Up the Junction, Intermediality and Social Change

This chapter examines intermedial connections between two visual iterations of Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction, a collection of observational stories published in 1963: Wednesday Play, a TV series directed by Ken Loach in 1965, and a feature film directed by Peter Collinson in 1968. These were based on the author’s cross-class experiences of living and working in Battersea in the late 1950s, taking the form of reported conversations and descriptive prose. Most critical commentary relates to Loach’s adaptation of Dunn’s stories. The privileging of the televisual expression of Dunn’s work, however, tends to obscure the extensive intermedial network of relations surrounding Up the Junction as a multifaceted critical experiment. The chapter demonstrates how the texts engage with complex fields, intersecting themes, and “traces” that illustrate how a basic idea is circulated within different media forms and styles. The analytical foci include Susan Benson’s line drawings in Dunn’s book and their “figural” relationship with her prose, the visualisation of sociological discourses through documentary techniques, the use of popular music, and the impact of monochrome and colour aesthetics. An incident (“The Gold Blouse”) that features in the stories and two visual texts are compared to map the effects of different emphases within intermedial exchange.