. Wait five years. I’ll be 18, and we can walk through this world together.

WILLIE: In five years, you won’t remember me.

MARTY: William.

WILLIE: I’m formed, and you’re not. You have changes to go through. You’ll change. And I’ll be Winnie The Pooh to your Christopher Robin.

MARTY: No literary reference left unturned. How do you figure Pooh?

WILLIE: Christopher Robin outgrew Pooh. That’s how it ended. He had Pooh when he was a child. When he matured, he didn’t need him any more.

MARTY: That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.

WILLIE: Yeah, but it’s true. You don’t realise it now, but you’ll be doing some changing. And...I can’t be a Pooh.

MARTY: I think I’ll skate away now, Pooh.

WILLIE: All right, Christopher.

Tracey subsequently joins Willie in Knights Ridge, and in an exchange through an upstairs window, Willie redons an air of maturity in letting a clearly disconsolate Marty (who is stowing her sleigh away below) down gently, telling her: ‘I hope we stay in touch. Cos I hope to learn someday about what you’re doing. Cos I think whatever it is, it’ll be amazing. I really do.’ In the film’s final scene, Willie bids her goodbye with a kiss on the cheek, and then a comic line is drawn under the matter when Paul asks Marty if she is ‘the little neighbourhood Lolita’, and Marty replies by asking him if he is ‘the alcoholic, high-school buddy shit-for-brains’.

Beautiful Girls needs to be understood within a broader culture of eroticising teenage girls in 1990s American film and popular culture more generally.3 Yet it is neither interested in actually titillating depictions of teen sexuality, nor especially in questions of child sexualisation, nor in the depravity of and abuses of power in age-inappropriate relationships. In short, it feels like a film slightly inured to the full significances of representing possible romance between a 29-year-old and a 13-year-old, using it primarily as a vehicle for exploring the former’s broader emotional dilemmas about adulthood, albeit while also hinting potentially at some of those more controversial tropes as a way of generating tension along the way.

Demme seemed slightly unnerved when Wygant asked him about his handling of the matter as director:

WYGANT: Casting, uh, Natalie Portman in this role, now, that could be a very delicate balance, that relationship between Natalie and Timothy Hutton…

DEMME: Absolutely.

WYGANT: Uh, was that, uh, a worrisome thing for you? Did you really watch everything very closely?

DEMME: Yeah, for me, probably yeah, in the back of my mind, but I knew how it ended so I always kind of knew, but you know what I wanted to do was for the viewer is maybe make it a little uncomfortable at one or two points and make uh, the viewer wonder ‘Boy, I wonder where they’re going with this, I hope they’re not going where I think they’re going,’ and hopefully we take them down the right path. I mean, stylistically, the thing I did in the film was– I always, uh, put something in between them in the film, when you go and see it for the second time – which I’m sure you’re gonna do, Bob – you know the second, you know– I always put like a fence between them, or a car between them, so they never got really close, they never touched until, uh, at the ice rink when she fell into his arms and got that great reaction from his friend, you know, and at the end when he gave her a kiss on the cheek, so I knew we were going to deal with it in a classy way.

WYGANT: Well, it– it certainly…there was never anything offensive about it to me, but I kept thinking, as the director, you had to be concerned…

DEMME: Sure, absolutely…

WYGANT: …because some people are sitting out there suspicious of everything.

DEMME: Well and guess what, there’s a lot of strange people out there that, you know, probably, you know, whatever (laughing), you know, like would be, yeah, be suspicious, and you know, whatever else awful thoughts came into their mind, but um, you know, I resp– you know, we respect Natalie and Tim, and you know those who, we know we have no problems with any– you know, we knew exactly where we were going with that character.

This rather suggests a desire to play at least lightly on expectations emerging from the wider cultural milieu I outlined above, while externalising any arousal by or disgust at those same implications as the possible product of warped minds within the audience. This despite Portman confirming to Wygant that Demme had encouraged her to audition for the role after seeing her in Léon: The Professional (1994), in which she had played an orphaned 12-year-old who strikes up a similarly ambiguous relationship with a middle-aged hitman who reluctantly takes her in.

Wygant enquired with Portman herself as to any parallels between herself and Marty’s character in the film:

WYGANT: Your character gets a crush on the next door neighbour, who is Timothy Hutton. You’re what now, 14?

PORTMAN: Yes.

WYGANT: …and in in your life now or before, have you ever had a crush on a much older man?

PORTMAN: Much older, no. Like older, yes, because girls, I mean, they mature faster than guys, so of course a younger girl and older guy are gonna have, you know, they’ll be– they’re growing up at the same rate, so, um, it kind of makes sense that, you know, the older guy, younger girl thing, but…um, I’ve never been in love with like a 30-year-old guy like that, but, um, it’s definitely possible like, you know, because when a 30-year-old immature, and a 14-year-old mature– I mean, it just works out.

WYGANT: Balances out…

PORTMAN: Yes.

When Wygant followed up by asking her if there was anything about the role that might have made her ‘nervous as an actress’, assumedly hinting at the same possibly controversy she asked Demme somewhat more directly about, Portman was quickly dismissive:

Not at all, I mean, she’s really, she's like a normal person, she’s going through normal- normal things, and she’s real– she’s like, a real character, and there’s nothing like, you know, scary about it or– it’s just a really fun movie to go see, and there are great people in it, and I got to work with a really great group of people, and it was so much fun.

At the same time, however, Portman was pushing back against her sexualisation as a child actor. She told Kristine McKenna in an interview for the Los Angeles Times the following month that she had gotten director Luc Bessson to remove planned scenes from Léon that she was uncomfortable with, including those featuring nudity; and had also turned down Adrian Lyne’s offer to cast her in his 1997 film adaptation of Lolita on similar grounds. In adulthood, Portman was more openly critical of the series of roles she had been cast in during the 1990s (and the sometimes lewd responses they drew), telling The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2007:

…there’s a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one.

She added:

…it was definitely interesting to think about – why men write the female characters they do. Just like the way they write the male character. How much is wish-fulfilment fantasy, and why.

Wygant presented the relationship between Willie and Marty much more neutrally in her questioning of Hutton, with the possibly problematic elements of it not touched upon by interviewer or interviewee:

WYGANT: I think one of the most interesting things about the film is the relationship between your character and this young girl next door played by Natalie Portman…

HUTTON: Yuh-huh.

WYGANT: …because this kid is like what, 13 going on 30, I mean, she is so bright, the character, as well as Natalie herself, but I found that so interesting that this kid ultimately is the one who kind of gets your life straightened out.

HUTTON: Yeah that’s what I loved about the script, that this complete stranger, uh, this 13-year-old girl who lives next door to the house he grew up in, um, has this amazing ability to, uh, get him to get to the truth of what’s going on in his life. She will not let him get away with anything, you know, falsely represent his life in any way and she says the most truthful– the most penetrating things to him and– and he takes notice and he becomes completely fascinated by her, becomes almost a child to her parental kind of wisdom, it’s- it’s- it’s an amazing relationship.

The framing of Willie’s relationship with Marty in both Portman’s and Hutton’s interviews with Wygant reiterated the logic of the film: that men and women are inherently different, that for the former growing up is especially hard, and that they need a bit of time to reconcile themselves with settling down with the right one of the latter. This even meant that a girl’s adolescent crush could serve to provide a series of teachable moments for a grown man, however much Willie in the film, and Dutton and Wygant beyond it, put that teenage character on a pedestal – the sort of narrative and casting exploitation Portman herself so astutely pointed a finger at around a decade later.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Writing in July 2019 for OnLondon – the website established by former Guardian commentator Dave Hill to cover the capital’s news, politics, and culture – freelance writer and local government consultant Richard Brown reflected on the fraught legacy of the ceremony that opened the city’s 2012 Olympic Games, in a Britain that had subsequently narrowly voted to leave the EU in 2016.

Seven years later, the lavish performance is still memorable, a very modern celebration of patriotism and pride, unity and diversity. But its meaning is now freighted with awareness of what followed, of the divisions that were triggered or laid bare by Brexit. We re-watch it through our fingers, like the opening scenes of a film where unsuspecting teens arrive for a party at a beautiful, isolated, cabin in the woods.

As Brown put it, the ceremony simultaneously resonated with different people ‘as a symbol of what we are losing, as a reminder of what we could be, or simply as a powerful piece of propaganda for a national unity that was always illusory’. This summary rather neatly captured the broadly tripartite composition of retrospective Olympic discourse in the late 2010s, albeit that occasionally exhibited greater nuance and ambiguity in the margins between the categories. There were those in liberal centre who looked nostalgically back on London 2012 as a high point of British multiculturalism, tolerance, and confidence. They saw this spirit as having been subsequently betrayed by an isolationist, divisive, dishonest, and xenophobic campaign to leave the EU.

Then there were those on the right who harked back to the Olympics far less, but when they did tended to see Brexit as a continuation of that project. This was epitomised by the connecting figure of the maverick Conservative politician Boris Johnson, who as then Mayor of London had been a high profile, comical ambassador for the city during the 2012 Games, but after his subsequent return to Parliament in 2015 had backed leaving the EU. On the more radical wing of the left, meanwhile, Olympic nostalgia was an object of mockery: though generally not pro-Brexit, they were contemptuous of the idea that Britain had been a much better, more inclusive place in 2012, given the country’s long history of colonialism and racism, and the damaging programme of austerity that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government had been implementing since coming to power in 2010.

This piece will explore how these arguments about the meanings of the 2012 Olympics unfolded in the interregnum between the 2016 referendum and Britain eventually leaving the EU at the start of 2020. The Conservatives under Theresa May fatefully underestimated the Labour opposition, under the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, calling a general election in 2017 at which they lost their slim majority, leaving May’s minority government and badly divided party struggling to agree on acceptable terms of departure from the EU. Yet Labour were simultaneously also divided over both Corbyn’s leadership and whether to push for a softer departure or for a second referendum. The impasse finally ended with Johnson’s succession of May as Prime Minister in 2019, a subsequent landslide victory over Labour that brought an end to Corbyn’s leadership of the party, and ensured the necessary parliamentary majority to implement his own version of Brexit.

Liberal Olympic nostalgias

In July 2017, former Labour Party spin doctor and ardent Remainer Alistair Campbell wrote a piece entitled ‘How did Brexit Britain lose the spirit of the 2012 Olympics?’ for The New European, the pro-European newspaper founded in the wake of the Referendum result, and which had recently appointed him editor-at-large. Campbell began by reflecting longingly on the the London Games as ‘such a wonderful time to be alive, to be British’, emphasising the sense of optimism and positivity that had marked the occasion. He celebrated the role of New Labour in successfully bidding for the Olympics, but also the way its planning and delivery persisted successfully after the Coalition came to power in 2010, a ‘sense of unity’ typified by the continued role of former Labour Olympics minister Tessa Jowell in the project. Campbell also enthused about the regenerated environs of the Olympic Park, claiming he ‘struggled even to recall what had been there – or perhaps not been there might be more accurate’.

Campbell contrasted the ‘Soft Power’ of London 2012, the vision it had presented of ‘a country that was modern, vibrant, dynamic, outward-looking, multicultural, confident, welcoming, successful, united’, with the present moment, in which its global reputation was the very antithesis of these qualities. He placed the blame for this primarily at the feet of now Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, whose ‘unique mix of wit, bonhomie and manicured buffoonery’ had charmed so many during the Games. ‘The Olympics made Johnson the force that he became,’ Campbell lamented. ‘And it is in large part the force that he became that delivered Brexit.’ He counterposed Johnson’s Olympic legacy with those of Jowell and Sebastian Coe, the former middle-distance runner and Conservative MP who had chaired London 2012’s organising body: ‘Yours is to have helped take the Olympic spirit, the mood of London 2012, and create a Britain which represents the very opposite of all the good that they did.’

This article was a relatively early paradigm of the way the Olympics and Brexit would be set in opposition with each other in liberal discourse over the coming years, with similar talking points reverberating through subsequent interviews and commentary. Interviewing dancer Akram Khan, who had choreographed part of the Olympic opening ceremony, for the Guardian in 2018, Sarah Crompton asked him how the mood at that time compared with the present. Khan replied:

It’s amazing going from London 2012, which celebrated our sense of embracing each other and embracing the difference in each other, to being in 2019, where we are hurtling towards post-Brexit. Everything that Brexit stands for is the opposite of what the message of the London Olympics was. It is our most pessimistic time now. A terrifying time.

During the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Tessa Jowell predicted in an interview with Tom Peck for the Independent: ‘If, in 2020, we’re looking back at a Team GB that has not performed at the level that it did Rio or in London then it will be fair to say that Brexit was one of the reasons’ – although the more concrete factor she presented as contributing to such a prospective decline was government cuts to grassroots sports investment. Campbell’s warnings about the damage leaving the EU would do to Britain on the world stage, meanwhile, were echoed by British Influence chairman Peter Wilding, who had himself originally coined the term ‘Brexit’. In a 2018 opinion piece for Sky News, he described the shock he experienced at the Referendum result, given what had preceded it:

Britain, over the last 30 years, had a Lazarus-like return from the 1970s deadzone. A golden age where, militarily, politically, culturally and economically, an old country had renewed itself culminating in the ultimate accolade of smart power – the 2012 Olympics.

Olympic optimism after the Referendum

James Heartfield, the academic and former Revolutionary Communist Party member turned Brexit Party candidate (a fairly common trajectory), unsurprisingly took a rather different view. Writing for Spiked in 2019, he mocked ‘Centrist dads like Hugh Bonneville and James O’Brien’ for tweeting melancholically about Britain’s decline from the high watermark of the Olympics. Instead, Heartfield stressed just how negative much of the commentary about the forthcoming Games had been prior to their beginning, including by some commentators who were now vocal critics of Brexit, which he deemed illustrative of the ‘deeper connection between Brexit and the Olympics’:

…both are popular expressions of national pride, and so both sent the liberal middle classes into a fit. Sulking Remainers and Olympian miserabilists are cut from the same cloth. Their abiding prejudice is that whatever is popular is wicked.

Heartfield’s narrative rather elided the very different ideological positions of the different public figures he grouped together as the ‘liberal middle classes’. Other voices, however, while shying away from polarising rhetoric, also framed the Olympics as a cause for potential optimism about the future, rather than remorse about a recent past lost. Polly McKenzie, who had served as director of policy to Nick Clegg during his time as Deputy Prime Minister and was now head of the cross-party think tank Demos, argued in an opinion piece for UnHerd that the Olympics offered a model for overcoming the ‘new kind of identity politics, which exists on the Left and the Right’. Writing a week after Johnson’s 2019 election victory, she held up the opening ceremony as an example of a more consensual form of national identity that could overcome and even embrace Britain’s contradictions:

Yes, it was a bit sentimental. But a national story needs a good dose of sentiment. And that opening ceremony…contained everything you’d want in a vision of modern Britain. Creativity. Optimism. Technological aspiration. It was unafraid of embracing diversity yet relaxed about being distinctly British, rooted in our unique land and unique history. It revelled in the absurd counterpoint between our two favourite national symbols: the feudalism of our monarchy and the socialism of our NHS. And it was full of ironic humour, surely the most vital pillar of what it might mean (or should mean) to be British.

The next great Prime Minister, McKenzie concluded, ‘will be the one who finds a way to bridge that divide, and a way to make us all feel as welcome under that single flag — just as our Olympic team did, parading into that Stratford stadium in 2012’. Sarah Healey, the Director General of the Department for Exiting the EU who had previously served at the Department for Culture Media and Sport, also saw the Olympics as providing a policy model, telling Civil Service World that it offered a prior example of a large-scale project that involved multiple departments undertaking clearly delegated tasks.

What Alistair Campbell had seen as a paradox, that the Olympics had also burnished Boris Johnson’s reputation and thus paved the way to Brexit, provided for others a straightforward way of connecting the two events through the former Mayor and future Prime Minister’s personage. Johnson was an active participant in this, telling Tim Shipman in an interview for the Sunday Times that ‘Cupid’s darts will fly once we get Brexit done. Romance will bloom across the whole nation’, just as with the ‘big baby boom’ he claimed to have correctly prophesised would occur after London 2012 – though no such boom had taken place. The Financial Times’s Sebastian Payne, himself a future prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate, highlighted the Games as an example of the way Johnson had ‘focused on selling London to the world’ during his tenure as Mayor, concentrating on laying out a strategic vision and allowing others to get to grips with the detail – an approach Payne anticipated would continue at 10 Downing Street.

One fierce Eurosceptic who took a very different position was Lance Forman, owner of the longstanding East London salmon smokehouse H. Forman & Son, which had been evicted from its premises during the Olympic regeneration project. Forman was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party in 2019, and identified Brexit not with the Olympics, but with the local opposition to it, telling the Hackney Citizen:

Back then, all the major political parties, the media, international sporting bodies sponsored by multinational corporates, colluded against the little guys and small businesses in East London, forcing them from their livelihoods to make way for their gains. I see a similar pattern today with Brexit – a fierce rearguard attempt to shut out the rest of us.

