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00:00Music
00:24And here in Trafalgar Square it's midnight
00:271959 going out and 1960 coming in
00:31A Happy New Year to you all
00:36The forecast is that 1960 will start with mild weather
00:40And strangulated southern voices on the BBC as usual
00:46But 1960 would be the year a new voice was heard
00:49And it would come from the north
00:51Like Arthur Seaton in the film Saturday night and Sunday morning
00:55It was cocky and defiant
00:57What I'm out for is a good time
00:59All the rest is propaganda
01:05Arthur was part of a newly prosperous generation
01:08Loudly asserting itself
01:14This is not kind of defeated downtrod, no woe is me north
01:17This is something entirely different
01:19This is the north, virile and passionate and colourful
01:21And it's remarkable
01:23The north of England would go from being the economic engine room of the country
01:27To its cultural powerhouse
01:29It would become fashionable
01:31And in literature, theatre and film
01:35A new kind of northerner would be depicted
01:37Working class, affluent, stroppy, sexy
01:43So here's Arthur Seaton on screen
01:47A heat-seeking missile hell-bent on sinking a dozen pints
01:51Having a ruck and a...
01:53Well, a good time with the ladies
01:55With Arthur, the old deferential north could step aside
01:58Or be pushed aside
02:00Mind what you're doing
02:01Mind what you're doing
02:02It was a time of immense freedom
02:04And hope and optimism
02:06And there was nothing like us
02:08So we thought
02:09I mean, we were the start of the 60s
02:11That revolution
02:12In at the start of this revolution
02:14Was a young writer from Salford
02:16In 1960, Sheila Delaney's play A Taste of Honey
02:19Was on Broadway and soon to be filmed
02:22It introduced a new kind of northern type
02:27I'm an extraordinary person
02:30Characters on screen with a wayward exuberance
02:33And sex lives
02:35We're bloody marvellous
02:37Suddenly we didn't have to be embarrassed
02:39We didn't have to be ashamed
02:40We were ourselves
02:42And there we were on the screen
02:43And we were stars
02:47But by the end of 1960
02:49It would be television
02:50And the start of Coronation Street
02:52That would bring this explosion
02:53Of northern creativity
02:54Into the front rooms of Britain
02:56And confirm 1960
02:58As the year of the North
03:01Is that where your crack on you are these days?
03:03Fine son
03:04A fine son you are
03:05That tongue of yours will get you on one of these days
03:06Oh, give over
03:14Oh, oh
03:20I found a place for the chance
03:23Oh, magic world
03:25You're my baby bizarre
03:27Cause off the bridge left seven and leaves
03:32A wondrous place
03:36In 1960, sometime Liverpudlian docker Ronald Wycherley
03:40AKA Billy Fury sang about A Wondrous Place
03:43For Billy, this place was anywhere in the immediate vicinity of his girlfriend
03:47But he might have been talking about the north of England
03:50And for those down south like photographer John Bulmer
03:56Who took these pictures
03:58Here was a far away, almost exotic place
04:04Anything north of Watford was like a foreign country
04:10You know, to me it was like going to New Guinea or something
04:13It was so different
04:15There were so many wonderful images there to be captured
04:21I think the cultural north in 1960
04:23Was anywhere outside of London
04:25I think Birmingham where I'm from
04:27Was very much the north
04:29I think anywhere that had chimneys
04:31Anywhere that was a bit dark and dingy
04:33That was perceived as the north
04:35So it didn't have to be in the north literally
04:39Nottingham fitted the bill
04:41And it provided the setting for one of the most powerful expressions
04:44Of the new northern stridency
04:46Saturday night and Sunday morning
04:49The film begins with the ultimate source of northern power
04:53The factory floor
04:54With the machines pounding like a migraine
05:01The factory was a dynamic place
05:03Something to rebel against
05:05But it also provided the cash
05:07To fund that rebellion
05:09I worked in a factory
05:11Metalastic
05:12We used to do
05:13We used to do rubber metal bondings
05:14And it was just like the beginning of Saturday night and Sunday morning
05:18You used to go
05:19230, 231, 232
05:23When's the tea break?
05:26You know
05:27You see Arthur Seton and it's yourself
05:29954
05:31954
05:32955
05:44955
05:45The film was based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe
05:48Who grew up in working class Nottingham
05:50Sillitoe really did have it rough
05:52For much of his childhood his family were homeless
05:54His father being an impecunious drunk
05:57For a time Alan followed his father onto the factory floor at Raleigh
06:01Making bicycles
06:02The opening scene was shot here
06:05The workers are real workers
06:07Living a life that Arthur Seton seeks to transcend
06:10Through sheer physical pleasure
06:12He was cocking a hoop at authority
06:16And he didn't give a dab
06:17And when he was doing his thing at the machine at the beginning
06:2014 pounds a week and all the rest is bloody propaganda
06:25That opened the film
06:28I mean he was saying
06:29Sorry but
06:31I'm here
06:33Arthur is almost an exemplum of the new affluent worker
06:38Who earns such a large pay packet
06:42That his foreman tells him not to reveal what it is to his workmates
06:47He spends his money on nice jackets and ties
06:52And there's a scene where he lovingly brings back his jacket from the dry cleaner
06:56Puts it on and knots his tie very carefully before going out for a night on the town
07:02Clearly he's someone who's almost too big for his surroundings
07:11You see him leave his back to back house
07:14And almost sort of pushing people out of the way
07:17It's as if his surroundings are too cramped for the way he wishes to live
07:22Mind what you're doing can't you?
