Joe Lampton’s north‐south divide: Remembering place and space in Man at the Top (1970‐72)

Abstract

This article considers the depiction of region and materiality in Thames Television’s Man at the Top (1970‐72). Dealing with the present by looking to the past, the series critiques the architectural reconstruction that changed the face of the country during the post-war years and beyond. This transformation is seen through the jaundiced eye of series protagonist Joe Lampton, a 1950s anti-hero recycled for a more uncertain age. He finds himself caught between the pull of tradition and the push for progress ‐ forces aligned respectively with the industrial North (his native Yorkshire) and the cosmopolitan South (his contemporaneous London-based life). Why, in the broader context of the early 1970s, must Lampton’s North be identified with the past? How does materiality work to frame remembrance? The article responds to these questions by mapping the series, along with television culture more generally, onto its socio-political moment. It arrives at conclusions via a constructionist analysis that draws on ‘New Left’ inflected discourses, on the one hand, and philosophies relating to collective memory and materiality on the other.