There were other indicators of the urban change wrought by London 2012 fuelling right-wing sentiments. Residents of Havering, on the outskirts of East London interviewed by the MyLondon website, blamed the Olympics for a wave of migration from more diverse inner-lying districts that they claimed had fuelled the strong 2016 Leave vote in the borough.

Ridiculing Olympic melancholia

For many on the left, meanwhile, yearning for 2012 as some sort of lost golden age seemed positively cringeworthy. Prior to electoral defeat in 2019, and especially after an unexpectedly strong showing in 2017, Corbyn’s leadership of Labour held the promise that the neoliberal hegemony of the past four decades, which the party had hitherto partly acquiesced in, might be supplanted by a more radically socialist paradigm. By contrast, for ardent Europhiles, Corbyn’s own lack of enthusiasm for the EU and passive acceptance of the result of the 2016 referendum were nothing short of a betrayal. This seeming monomania with remaining in the EU in turn came across to many of Corbyn’s supporters as emanating from a position of ideological woolliness and economic privilege, the collective tantrum of middle-class voters previously accustomed to governments protecting their interests and blissfully unaware of the inequality and racism blighting Britain prior to 2016.

With many formerly prominent Labour politicians critical of Corbyn from the backbenches, as well as his detractors on the broader centre-left in the media, being especially prone to Olympic nostalgia, this tendency came to serve for radical left commentators as a neat stand-in for the vacuity of centrism. Guardian columnist Dawn Foster neatly captured this line of argument in 2019:

Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems: the decline of industry and the public sector begun by Margaret Thatcher and continued by Tony Blair and David Cameron; vast inequality of opportunity, wealth and health; and the number of people being routinely ignored in a system with a huge democratic and electoral deficit.

The writer Dan Hancox had three years earlier outlined an account of the trajectory from the Olympics to Brexit in a piece for Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National, in which he corrected the idea that ‘back then, Britain had good patriotism – and now, somehow, it had bad patriotism’. Hancox acknowledged the positive aspects of the Games so beloved of liberals, such as the adoption of Mo Farah, a child migrant from Somalia, as a national hero, or the opening ceremony’s celebration of the Windrush generation, the NHS, and the suffragettes. Yet, he cautioned that this complacent notion ‘of an inclusive, multicultural patriotism’, underpinned by a reluctance to come to terms with Britain’s colonial legacy, masked the ‘toxic anti-immigration rhetoric’ simultaneously present in much of the media. This, combined with the detrimental effects of deindustrialisation, declining wages, and austerity politics, were what had made the Leave campaign’s promise to ‘Take back control’ so seductive.

Writing for the New Statesman in late 2019, Hetty O’Brien chastised that ‘the Olympics have become a centrist nostrum for a fractured political landscape, one that mistakes fleeting spectacle for meaningful politics’. She highlighted many of the contradictions the Games and its opening ceremony epitomised, such as spending £9 billion on them while slashing public spending elsewhere, or celebrating the Windrush Generation while introducing the ‘Hostile Environment’ for migrants that resulted in members of that same generation being deported. O’Brien also, in contrast with Alistair Campbell’s lionisation of the Olympic regeneration project, branded it emblematic of a broader tendency towards corporatisation and securitisation of public space. She concluded: ‘Far from bringing the country together, the London 2012 Olympics contained the seeds of an urban model that would draw its residents further apart.’ Paddy Bettington, who had been involved in staging the event as a production manager with FiveCurrents, had made many similar points to O’Brien’s in a piece for City Metric some nine months earlier. While proud of what he had been part of achieving, he warned:

…it is delusional to confuse that moment in time with a mode of politics that is somehow superior to the present day.

Olympic ceremonies are made with the unambiguous agenda of selling the host nation’s virtues to the rest of the world. To employ one as a reference point for reality is irrational.

Reclaiming Olympic radicalism

Yet all these accounts at least partly missed the deeper radical heritage in which that particular ceremony was steeped. It was written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the Liverpudlian screenwriter and author who had contributed regularly as a culture critic to the Real Communist Party’s magazine Living Marxism between 1989 and 1994, including appearing in the same issues as the aforementioned James Heartfield. He also wrote for popular soap operas like Coronation Street and Brookside, and along with several collaborations with filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, made the 2006 film Millions with director Danny Boyle, with whom he would subsequently work on the Olympic opening ceremony.

Less than a month after the 2016 Referendum, Cottrell-Boyce gave the annual Prom’s Lecture, previewed in a Guardian piece titled ‘What’s the point of culture in Brexit Britain?’. He was unabashed in celebrating the authenticity of what he and his colleagues had captured four years earlier:

The ceremony painted a portrait of a progressive, inclusive, innovative, funny nation stuffing an astonishing heritage into its backpack as it strode into a brilliant future.

No. It didn’t paint a portrait. Because at the heart of the show were thousands of volunteers – men and women, mostly not actors and dancers, who turned up to hours and hours of rehearsal, in a car park in Dagenham for no pay, and did it for Britain and for each other.

The ceremony didn’t depict a nation, it revealed it. It didn’t describe Britain, it WAS Britain – in the way that the Blitz spirit was or Dunkirk or The Last Night of the Proms.

He contrasted this apparent dawning of ‘a new era of social cohesion and national pride’ sharply with the divisiveness of the recent referendum. Yet unlike many others who held this polar distinction to be true, Cottrell-Boyce’s interpretation of the ceremony was more explicitly radical. In the first instance, he highlighted at length the debt the ceremony owed to the relatively obscure book Pandæmonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. This was a collection of excerpted responses to the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, capturing both the wonderment and misery wrought by technological advancement and the accompanying transformation of work. They were collated by the left-wing British documentary filmmaker and Mass Observation cofounder Humphrey Jennings, prior to his premature death in 1950, and eventually completed and published by his daughter Mary-Louise Jennings and former colleague Charles Madge in 1985.

Cottrell-Boyce recounted being lent a copy of Pandæmonium by another documentary filmmaker, Julien Temple, and subsequently purchasing a copy for Boyle, who subsequently drew on the book extensively for the initial section of the ceremony on the topic of the Industrial Revolution, also titled ‘Pandemonium’. Cottrell-Boyce explained the significance of how this intellectual lineage unfolded:

I’ve told this story because it seems to me a really clear, beautiful case study in how culture works, of how a cultural legacy is passed on. In particular I want to draw attention to the central role of generosity, kindness.

No one who had a copy of the book paid for the book. My Dad bought my copy. I bought Danny’s…it was a gift. And this is congruent with the nature of the ceremony. As I said, it was performed by volunteers who asked nothing in return except the joy of doing it. The impulse of delight.1

This voluntarist sentiment underpinned another aspect of Cottrell-Boyce’s argument, against the very utilitarian view of what culture was for: as a money-spinning industry, as a potential career path. He deemed this anathema to the ‘reckless generosity’ and wider culture of participation that actually made great art, or sport, or literature possible, but was in danger of disappearing:

Innovation comes from those who are happy to embark on a course of action without quite knowing where it will lead, without doing a feasibility study, without fear of failure or too much hope of reward…

…We are not fighting hard enough to protect that habitat - those playing fields, carnivals and libraries – because we’ve bought into the idea of culture as career, as something that can thrive just as well in a lesson or a soccer camp.

Cottrell-Boyce’s account of the ceremony and its significance, therefore, jarred somewhat with those centrist remembrances of the Olympics that pitted them as the zenith of a glorious era in British history, as an outward-looking nation in an age of globalisation, capable of converting its heritage into economic and political capital. Rather, it chimed with left-wing criticisms of precisely that transactional orthodoxy, lamenting the erosion of spaces of play free from commercial and competitive imperatives.

From the perspective of 2025, it does not feel that the parameters of debate shifted much after Brexit was finally seen through; the tenth anniversary of London 2012 prompted both positive and negative responses very much in line with the liberal-left divide explored above. What seems different is that many of those temporarily backbench Labour MPs who embodied the crudest stereotypes of Olympic nostalgia are now in government, but have largely abandoned any pretence of representing or seeking to revive the nation that they vocally yearned for after 2016. Indeed, in its public positioning and framing of policy at least, Labour seems keen to triangulate against leftists and liberals alike, to pine for days when its electoral base was more homogenously white and blue-collar, composed of the people who rejected both the EU and Corbynism.

This strategy of railing against the people more or less likely to vote for the party in one guise or another is unsurprisingly contributing to Labour polling badly in the low-to-mid 20s at time of writing. Cottrell-Boyce’s liberal-pleasing, left-rooted vision of Britain’s trajectory from past to present, at ease with growing diversity but wary of increasing marketisation, perhaps points to a more promising, unifying account of historical change for social democracy’s standard bearers to orient themselves within.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

In the previous post in this miniseries, I wrote about the Australian men’s association football team’s record 31-0 victory over American Samoa in 2001, a result that seemed to cause the victors more rancour than their badly defeated opponents.

Australian annoyance at the scale of victories they were racking up against other Oceanian teams – they had beaten Tonga 22-0 a few days before surpassing that precedent against American Samoa – owed to the damage it did to their credibility and prospects on the global stage. The best Australian footballers played for European clubs, who often resented those players travelling to the other side of the world during the season to feature in heavily one-sided wins. Nor did these matches do much to bolster soccer’s domestic popularity, given the fierce competition from other more nationally established sports like Australian rules football, rugby, and cricket. Only 3,000 people attended the win over American Samoa at the International Sports Stadium in Coffs Harbour.

Moreover, the weakness of Oceanian football had meant that despite the World Cup finals tournament’s expansion from 16 to 24 and then 32 teams, FIFA had refrained from granting a direct qualification route for teams from the continent. In qualifiers for the 1986, 1994, and 1998 World Cups, Australia had topped the Oceanian Football Confederation (OFC) qualifying competition, only to then lose out in inter-confederation play-offs against Scotland, Argentina, and Iran respectively. The same fate would eventually befall them again as they fell at the final hurdle of qualification for the 2002 World Cup, losing 3-1 on aggregate against Uruguay.

This post covers the implications that Australia’s heavy victories in qualifying for the 2002 had both for their standing in international football, and for that of Oceanian football more generally. It discusses the proposed and actual reforms to the OFC qualification system – including FIFA granting and then withdrawing a direct Oceanian qualifying place – which ultimately failed to satisfy Australian football’s administrators, and how that in turn led to Australia successfully applying to join the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in 2006.

Reforming Oceanian football qualification

In qualifying for 1998, Australia – along with the other three top-ranked sides in Oceania, New Zealand, Fiji, and Tahiti – had enjoyed a bye to the OFC second round, which followed a first round comprised of Polynesian and Melanesian groups. Qualifiers for 2002, by contrast, saw all ten Oceanian teams entered into two groups of five in the first round. Australia’s rout of Tonga immediately fuelled debate as to the wisdom of this format, but these were initially rebutted by the OFC’s Australian president, Basil Scarsella, who insisted that all of the OFC’s members had voted in favour of it. He stressed the value for the continent’s smaller teams in playing the likes of Australia, just as Australia themselves aspired to play the likes of Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. Scarsella also criticised Australia’s previous failure to do enough to support the sport’s development in its island neighbours, given the resources available to it.1

Australia’s subsequent result against American Samoa did little to dampen the debate though, and threatened to jeopardise the OFC’s ability to deal with the matter internally. FIFA’s media spokesperson Keith Cooper opined that pre-qualifiers would likely be reintroduced the next time around:

It’s quite clear that in none of the other five confederations, is the gap between the top and the bottom so large as it is in Oceania. It’s a question of time. The smaller ones will gradually catch up, but right now it’s not serving anybody any useful purpose…It doesn’t do the image of the game any good, really. It doesn’t do the winners any good, it certainly doesn’t do the losers any good. They don’t really learn anything and it should be a learning process.2

FIFA did nonetheless appear to be taking Oceanian football seriously. Having granted Oceania full confederation status at its 50^th Congress in 1996, it increased its direct annual funding to the OFC from $250,000 to $2.5 million. Additional financial support to individual members also enabled them to upgrade their facilities, and to attract more coaches from Australia and New Zealand.3 Moreover, with the 53^rd Congress taking place in Seoul 2002, and Sepp Blatter, beset by corruption allegations, seeking a second term as FIFA’s president over Confederation of African Football president Issa Hayatou, the prize of a direct qualification spot for Oceania appeared to be on the table. Ahead of Blatter’s scheduled appearance at a May 2002 OFC meeting in Tonga, Scarsella had vouched the confederation’s support for his re-election, given his previous advocacy for a direct Oceanian World Cup qualification route.4

Blatter comfortably defeated Hayatou, and Scarsella’s lobbying seemed to have paid off when a meeting of FIFA’s executive committee in Madrid in December 2002 voted to give an automatic berth at the 2006 World Cup to Oceania. This, and a new playoff spot for the fourth-placed team in the North and Central American and Caribbean qualifiers, came at the expense of South America, where the fifth-placed team in qualification could no longer qualify via a playoff, and Europe, who also lost a playoff spot. Scarsella insisted prior to the meeting on the legitimacy of Oceania’s claim: ‘This is a right, it’s not a handout. It’s not about the best 32 teams, it’s about having everybody represented.’5

Unsurprisingly, the prospective losers from this arrangement saw things differently. South American Football Confederation spokesperson Nestor Benitez, complained:

The tradition and history of the South Americans have been overlooked. What have Africa and Asia done in the history of football? This goes against fair play. It doesn’t respect our history and quality.6

In Britain, investigative sports journalist Andrew Jennings asserted in the Daily Mail that the outcome was a virtually guaranteed qualification spot for Australia, adding: ‘It may be only coincidence but most of the gains made this time have been by allies of FIFA president Sepp Blatter.’7

The OFC, meanwhile, was moving away from the internal maximalist participatory line Scarsella had espoused during the 2002 qualifiers. Of the now twelve Oceanian teams participating in qualification for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, Australia and New Zealand would be seeded. The other ten were sorted into two groups of five, with the top two in each of those groups joining the seeds in a second round group of six, and the winner of that second round group ostensibly qualifying directly for the World Cup finals.8

Oceania’s reluctant behemoth

Australia had long been somewhat unenthusiastically Oceanian when it came to football. The Australian Soccer Federation had co-founded the OFC with its New Zealand, Fijian, and Papua New Guinean counterparts in 1966 only after its bid to join the AFC had failed. It withdrew in 1972, with the aim of joining the AFC, only to re-join in 1978. In any case, there was a joint qualifying competition for Asian and Oceanian teams during this period, which Australia had topped to obtain the single place available to teams from both continents for the 1974 World Cup; this would remain their only appearance at a finals for the next three decades. Australian lukewarmness towards the OFC persisted even as the number of Oceanian teams regularly participating in qualification began to increase during the 1990s. In 1996, when the FIFA Congress voted 172-1 to recognise the OFC a fully fledged confederation, that sole dissenter was David Hill, then president of the renamed Soccer Australia.9

There continued to be clamour, both within and beyond Australia, for the country to join the AFC instead. A few days after the 31-0 game, British sportswriter Ian Ridley opined in the Observer: ‘The Aussies, who clearly have the potential to be a top-tier international footballing nation, deserve better than these current, ridiculous mismatches’. He argued that FIFA should reconsider letting Australia participate in the Asian qualifiers instead, and introduce a preliminary qualifying round in European qualification too, ‘as San Marino, Andorra and Liechtenstein are refusing to improve despite the easy money they are trousering from matches against the top nations.’10 Frank Farina also mooted the possibility of Australia entering the Asian qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup, albeit couching this less in terms of disrespect for Oceania’s smaller teams, but rather in frustration with the lack of a direct qualifying route for the continent:

We’re a bit like nomads. We are a confederation but we do not have a spot in the finals, we have half a spot. That in itself is a farce. Either give us a spot or integrate us. It’s not a matter of it being easier, it just makes a lot more sense.11

The prospect of a direct qualifying place therefore seemed to ease this source of tension, although the accusation that this was a still less than optimal outcome resonated with at least some in Australia. Former captain Johnny Warren, for example, described it as ‘lowering the bar when we should be lifting it’. He advocated instead for the wholesale integration of Oceanian teams into the AFC, arguing that the Australian team would be much more competitive for playing against sides like China and Saudi Arabia in front of large crowds.12

Warren would, inadvertently, partly get his wish. Australia’s failure to qualify for the World Cup, along with myriad concerns about governance at Soccer Australia, highlighted through an investigation by ABC, prompted Australian sports minister Rod Kemp to commission a review into the health of the game’s administration. The review panel, chaired by business director David Crawford and including Johnny Warren and Australian Sports Commission CEO Mark Peters, produced its report in 2003, recommending wholesale changes at Soccer Australia, including the instalment of an interim board led by the billionaire shopping centre developer Frank Lowy. Soccer Australia would subsequently be placed into liquidation, with Lowy establishing its successor body the Australia Soccer Association (later renamed Football Federation Australia).

