Last Wednesday, I attended a special event to commemorate the life of film and television academic Peter Hutchings at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Tyneside Cinema, alongside many of his former colleagues and students. This was a lovely gathering; it was great to learn more about Peter’s life, beyond my own relatively brief experience of being taught by him for one academic year when I did my MA in Film Studies in 2004/05.

Part of the event was the unveiling of the results of his Northumbria University colleagues’ apt idea of inscribing a whole row of seats in the Tyneside Cinema’s largest Classic screen, with his name and quotations from some of his favourite films, e.g. Chinatown (1974) and Horror Express (1972). Peter Cushing – so neglected for so long – was clearly Peter’s favourite actor, as his characters such as Dr Wells were well represented, quotation wise…

Inspector Mirov: The two of you together. That’s fine. But what if one of you is the monster?
Dr Wells: Monster? We’re British, you know.

Horror Express

The speakers, who included Northumbria’s Johnny Walker and Russ Hunter, were often emotional in paying tribute to a man who had helped shape their academic careers. As RH detailed, he could be unpredictable in class when teaching and his musical taste was varied and included the strange likes of Tiny Tim. Recently, he had taken to attending the horror film festival Abertoir, held annually in November at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre in Ceredigion, and has now had a festival cocktail named after him: the “Hutch”!

I found him personally very helpful; one of those lecturers who was sharp and expert, yet who you also sensed was thoroughly on the side of students trying to formulate their own thoughts on film and television. He steered me down interesting paths, and helped me refine my voice when writing about film and television; as Mark Jancovich has commented:

‘He wasn’t a Gothic villain who attempted to remake the world in his image. he had no interest in churning out replicas of himself or extensions of his will. Instead, he helped people to achieve their potential, to recognize their intellectual insights and have confidence in the value of their contribution to the world.’

Mark Jancovich (2018) ‘Remembering Peter Hutchings’, Horror Studies 9.1, 4

When getting down to work on my MA dissertation on British cinema of the 1970s – then, in 2005, a very neglected area – he strongly recommended I watch a few episodes of LWT’s 1969-74 sitcom On the Buses, to get a flavour of the era and what was popular with British audiences, and was thus especially significant. I learned from him that the first film adaptation was Hammer’s highest grossing film of 1971, exceeding any of the studio’s horror films of that year. It was clear that he felt this was a matter for some cultural sorrow, though he didn’t explicitly say so. I loaned a single VHS tape from Northumbria’s now sadly defunct “slide library” and proceeded to watch 3 or 4 episodes of the sitcom, which conveyed strangely, horribly virulent gender stereotyping and casual sexism, as well as notable class representations.

Johnny Walker (2018: 454) has argued that Hutchings was ‘not merely a scholar of popular British cinema, but its champion’, who, in addition to his work on horror, explored thrillers, disaster movies, science fiction as well as penning outlying essays on film and TV representations of the culturally marginal region of north-east England. Similarly, a major thing I learned from him was the importance of analysing and taking seriously both popular culture and areas within it that get neglected or marginalised by certain cultural gatekeepers – whether horror cinema or ITV comedies of the 1970s. He was also good at recommending excellent books in this area: Leon Hunt’s British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998) being perhaps the most memorable and useful during my MA dissertation.

Prompted by Walker’s tribute which mentions PH’s first published writing in Charles Barr’s ‘pivotal’ edited volume All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (1986), I have read and enjoyed this very piece today. Hutchings’s short essay on Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) closes a book which ambitiously explores institutions, ideology, overlaps between film and television and what Julian Petley defines as ‘the Lost Continent’ of British cinema. Hutchings locates Hitchcock’s film as being around the close of the period of generous US funding of British films, and 9 years before the ‘renaissance’ of Chariots of Fire (1981): a rebirth he regards as questionable as it has excluded ‘broad comedy, horror, melodrama, and ‘bad taste’ in general’. He further argues that ‘a regeneration of British cinema must remain incomplete’ until not just critical attention is paid to neglected popular films but until more such films are made. (Barr, 1986: 374)

He notes that there was derogatory criticism of the Covent Garden-set Frenzy for its Dixon of Dock Green dialogue, highlighting critics’ long-standing snobbery towards television. He conducts sophisticated textual analysis of the film, drawing fascinating links to features as varied as A Canterbury Tale (1944), Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Blue Lamp (1949), The Dambusters (1955), Every Day Except Christmas (1957), Look Back in Anger (1959), Peeping Tom (1960), Hands of the Ripper (1970), Carry On Loving (1970) and Murder by Decree (1978).

Hutchings describes Hitchcock’s first British-based film in over 30 years as a ‘democratic […] compendium’ of post-WW2 British cinematic genres which freely mingle and aren’t part of a ‘static, hierarchical order’. (ibid, 373) The modes of sex comedy, war film, social realism, melodrama and the new X-rated horror are all ripe to be richly exploited by Hitchcock, who saw cinema as artifice and didn’t accept what Hutchings defines as a binary critical paradigm of ‘realist/Good Taste’ (Ealing, British New Wave, Free Cinema) and ‘non-realist/Bad Taste’ (Gainsborough, Hammer, the Carry On series). (ibid, 369) He notes how realism has been critically privileged, with cultural gatekeepers like the Observer film critic George Melly attacking Frenzy for its anachronism. Interestingly, he links Powell and Pressburger with this non-realist tendency, highlighting their critical and commercial decline in fortunes in the 1950s. He places the mass of British war films as somewhere in between the binaries.

In a particularly rich section of textual analysis, Hutchings identifies the film’s exploration of ‘uncontrolled and violent male sexuality’, linking it with the cultural history of Jack the Ripper and Victorian London:

‘It is significant in this light that the first necktie murder in Hitchcock’s film is greeted with the comment that ‘It’s another necktie murder’, a line repeated in newspaper headlines several times throughout the film. One can link this with the reaction to the Glueman in Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale, the news of whose nocturnal activities – pouring glue into young girls’ hair during the blackout – is greeted with the remark ‘The Glueman’s out again‘. Again and another: two signifiers of indefinite repetition, in a situation where repeated acts of psychopathic violence have become an integral part of the British way of life’

Peter Hutchings (in Barr, 1986: 370)

This suggests so much: not just in its situation of Frenzy within the context of the increasingly ‘violence’ preoccupied 1970s, but also about our own times. Any budding film or television scholar should read this piece (and, indeed, its parent book) and aspire to emulate Hutchings’s incisive range of references and strength of argument.

On Wednesday, it was palpable how highly he was thought of and how he positively influenced and helped shape so many lives. As another colleague said, “He was a gentle man”, and there was a sense of loss as the many people gathered processed upstairs to the cafe bar to further toast his life, to the strains of Tiny Tim’s ukulele-led hit ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ (1968). But there was also a sense of celebration, as his was a life that had made a tangible difference.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Hutchings, P. (1986) ‘Frenzy: A Return to Britain’, in: Barr, C. (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 368-74
• Jancovich, M. (2018) ‘Remembering Peter Hutchings’, Horror Studies, 9.1, 4 January, 3-6
• Walker, J. (2018) ‘Hammer and Beyond: Peter Hutchings’s Contribution to the Study of Popular British Cinema and Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 15.3, July, 453-9