From filmed pleasure to Fun Palace

The Fun Palace programme initiated by the radical theatre producer Joan Littlewood in London early 1960s, aimed to articulate a response to the question of ‘increased leisure’ affecting British post‐war society through the provision of situations where playful exchange could activate audiences in self directedactions. A critical model for social organization, in which civics met with pleasure, it appeared in the form of representations across different media during the decade. By 1964, while the extraordinary cybernetic environment of the Fun Palace was being designed for the banks of Lea Valley, Littlewood was scripting and shooting the end of a film sequence to promote the idea to a mass public via commercial television stations. Scholarship to date has discussed extensively the architectural depictions of the Fun Palace and their impact. The related film, however, has not been explored – yet it constructs the mobile image that most effectively intimates the social aspirations of the Fun Palace programme. The paper argues that the film proposes a critical model of communicative production for an audience of citizens rather than consumers that sets the scene for a socialist alternative to modern urbanity. This paper examines the film as a montage which dramatizes the conditions of contemporary leisure production. The analysis will focus on three key aspects – the juxtaposition of images articulated shot‐by‐shot; the structural opposition between the main documentary of London pleasures and the part‐improvised and part scripted closing comic piece; and finally, its status as a media event that clashes with the ‘flow’ (as defined by Raymond Williams) experienced by commercial television audiences.