'The nerdiest and longest-running quiz around' The Spectator Have you got what it takes to tackle Radio 4's most fiendish quiz? Question: A fictional criminal psychologist, a former Conservative minister, and the eponymous protagonist of a Peter Hedges novel, might all serve on the board alongside some big cheeses. Can you explain?* The Round Britain Quiz is the oldest broadcast quiz anywhere in the world. Created in 1947 it has built and maintained a cult following from across the generations. Each series sees six teams from around the UK competing against each other to solve a series of seriously cryptic clues, with a chairman giving a steer on how to get to the answer. Compiled by long-serving series producer, Paul Bajoria, and with an introduction from the Chairman, BBC journalist Tom Sutcliffe, The Round Britain Quiz Book features 250 of the toughest and most challenging questions from the last 70 years as well as many new and exclusive conundrums, drawing on unpredictable fields of knowledge, to truly test the nation. *Answer: They might all be found on a cheeseboard, as accompaniments to the cheese. The psychologist referred to is 'Fitz' in the TV series Cracker, the former MP is Eric Pickles, and Gilbert Grape is Peter Hedges' creation.

Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics.
This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.

The book is a celebration of the South African celebrity and showcases some of the most popular influencers in our country today.

Each image was taken during the making of the television series "The Close Up", which since 2011 has enjoyed an audience of more than 500,000 viewers on E-TV. The information that accompanies each portrait was selected from hundreds of hours of interview footage, offering readers a rare glimpse into the lives of their favourite local personalities.

Among the celebrities featured are:
Loyiso Gola, Jeannie D, Maps Maponyane, Khanyi Mbau, Bonang Matheba, Siv Ngesi, Boity Thulo, Trevor Gumbi, Lee-Ann Liebenberg, Pearl Thusi, DJ Sbu, ProVerb, Terry Pheto, Leon Schuster, Jack Parow, Kabelo Mabalane, Desmond Dube, Kelly Khumalo, DJ Euphonik, A.K.A., Ross Learmonth from Prime Circle and loads more!

Performance and Professional Wrestling is the first edited volume to consider professional wrestling explicitly from the vantage point of theatre and performance studies. Moving beyond simply noting its performative qualities or reading it via other performance genres, this collection of essays offers a complete critical reassessment of the popular sport. Topics such as the suspension of disbelief, simulation, silence and speech, physical culture, and the performance of pain within the squared circle are explored in relation to professional wrestling, with work by both scholars and practitioners grouped into seven short sections: Audience Circulation Lucha Gender Queerness Bodies Race A significant re-reading of wrestling as a performing art, Performance and Professional Wrestling makes essential reading for scholars and students intrigued by this uniquely theatrical sport.

This research-based monograph presents an introduction to the concept of film-induced tourism, building on the work of the seminal first edition. Many new case studies exploring the relationship between film and TV and tourism have been added and existing cases have been updated. The book incorporates studies on film studio theme parks, the impact of film-induced tourism on communities and the effect of film on tourists' behaviour. It introduces new content including film-induced tourism in non-Western cultures, movie tours and contents tourism. The book is an essential resource for postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of tourism, film and media studies.

The award-winning VES Handbook of Visual Effects remains the most complete guide to visual effects techniques and best practices available today. This new edition has been updated to include the latest, industry-standard techniques, technologies, and workflows for the ever-evolving fast paced world of visual effects. The Visual Effects Society (VES) tasked the original authors to update their areas of expertise, such as AR/VR Moviemaking, Color Management, Cameras, VFX Editorial, Stereoscopic and the Digital Intermediate, as well as provide detailed chapters on interactive games and full animation. Additionally, 56 contributors share their best methods, tips, tricks, and shortcuts developed through decades of trial and error and real-world, hands-on experience. This third edition has been expanded to feature lessons on 2.5D/3D Compositing; 3D Scanning; Digital Cinematography; Editorial Workflow in Animated and Visual Effects Features; Gaming updates; General Geometry Instancing; Lens Mapping for VFX; Native Stereo; Real-Time VFX and Camera Tracking; Shot/Element Pulls and Delivery to VFX; Techvis; VFX Elements and Stereo; Virtual Production; and VR/AR (Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality). A must-have for anyone working in or aspiring to work in visual effects, The VES Handbook of Visual Effects, Third Edition covers essential techniques and solutions for all VFX artists, producers, and supervisors, from pre-production to digital character creation, compositing of both live-action and CG elements, photorealistic techniques, and much more. With subjects and techniques clearly and definitively presented in beautiful four-color, this handbook is a vital resource for any serious VFX artist.

