Rewind, Replay

Rewind, Replay is the first history of Britain's video boom. It considers the first programme distributors who, from the late 1970s, took chances on all sorts of commercial entertainment to attract consumer interest. It considers the birth of the video shop, the speed with which video rental became a habitual practice among the British public, and the key players who, at the height of a recession, invested wholesale into what contemporaneous media reportage was describing as a mere 'plaything'. Media historian Johnny Walker explores how distributors and store owners navigated various pressures, including piracy, the video nasties moral panic, and market rationalisation that resulted in shakeouts across the industry, as well as the corporate expansion of the business in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ultimately, Rewind, Replay charts how the British video business matured from its humble beginnings and associations of disrepute into a staple of high street retail. Johnny Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. His authored books include, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015), as editor, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (by Peter Hutchings, 2021), and as co-editor, Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (2016). His scholarship can be found in numerous journals and anthologies.