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00:00:03,080 --> 00:00:06,160
In particular since the last war,

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00:00:06,160 --> 00:00:08,600
we've all become much more educated

3
00:00:08,600 --> 00:00:14,000
in what really is violence
and sadism and savagery and so on.

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00:00:17,400 --> 00:00:23,240
For the writers of the 1950s, the
Second World War changed everything.

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00:00:23,240 --> 00:00:27,720
What you're admitting is that
millions of people can be killed.

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00:00:29,160 --> 00:00:33,200
It will be too late to regret it
when this bomb has dropped.

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00:00:35,520 --> 00:00:42,160
The post-war world brought
change and upheaval
on an unprecedented scale.

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00:00:43,680 --> 00:00:49,240
I wrote about the things
that I knew of, the tensions
of Berlin which I witnessed,

9
00:00:49,240 --> 00:00:53,360
institutional behaviour,
of British nostalgia for power.

10
00:00:56,840 --> 00:01:01,760
The blueprint for the world
which we inhabit now
was being laid down then,

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the world of consumer goods, package
holidays, jet travel, high rises.

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Change was in the air.

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This is the story of how
the British novel was reinvented
in the post-war years.

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It became an outlet to explore
the anxieties of the time,

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a way of coming to terms with
a displaced and changing nation.

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Britain in the early '50s.

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A nation devastated by war,

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physically and psychologically.

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The horrors of the Nazi genocide
had been exposed,

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the terrifying power
of the atomic bomb unleashed.

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Many feared that World War Three
was just around the corner.

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We had entered
what the poet WH Auden described
as "the age of anxiety".

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BELL CHIMES

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The British novel took nearly
a decade to recover its confidence.

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Novelists seemed unsure
of the style or subject matter
appropriate to the post-war age.

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Then in 1954, there was
a sudden renaissance in fiction.

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Four of the most significant
British novels of the 20th century
were published in a single year.

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Each in its own way seemed
a response to the uncertainty
of the time.

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And they were to kick-start
a new phase in British literature.

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One of the first of these novels
was by an elderly Oxford don.

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JRR Tolkien was 62 years old
when he published
The Fellowship Of The Ring,

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the first book in what would become
the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

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Tolkien created
an entire fantasy world,

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a world of hobbits and elves,
wizards and magic, good and evil.

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He even created his own language.

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SPEAKS IN MADE-UP LANGUAGE

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'One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,

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'One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them,

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'In the land of Mordor
where the Shadows lie.'

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I invented that in the bath,
I remember.

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I remember inventing that in one of
the baths...when I was having a bath
at 20 Northmoor Road.

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I remember kicking the sponge out
of the bath when I got the last line,
thinking, "That will do all right."

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'Frodo began to feel restless
and the old paths seemed
too well trodden...'

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The novel follows the fortunes
of a young hobbit

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on a quest to rid the world of
a ring with dark, magical qualities
and devastating power.

46
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But this was no mere fairy tale.

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If you really come down to any
large story that interests people

48
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and can hold their attention
for a considerable time or make...

49
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The stories are practically always
human stories and practically always
about one thing, aren't they? Death.

50
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And the inevitability of death.

51
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After the horrors
of the Second World War,

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many were keen to see
Tolkien's work as allegory.

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Hooray!

54
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Many, but not Tolkien himself.

55
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People do not understand
the difference between an allegory
and an application.

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You can go to a Shakespeare play
and apply it to things in your mind,
but they're not allegories.

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Many people apply the ring
to the nuclear bomb

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and think that the whole thing
is an allegory of it.

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Well, it isn't.

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FIREWORKS EXPLODE

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That's a good one.

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One sees that evil comes
from the east,

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one sees that there's
a Christ figure almost

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who is brought back to life.

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One could make a case for arguing
that The Lord Of The Rings was
a massive allegory,

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yet Tolkien said it was
the furthest thing from his mind.

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It's certainly a novel
about good and evil,

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but it doesn't necessarily mean
that that good and evil has
a particular mid-20th century focus.

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For Tolkien, fantasy was little more
than a form of escapism.

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But other writers used their fiction
to engage with questions of good
and evil in a more direct way.

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'William Golding works
as a schoolmaster in Salisbury.

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'He teaches at Bishop Wordsworth's
School in the Cathedral Close.

73
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'He teaches Philosophy,
Greek and English.

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'His first novel Lord Of The Flies
was about a group of schoolboys

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'stranded on an island
after an air crash.

76
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'He chose schoolboys
because he wanted a subject

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'out of his own experience
and they were what he knew best.'

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Lord Of The Flies
is an allegorical tale
about the collapse of civilisation.

79
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It describes the rapid descent
into savagery and violence
of a group of schoolchildren,

80
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freed from the constraints
of adult supervision.

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Good morning. Good morning, sir.
Right, sit down, please.

82
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How far have we got?
Act Two, Scene One, sir.

83
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Right, lend me a book, somebody.

84
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I don't know
how he put the characters
in Lord Of The Flies together.

85
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But they do, each of them, have
meanings within the narrative.

86
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There is the good leader,

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the ugly, kind man who is despised,

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the saint, the bad leader.

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And these rush around on the island

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and get into absolutely archetypal
religious confrontations,

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the one with the other.

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And there's the allegorical
outside world with atomic bombs
raining down from the heavens.

93
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And finally, the naval officer
appearing like an archangel

94
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to deliver judgment
on these trivial little boys.

