Alan Clarke

The British television director Alan Clarke is associated primarily with the visceral social realism of his banned borstal play 'Scum' and his football hooligan study 'The Firm', but this book uncovers the poetic and wide-ranging career beneath his violent stereotype, for instance the mythic fantasy 'Penda's Fen' and the radical terrorist short 'Elephant'. Using much original research, this book details Clarke's early theatre career, his development within the 'studio system' of provocative television play strands of the 1960s and 1970s, and his increasingly personal work in the 1980s, which made him one of Britain's greatest auteur directors. In its detailed analysis of many productions, this book raises crucial issues for students and lecturers in television and film studies, including aesthetics, authorship, censorship, the convergence of film and television, drama-documentary form, narrative and realism. As the first full-length study of a television director, this book attends to techniques of television direction and proposes new methodologies in its querying of the critical neglect of directors in what is often described as a writer's medium.