• 1 This is part of the blurb describing Blackpool on its BBC official website; see <http:/ (...)

1A white limousine is driving through the night. After the title Blackpool crosses the screen from right to left, written in bright yellow bulbs and superimposed on a blue-lit roller coaster, the first tune of Elvis Presley’s famous ‘Viva Las Vegas’ starts playing. Once the limousine has pulled up in front of a large hacienda mansion at the end of a sweeping crane shot, the main protagonist Ripley Holden (David Morrissey) appears in front of a mirror, slicking back his hair and grooming himself to go out while singing aloud the first line over the song. In all likelihood, Ripley is singing – or rather karaokeing – to some diegetic music. But he is soon joined by his wife (Sarah Parish) who is wearing a black low-neck evening dress and black patent high-heels, his daughter (Georgia Taylor), also dressed in a black evening dress, and lastly by his son (Thomas Morrison) who is smoking on the balcony. Their voices overlap in the original soundtrack as the swirling camera introduces them separately before the whole family walk down the stairs together. They go on singing in the limousine, drinking champagne as they are driving through the flashy neon-lit streets at night. Welcome to Blackpool, which “brings the glitz of Vegas to the English seaside town.”1

• 2 When first broadcast in the United States, the British serial drama Blackpool was retitled V (...)
• 3 “There is no consensus among scholars as to the etymology of ‘kitsch’. Some believe th (...)
• 4 First published in Partisan Review 6:5, 34-49, available at <http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg (...)
• 5 Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Bloomington: Indi (...)
• 6 Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts (eds.), Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste, Manchester: (...)
• 7 “Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard. True enough – simultaneo (...)

2As its American title Viva Blackpool clearly indicates,2 the opening sequence of Peter Bowker’s six-part serial drama sets the tone of the entire serial, tapping into some of the most famous icons which epitomize the glitz and kitsch of British and American popular culture. Most academics concur3 that if kitsch is notoriously difficult to define and, what is certain is that it has most often been used negatively by the elite to refer to any type of mass-produced, low-brow and crowd-pleasing art that exploits stock emotions and ready-made conventions. Clement Greenberg, whose 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” has provided much of the theoretical basis for subsequent discussions on the notion of kitsch, writes: “Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious.”4 As literary critic Matei Calinescu points out, “No matter how we classify its context of use, kitsch always implies the notion of aesthetic inadequacy.”5 In other words, kitsch is always the Other’s bad taste or lack thereof.6 The term thus denotes a value judgment which implicitly determines what is “good”, “authentic” or “legitimate” art to which kitsch has consistently been opposed since at least Clement Greenberg’s seminal essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).7 More recently, Monica Kjellman-Chapin notes in the introduction to Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice:

• 9 Ibidem, xiii.
• 10 Media literacy is defined as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media.” <h (...)

3More than a descriptive term, kitsch is used to confer or withhold value and in this respect it questions the viewers’ responses and modalities of reception. Monica Kjellman-Chapin can thus conclude: “In fact kitsch, though it may be carried through the hackneyed and clichéd, does not necessarily reside in the object, but in the response to the object.”9 In the case of television drama, this calls into question the audience’s viewing position shaped by their own cultural background and experience of media literacy.10

• 11 “But when “kitsch enters the museum it doesn’t enter as kitsch. Kitsch images are usua (...)
• 12 Roger Scruton, “Kitsch and the Modern Predicament”, The Social Order, Winter 1999, <http://ww (...)
• 13 Andrew Anthony’s review “What a Tower of Strength”, The Observer, 19 December 2004.
• 14 Mark Duguid, “TV Drama in the 2000s”, <http://0-www-screenonline-org-uk.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/tv/id/1394013/index.htm (...)
• 15 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama. A History, London: BFI-Palgrave, 2015 [second edition], (...)
• 16 “In many ways, production quality and professionalism are higher than they’ve ever been (...)

