Suite (212)

In our latest Session, Juliet talks to William Raban about his five decades in film, and especially his engagement with London, from his time in the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in the early 1970s to his most recent work in 2020. They discussed William’s origins in the Structural and Materialist movement of the Seventies, and his use of different film formats from 8mm to digital; how he made his feature-length Thames Film (1986), narrated by John Hurt and shown on Channel 4; his A13 (1994) and Island Race (1996), made partly in response to the election of a British National Party councillor on the Isle of Dogs in east London; how authors such as Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot have come into his work; and the difficulty of making films in the wake of the atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere.

A full list of references, with links is available to Patreon subscribers – go to https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212 to subscribe to Suite (212) for as little as £3.50 a month.

In the first of our Sessions for five years, Juliet speaks to artist, filmmaker, performer and art psychotherapist Jill Westwood (b. 1960) about her work in the early 1980s and its rediscovery after it was included in Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 in 2023. They also discussed how Jill’s practice was formed in the Black Country, where she encountered punk as a teenager, at art school in Stourbridge, and then in Sheffield amidst the city’s post-punk music scene, with deindustrialisation, misogyny and the Yorkshire Ripper in the background. We talked about her photography, performances and films, made as a student at the Royal College of Art in London between 1979 and 1984, how her art intersected with the queer and fetish scenes, and her subsequent work as an art psychotherapist in Australia and London. Finally, we talked about how group exhibition, Protect Me from What I Know with Sohrab Hura and Adam Lewis Jacob at Glasgow International, and how people respond to her work decades after its creation.

For a full list of references, as well as links to Juliet’s Frieze article on Jill’s work, please go to https://patreon.com/suite212 and subscribe for as little as £3.50 per month.

Since Labour returned to power in the 2024 UK General Election, announcing their landslide victory with a speech at the Tate Modern, little has been made of their cultural policy. In this free episode, Juliet talks to Dr David Hesmondhalgh – Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the University of Leeds, and the author of Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour (2015) and five editions of The Cultural Industries – about Labour’s approach to art and culture, looking at their policies and the ideology behind them.

Looking primarily at England as cultural policy is devolved in the rest of the UK, Juliet and David discussed the move away from Jeremy Corbyn’s arts policies; Labour’s Plan for the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries and the 2024 manifesto; the centrality of local government and education to cultural policy; Margaret Hodge’s review of Arts Council England; the timidity of Labour’s approach and the limits of their idea of ‘creative industries’; how this has differed (or not) from the Conservative and New Labour governments before them; and the need to shift the emphasis from financial returns to the intrinsic social and cultural importance of the arts.

Subscribe to us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212 for £3.50 per month to get a full list of references from this episode, as well as bonus episodes, Juliet’s archived articles, and more.

Suite (212) returns after five years – and true to form, it’s with an episode analysing the current political and cultural climate in the UK and beyond, and why we brought the show back into it. There’s a twist, however, as frequent guest Owen Hatherley asks regular host Juliet Jacques the questions, about why Suite (212) ended in December 2021, what’s changed since, and what the programme might do differently this time around.

Along the way, we talked about the differences between Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski as leaders of political projects and their respective tastes shape them; how the left reacted to the defeats of 2019-24 and the cultural effects of their withdrawal; the decline of the US as a cultural hegemon, and the rise of Chinese and Korean culture in the west; the international far-right attacks on the arts and the parts of society that uphold them; the concept of ‘counter-counterculture’; the impact of developments from the genocide in Gaza to the coming of AI on the arts; the crushing disappointment of Starmer’s Labour and their lack of interest in culture; how ‘stanning’ sells artists short; and some ideas for future episodes, ending with an appeal for our listeners to get involved in shaping its new direction.

To subscribe to Suite (212) for as little as £3.50 per month, please visit https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212.

Following from December 2021’s Resonance 104.4fm show on the cultural impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic with James Butler and Sarah Schulman, Juliet talks to writer Huw Lemmey about Channel 4’s landmark miniseries 'It’s a Sin'. Written by Russell T. Davies and broadcast across January and February 2021, 'It’s a Sin' follows a group of friends who meet on London’s gay scene in September 1981, just as the first British cases are being diagnosed, and charts the impact of HIV/AIDS on their sex lives, relationships, families, friendships and careers over the following decade. In this subscriber-only episode on the miniseries, Juliet and Huw talk about the conservatism of British television and their reluctance to commission it; critical reactions to the show, and call-backs to the 1980s ‘moral panic’ about homosexuality; Davies’ skill in writing for television; how the programme looks at the personal impact of HIV/AIDS, and its portrayal of LGBT activism and its relationship with wider British politics; and how 'It’s a Sin' is ultimately a show about care, and how it represents models of queer (and straight) kinship.