ChristieBooks Videos

[Update, 5 February 2009: after rising costs meant that the archive almost disappeared from the web, I'm happy to say that ChristieBooks films are now hosted here. The links below are now redundant, but the videos are being re-encoded and uploaded gradually. Hopefully all the material I mention below will become available again on the new site in due course.]

I’ve been checking out just some of the many excellent films now being hosted by ChristieBooks via Brightcove.TV. While particularly strong on the history of anarchism (often in the context of Spain or Latin America), the subject-matter is highly eclectic. There’s a lot for us hispanophiles, including footage and newsreels from the Spanish Civil War and material on the wonderful Chilean singer Victor Jara (one of the first victims of Pinochet’s 1973 coup, and a hero of mine since I first conjugated the verb ‘recordar’). But there really is something for everyone with an interest in twentieth-century and contemporary history. I recommend a leisurely browse through the whole menu.

Here are direct links to just a handful that particularly caught my eye:

LSD for the common cold

While this is perhaps more the domain of Trenchfever and the military experts – and, indeed, my distinguished acquaintance Professor Peter Hennessy – I was fascinated by today’s BBC report on LSD experiments on National Servicemen at Porton Down.

There is, of course, a long history of anecdotal evidence regarding these ‘experiments’, which were conducted in the apparent hope of refining LSD into a military/intelligence ‘truth drug’. The State, in the form of the Treasury/MOD/Intelligence Services nexus, has, at last, made token payments to three men given LSD without their knowledge or consent in the early 1950s. The out-of-court payments of less than £10,000, while made with no concession of ‘guilt’ on the part of the MOD or MI6, therefore mark the first official, public acknowledgement of these activities.

National Servicemen were given a substance which they believed to be a possible cure for the common cold. One of them, Don Webb, who later became a playwright, has given a very vivid and rational description of his subsequent ‘trip’ to the Today programme. This can be heard through an audio link from the BBC report.

Here is a PhD waiting to be written (if it hasn’t been already):
‘The “Volunteers Programme” at Porton Down, 1916-1989′.
Moreover, could we have had the Counter-Culture, in the generally accepted sense, without the LSD-assistance of MI6 and the MOD?
Discuss, with reference to the songs Initials and Hashish from Hair.

"Lefties"? 9 out of 10!

Almost full marks to the makers of Lefties. This was the closest to intelligent and rigorous TV oral history I’ve seen for a long time. The inclusion of writer/interviewer Vannessa Engle’s questions, for starters, raised this above the usual Channel Five-style tosh. This was documentary auterism, rather than voice-overed nostalgia. The interviews were edited with wit and in a manner which drove the anaysis: no faux-narrative ‘invisible’ or ‘MTV’ editing of endlessly-rehashed Saltley and Grunwick footage with The Clash playing anachronistically on the soundtrack. (I’m always tempted to point out to the makers of reductive 1970s documentaries that when, for example, they use – yet again! – the footage of the woman with a candle on her shopping trolley to ‘illustrate’ the Three-Day Week they should, in fact, have something like Remember You’re A Womble on the soundtrack. The Wombles were, after all, the highest-selling singles ‘artists’ of 1973. Or was it 1974? I shall check.)

Some hilariously ill-informed comments have been left at the BBC Lefties homepage: ‘I have a great interest in the politics of this period….what a self-indulgent lot they were’. How objective and analytical. ‘Why not cover the Far Right in this period?’ An excellent idea, in principle, but hardly viable as an oral history series. On the whole, they’re not quite so willing to talk about their activities.

Only in the last programme, on the doomed News on Sunday, did the tone become slightly self-referential. (Au fond, however, one could argue that that’s the ‘meeja’ – especially TV – for you.) But BBC Four are to be commended for this series, which they will probably re-run ad nauseum. Check it out. As Not The Nine O’Clock News might have it: ‘Well done the BBC! I would happily pay double the license fee for more programmes like this.’

"General De Gaulle is a Phallic Monolith"

Thanks once again to the thoroughly nice Debbie and Johanna for allowing me a return raid on the small but fascinating archive held by the People Show. This consists largely of scripts (sometimes mere fragments), production photos and press cuttings. There is little in the way of company correspondence, and of company accounts there are none; which is a marked contrast to the way in which creative bodies (particularly publicly-subsidized ones) are forced to function nowadays.

The glorious line “General De Gaulle is a Phallic Monolith” comes from People Show No.1, ‘People Show’. It struck me forcibly on several levels. Firstly, as an actor – what a fantastic (but incredibly difficult) line to deliver!
Secondly, out of context, it is undeniably hilarious. We can love our subject, have great respect for it and even be a fan while also being an interrogative critic, but we shouldn’t be scared to admit that sometimes ‘the buzz’ (thanks, Tim Rice and/or Howard Schuman) comes from an affectionate laugh at its gaucheness – from a 21st century perspective. It neither ridicules nor demeans to admit that there was an awful lot of very exciting but nonetheless hilarious ‘stuff’ produced in the late 60s/early 70s in the name of both ‘political revolution’ and ‘cultural change’.

And yet, thirdly…it’s also ‘true’; and remains so. General De Gaulle in 1966 was, undeniably, an iconic, indeed monolithic, representation of post-war France and post-war Europe. He was also, of course, implacably opposed to British entry into the then Common Market, and therefore something of an ‘anti-British’ monolith, in reductive terms.
Also, at the risk of fulfilling my supervisor’s witty observation that ‘you culturalists are obsessed: you’d think a penis was phallic’, if one thinks about the physicality of De Gaulle…substantial, erect, etc, etc…(or maybe that’s just me – or, rather, the way my mind works).