Multiplatform Media in Mexico is the first book to treat the exciting, interconnected fields of cinema, television, and internet in Mexico over the last decade, fields that combine to be called multiplatform media. Combining industrial analysis of a major audiovisual field at a time of growth and change with close readings of significant texts on all screens, acclaimed author Paul Julian Smith deftly details these new audiovisual trends. The book includes perspectives on local reporting on the ground, as covered in the chapter documenting media response to the 2017 earthquake. And, for the first time in this field, the book draws throughout on star studies, tracing the distinct profiles of actors who migrate from one medium to another. As a whole, Smith's analyses illustrate the key movements in screen media in one of the world's largest media and cultural producing nations. These perspectives connect to and enrich scholarship across Latin American, North American, and global cases.

Winning short scenes for auditions and competitions. This book is designed for professional actors seeking roles in TV shows, commercials and stage productions, but may be used by student performers who wish to work at a professional level. Actors have been using these same scenes to win roles at Los Angeles and New York TV and film studios. Students in acting classes have been using them to advance their acting experience. The book is divided into two categories of scenes: Comedy and Drama. Most scenes are generic, easily adaptable for use by male or female actors. Emphasis is on believable characterization, no cartoon types. Sample scenes Include: The Roommate, The Shrink, The Set-Up, The Break-In, The Hereafter, The Sitcom. The Accident, The Suspect. The Deal, The End.

Media pilgrimage has become a booming business in the 21st century. Fans of television shows, rock groups and books flock to places associated with their favorite series, artist or writer, trying to embody and perhaps understand what inspired the beloved piece of work, and, more importantly, to cobble together their own personal identity, seeking meaning in an ever-more divergent and fast-paced world. At the same time, participation in organized group activities are dropping. One of the largest down turns in the US and the UK can be seen in the steep decline of attendance at traditional religious venues. This trend dovetails with the radical uptick in on-line sites dedicated to pop culture and celebrities, as well as an array of niche-focused real-time tours allowing fans to experience the spaces, places and scenery featured in their favorite entertainment medium. The Secular Religion of Fandom: Pop Culture Pilgrim examines the function of fandom, specifically the visiting of spaces which have been recently deemed worthy of sanctification and a newly elevated status of importance. It examines how such pilgrimages are used as a means for forming and maintaining a common language of culture, creating a replacement apparatus based on more traditional frameworks of religious worship and salvation, while becoming an ever more dominant mechanism for constructing individuality and finding belonging in a commodified culture. Looking at television shows such as The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, bands like The Stone Roses and Joy Division, and authors like J.K. Rowling and the Bronte sisters, The Secular Religion of Fandom: Pop Culture Pilgrim delves into these issues by examining spaces, fan communities and rituals, providing a unique and provocative investigation into how technology, media and humanistic need for guidance are forming novel ways of expressing value, forging self and finding significance in an uncertain world.

"Shell Shock Cinema" explores how the classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I and the the devastating effects of the nation's defeat. In this exciting new book, Anton Kaes argues that masterworks such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Nibelungen," and "Metropolis," even though they do not depict battle scenes or soldiers in combat, engaged the war and registered its tragic aftermath. These films reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock, reeling from a devastating defeat that it never officially acknowledged, let alone accepted.

Kaes uses the term "shell shock"--coined during World War I to describe soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns--as a metaphor for the psychological wounds that found expression in Weimar cinema. Directors like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang portrayed paranoia, panic, and fear of invasion in films peopled with serial killers, mad scientists, and troubled young men. Combining original close textual analysis with extensive archival research, Kaes shows how this post-traumatic cinema of shell shock transformed extreme psychological states into visual expression; how it pushed the limits of cinematic representation with its fragmented story lines, distorted perspectives, and stark lighting; and how it helped create a modernist film language that anticipated film noir and remains incredibly influential today.

A compelling contribution to the cultural history of trauma, "Shell Shock Cinema" exposes how German film gave expression to the loss and acute grief that lay behind Weimar's sleek facade."

There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. Jose Esteban Munoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture--not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Munoz calls this process "disidentification," and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism."Disidentifications" is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Munoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.Munoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color--in Carmelita Tropicana's "Camp/Choteo" style politics, Marga Gomez's performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis's "Terrorist Drag," Isaac Julien's critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat's disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's performances of "disidentity," and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serialThe Real World."
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Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.

Why Mummy Drinks meets Bridget Jones. The first in the bestselling comedy series. Juliette is a new mother, but life isn't going the way she'd hoped. She doesn't live in a cottage with roses around the door. She doesn't own a rolling pin. And Daisy's out-of-work actor father still hasn't proposed. While Juliette sobs her way through sleepless nights and nappy changes, Nick drinks Guinness and plays computer games. Meanwhile, his helicopter mother is always on hand to find fault - with Juliette. At least when Nick pops the question, things will look up...won't they? With a supporting cast including Juliette's over-honest mother, potty-mouthed grandmother, militant hippy best friend and handsome-but-scarred hotel magnate Alex Dalton, the first in Suzy K Quinn's hilarious, bestselling Bad Mother series is a sassy, uplifting, addictive treat.

