Experimentation in the 1960s The community dramas of John Arden

Conflict and contradiction were central to British cultural history in the 1960s. This is most aptly signalled, perhaps, by the extraordinary sub-cultural clashes between the Mods and Rockers that broke out at seaside resorts on the balmy Bank Holiday weekends of 1965 and 1966. Jeff Nuttall nicely captures the social significance of the running fights in his thumbnail sketch of the two formations:

‘Mod’ meant effeminate, stuck up, emulating the middle classes, aspiring to be competitive, snobbish, phony, ‘Rocker’ meant hopelessly naive, loutish, scruffy.