Anthony McNicholas

Wrenching the Machine Around: EastEnders, the BBC and Institutional Change

EastEnders is one of the most successful BBC programmes of recent years. Previous studies have concentrated on the text, its reception and its audiences. This article examines the project to get EastEnders on air from an institutional viewpoint. EastEnders was launched at a critical moment in the corporation’s history and was intended to demonstrate the BBC’s ability to produce popular programming. However, this required change both in the way programmes were commissioned and resourced, and in terms of professional culture at all levels of the organization. Using interviews with participants and internal documentation the article highlights problems, discussions and solutions involved.

Faith and fatherland: cultural nationalism and the Irish press in mid-Victorian England

Emigration from Ireland during and after the Famine of 1845–50 was unparalleled in the nineteenth century. By 1890, 40 per cent of those born in Ireland were living outside of it – in Britain, North America and the rest of the English-speaking world. In tandem with this process was a burgeoning nationalist politics which sought the separation of Ireland from England. Widely described at the time as a haemorrhaging of its population, which would lead to the nations disappearance, emigration had centripetal as well as centrifugal effects, and Ireland as a nation was arguably imagined as much outside as inside the national territory. The nationalist newspapers of the Irish diaspora were central to this process; organising and sustaining political movements across vast distances and acting as a vehicle for the cultural nationalism which provided their intellectual and emotional underpinning. This cultural aspect of Irish nationalism has heretofore been largely associated with either the 1840s Young Ireland movement and the early Nation, and fin-de-siecle movements in sport, language and literature. However, an examination of the press of the Irish migrants in the Britain of the 1860s, the poetry, drama and prose as well as the news content, suggests there was much greater continuity of such effort between the earlier and later periods. This article will present an overview of some key issues. In particular, to explore what is the place of the press of the Irish immigrants of 1860s England in the development of Irish nationalism in general and in Irish cultural nationalism in particular?

Co-operation, compromise and confrontation: the Universal News , 1860–69

The Universal News was published in London for nine years between December 1860 and December 1869. It originated as a co-operative effort between Irish and English Catholics to produce a newspaper which, though essentially secular, was to be imbued with a religious sensibility. The great majority of Catholics, however, were by this stage overwhelmingly Irish and wanted news of Ireland and Irish politics. This was not necessarily to the taste of all, so from the outset a balancing act was required between the wants and needs of English and Irish Catholics. This was not to be without its problems, for as the decade progressed and the struggle developed between a secular Irish nationalism and church and state, divisions deepened. The Universal News quickly became a paper for Irish Catholics, spanned a turbulent decade and mirrored in its own history both the internal and external struggles of the Irish in England. Furthermore, the history of the Universal News demonstrates the centrality, in Irish journalism in England, of the influence of the church, and the central question for the press of the migrants was how, in a hostile political environment, to produce and sustain newspapers that were at the same time secular but operated within a system of distribution particularly sensitive to clerical control.