Monthly Archives: October 2015

This week’s high-point , if that is the right word, is Dominic Sandbrook’s four parter on British culture.  Just why the BBC has entrusted a large slice of its contemporary history output to his is a mystery to me.  It is not so much that he has become a pretty unpleasant right-wing columnist on the Daily Mail, but that his history is very poor indeed riddled with facile analyses and unsubstantiated political opinions asserted as if evidence-based conclusion.  Let Us Entertain You starts on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC2 which has at its heart the one-sided assertion that British culture remains in the thrall of the tropes established in Victorian Britain and that the modernism, the sixties and the avant garde had lasting impact.

Details of all programmes can be found on the TV and Radio page.

Early in October The Guardian reported that students and campaigners at Warwick University were campaigning against the presence of the BP Archive on their campus.  My initial reaction was that it was necessarily wrong to demand that BP be less transparent.  However, the more I examined the issues the more it appeared to me that BP had questions to answer.  Moreover, these questions can only be satisfactorily answered by changes in the way the archive operates.  My full piece can be read here. https://britishcontemporaryhistory.com/news/oiling-the-wheels-of-history-the-bp-archive-and-historical-research/

A thin week with very little to excite any contemporary British historians with a wish to watch TV while staying on duty.  The BBC considering the history of its own future is the only unmissable programme this week (BBC Radio 4, 8pm Saturday), which is up against a C4’s look at gender reassignment surgery and those who underwent in the 1950s (C4, 8pm Saturday).

Details of all programmes can be found on the TV and Radio page.

A quick-post in relation to a conversation I was having with someone at the Applied History event in London this evening.  The book on the history of the history of black and Asian immigrants to Liverpool before the mass immigration in the 1950s and 1960s is John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race relations in 20^th Century Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014).  Contrary to its title, only around the first half of the book is about the period before 1948.  I have not read it, so I cannot comment on its contents.

The older book about this migrant experience n Liverpool is Anthony Richmond Colour Prejudice in Britain: A study of West Indian Workers in Liverpool 1941-1951 (London: RKP, 1954).  In some way this has not dated well, but contains some interesting historical material.

This week has only material at the popular end of the spectrum – so we have British costal pleasure cruiser, Ford Capris and British psychedelic.

Details of all programmes can be found on the TV and Radio page.

A thin week.  A little bit of post-war British poetry (Larkin, Hughes) and that is about it.

Details of all programmes can be found on the TV and Radio page.

The great Michael Cockerell on Denis Healey at 8pm BBC2 tonight (up against the Great British cake-thing final on BBC1).  Denis Healey punched me in the stomach, really quite hard, in 1981 when I was 17, but I will only tell the story if you ask ne

From the News page

Is it right to Boycott Archives?

5th October 2015.  Rather unsettling stuff from the Guardian.  It is one thing to call on universities to disinvest from oil companies, it is quite another to call on them to refuse to hold the archives of oil companies.  The Guardian reports on a campaign to remove BP archive from Warwick university.  See http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/04/warwick-university-bp-archive-students-chancellor

For those of you live in London, the Institute of Contemporary British History at KCL (and which, despite any similarities in its name, is in no way related to this blog) have posted their schedule for 2016/16.  These are open (although fundamentally academic) events.   The schedule can be found at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/icbh/news/CBHseminar2015-16.aspx

Highlight of the week is undoubtedly Radio 4’s book to the week – the second volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher.  While Moore is generally sympathetic to Thatcher and her politics, the first volume contained new material and genuinely new insights.  The book itself is out on Tuesday.  Elsewhere we have John Lennon, indie music, historic paedophilia, St. Ives and more.

Details of all progammes can be found on the TV and Radio page.