4Surely enough, as Tomas Kulka recalls, using kitsch is not the same as being kitsch.11 Likewise, English philosopher Roger Scruton writes: “The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the intention to act unintentionally. Preemptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or ‘kitsch’.”12 If nothing else, Blackpool is the epitome of “kitsch” with inverted commas, just as Holden wears “his mutton-chop sideburns as if they were a pair of inverted commas”.13 However, by showcasing icons of kitsch and popular culture from the onset, Blackpool raises the question of its own quality as TV drama in the context of the mid-2000s, when British television drama production was undergoing major changes. On the one hand, the shift toward an ever more competitive, market-led broadcasting environment resulted in “broadcasters – and audiences – increasingly favouring ‘reality’ format”,14 but also in growing concern within the industry about the drift towards safer and formulaic productions to the detriment of quality and originality.15 On the other hand, true creativity and “quality TV” were then being perceived as the preserves of series produced by the American subscription channel HBO.16

• 17 John Reith was the first general manager of the BBC (1922-27) and its first director-ge (...)
• 18 John Caughie, Television Drama, Realism, Modernism and British Culture, Oxford: Oxford Unive (...)
• 19 “Although Benjamin does not offer an exhaustive definition of kitsch in any of his works, his (...)

5Lastly, Blackpool’s exuberant aesthetic choices could be construed as a call to reconsider value judgments on television drama production in other terms than the classical Reithian ethos17 and its social realist aesthetics which have long governed what is deemed “good television” in Great Britain.18 Reading Blackpool through the critical perspective of kitsch thus allows one to pinpoint the ambivalence of its narrative and aesthetic choices. Because of its extravagant hybridity, it defies the modernist insistence on ‘pure’ forms, its opposing pleasure and emotion to reflexivity and creativity. As the serial brazenly exploits generic conventions and iconic artefacts of popular culture while exposing their immediacy as artifice, it questions the very possibility of providing the “heart’s ease” or emotional gratification that Walter Benjamin criticized kitsch for, along with critical distance.19

• 20 John K. Walton, Blackpool, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998, 90.
• 21 “Funny Girls” is set on the North Shore and owned by Basil Newby who has been expanding Bl (...)
• 22 Blackpool has been nicknamed “The Gay Capital of the North”. See The Bolton News, 16 July (...)

7The serial makes full use of “the world’s biggest and brashest working-class seaside resort”20 as its setting, exploiting the connotations it provides. The city itself has been built as a collage of eclectic borrowings, from pseudo oriental cultures to its own version of the Eiffel tower, whose distinctive superstructure has become its enduring symbol, and its own version of Coney Island with its open-air amusement park christened “Pleasure Beach”. If the famous Tower is not seen before the second episode, its conspicuous silhouette on the skyline punctuates all the other episodes, which also use its underground aquarium as a meeting point. Other notable features include the Promenade, the silhouettes of its rollercoasters, its amusement arcades with their flashy neon signs and the camp cabaret venue “Funny Girls” which stages drag performers21 and attests that Blackpool is now also noted for harbouring a vivid centre of gay culture,22 adding masquerades and inversions to the carnivalesque tradition of the city.

• 23 In addition to the opening song “Viva Las Vegas”, which conveys Ripley’s ambitious dream an (...)
• 24 The name Shangri-La refers to the earthly paradise described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel L (...)
• 25 At the end of his opening speech, Holden concludes: “I declare this arcade open. Let’s (...)
• 26 Holden’s opening speech starts with such an assertion: “The gaming industry creates gamblin (...)
• 27 See Hermann Broch’s 1950 essay, Quelques remarques à propos du kitsch,Paris, Allia, (...)
• 28 His surname Holden may also be an ironical reference to J.D. Salinger’s teenage hero and n (...)
• 29 Andrew Anthony, “What a Tower of Strength”, the Observer, 19 December 2004.

