In what'll likely be the last RP before we're off to The World Transformed to cavort with Gape Nation and hobnob with the great and the good of the hard left, writer and New Socialist culture co-editor Rhian E. Jones joins Jack - who holds the same position at NS - and Geraint, to review the great Mike Leigh's most recent film, last year's Peterloo, and talk about the historical events that inspired it.
Rhian has a unique perspective on politics and their intersection with culture popular and otherwise, as seen in books such as Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, Triptych: Three Studies of The Manic Street Preachers' Holy Bible and Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender. She's also a historian of the Chartist movement, bringing her expertise to her book Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots, as well as Jack Whitehall's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? She's also written for publications such as Tribune and the Guardian.
Rhian talks to us about the historical accuracy of the film, its portrayal of the role of women in the Chartist movement, and how the grotesquery of Peterloo's ruling classes is basically justified. We go on numerous detours, including a discussion of Mike Leigh's other films, the art and poetry that the Peterloo massacre inspired, and its ongoing cultural and political resonances, plus Bob Dylan, Paul Weller, and forgotten '90s punk outfit S*M*A*S*H and their fist-pumping 1994 classic 'I Want To Kill Somebody'.
Read the piece Rhian wrote for New Socialist about Peterloo here: https://newsocialist.org.uk/peterloo-poetry-and-politics-protest-history/ and a kind of companion piece by Joseph Cozens here: https://newsocialist.org.uk/british-left-and-contested-memories-peterloo/
We left no material featuring Rhian on the cutting room floor, but if you like this and want us to keep churning out the goods, subscribe to patreon.com/reelpolitik
