Jack Rosenthal

by Sue Vice

This is the first-ever critical work on Jack Rosenthal, the highly regarded British television dramatist. His career began with Coronation Street in the 1960s and he became famous for his popular sitcoms, including The Lovers and The Dustbinmen . During what is often known as the "golden age" of British television drama, Rosenthal wrote such plays as The Knowledge , The Chain , Spend, Spend, Spend and P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang , as well as the pilot for the series London’s Burning . This study offers a close analysis of all Rosenthal’s best-known works, drawing on archival material as well as interviews with his collaborators, including Jonathan Lynn and Don Black. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in Television, Film and Cultural Studies, contemporary drama and Jewish Studies, as well as admirers of Rosenthal's work.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2009

About the author

More recently I have developed my enthusiasm for cinema-going into teaching film courses, and in 1993 I completed an MA in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.

I have been interested in representations of the Holocaust for many years, and have developed this into teaching at undergraduate and graduate level, as well as several books on Holocaust literature and film. Between 2007 and 2011, I was Head of the School of English.

Research interests
I am influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and my research background is in the work of Malcolm Lowry. My publications in the field of literary theory include Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (1996) and Introducing Bakhtin (1997).

In relation to the Holocaust, I have written about such subjects as novels, in Holocaust Fiction (2000), children´s perspectives, Children Writing the Holocaust (2004), Claude Lanzmann’s classic film Shoah (a BFI Modern Film Classics volume in 2011), and, with Jenni Adams, have edited a volume entitled Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013). book, Textual Deceptions (2014), is on the topic of false memoirs and literary hoaxes. My longstanding engagement with representation of memory has prompted my more recent investigation of the literature of memory-loss and dementia.

My interest in film and television archives led to my 2009 book Jack Rosenthal, and, with David Forrest, Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond (2017). I have a British Academy Senior Fellowship (2019-20) to write a study of the outtake footage from Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.