10Like the place he owns, Ripley Holden cuts a brash figure, sporting sideburns like his hero Elvis Presley, whose plate portrait hangs on the wall of his kitchen.23 Holden is wearing a silk white suit for festivities, bootlace ties and flowery shirts for his daywear, a golden chain, a bracelet and a signet ring. His home is a hacienda manor house named “Shangri-La”,24 with golden taps in the bathroom, a pool in the garden and the “S” of the house sign turned into a dollar sign. Ripley Holden is the epitome of the “nouveau-riche” entrepreneur, overbearing and vulgar, mesmerized by the glittering world of Las Vegas, its over-the-top, anything-goes mind-set as well as its individualistic and materialistic hedonism. He believes in the virtues of free-trade capitalism, thinks his business is a true surrogate for “living the dream”,25 equating his amusement arcade to “the people’s stock exchange”.26 He describes his dream-project for the arcade to his business partners in the kitschest terms possible: “You know, one day you’ll stand outside here and there’ll be pink colonnades, statues, barmen dressed as gladiators and shit and the sound of money falling 24 hours a day.” (episode 3). As such Ripley Holden is a caricature of the “Kitschmensch” or “kitsch-man”, first described by Hermann Broch,27 for whom value is reduced to price and who believes he can build up a “Shangri-La”, a kitsch utopia where arrogance, ruthless self-assertion and money are the recipes of permanent happiness, where one can fashion oneself after one’s own idealised image, no matter how sham it may be. If his first name evokes Patricia Highsmith’s famous con artist,28 Ripley is very much a masquerade, a fantasy “re-play”. As Andrew Anthony sums up, “Ripley [is] a triumph of mockery. He live[s] in a mock hacienda, with a mock Elvis wardrobe and an essentially mock marriage.”29

• 30 Stephen Pile, “Dark Drama in Blackpool’s Arcadia”, The Telegraph, 6 November 2004. (...)
• 31 “At the time, I was watching David Suchet in The Way We Live Now and wondered if I (...)
• 32 The analysis of the notion of kistch as the starting point of a critique of the consumer s (...)
• 33 Holden recalls his childhood to his son: “I was 16 years old. I’d run away from home. No ro (...)
• 34 In episode 2, Ripley wants to teach his son Danny the difference between right and wrong. T (...)

11Screenwriter Peter Bowker explained that the idea for Blackpool originated in a newspaper report of the city council’s new plans to transform Blackpool into a casino resort as new gambling laws were being discussed in the early 2000s.30 He added that Ripley Holden owed much to Anthony Trollope’s larger-than-life Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now31 as he wanted to create “a modern capitalist monster”, as cynical and dishonest as his Victorian counterpart, but as brash, self-delusionary and sham as Blackpool itself. In this respect, the references to kitsch and its aesthetics in Blackpool can be construed as a harsh satire of the most despicable features of consumer society and its leisure economy.32 Ripley Holden may wax lyrical about his first “Space Invader” and other slot machines, comparing his arcade to a Cathedral (episode 3) and his business enterprise to a Calling,33 he is depicted as cynical and immoral,34 cooking the books and cheating the Inland Revenue. His speeches are redolent of prejudices, peppered with xenophobic, racist and homophobic remarks, when he is not riling against political correctness and rattling off offensive “jokes” against women. He is uncaring towards his wife, rude to his children and to his friends whom he even goes as far as hitting in rage. Moreover, his success story soon turns out to be only a façade. Not only does he rent out sordid tenement flats to prostitutes and drug dealers just behind his glittery arcade which he persistently dubs a “family entertainment centre”, his “family business” is beset by debts contracted on risky ventures. Worst of all, all his dreams of expanding into a true Las Vegas-type casino hotel eventually fall apart after a dead body is found in the arcade, which triggers a police investigation and makes Ripley lose the trust of his business partners as well as the Enterprise Committee’s planning permission.

• 35 These are the words of DC Blythe’s report: “And Natalie Holden is the perfect trophy wife. (...)

