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Original Articles

From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side': The Irish in British Soap and Sitcom

Pages 215-227 | Published online: 21 Jul 2010

References

  • 27 September 1997 . Right to Reply 27 September , 'They [the programme makers] portrayed the Irish as drunks, idiots and unintelligent people and unfriendly'; 'a bit stupid, heavy drinking, there were donkeys running around in the streets. We were one step short of having people tripping over leprechauns.' In apologising, Yentob, too, focused on imagery: 'I think the storyline was fine, I think that they got the tone and a lot of the images often wrong.' All from Channel 4's, BBC1's Points of View, 1 October 1997, also aired numerous complaints. Some, especially from political figures, appear to have ascribed to the programme a political responsibility and power to assist positive and mutually respectful Anglo-Irish relations
  • 1999 . Irish Post , 12 February one of several articles following the Musgroves' arrival in Brookside
  • Pettitt , Lance . 2000 . Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation , Manchester University Press . notes that the 'Christmas Special in 1996 on RTE's Network 2 achieved an audience of 975,000, almost a third of the Republic's total population' (p. 186), but later reviews a widely divergent range of positive and negative responses amongst the Irish in Britain (pp. 196-197)
  • Fiske's , John . 1987 . Television Culture Methuen This is not to reverse the established distinction, in media and cultural studies, between the Open', progressive form of the soap and the 'closed', conservative form of the situation comedy. See
  • Nochimson , Martha . 1992 . No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject , University of California Press . but also more recent feminist works which depict the soap genre in itself as critical feminist cultural praxis: e.g.
  • Feuer , Jane . 1986 . “ 'Narrative Form in American Network Television' ” . In High Theory/Low Culture , Edited by: McCabe , Colin . Manchester University Press . On the supposedly inherently conservative nature of situation comedy, see
  • Alien , Robert C. 1995 . “ 'Introduction' ” . In To be Continued … Soap Opera Around the World , Edited by: Allen , Robert C. 17 Routledge .
  • Allen . “ 'Introduction' ” . 18
  • Geraghty , Christine . 1991 . Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Tune Soaps , 4 Polity .
  • Nochimson . No End to Her 205 – 206 . Nochimson extends a focus on feminine pragmatism versus masculine rigid adherence to the 'rule of law' in her analysis of gender differences in reasoning. She deems two aspects of the myth significant: Demeter's brokering a deal with Zeus, following the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades (Persephone will spend two-thirds of the year with her, and the other third with Hades). Secondly, the agency of Persephone's desire, for, though tricked by Hades into eternal marriage by eating a pomegranate, it is her desire for the symbolic fruit that entraps her.
  • Nochimson . No End to Her 120 – 121 .
  • Allen , ed. “ 'Social Issues and Realist Soaps: A Study of British Soaps in the 1980s and 1990s' ” . In To be Continued 66 – 80 . In discussing ethnic minorities in EastEnders, Christine Geraghty qualifies her general endorsement of the Openness' of soap texts,
  • Brunsdon , Charlotte . 1997 . “ 'Identity in Feminist Television Criticism' ” . In Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader , Edited by: Brunsdon , Charlotte , D'Acci , Julie and Spigel , Lynn . Oxford University Press .
  • Rand , Nicholas and Torok , Maria . 1994 . “ 'The Sandman looks at "The uncanny": The Return of the Repressed or of the Secret; Hoffmann's Question to Freud' ” . In Speculations after Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Culture , Edited by: Shamdasani , Sonu and Munchow , Michael . 185 – 203 . Routledge .
  • Eagleton , Terry . 1995 . Heathcliff and the Great Hunger , 127 Verso .
  • Eagleton . Heathcliff and the Great Hunger 130
  • Kiberd , Declan . 1995 . Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modem Nation , 41 – 42 . Jonathan Cape .
  • Geraghty . “ 'Social Issues' ” . 71 This was the fate of an earlier Irish character on the Square, Aidan, who first arrived as an apprentice footballer for Walford Town football club, became injured, then homeless, and ultimately returned to Ireland. He was a complete isolate as an Irish person in London, parachuted into the Square and dispatched just as suddenly
  • RTÉ radio's . 1997 . Today with Pat Kenny , 23 September
  • Buckingham , David . 1987 . Public Secrets: EastEnders and its Audience , 15 BFI .
  • Redmond , Phil . 1987 . Phil Redmond's Brookside: The Official Companion , 7 Weidenfeld & Nicholson .
  • 1998 . 'King, Queen, Master, Slave: the Master/Slave Dialectic and The Thousand and One Nights' . Neophilohgus , 82 : 335 – 356 . This analysis is partially inspired by Daniel Beaumont's reading, of Shahriyar's beheading of his wives in The Thousand and One Nights as a symptom of his fixation at the level of the imaginary. 'It is in so far as the wife, the other here, is the site of Shahriyar's alienation that he kills her' (p. 347)
