Classic British Television Serials

Paper Summary:

This paper argues that the British television classic serials convey a clear social realistic message and represent English culture in the largest sense of the term. It analyses the definition of artistic social-realism and focuses on the television adaptation of classic novels such as Charles Dicken's "Hard Times" (ITV, 1977) and Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" (BBC, 1995).

From the Paper:

"Incontestably, the Golden Age of Victorian/Dickens's classic serials covers the "Roaring 60s". On the streets, one would be submerged by sexual liberty, women's liberation movements, drug use, individual-child-centred-informal-experimental primary education and teenagers and young adults rejecting, en bloc, their parents and their values, without necessarily finding an equally structured (and structuring) substitute for either. In Cinema, Free Cinema Documentary Movement and the social-realistic genre of the Angry Young Men reproduced the very same reality. Finally, on television one was assaulted by it through news, documentaries and contemporary social-realistic plays and soaps. There was an unconscious collective need for a constructive counterweight and an efficient antidote to an overdose of de-structured and de-structuring reality. "

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