12As the main storyline follows Ripley’s downfall, Blackpool is very much a moral parable, equating ruthless capitalism with hubris. The persistent presence of Hallworth (David Bradley), the religious anti-gambling campaigner who is picketing outside the arcade eighteen hours a day, may thus appear as the moral centre of the serial, the only character who does not lie and cannot be bought off. Indeed, if Ripley stands at the epicentre of this phoney world, almost all the characters are deceitful, cheating and dissembling. As soon as the first episode, punters are shown cheating, Ripley’s son Danny is dealing drugs, Ripley is cheating on his wife, his friend in the local police appears easily corruptible; later on, Ripley’s accountant turns out to be a fraud, his “perfect trophy wife”35 starts cheating on him, DI Carlisle conceals his true identity to approach Ripley’s wife Natalie before having an affair with her, Ripley’s daughter Shyanne wrongly suspects her father of beating up her new boyfriend, Danny, who stealthily visits Hailey, one of his father’s prostitutes, turns out to be gay…

• 36 Matei Calinescu, op. cit., 15.
• 37 John Mundy, “Singing Detected: Blackpool and the Strange Case of the Missing Televi (...)

14Within this “aesthetics of deception and self-deception”,36 what John Mundy interprets as “the moral and ethical journey”37 which Riley Holden undertakes at the centre of the drama appears rather unlikely. The happy ending in particular is highly improbable as Ripley eventually shows some humility and selfless magnanimity, accepts to bless his daughter’s marriage with the man he disapproved of and even threatened out of courting her; encourages his wife to leave him for her lover, acknowledges his son is gay and even admits of his own failure as a self-made man, only to celebrate the humble joys of loving his family. Holden’s speech at his daughter’s wedding recaps it all:

• 38 Denis Dutton uses the strongly derogative term of parasitism to define “the essential attri (...)
• 39 John Mundy, op. cit., 59.
• 40 Robin Nelson, State of Play. Contemporary “high-end” TV drama, Manchester: Manches (...)
• 41 Adrian A. Gill, “Blackpool Rock or Singing Defective?”, Sunday Times, 14 November, (...)

16What this specious happy ending makes clear is that Blackpool’s narrative does not intend to provide any realistic character depiction that would follow their moral wanderings and psychological development. The serial’s narrative itself adopts some features that are associated with kitsch, often accused of indiscriminately putting together heterogeneous elements that have been mindlessly copied and recycled.38 Like the city itself, Blackpool is built on eclectic borrowings which at first sight would seem incompatible; it mixes unlikely genres and gleefully plays with their different codes and conventions. Blackpool has been described as a “heady mix of generic reference points”,39 an “energetic hybrid”40 which is part musical, part crime and detective story, relies much on soap opera clichés as regards Holden’s family, involves elements of romance and melodrama (Natalie’s affair and her daughter’s sentimental setbacks) but also of gritty northern social realism (the seedier side of the city depicted in the old decrepit tenement that Holden rents to prostitutes and drug dealers but also through some of the arcade’s working-class employees, deaf old Barry and dyspeptic Ruth) and even of western, through the leitmotif of the showdown between Ripley and Carlisle and the recurring guitar twang that inevitably recalls spaghetti westerns. In his review in the Sunday Times, A. A. Gill took issue with its “confused style”: “Blackpool doesn’t know whether it wants to be drama with humour, or comedy with dark bits.”41

• 42 For example when the camera follows Danny to the tenement flats and shows him knocking on t (...)
• 43 Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” ends with these words: “I’m gonna keep on the run / I’m gonna h (...)
• 44 Typically, Ripley reduces all moral issues to questions of chance. In episode 5, after Hold (...)
• 45 “La distanciation de l’humour ne doit donc pas nous faire illusion : il y a du Kitsch au fo (...)

