Output details

On Northern Men. Radio Broadcast: BBC Radio 4; Broadcast on 25th of July 2009 at 8.02pm and repeated on 27th of July (Radio 4 Archive Hour)

‘On Northern Men’ was conceived and written by Sally Harrison to explore changing portrayals of ‘Northern Men’ in radio and television over the past 40 years. Through archive research and commentary, the programme explores the way that northern English masculinities have been portrayed in British film and television, reconciling issues of blatant sentimentality with the real-life social parallels that inform the canon of the past 50 years.  It examines fictional portrayals that have changed and diversified, yet stayed much the same in many ways. From the crucial age of the Angry Young Man, marked out in This Sporting Life, Harrison considers the contrasts and similarities between the trapped northern masculine identities portrayed in Kes and Billy Elliot. The programme presents evidence that alongside the disintegration of traditional northern male stereotypes in fiction, we have seen the evolution of more diverse explorations, for example, the weak men in Coronation Street, Last of the Summer Wine and Keeping Up Appearances, British-Asian northern masculinities in East is East, the dysfunctional and proud Frank Gallagher in Shameless, and interpretations of homosexual masculinities in Queer as Folk and Jimmy McGovern's The Street.