This did little, however, to bolster Oceanian football’s reputation. Nor did New Zealand’s performance in the 2003 Confederations Cup in France, which they qualified for after defeating an understrength Australia in the 2002 OFC Nations’ Cup final. New Zealand subsequently lost all three Confederations Cup group games by an aggregate of eleven goals to one. These factors provided the official rationale for FIFA, just six months after granting the winner of the OFC qualifying group an automatic berth at the World Cup, to retract this promise – its executive committee voting 22-1 in favour of this decision.13 However, this reasoning was hotly contested by the interim administration at Soccer Australia, while coach Frank Farina described it as ‘a political decision…for the good of the superpowers, for the most powerful’. He complained:

What’s the point of having Oceania as a confederation. We may as well disband it now. They have no respect for this region or the people down here. They don’t want to develop the game in this region – they have not even told us what our path will be. They are not thinking about this region, so why have it. We might as well be put into the Asian group.14

Australia’s Asian pivot

David Hill was sceptical that this would come to pass. Writing for The Australian after FIFA’s about-face, he continued to insist on the unviability of Oceania as an independent football confederation, and the rectitude of his prior solitary vote against FIFA recognising it at such seven years previously:

I argued that Oceania was not big enough, or strong enough, and that we all needed the opportunity of playing a range of quality opponents in a larger international soccer family like Asia. It does nothing to help develop soccer in Pacific states – or Australia – for the Socceroos to play and win matches by the margin of 31-nil.

Yet he noted that Australia had unsuccessfully pursued this course for the past thirty years, including during his time as head of Soccer Australia, only to continually find AFC members unreceptive, a situation unlikely to improve given tensions with Asian countries over Australia’s record on issues like granting asylum and the War on Terror.

So where do we go from here? There seems little point in continuing with Oceania; its continued existence will only be used by FIFA as an excuse not to address our problems. And if we can’t open the door to Asia – or South America – perhaps we might look at Israel, who can no longer play in their own continent and have been included by FIFA to play their World Cup qualifiers in Europe. Now wouldn’t that be something.15

Hill’s pessimism about Asia proved unfounded. In March 2005, the AFC accepted in principle an Australian application to join, with its future membership of the confederation ratified by FIFA in June.16 Australian captain Craig Moore welcomed the development, asserting that Australia’s ‘world football standards’ and status as an economic power would ‘increase the image of Asian competition.’17 Both Sepp Blatter and AFC president Mohammed Bin Hammam felt the move would be beneficial all round, with Blatter commenting:

The Oceania delegates have thought for many years that Australia was too powerful and blocked the way of the other 11 countries. Now New Zealand, and the Pacific islands at least have a chance. They can go it alone. I am sure it will be a success.18

The International Herald Tribune’s longstanding sports columnist Rob Hughes put it less kindly that ‘In Oceania, the Australians are perennial kings in a pool that may cover the South Pacific but contains only smaller soccer fishes.’ He predicted that New Zealand’s aspiration of following Australia would make the AFC’s wholesale absorption of Oceania inevitable.19 In contrast to Blatter’s assertion, the New Zealand Soccer Association were rather put out that Australia had successfully pursued the option it was still mulling over. Its secretary Graham Seatter reflected bluntly:

We need to start playing the political influencing game. Australia have done it through resources where they can box in a different position to us. They’ve got a few billionaires on their board, which always helps when you’re dealing with FIFA.20

Hopes in Australia as to the positive impact of this move extended beyond football. Former diplomat Anthony Bubalo, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute – the right-leaning foreign policy think tank set up by one of the billionaires Seatter had referred to, Frank Lowy – told a forum arranged by the institute that Australia’s multiracial team regularly playing Asian opponents would help shift wider opinion on the continent, which continued to be shaped by memories of the ‘White Australia’ immigration policies in place for much of the twentieth century.

This is a chance for Australia to cut through to the grassroots in Asia and transact on a popular level in a way that’s never been done before. In Asia, we might not speak the same language but we all speak football.21

In the meantime, Australia’s final participation in Oceanian World Cup qualifiers would bear long-awaited fruit. They topped the second round group (which also doubled as the Oceania Nations Cup) ahead of the Solomon Islands, who unexpectedly pipped New Zealand for second place. The OFC had updated its format to include a two-legged playoff between first and second, in which Australia beat the Solomon Islands 11-1 on aggregate. This set up an inter-confederation qualification playoff in November 2005 against Uruguay, whom Australia had lost to in qualification for 2002. This time, however, after losing 1-0 away, Australia won 1-0 at home, before defeating the Uruguayans in a penalty shoot-out to make their first World Cup in over thirty years.

Despite being given a tough group at the finals in Germany, featuring future Asian rival Japan, defending champions Brazil, and Croatia (who had come third in 1998), Australia progressed in second place after winning, losing, and drawing against those three opponents respectively. They then faced eventual winners Italy in the second round, only losing 1-0 to a last-minute penalty.

After the tournament, Australian sportswriter David Lewis, writing in the Herald Sun, predicted an even bigger future for football in Australia, having ‘moved from being the bully boy of Oceania to the new kid on the block in Asia’, where they would get to play in higher-profile qualifying fixtures with much larger potential television audiences.22 By 2009, Australia had risen to 16^th in the FIFA world rankings; the Australian Associated Press responded by producing a list of sixteen reasons for this achievement, the seventh of which was:

No more rubbish opponents. American Samoa and Solomon Islands have been replaced by quality opposition and regular, meaningful matches. We have become better and more cohesive as a result.23

Australia reached the next four World Cups through the Asian route, but would find the going increasingly tough in doing so. Having made the 2010 World Cup by topping their qualifying group and 2014 by coming second, they only qualified for 2018 and 2022 after coming third in those groups, and narrowly winning playoffs against Syria and the United Arab Emirates respectively. These ironically set up the sort of inter-confederation playoffs that Australia joined the AFC partly to avoid. They beat Honduras 3-1 on aggregate to qualify for the 2018 tournament, and Peru on penalties after a 0-0 draw in a one-off tie to reach the 2022 World Cup. Of those four World Cups, they only again made the second round in 2022, once more losing narrowly to the eventual tournament winner, this time to Argentina, 2-1. At time of writing, Australia have not yet secured qualification for the expanded 2026 World Cup in Canada, Mexico, and the US, although with eight automatic Asian spots available, they are likely to eventually do so.

In a further irony, however, this expansion also means Oceania have now finally been granted that automatic berth they were promised over two decades ago – through which New Zealand have already qualified for the tournament.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

On 11 April 2001, the Australian men’s association football team hosted American Samoa at the International Sports Stadium in Coffs Harbour, for an Oceanian qualifying round game for the following year’s World Cup in Japan and South Korea. American Samoa’s Football Association (ASFA) had learned shortly before qualification began that most of their original squad of players were ineligible for selection due to not possessing American passports (having been born in neighbouring independent Samoa).

Coach Tuona Lui therefore had to field a hastily assembled team of mostly teenagers in the qualifying tournament, which was played entirely in Australia. They lost 13-0 to Fiji and 8-0 to Samoa in the first two games. Then came their match against an Australia team who had just two days earlier set the record for the biggest win in international football history, beating Tonga 22-0. Despite Australian coach Frank Farina heavily rotating his side, they easily surpassed that milestone, defeating American Samoa 31-0 – a record that still stands to this day – with forward Archie Thompson scoring 13 goals, another record.

The result captured international attention, with American Samoa, at the very bottom of the FIFA rankings, becoming the butt of many a sportswriter’s joke. They lost 5-0 to Tonga in the remaining game to finish last in the qualifying group. Australia came top (scoring 66 goals and conceding 0 across four games), comfortably beat New Zealand 6-1 on aggregate in the second round, but then lost 3-1 on aggregate in an inter-confederation playoff against Uruguay, who’d finished fifth in the South American qualifying group. Impatience with the shortage of meaningful competition in Oceanian football and the lack of a direct qualification route eventually led to Australia departing the Oceanian Football Confederation (OFC) for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in 2006.

As for American Samoa, the team would eventually complete a public redemption arc on 22 November 2011. Under the tutelage of Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen, they defeated Tonga 2-1 in Apia in the first round of Oceanian qualifying for the 2014 World Cup – their first-ever victory in a FIFA-recognised international fixture. Once again, the result captured international attention. A British documentary-making team covered American Samoa’s qualifying campaign (in which they narrowly failed to make the next round after a late defeat to Samoa) for the critically acclaimed Next Goal Wins (2014). Its subject matter was subsequently turned by New Zealand director Taika Waititi into a Hollywood film of the same name, released in 2023, with Michael Fassbender playing Rongen.

In the forthcoming miniseries of posts, I want to reflect on that trajectory between those two qualifying campaigns and landmark results, as it played out in contemporary global media coverage. During this time, a ruthless, inegalitarian account of the harsh realities of international football – which underpinned Australia’s eventual departure from the OFC – gave way to a more romantic, participatory narrative, as the underdog finally had its day.

The right to participate

ASFA applied unsuccessfully to the OFC to have their qualifiers postponed after the passport debacle, before eventually sending their makeshift team.1 Their arrival was so rushed that they had to purchase boots for the players once they arrived in Australia.2 Despite these difficulties, their first two inauspicious results, and the, for the most part, hardly good faith coverage of the team’s travails in the Australian press, Tuona Lui and his ASFA colleagues remained honest but equanimous about their task when interviewed. After their loss to Samoa, he insisted:

It is very hard for us, but it is also a great learning experience. This is our first World Cup series. We know how good Australia is, so all we can do is work hard, try our best and try to improve as a team. My players will not be frightened. They will go at it.3

Such sanguinity was seemingly underpinned by a broader sense of mission and realism, having only played their first FIFA-recognised international less than three years earlier. Given the strong American influence on its Pacific territories, and the potential lure of a sporting career in the US for young American Samoans, association football had previously struggled to achieve much of a foothold there. ASFA president Victor Stanley emphasised that it remained a ‘very young sport’ in the country, but that the association’s focus on youth was already bearing fruit, with 2,000 players now registered.

Maybe the World Cup has come a bit early for us, but we are going to Australia to learn. The long-term plan is to be a competitive team in the Oceania region, and we are sure we can achieve that.4

The American Samoans’ apparent serenity was also rooted in the deeply held Christian faith that the squad reportedly collectively expressed in the dressing room before and after games, and which Lui regularly gave voice to in interviews:

We are going to need some help from above. We will be asking that the Lord helps protect us and to keep us the score down. We thank him for his support because we don’t want Australia to set another world record.5

It was a resource that they were also able to draw upon in dealing with the aftermaths of heavy defeats. ‘God is the righteous one and because of him losing by so many goals does not matter,’ Lui insisted after the Australia game.6

The American Samoans remained publicly robustly positive in the face of the derision they faced thereafter, with team manager Tony Langkilde insisting ‘We are a member of FIFA and we have a right to play.’7 Just under a year later, American Samoa’s Panamanian technical manager Ismael Herrera conceded that the result had gotten to them: ‘We were frustrated, and sad, because the story went right around the world and it made us look bad.’ Yet he claimed that the severity of the defeat had perversely increased interest in the game in American Samoa, as well as encouraging American Samoan players based abroad to get in touch with the national team. Herrera insisted: ‘We are not giving up at all, and in three or four years’ time we will be competitive. I guarantee it. Because for the first time, the kids are being taught the right way.’8

Humiliation in victory

There was some sympathy for American Samoa prior to and after the game in the Australian media, given the asymmetry of the tie and the additional issues that had beset their preparations for the qualifiers. Australian journalist Michael Cockerill noted in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The question some may ask is: Why bother? But that is to presume football is only about results.’ He took seriously Lui’s and Stanley’s aspirations to use matches against stronger opponents as a learning curve.9

Yet such voices were rare amid the scorn and mockery. Patronising anecdotes about the American Samoan squad’s chaotic arrival were regurgitated in the Australian sporting press beforehand, while confusion over whether Australia had scored 31 or 32 goals, owing to a mistake on the scoreboard, was also the source of mirth. The coach’s and team’s religiosity became a further object of ridicule, a signifier of their backwardness and lack of professional preparation to participate in elite sport. Paul Millar remarked in the Australian Associated Press’s newsfeed: ‘While the Australians were working out who had scored the goals in the next room, the American Samoans were praying and singing hymns.’10

For the Australian team, the one-sided outcomes of fixtures like this brought a sense of frustration rather than accomplishment. Their biggest stars were European-based, and coaches like Glasgow Rangers’ Dick Advocaat and Coventry City’s Gordon Strachan were publicly disparaging about their players being unavailable to them while they played in highly uncompetitive qualifiers on the other side of the globe.11 While Frank Farina was dismissive of these complaints, he was also scathing in his criticism of a qualifying format that threw up ‘disgraceful and embarrassing’ one-sided games.12 His players echoed such sentiments, epitomised by Archie Thompson’s post-match remarks:

Breaking the world record is a dream come true for me – that sort of thing doesn’t come along every day. But you have to look at the teams we are playing and start asking questions. We don’t need to play these games.13

British contempt and sympathy

The response to the results in Britain confirmed their fears about such reputational damage, tapping into broader elitist sentiments in some quarters against the expansion of the international game, especially beyond its traditional European and South American strongholds. Writing for the Daily Star of Scotland, Ally Guthrie polemically queried:

Should a team, which arrived in Sydney without boots and jerseys, be permitted to compete? No! The [Scottish Premier League] wouldn’t let them anywhere near our top league. And the [Scottish Football Association] wouldn’t have them either. And you could safely wager your mortgage on the OVD Scottish Junior Cup finalists, Carnoustie Panmure and Renfrew, giving coach Tunoa Lui’s side a right tanking.14

Similarly, in his regular column for The People, Chelsea chairman Ken Bates lambasted FIFA for ‘allowing Australia to play Never-Never Land in play-off matches for World Cup rounds that shouldn’t exist,’ complaining bitterly that bottom-ranked American Samoa ‘have as much of a say in the running of the global game as England, Italy, France or Germany’.15

Yet the overall tone of British press coverage was more of amusement at American Samoa having unintentionally and briefly captured the global sporting media spotlight. The Times opined that ‘It’s not the winning that matters. It’s the losing.’ It urged American Samoa to ‘glory in their grand failure’, asserting that ‘if once they were a mere annotation in the footnotes of football, now they will go down in the annals for their trophy defeat.’16 Similarly, in his column for the Daily Mirror, Des Kelly compared the result to his own experience of a ‘wet, winter afternoon on a south London playing field when Norbury and Mitcham United lost a keenly contested match by the score of 37-0’.17

Such commentary was on the one hand heavily patronising towards American Samoa, and tapped into broader post-imperial chauvinism towards far-flung small nations: a short Daily Mirror feature published after the result, titled ‘Things You Should Knoa about American Samoa’, remarked: ‘Islanders have to rely on making their own entertainment, as there is just one TV channel and two radio stations’.18 Yet it also often spoke to an ironical, almost carnivalesque reading of football, a sense that the true meaning of the game lay in its lowest rather than highest echelons, in comedy rather than victory. It tapped into the same self-depreciating strain of humour that made apparent British sporting decline palatable, and ran counter to the increasing inequality of both domestic leagues and European competitions.

The second part in this miniseries is available here:

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

In February 2007, Hackney Council began demolishing a row of buildings between Nos. 4 and 14 Dalston Lane, despite some fierce local opposition. This included the destruction of an iconic venue that was perhaps best-known as the former home of the legendary Black music club, The Four Aces, but which had fulfilled multiple other leisure and communal functions over more than a century of usage.

Beginning its existence in 1886 as the vast North London Colosseum and Amphitheatre, accommodating popular circus entertainments, it was renamed the Dalston Theatre in 1898, now hosting music hall variety acts. With the growing popularity of film and the shift towards purpose-built venues for screening them, it was converted amid much fanfare into a cinema in 1920. As filmgoing declined in the post-Second World War period, amid expanding television ownership, the cinema closed in the 1960 and was briefly used as a storage facility.

It was then that the pioneering Black music promoters ‘Sir’ Charles Collins and Newton Dunbar intervened, making it the new home of The Four Aces, the club they had originally set up in neighbouring Islington. Enormously popular with the capital’s Afro-Caribbean population, it hosted iconic Jamaican ska and reggae and American soul performers, as well as providing the locus of a burgeoning Black British music scene. In the late 1980s, Dunbar handed control over the site to Joe Wieczorek, who had originally cut his teeth running illicit warehouse raves. The renamed Club Labrynth became an influential and heavily frequented dance music venue, accommodating shifting and diversifying trends such as hardcore, trance, and jungle.