More importantly – while I’m no expert on French history – in the pre-abortion, pre-1968 days, long before Simone Veil and the social liberalization of Giscard D’Estaing (who, ironically, to my childish eyes always resembled a 15th century monk, or a walking skull, a la Sir Alec Douglas-Home) the General can be construed as an embodiment of monolithic patriarchy. He was not, like Harold Wilson, a ‘swing with the sixties’, ideologically-light pragmatist. It is hard to imagine, for instance, had the Beatles been French, the General bestowing any state ‘gongs’ upon them.

For all these reasons, therefore, hats off to the memory of the late Jeff Nuttall, author and ‘director’ of the People Show’s early works, for writing such a densely-packed line of dialogue. Whether he would have agreed with a single word of my interpretation is, of course, a moot point. (But then I’ve learned the hard way that the way to really succeed as an actor is to argue more with your directors. It makes them feel they have a function…) More on People Show, and even more on Nuttall, later.

Images: http://212.84.179.117/list.htm & www.charles-de-gaulle.org

An ‘Angry’ Day?

As the BBC reminds us, it was exactly 35 years ago today, during the passage through Parliament of the Industrial Relations Bill, that the house of the then Employment Secretary Robert Carr was bombed. This was, of course, one of the sequence of bombings for which the ‘Stoke Newington 8′ would stand trial for conspiring to commit. Four would be convicted, to join a fifth already tried and sentenced separately for associated acts. The BBC News Archive clip can be accessed through the post title above, and makes for very interesting viewing. Given the European context of the time, was this perhaps the closest Britain ever came to a ‘Baader-Meinhof’ moment? It would appear so – if we believe the commitment to “smash the Angry Brigade” allegedly made in response by Prime Minister Edward Heath, and the general tone of the BBC report. How intriguing, then, that the press blackout on reporting a sequence of violent events reaching back to 1967 had only recently been lifted. The phrase “oxygen of publicity” – although coined by a later Conservative Prime Minister – therefore springs to mind. In whose interest was it to suppress, and then release, that oxygen supply? A famous graffito sprayed outside the Old Bailey at the end of the 1972 trial asked ‘Whose Conspiracy?’ 35 years later, do we have a satisfactory answer?

The Fight Against Cliché

I’m very grateful to Gail for getting the ball rolling with her comments (below); for drawing my attention to Horace Herring’s “From Energy Dreams to Nuclear Nightmares: Lessons from the Anti-nuclear Power Movement in the 1970s”; and for reminding me about Whole Earth. Best of all, her comment ‘let’s hear it for the fight against cliché’ sums up beautifully one of the primary aims of my research and thesis. Reductive 1960s clichés have too often been the stock-in-trade of the mainstream media in recent years. However, these have often gained credence from the endless contributions of certain (sometimes self-appointed) ‘key players’ of the time. It would be unwise for me to name my pet hate 1960s ‘talking heads’ at this stage (although I’ll have no such qualms later). However, anyone with a genuine historical interest in this period will have their own hate figures who provoke the TV-kicking response ‘oh no not him/her again, the self-promoting rent-a-mouth’. Much of the cliché debunking I’ll be undertaking will therefore involve interrogation of the plethora of books and anecdotal ‘recollections’ from ‘underground’ and ‘revolutionary’ ‘activists’, both at the time and since. These memoirs range, not surprisingly, from the very good to the very bad indeed, by way of the frankly dubious and/or mediocre. Sometimes in the space of one chapter. A handful have achieved near-canonical status as the backbone of an ‘official’ Counter-Cultural history – Neville’s ‘Playpower’ and Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ usually figuring at the top of the list – yet all are ripe for reinvestigation in a spirit of healthy scepticism. Any suggestions of ‘important’ Counter-Cultural persons or memoirs ripe for debunking – or, indeed, bunking – will therefore be received gratefully; in a spirit of love, of course.

Images and messages such as this have gained widespread, mainstream acceptance as ‘cultural shorthands’. They signify the totality of the so-called ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s and 1970s. They undoubtedly reflected profoundly held beliefs for some, and still do for others.

However, nostalgic, reductive tropes (particularly televisual) encourage us to believe in one of two polarized, yet simultaneously shared and apparently settled, national narratives. Contemporary public discourse offers two interpretations of the mythic ‘Sixties’. For the “I Love the 1960s” brigade it was the ‘golden’ Age of Aquarius. For the “I Hate the 1960s” tendency it marked the beginning of the almost irreversible decline of civilized British society. What of those for whom ‘The Sixties’ signifies merely another decade through which they happened to live?

How accurate a representation of the variety of cultural, social and political-revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 70s does contemporary discourse and the ‘settled’ nostalgic narrative offer? How much of a common agenda did these various groupings of activists actually share? Did they even like – let alone ‘love’ – each other? What do they think of each other now? How much credence should we give to the recollections of those who were involved; and those who claim to have been involved? Did the ‘Sixties’ mean anything outside of “Swinging London”? When did ‘The Sixties’ begin and end?

And how much – if any – of this is relevant to British political, cultural, social and economic life in the twenty-first century? These are the key thematic areas which this blog will attempt to address.