95
00:08:06,400 --> 00:08:11,960
All that is, as it were, like
a Dantesque or a Miltonic picture
of heaven and hell.

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Golding's tale, set in the aftermath
of some kind of atomic conflict,

97
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seemed to reflect his anxiety
about the recent war

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and mankind's innate propensity
for evil.

99
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I plan a novel from the beginning
right to the end...

100
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..before I write anything in detail.

101
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I see it in the air as a kind
of boundless shape about so long

102
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from here to here,
then the detail begins to fill in

103
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and I work it out until
almost the last flick of an eyelid,

104
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then I write it through
from one side to the other.

105
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'I don't know about other people,
but I am not satisfied
with my books.

106
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'People find them pessimistic.

107
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'But I'm not a pessimist,
I'm an optimist.

108
00:09:12,200 --> 00:09:18,800
'And if that optimism
which is obvious to me
as the background of my books,

109
00:09:18,800 --> 00:09:22,080
'if that optimism doesn't come out,

110
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'then I ought to have conveyed it
more explicitly, more vividly
and more importantly.'

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00:09:30,280 --> 00:09:33,800
Golding and Tolkien
were both scholarly novelists.

112
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But there was another
academic author who was to make
a major impact that year.

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Iris Murdoch was an Anglo-Irish
writer and philosopher

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who had looked to France
for inspiration after the war.

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# Les roulottes se sont arretees

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00:09:51,080 --> 00:09:54,920
# Sur la place du village... #

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After years of Nazi occupation,
post-war Paris was in the grip

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of a new mode of thinking -
existentialism,

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a philosophy
that emphasised the importance
of human individuality and free will

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in giving life meaning.

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# Les chiens et les singes savants

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# La p'tite fille de quatre ans
s'est casse le bras

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00:10:16,640 --> 00:10:19,880
# Mais fait son numero gentiment... #

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00:10:19,880 --> 00:10:23,720
Murdoch was to channel these ideas
into her novels,

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though she was careful
not to let them dominate.

126
00:10:26,920 --> 00:10:29,920
# Avec les yeux brillants... #

127
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As a novelist, one is just the pupil
of great novelists of the past
in a quite straightforward way.

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I don't think being a philosopher
alters or certainly doesn't help
one's job as an artist

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when writing a novel.

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I suppose my interests in philosophy
are chiefly in moral philosophy
and in political philosophy

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and possibly, to some extent,
thinking about situations
in moral philosophy,

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thinking about problems of freedom
and problems of moral decision
and so on.

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00:11:03,560 --> 00:11:07,560
This may affect sometimes
the way one portrays a character.

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She would have her characters
in her novel putting forward
different philosophical positions

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00:11:17,200 --> 00:11:20,040
which is a very good way
of writing a book.

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You don't know who's right or wrong,
they change sides and allegiances.

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00:11:24,560 --> 00:11:29,600
But they're concerned with...
They're concerned
with ideas of goodness.

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Murdoch's first novel Under The Net
follows the fortunes
of a young writer named Jake

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00:11:41,200 --> 00:11:45,600
as he journeys through the streets,
theatres and pubs of 1950s London,

140
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overcoming a tangled web
of personal relationships
and financial problems.

141
00:11:54,360 --> 00:12:01,160
For Jake, life is a philosophical
voyage of discovery, a matter
of choosing the right way to live.

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Time, gentlemen, please!

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00:12:06,680 --> 00:12:12,680
There is a theme in Under The Net
which is a perpetually
recurrent theme

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and one which I don't mind recurring.

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00:12:15,120 --> 00:12:17,560
That is, I think it's a deep theme

146
00:12:17,560 --> 00:12:23,280
and that's the conflict
between the man who wants to be good

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and the man who wants to create.

148
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And there's often, I think, a kind
of actual conflict of character

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and a conflict of life
involved in these choices,

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one might say the conflict
between the artist and the saint.

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00:12:47,800 --> 00:12:53,840
While some writers wrestled
with philosophical questions of
good and evil in a post-war world,

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others seemed more concerned
about the state of Britain.

153
00:12:59,680 --> 00:13:04,640
The end of the war had brought
a popular mood for social change

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00:13:04,640 --> 00:13:10,040
with a landslide Labour victory
and the establishment
of the welfare state.

155
00:13:12,720 --> 00:13:17,320
But by the early '50s,
Winston Churchill was back in power.

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CHEERING

157
00:13:21,160 --> 00:13:23,400
This prompted one man to write

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00:13:23,400 --> 00:13:28,560
what would become one
of the most successful debut novels
in the English language.

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I personally then was suffering
from a good deal of depression

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00:13:32,760 --> 00:13:37,320
over quite a long time, over
the results of the 1951 election

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00:13:37,320 --> 00:13:43,360
which seemed to say that the modest
bit of social revolution that the
British might have been going in for

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between 1945 and 1951 had now come
to an end and the public
had turned their back on that

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and were trying to reverse the
process, which I found depressing.

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00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:04,400
Kingsley Amis was a 31-year-old
Swansea University lecturer

165
00:14:04,400 --> 00:14:07,200
when he published Lucky Jim in 1954.

166
00:14:07,200 --> 00:14:10,680
The novel tells the story
of Jim Dixon,

167
00:14:10,680 --> 00:14:14,520
a reluctant history lecturer
at a provincial university

168
00:14:14,520 --> 00:14:18,560
who struggles through the daily
tedium of his job and his life

169
00:14:18,560 --> 00:14:21,280
with bitterly funny consequences.

