Abstract
This chapter is a history of significant representations of North East England on film and television from the early twentieth century to the 1970s, with a few later examples also given. It introduces the important themes and geographical foci that are necessary for an understanding of the case studies of subsequent chapters. Beginning with some of the earliest silent films, the chapter considers the small number of feature-length fiction films—for instance On the Night of the Fire (Hurst 1940)—made in the region up until the Second World War, alongside propaganda films such as Tyneside Story (Gunn 1944), industrial documentaries, and television documentaries focussing on gender and class experience broadcast up until the 1970s.
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Notes
- 1.
The BFI Britain on Film website can be accessed via https://www2.bfi.org.uk/britain-on-film.
- 2.
The North East Film Archive website can be accessed via https://www.yfanefa.com/.
- 3.
A list of the works included in the BFI’s Mediateque collection can be found via https://www2.bfi.org.uk/archive-collections/introduction-bfi-collections/bfi-mediatheques/all-mediatheque-films.
- 4.
Antsey speaking in Common’s Luck (1974), a documentary about the author shown only in the Tyne Tees region. According to Common’s biographer, Keith Armstrong (2009: 103), he worked on various training and education films during the period. Aside from Tyneside Story, his most notable writing credit was for North East Corner (Eldridge, 1946), which is actually about the fishing industry in North-East Scotland.
- 5.
The phrase ‘that’ll larn you’ means the equivalent of ‘that’ll teach you’.
- 6.
Cited from ‘Look at Britain! Free Cinema 3’, National Film Theatre programmes noes, May 1957. For a summary of the movement, see, for example Chapman (2015: 224–232).
- 7.
See Enticknap (2010) for the intriguing story of the happenstance ‘rescue’ of The Blackhill Campaign film from obscurity, and likely disappearance altogether—a reminder of the fragility of the archive.
- 8.
John Irvin speaking in the documentary The Big Meeting (Draper, 2019).
- 9.
These quotations are from the Radio Times listings for the programmes, accessed via the BBC Genome website.
- 10.
The BBC broadcast Death of a Miner in two parts: the first (shown 27 October 1968) was the Donnellan film; it was followed on 2 November with a follow-up discussion programme, in which Sid Chaplin was one of the panellists (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of his contribution to North-East television).
- 11.
The follow-up series A Year in the Life—Twenty Years On (BBC, 1990) featured an episode on Craghead.
- 12.
Examples of Byker-themed programmes on national British television include the ‘A Finn on Tyneside’ episode of It Takes a Stranger (BBC, 1974), the Viewpoint (BBC, 1959–1973) episode ‘Byker Will not Die’ (1971), the City (BBC) episodes ‘I’ll Die in Byker’ (1979) and ‘Roses Grow in Byker Now’ (1981), the Channel 4 broadcast of Amber’s Byker in 1983, and a Building Sights (BBC, 1988–1997) episode concerning the Byker Wall (1988).
- 13.
Curtis cited in Hankinson (2020).
- 14.
The two films produced for The Way We Live (1959) were ‘Fishermen’ and ‘Darlington Railway’.
- 15.
Description from the Evening Chronicle newspaper, cited in Murphy (2008). ‘The Hooky Mat’, which does not seem to exist in the archives, was apparently the tale of ‘Mrs Cannybody who wants to replace her fireside mat and comes up against the “Geordie Culture Act”’. The title is a reference to the Geordie dialect term for a hand-made mat.
- 16.
Information via the TV Times index accessible via the British Universities Film & Video Council’s Learning on Screen website.
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Leggott, J. (2021). Early Representations of the North East. In: The North East of England on Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69146-2_2
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