The BBC kept me entertained the other night with a packed schedule of gripping, top-flight programming. Don’t worry, I haven’t gone barmy. This wasn’t the current iteration of the terrestrial BBC or any of its channels. No, I sat down to catch up on the material released on the excellent and intelligently curated BBC Archive YouTube channel, where excerpts – and some full programmes – are unearthed from its vaults.
Drama, comedy and music aren’t included on the Archive channel because of the pesky contract renegotiations and artists’ payments involved. Instead, it concentrates on factual programming: news and documentaries. That remit still covers a tremendous range. At one end, there’s the fluff of the eccentric “and finally” items that used to end local news bulletins – skateboarding ducks, haunted council houses, etc. At the other there are weighty in-depth investigations and think pieces.
The Archive features many recognisable moments and personalities – from BBC Tonight’s Fyfe Robertson to the fire in the Blue Peter studio and Fred Dibnah’s steeplejacking scrapes – but there’s also a lot of other cracking, lesser-known stuff to delve into. And much of it – with its revolutionary premise that you’re clever and paying attention – throws a very unflattering light on what the BBC has become since those days.
My general impression after a night spent sifting through the BBC Archive? It reminded me of the pride we used to have in the BBC; the sense that Auntie was the sane centre of British life, a cold and high place that overlooked us all – but with benevolence and generosity. It was a very male world, yes, but male in a way that’s far removed from our current adolescent vision of masculinity: this is the sober judgment of the ideal Dad, not the pornified randiness of Andrew Tate. By contrast, the current BBC often gives the impression that it hates Britain, or pre-Blair Britain at least.
The enormous social and technological changes of this century made the move away from formality – and towards Americanised manners – inevitable. But the BBC should have been the bulwark against rampant stupidification. That was why, right at the very beginning, its creators conformed to the Reithian principles: to educate, inform, and entertain. Instead of protecting and guarding those values, however, the BBC went along with every daft fad, indulged every silly cultural fashion. As its star finally sets, let’s forget its decades of decline, and remember the BBC at its best with the aid of the Archive channel.
A round-up of the best the channel has to offer
The Book Programme: What Is Science Fiction? (1979)
Host Robert Robinson introduces novelist Ian Watson, here to plug his new novel God’s World. But this being the BBC of old, the easy ride of a puff piece cannot be countenanced, so Watson is joined by fellow sci-fi authors Douglas Adams and Harry Harrison, together with literary scholar Peter Nicholls, for a very heavy (by our modern standards) chat about science fiction itself.
Watson thinks metaphysics is acceptable in the genre; Harrison doesn’t, and is bracingly open about saying so. Robinson, who survives in the memory as a bumptious quiz show host, is very astute and knowledgeable. But the actual subject of their discussion isn’t the fascinating thing about this clip. What’s striking watching now is the formality and forthrightness of the speakers, who all talk very fluently and earnestly. (Though Adams, wonderfully, strikes up a cigarette towards the end.)
And yes, this is five educated white men talking, dropping things like, “It also throws up the most baroque metaphors in rather the way that a Bach fugue might.” But so what? I kind of miss this milieu, and mourn what their descendants in the academic class have become since. I can’t speak for everyone, as that would be ridiculous, but as a scruffy kid in this era I never felt intimidated or excluded by these people. The thought would never have entered my mind. Nor did I view them as role models, a concept that didn’t really exist then – because, of course, it is ridiculous.
Tuesday Documentary: Graham Hill Creating His Own F1 Car (1973)
This lengthy clip – following demon racing driver Graham Hill designing and constructing a speed racer – now has a slightly eerie quality, as Hill would die piloting a plane two years later. Hill was a grand presence, with a look of Dick Dastardly: a jutting chin, twirled moustache, sideburns that could take someone’s eye out, and a long, luscious mane. Again, this was a very masculine world, with a blithe assumption of the viewer’s seriousness and intelligence. “It’s very easy to ‘make do’”, says Hill of his creation. “In the long run, it pays to be exact”.
Fyfe Robertson Wonders: Is Life Getting Worse? (1975)
TV journalist Fyfe Robertson was another very vivid Seventies character. In this engrossing documentary, the 73-year-old Robertson looks at life in 1975 and finds it materially much better than the days of his youth – but lacking in the unity and personal satisfaction he so fondly remembers. He feels swamped by the relentless pace of the modern media. “I think we get too much of it,” he says of TV news, recalling that in the past, “bad news had to wait for the morning paper – at least you could go to bed in a good mood”.
TV journalist Fyfe Robertson in Is Life Getting Worse? – BBC
This piece is a gem, and gives the modern viewer a strange sensation of looking through two mirrors. You’re watching somebody 50 years ago yearning for 50 years before. Robertson’s big concerns? Housing, the economy, pornography.