17Although the main characters and story arcs are introduced as early as the first episode, the plot meanders from one genre to another, making the most of the episodic structure of the serial which manages to achieve as many twists and turns, multiplying red herrings, cliff hangers and new developments (see annex), using abrupt non sequitur editing from one setting to another.42 The serial’s generic hybridity thus foregrounds the arbitrary conventions of each narrative strand whose convergences appear to be governed by pure chance and coincidences. Already right at the beginning, the lyrics of the first two songs set up the metaphor of living one’s life like a gamble, suggesting one is not so much responsible for one’s lot as pure chance.43 Chance is one of the themes discussed explicitly by the characters. Ripley in particular strongly believes his life is ruled by luck, and the narrative clearly follows this view rather than endowing its characters with some destiny. In this regard, the philosophical, existential or even theological questions that are tackled in the serial are treated with a pinch of salt, for the sake of facetious wisecracks or a punch line verging on blasphemy,44 unless one contends with Abraham Moles that “there is a Kitsch theology”.45

• 46 This is actually the ninth and last occurrence of the device in episode 5.
• 47 The first occurrence, just at the end of Ripley and Carlisle’s first meeting (episode 1), (...)

18Most significantly, the chance leitmotiv is humorously foregrounded in the self-reflexive device of the fruit machine which is filmed repeatedly in close shot but instead of the fruit, some of the characters’ faces appear in the windows of the win line. Actually, except for once, when the accountant, grinning, frames a scowling Ripley after telling him he is bankrupt,46 the line shows either Carlisle or Ripley adopting different disguises and attitudes that convey their mood, winking, smirking jubilantly or frowning threateningly. All instances occur when the two men confront each other about the murder case, highlighting the couple’s conflictual relationships.47 The investigation thus becomes a contest between two gamers, with the fruit machine keeping the score as it were. And when they also both appear wearing cow-boy hats or carrying smoking guns, and, in the case of Carlisle, wearing a bobby hat, the device mockingly turns them into the conventional roles of arch enemies in westerns or cops-and-robbers movies.

• 48 Explaining to DC Blythe he is going back to the arcade: “Ripley and I already have a (...)
• 49 As Ripley tells his son after abusing some driver: “A quip for every occasion” (episode 2).
• 50 The serial is also noteworthy for the use of Northern slang (for example “skally” i (...)
• 51 The term comes from Abraham Moles, op. cit., 7. See note 38.
• 52 To Ripley who has made a poor joke about the dead boy found in his arcade, he answers: “Fre (...)

21Both Carlisle and Ripley in particular relish in “breathless repartees”48 with ornate rhetoric and vocabulary, vying for the most high-flown expressions, from utterly vulgar to mockingly politically correct as when Carlisle introduces himself as “a crime-citizen interface consultant” when Ripley explains he runs “a family entertainment centre” (episode 1). Along with such repartees,49 self-consciousness is also achieved through the multiplicity of references that can be found in the dialogue. If many of them draw from British popular culture,50 testifying to Ripley’s background and character, they also illustrate the extreme heterogeneity of a “mosaic culture”51 which ignores generic classification and hierarchy. This eclectic catalogue includes the famous football player David Beckham (cited twice in episodes 1 and 6), British and American pop singers (Shakin’ Stevens, Howard Jones, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, David Essex, Boy George), popular British television presenters (Richard Madeley, Hugh Scully, Carol Vorderman) and TV shows (The Weakest Link, Millionaire, the Graham Norton Show), well-known actors (Jimmy Stewart, Julie Andrews, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry), fictional characters of children’s literature (PC Plod) and historical figures (Mary Queen of Scots, Braveheart or even Tony Blair), notorious serial killers (Fred West) and well-known Northern places (“dead as Southport”, Goodison Park). In a manner characteristic of the miscellaneousness that kitsch has been accused of, allusions also include references to high culture which are mixed up with the rest, as when Carlisle facetiously cites Freud, Wittgenstein and Proust52 and even more unexpectedly when Ripley compares a punter to Pythagoras (episode 1) or transforms Puccini’s aria “Nessun dorma” into “Nesse Dorma” (episode 2).

