Cosmic effects on the intimate screen: J. B. Priestley, Ralph Richardson and 'Johnson over Jordan' (1965)

This article considers ideas about the suitability of experimental, non-naturalist, narrative forms in theatre and television, through the example of a 1965 BBC2 adaptation of J. B. Priestley's 1939 play Johnson over Jordan. Using both textual analysis of the programme and research into the BBC production documentation, this essay explains how the circumstances and conditions of 1960s television adaptation and the star casting of Sir Ralph Richardson transformed Priestley's stage play. The TV adaptation achieved cosmic effects on an intimate scale, through inference and the imaginative integration of the studio space with dubbed sound.

Did the RAI buy it? The role and limits of American broadcasting in Italy in the Cold War

With a 20 million dollar budget and 1,900 staff Voice of America broadcasted in 45 different languages and Italy was one of its main targets. By looking into what went on behind the microphone, this article addresses the extent to which cultural change was planned and structured transnationally, the interactions and interdependencies operating between Washington and Rome, and how a cooperation was achieved despite the fierce resistance of some of RAI’s executives. This allowed to air programmes produced in New York, and led to the launch of the most popular character of Italian radio and television: Mike Bongiorno.

Voice, body and the transmission of the real in documentary theatre

This article analyses how listening is used to develop performances in Alecky Blythe’s verbatim theatre. Listening includes Blythe’s use of recorded oral interviews for devising performances, and also the actors’ creation of performance by precisely imitating an interviewee’s voice. The article focuses on listening, speaking and embodiment in London Road, Blythe’s recent musical play at London’s National Theatre, which adopted and modified theatre strategies used in her other plays, especially The Girlfriend Experience and Do We look Like Refugees. The article draws on interviews with performers and with Blythe herself, in its critical analysis of how voice legitimates claims to authenticity in performance. The work on Blythe is contextualised by brief comparative analyses. One is Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor, a ‘quasi-documentary’ on the playwright, Andrea Dunbar which makes use of an oral script to which the actors lip-sync. The other comparator is the Wooster Group’s Poor Theater, which attempts to recreate Grotowski's Akropolis via vocal impersonation. The article argues that voice in London Road both claims and defers authenticity and authority, inasmuch as voice signifies presence and embodied identity but the reworking of speech into song signals the absence of the real. The translation of voice into written surtitles works similarly in Do We Look Like Refugees. Blythe’s theatre, Barnard’s film and The Wooster Group’s performances are a useful framework for addressing questions of voice and identity, and authenticity and replication in documentary theatre. The article concludes by placing Blythe’s oral texts amid current debates around theatre’s textual practices.

Spectroscopic signatures of an Fmoc–tetrapeptide, Fmoc and fluorene

The hydrophobic Fmoc [N-(fluorenyl)-9-methoxycarbonyl] unit is often conjugated to peptides to confer amphiphilicity on the molecules, and to introduce the potential for aromatic stacking interactions. In this paper we report spectroscopic data for fluorene, Fmoc and Fmoc conjugated to a small peptide (GRDS in this case) to enable interpretation of spectroscopic data collected on complex structures that can be created with Fmoc–peptide molecules. We report absorbance data (ultra violet and infrared), circular dichroism, linear dichroism (both film and Couette flow orientation) and Raman spectra. Orientations of the Fmoc chromophores in the linear dichroism studies are deduced.

Isotype: design and contexts 1925–1971

The work in graphic communication carried out by Otto Neurath and his associates – now commonly known simply as Isotype – has been the subject of much interest in recent years. Conceived and developed in the 1920s as ‘the Vienna method of pictorial statistics’, this approach to designing information had from its inception the power to grow and spread internationally. Political developments in Europe played their part in its development, and production moved to the Netherlands (1934) and to England (1940), where the Isotype Institute continued to produce work until 1971. Bringing together the latest research, this book is the first comprehensive, detailed account of its subject. The Austrian, Dutch, and English years of Isotype are described here freshly and extensively. There are chapters on the notable extensions of Isotype to Soviet Russia, the USA, and Africa. Isotype work in film and in designing for children is fully documented and discussed. Between these main chapters the book presents interludes documenting Isotype production visually. Three appendices reprint key documents. In its international coverage and its extensions into the wider terrain of history, this book opens a new vista in graphic design.