In the late 1990s, Hackney Council, which had originally bought the premises in 1977, repossessed the club and began making plans for the venue’s sale and redevelopment. Given the site’s rich cultural and architectural heritage, the proposal was fiercely opposed locally, a petition against the demolition accruing 25,000 signatures. Initial efforts to find a buyer stalled, and the building fell into disrepair. Eventually, the council, in collaboration with the London Development Agency (LDA) and Transport for London (TfL), concocted a plan to obtain permission for the former theatre and its adjacent houses to be knocked down and for tower blocks to be erected in their stead; the site would then be sold to a developer, and the profits used to subsidise the construction of a planned rail and bus interchange in Dalston. This was what would come to pass, but not without considerable obstruction and delay from an organisation recently established to hold local regeneration projects up to closer scrutiny: OPEN Dalston.

The establishment of OPEN Dalston

The Organisation for Promotion of Environmental Needs was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee on 11 December 2004. Its initial memorandum of association set out its principal objectives as follows:

a) To promote excellence in the quality of the built environment in relation to the design and execution of building works, the provision of transportation, the provision of amenities or otherwise and changes thereto

b) To ensure that persons effecting or proposing to effect changes to the built environment have proper regard to the needs of residents and businesses affected by such changes and to the maintenance of a sustainable residential and business community in the locality affected by such changes

OPEN’s first two directors were local solicitor William Parry-Davies, who also served as secretary, and hairdresser Roland Foley. They were joined as directors by Belfast-born garden designer Marie Murray in May 2006, and then in August of the same year by the Reverend William Campbell-Taylor and Lady Jill Lowe, wife of law scholar and disability rights campaigner Baron Low of Dalston, who had recently been elevated to the House of Lords as a crossbencher. Parry-Davies stood down as both director and secretary in October (eventually resuming the former role in 2013 and the latter in 2014).

In a December 2005 post for its nascent, soon-to-become prolific and much-visited blog, OPEN set out its priorities, explaining that recent property sales, dereliction of existing buildings, and plans for new development in Dalston meant that ‘Many of the historic buildings and businesses which give the area its special character are now under immediate threat.’ It cited stopping the demolition of the buildings at 4-14 Dalston Lane, including the former Dalston Theatre, as one of its three ‘urgent aims’, stating its objective of instead having a public consultation into how those existing buildings might be incorporated into any eventual new development.1

Resisting demolition

Hackney Council’s Property Services department gave notice in November 2005 of its intention to demolish the buildings at 4-14 Dalston Lane at some point early the following year. However, OPEN successfully issued a judicial review application, with a High Court judge ruling the council could take no action until the court had considered all the evidence at a future hearing. OPEN argued that the council could not demolish the buildings without a full planning process, not least given that it had acquired them at public expense and was still consulting on a local area action plan. It accused the local authority of having deliberately neglected the premises, ruining the theatre’s art deco interiors to the point of discouraging English Heritage from listing it as a protected building. Nonetheless, OPEN insisted the buildings could be restored and brought back into use, accusing the council of behaving unimaginatively and undemocratically in not incorporating them into its redevelopment plans.

Despite protests organised by OPEN and written objections from the Theatre Trust, Ridley Road Market Traders Association, and Charles Collins, among others, the council’s planning subcommittee voted in favour of demolition at a tempestuous meeting in February 2006. OPEN questioned why Hackney Property Services considered it necessary to destroy the buildings when it had not yet even submitted a planning application for what might replace them, and also whether the council’s planners could objectively advise the subcommittee on the matter when they had previously sat on a Greater London Authority steering committee with TfL and LDA representatives to decide on a masterplan for Dalston that contained to provisions for retaining heritage buildings.

In the wake of the subcommittee’s decision, protestors occupied the theatre to prevent its demolition; the council sought, initially unsuccessfully, judicial backing to evict them. Meanwhile, the LDA put forward a proposal for replacing the buildings with a set of tower blocks, the tallest of which was to be 19 storeys high. In another contentious meeting in July, the subcommittee’s usual chair withdrew owing to a conflict of interest. Its vice-chair, Labour councillor Darren Parker, chaired the meeting instead and with the committee divided, cast a deciding vote in favour of the development, despite himself being an employee of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, a non-departmental public body that also supported the redevelopment. The council ratified the decision in September, arguing that the proposed sale of the site to developer Barratts was necessary to raise funds for TfL’s £38 million bus station development nearby.

Once again, OPEN sought legal recourse, while Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly temporarily instructed Hackney Council to desist from proceeding with the buildings’ destruction, although she subsequently concluded that there was no need for the proposals to be reconsidered. Nonetheless, in November, the High Court renewed its injunction against demolition pending a final hearing. By this point, police had successfully entered the theatre and evicted the protestors. Later that month, the High Court denied OPEN permission to proceed with judicial review of the LDA’s planning application, deeming that Hackney was entitled to depart from its own commitments to protect historical buildings if it saw fit. Facing potentially unlimited liability for the council’s legal costs, OPEN decided against applying to extend its injunction against demolition, leaving the local authority free to proceed.

Interpreting demolition

OPEN’s blog and broader public commentary sought to puncture the progressivist, future-oriented narratives purveyed by Hackney Council, the LDA, and others in local government and associated state agencies, which presented wholesale urban transformation and major infrastructure projects as an unalloyed public good. Such framing, while accompanied by tokenistic nods to local heritage and democracy, centred on the idea that such change was not only beneficial but also inevitable. OPEN responded by detailing extensively, repeatedly, the historical series of events, deliberate choices, and apparent collusion by the council and others that had led to the degradation of the former Dalston Theatre and its neighbouring buildings, enabling their destruction to be presented as a fait accompli. It regularly featured photographs amended to demonstrate what the prospective redevelopment would look like, to emphasise its perceived ugliness and visual incompatibility with the existing built environment. It also highlighted the dearth of affordable housing contained within the new tower blocks, and warned of an alternative potential dystopian future of dereliction and congestion.

After finally withdrawing its legal challenge to the project, the tone of OPEN’s blogging shifted towards a pre-grieving of the soon-to-be-demolished buildings. In an elegiac post titled ‘The story that was never told’, it described the premises as having been ‘doomed’ and ‘on death row’ since the 1990s. It challenged the productive onus of optimistic forecasts of economic growth by emphasising the inability of regeneration boosterists to appreciate the value of what they already possessed.

The Philistines
Noun: the natives or inhabitants of ancient Philistia
Adjective: those who pursue only material gain and who place no value on beauty, culture or artistic creations;
Philistinism: the vandalism of our heritage and culture as justified by institutional policy.

Once demolition began in February 2007, OPEN documented the destruction in text and accompanying photos. When images of construction work and its associated machinery so often carry connotations of coming prosperity, here the site of wrecking crews provided an ironic commentary on ruination, with jarring accompanying captions such as ‘"We are championing the historic environment and using the Borough’s heritage as a key component of economic regeneration... " Hackney Council, September 2005’.

Yet alongside the pessimism and mourning, OPEN also offered an alternative futurity, in which the new did not displace, but rather complemented and revived the old. In doing so, even in the face of the ultimate inability to achieve one of its original stated urgent aims, it continued to emphasise the possibility of an alternative vision to that of developers and their political supporters. This was epitomised in its lengthy recollection of the history of 4-14 Dalston Lane, the multiple shifts in the entertainment and community functions served by the former Dalston Theatre, connecting the story of the Four Aces and the Black patrons and artistes it hosted to a longer, local narrative. This was an example of a building that simultaneously and organically manifested multiple presents and modernities.

The developers will not be building the new Jerusalem in Dalston but towerblock [sic] flats for sale which will overshadow and blight the area. They will be seen as a buy-to-let opportunity to house a transient population. Sub-standard designs may well lead to them becoming the slums of the future. We will see our children living at height with nothing for them except a dark playground at the bottom of the canyon between the skyscrapers. It is a hypocritical betrayal of Dalston’s community, and of hard won Council policies, to condemn future generations to this and, without a second thought, to wipe out our children's and grandchildren’s heritage into the bargain. We do not want to live in the past, but we do want to live with it.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warning: Murder; Death and bereavement.

Gordon Brown did not get to be Prime Minister before Tony Blair, but he did get to go on Desert Island Discs first, appearing on the show in March 1996 when he was still Shadow Chancellor. Then Leader of the Opposition Blair would make his appearance on the show in November of the same year.

For the uninitiated: Desert Island Discs is a radio show, first broadcast by the BBC in 1942 on the Forces Radio, subsequently moving to the Home Service, and then in 1967 to Radio 4, on which channel the programme has been ever since. Roy Plomey, who claimed Desert Island Discs as his brainchild, hosted it from its launch until his death in 1985. It was then hosted by Michael Parkinson until 1988, followed by Sue Lawley until 2006, Kirsty Young until 2018, and since then, Lauren Laverne.1

The show’s premise is straightforward: a famous guest, that episode’s ‘castaway’, chooses eight audio recordings they would want to have to listen to if they were marooned on a desert island. Between the records being played, the host interviews the guest about their life and career. At the end, the castaway is allowed to select one book that they would also choose to have with them on the island (alongside the King James Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare), and one luxury; they also nominate which of their eight records they would choose if they could preserve but one from submersion.

After Labour had won their landslide victory in 1997 , and over their 13 years in power, several more high-profile figures from the party would also feature as guests on the programme. Transport minister (and Oscar-winning actor) Glenda Jackson and Home Secretary Jack Straw did so in 1998, Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam in 1999, Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook in 2002, Health Secretary Alan Johnson in 2007, and left-wing backbencher Diane Abbott – who in 1987 had become the first Black woman to be elected to Parliament – in 2008.

Two other former members of New Labour Cabinets would also be guests on Desert Island Discs after Labour were ousted from office in 2010. John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister and then recently elevated to the House of Lords, did so in 2012. Ed Miliband, Energy Secretary during Brown’s premiership and subsequently Labour leader in opposition, did so in 2013.

In this piece, I want to reflect upon the selection choices made by these Labour politicians, and the ways in and extent to which they used the programme to construct a musical canon that also said something about both their politics and their lives as lived in the British public eye.

Music and cultural capital

The music selected by Labour politicians tended to combine classical and traditional music with classic rock, and occasionally more contemporary records. Tony Blair’s choices, for example, comprised the fairly obscure present-day folk-rock act Ezio’s ‘Cancel Today’, pianist Pascal Roge’s rendition of Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, the Beatles’ ‘In My Life’, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s ‘Fourth of July’, Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, Robert Johnson’s, ‘Crossroad Blues’, Free’s ‘Wishing Well’, and his ‘Castaway’s Favourite’, classical guitarist John Williams performing Francisco Tárrega’s ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra’. In some cases, the lists were less eclectic and centred on particular forms of music, as with Alan Johnson’s selection, made up mainly of classic rock from the 1960s and 1970s, or John Prescott’s jazz-heavy playlist.

I will delve into the ideological and personal aspects of these choices later in the post, but I just want to focus here for a moment on the way these guests sought to explain their choices in terms of musical calibre and canon, to demonstrate and legitimise (or apologise for) their taste. Sometimes this was expressed in terms of a generational identity, attributing their 1960s musical selections to the formative significance of growing up in that decade, as when Gordon Brown chose ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles, Robin Cook ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ by Bob Dylan, Alan Johnson ‘Friday on My Mind’ by the Easybeats, and Diane Abbott ‘Things We Said Today’ by the Beatles. In other cases they had encountered the music through, and associated it with, other media: Blair, for example, first heard ‘Adagio for Strings’ on the 1986 Vietnam War film Platoon.

Occasionally, these politicians expressed a self-depreciating awareness that their choices might be interpreted by listeners as betraying a lack of taste. Ed Miliband, for example, acknowledged that his choices of ‘Take on Me’ by A-ha and ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams could be seen as ‘cheesy’. Inversely, Alan Johnson, when introducing his one classical music selection, the fourth movement from Gustav Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 5’, rejected the notion of a distinction between popular and classical music. Another way in which some politicians demonstrated a sense of wishing to be more cultured was by choosing instruments as the luxury items they would bring with them, in order to use the time to attain or improve their proficiency. Jack Straw, for example, chose a saxophone, saying it would be ‘quite an achievement’ for an ‘Essex boy’ like himself to learn to play one, while John Prescott selected a keyboard, stating his regret at not having learned an instrument when music brought such joy to him.

Music, identity, and ideology

As Straw’s remark above in particular demonstrates, musical choices sometimes revealed a sense of being of a working-class background, or at least relatively ordinary social status. Many Labour politicians who appeared on the show recounted experiences of childhood poverty – Glenda Jackson, for example, chose a bath as her luxury item, having grown up without one – as well as a sense of lacking the privileged backgrounds and accompanying refinement of some of their peers, and at times they directly framed individual choices in terms of class identity. John Prescott selected ‘A Town Called Malice’, because of its usage on the soundtrack to Billy Elliot, noting how it captured the tensions between working class masculinity and a desire to express yourself artistically. Mo Mowlam was, as she noted, of a lower middle-class background, but opted for John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ as one of her choices, stating that while the class composition of politics might have been changing, the song still resonated as articulating ‘the establishment’s’ capacity to make you feel small, regardless of whom you were.

Politicians related their choices to other different forms of identity as well. Gordon Brown expressed his sense of Scottishness on the programme by choosing Kenna Campbell singing the 23^rd Psalm in Gaelic, which she performed at the 1994 funeral of another Scottish politician, Labour leader John Smith, and Scottish rock band Runrig’s version of the Scottish folk song ‘Loch Lomond’. He counterpoised this by also selecting ‘Jerusalem’, as sung by Liverpool Cathedral Choir, which he said encapsulated a sense of a ‘new Britain’. The choice of hymns, furthermore, reflected Brown’s own Christian upbringing, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and the centrality of private religion to his life and worldview. Diane Abbott, meanwhile, in picking the Temptations’ ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ as one of her tracks, highlighted the importance of Motown in offering Black representation when she was a child, while also describing Buju Banton’s ‘Driver A’ as emblematic of her parents’ native Jamaica.

Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in these choices and the way they were introduced, was a recognition of the inherently political nature of music, and an attempt to communicate something about their ideology and beliefs through them. Robin Cook laconically acknowledged as much when he followed his own ‘Castaway’s Favourite’, Richard Wagner’s ‘Siegfried Idyll’, with the more ‘politically correct’ choice of ‘Spartacus and Phrygia Parting’, from the Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus.

Diane Abbott was generally more overt in her weaving of her songs into a political narrative, perhaps most notably in her ‘Castaway’s Favourite’, Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s version of the South African national anthem ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, linking to this to her own formative experiences in anti-apartheid activism, and then of travelling over to South Africa for the first post-Apartheid elections in 1994. Yet the movement against Apartheid was also mentioned in 2013 by Ed Miliband – whom she unsuccessfully stood against for the party leadership in 2010 – as a touchstone in his political development, having met the South African activist and journalist Ruth First as a child, six months before she was assassinated in Mozambique by the South African Police in 1982. He too therefore selected ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ for his playlist, except the version from the 1987 film Cry Freedom, about the Black South African political activist Steve Biko, at whose funeral it is sung. Gordon Brown had previously chosen the title track from the film as one of his selections back in 1996.

Music, personal life, and hinterland

However, there was a competing imperative with this politicisation of music, to segment music from politics. This was firstly a logic of the programme itself, intended to tell the narrative of a great public life, with all of its milestones, but also to reveal something of the human person and relationships behind that. This was granted a more specific intrigue when the interviewee was a past, present, or potential future government minister, but it still cohered to a broader template that went beyond the Political-with-a-capital-P. Musical choices on the show stood somewhat as formulaic interludes in that narrative, albeit with their own explanations attached, rather than being tightly interwoven within it.

Secondly, for participants in a political project like New Labour, an integral objective in any public appearance like this was to present themselves as relatable to the not necessarily especially political median voter, and therefore to avoid coming across as particularly ideologically zealous, to convey their choices in ways that made sense on a personal level (but also communicate a degree of gravitas appropriate for someone holding or hoping to hold high office). It meant conveying a sense that they had a ‘hinterland’, a set of interests that extended beyond politics, to use the phrase popularised by another former Labour minister, Denis Healey, in quoting his wife Edna’s disparagement of Margaret Thatcher for lacking one.2

Labour politicians on Desert Island Discs did pick songs they associated with particular moments in their professional lives, such as Diane Abbott – somewhat ironically, given her status as a vocal backbench critic of New Labour – choosing D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ as reminding her of the 1997 general election victory it had served as campaign song for. Yet they were equally likely to choose songs that exhibited their hinterland, such as horses enthusiast Robin Cook picking Aly Bain’s ‘Tame Her When Da Sna Come’, about the taming of Shetland Ponies, or baseball fan Ed Miliband choosing Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’, associated with his favourite team, the Boston Red Sox.

Even more frequently, they chose songs that reminded them of loved ones. Tony Blair, for example, chose ‘Clair de Lune’ because it was his late mother’s favourite song, and ‘In My Life’ because it was a song his father taught himself to play again after a stroke, while Ed Miliband played a live version by Edith Piaf of ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ that his parents had had on record, and Diane Abbott selected Harry Belafonte’s ‘Scarlet Ribbons’, which she recalled listening to with her parents on their radiogram as a child. Robin Cook selected several songs that he associated with his second wife, Gaynor Regan, and John Prescott with his wife, Pauline Tilston. Jack Straw chose the Verve’s ‘History’ as a song that his adolescent children were fond of, while Alan Johnson included Halima’s ‘Beneath the Sun’, which his music engineer son had been involved in making.

