The 1970s Project

The aim of my research is to look at the diversity of portrayals of youth in 1970s British film and children's television within a broader cultural, social and political paradigm. My immediate perception of this diversity suggests that it is rather wider than the natural diversity one might encounter amongst young people living in the same era. The key focus of my research is to endeavour to explain why portrayals of youth are so much more diverse than the natural diversity within the group. A reasonable assumption is that portrayals are at least in part significantly influenced by socio-political factors. A further aim of my research will be to establish the veracity of this claim and to explore it in some depth. To this end, my research will focus on both the consumption and production of film and television.

Whilst there is a very small amount of literature dealing with 'spectacular' youth subcultures and film (for example, Barber and Sargeant's "No Focus- Punk on Film"), the wider portrayal of youth in film appears to be under researched. Although my research will explore 'darker' rebellious images of youth (in films such as "A Clockwork Orange", "Jubilee" and "Quadrophenia") it will also look at a wide range of other British films in order to attempt to attain a varying and perhaps contradictory picture of youth as portrayed in film. These would include films of diverse genre, such as horror movies, 'sexploitation' films and perhaps some TV 'spin off' films. I will also look at under researched 'Children's Film Foundation' films such as "The Boy Who Turned Yellow" as the audience of these films were younger people consuming representations of youth.

The role of television during this era cannot be ignored. Literature dealing with British television of the 1970s is generally concerned with its 'cult' or 'nostalgic' appeal (see for example, Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson, 2004). Messenger-Davies (2001) has conducted an empirical study of youth audiences of British children's broadcasting in the late 1990s, but there does not seem to be equivalent literature concerning youth audiences of the 1970s. British children's television during the 1970s was vibrant and diverse. Whilst programmes such as 'Crackerjack' and "Blue Peter" had first appeared on television in the late 1950s and retained much of their original formula, others such as "Magpie" (1968 -70) and Phil Redmond's "Grangehill" (1978- ) were new (if derivative) formats which placed emphasis on popular culture and were designed to appeal to an 'older' youth market. Of course, like film, television also provided representations of youth that were largely aimed at an adult audience. In this way, my research will investigate genres such as sitcoms and material filmed for Play for Today.

I am currently working on a chapter of my research which is concerned with televisual and cinematic representations of black British youth in the 1970s.