- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction: Sounding Liverpool
- 1 George Garrett, Merseyside Labour and the Influence of the United States
- 2 ‘No Struggle but the Home’: James Hanley's <i>The Furys</i>
- 3 Paradise Street Blues: Malcolm Lowry's Liverpool
- 4 ‘Unhomely Moments’
- 5 A Man from Elsewhere: The Liminal Presence of Liverpool in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell
- 6 The Figure in the Carpet: An Interview with Terence Davies
- 7 ‘Every Time a Thing is Possessed, It Vanishes’: The Poetry of Brian Patten
- 8 Finding a Rhyme for Alphabet Soup: An Interview with Roger McGough
- 9 Rewriting the Narrative: Liverpool Women Writers
- 10 Jumping Off: An Interview with Linda Grant
- 11 Ramsey Campbell's Haunted Liverpool
- 12 ‘We Are a City That Just Likes to Talk’: An Interview with Alan Bleasdale
- 13 ‘Culture Is Ordinary’: The Legacy of the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 Writer
- 14 ‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante
- 15 Manners, Mores and Musicality: An Interview with Willy Russell
- 16 Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons
- 17 Putting Down Roots: an Interview with Levi Tafari
- 18 ‘Out of Transformations’: Liverpool Poetry in the Twenty-first Century
‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante
‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante
- Chapter:
- (p.210) 14 ‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante
- Source:
- Writing Liverpool
- Author(s):
Philip Smith
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter compares the work of television writers Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante, both of whom gained prominence in the early eighties and helped renew mainstream television drama by engaging with genre. But where McGovern's writing bears Liverpool's imprint, La Plante's, at least superficially, is defined by its absence. The analysis includes McGovern' The Lakes (BBC, 1997–99) and La Plante's Widows (ITV, 1983).
Keywords: television writers, television shows, Liverpool, The Lakes, Widows
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction: Sounding Liverpool
- 1 George Garrett, Merseyside Labour and the Influence of the United States
- 2 ‘No Struggle but the Home’: James Hanley's <i>The Furys</i>
- 3 Paradise Street Blues: Malcolm Lowry's Liverpool
- 4 ‘Unhomely Moments’
- 5 A Man from Elsewhere: The Liminal Presence of Liverpool in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell
- 6 The Figure in the Carpet: An Interview with Terence Davies
- 7 ‘Every Time a Thing is Possessed, It Vanishes’: The Poetry of Brian Patten
- 8 Finding a Rhyme for Alphabet Soup: An Interview with Roger McGough
- 9 Rewriting the Narrative: Liverpool Women Writers
- 10 Jumping Off: An Interview with Linda Grant
- 11 Ramsey Campbell's Haunted Liverpool
- 12 ‘We Are a City That Just Likes to Talk’: An Interview with Alan Bleasdale
- 13 ‘Culture Is Ordinary’: The Legacy of the Scottie Road and Liverpool 8 Writer
- 14 ‘I've Got a Theory about Scousers’: Jimmy McGovern and Lynda La Plante
- 15 Manners, Mores and Musicality: An Interview with Willy Russell
- 16 Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons
- 17 Putting Down Roots: an Interview with Levi Tafari
- 18 ‘Out of Transformations’: Liverpool Poetry in the Twenty-first Century