Summer Schedule: Festival 77

 

The BBC’s Festival 40 must have been considered a success, because exactly a year later, the corporation did it all over again, presenting another retrospective season, this time under the umbrella title of Festival 77. The Radio Times for the week in question uniquely relegated its familiar masthead to a corner, making room for a display of twenty five vintage covers. This time, taking its cue from the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the trawl through the archives was a celebration of 25 years of BBC television, spanning 1952 to the then present day.

Viewers expecting the BBC to make good on the comparative dearth of truly populist material in the previous year’s retrospective were to be disappointed: if anything, Festival 77 was even more elitist than its predecessor. Over twenty-five nights, a different programme was presented as representative of a different year in the broadcaster’s history. Once again, a compilation programme served to introduce the season: Thanks for the Memory (Sunday 31 July, 20.10 BBC2) adopted a vox pop approach, drawing on the memories of viewers and contributors to television, once again illustrated with a choice helping of clips from the archives. My diary noted the inclusion of the original Z Cars titles, along with what I referred to as ‘other silly programmes’ one of which, was, if memory serves, the famous 'Spaghetti Harvest' film presented by Panorama as an April Fool's joke back in 1957. But if this was a lightweight selection, the season itself would prove to be anything but. 

With so much early television going out live, the choice of material available from the 1950s was decidedly limited, and the first evening’s offering was a compilation of the old television newsreel, Retrospect 1952 – a kind of Rock and Roll Years without the rock and roll, good nostalgia fodder for anyone alive at the time, but of no special interest to myself (I opted for the film The Magus over on BBC1). The programme was, like everything else in the 1977 season, prefaced with an introduction from the broadcaster and war correspondent René Cutforth. The same evening saw a one-off revival of the discussion programme Late Night Line-Up, which solicited contributions from David Frost, Dennis Potter and others, and considered topics including the development and importance of the television play from the 1960s. 

Tuesday evening’s selection took the form of two interviews from 1953, with Aneurin Bevan and Adlai Stevenson – hardly the kind of thing that viewers would have held dear in the memory – but Wednesday night brought the season’s first real gem in the form of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the legendary Nigel Kneale/ Rudolph Cartier production of 1954. I made a special point of watching this. It was black and white, blurry (no kind of restoration having been attempted), and with the static, slow-moving production values typical of its era – but it was still powerful stuff. My diary didn’t afford much room for comment aside from the laconic note ‘is good’ (my diary entries often sound as if they’d been written by Manuel out of Fawlty Towers…)

Radio Times listing for 1984 – the picture quality wasn't as bad as their Schaflined image suggests.

The following night’s selection, from 1955, was hardly typical of mid-50s television, comprising a nostalgic celebration of the tenth anniversary of Victory in Europe. Cue Vera Lynne, Richard Murdoch, Jack Warner et al… On Friday evening, At Home (1956) was a pair of outside broadcasts visiting famous people in their domestic surroundings, and offering up the sharp cultural contrast of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Kenneth Horne. 1957’s offering again eschewed contemporary content for another return to the war years, Men in Battle: Arnhem. Important television it undoubtedly was, but hardly the stuff of which nostalgic retrospectives are made…

1958 was represented by an early ‘fly on the wall’ documentary, presenting a ‘vivid portrait of community life in the East End’, long before Albert Square became inextricably associated with that particular corner of the metropolis. 1959’s offering was the crime drama Who, Me?, with a cast that included Lee Montague and Z Cars’ Leonard Williams; while from 1960 another two episodes of Face to Face were dusted off, presenting interviews with Evelyn Waugh and Adam Faith. From here, it was downhill to populist comedy fare with Here’s Harry representing the BBC’s output from the year of my birth, 1961. Back in 1977, I still thought Harry Worth was vaguely amusing, and it was worth tuning in if only to see the ‘legendary’ title sequence where he gets himself up against a shop window and does that thing with his arms and legs. The episode concerned his attempts to get a record request played on Housewives’ Choice.

Thursday night’s selection has been seen on BBC4 within the past few months: Pop Goes the Easel (1962) was described as ‘an exciting early film by Ken Russell from the Monitor series’, and looked at the work of four ‘pop artists’ (Radio Times’ commas, not mine), Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips. I was tuned in again on Friday 12 August for That Was the Week That Was, a programme I’d first heard about in last year’s compilation. TW3 was very much a programme whose reputation preceded it. Having clocked up 37 episodes across two series, its run was abruptly terminated in December of 1963 on the pretext of 1964 being an election year – and heaven forbid that a piece of televised satire might have an influence on the way people voted. If the establishment had been running scared, it did them no good, as the Tories were ousted anyway – but it all goes to show how far we’ve come since those days – and not in a favourable direction.

