Kitchen Sink Dramas

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Kitchen-sink dramas, a genre of British drama that depicts the real and often trashy side of life, are usually political and socially motivated, often illustrating the writer’s view of society’s moral breakdown. Often these dramas use the working class as characters in their stories.

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[edit] Early History

In the austere late 1950s and early 1960s The United Kingdom's Underclass were perennially being misrepresented by the likes of Noel Coward's Drawing-Room farces and permanently on their uppers financially. Riding against this oppression was a reverse-engineering, known today as Kitchen Sink Drama which pioneered modern British Cinema. Counterpoised against the concurrent French New Wave and European film-making in general (Ingmar Bergman for example) one was comparatively the complement of the other in a conflated World-View that saw the World through the same prism. Taking as its theme the championing of the urban-proletariat, Kitchen-Sink Drama was an immediate and influential hit, one considered Dangerous by The System in the UK.

In the terms of this context, one of ground-breaking European cinema, then being considered 'Subversive' by the Higher -Orders only intensified the bullish and insouciant nature of the films and filmmakers themselves of course. While European filmmakers were in bistros in cafe society, British filmmakers articulated seemingly vitriolic and uncontrollable anger onto 16 mm cine-cameras, taking the sophisticated and ahead-of-their-time editing techniques of Sergei Eisenstein and the Philosophy of Camus, Beckett, Sartre even Kafka; this was a delicious new experience in the UK, poets with a muse of fire telling How It Is.

Indeed the counter-attack against the inert status quo was launched by amongst others Tony Richardson and Ken Loach, whose masterpiece Cathy Come Home was so powerful that it launched The Charity Shelter overnight and addressed the fundamental problem of Homelessness in Britain in the 1960s. Such an impact is of course almost unthinkable in today's media. Nonetheless, Loach, a bookish leftish director, managed to galvanise considerable support for his cause successfully and singlehandedly transforming British Drama from its Angry and Raw chrysallis into 'Powerful' and Shocking. In the midst of all this flux the dynamic of cinema in the UK was spellbindingly transformed of course into Class-Consciousness.

Shorn of all of the aforementioned artifice this was Realistic filmmaking from its Alpha to Omega along the lines of Pasolini in Italy for example. No obfuscation then just straightforward Drama/Characterisation usually highlighted by Down-beatendings and broken (Anti-)heroes. Notwithstanding, this was the foothold left by John Osborne's Look Back In Anger which showed Angry Young Men not dissimilar to the directors themselves exploring nightmarish existentialism in their crevice of a house fulminating against authority and indeed Life itself. However, this stereotype is transcended by passionate and heartfelt characterisation and insight. Inter-generational then the films of Pasolini and Bergman are Promethean and Frame-breaking, even today of course as is Osborne's dialectic.

Coming then as they did, when they did, was probably no accident either - this was after all a crossroads in British history when Ealing Comedy and dramas by the likes of Terrence Rattigan were evaporating into tweeness and The Revolution was definitely On. Black and white cinema was not quite ready for its transformation into colour; it would be a few years later. However this suited The Kitchen Sink Drama of course.

Outstanding creatively, these films indeed offered no Yellow--Brick Road out of Poverty other than a Rake's Progress (Lawrence Harvey, magnificent in Room At The Top) and indeed dealt with the claustrophobia and hardship urban poverty caused and its influences economically and personally. Structurally left-wing, multi-layered and post-structural in outlook Kitchen Sink Drama explored the limits and possibilities of groundbreaking cinema. Ultra-realistic in the New Wave school of Filmmaking, infiltrated from Europe by the likes of Bergman and Fellini, Kitchen Sink drama was its equal and opposite in terms of its school-of-philosophy poetry and visionary capabilities.

Noteworthy today for paving the way in terms of gritty realism deliberately unfocused photography and an antagonistic relationship with authority the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach and Tony Richardson are still lauded and feted in today's filmmaking colleges. Artistically speaking, their influence has never dissipated only increased in subsequent years as the vacuum of Thatcherism and even Blairism decimated so many of the aforementioned urban communities.

[edit] Influence on society

Understanding their influence is to therefore acknowledge a sea-change that is with us today. Ultimately it is difficult to envisage a creation-process as fecund in today's cinema such is the diaspora of their forerunner's cultural influences. Made at a time when we never had it so good was juxtaposed to hardship and even hunger they managed to change not only cinema of the time, these films changed the face of perceptions about long-held industrial stereotypes that the likes of Coronation Street oppositionally underpinned - a tweeand conventional look at the Underclass.

Nonetheless, however confrontational Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and A Taste Of Honey photosynthesised perceptions cinema moved on in the late 1960s into colour television and, for most, material affluence. It was the death-knell unfortunately as Hammer Cinema financially supplanted Kitchen-Sink in the late 1960s. In the end then Kitchen-Sink's renaissance came perhaps unexpectedly in the ironic knowing 1990s, a full 180 degree turn from its heyday in the 60s starring the likes of Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Julie Christie and Tom Courtney, all of whom went onto lesser things. The disadvantaged of course will always be with us. Thankfully so too will Kitchen-Sink Dramas in the archives of our hearts and minds.