The Lonely Arts Club

Series 3, Episode 5: Roger Shannon

November 03, 2020 Season 3 Episode 5
The Lonely Arts Club
Series 3, Episode 5: Roger Shannon
Show Notes

This week, Roger Shannon joins us in The Lonely Arts Club.


As the former Director for the Institute of Creative Enterprise, we invite Roger Shannon onto The Lonely Arts Club to tell us all about his time in the film industry and how he came to be a Professor in Film & Television.

Local lad, Roger, takes us back to the beginning, sharing stories of growing up in Litherland, his rebellious years as a student and finding his way into the media industry.

'I always remember when we graduated and at that time we were still in a sense part of a rebellious generation so we turned up but we didn’t go in front to get our scroll, we just sat the back and the Vice-Chancellor who’d been a metallurgical professor announced that “we’re so proud that Teesside Poly is now giving arts degrees and we’re so pleased that we are in the guard’s van of curriculum development”, [laughter]. Being political animals we coined this phrase, ‘guardsvanism’ as a way of trying to make fun of the place but it was a hard place I felt to be doing undergraduate work when there was no culture around you know for – like there is today – for students but in a way we had to build it ourselves. We did a listings mag, we set up a film society, so in the end doing those things was probably more important than the fact that they weren’t there in the first place and we kind of created things for ourselves."

Chatting to Roger, Martin McQuillan finds out where the inspiration came from for getting into film, his rebellious student years and different career prospects along the way. 

This podcast is brought to you by the Institute for Creative Enterprise at Edge Hill University.

Making connections through culture.

The podcast is edited by Roz DiCaprio who is the producer alongside Karen Appleton and Carl Hunter.

Audio production is by Sam Auguste of Onomatopoeia Studios in Liverpool.

Music is by Joseph McDade.

For more information on the work of the Institute for Creative Enterprise and courses at Edge Hill University, visit edgehill.ac.uk/ice

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