The BBC<\/a> kept me entertained the other night with a packed schedule of gripping, top-flight programming. Don\u2019t worry, I haven\u2019t gone barmy. This wasn\u2019t 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<\/a> YouTube channel, where excerpts \u2013 and some full programmes \u2013 are unearthed from its vaults.<\/p>\n Drama, comedy and music aren\u2019t included on the Archive channel because of the pesky contract renegotiations and artists\u2019 payments involved. Instead, it concentrates on factual programming: news and documentaries. That remit still covers a tremendous range. At one end, there\u2019s the fluff of the eccentric \u201cand finally\u201d items that used to end local news bulletins \u2013 skateboarding ducks, haunted council houses, etc. At the other there are weighty in-depth investigations and think pieces.<\/p>\n The Archive features many recognisable moments and personalities \u2013 from BBC Tonight\u2019s Fyfe Robertson to the fire in the Blue Peter studio and Fred Dibnah\u2019s steeplejacking scrapes \u2013 but there\u2019s also a lot of other cracking, lesser-known stuff to delve into. And much of it \u2013 with its revolutionary premise that you\u2019re clever and paying attention \u2013 throws a very unflattering light on what the BBC has become since those days.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 but with benevolence and generosity. It was a very male world, yes, but male in a way that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The enormous social and technological changes of this century made the move away from formality \u2013 and towards Americanised manners \u2013 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\u2019s forget its decades of decline, and remember the BBC at its best with the aid of the Archive channel.<\/p>\n Host Robert Robinson introduces novelist Ian Watson, here to plug his new novel God\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Watson thinks metaphysics is acceptable in the genre; Harrison doesn\u2019t, 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\u2019t the fascinating thing about this clip. What\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n And yes, this is five educated white men talking, dropping things like, \u201cIt also throws up the most baroque metaphors in rather the way that a Bach fugue might.\u201d But so what? I kind of miss this milieu, and mourn what their descendants in the academic class have become since. I can\u2019t 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\u2019t really exist then \u2013 because, of course, it is ridiculous.<\/p>\n This lengthy clip \u2013 following demon racing driver Graham Hill designing and constructing a speed racer \u2013 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\u2019s eye out, and a long, luscious mane. Again, this was a very masculine world, with a blithe assumption of the viewer\u2019s seriousness and intelligence. \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to \u2018make do\u2019\u201d, says Hill of his creation. \u201cIn the long run, it pays to be exact\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 but lacking in the unity and personal satisfaction he so fondly remembers. He feels swamped by the relentless pace of the modern media. \u201cI think we get too much of it,\u201d he says of TV news, recalling that in the past, \u201cbad news had to wait for the morning paper \u2013 at least you could go to bed in a good mood\u201d.<\/p>\n TV journalist Fyfe Robertson in Is Life Getting Worse? – BBC<\/p>\n This piece is a gem, and gives the modern viewer a strange sensation of looking through two mirrors. You\u2019re watching somebody 50 years ago yearning for 50 years before. Robertson\u2019s big concerns? Housing, the economy, pornography.<\/p>\n It\u2019s tempting to shrug, mutter plus \u00e7a 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.<\/p>\n He keeps saying things that resonate across time. \u201cPolitically and industrially you could almost think sometimes that we hate each other. It wasn\u2019t like that when the bombs were falling, remember?\u201d Or, \u201cWe sometimes seem to be the helpless victims of minorities today, as if the majority didn\u2019t have rights too.\u201d Quaintly, he is charmed by one modern thing: a very ordinary shopping centre in Nottingham.<\/p>\n A look at a joint venture by The Coffee Promotion Council and the International Coffee Association to promote \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 coffee. \u201cIn England, we don\u2019t drink much coffee,\u201d 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 \u2013 so if you\u2019re now between 69 and 74, this is why you\u2019re knocking back that cup of Joe instead of tea.<\/p>\n The agency in charge of the ad is nothing like Mad Men. \u201cThey mustn\u2019t look like Hells Angels,\u201d 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 \u2013 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).<\/p>\n This documentary follows Brighton rock band The Mike Stuart Span for a year as they try, and fail, to break into the charts. It\u2019s 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\u2019s chancer of a manager as well as lots of beguiling detail: the lavish promotional packaging on a 7\u201d single, tastemaker Penny Valentine stubbing out fags, the very unpsychedelic kitchen of the drummer\u2019s mum.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 uncredited \u2013 having a moan about modernity, and saying things like, \u201cWe\u2019re constantly snuffling about like baffled bloodhounds looking for a really authentic bit of our past.\u201d It\u2019s captivating, though it lacks the charm of old Fyfe.<\/p>\n One of Nationwide\u2019s classic \u201clight\u201d 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.<\/p>\n They\u2019re not keen. \u201cAll this sex and every wretched thing, more and more of it!\u201d \u201cIt will attract the wrong kind of person, all the scoundrels of Hell!\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s disgusting!\u201d The joy of this selection is that this is Hornsea in October, so grey and fogbound that you probably couldn\u2019t see your own hand right in front of you, let alone anything else.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s always a treat to see proper old Seventies ratbag pensioners blowing their tops in a \u201cwhere will it all end?\u201d way. Though sometimes one wonders if, however inarticulately expressed, they had a point.<\/p>\n One of the channel\u2019s biggest hits, and it\u2019s easy to see why, as the Tomorrow\u2019s 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\u2019ll be able to use windows as TV screens, and technology will be tastefully hidden in our minimal, clutter-free abodes. Elsewhere, \u201cnew materials will reduce heating bills almost to zero\u201d apparently. Oh well.<\/p>\n I finished off my night\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t appreciate is that a lot of this material felt elegiac even at the time.<\/p>\nA round-up of the best the channel has to offer<\/h2>\n
The Book Programme: What Is Science Fiction? (1979)<\/h2>\n
\nTuesday Documentary: Graham Hill Creating His Own F1 Car (1973)<\/h2>\n
\nFyfe Robertson Wonders: Is Life Getting Worse? (1975)<\/h2>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
\nScene: The Coffee Campaign (1970)<\/h2>\n
\nA Year In the Life: Is This Band the Next Big Thing? (1969) plus 20 Years On (1989)<\/h2>\n
\nForty Minutes: Voices In A City (1984)<\/h2>\n
\nNationwide: Should Hornsea Have A Nudist Beach? (1973)<\/h2>\n
\nTomorrow\u2019s World: The House Of 2020 (1989)<\/h2>\n
\nEnquiry: Voice Of The People: What Future For The Scottish Highlands? (1960)<\/h2>\n