Jack Rosenthal on Jack Rosenthal Street at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
It’s January, which means that the HOME film team have assembled another season dedicated to an overlooked or underappreciated British screenwriter. Seeing as HOME is situated next to Jack Rosenthal Street, this year’s season will showcase the work of the man who gave the street its name. Born in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill, Jack Rosenthal started out with a stint writing for Coronation Street in the 1960s before continuing to work with Granada to develop distinctive sitcoms and one-off dramas in the 1970s, going on to produce work for the BBC and ITV in a long career that lasted until shortly before his death in 2004.
The season is curated by Andy Willis, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Salford and Senior Visiting Curator of Film at HOME, who will joined by programmer Andy Murray to explore Rosenthal’s cultural significance and draw out themes and recurring ideas across his work in an illustrated introduction to the season on Thursday 11th January. The session should provide a useful orientation for those of us who haven’t encountered Rosenthal’s work before. From there, HOME present a choice selection from the screenwriter’s resume, including the fantastically titled amateur football drama Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., a coming-of-age tale centred on a cricket-obsessed youth in the form of P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Spend, Spend, Spend – about a couple’s big win on the pools.