  • Moane , Geraldine . 1994 . 'A Psychological Analysis of Colonialism in an Irish Context' . Irish Journal of Psychology , 15 ( 2/3 ) : 250 – 265 .
  • Nandy , Ashis . 1983 . The Intimate Enemy: The Lass and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism , Oxford University Press . On the feminising, infantilising dimensions of colonisation, see
  • Fennel , Nicky . 1996 . 'Interview: Father Ted' . Film West , Summer : 38 – 40 . As confirmed by the authors in
  • Hill , John . 1986 . Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963 , BFI .
  • Grote , David . 1983 . The End of Comedy: The Sitcom and the Comedic Tradition , Shoestring Press .
  • Palmer , Jerry . 1987 . The Logic of the Absurd , 39 – 44 . BFI .
  • Keegan , Dennis . 1996 . Irish Post , 6 April
  • Boyle's , Raymond J. 1996 . Irish Post , 6 May letter,
  • Doyle , Martin . 1996 . 'In Good Faith" . Irish Post, 'The Craic' , 9 March : 1 3 apparently in response to
  • Bakhtin , Mikhail . 1981 . The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays , Edited by: Holquist , Michael and Emerson , Caryl . 253 University of Texas .
  • Linehan , G. and Mathews , A. 1999 . Father Ted: The Complete Scripts , 8 Boxtree .
  • Fennel . “ 'Interview--Father Ted' ” . 39 See their comments in
  • Dixon , S. and Falvey , D. 1999 . Gift of the Gag: The Explosion in Irish Comedy , 60 Blackstaff Press .
  • 2000 . 'Two Priests and a Nun Go Into a Pub' . BBC Radio , 2 22 April
  • Hutcheon , Linda . 1994 . Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony , 62 – 63 . Routledge .
  • Bourdieu , Pierre . 1984 . Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , Edited by: Nice , Richard . Routledge & Kegan Paul .
  • Linehan and Mathews . Father Ted , 8
  • Lash , Scott . 1990 . Sociology of Postmodernism , 20 Routledge .
  • Kennedy , Liam . 1992-93 . 'Modern Ireland: Post-colonial Society or Post-colonial Pretensions?' . Irish Review , : 107 – 112 . shows how the post-colonial pretensions of modern Ireland entail a paradoxical collective aggrandisement, an indulgence of a childlike divestment of responsibility in an imaginary romantic identification with Europe's Other'
  • Scheper-Hughes , Nancy . 1981 . Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland , University of California Press .
  • 1987 . Tom Inglis's analysis of the development of the social and cultural 'mother' archetype in modern Ireland in Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modem Irish Society , 187 – 214 . Gill & Macmillan .
  • Bateson , Gregory . 1963 . 'A Note on the Double Bind' . Family Process , 2 : 154 – 161 .
  • 1995 . Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist , 56 – 107 . Cork University Press . Yet its obviousness as a televisual text, its grotesquery, unsettlingly draws attention to this, by contrast with the 'early postmodernist', Flann O'Brien who according to Keith Hopper disguised an undercurrent of misogyny with metonymic displacements. See his,
  • Llewellyn-Jones , Margaret . 2000 . “ 'The Grotesque and the Ideal: Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Popular Comedy Programmes on British TV' ” . In Frames and Fictions on Television: The Politics of Identity within Drama , Edited by: Carson , Bruce and Llewellyn-Jones , Margaret . 132 Intellect .
  • Sheeran , Patrick and Witoszek , Nina . 1990 . 'Myths of Irishness: The Fomorian Connection' . Irish University Review , 20 ( 2 ) : 239 – 250 . On Ireland's embarrassing inner, pre-modern 'other', historically located in 'the west', see
  • 1984 . Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture , 39 – 63 . University of Pennsylvania Press . I realise this is a rather 'Catholic' argument for the necessity of suffering to redemption. As a theoretical crutch, I cite David Marc's analogous argument for the satirical potential of the decidedly incorrigible Beverly Hillbillies who never adjust to the individualist, consumer culture world of 1950s America:
  • Waters , Maureen . 1984 . The Comic Irishman , State University of New York . Of course, these figures are also in the tradition of the 'comic Irishman', men who are boys who just never grew up. See
  • 1999 . 'The New Funny-bone of Europe' . Belfast Telegraph , 19 December Eamonn McCann argues that the success of contemporary Irish comedy stems from its 'delicious hint of something hazardous combined with a certainty that it means no harm':
  • Falvey , Deirdre . 2000 . 'The Radio Show that Never Was' . Irish Times, 'Weekend Supplement' , 29 July The programme was to be a spoof of Irish radio, the pilot including a sketch in which a group of ex-paedophile priests are interviewed about their plan to tackle their guilt by forming a jazz band. RTÉ claimed it would not appeal to Our audience'
  • 1999 . Irish Post , 20 March
  • Pettitt . Screening Ireland 195 – 197 . 204 See also the discussion of responses to Ted in

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