TPL - Richard Eyre (Assessment)

Question 1

he film centres around an ambitious, opportunistic BBC radio news editor of working-class origins, James ________ (Jonathan Price), who avidly pursues class, status, and an unattainable upper-class woman, Susi (Charlie Dore)

Answer 1

Penfield

Question 2

Penfield represents a fitting antiheroic figure for an ethos that eschews social concern and commitment in favour of the celebration of __________ success.

Answer 2

Individual

Question 3

Penfield can pretend his working-class ________ don’t exist when it suits him.

Answer 3

Parents

Question 4

Penfield remains passively remote from his dying mother, the emotional desperation of a colleague, and the moral fervour of the __________ Common women

Answer 4

Greenham

Question 5

Penfield displays a gift for adapting his political convictions to the person he is talking to - turning into a proponent of imperial England and the invasion of ______ when talking to his conservative publisher, and anti-Suez and sympathetic to socialism when talking to a left-leaning historian.

Answer 5

Suez

Question 6

The Ploughman’s Lunch does more than focus on one driven careerist’s saga. Eyre totally entwines Penfield’s fortunes with a pointed critique of the _______ emptiness of British public life.

Answer 6

Moral

Question 7

The BBC news staff meetings function as gatherings of wary, ________ professionals who lack any moral or intellectual response to the news.

They aim to find the right balance, to provide a great deal of soft news and avoid controversial stories, like the Greenham Common women, that could upset the bland social order they wish to convey.

Answer 7

Cynical

Question 8

In other spheres, book publishing turns into merely the packaging of commercial products, while advertising creates fabricated pasts like the supposed eighteenth-century “ploughman’s lunch” - invented in the ________ in some London marketing office.

Answer 8

Sixties

Question 9

The “ploughman’s lunch” is a __________ for all the falsifications - private and public - that Penfield and other men on the make in Thatcher’s England construct.

Answer 9

Metaphor

Question 10

Penfield diligently writes a book on Suez, revising its humiliating history so that it can be viewed as a predecessor of the imperial _________ victory.

Answer 10

Falklands

Question 11

To top all these fabrications off, Eyre seamlessly fuses footage of the 1982 _____ party conference in Brighton with his fictional story.

Answer 11

Tory

Question 12

At the 1982 Tory party conference, Margaret Thatcher made political capital by invoking the successful Falklands invasion as a sign of the renewal of British spirit - one more powerful example of how hype and promotion substitute for _______.

Answer 12

Reality

Question 13

Like most of the eighties films critical of Thatcher, The Ploughman’s Lunch offers no defined ______ or other specifically political alternative to her ethos.

Answer 13

Leftist

Question 14

The only socialist in the film, Ann __________ (Rosemary Harris), a middle-aged historian, lives a life of affluence and total comfort in a grand Norfolk house, while still indulging in empty, leftist critiques of the Labour party.

Answer 14

Barrington

Question 15

The Ploughman’s Lunch suggests that the Suez crisis and the Falklands war were both repackaged for the history books like commodities in the advertising market.

The film’s theme of ___________ appearances is underscored by its scenes shot at the Conservative party conference in Brighton, an event notoriously staged with great care for the national television cameras.

Answer 15

Manufactured

Question 16

The Falklands conflict reversed widespread popular disillusionment against Thatcher’s Conservative Government’s fist term.

Unemployment was above _____ million, economic policies were failing, and another recession was approaching.

Answer 16

Three

Question 17

Even before the actual invasion, the British government knew of __________ plans for invasion.

It used the Falklands issue as an ideological weapon to reinforce anachronistic feelings of patriotism and national sentiment.

Answer 17

Argentine

Question 18

In the film, Ann says the struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against __________.

Answer 18

Forgetting

Question 19

If the struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting then it is one which James Penfield will not participate. His individual rewriting of the Suez crisis parallels the government’s version of the Falklands invasion, involving _______ and deceit.

Answer 19

Betrayal

Question 20

The film’s title offer an appropriate metaphor for its content.

A Ploughman’s Lunch is a popular English pub snack but was never historical. As television advertising director, Mathew Fox, tells James, it was a “completely successful fabrication of the past,” a media strategy to attempt to persuade people to eat in pubs.

This culinary manipulation thus parallels Thatcher’s successful stage management of Churchillian ________ during the Falklands campaign.

Answer 20

Ideology

Question 21

Throughout the film, the miss-en-scene surrounds upper-middle-class life with signifiers of sterility and artificiality.

James takes ________ to the Barbican Art Gallery - an upper-middle-class ghetto with pretentious paintings representing various forms of aesthetic self-consciousness.

Answer 21

Susan

Question 22

After he gains access to Ann’s archives, James eventually _______ her. Yet James will soon suffer the same fate.

Answer 22

Discards

Question 23

Travelling with Susan and Jeremy to the national Conservative Party Conference, James witnesses his own personal betrayal. Susan and Jeremy are “old allies” who both ________ and sexually screw James.

During this humiliation, Thatcher announces the Falklands victory. Her ideological distortion of present history echoes James’s rewriting of the past.

Answer 23

Socially

Question 24

Like most of the eighties films critical of Thatcher, The Ploughman’s Lunch offers no defined ______ or other specifically political alternative to her ethos.

Answer 24

Leftist