United Kingdom Popular Culture

George Orwell once described the English in terms of their fondness for “the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside, and the ‘nice cup of tea'." But what would he have made of the Sex Pistols or Amy Winehouse? In this course we will trace a particular arc through post-1945 British popular culture in order to ask how we got from Orwell to The Office, from the Rolling Stones to Radiohead. We will ask how film, music, and TV prepared the ground for important episodes in British history: the “special relationship” with the United States, the modernization of sexuality, the transformation from welfare state to free market capitalism, the slow passage toward a multicultural society.