July 26, 1994 Contact: Barbara McKenna (408) 459-2495

BBC FILM CREW VISIT TO UC SANTA CRUZ CAMPUS MARKS BEGINNING OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN BBC AND UCSC'S DICKENS PROJECT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ--A collaborative project between the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, gets under way the week of July 31 when Angie Mason, the head of BBC's Educational Developments division, will be on campus with a film crew interviewing world-renowned Dickens scholars.

The BBC and the Dickens Project are joining in partnership to produce an educational resource kit on Hard Times and Martin Chuzzlewit--two novels by Charles Dickens. The kit will be produced as a companion piece to BBC adaptations of the two works (one starring Alan Bates) that will air in the U.S. on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre in early 1995. They will be presented on PBS by WGBH in Boston.

The resource kit consists of a video, an audiocassette, a workbook, and a viewer's guide. This is the BBC's second collaboration of this type. The first was in early 1994 with the British Film Institute for the BBC/WGBH co-production of George Eliot's Middlemarch. Materials are produced by BBC Education, a division of BBC and a major producer of educational materials and programs distributed worldwide.

The Dickens Project, founded in 1981, is an international consortium of faculty and graduate students headquartered at UCSC. The home of an extensive library and archive on Dickens, the project promotes collaborative research and produces curricular materials for use in teaching Dickens.

Mason will work with Dickens Project director John Jordan and Dickens Project founding director Murray Baumgarten, both faculty members at UCSC. Her visit coincides with the fourteenth annual Dickens Universe--a conference running August 1-7 that, coincidentally, is focusing on Hard Times. The conference will bring more than 250 people together, including eminent Dickens scholars from around the world.

You are invited to a screening of Hard Times on August 1 at 9 p.m. in Kresge 321. The screening, open to conference attendees and the press only, runs 102 minutes. (Hard Times was co-produced by BBC School Programmes--a division of BBC Education--and WGBH.)

To arrange for an interview or to attend the screening, please call Linda Hooper at the Dickens Project at (408) 459-2103.

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