Translating History to Television

Date: Saturday 27 April 2013
Time: 2.15
Venue: Lord Ashcroft Building (LAB) Room 002, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge

Guest Speaker: Dr Pamela Cox (University of Essex)

All welcome - no ticket required.

This will be a stimulating lecture about the problems of doing History on television delivered by one of Britain's leading historians.

Dr Cox is a historian and sociologist at Essex University. In 2012, she presented the acclaimed BBC series, Servants: The True History of Life Below Stairs. When it was shown, critics noted that the series presented a very different view of servant life from television's Downton Abbey and was considered one of the best presentations of social history that has been offered by the BBC. Pamela Cox will talk in her lecture about the problems of doing history on television using extracts from her series.

Her book, Bad Girls in Britain (2002), explored the lives of many 'immoral' and criminal young women in the first half of the twentieth century. It followed them into the many reform homes, moral welfare homes and rescue homes that operated at the time, which trained thousands of them as servants. There are significant similarities between these homes and Ireland's infamous Magdalen Laundries. This will be the subject of a follow-up series to Servants on BBC2 later in the year.

For more information please contact Professor Rohan McWilliam.

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