Yet such selections were also inherently political, precisely because of the extent to which those family ties connoted something about their politics and their status as politicians. Discussing their parents meant talking about their social background and nodding at least to their own early political influences, not least in the case of Ed Miliband, who as Leader of the Opposition defined himself extensively both in relation to and contrast with his father Ralph Miliband, a Belgian Jewish refugee turned renowned Marxist academic, and who had died when Ed was 24.

Moreover, both Cook’s and Prescott’s public reputations had been somewhat dented by their infidelities, the former having left his first wife, Margaret Whitmore, for Regan in 1998, while the latter in 2006 had admitted to an affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple. In both cases, dedicating songs to their wives worked to partly re-legitimise themselves and their personal lives. Similarly, Straw’s choice of a song favoured by his children was of a part with his discussion of the controversy arising from his son Will being caught selling cannabis as a teenager in a newspaper sting, making his tough stances on drugs and juvenile crime as Home Secretary seem hypocritical.

In this way, appearing on Desert Island Discs as a Labour politician and selecting songs involved assembling a particular type of progressive musical canon. It entailed building a soundtrack to the story of their lives as politicians, albeit one that might stand somewhat apart from that story. It meant giving cues about what types of music politicians of their stripe might value, what their social background was, what combination of ordinariness and sophistication they possessed. It meant subtly or openly demonstrating their commitment to causes such as social equality and antiracism. It provided a vehicle for talking about what sort of person they were, who the people that mattered in their lives were, and what that said about their political values as practiced, easily comprehensible, everyday behaviours.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

2024 drew to a close with a pretty positive professional development: I signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan to write what will be my first solo-authored book, provisionally titled Progressive Politics, Popular Culture, and Public Memory in Contemporary Britain. It is extremely exciting news and I’m really looking forward to working on it over the next two years or so, and writing regularly about the research I do for it here for the newsletter.

(Shameless request: I ought to mention here that being on a fixed-term, teaching-only contract, the research and writing I am doing for the book is virtually entirely unpaid, so if you want to support it, please do consider taking out a paid subscription to the newsletter. It also enables me to keep producing work for this outlet. Paid subscriptions are £3.50 per month or £35 for a year at the time of writing, and give you access to my full archive of posts; however, new subscribers get 50% off for the first 12 months, so please do consider taking advantage of this offer. Thank you!)

Anyway, the book’s key argument (as I see it, at the outset of writing it) is that culture has become increasingly important as a realm in which the contours of different forms of progressive politics are shaped and contested; and that, though ostensibly future-oriented, these expressions of progressive politics have often been retrospective in focus, concerned with their own histories.

This has happened at the intersection of three broader developments. Firstly, the of evolution of progressive politics in Britain in the late 20^th and early 21^st century, particularly as the Labour Party in and out of power went through phases of convulsion over the question of what social democracy should look like in the wake not only of Thatcherism and the erosion of the post-war settlement, but also of the rise of intersecting social movements beyond the traditional left.1

Secondly, the transformation of cultural industries as part of a post-industrial, informational society, in which they have been feted as new sources of economic growth and as traditional barriers and hierarchies have been dismantled through digitisation, but also in which external and internal conditions that made a career in the sector possible, particularly for those without inherited wealth and contacts, dissipated.2

The third phenomenon is a transformation in public memory itself in the age of the so-called ‘memory boom’, whereby the strengthening of generation as a basis of identity, the erosion of the institutions and norms of industrial society, and the advent of new forms of media radically expanded, transformed, and pluralised the ways in which the past is remembered.3

Defining progressive cultural memory

In taking ‘progressive politics’ – and its intersection with popular culture and public memory – as the book’s focus, I am putting forward the argument that from the late 20th century onwards, there was a closer alignment of economically redistributive political positions with socially liberal ones, particularly related to combating discrimination on grounds of race, gender, and sexuality. Certainly, the Labour Party was – as with Western social democratic parties elsewhere – the principal actor in high politics that most embodied this trend, although other parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party also competed on this terrain.4

Yet this ideological congealment extended further and deeper, speaking to the priorities of a wider social constituency, and expressed not only as a coherent doctrine or set of policies, but also more nebulously as a form of cultural aesthetics and personal dispositions. It has been marked by fragmentation and internal contradictions, including accommodations with or even embraces of communitarianism and neoliberalism. These flaws have inhibited its effectiveness and appeal as a political project, but not its wider cultural preponderance. It has manifested as support for Labour at times, but also around other political events such as the campaign against leaving the European Union (on which Labour was far more circumspect).

It has been marked, above all, by a sense of modernity, that the beliefs and affects it entailed were future-oriented, in opposition to a series of perceived retrograde equivalents that were associated particularly (but not solely or consistently) with the Conservative Party. Yet staking a claim for the hegemony of these values also necessitated their legitimisation through reference to the past and could also be expressed in ways that were heavily nostalgic, particularly in the face of perceived setbacks. This is why I have opted for the term ‘progressive’ as that which best encapsulates this political tendency and its parameters.5

It is therefore the contention of the book that while Labour is the principal actor in setting out this progressive project, it did not possess wholesale hegemony over it, and when it came to articulating a vision of the place of the past that adhered to progressive values, it did so in dialogue with a broader set of actors – especially within the cultural industries – that it had far less authority over.

Labour and cultural heritage

One of the book’s central areas of focus is Labour's relationship with cultural history and heritage, something I intend to explore through two principal case studies. One is how Labour politicians have articulated their own personal cultural histories as guests on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, and how that relates to the way they understand the history of Labour and progressive politics, their own relationship to that history, and their conception of a progressive approach to culture.

These guests assembled a ‘soundtrack to their own lives’ as part of a wider process of canon reformation, including the shifting high/popular cultural divide, music’s role in generational, national, and political identities, and its relationship with other cultural forms. I also want to consider the reception of these episodes and their place in Desert Island Discs’ broader output, and their relationship with the formulation of Labour cultural policy in government and opposition. I am particularly concerned with how Labour politicians attempted to use the show to articulate an account of the cultural past that adhered to their broader ideological agenda, but in doing so had to adhere to an expressive framework set by BBC Radio in anticipation of the preferences of its listeners.

The other case study considers how considers how Labour councils have eroded subversive and radical cultural heritage through commercially driven urban regeneration projects. It does so through the prism of the famous The Four Aces Club in Dalston, Hackney: a disused former theatre and cinema turned into one of London’s most pioneering Black music venues in the 1960s and 1970s, and which later became the renowned indoor rave venue Club Labrynth in the 1990s. The club closed after Labour-controlled Hackney Council repossessed the premises in 1997, and was subsequently demolished it in 2007 to make way for a residential development.

I aim to explore the material and ideological concerns that drove the council to eradicate a site of such multi-layered cultural significance, as well as of the determined but ultimately unsuccessful movement to oppose the demolition. I also intend to look at the way The Four Aces has lived on in public memory since its demolition, and subsequent efforts by the council and developers to appropriate local Black history for the sake of granting their policies a progressive sheen. In seeking to impose a modern vision of urban life through regeneration, the council erased a crucial component of the Black cultural past, in a way that highlighted the limitations of Labour’s commitment to racial justice.

Mediating progressive cultural legacies

The book is also concerned with specific cultural projects with progressive connotations that they partly owed to their associations with New Labour, but which also had their own logic that went beyond that connection, and continued to evolve long after New Labour had left office. One of those is the afterlife of New Labour’s best remembered dalliance with popular culture, with Britpop: the surge of bands producing guitar-centred rock music within an explicitly British music canon and who enjoyed substantial domestic commercial and critical success during the mid-1990s, when – like the New Labour opposition – they seemed to capture a mood of national optimism.

This legacy soured, however, as Britpop bands and the wider media – left and right – came to look at the mutual endorsement of New Labour and Britpop with increased cynicism after the former entered government, and especially after the Iraq War. The New Labour-Britpop relationship, however, later came to be seen as a template for future governments’ relationships with the cultural industries, while former Britpop artists continued to be expected to act as commentators on politics. Ultimately, a new nostalgia emerged for Britpop as a hallmark of a period of working-class prominence in music and popular culture more widely, in contrast to the apparent overrepresentation of a privileged minority in the contemporary cultural industries.

(This is, incidentally, a topic I have previously written about for this newsletter).

Another legacy the book will explore is that of the 2012 London Olympics, which functioned as a beacon for public remembering of the New Labour government that successfully bid for it, and the Ken Livingstone mayoralty that did much to deliver it, at a point when the Conservatives governed both London and Britain. These related to a broader emphasis on the idea of ‘legacy’ both in the planning of the 2012 Games and in the modern Olympic movement more broadly, as well as with the narratives of a progressive, inclusive British history projected through and around the Games.

Yet the 2012 Olympics itself subsequently became an object of progressive nostalgia following the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU, as it came to be seen as emblematic of a more tolerant and outward-looking form of nationhood that had since been taken away. This elided much of the context of and tensions around the 2012 Games, and promoted critiques of this allegedly Olympic-centred worldview from both left and right.

Progressive historical fictions

Finally, the book also aims to consider narratives originating wholly outside of elite politics, in fictions constructed by the cultural industries, but that were nonetheless characterised by many of the same political inclinations as those discussed above. This includes, for example, Made in Dagenham and Pride, which relayed histories of industrial action intersecting with histories of women’s and gay liberation respectively. (Again, these are two films that I have previously covered for this newsletter).

Made in Dagenham originated through encounters with the memories of the striking women machinists at Ford Dagenham from 1968; Pride with those of members of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners movement of 1984-85. These events were transformed into semifictional cinematic narratives that presented whiggish stories about the advancement of women’s and gay rights while marginalising the element of class struggle equally integral to these events, and therefore evaded more challenging narratives of deindustrialisation and de-unionisation. Yet these film narratives – and connected para-narratives – were shaped by the industrial logics of a fragmented UK film production sector reliant on multiple funding streams and an older niche of cinemagoers. They persisted and developed in the reception and afterlives of these films, most notably in the adaptation of Made in Dagenham into a stage musical.

This type of progressive cultural memory is also discernible in children’s television. CBeebies programmes Postman Pat and Katie Morag offered early 21^st-century depictions of traditional remote communities – one in approximate vicinity of the Yorkshire Dales and The Lake District, the other in the Scottish Highlands. The former is rooted in the original children’s television series written by John Cunliffe and screened on BBC in the early 1980s; the latter in the series of books written by Mairi Hedderwick from 1984.

I want to consider how the two programmes portrayed rural communities interconnected by and connected to the wider world through the mail, at a time when electronic mail was increasingly supplanting paper-based communication. They were also made at a point when mail services were more broadly undergoing cuts and privatisation, as well as against a backdrop of real rural communities often facing environmental, infrastructural, economic, and social problems. Postman Pat ‘Special Delivery Service’ depicted a more ideologically neoliberal and technologically advanced postal service, whereas Katie Morag offered a more traditional vision of the local post office. Both shows need to be understood within the context of the BBC’s ambitions for high-quality public programming intended to both educate and entertain young children, while itself facing increasing financial challenges post-2010.

Drawing these themes together

These might seem disparate threads to intertwine; they certainly do not comprise a comprehensive account of all progressive visions across all popular cultural forms over the past thirty years or so. They do, however, adhere to the logic I outlined above: that British politicians have offered progressive visions of the past through the prism of cultural policy, but that cultural industries and producers have also crafted their own retrospective progressive narratives that have proven just as impactful.

While much attention has been given to nostalgia as an aspect of right-wing politics, and the role of ideas about the past in fuelling radical or issue-based social movements has also received some coverage, I hope the book also draws attention to the role of ideas about the past in informing broadly mainstream progressive norms. In doing so, I hope to explain how certain progressive norms, rooted in optimistic histories of Britain, have become at times seemingly culturally hegemonic, without that necessarily translating into political hegemony.

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Content warning: Video with flashing images.

It is now, frighteningly, 15 years since Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ unexpectedly beat X-Factor winner Joe McElderry to the 2009 Christmas No 1 slot in the UK singles charts, after a hugely successful social media campaign. In this post, I want to explore how this chart battle pitted differing conceptions of a musical moral economy against each other, pitting popular music’s past in competition with its present for ownership of the British ‘Christmas No. 1’ tradition. Looking at how this occurred at the intersection of different media industries and formats also sheds light on shifts and continuities in the balances of power between them and their consumer bases.

Rage Against the Machine and ‘Killing in the Name’

Formed in California in 1991, Rage Against the Machine (RATM) comprised vocalist Zack De La Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk. After signing to Sony subsidiary Epic, they enjoyed global commercial success in the 1990s, releasing three original albums, before going on hiatus in 2000. Their sound combined heavy metal with elements of both hip hop and funk, marrying heavy riffs with staccato beats, over which De La Rocha half-rapped, half-roared leftist lyrics, railing against institutional racism, corporate capitalism, American foreign policy and mass media vacuity, and championing both domestic and Third World resistance movements.

The band’s left-wing activism has also extended to public support for causes such as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico these concerns partly reflect Rage’s own ethnic diversity: De La Rocha is half-Mexican, Morello half-Kenyan. Jeffrey A. Hall has characterised the apparent contradictions the band represent – rejecting capitalism and consumerism while selling millions of records on a major label – as a form of real irony, in which they recognise their own participation in the reality they examine and establish a dialectic relationship with it, involving listeners in this process too.1

Released in late 1992, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, ‘Killing in the Name’ was RATM’s debut single, and arguably their signature song. It is built around Morello’s juddering, repetitive riff, with De La Rocha alternately hissing and yelling repeated slogans about police racism: ‘Some of those who work forces/are the same who burn crosses’, ‘Those who died/are justified/for wearing the badge/ they’re the chosen whites’, as well as the track’s title and the taunting ‘Now you do what they tell ya’.

Then, following a squealing guitar solo, the song quietens down and its infamous crescendo commences. ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!’, De La Rocha intones eight times, quietly but increasingly menacingly, before shouting the refrain a further eight times, and finishing with a final cry of ‘Motherfuckerrrrrr…uh!’. Upon its original release, the song reached No. 25 in the UK singles charts, its controversial reputation enhanced when Radio 1 DJ Bruno Brookes accidentally played the uncensored version of the song during the chart rundown.

The X-Factor, popular music, and reality television

From the 1990s, a new generation of music-themed reality television shows were successfully launched, starting in the UK with Pop Stars and then Pop Idol, both screened on ITV in the early 2000s. Pop Idol entailed expert judges auditioning unsigned singers, with the selected finalists then being whittled down by public vote until a successful singer had been selected, and made a television star of one of its judges: Simon Cowell, who had worked in the music industry since the 1980s, recruiting a string of successful acts, and whose caustic persona made him popular with audiences.

Cowell then launched his own entertainment company, Syco, through which he produced his own reality television music competition, The X-Factor, on which he also starred as a judge, and which was screened on ITV from September through to December annually from 2004. The winner would secure a contract with Syco, which then released their debut single just before Christmas. Cowell sold Syco to Sony in 2005 but continued to run the company on their behalf. He also established a celebrity profile in the US as well, firstly as a judge on US music reality TV show American Idol and as executive producer of America’s Got Talent.

Amid the fragmentation and hollowing out of British music’s mainstream, X-Factor’s prime time Saturday night slot and huge viewing figures – 19.4 million people watched the 2009 final – gave the show’s contestants and guest performers an unparalleled public platform.2 X-Factor’s first winner, Steve Brookstein, released his single in 2004 only early enough to chart on Boxing Day in 2004, when charity record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ by Band Aid 20 was Christmas No. 1. 3However, thereafter Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke each topped the Christmas charts after winning the show.4 The song selected for Burke was Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, prompting a backlash from fans of the late American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, who considered his 1994 cover of it to be the definitive version, and launched an online campaign to try and get Buckley’s rendition of the song to No. 1 instead. Buckley’s version was downloaded 81,000 times in total in the run-up to Christmas, a fraction of the 576,000 copies Burke’s sold, but enough to get it to number two in the charts.5

Chris Hackley, Stephen Brown, and Rungpaka Amy Hackley have described X-Factor as a ‘marketization of liminal existentialism’, temporarily placing its contestants outside the social structure and offering the possibility of its transcendence, while Cowell served as a ‘trickster figure’, directing the ritual and enabling the television audience to engage in a sense of communitas.6 Nick Stevenson, meanwhile, described the show as eroding the boundaries between politics, education, and entertainment through its interactive dimensions, and as presenting neoliberal capitalism, with its hyper-competitiveness and perennial insecurity, as popular entertainment.7

‘Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No 1!’