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00:14:22,280 --> 00:14:24,640
He may have taught at Swansea,

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00:14:24,640 --> 00:14:29,440
but for Amis, university life
was ripe for mocking.

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00:14:30,440 --> 00:14:37,080
The university did strike me,
I think I can say, as one
of those sacred cows of British life

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00:14:37,080 --> 00:14:42,840
that could stand a bit of deflation
or puncturing or whatever one does
to a sacred cow.

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00:14:42,840 --> 00:14:49,480
The establishment, if such a thing
exists in English literature,
were horrified by Lucky Jim

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00:14:49,480 --> 00:14:54,840
because it poked fun at sacred cows
like classical music -
"Filthy Mozart!"

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00:14:54,840 --> 00:14:57,280
It mocked the Bloomsbury Group.

177
00:14:57,280 --> 00:15:00,840
It had no time for a great many
of the cultural icons

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00:15:00,840 --> 00:15:05,880
which a lot of the people
who peddled culture in the 1950s
had grown up with.

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00:15:05,880 --> 00:15:09,600
It caused great alarm
among that class.

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00:15:09,600 --> 00:15:12,040
It won The Somerset Maugham Award

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00:15:12,040 --> 00:15:15,880
and there's a quote often quoted
from Maugham saying,

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00:15:15,880 --> 00:15:21,400
"There is a new generation
of young men and women
coming up to the universities.

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00:15:21,400 --> 00:15:25,240
"Mr Amis's ear is so acute
that he captures them exactly."

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00:15:25,240 --> 00:15:29,080
But the next sentence of that piece
is, "They are scum.

185
00:15:29,080 --> 00:15:33,520
"They have no conception
of what is beautiful and noble."

186
00:15:33,520 --> 00:15:37,480
And Lucky Jim is
absolutely anti-that.

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00:15:37,480 --> 00:15:41,840
How far are you yourself a socialist
and a welfare state boy?

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00:15:41,840 --> 00:15:47,400
I used to be a socialist.
I used to be much keener
on being a socialist than I am now.

189
00:15:47,400 --> 00:15:50,440
Jim is a socialist, I suppose,
after a fashion,

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00:15:50,440 --> 00:15:56,560
but both he and I are, or would be
by now, anti-Conservative people,
rather than socialists.

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00:15:56,560 --> 00:15:59,000
Jim is a controversial figure.

192
00:15:59,000 --> 00:16:04,240
A lot of people see him
as a villain, rather than a hero.
How do you react to this?

193
00:16:04,240 --> 00:16:09,800
Jim was my mouthpiece
for saying things about education
and he had some harsh things to say,

194
00:16:09,800 --> 00:16:13,840
but they were about the arts side
of a university, history, literature.

195
00:16:13,840 --> 00:16:18,880
If he'd been talking
about the science side,
he'd have been far more offensive.

196
00:16:18,880 --> 00:16:24,920
I would welcome the chance of saying
some harsh things about scientists
and the way scientists are regarded.

197
00:16:24,920 --> 00:16:30,080
There's a great deal
of ignorant bumptiousness
on the part of scientists these days

198
00:16:30,080 --> 00:16:34,120
and an unthinking acceptance
of the importance of the scientist.

199
00:16:34,120 --> 00:16:36,560
On the question of him being a hero,

200
00:16:36,560 --> 00:16:41,400
he hasn't got a lot
of the characteristics
of the conventional hero,

201
00:16:41,400 --> 00:16:45,440
but he is certainly intended
to be an admirable kind of person

202
00:16:45,440 --> 00:16:51,760
with a lot of attitudes and views
on things and even kinds of behaviour
in personal relationships and so on

203
00:16:51,760 --> 00:16:53,960
that I'd endorse a good deal.

204
00:16:53,960 --> 00:16:56,440
He's a conscientious kind of chap

205
00:16:56,440 --> 00:16:59,800
and in his own odd way,
a moral chap too.

206
00:17:02,280 --> 00:17:05,040
Amis's unlikely hero struck a chord.

207
00:17:05,040 --> 00:17:08,600
Lucky Jim was to take the novel
in a new direction.

208
00:17:09,600 --> 00:17:14,000
And Kingsley Amis became associated
with a new set of writers,

209
00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:20,840
a disparate group of novelists,
playwrights and critics collectively
known as The Angry Young Men.

210
00:17:23,320 --> 00:17:29,600
Well, Kingsley taught us grammar
school boys how to make rudeness
genuinely funny.

211
00:17:29,600 --> 00:17:31,840
They included Ken Tynan,

212
00:17:31,840 --> 00:17:34,280
Alan Sillitoe...

213
00:17:35,280 --> 00:17:37,840
..and John Braine.

214
00:17:46,280 --> 00:17:50,520
Many of these writers came
from working-class northern cities

215
00:17:50,520 --> 00:17:52,880
and they wrote of what they knew.

216
00:17:52,880 --> 00:17:59,240
They brought gritty, kitchen sink
realism to the forefront
of popular literature.

217
00:18:03,720 --> 00:18:10,680
One of the first of these novelists
to hit the mainstream was
the Yorkshire librarian John Braine.

218
00:18:12,760 --> 00:18:16,800
In 1957, Braine published
Room At The Top,

219
00:18:16,800 --> 00:18:22,360
the tale of a working-class lad
determined to make a better life
for himself.