Juliette Duffy is knocked up again. Preggers. Up the duff. To put it another way... whoops. While she and her hotel magnate boyfriend Alex get their heads around unexpected parenthood, Juliette is having all the usual pregnancy symptoms: throwing up, indigestion, sciatica, constipation, migraines and brain-fuddling tiredness. Because Mother Nature is a psychopathic old hag. She needs a distraction and this summer she is determined to get away. Her party-loving mother is demanding the usual Duffy family all-inclusive Greek holiday. Her dad wants to go camping in Norfolk. And Alex? Well, he has asked her on a five-star luxury cruise. The trouble is, his mother is coming too... The third in Suzy K Quinn's addictive, bestselling Bad Mother series, where Why Mummy Drinks meets Bridget Jones, is another laugh-out-loud treat.

What does a place sound like - and how does the sound of place affect our perceptions, experiences, and memories? The Sound of a Room takes a poetic and philosophical approach to exploring these questions, providing a thoughtful investigation of the sonic aesthetics of our lived environments. Moving through a series of location-based case studies, the author uses his own field recordings as the jumping-off point to consider the underlying questions of how sonic environments interact with our ideas of self, sense of creativity, and memories. Advocating an awareness born of deep listening, this book offers practical and poetic insights for researchers, practitioners, and students of sound.

From classical Hollywood film comedies to sitcoms, recent political satire, and the developing world of online comedy culture, comedy has been a mainstay of the American media landscape for decades. Recognizing that scholars and students need an authoritative collection of comedy studies that gathers both foundational and cutting-edge work, Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz have assembled The Comedy Studies Reader. This anthology brings together classic articles, more recent works, and original essays that consider a variety of themes and approaches for studying comedic media-the carnivalesque, comedy mechanics and absurdity, psychoanalysis, irony, genre, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and nation and globalization. The authors range from iconic theorists, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Linda Hutcheon, to the leading senior and emerging scholars of today. As a whole, the volume traces two parallel trends in the evolution of the field-first, comedy's development into myriad subgenres, formats, and discourses, a tendency that has led many popular commentators to characterize the present as a "comedy zeitgeist"; and second, comedy studies' new focus on the ways in which comedy increasingly circulates in "serious" discursive realms, including politics, economics, race, gender, and cultural power.

Nineteen chapters detailing all the fundamentals of backstage work -- all the tools and the language which apply to any theatre operation. The book is loaded with photographs, illustrations and diagrams of the text material. The what, when and why of stagecraft. Selected for the Baker and Taylor Approval Program.

A saddle-stitched book drilled for insertion into a three-hole notebook binder. Format allows for structured note-taking. Worksheets contain 23 crossword puzzles and illustrations.

In a significant departure from other works on Ritwik Ghatak, this book establishes him as an auteur and a maestro on par with some of the great film directors, like Sergei Eisenstein, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Kenji Mizoguchi and Luis Bunuel. Based on in-depth research that follows Ghatak's journey within the context of the Indian People's Theatre Association, it fills an important gap in the scholarship around Ghatak by offering crucial insights into Ghatak's unique vision of cinema embedded as it is in the cultural psychic configurations of the people. It analyses Ghatak's practice by minutely tracing formal similarities across the language of his cinematic oeuvre in the domain of cinematography, lighting, music, and sound. The book develops the way in which cinematic technique enters the domain of conceptual constructs and abstractions. It moves on to chronicle Ghatak's political odyssey as reflected in his cinema. Moreover, it charts the manner in which Ghatak, through his cinematic idiom, offers a polemic of cinema that further adds to his notion of praxis - a thoughtful Marxist paradigm organically associated with the culture and context of India. By locating Ghatak within the discourse of nationalism, the book brings to the surface Ghatak's critical insights related to the independence of the nation and the trauma of the partition of Bengal. Ghatak's cinema served the crucial function of chronicling the mass tragedy of partition and its impact on the human psyche.This book appeals to scholars of film studies and filmmaking as well as to researchers and general readers interested in debates pertaining to culture, politics, art, psychoanalysis, partition and refugee studies, cinema, theatre, and ideology.

This practical and inspirational book introduces readers to the value of storytelling throughout life, discussing the importance of traditional tales, and how they can transform our lives from childhood through to old age. Children develop emotional intelligence by being immersed in stories that deal with the challenges they face in growing up. Josie Felce discusses the use of stories in the Steiner-Waldorf school curriculum, and hopes to pass on this wisdom to a wider audience. She goes on to discuss the therapeutic value of stories throughout our adult lives, how they help us to approach challenges creatively, giving examples of how stories can be used in group development sessions. Felce considers the difference between telling and reading a story, offering practical advice on body language and presentation skills. Throughout the book she recommends suitable stories for different age groups and situations, with examples of how to adapt stories and tailor them for your audience.