In your opinion, how does the representation of youth in 'iLL Manors' affect the collective identity of British youth?

iLL Manors is a film produced by Ben Drew also known as Plan B. He produced this to bring attention to how there are events going on in children's lives who live in the deprived areas of London which no one knows about or takes any consideration too. "This is another bit of the country that you don't talk about, you don't see, but nevertheless, large numbers of children and young people are trapped in this life"Drew stated this in an interview showing that he has an understanding of what is going on and the importance to broaden everyones knowledge of what some peoples lives are like. 

The film itself has a range of mixed reviews from different audiences. I personally think as a middle classed teen that without any understanding of the context of the film certain audiences ,especially those who have no sort of connection with the characters will have an opinion that all youth's act the way they are shown in iLL Manors which is disrespectful to others, drinking alcohol and doing drugs. One review from Toby Young clearly shows how the film itself has had a different impact on him than what Drew wanted. Young said "people on different sides of the political debate and policymakers of all shade will take what they want from this film. But what i took away from it is that the best way to address broken britain is to support the police and the criminal justice system and to start handling out tougher sentences". This review clearly shows how the youths are represented as criminals and people have made an observation that they deserve to be locked up. 

Drew stated when he spoke about iLL Manors at TEDxObserver 'iLL Manors is trying to get to the bottom of why we have these problems in society with our youth, why we constantly keep on reading negative things about our youth". He also said "i believe that there is a demonisation of the youth throughout the media. And people are falling for it, because if you'd had no direct contact with the kids that I'm talking about how the hell can you judge them? because you're only judging them based on something you read in a newspaper, aren't you?" This displays that he knew there would be negative comments such as Young's about the film but to look at the deeper meaning of the film and not to be quick to judge youths identity as a collective opinion. 

Many other reporters somewhat connected with the film having a sympathetic review on the youths in the film and how it is a reflection of what today is like. Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of kids company said "this film has that kind of impact, these children are living with such dark secrets, thats why its so important". This demonstrates that the film has opened peoples eyes and everyone lives differently. It also shows that the film has shown the visible divide between the classes in britain and how we don't pay attention to those at the bottom of the hierarchy. It also shows how people have different collective opinions of the youth shown in this film whilst young's is extremely negative, Batmanghelidjh hasn't targeted youths as a whole. 

Overall I think the film itself has a deeper meaning than what is shown. After reading and watching what Drew wants us to think about the film that not all youths are like this but depending on your background and upbringing its very easy to get mixed up in situations that have been shown in the film. 

contemporary representations of british youth- 2011 london riots

We spent time establishing the background to the 2011 London riots.

Here are the slides and videos we watched in class.

CLICK HERE  to visit the BBC News page which details events surrounding the Mark Duggan shooting.

CLICK HERE to visit the BBC News timeline of events which includes several videos reporting the spread of events around London and the country in general.

The video below shows Sky News' live coverage after the first day of rioting in London.

What have We Learned so far?

We spent some time reflecting on the main things that we had learned in our previous work relating to  Section B of the exam.

Here are the lesson slides we looked at.

Past Exam Questions

Here is a collection of past questions from the Collective Identity section of the exam paper. Hopefully, by looking at these you will be reassured that the exam does not hold any great terrors for you.

A good piece of advice to try to make the question more accessible is to replace the term 'group of people' with 'British Youth'. 

For example:

Analyse the ways in which at least one group of people is mediated'

becomes

Analyse the ways in which British Youth are mediated.

Quodrophenia - Summary and Watch The Film

Set in London and, subsequently, the south coast of England in 1964, this film is useful to watch as an interpretation of what was happening in teenage culture in the mid 1960s.

The film's narrative reveals the story of Jimmy Cooper (Phil Daniels), a London Mod. 

Disillusioned by his parents and a job as a post room boy in an advertising firm, Jimmy finds an outlet for his teenage angst with his Mod friends Dave (Mark Wingett), Chalky (Philip Davis) and Spider (Gary Shail). One of the Mods' rivals, the Rockers, is in fact Jimmy's childhood friend, Kevin (Ray Winstone). An assault by aggressive Rockers on Spider leads to a retaliation attack on Kevin. Jimmy participates in the assault, but when he realises the victim is Kevin, he doesn't help him, instead driving away on his scooter.

A bank holiday weekend provides the excuse for the rivalry between Mods and Rockers to come to a head, as they both descend upon the seaside town of Brighton. A series of running battles ensues. As the police close in on the rioters, Jimmy escapes down an alleyway with Steph (Leslie Ash) – a girl on whom he has a crush – and they have sex. When the pair emerge, they find themselves in the middle of the melee just as police are detaining rioters. Jimmy is arrested, detained with a violent, charismatic Mod he calls 'Ace Face' (Sting), and later fined the then-large sum of £50. When fined £75, Ace Face mocks the magistrate by offering to pay on the spot, to the amusement of fellow Mods.

Back in London, Jimmy becomes increasingly depressed. He is thrown out of his house by his mother, who finds his stash of amphetamine pills. He then quits his job, spends his severance package on more pills, and finds out that Steph has become the girlfriend of his friend Dave. After a brief fight with Dave, the following morning his rejection is confirmed by Steph and with his beloved Lambretta scooter accidentally destroyed, Jimmy takes a train back to Brighton. 

