Abstract
Johnny Walker’s Rewind, Replay constitutes an important contribution to the field of film and media studies, in general, by making a crucial addition to the vibrant scholarship on home video in particular. Looking specifically at the growth of the home video industry in Britain from the 1970s through the 1990s, Walker lays out an engaging historical narrative full of experimentation, resourcefulness and fraught competition among video distributors and retailers amid a fluctuating and highly impactful regulatory environment. Importantly, many of the important players in this story were independent operations, yet Walker does an excellent job of indicating how the British home video industry became increasingly rationalized and, eventually, dominated by large corporate chains such as Ritz Video Film Hire and Blockbuster Video. And while the arc of this story leads to such standardization and the apparent triumph of big capital, it is full of twists and turns that prompt us to reconsider just how British home video came into its own as a powerful industry and significant element of popular culture.
Theoretically and methodologically informed by media industry studies and new cinema history, the latter of which focuses especially on the ways in which movies circulate through culture, Walker’s work is supported by rigorous research of copious archival materials. Indeed, Walker is meticulous in drawing upon numerous pieces of material evidence to showcase the inflection points as well as general trends in the development of the British video industry; primarily these sources entail the most instructive reportage from industry trade press and consumer magazines, which the author generously lists in an appendix for curious researchers. Written in lively prose that is infused with Walker’s clear passion for the subject, Rewind, Replay is as engaging as it is insightful.
Rewind, Replay makes several noteworthy interventions. As Walker rightly points out, a preponderance of scholarship about home video looks at the North American context. By providing a deeply considered and sustained examination of home video in Britain, Walker contributes to the decentering of America as the focal point for understanding ‘the video industry’ writ large; this important endeavor is also illustrated by Blake Atwood’s excellent Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran (MIT Press, 2021). Furthermore, Walker’s analytical frame and focus do much to innovate and impact the study of British home video, specifically. Walker’s attention to the British video industry marks a change from previous studies, which as he notes have attended more closely to the usage of video technologies by British citizens or engaged in assessments of the societal impact of these technologies in the United Kingdom.
Finally, Walker greatly expands and complicates understandings of British video by reassessing the historical and industrial importance of the ‘video nasties’. Comprising an assortment of horror films that entered the UK market in the early years of video, the video nasties prompted a social panic in the 1980s, which in turn prompted new regulatory measures on the part of the government. The Video Recordings Act (VRA) passed in 1984, especially, was a sweeping piece of legislation that set government-determined age restrictions on the sale or rental of all videos, and banned some movie titles outright. This is not to say that the nasties play no role in this story, but rather that Walker does an admirable job of lifting the historiographical veil that the nasties have left over received accounts of British video in the 1980s.
Walker effectively counters, for instance, the premise that the passage of the VRA single-handedly destroyed the independent video distribution sector of the industry, and also that its passage was universally opposed by industry players. Relatedly, I was fascinated by the book’s detailed account of the importance of children’s media – kidvids – to early independent distributors’ success and growth.
But these are just a few of the book’s important disclosures that some might find surprising and that many will find captivating. Although Rewind, Replay will be of interest to film and media scholars broadly, this book is essential reading for students and researchers that specialize in home video as well as those that focus on British media culture. In addition, scholars working in the subfield of media industry studies will gain much from this book, particularly as it represents a shining example of a nationally bounded industrial study – and one that, moreover, is complex and nuanced in its construction of a historical narrative. There is almost assuredly a non-scholarly audience for this book as well, made up of enthusiastic fans of 1980s videos and video culture. No matter one’s background, though, readers of Rewind, Replay will be rewarded with historical insight and sharp analysis of a crucial phase in Britain’s media culture.