07:24The 1960 moment was not only important for Northern writers
07:28It also allowed a new generation of Northern actors to shine
07:31Arthur Seaton was played by Albert Finney in his breakthrough performance
07:34Before 1960, sex symbols didn't tend to come from Pendleton Salford
07:39His co-star was Shirley Ann Field who grew up north of Bolton
07:46Until now she'd naturally assumed that all aspiring Northern actors
07:50Had to appear Southern in order to get on
07:53So I went to these painful lessons one after another, one after another
07:59And spoke terribly carefully, like this, you see
08:03Tried to be like everybody else of that day
08:06The producer of Saturday nights and Sunday morning was Tony Richardson
08:10Who was born in Shipley, Yorkshire
08:12He'd had great success in the theatre staging Look Back in Anger
08:16So he had the reputation and the funding for his mission
08:19To put the life of the North on the cinema screen
08:23So I auditioned for Tony Richardson and I read in my best English
08:28And then I got to the door and my back was to them and they said thank you
08:32And just as I was leaving he went
08:34You couldn't talk in a northern voice could you
08:38And I went bloody hell, I've spent four years learning not to
08:42And he said get back in here and read it again in that voice
08:44They said we've been looking for a working class heroine
08:47Well I was slightly offended by that, I thought working class
08:51What's your name then, Doc? Doreen
08:53Doreen
08:54In the film, Shirley Anfield's character makes no particular attempt to finesse her social position
08:59Where do you work then, Doreen?
09:02Me? Aris is the air net factory
09:04I've been there ever since I left school
09:06Alright, I will have a fag
09:08But Arthur sees no reason to confine himself to Doreen
09:14He's also carrying on with the wife of her workmates
09:18This frank portrayal of sex and adultery was something quite new in 1960
09:24There was quite a tussle with the censor about the use of certain words in Saturday night and Sunday morning
09:32There was also concern about Arthur and Brenda being seen in bed together
09:37There was debate about whether Arthur should have his shirt on or his shirt off
09:41And therefore there was a concern on the part of the censor that, as it were, Saturday night and Sunday morning was overstepping the mark in terms of its representation of sexual pleasure and sexual activity outside of marriage
09:56The film was a smash hit and went on to become one of the top grossing British films of 1960
10:17It really connected with young audiences, especially in the North itself
10:23These huge cinemas, 2,000 people in them
10:28And suddenly it wasn't Ronald Reagan, it wasn't John Wayne
10:32You saw yourself on the cinema screen
10:35Your scowling, northern, rough self
10:38It was just amazing
10:41And you felt that you no longer needed to be embarrassed
10:45You no longer needed to be ashamed
10:48You could beat your scent
10:50What do you want if you don't want money?
10:53What do you want if you don't want money?
10:57What do you want if you don't want gold?
11:00In 1960, Adam Faith had a hit with a song that beadily inquired
11:04What do you want if you don't want money?
11:07What do you want if you don't want money?
11:10It was the right song for a year in which the pleasures of materialism finally reached the masses
11:15Wish you wanted my love, baby
11:19Between 1957 and 1960, spending on consumer goods increased by nearly 50%
11:25Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, venturing into rare colloquialism, said Britons had never had it so good
11:32It was irrefutably the case
11:34Industry was booming and workers were doing well out of it
11:37The weekly wage was £14.10 shillings
11:41It had tripled since 1950
11:44I think just the sheer availability of jobs at the time, you know, of kind of semi-skilled
11:50And often quite skilled jobs and certainly quite well-paid jobs
11:54Was absolutely fundamental to people's sense of being free almost to do what they wanted
12:00I mean, you know, I've read a lot of stories of people, you know, on a Friday evening telling their boss to sod off
12:06And just not worrying about it because they knew that they could walk straight into another job on a Monday
12:10If you argued with me, piss off and you go to... down the road to the next factory
12:19No, no, no trouble
12:21And people had money in their pockets for the first day
12:25The factories hummed all day and all night, you know, and there was overtime to be had
12:30And trade unions were securing decent working conditions and you couldn't be pushed around anymore
12:35Seaton's kind of swagger in that film, and it really is swagger, is the beginnings of a kind of swagger of the northern working class as well
12:43But in Saturday night and Sunday morning, Arthur Seaton insists that having a few extra bob isn't going to buy him off
12:50I've still got some fight left in me, not like most people
12:53You know what I'm saying, you ain't?
12:55Where does all this fighting get you?
12:57Have you ever seen where not fighting's got you, eh, like my mum and dad?
13:00What do you mean?
13:01They've got all they want
13:02Ah, they've got a television set and a packet of fags, but they're both dead from the neck up
13:06I'm not saying it's their fault, mind you
13:09They've had their hash settle for them so that all the bloody gaffers can push them around like a lot of sheep
13:14Their answer to the grind of their exploited lives was, of course, to be anarchic, was to overthrow the rules, to use an air rifle on someone's bottom
13:25Don't worry, he'll get checked one of these days
13:27Oh, it's roof!
