The document discusses the origins and development of social realism in British film and television from the 1930s-1960s. It began with documentary films showing working class lives, and was further developed through kitchen sink dramas in the 1950s exploring social issues through stories of working class people. John Osborne's influential 1956 play Look Back in Anger, set in a cramped flat, helped establish the angry young man genre. This led to socially realistic films of the 1960s adapting novels and plays about working class northern English life. Television drama also increasingly portrayed social issues through plays and soap operas like Coronation Street.

1. The Social Realist Roots of Soaps

5. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956) was set in a cramped one bedroom flat in the Midlands and explored the social alienation and claustrophobia of the life of a manual worker on a low income. Critic John Heilpern wrote that Look Back in Anger expressed such "immensity of feeling and class hatred" that it altered the course of English theatre. The play was premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956 by the English Stage Company under the direction of Tony Richardson. The press release called the author an ‘angry young man’, a phrase which came to represent a new movement in 1950s British theatre. Legend has it that audiences gasped at the sight of an ironing board on a London stage!

6. Now it’s thought of as key play in the development of British theatre but at the time,not everyone loved it. On BBC Radio's The Critics , Ivor Brown began his review by describing the play's setting—a one-room flat in the Midlands—as 'unspeakably dirty and squalid. It is difficult to believe that a colonel's daughter, brought up with some standards, would have stayed in this sty for a day'.

7. On the other hand, Kenneth Tynan wrote, "I could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger ." Tynan described the play as "a minor miracle": "All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage—the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes an effeminate male friend as 'a female Emily Brontë'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned." Alan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , wrote that Osborne "didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up."