The same year that rival ‘Hallelujah’s were vying for Christmas No. 1, Jon Morter, a part-time rock radio DJ from Essex, had launched his own Facebook campaign to get Rick Astley’s 1987 hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ to Christmas No. 1, in tribute to the ‘Rickrolling’ fad – a prank involving tricking web users into clicking on a hyperlink that took them straight through to the song’s video.8 The campaign was only a muted success, reaching the lower echelons of the chart.

The following year, as X-Factor once again approached its series finale, Morter and his wife Tracey launched another campaign, this time to get ‘Killing in the Name’ to the top of the charts instead of whoever the winning contestant turned out to be. As some of the proceeds of the X-Factor winner’s single would go to charity, they also set up a Just Giving page that would enable people who joined the campaign’s ‘Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No 1!’ Facebook group to donate to homeless charity Shelter.9

By 4^th December, the group had around 45,000 members, and the campaign began to gain press coverage.10 By the 8^th, 300,000 people had joined and bookmakers had made it second favourite for Christmas No. 1 behind X-Factor at 9-2, with some newspaper columnists voicing their support.11 At a press conference held ahead of X-Factor’s final weekend, Cowell denounced the campaign as ‘stupid’, but this was merely tantamount to further publicity.12 The Facebook group’s membership had surpassed 700,000 around the time that Joe McElderry, an eighteen-year-old from South Shields, was announced as the show’s winner on the evening of Sunday, 13 December.13 His debut single was to be a rendition of ‘The Climb’, a ballad originally sung by Miley Cyrus in her recent film, Hannah Montana: The Movie.

The chart battle commences

However, supporters of Jon Morter’s campaign had already been downloading ‘Killing in the Name’ since that morning, giving it an early head start, and by Monday it led ‘The Climb’ on several music purchasing websites, although McElderry was still anticipated to overtake Rage once physical copies of his song became available in shops on the Wednesday. Midweek charts compiled by the Official Charts Company indicated that ‘Killing in the Name’ had been downloaded 175,163 times, compared to 109,726 downloads for ‘The Climb’.14

Around this time, RATM, who had reformed in 2007 to start playing live shows again, themselves began to voice their own public support for the campaign, championing its anti-establishmentarian spirit; other high-profile endorsers included the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and former Beatle Paul McCartney.15 The band themselves were interviewed live from LA on the BBC Radio 5Live Breakfast Show on the Thursday, before giving what was supposed to be a censored rendition of the song, only for De La Rocha to renege on his promise not to swear, leading to it being faded out and presenter Shelagh Fogarty apologising to listeners.16 RATM also subsequently announced plans to hold a free gig in the UK if they got to No. 1.17

Meanwhile, McElderry launched the CD version of his single on the Wednesday with an appearance at HMV in his native South Shields.18 Yet while ‘The Climb’ sold around 100,000 copies on that day alone, taking its total sales to date to 216,795, the lateness of the single’s pressing meant HMV and Asda were still the only retailers to have stocked it, and it still languished behind ‘Killing in The Name’, downloaded 253,476 times in total.19 Over the following 24 hours, the gap narrowed further, with 297,192 sales for ‘The Climb’ to ‘Killing in The Name’s’ 306,115.20

According to Jon Morter, the race between the two remained extremely tight up until the Saturday evening, at which point he encouraged the Facebook group’s members – who now numbered nearly a million – to buy a live version of ‘Killing in The Name’, whose sales would still count towards the song’s final chart position. This version was subsequently downloaded 72,000 times before midnight, taking ‘Killing in The Name’ to the Christmas No. 1 spot with 502,672 downloads in total, to ‘The Climb’s’ 450,838 downloads and physical single sales.21

The campaign’s aftermaths

The campaign raised an estimated £100,000 for Shelter in the run-up to Christmas, while Morello announced he would donate his share of the royalties to Youth Music, a UK charity that provided music-making opportunities to underprivileged young people.22 RATM made good on their promise to play a free UK gig, performing for 40,000 randomly selected fans in Finsbury Park in North London in June 2010 – and presenting a cheque for a further £62,000 to Shelter.23 The band embarked upon another long hiatus from 2011; a third reunion initially scheduled for 2020 was delayed by the COVID pandemic and then cut short in 2022 by an on-stage injury to De La Rocha, with drummer Brad Wilk stating earlier this year that RATM ‘will not be touring or playing live again’.24

Jon Morter (who is now divorced from Tracey) has subsequently embarked upon a series of other music-related initiatives, including successfully campaigning to save the BBC radio station 6Music, participating in the Justice Collective set up to raise money for Hillsborough Disaster-related charities and which attained another Christmas No. 1 in 2012 with a cover version of The Hollies’ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’, and more recently assisting in novelty band The Kunts’s efforts to attain a Christmas No 1 with a succession of anti-Conservative Party diatribes.25

As for X-Factor, its 2010 series attained its highest ratings yet, with winner Matt Cardle succeeding where McElderry had failed in taking the Christmas No. 1 slot.26 Yet although some acts who made their names on the show, such as One Direction, Olly Murs, and Little Mix, subsequently enjoyed sustained success, its own audiences subsequently decreased year-on-year, culminating in there having been new series since the 15^th, which ran in 2018, and there being currently no plans to revive it.27

The moral economy of X-Factor

The 2009 battle for Christmas number one pitted against each other divergent conceptions of the singles chart as moral economy, in which acts of consumption were reinterpreted as inherently ethical, political and gestural, operating through their own intermedial networks, with their own remembered traditions and convenient memory lapses, and their own replication and recycling of older popular cultural products.

X-Factor’s success during the mid-to-late 2000s relied in part on the familiarity of its brand, formulae, and output: of the progression through specific stages over the series, from auditions to live finals, as well as the conventions of the talent show and the reality TV programme more generally; its ritualization both within the cycle of the week and year, embedding it in the practices of Saturday night television viewing and the run-up to Christmas; the celebrity of the judges and guest performers; the contestants’ ‘real life’ story arcs that adhere to stereotypical comic, tragic and heroic narratives; and their renditions of well-known standards.

Yet it also required a degree of cultural forgetting from its audience: to invest themselves emotionally in the stories of the series’ contestants, to pick a favourite and vote for them each week, and if they win, buy their debut single – but then to just as easily jettison that investment and memory of it, to go through the same process again twelve months later. These debut singles have since 2008 been cover versions of songs likely to have been relatively unknown to the intended market, whether the work of older singer-songwriters or recent minor hits (as with ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘The Climb’ respectively).

X-Factor also exemplified the resilience of some long-established media industry giants and entrepreneurs, such as Cowell, adapting existing media and venerable genres to a new media environment by integrating them with digital forms such as texting, MP3s, and social media, facilitating a more pervasive reach and greater levels of audience engagement.

Amid the hostile scrutiny that came the programme’s way during the 2009 Christmas chart battle, Cowell defended The X-Factor in populist terms, depicting the charts as a ‘democracy’ in which its output secured the support of the most music buyers, and denouncing its critics as elitist snobs unwilling to respect the people’s choice – an interpretation that extended the show’s own façade of subservience to the will of the viewing public, via paid-for-votes.28 He and the other judges, most notably McElderry’s mentor on the show and fellow Tynesider, Cheryl Cole, characterised the campaign as cruel in the way it sought to prevent an aspirant star from an ordinary background from achieving his dream – again defining the chart battle in moral and vaguely political terms.29

The moral economy of the Christmas No. 1

By contrast, the campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to number one fused the assertion of two somewhat discordant traditions. The first of these was that of the Christmas No. 1 itself. Jon Morter steered clear of excessive criticism of The X-Factor itself as a form of musical-televisual entertainment, instead specifically criticising its monopoly over the Christmas No. 1 spot, and harking back to an earlier idealised age in which the battle to top the festive charts was fun and unpredictable. He also dismissed the criticism that both McElderry and Rage were signed to subsidiaries of Sony as simply beside the point.30

This chimed with a longstanding conception, ingrained in radio and television charts shows, that the competition between artists and labels to sell the most records is itself a form of entertainment, with heightened significance in seasonal context. Cowell rejected the idea X-Factor had destroyed a great tradition, highlighting how ‘terrible’ some of the songs that had gotten to number one at Christmas prior to the show’s launch had been, some supporters of the campaign claimed he was simply missing the point: Christmas was supposed to be a time when unconventional or novel songs could reach the number one spot, and ‘Killing In The Name’ was very much within this tradition.31

Yet not everyone bought this line either. Comedian David Baddiel, writing for The Times, instead harked back to the unabashed Christmas song of the 1970s and 80s, stressing the exoticism that the season and its traditions held for him growing up in a Jewish household.32 Detractors of the Morters’ campaign also decried it as unseasonal, with Cowell describing it as ‘Scrooge-like’, while Cole asserted: ‘If that song – or should I say campaign – by an American group is our Christmas No 1, I'll be gutted for [Joe McElderry] and our charts.’33

The moral economy of alternative rock

The other tradition manifest in the campaign was that of the alternative rock canon. Jon Morter was himself a rock enthusiast, and a fan of Rage in particular, and stated in one interview that he had selected ‘Killing in the Name’ as the record to try and get to Christmas number one because ‘We’re not going to have this anymore. The band’s name itself says it all. It’s perfect really.’34 It was a song that carried strong connotations of where and when it was made, a time-place central to the narrative of alternative rock’s insurgency against the mainstream. It also possessed its own pedigree in a British context, with commentators often referring to the occasion it was played uncensored on Radio 1.

The campaign offered an opportunity to, through the act of consumption, invert the hegemonic structures of the media and desacralize the festive season, in contradiction of Jon Morter’s stated desire to save the Christmas number one tradition, and thereby make, or remake, musical history, altering its present through a deliberate resurrection of its past. This was in many ways in keeping with RATM’s modus operandi. Although seemingly oblivious to the campaign until it reached a crescendo, the band were nonetheless enthused by what they subsequently repeatedly described in interviews as an organic, grassroots movement, illustrative of the power young people could hold when they came together to make a change.35

Yet other commentators questioned as to how ‘cutting edge’ a moment this could be considered when the campaign’s aim was to elevate a song now nearly 20 years old to the top of the charts, rather than a new release.36 Moreover, it is striking how little attention was actually paid within the discussions around the campaign to the song’s historic political context and meaning as a denunciation of institutional racism. Rather, it simply harked back to a tradition of rock as rebellion for its own sake. This self-referentiality, this combination of revival and unawareness, meant the campaign’s relationship with the alternative rock canon mirrored X-Factor’s with the pop canon. Even the valuable work it did in raising money for Shelter seems to have been a post-rationalisation of its objective, a statement of ethicality that again simply duplicated X-Factor’s own philanthropic gestures.

The Morters and new media

Furthermore, ‘Killing in the Name’s’ victory owed much to Jon Morter’s own skilled exploitation of old and new media. Though he denied at the time that his campaign had been in anyway manipulative, he revealed in a much later interview with the Radio Times some of the methods he and Tracey had utilised, including taking over unrelated Facebook groups without stated administrators so that he could message their members about the campaign; deliberately employing a confrontational approach in early radio interviews to create drama and intrigue; and of course his final manoeuvre in getting people to download live versions of the song as well.37 Cowell himself later struck a conciliatory note, publicly congratulating the Morters on the success of their campaign and claiming to have offered them both jobs with Syco.38

Jon and Lynn Morter were outsiders who had grasped the possibilities available through the relatively new formats of Facebook and legal downloading sites to direct consumer power in a way that challenged hegemonic music industry narratives of success and novelty, albeit while leaving industry structures untouched and merely accelerating monetary flows within existing directions. It was also a campaign very much of its time, relying on the accessibility but also degree of uniformity of contemporary new media formats to narrativise and orchestrate music purchasing patterns.

The subsequent rise to greater parity of other social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram (and more recently TikTok and BlueSky), the growing popularity of music streaming and accompanying decline in music downloading, and changes in chart rules from 2014 to reflect this, with a hundred streams of a song now recorded as equivalent to one download or hard copy single purchase, all entail a more diffuse and fragmented media environment than the one the Morters navigated in late 2009.39

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

I have been working recently on a journal article on the 1937 MGM film A Family Affair, and its wrestling with and reaffirmation of classical jurisprudential norms at a time when they were being increasingly heavily undermined by contemporary economic and political change. You can read my thoughts on that film specifically here:

One of the principal concerns underpinning the journal article, and what I want to focus on in this piece, is the relationship between broader shifts in thinking about the law in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, and the law as a theme in American cinema. There is a rich literature on both of these subjects, as well as on how Hollywood and Hollywood films engaged with the politics of the 1930s, but far less attention has been paid to the connections between them: to the particular value of film as an arena for working out tensions in legal thinking in the era of the Great Depression and New Deal; to the particular importance of this era, and its politics, in the history of the legal drama (broadly defined).

Jurisprudence in the age of the New Deal

One principal debate around the operation of the law in the 1930s centres on why an apparently deeply conservative legal establishment seemed to quite suddenly fold as an obstacle to progressive political reform. This has tended to centre in particular on the Supreme Court, and its decreased appetite for confrontation with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. As Laura Kalman put it, much scholarship hitherto adopted either an externalist approach, attributing the change to the Court kowtowing in the face of Roosevelt’s threat in 1937 to expand the number of justices in order to break the stalemate between its existing conservative and liberal wings; or an internalist one, highlighting the intellectual febrility of contemporary legal theory and practice and fragility of classical jurisprudential principles, eventually reflected in the inclinations of the Supreme Court itself.1

Classical jurisprudence, put simply, upheld the idea that the law existed objectively, constituted by formal, abstract principles, and that the expert role of judges was to impartially discover and implement them. Ascendant in the nineteenth century, its internal contradictions were exposed in practice by increasing social and economic complexity as epitomised in the cases it adjudicated on. It faced successive political challenges from Populists, Progressivists, and eventually New Dealers, who identified the legal system as it actually operated as an upholder of monied interests and opponent of reform.

Within law schools themselves, which would ultimately also influence and produce practitioners, a growing number of theorists directly took on the claims of classical jurisprudence. This culminated in the emergence during the 1920s and 1930s of legal realists who argued that judges constructed rather than discerned what the law was; that they were not neutral actors, and nor was their authority distinct from that of the law itself; and that the law therefore could and ought to be updated to meet societal needs. These ideas faced pushback as heretical but by the 1940s had become largely hegemonic. They formed part of a broader shift in academic disciplines, and indeed in American culture more broadly, towards a modernist recognition that knowledge and experience were inherently subjective.2

Indeed, the 1937 showdown between Roosevelt and the Supreme Court might be viewed as a symptom of the changes already wrought by this confluence of factors , as G. Edward White argued:

By assuming that the Supreme Court of the United States could be “packed” with persons who would be sympathetic to the political goals of the Roosevelt administration, and who would translate that sympathy into constitutional doctrine, the proponents of Court-packing were taking as a given that America was a government of men, not laws.3

There was certainly polarisation over the nature of the law in this period. It was epitomised not only by splits in the Supreme Court, but even more so in wider political debate, and in the nascent wing of American conservativism, coalescing around former President Herbert Hoover, that characterised the New Deal as in breach of the Constitution, and of the natural rules and freedoms underpinning it.4

Yet there was also considerable recognition and disquiet among advocates of classical jurisprudence that modern political and economic changes were rendering the law as they understood it harder to implement, and this indeed shaped the 1923 founding of American Law Institute and its ‘Restatements’ project to re-assert traditional common law principles and their continuing applicability, but instead fuelled further critique from legal realists.5 At the same time, there were areas of agreement between conservatives and liberals around some aspects of jurisprudence, such as in criminal law.6

Moreover, even prior to the court-packing dispute, some influential figures, including, Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes, sought to chart a potential middle course and legitimise changes in the implementation of the law by drawing on the notion of the Constitution as a ‘living document’, whose meaning could be adapted to contemporary circumstances.7 New Dealers and civil liberties campaigners, enabled in part by moderate conservative critics of the New Deal who drew upon similar rhetoric, likewise turned to the Constitution and the aspects of it most salient to liberals (such as the Bill of Rights) to justify progressive legislation and state expansion.8

Screening the law

In her 1998 chapter, ‘Law and the Order of Popular Culture’, the film scholar Carol J. Clover argued that the trial was so integral to Anglo-American culture that its structures and procedures shaped fictional plots that went nowhere near a courtroom. She identified the trial’s adversarial nature, the role of the jury within it, and relatedly, its procedural formalism and emphasis on evidence, as its principal features as represented in popular culture. The audience is invited into the role of juror as the trial progresses through opening statements, in which the prosecution’s and defence’s contrasting positions are set out; an examination of the evidence broken down into discrete components through alternation between direct and cross examination; the closing statements where both sides try to combine all evidence into convincing account; and finally the coda of the verdict.9

Subsequent scholarship has, however, complicated this picture. Naomi Mezey and Mark Niles emphasised the wide range of representations of law in Hollywood film, from the conformist to the subversive, which they attributed to the complex structure and diverse political economy of the film industry.10 For trial films more specifically, Nerit Grossman has pointed out that – despite offering the symbolic trappings of law and justice – they frequently posit lawyer-heroes in opposition to an unfair legal system, while verdicts in these films often provide only partial closure, highlighting disjuncture between the outcome of the trial and the outcome of the broader social dilemma that the case encapsulates.11

Focusing more specifically on the American trial film’s ‘heroic age’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Barry Langford highlighted the ideological tensions, subjective nature of truth, and potential arbitrariness of verdicts exhibited in films ostensibly celebratory of the legal system, such as 12 Angry Men (1957), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).12 Norman W. Spaulding, meanwhile, has pointed out the particular importance of moments of disorder in court, whereby lawyers (especially) and other participants break rules and disrupt procedures in their efforts to ensure justice is actually done.13

Indeed, it is significant that in trial films the protagonist is so often a lawyer, tipping the audience’s sympathies towards one particular side in the case, and the moral and social cause it represents, rather than inviting us to dispassionately favour the fair adjudication of the contest, regardless of its eventual victor. As both Grossman and Spaulding have highlighted, trial films frequently depict moments of conflict between lawyer-heroes and judges, as a way of illustrating the gap between the fairness (or not) of the system and the question of righteousness in the case.14

Putting law, film, and the New Deal together

There is then, I think, especial insight to be gained from examining cinematic representation of the law in the era of the New Deal. Film is of value to the legal historian not only in demonstrating the wider normative social understandings of law that underpin its operation, but also the internal ideological contradictions that its workings reveal, particularly when the system of legal thought is not hermetically sealed in its operation, but exposed to other prerogatives, structures, and expectations, such as those relating to the motion picture. This is particularly pertinent in the context of the 1930s, when legal realism supplanted classical jurisprudence intellectually and then practically, accelerated by social and economic problems and the political and popular scrutiny they brought with them.

