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London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The super unrealisitic ending. Alex gets super famous in one year and after written only three plays. Collins' huge success as Controller of the Light Programme led to his appointment in 1947 as Controller of the BBC Television Service, during which time it began to take its first steps into becoming a truly mass medium, with television licence numbers breaking into six figures for the first time. This was helped by the extension of broadcasting beyond London with the opening of transmitters in other major cities such as Birmingham, and also by the appeal of the programming Collins and his team were able to offer. Perhaps the high point of his time in control of the channel was the broadcasting live on television of much of the 1948 Olympic Games, being held predominantly in London at Wembley Stadium, where the majority of the BBC's television cameras were placed for the duration of the games. It opens up with our main character Alex Sinclair, arriving in London at the airport - unfortunately without her luggage, which somehow got lost. Alex's family: It was really nice seeing Alex's relationship with her family, something that sometimes is overlooked in some books. They were so supportive towards Alex's career and dream. The film concerns the residents of a large terraced house in London between Christmas 1938 and September 1939. Among them are the landlady, Mrs Vizzard (played by Joyce Carey), who is a widow and a believer in spiritualism; Mr and Mrs Josser ( Wylie Watson and Fay Compton), and their teenage daughter Doris ( Susan Shaw); the eccentric spiritualist medium Mr Squales (Sim); the colourful Connie Coke ( Ivy St. Helier), the young motor mechanic Percy Boon (Attenborough) and his mother ( Gladys Henson).

If that line didn't hook me, nothing could have. I felt such a connection to the main character, Alex, because our personalities seem eerily similar. Is Jacquelyn Middleton the pen name of one of my friends? ;) It's like she knows me.Norman Richard Collins (3 October 1907 – 6 September 1982) was a British writer, and later a radio and television executive, who became one of the major figures behind the establishment of the Independent Television (ITV) network in the UK. This was the first organisation to break the BBC's broadcasting monopoly when it began transmitting in 1955.

Anyway, enough comparing the two. It took me quite a while to get into this book and even once I did, I didn't particularly like any of the characters - except poor, put-on Mr Josser.

According to the interesting preface in this edition, Norman Collins was the author of sixteen novels and two plays, none of which, save London Belongs to Me, is worth remembering. Which makes the book even more noteworthy because it is a complete gem of a novel in almost every detail. Interestingly (at least to me), I live and have lived in the neighbourhoods depicted in both books; Hamilton's Fitzrovia and Collins' Kennington. The suburbs south of the river might be less salubrious than Soho, but they are brought to life with the same colour and, despite the fact that the book depicts life in the 30s, there's still much for a local to recognise in the descriptions - right down to the bus routes, which made me smile.

Alex is such a sweet and geeky person and despite struggling a lot in her first months in London, she somehow never loses hope and fights for her dream of becoming a playwright. I really enjoyed her geekiness for theatre and pop culture and I love how she admires strong female characters and also writes about them in her plays, though Alex herself has some problems becoming one herself. At times, she seems really insecure about her talents, which leads to her getting pushed around If you enjoyed London Belongs to Me, you might like Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. the story dragged on from roughly the middle all the way to the end; I wasn't consistently interested in the plot for the entirety of this hefty novel; I think this took me so long to read because plot & charactersand Richard Attenborough whose convincing portrayal of a terrified good boy gone wrong is palpable. Secondary characters are always hard to do; you either get too little or too much of them, but I think Middleton has nailed it here. Freddie, Lucy, Mark, Tom and even Olivia were fully rounded characters that could easily have novels of their own (which I'm still hoping for!) While I'm not generally a fan of random chapters in other characters' POVs, the one chapter from Olivia was actually really helpful in understanding her motivations, which I think was necessary for her character.

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