Last Night’s TV – America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner

From the melancholy isolation of Edward Hopper’s ‘Night Hawks’, the iconic scenes of 50’s youth diner culture in Grease; the tense scenes between Robert Di Niro and Ray Liotta in gangster flick Goodfellas and the youthful bonhomie found in Wayne’s World’s Donuts diner: the diner is the image that flickers to mind when we imagine small-town America, Cadillacs, clandestine meetings, and endless dusty highways through the desert.

It is the cornerstone of every Buddy movie, the meeting place for murderers and miscreants, the place where we find a perfect contrast between the domestic and the disturbing.

Far more than the British Cafe or the traditional pub, America’s diners hold a romantic and symbolic place in our imagination. It is hard to visualise the imagery of a London Pie and Mash shop emblazoned on clothes in the same way that the fashion world embraces US diner imagery every spring and summer. It is the diner that we associate with opportunity as well as a sense of home – in short it is symbolic of the American Dream.

In BBC 4’s America on a Plate, writer and broadcaster Stephen Smith examines the cultural impact that the diner has had on America’s sense of self, from its humble beginnings in Providence in 1872 as a ‘night lunch wagon’ through to its turbulent and climactic role in the Civil Rights movement, up to today, where the diner is still central to America’s working and social life.

The charm of The Story of a Diner lies in Smith’s ability to stay the right side of scholarly – a thought-provoking delve into America’s history without the po-faced seriousness that BBC4 programmes have a tendency to indulge in.

His thoughtful but probing style allowed him to draw astonishing stories from his interviewees, such as the black teenagers (now in their 60s and 70s) whose sit-in at the segregated diner of a department store erupted into an explosive cornerstone of the Civil Rights movement. One man revealed how he ‘paid for it with his two front teeth’ after being confronted by the chef with a butcher’s knife and was then punched to the floor. Another woman remembers being burnt with cigarettes by white customers as they staged their protest. It was the shocking contrast of such violence with the homely patriotism of the diner that would set the wheels in motion for the Civil Rights act to be passed in 1964.

Elsewhere, Smith meets with Suzanne Vega, whose song Tom’s Diner was a huge hit in 1990 and describes how the diner’s place as a halfway house between isolation and sociability inspired the song that would make her career.

Interviews with Barry Levinson, director of Diner, explore the special relationship between the diner and Hollywood – from climactic scenes in the Ava Gardner movie The Killers, to De Niro and Pacino’s face-off in Heat- and why it is as effective in conveying a sense of tension and terror as it is a sense of cosy domesticity.

America on a Plate:The Story of a Diner was the insightful but sensitively told story of one of America’s cultural icons, and an affectionate history of the humble eating place that changed how America was seen in the eyes of the world.

America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner is repeated on BBC Four on Tuesday 29 November at 21:00, followed by Barry Levinson's film Diner at 22:00.