Feeling My Age

From 1962 to 1963 That Was The Week That Was became compulsive, in fact almost compulsory, Saturday night viewing in our house. The piss being ripped out of Establishment figures on live television was a spectacle that delighted Dad in his radical forties as much as me in my early teens.  Bernard Levin, Roy Kinnear, Millicent Martin, Lance Percival, William Rushton, Al Mancini, Timothy Birdsall and of course David Frost were people we almost felt we knew personally.

TW3 was the very pinnacle of the UK satire boom. To have seen Beyond The Fringe you would have had to go to the Edinburgh Festival or a London theatre. Even to read Private Eye, I had to hand over my pocket money once a fortnight in Harts – the only newsagent in town not supplied by the WH Smith chain, which had banned it.

By contrast That Was The Week That Was was beamed into living rooms across the UK every Saturday by the BBC’s main, indeed only, TV channel. Nowadays mocking government ministers on TV is merely banal: in 1962 it was quite literally without precedent. Watching the opening credits with their Pop Art graphics and shots of the working studio still brings back my first thrill of amazement that producer Ned Sherrin and his team could actually have got away with this stuff on the BBC.

They didn’t for long, either. With 1964 being an election year, Auntie got cold feet and pulled the plugs.

David Frost accepted an OBE in 1970 and a knighthood in 1993. it’s good to look back and see how genuinely daring and disrepectful he was to the power elite of the day.

Our household are big fans of the post-2005 Dr Who, but I can still remember watching the first ever episode at a mate’s house in November 1963. It was the day after the Kennedy assasination, so a lot of our friends and their parents missed it. But during the following week there was such a buzz about it that the BBC had to bow to to popular demand, change its Saturday night schedule and re-screen Episode One as the first half of a double length feature. And this time everybody, but everybody, watched it.

William Hartnell was born in 1908 and played The Doctor as elderly and irascible with long swept-back silver hair. I was 13 at the time, and what with the Daleks, the police box and the unprecedented all-electronic theme music, Dr Who completely captured the public imagination.

One of our science teachers devoted a whole lesson to musique concrète and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. At the Arts Theatre pantomime in Cambridge that Christmas a Dalek scuttled across the stage just so that Cyril Fletcher (who was playing the Dame) could crack a weak pun about speaking in “a Cambridgeshire Dalek”.

When Russell T Davies first revived the show seven years ago, the biggest change he made was to cast fit, attractive leading men and – for the first time ever – make Dr Who sexy. Combined with improved plots, modern pacing and camerawork, a proper CGI budget and the occasional bisexual frisson, it’s been a perfect show for all the family ever since.

There’s quite a lot more than a frisson in the above video, made by the cast & crew of the show – plus The Proclaimers – as a swansong for outgoing writer/producer Russell T. and tenth doctor David T.  My wife – a regular visitor to the David Tennant webite – happened across it a couple of days ago.

I particularly like the dancing Oud – and Dave & Will from the VFX department flaunting their skills as they sing with tiny, tiny heads.

(AP Photo/File) / Beaumont

Martin Luther King’s Address at March on Washington
August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C.

“…In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check – a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice…”

[For full text see the MLK website]

The full video of this landmark speech used to be available on YouTube but EMI Publishing acquired the copyright to the only footage and have had it removed. You might imagine that in a selfproclaimed “creative industry” the importance of Dr King’s impassionated oratory being viewed as widely as possible by today’s generations would count for something, but you’d be wrong.

Well can we at least pay to view it on iTunes ? Can we fuck. EMI make far too much money charging the world’s TV & film companies through the nose everytime they want to use a few seconds of it in a programme. At least the full length audio recording is available, and you can hear it by clicking play above or the Soundcloud link.

I’m all in favour of creative individuals holding a copyright in their original works and receiving due income as we enjoy them – Iggy Pop, for instance, or even JK Rowling. But who was the creative individual here – the network employee who pointed his camera at the podium or the man giving the speech ? And do you suppose either of their families ever see a cent from this continuing income? No, neither do I.

So here we have perhaps the most powerful assertion of human rights ever seen in the modern era witheld from view, simply to line the pockets of corporate shareholders. It’s a fucking disgrace.

Addition/Correction – 2 Sept 2011 
See this comment by Merrick and, for my part,  this retraction