By 1964, Beatlemania was at its height and the media were increasingly obsessed with the fads, fashions and opinions of teenagers, which may explain the next entry in the Festival 77 line-up. Ten Years After was a return visit to a group of London teenagers from differing backgrounds who had been the subject of a 1955 Special Enquiry film. Following the broadcast, René Cutforth spoke to some of the participants, 22 years on from the original film. ITV pursued a similar line of enquiry with their own series, Seven Up, that premiered the same year as the updated BBC documentary. Coincidence or not?

Sunday 14 August saw the seminal drama Up the Junction given an airing. The BBC’s original black and white production was a good deal more earthy and raw than the colour feature film of 1968, which I had yet to discover. Up the Junction has become something of a touchstone when discussing the neo-realist ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the late 50s and early 60s, and still delivers a clout even today.

Monday took viewers back to 1966 for a early episode of Till Death Us Do Part. First broadcast on 20 June 1966, the episode was now clocking up its third airing, following a repeat run in September of the same year. I was vaguely familiar with Alf Garnett, but not a special fan of the series – I could never warm to Johnny Speight’s acerbic humour – but I made a point of watching this vintage piece of television. It has since been shown on BBC2 in 1997 and on BBC4.

1967’s representative programme was In Two Minds, a hard-hitting drama tackling the subject of schizophrenia – again, I passed on this one, but was back in front of the set for All My Loving, Tony Palmer’s 1968 film about pop music, and one of the first documentaries ever to interrogate the subject in any depth. From 1969, Royal Family was a famous ‘fly on Buckingham Palace wall’ documentary, described by the Radio Times as a ‘revelation’. Shock horror for viewers at the realisation that the Windsors were just a regular family like any other. Pull the other one, auntie…

On Friday 19 August, viewers were afforded a trip back to 1970 and the seaside in the form of Bird’s Eye View, an aerial tour of the coast with commentary from Sir John Betjeman. From this affable travelogue it was straight into the gutter for the harrowing Edna, the Inebriate Woman, a warts and all (warts and nothing else?) portrayal of a drunken down-and-out, portrayed by Patricia Hayes. I should probably have seen this, if not in 1977 then on its subsequent repeat run during another archival season in 1986. This was the kind of television play about which grown-ups were heard to mutter darkly and disapprovingly.

Having been passed over for the previous year’s line-up, Morecambe and Wise finally made the grade for 1972’s archival offering. The comedy continued on Monday 22 August with the first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, a welcome repeat as far as I was concerned. I’d last seen it on a repeat run in December 1974 which already felt like ages ago. It is now…

It was back to much heavier and challenging fare on Tuesday 23 August with Joey, a dramatised true story about a man with severe brain damage who, despite facing significant communication difficulties had managed to dictate his own life story. The following night, Just Another Saturday, from 1975, presented a film portrait of a marching band. This was followed on Thursday 25 August by the most unusual item in the whole season – a 1976 edition of Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, the only occasion on which the programme was ever seen outside of its customary Saturday morning slot, and the only edition ever to be given a repeat screening. The episode, described in the Radio Times as a ‘condensed’ edition, included contributions from Softly, Softly’s Frank Windsor and Norman Bowler, motor racing champion James Hunt, and the Electric Light Orchestra. Bringing the season right up to date on Friday 26 August was a special new edition of Horizon, looking back at the past 25 years of the documentary strand. And with this, Festival 77 sank gracefully below the horizon…

These two consecutive seasons of archival exhumations may have led some to suspect that this would now become an annual treat on BBC2, but it was not to be. Aside from the usual repeat runs for series of not-so-distant vintage, there would be no further mining of the archives for almost a decade, when BBC television marked its fiftieth anniversary in 1986. The corporation would acknowledge notable dates like Z Cars’ twentieth anniversary in January 1982 by exhuming odd episodes (and once, memorably, picked out an episode of Maigret from which Rupert Davies was almost entirely absent!) but on the whole, archival material was thin on the ground and most often found an outlet in compilations like the short-lived but well meaning Windmill. Today, real rarities occasionally find their way to the screen – just recently BBC4 viewers were treated to four episodes of Andy Pandy – but the kind of archive seasons we saw in the 1970s and 80s are less common. On the other hand, where it was once considered enough to show a single episode, today’s viewers are more likely to find entire series available to watch, such as 2022’s welcome repeat for the rarely seen 1970 production Roads to Freedom, which resurfaced as part of a comprehensive drama retrospective.

With many vintage items having become available on home media, and still more on YouTube, the value of retrospective seasons is no longer quite what it was in the 1970s when there was no other means of access to the archive. Are we in a better place? Undoubtedly. But it would still be nice to see another season of repeats with the diversity and rarity value of Festivals 40 and 77.