Coffee-Table Notes

Downtown   The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is Amy Sherman-Palladino’s hit TV drama about a 1950s New York housewife who becomes a stand-up comedian.  Much of the show’s early action is set in Greenwich Village, where Rachel Brosnahan’s eponymous Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel cuts her performing teeth at The Gaslight Café.    The Gaslight was a real life basement club, which, as well as comedy, in the 1960s played host to early performances by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton, and many more riding high on the era’s folk revival. Jazz bassist Charles Mingus played the Gaslight, as did civil rights legend Odetta, blues singers Son House, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and many more.   Exteriors for Mrs Maisel’s depiction of The Gaslight were filmed, not where the real Gaslight was, over on MacDougal Street, but on St Mark’s Place, in the doorway of a tenement building previously photographed for the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album, Physical Graffiti. A few years later...

The Black Stuff   Storm clouds were already gathering over an increasingly broken looking Britain by the time Boys from the Blackstuff was first screened in October 1982. Alan Bleasdale’s five-part drama focusing on the everyday struggles of a gang of Liverpool labourers thrown on the dole seemed to chime with ongoing political dramas in the real world. The stakes had been raised considerably following the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in the 1979 general election, which put Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street for the next decade.   Bleasdale’s series was a spin-off from The Black Stuff, the one-off drama that first introduced the world to Chrissie, Loggo, Dixie Dean and his son Kevin, old George Malone, and of course Yosser Hughes. When first aired in 1980, Bleasdale had already written much of the five scripts it sired prior to Thatcher receiving the keys to number 10. Just as the revolutionary fantasia of Lindsay Anderson’s film, If…, captured the zeitgeist of the ...