British Audiences Research Articles

Mid-century cultural tectonics: Unpacking the ‘Ying Tong Song’ core sample

The Goons’ ‘Ying Tong Song’ is an unlikely candidate for a popular music chart hit. Yet it held a place in the British top ten for six weeks in 1956. On the face of it, this novelty record presents a musical variation on eccentric Goon themes that had become familiar to British radio audiences over the preceding five years of Goon Shows: silly voices, absurd situations, non sequiturs, sound effects, chaos and seeming non-sense. On closer examination, however, the ‘Ying Tong Song’ reveals itself to be an encapsulation of defining conflicts, phobias and preoccupations of the mid-1950s, such that it takes on the character of a geological core sample. By analysing the ‘Ying Tong Song’ according to its principal operative contexts (British national history, cultural history, musical tastes, radio humour, language and humour theory), this article unpacks key layers of signification that define the Ying Tong phenomenon.

“Thou maiest inforce my body but not mee”: Racializing Consent in John Marston’sThe Wonder of Women

“Thou maiest inforce my body but not mee”: Racializing Consent in John Marston’s<i>The Wonder of Women</i>

Systematic review and content analysis of Australian health care substitute decision making online resources.

Objective Substitute decision makers (SDMs) can be required to make difficult health care decisions on behalf of individuals lacking decision-making capacity. Online resources may be helpful in preparing and supporting SDMs. This study systematically explored the frequency, content and usability of Australian online resources containing health care substitute decision-making content written for consumers. Methods In April 2019, Google searches were conducted to identify online resources containing health care substitute decision-making content for consumers. Analysis comprised mapping resource characteristics, including target audience (individual-specific, SDM-specific, mixed) and thematic analysis of content. Usability was assessed using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT). Results Of the 61 resources identified, the most frequent were webpages (57%), individual-specific (43%) and those produced by government organisations (31%). Only 15 resources (24%) were written for SDMs. Content themes identified were: defining the scope of the SDM role (93%); recommended traits or characteristics of SDMs (80%); instructions or principles regarding standards for decision making (75%); duties of SDMs (70%); and supports (46%), rights (16%), barriers (8%) and benefits (5%) for SDMs. The median (interquartile range) PEMAT scores (out of 100) were 66 (27) for understandability and 60 (55) for actionability. Conclusions SDMs have a vital role in making decisions for people lacking decision-making capacity. Online resources are a potential source of information and support for SDMs in Australia. This study identified key gaps in availability, content and usability of existing SDM resources, highlighting the need for the further development of such resources. We suggest that future resource development include SDMs in the design and evaluation processes. What is known about the topic? An aging population and a greater need for decisions to be made on behalf of others who lack capacity means that health care substitute decision-making is occurring more frequently. Appointing one or more SDMs may occur as part of the advance care planning process. However, being a healthcare SDM can be difficult and stressful. People frequently use the Internet to search for health-related information. What does this paper add? This paper systematically examined the frequency, content and usability of existing Australian online resources with substitute decision-making content written for a consumer audience in English, and identified key gaps in online resources available to support SDMs. What are the implications for practitioners? Although there is a need for resources written for SDMs, authors of online resources need to pay careful attention to the purpose, content and usability of their resource. Future resource development should include input from SDMs and involve them in evaluation to assess whether the resources meet target audience needs.