Postmodernism, culture and feminism: the aesthetics of space and performance in Rock Follies and Rock Follies of '77

This article discusses the aesthetic and spatial representational strategies of the popular studio-based musical television drama serials Rock Follies and Rock Follies of ’77. It analyses how the texts’ themes relating to women and the entertainment industry are mediated through their postmodern ironic mode and representation of fantastic spaces. Rock Follies’ distinctive stylised aesthetic and mode of caricature are analysed with reference to the visual intentions and ‘voice’ of the writer, Howard Schuman. Through considering the programmes’ various spatial strategies, the article draws attention to the importance of visual and performance style in their postmodern discourse on culture, fantasy, gender and subjectivity. Analysis of the spaces of musical performance, characters’ domestic environments and simulated entertainment spaces reveals how a dialectic is established between the escapist imaginative pleasures of fantasy and the manipulative and exploitative practices of the culture industry. The shift from the optimism of the first series, when the LittleLadies first form, to the darker mood of the second series, in which they are increasingly divided by industry pressures, is traced through changes in the aesthetics of space and characterisation. As a space of artifice, performance and electronic visual manipulation that facilitates the texts’ reflexive representation of culture and feminised fantasy, the studio’s unique aesthetic strengths emerge through this case study.

“There’s something very familiar about all this”: generic play and performance in the Back to the Future trilogy (Robert Zemeckis, 1985, 1989, 1990)

The Back to the Future Trilogy incorporates several different generic elements, including aspects of the fifties teen movie, science fiction, comedy and the western. These different modes playfully intertwine with each other creating a complex world of repetitions, echoes and modulations. This essay seeks to interrogate the construction of generic elements and the play between them through a close analysis of a repeated performance. Genre is signalled through various strategies employed within the construction of mise-en-scène, a significant portion of this, as I would like to argue, is transmitted through performance. The material detail of a performance – incorporating gesture, movement, voice, and even surrounding elements such as costume – as well as the way it its presented within a film is key to the establishment, invocation and coherence of genre. Furthermore, attention to the complexity of performance details, particularly in the manner in which they reverberate across texts, demonstrates the intricacy of genre and its inherent mutability. The Back to the Future trilogy represents a specific interest in the flexibility of genre. Within each film, and especially across all three, aspects of various genres are interlaced through both visual and narrative detail, thus constructing a dense layer of references both within and without the texts. To explore this patterning in more detail I will interrogate the contribution of performance to generic play through close analysis of Thomas F. Wilson’s performance of Biff/Griff/Burford Tannen and his central encounter with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in each film. These moments take place in a fifties diner, a 1980s retro diner and a saloon respectively, each space contributing the similarities and differences in each repetition. Close attention to Wilson’s performance of each related character, which contains both modulations and repetitions used specifically to place each film’s central generic theme, demonstrates how embedded the play between genres and their flexibility is within the trilogy.

Telefantasy tower blocks: space, place and social realism shake-ups in Misfits

This article considers the ways in which British youth telefantasy Misfits (E4, 2009–13) takes up and makes strange urban spaces familiar from social-realist narratives. Filmed on the sprawling East London estate, Thamesmead, the programme chronicles a group of young offenders who are given powers by a freak storm, turning them into ‘ASBO superheroes’. Misfits depends on its British urban landscapes for the assertion of its ‘authenticity’ within British youth television, using spaces and landscapes familiar from urban youth exploitation cinema and television's narratives of the underclass. After situating the series within existing cultural discourses and recent developments in social-realist representations, the article explores how Misfits disrupts what have become signifiers for the ‘real’ – the brutalism of housing estates, the grey of the concrete and sky – by making them strange, turning them into telefantasy. The series presents the estate as an uncanny place: the domestic, social-realist world shifted into a fantastical space by the storm. Through close analysis, this article explores how the familiar spaces become skewed and unsettling to match our protagonists' isolation, shifting bodies and scrambled sense of self.

The politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

This chapter re-evaluates the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.

