Cuts
by Malcolm Bradbury
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Looking to strike it rich with television gold, an English media tycoon enlists the help of an unassuming novelist to script his small-screen epic, to disastrous--and hilarious--effect The year is 1986, and the cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher's government have trickled down to university life, where departments are being forced to shave their payrolls to account for reduced public funding. Meanwhile, at Eldorado Television, a different kind of cut is about to wreak havoc. Lord Mellow, head show more of the declining studio, watches as his last-ditch effort to produce a hit series falls to pieces. The show's star, the volatile but vaunted Sir Luke Trimingham, has just declared that he will quit unless the script is entirely rewritten. Desperate to save the project, Eldorado brings university lecturer and author Henry Babbacombe into the fold to write thirteen new episodes of ambitious television--something so grand that the leading man cannot possibly refuse it. But the production is plagued from the start, suffering endless calamities with its unpredictable actors and crew, whose behind-the-scenes drama rivals anything Babbacombe could dream up. show lessTags
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64+ Works 5,671 Members
A professor of English literature and American studies who has published numerous critical works, Malcolm Bradbury is also a novelist whose protagonists are academics who make muddles of their personal and professional lives. He maintains that his main concern is to explore problems and dilemmas of liberalism and issues of moral responsibility. show more The targets of Bradbury's satires include intellectual pretension, cultural myopia, and official smugness. His protagonists are largely sympathetic, if comic, failures at mastering their own fates in a world of absurd rules and regulations. His major novels include Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975). This last, a novel of intellectual and political conflict at an English university in the late 1960s, was made into a successful television minidrama. More recent novels include Rates of Exchange (1983) and Cuts (1987). (Bowker Author Biography) Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatist, & satirist. His many books include "Rates of Exchange", which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, & "The Modern American Novel". (Publisher Provided) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Cuts
- Original publication date
- 1987
- People/Characters
- Henry Babbacombe; Lord Mellow; Jocelyn Pride; Cynthia Hyde-Lemon
- Dedication
- To Brian Eastman
- First words
- It was the summer of 1986, and everywhere there were cuts.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)So Lord Mellow, in bed in his black armband, made his decision: and the television series that would, if it had been made, probably have been called "Serious Damage" was -- well, not to put too fine a point on it, cut.
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- ISBNs
- 18
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