Festival of post-1945 footage

I’m very aware that things have been quiet round here recently, but I hope that normal service will be resumed in 2009.

Earlier in this year, however, I spent a lot of time putting together a variety of clips from YouTube (and/or the BFI and BBC) as additional teaching material for the QMUL Level 1 course ‘The Road From 1945: Britain Since the Second World War’.  My supervisor, Dan Todman of Trenchfever, hit upon the idea (excellent, I think) of a new blog consisting of primary film, televisual and musical sources to complement the other course documents and teaching materials. Although comments are not enabled on the Road from 1945 blog, we would be interested to hear any reactions through the comments which you can post here. 

As we explain on this page, the clips are categorized chronologicaly and cross-referenced thematically.  I was responsible for most of the material which might be of particular interest to Window Smashers: on The Sixties; the 1970s; the 1980s; Music; Cultural History; Political History and Devolution (or, more accurately, the non-English parts of the UK since the late 1960s). 

I’d appreciate any feedback on the the choices of clips, the passages I have written to contextualize them, and the questions I’ve posed to get the students thinking.

Steady as she goes, Sunny Jim

Here are two interesting quotes from the 16th June 2008 edition of BBC Radio Four’s 1968 Day by Day series. As well as offering insights into the generational shifts of the time, they are also excellent examples of the distinctive rhetorical style of James Callaghan.

The then Home Secretary spoke (using what Anthony Howard once described beautifully as his ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ mode) to The World This Weekend about the ongoing student protests in Britain and abroad. The first quote could (as so often with Callaghan) be described as ‘avuncular’. I’m undecided about the adjective which best describes the second:

“I think some of the student leaders are thoughtful, idealistic people who have something to contribute to society…I think they’re all more self-confident these days than we used to be. They’re more self-confident perhaps because they’ve got greater financial independence than we used to have. But although more self-confident I doubt whether they’re any more mature.”

“I think Mr Tariq Ali is a spoiled, rich playboy who the medium of mass communication has elevated to a distinction that a squalid nuisance doesn’t really command.”

In the air

I’m pleased that the Broadway opening of Hair at the Biltmore Theatre on 29th April has been noted in Radio 4′s 1968: Day by Day. According to John Tusa, ‘Broadway’s defences crumble[d]‘ as the ‘first Rock Musical’ arrived after playing Off-Broadway for six months. (Not only that, Sir John: Hair was the first theatre piece ever to transfer from Off- to On-Broadway.) However, while it’s great to hear a burst of Nina Simone, the rather clumsy statement ‘at [Hair's] heart: Nina Simone’s classic – Ain’t Got No…I Got Life‘ could give the erroneous impression that she wrote the song. It was Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot’s ‘classic’ before it was ‘hers’.

Forty years and one day later, Albert Hoffman, the man who invented LSD, died. He was 102. He must have been doing something right.

Forty years and two days later, the city formerly known as ‘Swinging’ London seems inclined, on May Day, to elect as its Mayor a man who does a very convincing impersonation of an imbecile – which, of course, he can’t be because he was ‘educated’ at Eton and Balliol. And it just doesn’t get any better than that, does it? If, forty years on, so many caps can still willingly be doffed at a pig’s bladder on a stick, did 1968 change anything…?

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:

Sweet (Saint) F (of) A

The relentless nature of our raw material finally catches up with me this week, when I teach my undergraduates about Margaret Thatcher’s government. This is a situation in which I never, ever dreamed I would find myself: rehearsing the entire political landscape of my formative years (in the west coast of Scotland) with (London) students who have no living memory of those events. And doing so “dispassionately”. Mmmm.

In lieu of further comment, here is a clip from 4th May 1979 which, for a variety of reasons, none of us who watched it live will ever forget. In my case, as my mum and I rolled about the sofa, laughing like the aliens in the Smash adverts, I vividly recall my complete conviction that good old Messrs Callaghan and Healey and that very nice Mrs Williams would be back within a matter of weeks.

I still struggle to believe that they never did return.

All of this is now, of course, History. Most bizarelly of all: so, it seems (at least in part), am I.

Image: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/images/thatcher_is_pm.jpg

Gordon is Ted?

I try to avoid contemporary politics on this blog. However, having watched the coverage of today’s change in personnel at Number 10 I’m rather struck by a historical parallel. Much of this is subjective reaction – but then, many ‘esteemed’ TV and broadsheet commentators get paid vast sums to speculate on the strength of no more than that. As I get paid nothing, here goes.

Peter Hennessy (not, I stress, one of those types of commentators) has often remarked on the understandable fear of any Prime Minister who takes over in mid-term of being a mere ‘suffix’ to an illustrious predecesor (whether or not they subsequently win an election in their own right): Thatcher/Major, Wilson/Callaghan, Macmillan/Douglas-Home, Churchill/Eden.

However, on the strength of his performances over the last six weeks, his demeanour today, and rumours of impending, far-reaching, systemic reform of Whitehall departments, Gordon Brown hasn’t put me in mind of Sir Anthony, the 14th Earl of Home, Sunny Jim or Mr Major. As Brown arrives as PM I can see only a re-incarnation of Edward Heath.

"Tory! Tory! Tory!"

In the name of political balance, a quick mention for this latest BBC Four 3-part documentary series, the first of which was broadcast last night in what had been the “Lefties” slot. Although handled in a more conventional, high-political ‘talking head’ manner, this was, nonetheless, an interesting look at the history of the Conservative Right since 1945. It examined some of the ideological strands which knitted together, often in unlikely and haphazard ways, into what would become known as “Thatcherism”. Unfortunately, BBC Four have not provided a decent webpage to accompany this series. They’ve also given it what I think is a terrible title.

However, if any of you recorded it, why not rewind to around the 42 minute mark? There, in all her brief glory, amongst the woefully limited amount of stock footage which the BBC regurgitates in every documentary which touches on the Heath government and the Three Day Week, you can savour…The Woman With The Candle On Her Shopping Trolley (see “Lefties”? 9 out of 10! below). She always moves from screen left to right. Sometimes we see more of her. Sometimes she is in colour; sometimes black and white. But she must be there, or it’s just not TV History of 1970s Britain, is it? How soon, I wonder, before we see yet again the second most over-used BBC documentary clip: Two Hippies In Little John Lennon Sunglasses Walking Down Carnaby Street? I’d give it a few weeks.

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?