220
00:18:22,360 --> 00:18:29,840
I think that up to about 1954 and
indeed let me say up to 1957 with
the publication of Room At The Top,

221
00:18:29,840 --> 00:18:33,160
open brackets, advertisement,
close brackets,

222
00:18:33,160 --> 00:18:38,640
that it was considered
that there were certain OK places

223
00:18:38,640 --> 00:18:41,600
for novels to be set in,

224
00:18:41,600 --> 00:18:45,560
just as there were certain OK people
to be written about

225
00:18:45,560 --> 00:18:49,960
and if you did write a novel
with a provincial setting,

226
00:18:49,960 --> 00:18:55,040
it was pretty well bound to be
a piece of straight propaganda

227
00:18:55,040 --> 00:18:59,160
or else a regional novel, "regional"
in heavy italics, you see.

228
00:18:59,160 --> 00:19:01,520
John Braine...

229
00:19:01,520 --> 00:19:08,360
used to bring lunches to a halt
by looking round the table drunkenly
and resentfully and saying,

230
00:19:08,360 --> 00:19:12,400
"You hate me, don't you,
for I never went to university!"

231
00:19:12,400 --> 00:19:17,640
But it was a great thing
to have the untutored voice.

232
00:19:19,160 --> 00:19:22,200
That was a tremendous contribution.

233
00:19:27,080 --> 00:19:29,720
Hot on his heels was Alan Sillitoe

234
00:19:29,720 --> 00:19:35,760
whose novel Saturday Night
And Sunday Morning catalogues the
frustrations and sexual infidelities

235
00:19:35,760 --> 00:19:38,800
of a young factory worker
in Nottingham.

236
00:19:38,800 --> 00:19:42,640
But the hero of the novel was taken
quite recently, I think,

237
00:19:42,640 --> 00:19:48,480
to be a rather tempestuous man
with a profound discontent.
What is he discontented about?

238
00:19:48,480 --> 00:19:50,720
Well, it depends what you mean.

239
00:19:50,720 --> 00:19:56,760
The discontent could be the sort
of human condition which I think
most of the time is discontent

240
00:19:56,760 --> 00:20:02,280
and I would say that this discontent
often manifests itself
in sort of social ways.

241
00:20:02,280 --> 00:20:09,240
This character, for example,
had practically
all the earthly bread he wanted,

242
00:20:09,240 --> 00:20:13,480
but he didn't have any spiritual
bread whatsoever of any kind.

243
00:20:13,480 --> 00:20:19,520
In this sense, perhaps people
could put on to it some sort of
social importance or social meaning.

244
00:20:19,520 --> 00:20:22,080
HE BLOWS TRUMPET

245
00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:29,440
Sillitoe was writing about
a genuine Nottingham underclass.

246
00:20:29,440 --> 00:20:35,480
Sillitoe's childhood, so far as
we can tell, was spent in pushing
the family belongings on a barrow

247
00:20:35,480 --> 00:20:37,720
from one rented room to another.

248
00:20:37,720 --> 00:20:42,000
Almost the first words he remembered
being spoken in the family household

249
00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:45,040
were his mother shouting,
"Not on the head,"

250
00:20:45,040 --> 00:20:49,480
when his illiterate labouring father
used to beat him up in the evenings.

251
00:20:51,120 --> 00:20:55,160
These working-class voices
represented an unsettling assault

252
00:20:55,160 --> 00:20:59,000
on the middle-class
literary establishment.

253
00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:05,680
The point is that we don't shape
events, we mirror events.

254
00:21:05,680 --> 00:21:08,120
And if we are good mirrors...

255
00:21:08,120 --> 00:21:13,680
Let's face it,
most writers are cracked mirrors.
They don't show what really happens.

256
00:21:13,680 --> 00:21:16,240
Everybody gets such an awful shock

257
00:21:16,240 --> 00:21:21,840
that it might indeed move them
to do something about things.

258
00:21:21,840 --> 00:21:27,880
I think Kingsley's books and John
Braine's books and John Osborne's
books all reflect a feeling

259
00:21:27,880 --> 00:21:31,720
that it's possible to take people
of all classes seriously,

260
00:21:31,720 --> 00:21:35,240
their opinions, intelligence
and wit seriously,

261
00:21:35,240 --> 00:21:39,280
their attitudes of irreverence
towards the established order.

262
00:21:39,280 --> 00:21:45,800
Kingsley's book especially had
that sort of "why the hell do I have
to accept this" attitude about it.

263
00:21:45,800 --> 00:21:51,840
Since his book, the effect has been
to liberate lots of people who had
shared this attitude for years

264
00:21:51,840 --> 00:21:55,320
into becoming unconscious socialists

265
00:21:55,320 --> 00:21:58,000
by becoming rebels and satirists.

266
00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:05,480
So The Angry Young Men opened up
the world of fiction
to previously dispossessed voices.

267
00:22:07,760 --> 00:22:10,320
The consequences would be immense.

268
00:22:11,360 --> 00:22:14,480
# London is the place for me

269
00:22:15,800 --> 00:22:19,760
# London, this lovely city

270
00:22:19,760 --> 00:22:22,760
# You can go to France or America

271
00:22:22,760 --> 00:22:24,960
# India, Asia or Australia

272
00:22:24,960 --> 00:22:28,720
# But you must come back
to London city... #

273
00:22:28,720 --> 00:22:31,960
British society was changing

274
00:22:31,960 --> 00:22:37,000
and one of the most obvious changes
was the influx
of West Indian immigrants,

275
00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:39,240
known as the Windrush Generation.

