This lecture will use Raymond Williams’ concept of Flow, and Stuart Hall’s reflections on ‘Heritage’, ‘Spectacle’ and ‘Otherness’ to explore A Hole in Babylon (1979) by situating it in the context of the BBC’s own racialised coverage of the Spaghetti House Siege.

Horace Ové and Jim Hawkins reflect on the siege in this Play for Today and offer a counter-narrative to the notion that the siege was an apolitical act of ‘terrorism’. How could it be that the same BBC was responsible for both programmes? What within the structure of the Corporation in the 1970s permitted such perspectives to co-exist? And how did the ‘flow’ of broadcast television operate to maintain the attention of viewers while oscillating so dramatically between such positions?

Today’s lecture and discussion will explore such questions, while being guided by Horace Ové’s own reflections on the frameworks restricting marginalised creators of television. 

Short Bio

Dr. Katie Crosson is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the project ‘Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible’ at the University of Exeter. Her PhD, undertaken at the British Film Institute and Royal Holloway and titled 'Replay for Today: Revisiting Play for Today (1970-1984) at Fifty', re-conceptualised BBC1's Play for Today as a strand rather than a canon of plays, attending to its undervalued and overlooked aesthetic forms and their political resonances.