Small World: Ireland 1978–2018 by Seamus Deane

Book reviews Seamus Deane, Small World: Ireland 1978 – 2018 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 364 pages This collection of Seamus Deane’s writings is not for the dilettante reader: Deane’s grasp of so many inter-locking areas of knowledge demands total focus and concentration. That said, his wide-ranging intelligence as well as his sense of humour make the volume a testament to the man whom Joe Cleary, in the book’s foreword, calls ‘[since] the 1970s, Ireland’s most notable literary critic’. Cleary might have added that Deane was also one of Ireland’s most controversial writers. During the 1970s and since, when many of Ireland’s literary figures tended to run for cover or hedge their bets in ambiguity, Deane was unapologetically nationalist. The essay ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ exemplifies this feature of his writing. The author cites Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland: ‘The Irish must be compelled to be free by a sustained policy of war followed by good governance’. Deane’s response is pithy: ‘To become free and prosperous the Irish were evidently going to have to become English’. In ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’ he explores the importance of the particular tradition in which writers work, and how it affects their writing as well as the reader’s approach to their writing. Yeats, he reminds us, is stimulated in his work by being part of the Ascendancy tradition. In the poem ‘Ancestral Houses’, Yeats offers a particular view of and attitude to Ascendancy history; but to argue for or against its historical accuracy, Deane contends, is pointless, since with Yeats it is history put forward as myth. In contrast Patrick Pearse’s poem ‘The Rebel’, is ‘no more than an adjunct to political action… But ultimately we find ourselves inclined to dispossess it of history, to concede to it an autonomy which is finally defensible only on grounds of style’. Later in the same essay he questions the belief that Irish writing in English provides an injection of vitality to the mainstream of English writing. Writers such as Somerville and Ross, he believes, present to English audiences an Ireland that is ‘endearingly quaint’. In contrast, Yeats, Joyce and Pearse shared a common ambition: to restore vitality to a lost community. For Yeats it was the Ascendancy, for Joyce the family, and for Pearse the revolutionary brotherhood. Book Reviews: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 495 In the wonderfully-titled ‘Wherever Green is Read’, the opening sentence sets the tone: ‘The Easter Rising of 1916 has been so effectively revised that its seventy-fifth anniversary is a matter of official embarrassment. ‘Such is the fear of nationalist contagion, the historical revisionists have themselves been subjected to revision and the emptiness of their claims to ‘objectivity’ exposed: ‘Conor Cruise O’Brien has declared himself to be a unionist and, in that light, his writings can be understood as a polemic in favour of that position’. Likewise the historian Roy Foster is seen as fitting into the British and unionist ‘reading’ of Irish republicanism: ‘The whole point of Foster’s representation is that the Easter Rising was an exercise in irrationalism, a word entirely congruent with nationalism (of the Irish, not the British, kind) and that it was read as such in Ulster’. ‘The Famous Seamus’ is autobiographical and intriguing. The famous one in question is, of course, Seamus Heaney; Deane himself is ‘Seamus eile’. Deane recalls seeing Heaney’s name as it appeared on examination notice boards in St Columb’s College, Derry and later in Queen’s University: ‘Seamus Justin Heaney, or Heaney, SJ.’ Deane as a dayboy escaped St Columb’s at 3.30pm each day, leaving boarders such as Heaney to mope around the walks or play football. ‘Heaney didn’t play football, either soccer or Gaelic, except when required. He would smile from the sidelines.’ Deane recreates in detail an abortive audition for a college production of The Merchant of Venice, with a wooing scene casting Heaney as Lorenzo and Deane as Jessica. Their giggling leads to their angry dismissal by the teacher. In their final year in St Columb’s, Heaney and Deane...

Nōn and Tīd: Computus Calculations and Ancestral Time in Beowulf

The early medieval English computus—or science of the calendar—and its impact on early English perceptions of time offer a new context for the study of Beowulf. This context brings new ideas to bear on the epic poem, which, though it concerns Scandinavians from the Migration Age, is presented by a Christian narrator to an early medieval, English, Christianized audience. The vocabulary of hours and timekeeping in the poem communicates an antiquarian perception of time for an early medieval English audience. The nouns for small units of time, such as the flexible hours of tīd and the monastic hours of nōn (nones) and ūhta (matins, dawn), are in a dialectic relationship that does not contradict the paganism of the characters but provides the poem with a liturgical backdrop. Outside of Beowulf, nōn can only be found in liturgical texts and ūhta occurs only once in nonreligious poetry. Both nouns give a hagiographical resonance to the monster-fighting. Tīd, however, is attached to meaningful moments rather than hours of a fixed arithmetical duration. This is symptomatic of the complementarity in early medieval England between mathematical and observational time perceptions. In Beowulf, both time perceptions are tied to ideological and theological overtones. Nōn represents learned time reckoning, embodied by the Church computus, and tīd represents experiential time, based on Germanic empirical observation. While the narrator announces a Germanic, empirical sense of time in the opening of the poem, there are subtextual allusions to the perception of time as mathematical and bound to the disciplines of the quadrivium.

Shaw and Legacy: Introduction

Shaw and Legacy: Introduction

Identity Construction in Academic Writing of Student Writers Who Use English as an Additional Language: A Literature Review1

Abstract Academic writing is social interaction between writer and reader, during which writers can employ discursive and non-discursive features to construct their identities. However, many student writers who are users of English as an additional language (EAL) may find it challenging to construct their identities in academic writing. Properly constructed identity in academic writing can help EAL student writers develop a stronger sense of self, exercise their agency, and negotiate the academic discourse. Therefore, this paper reviews empirical studies on EAL student writers’ identity construction when they write in English to investigate the features of identities that EAL student writers construct in texts and the factors that influence their identity construction. The findings show that, compared with expert writers and native-English-speaking (NES) counterparts, EAL student writers tend to present a weak authorial identity. Furthermore, EAL student writers tend to be more engaged with texts than with readers and lack commitment to their claims. The identities that EAL student writers construct in academic writing are also interwoven with EAL students’ English proficiency levels, educational experience, disciplinary conventions, genre affordances, and audience awareness. The findings of this literature review can help teachers and educators raise EAL students’ identity awareness and facilitate students in strategically constructing writer identities in academic writing.

