Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

Not a great deal this week.  But what we do have is no less than two programmes on indie music and its roots in the DIY culture identified with punk culture (but preceding by many years).  Other than that, we have Sean Meadow fine This is England ’90 (itself not far from that DIY ethos).

Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

A few bits and bobs this week  .Two programmes of clips driven by irony-laden nostalgia (It Was Alright in the 1980s and Britain as Seen on TV) and a repeat of The 90s: Ten Years That Changed the World, a documentary that looks at the overly commodified pop-culture of the 1990s in an entirely uncritical way.  The only glimmer of hope is the a new (and apparently last) chunk of Shane Meadows’s semi-autobiographical This is England with this alter ego, Sean Fields, aged eighteen facing up to adulthood in the 1990s.

 Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

A full-on week of relevant broadcast material dominated by Radio 4.  Highlights include Jim Naughtie’s history of British oil (R4, Monday 8pm) and Archive on 4 examination of the role of forgetting at the interface between history and politics (R4, Saturday 8pm) and punk violence in Too Much Fighting on the Dance Floor (R4, Friday 11:30am).  Elsewhere, there is much royalist propaganda.  Much better history can be found in the unlikely- source of a couple of clips shows (It was Alright in the 1970s (C4, Saturday 9pm) and Britain as Seen on TV (ITV, Monday 8pm) that, without seemingly trying, supply a better history of modern Britain than any adulatory programmes about Brenda.

Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

Undoubted highlight of the week – three hours of coverage of the 1955 general election.  Truly unmissable.

Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

Quite a bit of art this week, from Roy Strong (too often held up as icon of sixties London) to the pop art (too often a trite capitulation to consumerism).  Meanwhile, a true great of post-war British art, Francis Bacon, is consigned to Book of the Week on Radio 4.

Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

Oh dear, even when Auntie does venture into the recent past her thoughts are dominated by war and great men.  So on Monday on BBC4 we have an evening of Churchill, war and war films.   And that is about it.

Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.