276
00:22:39,240 --> 00:22:42,440
# Believe me,
I am speaking broad-mindedly

277
00:22:42,440 --> 00:22:45,800
# I am glad to know
my mother country

278
00:22:45,800 --> 00:22:49,280
# I've been travelling to countries
years ago

279
00:22:49,280 --> 00:22:51,840
# But this is the place
I wanted to know

280
00:22:51,840 --> 00:22:55,280
# London,
that's the place for me... #

281
00:22:55,280 --> 00:22:59,760
The experience was captured
in this BBC documentary.

282
00:23:00,760 --> 00:23:06,520
I've heard that you've got rooms
going. I have got a room,
but I'm afraid I can't let you in.

283
00:23:06,520 --> 00:23:12,080
I beg your pardon?
I can't let you in.
I've got 14 English boys in here.

284
00:23:12,080 --> 00:23:16,560
14 English boys? So you don't want
a...? I can't mix. I'm ever so sorry.

285
00:23:16,560 --> 00:23:21,000
I would myself, but if I let you
come in, all my boys would leave.

286
00:23:21,000 --> 00:23:25,000
If I let you come in,
all my other ones would go. Yes.

287
00:23:25,000 --> 00:23:27,320
OK... I'm ever so sorry. Yes.

288
00:23:27,320 --> 00:23:29,880
# That's the place for me... #

289
00:23:30,640 --> 00:23:33,600
INAUDIBLE

290
00:23:38,760 --> 00:23:42,800
Several West Indian writers
began to chronicle the experiences

291
00:23:42,800 --> 00:23:46,320
of immigrants in Britain
in the post-war years.

292
00:23:46,320 --> 00:23:49,360
'In England,
nobody notices anybody else.

293
00:23:49,360 --> 00:23:55,680
'You pass me in the street
or sit next to me in the train
as if I come from the next planet.

294
00:23:55,680 --> 00:23:58,720
'Nobody asks questions
and nobody gives answers.

295
00:23:58,720 --> 00:24:02,200
'You see this the minute
you put foot in London.

296
00:24:02,200 --> 00:24:06,040
'People don't have nothing to do
with one another.

297
00:24:06,040 --> 00:24:11,280
'You can live and die in
your own room and people next door
never say "boo" to you,

298
00:24:11,280 --> 00:24:14,320
'no matter how long you inhabit
that place.'

299
00:24:14,320 --> 00:24:18,440
George Lamming, who arrived
in England from Barbados in 1950,

300
00:24:18,440 --> 00:24:23,440
was one of the first to write
about the West Indian experience
of Britain.

301
00:24:23,440 --> 00:24:27,320
The terror of not knowing
and of not even daring

302
00:24:27,320 --> 00:24:31,360
to call upon a single soul
among the hundred who surround him.

303
00:24:31,360 --> 00:24:35,200
That is the initial experience
of the West Indian arriving.

304
00:24:35,200 --> 00:24:40,040
However tough he is, for the first
time in his whole experience,
he is alone.

305
00:24:42,080 --> 00:24:47,600
Both George Lamming's The Emigrants
and Sam Selvon's
The Lonely Londoners

306
00:24:47,600 --> 00:24:53,440
deal with the hardship, alienation
and disillusionment
of the Windrush Generation.

307
00:24:53,440 --> 00:24:56,160
I wrote my first novel here.

308
00:24:56,160 --> 00:25:02,520
I was called upon to describe
what was happening with West Indians
in this country.

309
00:25:02,520 --> 00:25:07,080
I had to meet the immigrant
to find out how they were living.

310
00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:11,760
They had this feeling
of being carefree

311
00:25:11,760 --> 00:25:14,120
and being able to laugh

312
00:25:14,120 --> 00:25:19,560
at the fact of not being able
to get a place to live,
of not being able to get a job.

313
00:25:19,560 --> 00:25:23,960
This was a joke. Chaps met in
the pub or they met in the street.

314
00:25:23,960 --> 00:25:29,800
One would tell the other,
"I couldn't get work down the road,"
and that would be a joke.

315
00:25:29,800 --> 00:25:33,840
This is what I tried mainly
to bring out in The Lonely Londoners,

316
00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:37,880
that they were able to cope
with all the difficulties

317
00:25:37,880 --> 00:25:42,760
and they had brought over from
the West Indies some of this humour

318
00:25:42,760 --> 00:25:45,200
and this exuberance

319
00:25:45,200 --> 00:25:48,080
and this carefreeness about life,

320
00:25:48,080 --> 00:25:52,320
which, alas, in these latter years,

321
00:25:52,320 --> 00:25:55,000
they seem to have lost somewhat,

322
00:25:55,000 --> 00:25:57,880
which to me is a very great pity.

323
00:25:57,880 --> 00:26:03,600
And I think this is a result
of all this racial talk and trouble.

324
00:26:03,600 --> 00:26:05,920
PIANO MUSIC

325
00:26:08,520 --> 00:26:12,720
# No more shall they in bondage toil

326
00:26:12,720 --> 00:26:16,200
# Let my people go

327
00:26:16,200 --> 00:26:21,120
# Let them come out
with Egypt's spoil

328
00:26:21,120 --> 00:26:25,000
# Let my people go... #

329
00:26:25,000 --> 00:26:28,840
Racial talk and trouble
was undoubtedly on the rise.