Film historians have already extensively explored the place of Hollywood in the New Deal era, both in its films’ animation of the predominant political debates of the day, and in the interconnection between studio and mainstream politics – not least in the case of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, his relationship with Herbert Hoover, and his role in the Californian Republican Party.15 Given the particular importance of legal arguments to the political debates and disputes of the 1930s, and Hollywood’s durable fascination with law as a theme and the legal drama as subgenre, gleaning how law operated as motif and structuring device in American films of that period is invaluable in understanding their broader political orientations.

Whither A Family Affair specifically in all this? Well, I think it’s hugely significant that its hero is a judge, not a lawyer, and that while focused on a particular legal dispute, it is not a trial film per se (the closest it gets to that, in its final scene, is the closest its judge-protagonist gets to behaving like a lawyer). It is a film rooted in classical jurisprudential ideas, it is a film about the legal system working properly when politics is corrupted. However, it is also a film that confronts business as the source of that corruption, which pits law against capital, at least when the latter is ostensibly acting in concert with government, through the act of upholding abstract jurisprudential principles, in defence of common prosperity. And even if it is a film that ultimately concludes reassured of the validity of those principles, it nonetheless showcases the difficulties of squaring them with the economic upheavals of the 1930s, especially when one factors in popular sentiment, in the form of the preferences and premises held by cinemagoers.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

In my Rewound post on Passport to Pimlico (1949), published earlier this year, I remarked upon how the film’s retrospective reputation as a particularly whimsical, gentle Ealing comedy belied the ardently social democratic, anti-capitalist core especially evident in the more zealous first drafts of the film’s story, and still persistent in more muted form in the finished version of the film.

I want to pick up the thread again here, and explore how this toning down and shifting of emphasis continued through the film’s contemporary promotion and reception.

Promoting Passport to Pimlico

Ealing’s promotion of Passport to Pimlico’s went heavily on the comedy element, as with its posters featuring enlarged versions of the principal actors’ heads atop daintier cartoon bodies, and taglines designed to evoke expectations of amusement, such as ‘Laugh your way to happiness’, and ‘French goings on in the heart of London’ – the latter accompanied by a drawing of police officers in British and French dress encountering each other. French-ness here implied foreignness and exoticism, not resistance to an external occupier (which was an equally significant component of the idea of Burgundian Pimlico in the film.

The film and Ealing’s promotion of it certainly captured the domestic press’s, and it would also seem filmgoers’, imaginations. Reviews were uniformly positive, and in some cases mentioned the rapturousness of the audiences’ responses to it in cinemas. The film was a huge success during its three-week run at the Gaumont in Haymarket and at Marble Arch Pavilion, and was only taken off at the height of its popularity on May 18^th due to other booking commitments.1 Industry publication Kine Weekly listed it among ‘Other Notable Attractions’ in its review of 1949’s biggest box office hits.2

Emphasis on Englishness

There were two especially dominant themes in the film’s reception. One was pride in it as a paradigmatic example of what English or British – the slippage between the two descriptors suggests a lack of distinction between the two in the minds of the London papers’ film critics – cinema was and should be. The Daily Express identified Connie Pemberton’s (Betty Warren) line ‘We are English – and it’s because we’re English that we must fight for our right to be Burgundians’ as the best line in the film.3 The quote was also included in a number of other reviews.4

More generally, reviewers also praised scriptwriter T. E. B. Clarke for the way he fleshed out the film’s fantastical comic scenario while rooting it in and satirising English life. Indeed, they drew an explicit connection between national identity, comedy, and quality. ‘It laughs with and at the English,’ remarked the Sunday Times.5 The Sunday Dispatch got even more local in its diagnosis: ‘The dialogue is neat and smacks of nowhere else but London in its style of humour.’6 Writing in the Sunday Express, Steven Watts praised Ealing for having ‘come closer to the heart and nature of the life of people in this country than anybody else’.7

This prompted a degree of bullishness in some quarters as to how good-quality British films could perform domestically and abroad if given the chance. Watts noted that Passport to Pimlico ‘has none of those big names, none of those big dimensions or “production values” which we have always been told are the only way to make even English-speaking foreigners look at our films.’ He added: ‘You don’t come away from this picture thinking of a star. I would be hard-pressed to tell you who is the star of the excellent team which shares the work’.8 The Daily Graphic railed against exhibitors and distributors for ensuring that foreign fare and ‘Wicked Lady type’ British films dominated cinemas rather than more authentically English films like this.9

The film’s brand of Englishness/Britishness did attract admiring reviews overseas. When Passport to Pimlico was shown at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, L’Espoir de Nice praised it as:

…really good cinema…The English film-makers merrily satirise their local governments, their diplomacy, their police methods. They manage to ridicule situations which ought to be dramatic, and it is curious to note that the English, who have suffered so terribly during the war, are capable of remembering its more painful moments in an atmosphere of fantasy.10

Le Figaro said of the film, ‘Sometimes the development is a little “far-fetched”, but mostly it contains witty situations in which one easily recognises the essentially British sense of humour’.11 The following month it played the Trans-Lux-60 Street Theatre in New York. The New York Post described it as ‘a kind of British humour that survives export more successfully than varieties based on dialect', while the New York Daily News called it a ‘diverting comedy. A clever satire on politics and international relations’.12

An anti-statist perspective?

The second dominant strand in Passport to Pimlico’s contemporary reception was its interpretation as, above all, a film opposed to statism and controls. The Sunday Dispatch noted with envy that the inhabitants of Miramont Place ‘can make their own laws, import what they like from across the border, abolish purchase tax, rationing, etc., and do exactly what you and I would like to do if we had half the chance’.13 In a similar vein, the Evening News remarked: ‘Imagine, if you can bear the painful thought, the unrestrained joy of these Pimlicans when they realise that all Whitehall’s orders in Council and forms in triplicate matter to them not a tinker’s cuss’.14 The Sunday Dispatch, meanwhile, asked its readers:

Now what would you do, citoyens, if you found that your own back alley was really a foreign country? Would you declare yourself an alien, no longer forced to suffer the kind of life imposed by Sir Stafford Cripps? Would you burn your ration book? Tear up your identity card? Abolish purchase tax? Forbid any cry of “Time, gentlemen, please!” at your local pub?15

These are, it ought to be stressed, extremely partial readings of a film whose cast of characters are ultimately compelled to implement their own, stricter controls in response to the constitutional crisis that befalls them. Yet that does not mean these reviews were wrong in perceiving vicarious pleasures to be had in those same characters’ earlier libertarian spasm, nor to highlight their anti-authoritarian streak – albeit one that sits alongside a desire for law and order – directed primarily against the national government.

The idiosyncratically socialist writer J. B. Priestley, who had worked with Ealing to adapt his own play They Came to a City for the screen in 1944, reviewed Passport to Pimlico for the left-leaning New Statesman. Priestley claimed that the audience at the Newport cinema where he watched the film ‘hilariously greeted’ its characters’ evasion of the restrictions placed upon them.16 Yet while critical of Labour for not jettisoning ‘Cumbersome and pedantic methods’ of government while expanding the state and its role, he insisted on perceiving nuance within the watching crowd’s mood:

Most people here are sensible enough to understand that in the situation we are placed in now many major controls are necessary. We have to discipline ourselves. I think many of the controls are enforced with foolish inflexibility, largely because minor officials lack either the power or the intelligence to make exceptions.17

This caveated critique of arbitrarily wielded overmighty power echoed the sentiments that Passport to Pimlico’s director Henry Cornelius expressed in an interview with the conservative-inclined Daily Graphic:

I am a timid man and in making “Passport to Pimlico” I wanted to get a message across to my fellow sufferers whose bones, like mine, turn to water when confronted with authority. If after seeing the film there is a bit of extra determination in the way in which they confront their boss, landlord or mother-in-law, then “Passport to Pimlico” has not been made in vain. Not that I am waging a campaign against these or any other reputable agents of authority. In fact, I am sure that many of the controls and restrictions facing mankind all over the world to-day are necessary and will ultimately help progress. But I am sure that we shall never get anywhere unless we constantly remind ourselves that all these frustrating limitations of freedom are man-made and if “they” can put them up “they” can, presumably, pull them down – and in this country “they” still means “us”.18

Priestley’s and Cornelius’s readings get closer, I think, to the contradictions and tensions that propel Passport to Pimlico forward. The film carries multiple impulses: to represent Britain, positively and enthusiastically; to champion communal welfare over individual self-interest and unrestrained capitalism; to thumb its nose at bureaucratic, top-down statism. Yet the economically liberal readings of it in the British press at the time are illustrative of why a film that offered a localised, autonomist vision of post-war social democracy has enjoyed such an enduring appeal across a broader political spectrum.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warnings: Murder; Death; Alcohol; Bereavement; Domestic violence.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the first part of this piece on typical plots of Ealing films, and their ideological roots, talking about Ealing’s war films and also the films it made set during the war after the conflict was over:

I’m following that up here with Part II, looking at some of the typical structural elements of Ealing’s post-war comedies and dramas, with a particular emphasis on how the template of the war film echoed through both.

Post-war comedies

So much has been written about the topic of the Ealing comedy, but I really want to zero in here on a few common, overlapping elements. I also want to stress the extent to which these feature across the divide drawn by Charles Barr between the gentler films written by T. E. B. Clarke, and the more acerbic ones directed by Alexander Mackendrick and Robert Hamer. These are not simply formal similarities; they have their own structuring logics that frame the ideological conflicts within the films.

Firstly, there is the fantasy. Put simply, there is the point in the films whereby (in the main) rather ordinary people in pretty mundane, recognisable circumstances, find themselves in, or manoeuvre themselves into, remarkable scenarios (mostly within those same surroundings). In Hue and Cry (1947), it is the discovery by a bunch of youths that one of their employers, Mr Nightingale (Jack Warner) is the leader of a criminal gang that communicate via the pages of their favourite comic. In Passport to Pimlico (1949), it is the detonation of an unexploded bomb revealing that a small neighbourhood, Miramont Place in central London is in fact Burgundian territory and thereby independent of Britain. It is the discovery by the inhabitants of the fictionalised Scottish island of Todday of a shipwrecked consignment of whiskey in Whisky Galore! (1949). It is the discovery of a fabric that never gets dirty in The Man in the White Suit (1951). And so on.

The outcome of this is generally a form of mobilisation, whereby individuals or groups conduct quite remarkable operations, whether by meticulous planning or spontaneous activity, usually in defiance of the powers that be. The youngsters in Hue and Cry hatch a plan to use the same comic to lure Nightingale and his gang into a trap (after the police have refused to take them seriously). In Passport to Pimlico, there is the realisation by its inhabitants that they no longer have to follow the existing rules and regulations of post-war Britain; a handful of them conspiring to turn Miramont Place’s water back on after the authorities have cut it off; and a spectacular grassroots aid programme that begins with a few people throwing food to the residents of Miramont Place out of sympathy, and culminates with masses of packages being delivered from every borough. In Whisky Galore!, there is the clandestine rescue of the whiskey for purposes of holding a rèiteach, and the subsequent rapid concealment of that whiskey when customs officials turn up.

If those forms were more pro-social acts of law-bending and breaking, there is also the more explicitly individualist cases, where the fantastic scenario is the mobilisation. In Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), shop assistant Louie Mazzini (Dennis Price) methodically and surreptitiously murders his relatives, members of the D’Ascoyne family (all played by Alec Guinness) who had disinherited his mother, one by one in order to gain the dukedom of Chalfont. In The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), bank clerk Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) and foundry owner Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) conspire to stage the robbery of gold bullion under Holland’s watch, melt it down and recast it as model Eiffel Towers, and ship it over to France. In The Ladykillers (1955), a gang of criminals posing as musicians rob a security van near Kings Cross Station in London, before the meddling of their landlady Mrs Wilberforce (Katy Johnson) and their own greed and distrust results in them murdering each other in succession.

I would argue that the fantastic events in Ealing comedies play a structural role equivalent to the war, or rather the intensification of the war (from a British perspective) in Ealing’s wartime films. We are presented with characters in some ways individually and/or collectively unfulfilled until something extraordinary happens. And, though played for laughs rather than straight, the characters find purpose in the process of mobilisation, and they overcome – if only temporarily – ostensibly more powerful conservative, restrictive, or established forces, by means of ingenuity and/or cooperation. They replicate aspects of Britain fighting ‘alone’, or indeed of the movements waging asymmetrical warfare in occupied Europe.

This is clearest in the Clarke-written Passport to Pimlico, whereby the realised independence and subsequent besiegement of Miramont Place enables the residents to re-enact the war in different ways, with former air raid warden Arthur Pemberton (Stanley Holloway), whose ideas for communal improvement had previously been ignored, becoming ‘prime minister’. He is appointed to this role by the newly arrived Sébastien de Charolais, heir to the dukedom of Burgundy, played by Paul Dupuis, who had previously starred as Yan, the Breton fisherman who helped ferry fleeing members of the British Expeditionary Force back across the Channel in Johnny Frenchman (1945), and then as a member of the Belgian Resistance working for the Special Operations Executive in Against the Wind (1948). Dupuis’s casting was emblematic of the way Ealing films found a flattering mirror for Britain in the resistance movements it had allied with.

It is also true, though, of the Mackendrick-directed Whisky Galore!, which is set in 1943, in the middle of the war, and yet the conflict so far away that places them under the supervision of the pompous English Home Guard captain Paul Waggett (Basil Radford), is Todday’s own phoney war. It is the discovery of the wrecked whiskey cargo that Captain Waggett fastidiously refuses to let them salvage, and which they capture and conceal anyway, that is their real war. Through their communal mobilisation, it brings about the solution to their collective problem, the whiskey shortage, and also individual ones in enabling Peggy (Joan Greenwood) and Catriona Macroon (Gabrielle Blunt) to marry Sergeant Odd (Bruce Seton) and George Campbell (Gordon Jackson) by ensuring the rèiteach can take place. As Monja Danischewsky, the film’s associate producer, later reflected in his autobiography, ‘no resistance movement in war-ravaged Europe was better organised than that in these war-ravaged islands’.1

We might also think about the broader similarity between the heist film, which The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers were comical early British versions of, and certain subgenres of war film that became especially successful in the decades after the Second World War ended, which centred on combatants behind enemy lines, such as prisoners of war or special operatives, of which Ealing’s The Captive Heart (1946) and Against the Wind respectively were again early examples. We have the secretive plotting of an ingenious, high-stakes, illegal act (in the view of the relevant ‘authorities’), whether that be a bank job, a breakout, or an act of sabotage, its tense execution, and its equally fraught aftermaths as the perpetrators go on the run.

These formulae set up the ideological tensions at play in most Ealing comedies: over the relationship between individual wants and aspirations and the collective good, between authority and order on the one hand and freedom and egalitarianism on the other; between tradition and radicalism. If the films ultimately came down in differing positions on these issues, they nonetheless were together engaged in an ongoing dialogue about how British society was organised, about the nature of British national character, that started with a shared set of references, for which the war was hugely formative.