‘On the programme tonight’

British popular music television series The Old Grey Whistle Test (OGWT) was a regular feature on BBC2 between 1971 and 1987. The show enjoyed its greatest popularity during the early 1970s when, as a programme synonymous with the term album-orientated rock (AOR), it was responsible for introducing British popular music audiences to a different range of music than was generally featured on national television and radio at the time. Despite its iconic and relatively unique status during the early 1970s, however, little has been written about OGWT. The purpose of this article is to examine and assess the significance of OGWT in terms of its critical role as a tastemaker for British AOR audiences during an era where opportunities to listen to AOR on British television and radio were limited. The article also considers the legacy of OGWT in the digital age where its significant archival footprint on YouTube has given the show a renewed level of importance as a comprehensive retrospective guide to the AOR music of the early 1970s.

“The Show Is Not about Race’”: Custom, Screen Culture, and the Black and White Minstrel Show

AbstractIn 1967, when the BBC was faced with a petition by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination requesting an end to the televised variety program the Black and White Minstrel Show (1958–1978), producers at the BBC, the press, and audience members collectively argued that the historic presence of minstrelsy in Britain rendered the practice of blacking up harmless. This article uses critical race theory as a useful framework for unpacking defenses that hinged on both the color blindness of white British audiences and the simultaneous existence of wider customs of blacking up within British television and film. I examine a range of “screen culture” from the 1920s to the 1970s, including feature films, home movies, newsreels, and television, that provide evidence of the existence of blackface as a type of racialized custom in British entertainment throughout this period. Efforts by organizations such as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, black press publications like Flamingo, and audiences of color to name blacking up and minstrelsy as racist in the late 1960s were met by fierce resistance from majority white audiences and producers, who denied their authority to do so. Concepts of color blindness or “racial innocence” thus become a useful means of examining, first, the wide-ranging existence of blacking-up practices within British screen culture; second, a broad reluctance by producers and the majority of audiences to identify this as racist; and third, the exceptional role that race played in characterizations of white audiences that were otherwise seen as historically fragile and impressionable in the face of screen content.

What does ELF mean for the simultaneous interpreter? An overview of the current situation of the Spanish interpreting market

Abstract The article reports on a survey of Spanish-based interpreters’ perceptions of ELF in simultaneous interpreting settings. The findings of the survey were then further explored through interviews with eight professional conference interpreters in order to provide a more accurate overview of the current situation of the Spanish conference interpreting market. Our research revealed the growing prevalence of ELF at international conferences held in Spain, and that this new reality is perceived as a threat to the interpreting profession. Participants were asked about the quality and accessibility of non-native English source speeches, about their approach to interpreting into English for a non-native English audience, and about whether or not they had to seek alternative employment in other parallel language services, such as translation or teaching in order to make a living.

Translation as Defamiliarization: Translating Tawada Yōko’s Wordplay

Keijirō Suga coins the term “translational poetics” to describe the essential similarities between literary translation and creative writing, since both perform a linguistic revolution or transformation. Japanese-German writer, Yoko Tawada, exhibits a literary style that exemplifies this transformative and interactive potential of language, deriving from her self-described existence in the “poetic ravine” or border zone between languages and identities. Many of the characters in her works are also travelers and lack a sense of national identity or most-comfortable language. Tawada forces her readers to question their belief in the naturalness of their native language through a defamiliarizing style that often involves wordplay, such as humorously drawing attention to the literal meaning behind commonly-used idioms and proverbs. This paper focusses on an excerpt from Yoko Tawada’s 2002 work Yōgisha no yakōressha, “To Zagreb”, and its English translation by Margaret Mitsutani, considering how the defamiliarizing effects of Tawada’s wordplay can be conveyed to an English audience. While double meanings and puns are inevitably achieved differently in the two languages, various translation strategies may create similar effects, such as making Japanese and English creatively interact, or exploiting the inherent possibilities of wordplay in English.

Andrew Marvell in Russia

This article examines interactions between diplomatic representation, state bureaucracy, and rhetoric in early modern diplomacy. It analyzes manuscripts in the hand of the poet Andrew Marvell, which he wrote as secretary to the Earl of Carlisle’s 1663–64 embassy to Moscow. The manuscripts show how a battle over diplomatic ceremony and honor unfolded into disputes over the forms and decorum used in a lively exchange of diplomatic letters and written complaints. These texts were edited, translated, and published for English and international audiences by another embassy secretary, Guy Miège. The article traces the afterlife of the embassy letters in print, arguing that Marvell and Miège became central agents in shaping how the embassy was perceived at home and further afield. The wider context of public diplomacy drew from the secretaries’ considerable skill in framing diplomatic letters for consumption by different audiences. Early modern ambassadors performed rituals of sovereignty, symbolizing status and rank, but the complex art of diplomatic image-making was also directed by lower-ranking embassy personnel. Examining the relationship between bureaucratic practices and the performative nature of diplomacy, this article shows how secretaries exerted significant influence on the reception of early modern diplomatic relations.

