Richard Weight – författare

Welcome to the world of the sharp-suited ‘faces’. The Italianistas. The scooter-riding, all-night-dancing instigators of what became, from its myriad sources, a very British phenomenon.Mod began life as the quintessential working-class movement of a newly affluent nation – a uniquely British amalgam of American music and European fashions that mixed modern jazz with modernist design in an attempt to escape the drab conformity, snobbery and prudery of life in 1950s Britain. But what started as a popular cult became a mainstream culture, and a style became a revolution.In Mod, Richard Weight tells the story of Britain’s biggest and most influential youth cult. He charts the origins of Mod in the Soho jazz scene of the 1950s, set to the cool sounds of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He explores Mod’s heyday in Swinging London in the mid-60s – to a new soundtrack courtesy of the Small Faces, the Who and the Kinks. He takes us to the Mod–Rocker riots at Margate and Brighton, and into the world of fashion and design dominated by Twiggy, Mary Quant and Terence Conran. But Mod did not end in the 1960s. Richard Weight not only brings us up to the cult’s revival in the late 70s – played out against its own soundtrack of Quadrophenia and the Jam – but reveals Mod to be the DNA of British youth culture, leaving its mark on glam and Northern Soul, punk and Two Tone, Britpop and rave. This is the story of Britain’s biggest and brassiest youth movement – and of its legacy. Music, film, fashion, art, architecture and design – nothing was untouched by the eclectic, frenetic, irresistible energy of Mod.

The period 1940-1960 was a time of considerable change in British society. It saw the emergence of mass democracy, a world war and then unprecedented affluence. Change brought uncertainty among Britain s elites, which in turn encouraged them to reflect more acutely on the direction the nation was taking. Questions were posed: what was the social role of ordinary men and women in 20th-century Britain? What were their needs, their rights, their responsibilities? How did they stand in relation not only to the State but to their regions and communities? And how were those objects of loyalty or disloyalty defined? Who, in other words, were the British, and by what processes did they come to be so considered?; The contributors explore the development of these ideas by a variety of individuals and organizations, and the relationship between these opinion-makers and political parties. They also examine the extent to which their conclusions were translated into social policy in an attempt to shape the evolution of modern Britain."

‘Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court and it is now my duty to pass sentence.’ Those words, spoken by a judge to the show’s hero in the title sequence of every Porridge episode, are among the most famous in British comedy and they remind viewers that this is no ordinary TV sitcom.The first situation comedy anywhere in the world to be set in a prison, Porridge is about men being punished for crimes committed against the same sort of people who are watching the show. Millions of hard working Britons were fans, many of them anxious about rising crime and worried that burglars would steal the TV set they were watching it on.Yet they still settled down at 8.30pm on Friday nights between 1974 and 1977 to watch a series that celebrates the sometimes pathetic, often ingenious, recidivism of a group of social misfits who by their own admission are failed citizens. How did such a comedy come to be seen as part of a ‘golden age of British sitcom’, without ever losing its edge to nostalgia?Crime, like sex, sells. But Porridge did not romanticise villainy. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, it’s a satire of class-consciousness and power, warmed by a humanistic celebration of men on the margins of society. Its heroes are weak inadequate misfits, not tough, glamorous gangsters. Porridge was a success because the essence of situation comedy is confinement; characters in this format are people who feel trapped and thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. This, therefore, is the ultimate sitcom. Richard Weight's entertaining study of this much-loved classic places Porridge in the context of 1970s social upheavals, explores how the series satirises structures of class and authority through Fletch and Godber's battles to outwit the prison officers Mr Mackay and Mr Barrowclough, and traces its influences on TV comedy that followed.