Tag: BBC

BBC’s 2020 Dracula and its Others

Other, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Remakes of Victorian novels abound in the twenty-first century. While Dracula seems to be a particular favourite for re-writes, we seem consistently drawn back to the Victorian era for our gothic monsters: The Limehouse Golem, Penny Dreadful, Jekyll + Hyde, Sweeney Todd, and many more.[1] Beth Palmer describes these almost Freudian re-imaginings as ‘dramas which are often […] seeking to re-stage, in different ways, the neo-Victorian double-act of surprise and recognition: the Victorians were so strange; the Victorians were strange

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Will the Real Esther Price Please Stand Up? Archival Fiction & The Mill

Other

By Catherine Feely Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, the setting and subject of Channel 4’s drama The Mill, holds a privileged place in my early historical training. My mother remembers that when I was a child, bored stiff by country houses when my parents invested in membership to the National Trust in the 1980s, a trip to the cotton mill could always be counted on to stop me moaning. (My father half-jokes that he has spent all of his adult

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BBC Radio Three and Dion Boucicault’s ‘The Octoroon’ (1859)

Victorians Beyond the Academy

By Ian Higgins (University of Leicester) A few week’s ago Victorian melodrama was (briefly) revived on the airwaves in a one-off production of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, which forms part of a series of plays curated by Mark Ravenhill for BBC Radio 3’s Drama on 3. The play was recorded for radio in front of a live audience at the Victorian-era Theatre Royal Stratford East, which hosted a production of the same play in 1885. It was a

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Who’s afraid of the big bad parasite? ‘The Crimson Horror’ and Victorian Social Angst in BBC’s Dr Who.

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Emilie Taylor-Brown (University of Warwick) A couple of week’s ago Dr. Who saw a very Victorian antagonist (first aired in the UK on Saturday 4th May 2013). One might think that an alien parasite is a rather unlikely denizen of 1890s Yorkshire, but in fact, Mark Gatniss (the episode writer) has hit on a very nineteenth-century anxiety. Past JVC posts, such as Doctor Who-ing the Victorians and Scrooge in Space; Updating A Christmas Carol for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond,

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Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Peter Raby Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero, a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace in the year that marks the centenary of his death (BBC 2, April 21st and 28th) proved to be even more than the sum of its parts, which were considerable. Bill Bailey’s knowledge about Wallace and about Indonesia, and his wittily expressed enthusiasm and admiration, were supported by excellent camera-work, illuminating use of documents from the archive at the Natural History Museum, and a dazzling cast of

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Review of the BBC Radio 4’s adaption of George Moore’s ‘Esther Waters’ (1894)

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Guy Woolnough (Keele University) Esther Waters (George Moore, 1894) is an interesting choice for the BBC Radio 4 Sunday afternoon serial. [1] It is a novel that I have used it as a historical quarry (rather like Gissing’s Nether World), as a source of references of a particular type, but is not a work that I should ever have chosen to read for entertainment. Like Gissing’s work, Esther Waters belongs to the miserablist genre. It is a narrative of adversity and setback for

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Full steam ahead! Murder on the Victorian Railway

Victorians Beyond the Academy

George Dent and Julie-Marie Strange, Trainspotters Extraordinaire A review of ‘Murder on the Victorian Railway‘ first shown 21 February 2013, BBC 2. To watch an earlier interview with Kate Colquhoun, the author of Mr Briggs’ Hat, click here. The body on the tracks; the carriage spoiled with blood; the missing watch; the clue of the hat.  Murder! On the Railway! Not, in this case, an Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle mystery, but, the murder of a businessman, Thomas Briggs, on

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Ripper Street Reflections

Victorians Beyond the Academy

We’ve asked some Victorianists to reflect on Ripper Street. You can read their comments below and don’t forget that you can also join in conversation by leaving a comment in the box below. Damian Michael Barcroft The article has been reproduced with the kind permission of ‘The Whitechapel Society’ (London’s premier society for the study of Jack the Ripper). You can read it in full here “As the sun sets over the Olympics, darkness rises on Ripper Street” On Thursday,

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Ripper Street: The Historian’s Dilemma

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Guy Woolnough (Keele University) I have watched Ripper Street with interest. There is an unpleasant interest in ‘Ripperology’ which distorts the popular view of Victorian crime and policing, and I feared that a series with this title might be focussed too narrowly. There are stories far more worthy of investigation by historians and programme makers than the unsolved Whitechapel murders. The first episode dispelled my fears, for although ‘The Ripper’ was the hook to catch the audience, the message to

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Imagining the Ripper

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Jenny Pyke (Mount Holyoke College) As the new “Ripper Street” series begins on BBC, the many other versions from books, tv, film, and stage echo like footsteps in a dark alley.  “Crime present,” says David Taylor “has a fascination, in part at least, rooted in fear; crime past has a fascination rooted in curiosity.”[i] Figure One: Front cover of the Police Illustrated News found here Teaching Victorian detective fiction, I am reminded regularly that the sensation of Jack the Ripper

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