• 53 Peter Bowker acknowledged that Dennis Potter’s work had great influence on him; to the ques (...)
• 54 Most specifically, Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986) and Lip (...)

22Nevertheless, Blackpool’s most notable feature lies in its extensive use of popular songs. As in traditional musicals films, all of a sudden characters start singing and dancing in the middle of a scene. However, unlike musicals, the songs are not specific to the serial which uses pre-existing pop anthems. Because of this device, Blackpool has unmistakably drawn comparison with Dennis Potter’s work,53 in which musical numbers enact characters’ own self-dramatisations, giving voice to the thoughts and feelings they would otherwise be unable to express.54 As in Potter’s dramas, songs can convey the characters’ inner moods and emotional states. As discussed before, Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” (episode 1) objectifies Holden’s overbearing confidence in his good luck while offering the viewer the perfect image of a happy family that shares his upbeat optimism. Similarly, the love songs (Johnny Cash “Cupid”, Gabrielle’s “Should I Stay”, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “I Second That Emotion”, Slade’s “Skweeze me, Pleeze Me”, The Faces’ “Ooh La La”) all reflect on the characters’ falling in and out of love, their hopes and doubts. After Natalie has discovered Carlisle’s deception, they meet in a café and Mud’s “The Secrets That You Keep” aptly gives dramatic expression to her anger and grief.

• 55 The serial features 23 songs in all, ranging from the 1960s (Elvis Presley, “Viva Las Vegas (...)

23However, whereas the songs in Potter’s work are supposed to endow the characters with greater psychological and existential depth, in Blackpool the musical numbers are not so much related to the characters’ consciousness as they are used to provide performative spaces for enacted fantasy that comment upon the narrative itself. Nor are they meant to recreate the atmosphere of an era, since the songs range from the 1960s to 2000.55 Rather, they capitalise on their pre-existing resonance within popular culture and their appropriation for dramatic purpose.

• 56 In his essay Kitsch and Art, Tomas Kulka identifies the ability to elicit stock emotions a (...)

24Because most of the songs’ lyrics deal with stock feelings and emotions,56 they can easily relate to the main themes of the serial, namely chance and fate, expectations and disillusionments, love relationships, deception and self-deception, and thus provide some comment upon the dramatic action while contributing to further it. Holden’s financial difficulties are thus underlined by Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake”, whose protagonist “thought he was the king of America / Where they pour Coca Cola just like vintage wine”. The songs often prove ironical or subject to dramatic irony, stressing Ripley’s delusionary self-confidence. The visit of the enterprise committee is thus filmed as a deceptive fantasy with everybody dancing in yellow overalls and hard hats to the tune of Diana Ross and The Supremes’ “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” (episode 4). After they have declined Ripley’s planning application and left, Ripley is filmed alone with his accountant on top of the balcony, still singing after the music has stopped. Likewise, the lyrics ending Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” “Have a good time, good time” shed an ironic light on Ripley’s gambling away his arcade (episode 5). Moreover, the songs are also often used to relate the main characters to each other, illustrating how the different storylines are intertwined. As such they function as classical choruses that comment the action, while inviting comparative confrontation of different perspectives. This is the case particularly in the first song of each episode that immediately follows and somehow prolongs the recapitulation of all that happened previously. To give but one example, episode 3 opens with Holden who is singing Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake” while walking in the streets. The song then interconnects a collage of short scenes that show all the main characters in different places (Danny on the balcony at his parents’ home, Natalie at work answering the phone, Shyanne in front of her then-former boyfriend’s flat looking up at his window, Carlisle questioning Hailey during forensic work at her flat) before ending with Holden again who finally arrives at his arcade. As the characters are singing the same song while remaining apart in different environments, the lyrics take on different meaning for each, each reflecting on the “brilliant mistake” they have made.

• 57 Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1987), known as Liberace, was an American pianist who beca (...)

