Forrest, D and Johnson, B orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-568X (2020) Erasing Diversity: Mediating Class, Place, Gender and Race in ‘The Moorside’. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 17 (1). pp. 91-111. ISSN 1743-4521
Abstract
This article is focused on the 2017 BBC drama, The Moorside. Over two episodes, it revisits the events surrounding the ‘disappearance’ of Shannon Matthews, a nine-year-old schoolgirl from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, with the drama culminating in the arrest of Shannon's mother, Karen, on charges of child neglect and perverting the course of justice. We identify the events depicted in The Moorside and, in particular, the media's framing of them, as central to the formation of pervasive and corrosive narratives of ‘broken Britain’. In revisiting the Matthews case, The Moorside re-animates and, we argue here, further perpetuates these discourses by rendering them through highly constructed and reductive frameworks of class, place, gender and race. Our analysis considers the textual strategies at work in the drama, some of its key intertexts, questions of diversity – in class terms – within the BBC, and the role of Sheridan Smith, The Moorside's ‘star’, as a conduit for narratives of regional and social identity.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author produced version of a paper accepted for publication in Journal of British Cinema and Television. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | ‘broken Britain’; class; community; diversity; gender; The Moorside; place; race; Sheridan Smith; the North |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 26 Mar 2019 10:44 |
Last Modified: | 07 Jan 2020 16:37 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Edinburgh University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.3366/jbctv.2020.0509 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:139469 |