330
00:26:28,840 --> 00:26:35,720
1958 saw racial tensions boil over
in Notting Hill when white mobs
attacked West Indian homes

331
00:26:35,720 --> 00:26:38,200
and violent skirmishes ensued.

332
00:26:40,040 --> 00:26:46,000
# Tell ol' Pharaoh

333
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:54,560
# To let my people go... #

334
00:26:54,560 --> 00:26:59,880
And it wasn't only
West Indian writers who engaged
with the immigrant experience.

335
00:26:59,880 --> 00:27:04,720
Colin MacInnes became fascinated
by this clash of races.

336
00:27:11,920 --> 00:27:16,720
In 1959, MacInnes published
Absolute Beginners.

337
00:27:16,720 --> 00:27:20,880
Set against the backdrop
of the Notting Hill race riots,

338
00:27:20,880 --> 00:27:24,840
it charts the experiences
of a teenager in late '50s London.

339
00:27:29,520 --> 00:27:34,960
Often it is by placing
your character in conditions
of moral and social difficulty

340
00:27:34,960 --> 00:27:38,800
that you enable him or her
to be tested by circumstances.

341
00:27:38,800 --> 00:27:44,480
I've also tried to learn
from life itself not to judge,
not to pretend I know,

342
00:27:44,480 --> 00:27:49,960
but to be, as it were, a witness
to the society of my own age,

343
00:27:49,960 --> 00:27:53,880
so that those who do me the pleasure
of reading what I've written

344
00:27:53,880 --> 00:27:57,720
may make their own judgments
and draw their own conclusions.

345
00:28:03,240 --> 00:28:09,080
The novel soon caught
the attention of the BBC's
flagship book programme Bookstand.

346
00:28:10,360 --> 00:28:14,800
These riots are the climax of Colin
MacInnes's novel Absolute Beginners.

347
00:28:14,800 --> 00:28:17,840
His novel is mainly
about the teenage world

348
00:28:17,840 --> 00:28:23,880
and it seems to get inside the skin
of a teenager more successfully than
almost any book could hope to do.

349
00:28:23,880 --> 00:28:28,720
It's written in the first person
and the hero is
an 18-year-old photographer.

350
00:28:28,720 --> 00:28:33,760
He lives in that very overcrowded
part of London which is the scene
of the disturbances

351
00:28:33,760 --> 00:28:36,800
and he refers to coloured people
as "spades".

352
00:28:36,800 --> 00:28:41,240
They dramatised sections of the
novel with a young Terence Stamp

353
00:28:41,240 --> 00:28:45,160
who describes a mob attack
on a West Indian man.

354
00:28:45,160 --> 00:28:47,800
And then somebody cried, "Get him!"

355
00:28:47,800 --> 00:28:50,440
The spade dug it quick enough then.

356
00:28:50,440 --> 00:28:56,280
He went running down the Bramley Road
like lightning, still holding
his holdall and his parcel.

357
00:28:56,280 --> 00:28:59,800
There must've been a hundred
young men chasing after him

358
00:28:59,800 --> 00:29:05,320
and hundreds of girls and kids
and adults chasing after them
and even motorbikes and cars.

359
00:29:05,320 --> 00:29:11,160
Someone must have shouted sense
into his ear cos he dived into
a greengrocer's and slammed the door.

360
00:29:11,160 --> 00:29:15,200
The old girl inside locked it
and she glared out at the crowds...

361
00:29:16,200 --> 00:29:19,440
And the crowd gathered there
and they shouted.

362
00:29:19,440 --> 00:29:22,640
And I'm quoting their words exactly.

363
00:29:23,640 --> 00:29:27,320
"Let's get him!
Bring him out and lynch him!"

364
00:29:28,320 --> 00:29:30,480
They cried that.

365
00:29:33,000 --> 00:29:37,040
It was through the immigrant
experience that MacInnes felt

366
00:29:37,040 --> 00:29:41,080
the reality of post-war Britain
was to be found.

367
00:29:44,240 --> 00:29:50,000
If you want to know
what a former great power
and now a dwindling minor power

368
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:56,640
is really like, who better
can tell you than its minorities?
Who knows better?

369
00:29:56,640 --> 00:30:00,800
Who knows more, the master or the
servant? It's always the servant.

370
00:30:00,800 --> 00:30:05,160
The one who is exploited knows more
about the one who exploits

371
00:30:05,160 --> 00:30:09,200
than the exploiter knows
about the exploited.

372
00:30:10,680 --> 00:30:17,080
Colin MacInnes had picked up
on Britain's changing position
on the world stage.

373
00:30:20,520 --> 00:30:24,320
CHURCHILL:
From Stettin in the Baltic

374
00:30:24,320 --> 00:30:30,960
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an Iron Curtain has descended
across the continent.

375
00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:41,560
As World War turned to Cold War,
Britain had to confront its reduced
role in international affairs

376
00:30:41,560 --> 00:30:44,320
and the loss of a once-great empire.

377
00:30:48,000 --> 00:30:54,800
The symbolic watershed came with
the Suez Crisis when Britain lost
control of the Suez Canal to Egypt.