13:29There was real, real rebellion, I don't mean rebellion on the streets, I'm not talking about that, but in people's hearts there was a real, real rebellion that I will do it my way, not your way
13:41So for the first time, people like Seton, have a bit of money in their pockets, and with that comes power
13:46And that power to kind of, and I think there was a nervousness in most of the middle classes about that as well
13:51Because when these people were just, you know, 48 to a house and dying of diphtheria before they were 40, that was all well and good
13:58But Seton represents the rise of a new kind of northerner, the Beatles are going to be that kind of northerner as well
14:03They were going to change the game forever
14:06Before 1960, there'd been a kind of iconoclasm in northern popular culture
14:12The North, as any northerner will tell you, has always had the best comedians
14:17Hardship, very sharp wit and a subtle irony
14:23But the performers who succeeded on the national stage tended to be buffoonish, somewhat lacking in revolutionary intent
14:31Thank you, and now I'm going to sing a song, and they're going to make a film of it at the same time
14:37So if you see any flashing, don't take any notice, you see
14:42I don't think the North was so much invisible, as patronised, or put into comic effects
14:49A girl while bathing clung to me, I shouted out, oh
14:53She said, I think I'm drowning and you'll save me, I know
14:57I said, well, if you're drowning, do you mind letting go
15:00Of me little stick of black bull roe
15:04It's certainly seen as a comic place
15:07Both in the sense of a place where comics come from
15:10The great northern comics, Gracie Fields, George Formby
15:13I think it's also a place that is seen as somehow funny
15:19And the accent and the lifestyle is the object of some easy humour south of the Trent
15:33Even in sport, there was a north-south divide in 1960
15:37Down south, it looked like this
15:39When the sun beats down, you need a hat
15:43And where will you see better hats than at Royal Ascot in June?
15:46But up north, sport was more like this
15:53The north even had its own form of rugby
15:55League, as opposed to union
15:57Rugby union was a game for gentlemen amateurs
15:59And these being thinner on the ground in the north
16:02The players of rugby league got paid
16:04So more was at stake
16:05And the games were harder and faster
16:07In his novel of 1960, This Sporting Life
16:12David Storey viewed the north through the prism of rugby league
16:16Storey was of impeccable northern pedigree
16:19He was born in Wakefield, the son of a miner
16:22And he played rugby league himself
16:24The book actually really began in the middle of the match at Leeds
16:28When, in the middle of the game, I suddenly realised
16:32If I picked up the ball, which has just come loose at my feet
16:35I'd get my teeth knocked in
16:37And it just happened in a fraction of a second
16:40And I hesitated
16:41And an old pro who was playing with me in the forwards
16:45Just instinctively picked it out and lost his teeth
16:48The film version of this sporting life shows the brutal world of a northern alpha male
16:54Frank Machin
16:55A coal miner trying to make it in rugby league
16:59The opening game, if we can even call it a game
17:04The gladiatorial combat in sporting life
17:06Is he becomes a relentless juggernaut
17:10And he's smashing his way through opposition
17:13We've got a ruthless, vicious machine of bone, muscle and sinew
17:22It's a very, very compelling vision that we see in front of us
17:26This sporting life was directed by Lindsay Anderson
17:30A founding member of the Free Cinema group of documentary makers
17:34Moving into feature films, they carried a realist style
17:37Into what became known as the British New Wave
17:40So Anderson's film features real players
17:45With real crowds looking on
17:47And real cooling towers in the background
17:51Frank Machin was the first starring role for Richard Harris
17:55Who might himself have played rugby league
17:57Were it not for a bout of tuberculosis as a young man
18:02Frank Machin in sporting life
18:05Isn't somebody you'd like to know
18:08Again, he's an anti-hero
18:10He's ruthless in his own little goldfish bowl
18:14He uses the women in his life
18:18He uses the men in his life
18:21Frank is signed up for the huge fee of a thousand pounds
18:24But he's still a man in a donkey jacket
18:26Surrounded by men in suits
18:28And treated accordingly
18:31Well, don't spend it all at once now, will you, lad?
18:35In some ways, Frank predates, I guess, what we've seen happen in football
18:41Where people from what's sometimes rather patronisingly called by people
18:47Humble origins and humble beginnings
18:49Become multi-millionaires through their expertise at sport
18:52Frank's success allows him to come into contact with a higher echelon of northern society
18:58And funds his own personal class war
19:02The restaurant scene where Harris' character goes out for a meal in a posh restaurant
19:10Is really cringingly embarrassing
19:13He just does what he wants to do
19:15And he's going to do it
19:17And doesn't give a damn
19:19Watch you don't burn these whiskers, love
19:21Watch you don't burn these whiskers, love
19:25Shouldn't have come here if you're going to behave like this
19:29We're paying for it, aren't we?
19:31That's all they're interested in
19:33Many of the films have a strong sense that the north is masculine
19:38There are, of course, very common images of the north
19:41As tough, as hard
19:43Which stands in contrast to the rather soft defeat south
19:47And therefore that's quite a popular image of the north-south contrast
19:51And I think these working class films celebrate a certain masculine aggression
19:57A certain masculine virility and toughness
20:01Which is part of their power and vitality
20:07In the end, this sporting life is difficult to watch and harrowing
20:11Not least because Frank Machin does not confine his violence to men
20:21It was a year of upheaval
20:23Beyond the turbulent north of England inhabited by Machin
20:26A wider populism was asserting itself in 1960
20:30In Africa, Harold MacMillan made a historic speech signalling the end of colonialism
20:36The wind of change is blowing through this country
20:40In America, Kennedy was elected president
20:43His appeal was a new, youthful, open-mindedness
20:46The supreme national effort will be needed in the years ahead
20:50To move this country safely through the 1960s
20:54In the north of England, the new optimism was underscored by the coming of free, universal secondary education
21:01Ideally at a grammar school
21:03Now life need not mean years of hard labour on the factory floor
21:09You could escape by brain power
21:15The aspirations of a northern grammar school boy were the stuff of a 1960 West End hit, Billy Lyre
21:21The play was from the novel by Keith Waterhouse, who was born in Leeds
21:27Later filmed, Billy Lyre is the story of a young clerk who doesn't see why suburban Bradford should hold him back
21:37There's a fantastic scene in Billy Lyre where Billy's dad says to him, you know, you should be grateful for the chances that you had because I never had them
21:47You want to be grateful, you've got a job in an office
21:49Grateful, grateful, grateful for this, grateful for that, that's all I've ever heard
21:53Grateful you let me go to the grammar school
21:55Better think that once in the first day I went there
21:57Well, it's a chance we never had
21:58And don't we bloody well know it
22:00I've got to be grateful for one of my own scholarship
22:02And what did you say when I came running home to tell you I'd won it?
22:05That you'd have to pay for the uniform and I'd have to be grateful
22:08Generational conflict is obviously a long-established theme of literature
22:12But it's particularly acute in these novels of the 50s and 60s because people are moving out of their social class
22:19Education is much of the problem
22:21Of that generation of parents and their children are moving into new areas that they don't fully understand and don't fully comprehend
22:28And they're being they're being left behind
22:32Billy Lyre was directed by John Schlesinger and starred the biggest thing to have come out of Hull, Tom Courtney
22:39Courtney plays Billy as a misfit like Arthur Seaton and Frank Machen
22:43But his problem is not an excess of testosterone
22:47It's an excess of imagination
22:50He's working in an undertaker's as a clerk and he finds it deathly boring
22:54And he had all these ideas, you know, that his education maybe would be a ticket to a more exciting life
23:00As a scriptwriter, which is what he really wants to become
23:03And so his fantasy life, you know, in which he's, you know, the leader of the fictional country of Ambrosia
23:08Gives him a kind of really important kind of outlet
23:12The film alternates between work-a-day Bradford where the story is set
23:16And the more epic world of Billy's daydreams
23:19Battalion!
23:21Battalion!
23:23Billy has the command of his environment in his dreams and in his fantasies that he doesn't have in real life
23:34Which is much more drab and constricting than he would wish it to be
23:44Capturing the North at a moment of change, the film shows Billy caught between the old and the new
23:49He wants to embrace the new and the old quaint North is something to be satirised
23:56There's a wonderful scene in Billy Lyre set on a slag heap
24:02Where Billy Lyre, played by Tom Courtney, meets Councillor Duxbury
24:08And what Tom Courtney does is talk to him in broad Yorkshire
24:12And actually makes up words
24:14So, you're planning to go to London then, eh?
24:17Aye, just about draped with this place
24:21How do you mean?
24:23Why, it's neither muckling nor mickling, is it?
24:27You've not taken a rise out of me, young man
24:30No, sir
24:31He doesn't either mickling nor muckling
24:33And I'm re-thraped and get ganged
24:35And all that cod Yorkshire patra he comes out with
24:37He thinks these people are fools
24:39And he's quick-witted enough to want to get out of that world
24:42But it keeps dragging him back all the time
24:46Billy reflects the aspirations of young men in the New North
24:50But the film also introduces a new type of Northern woman
24:53One who is really in control of her own life
24:56She's played by Julie Christie
24:59Whose hair is shockingly unconstrained by hat, headscarf or hairnet
25:04Here is the start of the 60s
25:06And, take note, it's happening in Bradford
25:10Liz represents a completely different kind of alternative
25:14The minute she enters the film, the soundtrack changes
25:18It's kind of really swingy, jazzy kind of music
25:21She's swinging her bag, completely carefree
25:24Completely rootless
25:31Liz, the Julie Christie character in the film
25:34Is the role model for Billy effectively
25:38She's the person who puts her fantasies into reality
25:41She's the most free-spirited person in the film
25:44She's the person who takes off whenever she likes
25:46You know, Billy just says, you know
25:48He sees her sort of skipping around town one day
25:50And he goes, oh, she's crazy, she does what she likes
25:53Well, I think the theme of escape runs through a lot of these plays
25:57And films that characters want to escape their environment
26:02And the irony, of course, of Billy Lyre
26:05Is that he has the opportunity to escape at the end of the film
26:09But by virtue of fiddling with the milk machine
26:13Misses the train to London
26:15And Julie Christie goes off to London without him
26:25To go to London was a remarkable adventure
26:28To go south was something that very few people from up here managed
26:34The sense that you are stuck
26:36And that you've got to muck in and get on with it
26:40It was very much a part of one side of the schizophrenic northern culture
26:46The other side said, we can do anything
26:48In 1960, an ambitious individual might be just as likely to head north as south
27:00Certainly an ambitious filmmaker would be
27:03I think for many of the film directors born in the south of England
27:07Certainly educated, usually public school, Oxbridge
27:09The north of England just for them was a totally exotic landscape
27:15The north became a magnet for film directors
27:33Fascinated by what George Orwell once called the macabre appeal of its industrial landscape
27:39And finding a paradoxical, poetical quality in its backstory
27:44One such was Ken Russell, who in 1960 was given a tour of Salford
27:51By the 21-year-old writing sensation Sheila Delaney
27:57She gave him a bittersweet account of growing up in its terraced streets
28:02And you get these alleyways going on for miles
28:07Separating houses that look as if they've been built on top of one another
28:11And because everyone is so close together
28:14They seem to generate a terrific warmth
28:16And down here you can almost feel the heart of the city beating
28:20Street living was community
28:35You met people, you met them all the time along the road where you live
28:39You stepped out and walked along and you met people you knew
28:43People who would look out for you
28:47Perhaps it's the old cliché, you perhaps didn't look at your door
28:50When you went out
28:52And there was always somebody there who knew who you were
28:55It had become a bit repressive because everybody knew everybody else's business
29:00But it wasn't lonely
29:07It was in this world that Sheila Delaney found inspiration for her play
29:11A Taste of Honey
29:12A hit in the West End and about to open on Broadway in 1960
29:16The film version, directed by Tony Richardson
29:19Introduced the unknown Liverpudlian actress Rita Tushingham
29:22As the central character, the maverick and contentious teenager, Joe
29:32In the opening scene, Joe and her mother struggle up steps in a maze of terraces
29:37But if the townscape looked Victorian, the plot line certainly wasn't
29:43She's seeing a culture which is in transition
29:51She's in Broughton in Salford
29:53Which is about as traditional working class as you can get
29:57But it's on the verge of the docks, it's on the edge of the docks
30:01And therefore it's open to other cultures
30:04Sheila Delaney was amazing
30:07You know, 16-year-old schoolgirl
30:09You know, right to play
30:11And all about a Salford schoolgirl
30:14Who falls in love with a black sailor
30:18Gets pregnant
30:20Brings up the child with the help of her gay best friend
30:25I mean, this is a plot
30:27Which should be, you know, a drama series in 2010
30:31Regarding her friend's sexuality, Joe comes quickly to the point
30:36Who did she find you with? Your girlfriend?
30:42Of course not
30:43He wasn't a man, was it?
30:46This was ordinary street
30:50This was the gays that we knew
30:52These were just normal, he was just normal
30:55Just... this is what it was, it was the normality of us
31:00But perhaps the most touching relationship in the film is between Joe
31:05And her equally spiky mother, Helen, played by Dora Bryan
31:09For me, Joe and Helen are two of the best characters in literature
31:16They really, really are
31:17I've got something to tell you
31:19Joe, I'm going to get married again
31:21Helen's in the bath and she's telling Joe that she's going to get married again
31:26And Joe's response is just so telling
31:29She wants her mum to herself, she wants her mum to be a mum
31:32But her mum doesn't want to be a mum
31:34Her mum is 40, she wants to have a good time
31:37I wish you wouldn't talk about me as if I'm an impotent old woman
31:40You're not exactly a child bride
31:42I was one
31:43Who I have to be dead and buried by the time I reach your age
31:46Joe knows her mother inside out, she knows exactly what her mother's like
31:49So you've got this, also in the, you've got the young person's coming distrust of the older generation
31:55The idea that the older generation was something to be looked up to and valued and trusted
31:58It's not there in taste of funny at all
32:00Joe is like, she's the thing that the Beatles is going to usher in as well
32:04A kind of cocking snook and making fun of the older generation
32:07For being kind of stuffy on one hand and hypocritical as well in their morality
32:12I think what these films did for the first time was give a picture of working class people having inner lives
32:18And having very, very unique individual lives and unique perspectives on the world
32:24And even though there's a kind of collective shared experience of difficulty and adversity
32:30And to some extent grimness, there's an awful lot of joy to be had
32:35There's the scene in A Taste of Honey where Joe and Jeff, they're just talking to each other about how marvellous and how unique they are
32:41And to hear two working class people who are really, you know, kind of in quite a pickle in terms of the circumstances of their lives
32:51She's pregnant, you know, and he's gay and has got nobody to turn to
32:55You know, both of them, you know, kind of affirming each other's value for the first time on film to everybody in the world is just fantastic
33:05My usual self is a very unusual self
33:08And don't you forget that, Geoffrey Ingham
33:10I'm an extraordinary person
33:12There's only one of me like there's only one of you
33:14We're unique
33:15Young
33:16Unrivaled
33:17Snacky
33:18Wibbler is marvellous
33:191960 would prove to be a big year for a rather more conventional family unit down south
33:32The head of the family, Elizabeth Windsor, had a new baby, Prince Andrew, here making his TV debut
33:40Then her younger sister, Margaret, got married
33:43But whilst all the glitz and glamour seemed to be confined to its usual southern haunts, the North would keep crashing the party
33:53The judges of the Miss Cinema 1960 competition seemed to know which way the wind was blowing
33:58The final was on Halloween at the Lyceum Ballroom
34:01Third prize went to 18-year-old Ellen Lloyd, a London girl
34:05The first went to Nottingham, a city famous for its pretty girl
34:08Then an infamous son of Nottingham, D. H. Lawrence, stole the limelight from beyond the grave
34:18In the winter of 1960, Penguin Books were taken to court in an attempt to prevent them from publishing an uncensored paperback version of Lawrence's erotic novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover
34:29Lawrence, although he's obviously long dead, but he is a working-class writer from the North
34:42And he's a sexual revolutionary, I mean genuinely
34:46And also he's actually a literary revolutionary in the sense that he puts explicit sex into a novel like Lady Chatterley's Lover
34:54In the old Bailey courtroom, an elemental culture clash was played out
34:59Much of the argument of the learned friends centred on the F-word and its function in working-class speech
35:04The literary critic Richard Hoggart, who'd been born in Leeds, was called to give evidence for the publishers
35:10One of the key moments in the whole trial, at least in my dad's evidence, was that er, er, he was asked about the use of that very bad four-letter word
35:19He was asked about the use of the word fuck
35:21And er, er, in the courtroom, there was sort of frisson
35:26Somebody had said that word, which was never used in polite society
35:30And Dad said, yes, I was er, on my way to the old Bailey here
35:33And I heard er, the word used many, many times, er, when I walked past a building site
35:38You know, er, that's what people do, that's the word for it
35:41And er, you know, what he was saying was, if you don't like it, then you're actually going to be very, very unhappy
35:46Because it's a very, very commonly used word
35:50But the pivotal event of the trial would prove to be a fatal aside by the rather patrician chief prosecutor
35:59His speech to the jury was going very well, and he allowed himself an ad-lib
36:03And the ad-lib he used was, is this a book you would want your wife or your servants to read?
36:09And that was at the very beginning of the trial, on the opening day
36:12And the trial was probably lost at that point when this ancient attitude was revealed
36:20With Victory for Penguin, the book became a mainstream bestseller
36:24Another breakthrough for Northern culture in this year of 1960
36:28Just as a tale of cross-cultural sex was erasing ideas of taste and decency
36:45So the Old North was being physically erased
36:50The dark satanic mills and correspondingly gloomy houses
36:53Were being replaced by something more salubrious
36:57And this modernisation was welcomed by many
37:00The kind of suburban dream that starts to filter through to Northern working-class communities this time
37:07Is of the new house on the outskirts of town, the new estates
37:11And you can see that in Manchester that happens, and in Sheffield that happens, and in Liverpool that happens
37:14And the dream is to get out of these, these overcrowded, grimy, run-down inner city areas
37:20And you can understand quite why centrally heated, properly ventilated, clean homes on the outskirts of town
37:26Were a dream for people
37:28There were going to be parks and fields, and er, instead of the bathhouse, you'd have your own bath
37:34Instead of going to er, there'd be the municipal laundrettes, there'd be garage parking, there'd be roadways in the sky
37:42We'd probably go to school with jet backpacks, I don't know
37:47It was going to be everything that you'd ever seen in encyclopaedias of the future
37:53But even in 1960 there were those, like Sheila Delaney, who worried about what was being lost
38:01They're tearing down whole parts of sulphur, and building them again
38:05And they're tearing them down, and again, they're not putting the people back there, they're sending them away
38:12Far away, you know, to places where there's no city
38:16And there's no, you know, just sort of sterile places
38:20Nobody knows anybody on it
38:22And when they're building these places, they never think of putting anything in them, like a theatre or something, you know
38:29Another writer looking warily at the changes taking place in the North, was that star of the Lady Chatterley trial, Richard Hoggart
38:38His book, The Uses of Literacy, was one of the talking points of 1960
38:43It examined the shifting dynamics of Northern working class life, not so much with a magnifying glass, as a very powerful microscope
38:49He wrote about working class people as if they had a real culture of their own, almost as if they were as strange and as different as the Trobriand Island, as written about by anthropologists
39:05But at the same time, very much part of our world, our society and our nation
39:09So that came as quite a surprise to a lot of people
39:11It also came as a tremendous surprise to a lot of people who'd come from that background, who'd never seen what they absolutely took for granted
39:19The way they were schooled, the kind of streets they lived in, the attitudes that their parents and friends had
39:24They'd never seen that written about
39:26A fan of Hoggart's book was writer Stan Barstow, from Hawbury near Wakefield
39:31Barstow was a grammar school product, son of a miner
39:35He worked in the drawing office of an engineering firm before becoming a novelist
39:39I think the uses of literature, it certainly influenced me
39:45It gave me an insight into what, you know, what
39:49Somebody was observing working class life
39:54With an acute insight and it excited me very, very much
39:59And I think I certainly wasn't the only one who found it very, very valuable in his reporting from the grassroots
40:06In 1960, Barstow's debut novel A Kind of Loving was published
40:12It tells the story of Vic, an ambitious, upwardly mobile young draftsman
40:17A film version starring Alan Bates and directed again by John Schlesinger
40:23Was shot in various northern locations
40:25They just caught the industrial North, just on the change when things, four or five years later, all kinds of things would have changed
40:36The film counterposes the aspirant with the traditional North
40:41Unlike his father, Vic goes to work in a collar and tie
40:46He kept a clean collar, as the phrase had it
40:49Alan Bates is shown at work in an office that is both literally and metaphorically above the factory floor
40:55We've got this perfect character, this cipher for man, 1960, who's not a coal miner, who's not a factory floor worker
41:10Who is somebody who could rise to a lower managerial position if he played his cards right, or married the right girl
41:18All these things are possible
41:20That notion of the white collar job and the factory job and the manual job and the office job is absolutely massive in the northern culture at the time
41:29Your mum would want you not to have to do what your dad had done and what she had done, i.e. not be in factories or be in a coal mine or whatever
41:38And so, you know, I remember growing up thinking that, you know, working in a bank was the ultimate accolade
41:43Because you could wear a clean shirt to work and you didn't come on covered in soot, or tired, or with a broken arm
41:49Not unless it had been a particularly hectic day at the bank
41:52But against that feeling that this was a nice job was also this feeling, and you heard it expressed by older guys sometimes
41:58This feeling that it wasn't quite a proper job for a man, that it was a cushy number, pen pushing
42:03Oh, he's a pen pusher
42:05Vic's father, a cheerful railwayman, evinces all the inverted snobbery of the old-fashioned northerner
42:12Hey, where's my tea then? Tea? Tea? White-collar workers don't get tea
42:17You want to get a day's work done before you get tea?
42:19Vic's caught between the values of the old traditional working class
42:23And the temptations and the pull of the new working class
42:26It is Vic's girlfriend, Ingrid, who represents the dreams now on offer
42:31Vic is living in two worlds, his loyalties are divided
42:35You see him running backwards and forwards between the new kind of houses
42:39on the kind of aspirational housing estate
42:42Ingrid lives in a semi-detached house
42:44And then him running back to the terraces, which is where he's from and where he also belongs
42:50The dilemma is his awareness of what is possible
42:57And the danger of leaving behind the parts of it that are very, very valuable
43:01and which have made him and given him his stability and his values
43:07When Vic does the decent thing and marries his pregnant girlfriend
43:12he is claimed by the semi-detached suburbia that was beginning to rise up around northern towns
43:17My favourite scene in A Kind of Loving is when Alan Bates comes home drunk
43:23It's not his home, it's his mother-in-law's home where he's having to live
43:26How dare you say such filthy disgusting things, you filthy upstart
43:31You're coming to the house drunk, filthy drunk, you're filthy, you talk filth, you are filth
43:38He just turns and he just vomits all over the carpet
43:41And she just looks at him with utter disgust and she calls him an animal
43:44You filthy pig
43:46And it's a classic example of not just the generations clashing
43:50but the class is clashing
43:53Because Thora Heard's character is incredibly aspirational
43:56She lives in this semi-detached with a nice sort of bedroom suite
44:01And he, the new son-in-law, is from working class
44:07I mean she's working class herself but she doesn't think herself that way
44:11True to the spirit of 1960, Ingrid and her mother talk about little else than their latest purchases
44:16Everything's been going wrong while you've been away. The new carpet hasn't come
44:21They promised me faithfully it would be down and fitted by the time you came back
44:24And now they're saying it'll be another fortnight
44:26Never mind. Oh, and the television's gone wrong?