In an attempt to relive the recent excitement, he revisits the scenes of the riots and of his encounter with Steph. To his horror, Jimmy discovers that his idol, Ace Face, is in reality a lowly bellboy at a Brighton hotel. Jimmy steals Ace's scooter and heads out to Beachy Head, crashing the scooter over a cliff, which is where the film begins with Jimmy walking back from the cliff top in the sunset back drop.

 You can watch the whole film via Youtube.

Independent Reading : Mods vs Rockers - Two Tribes Go To War

CLICK HERE to read journalist Jon Savahe's account of the fighting that took place in 1964 on the south coast of England.

Here is an interesting section from the full article:

"On the Whitsun weekend of the 16-18 May 1964, the youth of Britain went mad. If you believed the newspapers, that is, who went with screaming headlines like ‘Battle of Brighton’, and ‘Wild Ones 'Beat Up' Margate’ . Editorials fulminated with predictions of national collapse, referring to the youths as 'those vermin' and 'mutated locusts wreaking untold havoc on the land'.

Whitsun 1964 has become famous as the peak of the Mods and Rockers riots, as large groups of teenagers committed mayhem on the rain-swept streets of southern resorts like Margate, Brighton, Clacton and Bournemouth. Extensively photographed and publicised at the time, these disturbances have entered pop folklore: proudly emblazoned on sites about Mod culture and expensively recreated in the 1979 film Quadrophenia.

Yet, as ever when you're dealing with tabloid newspapers, things are not quite what they seemed. What was trumpeted as a vicious exercise in national degeneration was to some extent, pre-hyped by the press. It was also not as all-encompassing as the headlines suggested: although an estimated 1,000 youths were involved in the Brighton disturbances, there were only 76 arrests. In Margate, there were an estimated 400 youths involved, with 64 arrests. While unpleasant and oppressive, this was hardly a teen take-over."

Independent Reading : Media Creation of Moral Panic - Art and Popular Culture

The following article is taken from www.artandpopularculture.com

BBC News stories from May 1964 stated that mods and rockers were jailed after riots in seaside resort towns on the south coast of England, such as Margate, Brighton, Bournemouth and Clacton. The mods and rockers conflict led sociologist Stanley Cohen to coin the term moral panic in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s. Although Cohen admits that mods and rockers had some fights in the mid-1960s, he argues that they were no different to the evening brawls that occurred between youths throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, both at seaside resorts and after football games. He claims that the UK media turned the mod subculture into a negative symbol of delinquent and deviant status. 

Fights occurred where territories overlapped or rival factions happened upon each other. As noted above, there was an urban/rural split, meaning that the groups could only fight if brought together for some reason - most often the seaside during summer. The film Quadrophenia, on the other hand, depicts some violence within London. Mods sometimes sewed fish hooks into the backs of their lapels to shred the fingers of assailants. Weapons were often in evidence; coshes and flick knives being favoured. The conflict came to a head at Clacton during the Easter weekend of 1964. 

Round two took place on the south coast of England, where Londoners head for seaside resorts on Bank Holidays. Over the Whitsun weekend (May 18 and 19, 1964), thousands of mods descended upon Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton to find that an inordinately large number of rockers had made the same holiday plans. Within a short time, marauding gangs of mods and rockers were openly fighting, often using pieces of deckchairs. The worst violence was at Brighton, where fights lasted two days and moved along the coast to Hastings and back; hence the Second Battle of Hastings tag. A small number of rockers were isolated on Brighton beach where they – despite being protected by police – were overwhelmed and assaulted by mods. Eventually calm was restored and a judge levied heavy fines, describing those arrested as Sawdust Caesars. 

Newspapers described the mod and rocker clashes as being of "disastrous proportions", and labelled mods and rockers as "sawdust Caesars", "vermin" and "louts". Newspaper editorials fanned the flames of hysteria, such as a Birmingham Post editorial in May 1964, which warned that mods and rockers were "internal enemies" in the UK who would "bring about disintegration of a nation's character". The magazine Police Review argued that the mods and rockers' purported lack of respect for law and order could cause violence to "surge and flame like a forest fire". 

Cohen argues that as media hysteria about knife-wielding, violent mods increased, the image of a fur-collared anorak and scooter would "stimulate hostile and punitive reactions" amongst readers. As a result of this media coverage, two British Members of Parliament travelled to the seaside areas to survey the damage, and MP Harold Gurden called for a resolution for intensified measures to control hooliganism. One of the prosecutors in the trial of some of the Clacton brawlers argued that mods and rockers were youths with no serious views, who lacked respect for law and order. Cohen says the media used possibly faked interviews with supposed rockers such as "Mick the Wild One". 

As well, the media would try to get mileage from accidents that were unrelated to mod-rocker violence, such as an accidental drowning of a youth, which got the headline "Mod Dead in Sea."

Eventually, when the media ran out of real fights to report, they would publish deceptive headlines, such as using a subheading "Violence", even when the article reported that there was no violence at all. Newspaper writers also began to use "free association" to link mods and rockers with various social issues, such as teen pregnancy, contraceptives, amphetamines, and violence.