378
00:30:56,400 --> 00:31:02,520
Strangely, these global upheavals
were to revitalise
an old literary genre

379
00:31:02,520 --> 00:31:08,640
which had its roots in the Boys
Own-style adventures of Richard
Hannay and Bulldog Drummond.

380
00:31:12,200 --> 00:31:16,720
Ian Fleming was a journalist
when he created James Bond,

381
00:31:16,720 --> 00:31:21,360
a hero for the post-war world
who would keep Britain great.

382
00:31:21,360 --> 00:31:28,200
Fleming had worked in Naval
Intelligence during the war
and he drew on his own experiences.

383
00:31:29,200 --> 00:31:36,440
Particularly since the last war,
we've all become much more educated
in what really is.

384
00:31:37,800 --> 00:31:41,880
Violence and sadism
and savagery and so on.

385
00:31:41,880 --> 00:31:47,520
And what technical tricks
of torture and violence

386
00:31:47,520 --> 00:31:52,560
the Gestapo got up to, what the KGB
gets up to now in Russia,

387
00:31:52,560 --> 00:31:57,400
what happened in Northern Africa
in Algeria and Morocco,

388
00:31:57,400 --> 00:32:01,640
with these terrible electrical
devices they use on people.

389
00:32:01,640 --> 00:32:07,680
And so to, as I say, use the old
Bulldog Drummond baseball bat
would be rather stupid.

390
00:32:07,680 --> 00:32:10,040
It wouldn't be contemporary writing.

391
00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:16,840
Fleming is really disturbing.
I used to read him when I was a kid.

392
00:32:16,840 --> 00:32:20,880
I don't know if my mind was poisoned
by the violence and misogyny.

393
00:32:20,880 --> 00:32:27,760
He really likes the bad things
that happen to people. It's really
quite thigh-strokingly detailed.

394
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:35,520
Fleming's seemingly unrestrained use
of sex and violence caused outrage
at the time,

395
00:32:35,520 --> 00:32:40,560
but that did little to dent
the popularity of the franchise.

396
00:32:51,440 --> 00:32:55,880
A new Bond adventure was published
every year until 1966.

397
00:33:02,200 --> 00:33:07,240
By the early '60s, the Cold War
had grown distinctly chillier.

398
00:33:09,880 --> 00:33:16,880
In 1961, the ideological division
between East and West
found tangible form in Berlin.

399
00:33:23,440 --> 00:33:29,040
The following year saw the world
brought to the brink of destruction
by the Cuban Missile Crisis.

400
00:33:29,040 --> 00:33:35,680
Some writers felt
the fantasy and escapism of Bond
was too far removed from reality.

401
00:33:36,720 --> 00:33:41,720
I think it's a great mistake, if
talking about espionage literature,

402
00:33:41,720 --> 00:33:44,960
to include Bond in this category.

403
00:33:44,960 --> 00:33:49,720
It seems to me that he is more
some kind of international gangster

404
00:33:49,720 --> 00:33:52,360
with, as is said, a licence to kill.

405
00:33:52,360 --> 00:33:58,200
He's a man with unlimited movement,
but he's a man entirely out of
the political context.

406
00:33:58,200 --> 00:34:02,840
It's of no interest to Bond who, for
instance, is President of the US

407
00:34:02,840 --> 00:34:06,880
or who is President
of the Union of Soviet Republics.

408
00:34:06,880 --> 00:34:11,320
It's the consumer goods ethic,
really,

409
00:34:11,320 --> 00:34:15,560
that everything around you,
all the dull things of life,

410
00:34:15,560 --> 00:34:20,400
are suddenly animated by
this wonderful cachet of espionage.

411
00:34:20,400 --> 00:34:27,240
With the things on our desk
that could explode, our ties which
could suddenly take photographs.

412
00:34:27,240 --> 00:34:32,400
These give a drab and materialistic
existence a kind of magic.

413
00:34:34,600 --> 00:34:38,640
John Le Carre, a former
British Intelligence officer,

414
00:34:38,640 --> 00:34:45,680
understood the reality of Cold War
espionage and it was a world away
from the glamour of Bond.

415
00:34:47,600 --> 00:34:51,640
Has he called yet? No.
Six minutes to go yet, Control.

416
00:34:51,640 --> 00:34:56,480
If Fleming provided escapist
entertainment with a dash of sadism,

417
00:34:56,480 --> 00:35:02,520
Le Carre was all about
the paranoia and everyday reality
of intelligence work.

418
00:35:02,520 --> 00:35:07,360
City Removers here.
I believe you wanted an estimate.

419
00:35:07,360 --> 00:35:09,880
'You're always welcome.'

420
00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:20,440
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,
published in 1963,

421
00:35:20,440 --> 00:35:24,880
painted a bitterly harsh picture
of Cold War Berlin.

422
00:35:24,880 --> 00:35:29,320
I was in Berlin
watching the wall being built.

423
00:35:29,320 --> 00:35:36,320
And that was like seeing
one's first dead body. That was
an absolutely appalling sight

424
00:35:36,320 --> 00:35:41,280
and of monstrous cruelty.
People, one forgets now,

425
00:35:41,280 --> 00:35:45,920
were jumping out of windows and being
brought away by the Fire Brigade

426
00:35:45,920 --> 00:35:49,280
and people died, people were shot.

427
00:35:49,280 --> 00:35:55,520
The sight, the actual experience
of a great political
and potentially apocalyptic event

428
00:35:55,520 --> 00:36:03,200
was extraordinary and to see
Russian tanks brought up nose to nose
almost with American tanks...