It’s tempting to shrug, mutter plus ça change, and imagine that someone in 2075 will be looking back at our age in the same way. But the points Robertson makes are too specific and pertinent to be so easily dismissed. When he shakes his head, appalled at the title of the film How To Seduce A Virgin, you wonder what he would make of PornHub.
He keeps saying things that resonate across time. “Politically and industrially you could almost think sometimes that we hate each other. It wasn’t like that when the bombs were falling, remember?” Or, “We sometimes seem to be the helpless victims of minorities today, as if the majority didn’t have rights too.” Quaintly, he is charmed by one modern thing: a very ordinary shopping centre in Nottingham.
Scene: The Coffee Campaign (1970)
A look at a joint venture by The Coffee Promotion Council and the International Coffee Association to promote – you guessed it – coffee. “In England, we don’t drink much coffee,” the narrator tells us at the outset. This was a campaign that definitely worked, focused on the 16 to 24-year-olds of the day – so if you’re now between 69 and 74, this is why you’re knocking back that cup of Joe instead of tea.
The agency in charge of the ad is nothing like Mad Men. “They mustn’t look like Hells Angels,” one of them frets of the models in their new ad. They assemble a focus group of youngsters who also look incredibly ordinary, far from the hippies and skinheads we recall from the Seventies. A TV ad is produced, featuring motorbiking coffee drinkers – a Home Counties vision of Easy Rider that ends with a mug of Maxwell House (and, like almost anything made in this very specific era, it looks and sounds inescapably like Monty Python. And despite the American cultural shadow, everyone is very, very British).
A Year In the Life: Is This Band the Next Big Thing? (1969) plus 20 Years On (1989)
This documentary follows Brighton rock band The Mike Stuart Span for a year as they try, and fail, to break into the charts. It’s fascinating to see the vivid splashes of colour in the provinces; this is the swinging bit of the Sixties seen at ground level. You get the amazing character of the Span’s chancer of a manager as well as lots of beguiling detail: the lavish promotional packaging on a 7” single, tastemaker Penny Valentine stubbing out fags, the very unpsychedelic kitchen of the drummer’s mum.
The 20 Years On programme from 1989, appended to the main feature, where the film-maker catches up with the band members, is touchingly bittersweet; it makes you want to catch up with the band, led by Stuart Hobday, again today.
Forty Minutes: Voices In A City (1984)
A beautifully shot, deliberately eerie portrait of Birmingham in 1984. By now, the kind of shopping centre eulogised by Fyfe Robertson is a spooky, Blade Runner-style environment. Against shots of traffic tunnels, cityscapes and shuttered, CCTV-riddled structures we hear voices – uncredited – having a moan about modernity, and saying things like, “We’re constantly snuffling about like baffled bloodhounds looking for a really authentic bit of our past.” It’s captivating, though it lacks the charm of old Fyfe.
Nationwide: Should Hornsea Have A Nudist Beach? (1973)
One of Nationwide’s classic “light” items, this clip sees reporter Bernard Falk, always the joker in the pack, wearing nothing but a strategically placed shrub to investigate the response of Hornsea residents to a naturist beach.
They’re not keen. “All this sex and every wretched thing, more and more of it!” “It will attract the wrong kind of person, all the scoundrels of Hell!” “It’s disgusting!” The joy of this selection is that this is Hornsea in October, so grey and fogbound that you probably couldn’t see your own hand right in front of you, let alone anything else.
And it’s always a treat to see proper old Seventies ratbag pensioners blowing their tops in a “where will it all end?” way. Though sometimes one wonders if, however inarticulately expressed, they had a point.
Tomorrow’s World: The House Of 2020 (1989)
One of the channel’s biggest hits, and it’s easy to see why, as the Tomorrow’s World team look forward to our time, and get it, mostly, spectacularly wrong. Apparently, plugs and sockets will be a thing of the past in the 2020s, we’ll be able to use windows as TV screens, and technology will be tastefully hidden in our minimal, clutter-free abodes. Elsewhere, “new materials will reduce heating bills almost to zero” apparently. Oh well.
Enquiry: Voice Of The People: What Future For The Scottish Highlands? (1960)
I finished off my night’s viewing with this soothing, and almost unbearably beautiful, film, capturing the Highlands and its people in pin-sharp black and white. It will have you scurrying to the internet to have a look at the area and how it’s doing today. Almost all of these selections were made on film rather than video, analogue rather than digital. The patina of film, its grain and weft and its echoing sound, capture the world in a very different way. Something young people probably don’t appreciate is that a lot of this material felt elegiac even at the time.
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