Erasing Diversity

Mediating Class, Place, Gender and Race in The Moorside

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21785035
AutoresDavid Forrest (0000-0003-0565-3396), Beth Johnson (0000-0001-7808-568X)
Año2020
Volumen17
Número1
Páginas91-111
Fecha de publicación2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of British Cinema and Television (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1743-4521 • E-ISSN: 1755-1714
EditorialEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/jbctv.2020.0509
OpenAlexW2990537412
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas12

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

Art · Drama · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Night-time city culture · Urban Planning and Governance · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies