The monthly roundup of film and television publications compiled by Simon Baker, Institute of Historical Research, & published here at the BUFVC by Linda Kaye.

Detectives loom large in the latest update covering a hundred years of the genre; there is the 3^rd revised updated edition of Sherlock Holmes on Screen: the Complete Film and TV History which brings us up to date with the Cumberbatch incarnation; Effron’s The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990-2010; Mason’s Hollywood’s Detectives: Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir; and Nichols-Pethick’s TV Cops: The Contemporary American Television Police Drama.

Ireland also features including, Heinrich Boll and Ireland and his film The Children of Eire. Holger Pötzsch discusses the two dramas – Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday and Jimmy  McGovern’s Sunday in Renegotiating Difficult Pasts: Two Documentary Dramas on Bloody Sunday, Derry 1972. Morales’ Glocal (sic) Ireland: Current Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts has two chapters on contemporary Irish cinema as well as representations of Irishness in The Simpsons. Continuing the humorous theme, Father Ted features in the article, Doesn’t Mary Have a Lovely Bottom?”: Gender, Sexuality and Catholic Ideology in Father Ted. Finally there is Doorley’s Stella Days: the Life and Times of a Rural Irish Cinema.

On a more sombre note the classic shellshock film is discussed by Edgar Jones in War Neuroses and Arthur Hurst: A Pioneering Medical Film about the Treatment of Psychiatric Battle Casualties.

There are two books on the BBC and empire, though from very different perspectives: Darrell Newton’s Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and Black Britons and Simon Potter’s Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British World, 1922-1970.

Media Screen Roundup (November 2012) IHR-BUFVC