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s &lt;em&gt;The Night Manager&lt;/em&gt;

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s &lt;em&gt;The Night Manager&lt;/em&gt;

God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. John D. Niles. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+288.

<i>God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry</i>. John D. Niles. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+288.

Hai Karate and Kung Fuey: Early Martial Arts Tropes in British Advertising

This paper focuses on the responsibility of advertising messages to authentically mirror and reflect British audience feelings towards ‘the Other’ and discusses caricatures of the Chinese in advertising through early martial arts tropes. It provides contextual background to Chinese depictions on screen in Britain before illustrating martial arts representations on print and television advertising during the 1970s. The paper includes examples of two popular brands in Britain: Pfizer’s ‘Hai Karate’ (1973) and Golden Wonder’s ‘Kung Fuey’ (1974-76) to illustrate colonial notions of the ‘Oriental’ during the 1960s and ’70s. This interdisciplinary study borrows from ethical representation and martial arts discourse in film and TV, to explain the exoticisation and exclusion of the Chinese in the context of authenticity and appropriation in advertising.

The Impact of Italian Dubbing on Viewers’ Immersive Experience: An Audience Reception Study

This paper analyses the impact of Italian dubbing on the immersive psychological experience of the American TV series Game of Thrones, using data from post-hoc self-report questionnaires. The show is filled with historical and cultural references to medieval England and the characters are portrayed linguistically through different accents, regional dialects and registers. The research takes the form of an audience reception study. Two audience samples (Italian and English native speakers) watched an excerpt from the ninth episode of season two. English viewers watched the video in the original version, while the Italian sample watched it in the dubbed version. Participants then completed a 40-item questionnaire to self-report their level of immersion, using post-hoc Likert scales to evaluate their presence, perceived realism, character identification, enjoyment and transportation to the narrative world. The results showed significant differences between the immersion levels experienced by the two samples. The English audience reported higher scores on each immersion scale, especially with regard to perceived realism, character identification and transportation, while presence seemed to be the least affected by language transfer.

When Boucicault was ‘Boucicaulted’: The Octoroon, Race, Photography, and Pre-adaptation

Boucicault’s Octoroon was famously ‘adapted’ by the author in response to British audience’s discomfort with Zoe’s death in 1861. As it turns out, however, a play very similar to Boucicault’s appeared in England nearly a year before its British debut. The Quadroon; or, the Sun Picture (1860) is not simply an act of plagiarism, or even simply an adaptation of Boucicault’s play. Instead, it is a pastiche of the sources Boucicault drew on for his play, along with unmistakable elements of Boucicault’s – a kind of meta-adaptation. I focus on how The Quadroon incorporates The Octoroon’s use of photography and his sources for the idea of a camera capturing a murderer in the act. What emerges is a play that offers a different representation of the figure of the photographer, the dynamics of racial justice, and the dynamics of racial visuality. By focusing on the use of photography in The Octoroon, The Quadroon, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), I explore more broadly how the spectacle of photographic technology on stage itself offers a self-reflexive commentary on melodramatic form and structure. Melodramas that stage photography both highlight the strange temporality of the tableau and ask us to think of photography as both a frozen image (a product) and kinetic act (a process and performance).

The Character of the Treacherous Woman in the Passiones of Early Medieval English Royal Martyrs

Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of political power provides the impetus for the martyrdom of the royal saint. Flatly drawn and lacking in complex motivation, the treacherous woman of English hagiography is a trope, a didactic exemplar tailored to eleventh-century English audiences, and a caution of the dangers of female agency. Here biblical archetypes, clerical scholarship, and an inherent social misogyny unite in a common literary framework. Yet it is also true that each of these “wicked queens” has a unique transmission history that displays a complicated progression of the motif within a living narrative. This article examines the role of the treacherous woman as a narrative device in three royal hagiographies: <em>Passio S. Æthelberhti</em>, <em>Vita et miracula S. Kenelmi</em>, and <em>Passio S. Eadwardi regis et martyris</em>. In so doing, it explores the authorial motives and social influences that informed the composition of these figures, arguing that each is formed of a convergence of the historical and regional contexts of the saints’ cults with the political concerns and ecclesiastical anxieties of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Guillaume Connesson Les Bains Macabre. Théâtre de l'Athénée Louis-Jouvet, Paris, 1 February 2020

Guillaume Connesson is a French composer widely performed across Europe and the US, but almost entirely unheard in the UK, in concert or broadcast. The article ‘Glimmers in a Dark Age’ (TEMPO 73/288 (2019), 70–80) was my attempt to introduce a British audience to a composer whose work I find compelling, beautifully crafted and worthy of wider attention.

Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement inPericles

Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement in<i>Pericles</i>