British Union of Fascists - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• The Channel 4 television serial Mosley (1998) portrayed the career of Oswald Mosley during his years with the BUF. The four-part series was based on the books Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, authored by Mosley's son, Nicholas Mosley.

• In the film It Happened Here, the BUF appears to be the ruling party of German-occupied Britain. A Mosley speech is heard on the radio in the scene before everyone goes to the movies.

• Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, is set in 2010 in a world where the Nazis were triumphant, the BUF governs Britain – and the first stirrings of the reform movement come from there. The BUF and Mosley also appear as background influences in Turtledove's Colonization trilogy which follows the Worldwar tetralogy and is set in the 1960s.

• James Herbert's 1996 novel '48 features a protagonist who is hunted by BUF Blackshirts in a devastated London after a biological weapon release in WW II. The history of the BUF and Mosley is recapitulated.

• In Ken Follett's novel Night Over Water, several of the main characters are BUF members. In his book Winter of the World the Battle of Cable Street plays a role and some of the characters are involved in the BUF or in the anti-BUF organisations.

• The BUF is also in Guy Walters book The Leader (2003), where Mosley is the dictator of Britain in the 1930s.

• British humorous writer P. G. Wodehouse satirized the BUF in books and short stories. The BUF was satirized as "The Black Shorts" (shorts being worn as all the best shirt colours were already taken) and their leader was Roderick Spode, owner of a ladies' underwear shop.

• British novelist Nancy Mitford satirized the BUF and Mosley in Wigs on the Green, initially published in 1935 and republished in 2010. Diana Mitford, the author's sister, had been romantically involved with Mosley since 1932.

• In the 1992 Acorn Media production of Agatha Christie's One, Two, Buckle My Shoe with David Suchet and Philip Jackson, one of the supporting characters (played by actor Christopher Eccleston) secures a paid position as a rank-and-file member of the BUF.

• The BUF and Oswald Mosley are also alluded to in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day.

• Mark Gatiss's second Lucifer Box novel The Devil in Amber's main villain is a thinly-veiled version of Mosley named Olympus Mons.

• The BUF and Mosley are featured heavily in the 2010 BBC version of Upstairs, Downstairs where two of the characters are BUF supporters.

• The Pogues song "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn," from their 1985 album Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, references the BUF in its second verse with the line "And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids."

• Ned Beauman's 2010 debut novel Boxer, Beetle portrays the Battle of Cable Street.