ABSTRACT
‘Northern comedy’ is arguably a genre of its own within British film and has its roots in the Mancunian Film Company. The decline in cinemagoing in the 1950s led to the eventual demise of Mancunian as film-makers but, ironically, TV’s insatiable appetite for cheap films saw a brief revival for Mancunian products in the early 1960s. Recently cultural historians have begun to study the company’s content in terms of regional comedy, but it has often been overlooked in terms of its place in British film history. This chapter sets out to provide key information on Mancunian’s origins, its output and its principal players, to create an understanding of why this studio is worthy of recognition beyond the dusty footnotes of the past and to justify the importance in creating a genre of regional film comedy that paved the way for successive generations of comedy performers many of whom became household names.