44:28In the uses of literacy, Richard Hoggart fretted that the integrity and cohesion of northern working class life
44:34was being threatened by this new consumer culture
44:37The key theme of Hoggart's work, in a way, is the social changes being wrought
44:47By affluence and materialism in that period
44:52So in many ways, Hoggart lays out that concern about the quality of life
44:58About how we might be coming economically better off
45:01But culturally might be becoming worse off
45:03A poignant moment in A Kind of Loving brings Hoggart's critique to the screen
45:14Vic Brown's father is, as Stan Barstow's father was in real life, was a brass bandsman
45:22And Vic and his girlfriend Ingrid and her mother sit at home watching the new television set
45:31There's two or three empty seats in the local town hall where they should be sitting, watching his father play his short trombone solo in that most northern, most communal of experiences, the brass band concert
45:45Vic could go to a brass band concert that his dad is playing in, but instead he's sitting with his mother-in-law and his wife in silence, eclipsed
46:01Nobody's interested in him watching game shows on television, and that's all that Ingrid and Ingrid's mother seem to be interested in, and their superficiality and their vulgarity is something that the film really enjoys
46:14A common feature of new wave films was the presence of a TV set, usually depicted as an agent of moronism
46:21And your hobbies are gardening and looking at people
46:25It's very interesting how a lot of these films will have a scene in which the telly appears
46:32And the telly appears often very negatively
46:34It's viewed very negatively because it's a threat to what is seen as authentic working-class amusements
46:43Down south in 1960, the BBC proudly unveiled its new headquarters in London, Television Centre
47:00Director of TV, Gerald Beadle, boasted it was the largest and most carefully planned factory of its kind in the world
47:07This 100 feet long studio is one of seven in a building that may well become the Hollywood of television
47:16From this manufacturing base, the BBC could take on that upstart commercial television
47:25The arrival of independent television had introduced not only a competitor to the BBC, but it had introduced advertising to television
47:34And of course it was the impact not only of advertising on British cultural life, but also what was seen as increasingly commercial, audience-winning programmes
47:46Such as quiz shows with big-money prizes
47:49They were often seen as symptom of a new, more commercial material culture
47:54A mum is someone who uses persil in her washing machine
47:57Heinz baked beans
48:00Oven baked to give you that extra Heinz flavour
48:02Glucose and sugar, milk and chocolate are all in Mars
48:07Yes, a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play
48:12By 1960, TVs squatted in three quarters of British living rooms
48:24The franchise for commercial television in the North had recently been won by the Bernstein Brothers from London
48:31The North-pointing logo of Granada Television symbolised its geographical orientation
48:38But in 1960, there was concern within the company that it wasn't adequately reflecting life in its catchment area
48:45That changed, thanks to an altercation between a studio executive and a young local writer, Tony Warren
48:56I climbed on top of a green tin filing cabinet in a Canadian executive producer's office
49:02And said, I'm not coming down until you let me write what I know about
49:05And he said, well, what do you know about?
49:07So I said, well, I know about the North of England
49:08And I know about show business
49:11He said, well, show business is kiss of death
49:13But how about writing me the story of a street out there?
49:17Tony Warren grew up in Swinton, which is near Salford
49:19And he knew the Salford back streets incredibly well
49:22I mean, he'd walk down them, he'd observe them, he'd go through them in a bus
49:27And this is real community, and he observed that
49:31And it's his observations which became Coronation Street
49:34The first episode of Coronation Street was broadcast on the 9th of December, 1960
49:43The opening scene is a masterpiece
49:46I mean, it was shot in Archie Street in Salford
49:49It actually captures the classic back-to-back streets
49:53Very much takes its iconography from the New Wave cinema
49:57And has that marvellous theme tune
49:59What could be more northern to a mass audience in 1960 than a cornet solo?
50:06In fact, the cornet solo is written by a man born in Croydon
50:09Perhaps takes a little bit away from that
50:11But it's extremely skilful at creating a mood
50:15And creating an imaginative setting just in a few seconds
50:18Every possible facet of northern life was reflected in its cast of characters
50:33We could now examine at our leisure some of the incendiary types the new wave of northern writers had created
50:39Coronation Street had its very own pouting, smouldering bad boy
50:44Dennis Tanner, played by Philip Lowry
50:47In that opening episode, we're taken into the Tanners
50:51Elsie Tanner having a big argument with Dennis Tanner
50:54And she's accused him of nicking Two Bob from her purse
50:57Let's get this straight, not an hour ago you asked me for Two Bob for cigarettes
51:00And you wouldn't give it me, we know
51:02So you're stuck to going in a ladies handbag?
51:03Just listen it, a lady, is that what you crack on you are these days?
