Shepperton Babylon
The Lost Worlds of British Cinema
Average rating:
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
This is a wonderful secret history of British movies that includes the scandals, the suicides, the immolations and the contract killings – the product of thousands of conversations with veteran film-makers. Here you’ll meet, among many others, the 20s film idols snorting cocaine from an illuminated glass dance floor on the bank of the Thames, the model who escaped Soho’s gangsters to become the queen of the nudie flicks and the genteel Scottish comedienne who, at the age of fifty-five, reinvented herself as a star of exploitation cinema, and fondly remembers ‘the one where I drilled in people’s heads and ate their brains’. Welcome to the lost worlds of British cinema.
About the Author:
Matthew Sweet presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio Four. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton Babylon, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A Brief History of Fun, The Age of Excess, Truly, Madly,…
See the publisher website: Faber & Faber
> On a related topic:
Killing Children in British Fiction (2025)
Thatcherism to Brexit
by Dominic Dean
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Soho on Screen (2025)
Cinematic Spaces of Bohemia and Cosmopolitanism, 1948-1963
by Jingan Young
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Uncanny Landscapes in 21st Century British Cinema (2025)
The Pestilence in the Ditch
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Literature and Sound Film in Mid-Century Britain (2025)
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
How Stage Playwrights Saved the British Cinema, 1930-1956 (2025)
The Well-Made Screenplay
by David Cottis
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Adult Themes (2025)
British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s
Dir. Anne Etienne, Benjamin Halligan and Christopher Weedman
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
London as Screen Gateway (2024)
Dir. Elizabeth Evans and Malini Guha
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago (2024)
Imagining Islands
Dir. Ysanne Holt, David Martin-Jones and Owain Jones
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Eccentric Laughter (2024)
Queer Possibilities in Postwar British Film Comedy
Subject: Countries > Great Britain