27In one unusual instance, when Natalie and Carlisle are dating each other for the first time at the “Funny Girls” club (episode 2), the song is first introduced diegetically: Gabrielle’s “Should I Stay” is actually performed on stage by a drag singer, but it soon evolves into non-realistic mode, involving the characters as performers. After focusing on the singer, the camera tilts up from the star-lit stage to the ceiling which displays the shadow of a couple who is dancing; the ceiling actually turns out to be a similar star-lit dancing floor where Carlisle and Natalie are dancing but now in full evening dress. Then, just behind the couple turning, Ripley is shown emerging from the ground of the stage, playing the piano in a Liberace-like57 manner when the words “maybe I’m getting in your way” are being played. While romance is still conveyed through the couple’s performance, the use of slow motion which captures the glittering reflections of the club and creates blurring halo effects as well as the metaleptic breaches into the “reality” of the fictional world highlight its artificiality.

• 58 In his play Private Lives (1930) Noël Coward has one of his characters comment on some mel (...)
• 59 In the preface to Pennies from Heaven, Kenith Trodd notes that Dennis Potter fully acknowl (...)

29Because these sequences stand out for their deliberate artificiality and exuberance, the main dramatic device of actors bursting into song and dance routines with their voices superimposed on the original versions brings about a range of complex and ambivalent effects: while viewers are drawn into feeling the potency of popular music,58 fostering that process of shared “emotional reclamation” which Dennis Potter deemed so important in popular songs,59 it also gives prominence to its own artificiality, undermining all mimetic illusion and thus forcing viewers to adopt a critical stance. By challenging the viewers’ suspension of disbelief, the musical numbers appear as first and foremost full-scale performances, revealing both the diegetic world and drama as narrative construct and spectacle.

• 60 John Mundy, op. cit., 69.

30Just as the main character Ripley Holden elicits mixed feelings, both alienating the viewers by his outrageous xenophobic and misogynistic jibes while seducing them by the sheer exuberance of the part and the actor’s performance, Blackpool remains highly ambivalent. As it plays with codes and clichés, making extensive use of kitsch and popular culture, it subverts them as much as sustains them. On the one hand, as its original use of musical numbers testifies, it demonstrates a genuine desire to pay tribute to icons of kitsch and popular culture and their “sheer visceral qualities”,60 their ability to open up all types of personal resonances, to convey feelings and emotional states that can be shared. On the other hand, by foregrounding the hybridity and ambiguity of its narrative, Blackpool also invites its viewers to adopt a critical distance to a medium which usually invites them to immerse themselves into the immediacy of a fictional world.

• 61 Robin Nelson, op. cit., 124.
• 62 “Among the consecrated forms of expression, kitsch and art stand irreconcilably opp (...)
• 63 See note 19.

31In his essay State of Play. Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama, Robin Nelson suggests that such contemporary fictions which, like many postmodernist works, overtly display features such as hybridity, ironic playfulness with genres and conventions and an indiscriminate mixture of high and low culture, foster a “both-and” mode of engagement,61 a mode that combines the pleasure of following a good narrative with the awareness of its artificiality. According to the same principle, Blackpool has its pink-iced cake and eats it. Its deliberate artificiality and exuberance only adds to the enjoyment of its spectacle owing to its playfulness with generic codes and its display of performance. As Robin Nelson also points out, such contemporary fictions overcome the traditional opposition between artless immersion and suspension of disbelief which have characterised popular fiction and the self-reflexive devices that have long remained the hallmark of the avant-garde. In this respect, Blackpool’s stylistic originality demonstrates the ability of television drama to provoke and challenge through the means of truly “popular” narrative devices and cultural artefacts. Ultimately Blackpool perfectly illustrates Walter Benjamin’s claim that all “living forms” of art must engage in “taking kitsch dialectically up into themselves”62 – allowing them to provide some “heart’s ease”63 along with critical distance.