British Flanders: Co-produced Television Drama and the Limits of a European Heritage

Abstract

If the origins of the heritage discourse are national and political, this is most obviously the case in the United Kingdom. Stuart Hall (2005) has argued that this discourse met a British desire to preserve those sites and objects that would acquire value and meaning only in relation to a specifically English (rather than British) aristocratic and imperial past. The Conservative National Heritage Acts of the 1980s accordingly supported a heritage industry that, centred on the commercial exploitation of noble estates and the natural environment, served the economic interest and bourgeois values of the English upper class (Wright 1985; Hewison 1987). It is in this historical context of Thatcherite Conservatism, Claire Monk reminds us, that the critical debate on the British heritage film emerged in the late 1980s (2011: 14–18). The discussion addressed a collection of historical melodramas that were said to construct a heritage of Britishness that positioned itself at the height of Britain’s imperial power while refashioning its national past into romanticized representations of England’s southern districts and their pastoral sceneries and aristocratic social milieus. In his 1993 essay entitled ‘Representing the National Past’, Andrew Higson posited that films such as Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson 1981) belonged to a cycle of heritage productions whose ‘aesthetic of display’ fetishized the private possessions of the English elites. In the process, these nostalgic visualizations established a ‘heritage space’ for ‘the display of heritage properties’ that, commodified into a national brand, served Thatcherism’s support for England’s social elite (Higson 1993: 117, 2003: 9–45). Since the publication of Higson’s polemic, scholars have increasingly questioned the discursive dichotomy between those melodramas that romanticized an elitist English past and those more socially engaged ‘anti-heritage films’ or ‘post-heritage films’ that were either set in a post-imperialist, working-class Britain or advanced alternative representations of gender and sexuality (Church Gibson 2002; Monk 1995). What united these different responses, however, was their association of the heritage drama with a British national cinema.