Authenticity and performance of class in British factual TV series

The chapter characterises British ‘Reality TV’ as a hybrid of factual and fictional television genres, as signaled by the more accurate genre designation ‘structured reality’ television. From the 1990s onwards, in order to develop programmes that are attractive to audiences and inexpensive to produce, programme makers have focused on hybrids of dramatic and documentary modes. This chapter argues that many recent Reality TV programmes privilege soap opera’s emphasis on character, storyline and performance. This affects the ways that class authenticity is understood, undermining factual programmes’ usual claim to legitimacy based on reference to a pre-existing reality, and transforming hierarchies that separate highly-valued from low-valued types of programme.

Education and training futures in horticulture and horticultural science

Horticultural knowledge and skills training have been with humankind for some 10,000 to 20,000 years. With permanent settlement and rising wealth and trade, horticulture products and services became a source of fresh food for daily consumption, and a source of plant material in developing a quality environment and lifestyle. The knowledge of horticulture and the skills of its practitioners have been demonstrated through the advancing civilizations in both eastern and western countries. With the rise of the Agricultural Revolutions in Great Britain, and more widely across Continental Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as the move towards colonisation and early migration to the New Worlds, many westernised countries established the early institutions that would provide education and training in agriculture and horticulture. Today many of these colleges and universities provide undergraduate, postgraduate and vocational and technical training that specifically targets horticulture and/or horticultural science with some research and teaching institutions also providing extension and advisory services to industry. The objective of this chapter is to describe the wider pedagogic and educational context in which those concerned with horticulture operate, the institutional structures that target horticulture and horticultural science education and training internationally; examine changing educational formats, especially distance education; and consider strategies for attracting and retaining young people in the delivery of world-class horticultural education. In this chapter we set the context by investigating the horticultural education and training options available, the constraints that prevent young people entering horticulture, and suggest strategies that would attract and retain these students. We suggest that effective strategies and partnerships be put in place by the institution, the government and most importantly the industry to provide for undergraduate and postgraduate education in horticulture and horticultural science; that educational and vocational training institutions, government, and industry need to work more effectively together to improve communication about horticulture and horticultural science in order to attract enrolments of more and talented students; and that the horticulture curriculum be continuously evaluated and revised so that it remains relevant to future challenges facing the industries of horticulture in the production, environmental and social spheres. These strategies can be used as a means to develop successful programs and case studies that would provide better information to high school career counsellors, improve the image of horticulture and encourage greater involvement from alumni and the industries in recruitment, provide opportunities to improve career aspirations, ensure improved levels of remuneration, and promote the social features of the profession and greater awareness and recognition of the profession in the wider community. A successful career in horticulture demands intellectual capacities which are capable of drawing knowledge from a wide field of basic sciences, economics and the humanities and integrating this into academic scholarship and practical technologies.

Evaluating and optimizing oral formulations of live bacterial vaccines using a gastro-small intestine model

Gastrointestinal (GI) models that mimic physiological conditions in vitro are important tools for developing and optimizing biopharmaceutical formulations. Oral administration of live attenuated bacterial vaccines (LBV) can safely and effectively promote mucosal immunity but new formulations are required that provide controlled release of optimal numbers of viable bacterial cells, which must survive gastrointestinal transit overcoming various antimicrobial barriers. Here, we use a gastro-small intestine gut model of human GI conditions to study the survival and release kinetics of two oral LBV formulations: the licensed typhoid fever vaccine Vivotif comprising enteric coated capsules; and an experimental formulation of the model vaccine Salmonella Typhimurium SL3261 dried directly onto cast enteric polymer films and laminated to form a polymer film laminate (PFL). Neither formulation released significant numbers of viable cells when tested in the complete gastro-small intestine model. The poor performance in delivering viable cells could be attributed to a combination of acid and bile toxicity plus incomplete release of cells for Vivotif capsules, and to bile toxicity alone for PFL. To achieve effective protection from intestinal bile in addition to effective acid resistance, bile adsorbent resins were incorporated into the PFL to produce a new formulation, termed BR-PFL. Efficient and complete release of 4.4x107 live cells per dose was achieved from BR-PFL at distal intestinal pH, with release kinetics controlled by the composition of the enteric polymer film, and no loss in viability observed in any stage of the GI model. Use of this in vitro GI model thereby allowed rational design of an oral LBV formulation to maximize viable cell release.