51:07Dennis Tanner in that is absolutely
51:09Arthur Seton on the small screen with the quiff
51:12And the, you know, the turned up shirt
51:14And the kind of open neck
51:16And he absolutely is that same kind of slightly brooding, Elvis Presley relocated to Salford
51:20The grammar school boy burning with ambition to escape
51:24An ambition still mysteriously unfulfilled after 50 years
51:27Is Ken Barlow, played by William Roach
51:29We move into the Barlow's and there's young Ken
51:33And he's, he's still at college
51:35And Ken's looking down his nose because they put a bottle of brown sauce on the table
51:39What's up? Nothing
51:43What's that's an empty expression for then?
51:45Well what's an empty expression?
51:47Duffle-coated Ken Barlow, it looks like he's arrived just straight from Aldermaston, March
51:51Erm, you see this new idea of the new educated working class lad
51:54Who is going to go away to university
51:57And all the attendant problems that will bring there
52:00He will be both, he'll love his mum and dad and he'll love his culture
52:02And he'll be slightly ashamed of it as well
52:04You're not so much getting in the early Corrie a sense of the new economic prosperity coming I don't think as much
52:09But you are getting the idea of new values coming into the North
52:12Embodying the sexualisation of Northern culture was Pat Phoenix
52:19As the vampish Elsie Tanner
52:22Elsie Tanner is a fascinating character because she's a new phenomenon in culture
52:28She is a single mum
52:30Now we've had widowed mums who are honourable
52:33Elsie Tanner is a single mum and she's loose
52:36In a scene between Elsie and her daughter, Elsie's erotically adventurous past is firmly, if glancingly, established
52:43You haven't been doing anything you shouldn't have, have you?
52:46What do you mean?
52:47Well you're not a kid anymore, it's no secret round here why your dad left me
52:50Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, dressed very glamorously, on very little money
52:54And that kind of older, evidently sexually active woman character was really, really much at odds with the kind of the more kind of battle-axe Haridan, kind of Ena Sharples character
53:09If Elsie represented the turbulence of a new, more liberal era, Violet Carson as Ena Sharples seemed to personify about 200 years of Northern rectitude
53:20The North was and is a matriarchal society, you know, the men are there and thereabouts, but they're at work, or they're in the pub, or, and that's not a cliche, I think to a certain extent men were important, but kind of shadowy figures
53:38Daily life as it was lived, on the streets and in the shops, and in houses and in factories, is dominated by women
53:45Ena Sharples' arrival into the corner shop is an absolute tour de force, she's incredibly intrusive, one of the first questions she has for Flory Lindley is, has Flory thought about where she's going to be buried?
53:59And in and around that, she's punctuating all of these really acute and precise observations about the locality with her shopping order
54:09You're a widow woman?
54:10Well, yes
54:11I thought so. I'm the caretaker at the Bad Tidings Hall
54:14Oh, that's just across the street, isn't it?
54:16What's your place of worship?
54:18I don't really do much about it
54:20What Coronation Street is giving us is the rhythm and the tonality and the inflection of Northern dialogue, Northern speech
54:29Within a week, they were received, christened and confirmed, and within a fortnight, she was sitting up all night, so in surplices, I'll take a packet of baking powder
54:38And suddenly, we hear Northern voices on TV
54:41Apparently, when they, the papers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express in 1960, published little explanations of what out meant, or ecky thump, or what have you
54:52So that Southerners wouldn't be baffled by the language of Coronation Street
54:58All the stressful argy-bargy of Northern working class life enshrined on TV
55:03Well, it took some getting used to
55:06When Coronation Street was first transmitted in 1960, lots of people didn't know how to take it
55:11Because some people actually thought it was real life, and these characters actually existed
55:16Because they'd never seen a soap opera before like it
55:19And a lot of people were expecting a comedy, because they were used to the Manchester accents being from the musical
55:27From the comedy act of the musicals, like George Formby and Gracie Fields
55:31But the viewers did acclimatise, and Coronation Street, originally commissioned for 13 episodes, soon became unstoppable
55:44A hit all over the country
55:52I think Coronation Street is, in many ways, the most revolutionary of all the products of this Northern moment
55:56By 1961 it's got 24 million viewers, so it's reaching a far bigger audience than any of the other cultural products
56:03And it, along with Granada Television and the other regional television companies
56:09Was inserting the North of England in the national culture in a permanent way that simply hadn't happened before
56:15The North has always had its moments of fashionability, 1840s and 50s, 1930s, but they came and went
56:22And it was television that really meant the North could never go away again
56:27By the end of 1960, the North had attained true glamour
56:32It was unignorable, and if you tried to patronise it, you risked looking stupid
56:38If you wanted iconoclasm, humour, style, music, you looked North
56:44And this was only the start
56:48I am certain we, in some ways, paved the way for the swinging 60s, because before we came along
57:00The Northern accent certainly wasn't acceptable, except as a caricature
57:05The Midlands accent was unheard of, and now suddenly, in 1963, we had people like the Beatles
57:22Now, they will ever pull and talk like that at the beginning, you know
57:26I don't think they would have got away with it if we hadn't started the trend to regional accents
57:32The Beatles write from the word go, speaking in their own voice
57:36They speak in their own voices, they speak in their own argot
57:38And the world is ready to fall in love with them
57:41So instead of finding it upstart or vulgar, they find it charming
57:45And it's that beginning of the idea of the kind of impishness and the vitality of the North
57:50And the charm of the North, and of course the Beatles take that and make it global
57:53I think this is the kind of beginning of the 60s, and maybe a kind of more exciting 60s
57:58Love, love me too
58:04You know I love you
58:07I'll always be true
58:10So please
58:15Love, love me too
58:16Love, love me too
58:17Love, love me too
58:18Love, love me too
58:22The whole world used to pass me by
58:32I'd sit home all alone and cry
58:38No one stopped me to say hello
58:45But now I am someone they wanna know
58:49Ever since I've been here
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