For example, Whisky Galore! is more ruthless in offering no reconciliation with or rehabilitation of Captain Waggett, who ends the film a despondent figure or derision, than Passport to Pimlico is in concluding with the Pimlico-Burgundians reaching an amiable accommodation with the pompous civil servants Gregg (played by the same man, Basil Radford) and Straker (Naunton Wayne). But the former also recalls the uncompromising condemnation of upper-class incompetence and complacency of wartime films like The Next of Kin (1942), which ended with a condemnatory depiction of careless talk in front of a German spy by two officials (also played by Radford and Wayne!).

Post-war drama

The war also had a substantial, though complex, influence on the social realist dramas made by Ealing after the war, primarily directed by Basil Dearden – who previously directed The Bells Go Down (1943), about London firefighters during the Blitz, and The Captive Heart – and produced by Michael Relph. Just as the studio’s war films had been especially concerned with civil defence, and with blurring the lines between civilians and combatants within the war effort more generally, so its post-war dramas imbued post-war public services with wartime ideals. As Relph himself subsequently reflected, ‘…at the time we were still very service-minded after the war, and the fight against crime had taken the place of the fight against the Germans’.2

The question many Ealing post-war dramas asked was: what can we do with the energies, potential, and good intentions of ordinary Britons in the context of the post-war period? And the answer they frequently gave – just as they had in wartime – was: enlist them into the realms of the expanded state, invest those qualities within concrete, governmental institutions. The Blue Lamp (1950) follows new recruit Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Hanley) into the police force, taken under the wing of the experienced George Dixon (Jack Warner). In Cage of Gold (1950), Dr Alan Kearn (James Donald) takes over his father’s doctor’s surgery, now part of the new NHS. I Believe in You (1952) sees Henry Phipps (Cecil Parkinson), formerly of the Colonial Service, begin a new career as a probation officer, under the kindly guidance of the soon-to-retire Mr Dove (George Relph). These are films at least partly about social and institutional reproduction.

The continuity between the depictions of wartime and post-war institutions is neatly illustrated by The Blue Lamp. When, after appearing as Corporal Horsfall in The Captive Heart, Jack Warner wanted to take the role of crime boss Mr Nightingale in Hue and Cry, Balcon sought unsuccessfully dissuade him from being cast against type in this way, reportedly telling him ‘This warm Cockney corporal you created in the last film must go on a little longer’.3 The corporal did indeed effectively reappear when Warner was cast as the avuncular PC Dixon, a point reinforced by both The Captive Heart and The Blue Lamp featuring Gladys Henson in the role of his wife, and Jimmy Hanley as a sort of surrogate son.

The police, the NHS, the probation service, these are all institutions framed as embedded within their communities, made up of professionals who know their local neighbourhoods, are intimately familiar with and serve their inhabitants, and are recognised and respected by them. Nonetheless, the society they exist within is characterised as a troubled one, in which the qualities and aspirations that institutions might give meaningful purpose too are instead squandered in delinquency and crime – especially among the young, or the unfulfilled.

In The Blue Lamp, the truly rotten element is encapsulated by young hoodlum Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde), PC Mitchell’s antithesis, who fatally shoots PC Dixon during a robbery. The murder crosses a line that causes the local community to rally around the police, confirming its qualities as their own, including among the more respectable local criminals, who collaborate in helping them catch Riley. In I Believe in You, Henry Phipps saves the essentially good Charlie Hooker (Harry Fowler) and Norma Hart (Joan Collins) from involvement in a robbery that would imperil their futures.

The Ship that Died of Shame (1955), meanwhile, demonstrated what happened when wartime purpose did not find a positive post-war outlet. Based on a story by Nicholas Monserrat (as was The Cruel Sea, made two years earlier), it centres on skipper Bill Randall (George Baker), first lieutenant George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough), and coxswain Birdie (Bill Owen), the highly effective wartime crew of a Navy gunboat; when the war ends, Hoskins convinces his former crewmates to band together to buy their former vessel and then to use it to smuggle ever more illegitimate cargoes, only for the craft to increasingly malfunction out of seeming guilt at its owners’ activities, eventually sinking (and killing Hoskins).

Elsewhere, though, the war itself (rather than its conclusion) was cited by Ealing films not just as as a marker of service-mindedness, but also as a cause of societal problems, often by explaining the trajectory of individual characters. Train of Events (1949) provides a portmanteau of stories connected by their characters’ involvement in a single rail crash, including actor Philip (Peter Finch), who murders his estranged wife Louise (Mary Morris), who had been unfaithful to him while he was serving in the Army during the war, and Richard (Laurence Payne), an escaped German prisoner of war.

In The Blue Lamp, the narrator vaguely says of Riley’s girlfriend Diana Lewis (Peggy Evans) that her involvement with him stemmed from her being from ‘a home broken and demoralised by war’, while we also learn that George Dixon’s son had died in the conflict. In I Believe in You, Charlie’s mother (Gladys Henson) attributes his involvement in gangs to his father dying in the war, while probationer Hon Ursula (Ursula Howells) has become an alcoholic after the death of her pilot lover; it is also implied that another probation officer, Matty Mattheson (Celia Johnson) lost her husband during the war as well.

In Frieda (1947), meanwhile, the film’s eponymous heroine (played by Mai Zetterling) is a German girl who moves to Britain after the war with her new husband Robert (David Farrar), an RAF pilot whom she rescued from a prisoner of war camp. Frieda examines the tensions generated by her presence in their Oxfordshire village, due to persisting local Germanophobia, and the pressure this places on her marriage, exacerbated by the arrival of her unrepentantly Nazi brother Richard (Albert Lieven). The film remains animated by the antifascist sentiments integral to the conception of Britain at the heart of Ealing’s wartime films. Yet it also emphasises the need to move on from the war itself, from understanding the fight between liberal democracy and fascism purely within the context of a conflict between Britons and Germans, lest they forget the lesson drawn at the end of the film by Robert’s hitherto fiercely anti-German aunt, Eleanor (Flora Robson): ‘You cannot treat human beings as though they were less than human…without becoming less than human yourself.’

It is apt to circle back here to Michael Relph’s remark, that the fight against crime had taken the place of the fight against the Germans, and ponder the discontinuities as well as continuities implied by such a statement. What does it mean to frame individual decency, social norms, and national character in contraposition not to German Nazism (and its fellow travellers), but to domestic criminality?

Well, it still entails mobilisation through institutionalisation, the integration of the individual into a greater whole (without losing their individuality) within the organs of the state. It still entails a celebration of duty and sacrifice for a greater cause, over selfishness and individualism. But it also means the latter proclivities are individualised and pathologised, rather than understood as an outcome of broader unequal socioeconomic conditions, of unjustified hierarchies. Whereas Ealing’s wartime (and post-war war) films condoned ruthless violence in the name of a just cause, its postwar films were concerned with its suppression at all costs. Whereas mobilisation in the war films meant of society as a whole, the institutionalisation of the whole community, the institutions of the post-war film are that little more sealed off from those communities, committed as they are to their protection – the meritocratic preserve of paternalistic, service-minded professionals.

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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.

Content warning: Death; Murder; Suicide.

I’ve returned again this month to a perennial favourite topic of mine, Ealing Studios, for an article I’m writing on Passport to Pimlico and the post-war settlement. That article builds on this piece I wrote on the film for the newsletter:

What I want to discuss in this post is the ideological underpinnings of Ealing films at a narrative and generic level: the way their typical plots baked certain logics into the way these films functioned as political parables; the origins of those logics; and the tensions that existed between their different elements. It’s a lot to cover, so I will split it into two halves, with Part II following soon.

I take my lead in part from Charles Barr, whose 1977 book Ealing Studios – which I’ve also written about for this newsletter – remains a foundational work in the study of Ealing’s films, but which I think carves too sharp a dichotomy between the work of people he really admires, such as the directors Alexander Mackendrick and Robert Hamer, and those towards whose artistic and political credentials he is more dismissive of, like scriptwriter T. E. B. Clark. My own view is that typical plot elements remain hallmarks of Ealing films across that divide, and that the ur-narratives they work within condition the ideological content of their films even if they chafe against them.

I commence this analysis of Ealing plots with the formative wartime period of the studio’s filmmaking under Michael Balcon (who headed it up from 1938), and its continued production of films set during the war after the conflict had concluded. Part II will look at the studio’s post-war comedies and social dramas.

Wartime films

As the Second World War progressed, the conflict itself became integral to most of the films the studio produced. There is a recurring structure to these films that pertains to the logic of the narrative being imposed upon the British war experience more broadly even as it was unfolding. They often begin within the setting of a group marked by petty divisions and gripes, who initially respond lethargically and uncertainly to the circumstances of war – a kind of ‘phoney war’ period. Then comes a genuine crisis which makes it necessary for the group to mobilise, develop and display proficiency, put aside differences and work together, endure deprivations and make sacrifices. The films usually end on an optimistic note with the promise not only of victory, but also a better future for a transformed community. They exhibit the influence of documentary realism, imported in part through Ealing employing directors like Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt, previously part of the documentary filmmaking unit attached to the Empire Marketing Board, the General Post Office, and the Ministry of Information in succession.

It is particularly striking that while these films sometimes focus on sets of characters within the armed forces, they are more often concerned with depicting those whose occupational status or particular circumstances blur the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant. San Demetrio London (1943), for example, depicts a Merchant Navy crew who successfully salvage their own oil tanker after it is attacked by a German warship, while The Bells Go Down (1943) is about a group of East Londoners who join the Auxiliary Fire Service and serve at the height of the Blitz, and For Those in Peril (1944) is about Air Sea Rescue. Went the Day Well? (1942), meanwhile, portrays a village community compelled to bravely rise up in concert when a locally billeted group of soldiers turn out to be an invading group of German paratroopers.

Adversity as a source of unity is another principal component of Ealing’s wartime films. There is space for individual initiative, bravery, and ingenuity, particularly in contexts where effective leadership is absent and the situation particularly perilous, as with the titular hero of The Foreman Went to France (1942), who travels over of his own accord to France to rescue vital armaments machinery from the advancing Germans. Where characters are shown as particularly rebellious, such as ‘Yank’ Preston (Robert Beatty) in San Demetrio London or Tommy Turk (comedian Tommy Trinder) in The Bells Go Down, the audience gets to enjoy their individuality while also being instructed in the importance of its sublation into the collective. Indeed, individual acts of self-sacrifice are often the way this message is conveyed, as when Tommy dies in The Bells Go Down after gamely scaling a burning hospital building, rather than let his former rival Ted (James Mason) risk his own life in doing so.

The small group facing danger together, whether locality or service unit, stands in for broader national unity, as in Nine Men (1943), which centres on a troop of soldiers who represent a regional and social cross-section of the wider United Kingdom, bravely defending a fort surrounded by the Italian Army in the Libyan desert. This could be extended to represent international unity as well, as with Johnny Frenchman (1944), in which the fractious relationship between rival Cornish and Breton fishing villages is smoothed over through the exigencies of war, epitomised by the romantic union between Cornish girl Sue Pomeroy (Patricia Roc) and Breton Yan Kervarec (Paul Dupuis).

Also central to these films is the notion that suffering and inflicting the violence of war necessarily educates and transforms both individuals and broader British society. In Went the Day Well? and The Next of Kin (1942), about a planned British raid on a German-held French coastal village and German intelligence’s efforts to uncover and foil it, obliviousness and undue deference have frequently grievous consequences. Both films also contain scenes where ordinary women brutally kill a German soldier and spy respectively, in a courageous but futile effort to foil the infiltrators’ plans, only to be immediately discovered and tragically murdered themselves.

Meanwhile, upper class characters are shown as at best particularly prone to complacency and mistakes as in The Next of Kin, or at worst as active Nazi-sympathisers and abetters, as with the squire Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks) in Went the Day Well?. They stand in for the ‘Guilty Men’ of the pre-war leadership who had presided over both economic hardship at home and failure to stand up to German aggression abroad. Vicar’s daughter Nora Ashton (Valerie Taylor), whose father has already been killed by the German invaders, ruthlessly shoots the Squire dead in Went the Day Well? after discovering his treachery, a ritual purging of hereditary but alien leadership.

Post-war war films

Ealing continued to make films set retrospectively during the war after the conflict had finished, as well as ones directly concerned with its aftermath. I want to focus here, briefly, on the former, because although they were but a small component of Ealing’s output during the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, they nonetheless illustrate continuities between the plots and underlying ideological concerns of Ealing’s wartime and broader post-war output.

The Captive Heart (1946) is an early example of the prisoner-of-war film that would be produced by British film studios in far greater quantity from the 1950s onwards. However, whereas those tended to present POWs as uniformly upper middle-class, The Captive Heart was infused with the same collectivist, cross-class ethos as Ealing’s wartime films. It has a principal protagonist: Czechoslovakian Captain Captain Karel Hašek (Michael Redgrave), who is masquerading under the name of a deceased British officer, and in maintaining a written correspondence with the latter’s estranged wife for the sake of concealing his true identity, falls in love with her. Yet the film is nearly equally concerned with the lot of the rest of his fellow prisoners, members of the British Expeditionary Force whose tribulations, sacrifices, and endurance it depicts over the five years from their capture during the fall of France until the end of the war. Their recreation, in the unpromising context of the prison camp, of the world they have left behind is described admiringly by the insider/outsider Hašek in one of his letters as typical of ‘scores of camps across Germany…each a little piece of England’.

Against the Wind (1948), meanwhile, depicts a Special Operation Executive team, including a number of Belgian exiles, undercover in Belgium where they are tasked with destroying a German record office and freeing a high-profile SOE officer before he can be taken back to Germany. The dual mission is a success, but not without the death of one of the operatives, Julie (Gisèle Préville), upon parachuting into Belgium, and of another, Jacques Piquant (Paul Dupuis), who dies by suicide after his cover is blown helping another member of the team evade capture. There is also a suspenseful scene where one operative, Michèle Denis (Simone Signoret) executes in cold blood another, the amiable Max Cronk (Jack Warner), with whom she had built up a warm rapport, after realising he is a double agent. Against the Wind is very much in the vein of the earlier Went the Day Well? and Next of Kin, with its emphasis on the need for caution, alertness, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to engage in ruthless violence under the circumstances of war.

There is a marked difference between these 1940s films and two Ealing made about the war in the 1950s, The Cruel Sea (1953) and Dunkirk (1958). The Cruel Sea focuses on the crew of HMS Compass Rose, or rather principally its experienced Lieutenant Commander George Ericson (Jack Hawkins) and his novice sublieutenants Keith Lockhart (Donald Sinden) and Gordon Ferraby (John Stratton), as they navigate the Battle of the Atlantic and the German U-boat threat. There is a continuity in some ways with the earlier films, with its depiction of war as a learning process, and requiring individuals to take difficult decisions with awful repercussions, as in the famous scene when Ericsson orders his crew to drop depth charges on an oncoming U-boat, sacrificing the lives of merchant crewmen afloat in the water after their own boat is wrecked. Yet Ericsson – and Jack Hawkins – embodies an upper middle-class professionalism, sealed off from the lower orders and civilian life, which is rather distinct from Ealing’s wartime films.

Dunkirk, meanwhile, was one of the very last films Ealing made. It tells the story of the evacuation of the BEF at Dunkirk from two principal perspectives: that of journalist Charles Foreman (Bernard Lee) and his selfish businessman neighbour John Holden (Richard Attenborough, who ultimately sail their own small boats across the Channel to rescue members of the BEF after German forces overrun France; and that of Corporal ‘Tubby’ Binns (John Mills), who seeks to lead a small group of soldiers to safety after they become stranded near the French coast. There are again some of the elements of those earlier Ealing war films, depicting divisions, selfishness, and complacency within society (including between civilians and servicemen, and among servicemen) until a real element of jeopardy is introduced by Germany’s sudden westward advance, at which point individuals properly band together, take initiative, risks, and difficult decisions, and in some case sacrifice their lives.

Yet there is little of the optimism found in those earlier films. Its spirit is embodied by what Foreman tells Corporal Binns when they encounter each other in France:

Everybody saying that war was so damnable it couldn’t happen again, shoving our heads in the sand like a lot of ostriches. Well the Germans didn’t think that way, to them war meant guns or butter. They chose guns. We chose butter.

This is the critique offered by so many wartime Ealing films of Britain prior to 1940, and Dunkirk accordingly encapsulates in its final voiceover narration, the way the events it depicts were increasingly remembered as the war progressed, and afterwards:

Dunkirk was a great defeat, and a great miracle. It proved, if it proved anything, that we were alone, but undivided. No longer were there fighting men and civilians. There were only people. A nation had been made whole.

Yet this jars with the bleak tone of the more than two hours that preceded it: Dunkirk is a film about the phoney war and its sudden conclusion, made at a time when Ealing was on the verge of closing, and when the radicalism of Britain’s wartime coalition and post-war Labour government had been followed by two terms of resumed Conservative rule. This is but an unconvincing mimesis of the unity of the war years, a faltering recollection of what it had seemed to mean. Whereas in The Captive Heart, the fall of France was the beginning of something, in Dunkirk it was very much an ending.

Part II of this post is now available to read here:

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