Reframing the Long 1960s on British Screens

In this book, Estella Tincknell explores representations of gender, violence, race, and desire in a range of significant British crime films and television series made between 1960 and 1973, comparing those to more recent examples set during “the long 1960s.”Tincknell contends that our understanding of the period is marked by tensions around modernity and tradition, with nostalgic myths of masculinity, power and whiteness set against the shock of the new. Both are present in the earlier texts and reimagined in the contemporary narratives, but, she posits, in ways that often ultimately recuperate attempts to critique such myths. This dynamically written book explores key films and television shows made during this period, from police procedurals and heist films to gangster narratives and thrillers, comparing their approach with period-set drama which reimagines that era for a twenty-first century audience. Exploring texts as varied as Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeney, Frenzy, The Trial of Christine Keeler, Endeavour, Legend, The Great Train Robbery and Life on Mars, Tincknell examines changing representations of the police and the criminal, highlighting the centrality and sometimes absence of sexual violence to the discursive regime of the crime story. Blending cultural analysis and original research with close reading, the book unpacks the intersections between text, genre, nostalgia and popular memory in the recirculation of myths about crime in the long 1960s, including the desire for “hard men” villains and detectives, and the suppression of feminist politics in favour of benign patriarchs.