429
00:36:03,200 --> 00:36:09,280
In those days, they were big tanks.
You had to keep them warm
if they were going to advance.

430
00:36:09,280 --> 00:36:15,920
And to watch the American advisor
going through the checkpoint, testing
the responses all the way through,

431
00:36:15,920 --> 00:36:19,160
that was extraordinary.

432
00:36:19,160 --> 00:36:25,200
So I shot back to Bonn then and wrote
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
in three or four months.

433
00:36:25,200 --> 00:36:28,280
And I knew then it was pretty good.

434
00:36:28,280 --> 00:36:34,320
There was still the absorption
in this tight little word of spying,

435
00:36:34,320 --> 00:36:40,760
packages being left in the backs
of cars and mysterious transits
through continental cities,

436
00:36:40,760 --> 00:36:46,400
but the impression one gets
out of Le Carre is that it's become
a job of work.

437
00:36:46,400 --> 00:36:52,640
It's become almost
institutionalised, I suppose. The
spy is a high-grade civil servant.

438
00:37:00,600 --> 00:37:04,280
'I wrote about
the things that I knew of.'

439
00:37:04,280 --> 00:37:08,920
The tensions of Berlin,
institutional behaviour,

440
00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:12,160
British nostalgia for power, perhaps.

441
00:37:12,160 --> 00:37:18,600
And...
I imported from my experience
of the Foreign Service

442
00:37:18,600 --> 00:37:24,280
a great deal of
the way paper is moved around,
the dinginess of decisions.

443
00:37:25,280 --> 00:37:27,120
Right.

444
00:37:27,120 --> 00:37:29,840
We shall start.

445
00:37:29,840 --> 00:37:31,880
JAZZ BAND PLAYS

446
00:37:34,040 --> 00:37:40,760
Spy fiction wasn't the only genre
to respond to the changing mood
of the time.

447
00:37:43,840 --> 00:37:50,000
As the Cold War took hold
in the public mind, atomic anxiety
began to approach fever pitch.

448
00:37:51,840 --> 00:37:57,480
I believe it is a world
where people want peace.
Ordinary people want it.

449
00:37:57,480 --> 00:38:00,800
So when Khrushchev says it,
I believe him.

450
00:38:00,800 --> 00:38:07,720
A young Doris Lessing seemed
to articulate the thoughts of
an increasingly-nervous generation

451
00:38:07,720 --> 00:38:10,240
when she appeared on Panorama.

452
00:38:10,240 --> 00:38:15,680
In a studio panel discussion, she
grilled Home Secretary Rab Butler

453
00:38:15,680 --> 00:38:19,920
about the Government's position
on the H bomb.

454
00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:25,960
Mr Butler, a great many people
are not so much worried about whether
your government or the Russians

455
00:38:25,960 --> 00:38:32,280
or the Americans are going to start
a war, but whether some trigger-happy
general starts one by accident.

456
00:38:32,280 --> 00:38:38,040
I cannot be responsible
for situations that might arise
that I'd regret as much as you.

457
00:38:38,040 --> 00:38:41,800
It would be too late to regret it
when this bomb has dropped.

458
00:38:44,600 --> 00:38:48,640
The atomic threat and rapid advances
in science and technology

459
00:38:48,640 --> 00:38:54,000
pushed a number of writers toward
an increasingly dystopian view
of the future.

460
00:38:54,000 --> 00:38:58,040
Consider for a moment
the end of the world.

461
00:38:58,040 --> 00:39:03,880
Throughout the centuries,
many suggestions have been made as
to how it will come about and when

462
00:39:03,880 --> 00:39:05,960
but few more sinister than this.

463
00:39:05,960 --> 00:39:10,000
For the moment, we have pushed them
back, but they will return,

464
00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:16,840
for the same urge drives them
as drives us - the necessity to
exterminate or be exterminated.

465
00:39:16,840 --> 00:39:22,040
And when they come again, if we let
them, they'll come better equipped.

466
00:39:22,040 --> 00:39:25,640
Or maybe this might be
the beginning of the end.

467
00:39:25,640 --> 00:39:30,080
If you look at the statistics of
casualties, look at the proportion

468
00:39:30,080 --> 00:39:33,720
that were stung across the eyes
and blinded.

469
00:39:33,720 --> 00:39:37,200
It's remarkable and significant.

470
00:39:37,200 --> 00:39:43,240
Both these books, The Day of
The Triffids and The Kraken Wakes,
as well as these others

471
00:39:43,240 --> 00:39:47,360
are by one of our best-known writers
of science fiction, John Wyndham.

472
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:57,440
John Wyndham's most famous novel,
The Day of The Triffids, tells
the story of an attack on mankind

473
00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:00,520
by giant carnivorous plants.

474
00:40:00,520 --> 00:40:01,560
Aah!

475
00:40:01,560 --> 00:40:03,240
Ohh...

476
00:40:05,320 --> 00:40:07,520
The original Triffids one,

477
00:40:07,520 --> 00:40:11,960
I think came one night when I was
walking along a dark, country lane

478
00:40:11,960 --> 00:40:16,600
and the hedges were only just
distinguishable against the sky.

479
00:40:16,600 --> 00:40:22,640
And the higher things
sticking up from the hedges
became rather menacing.

480
00:40:22,640 --> 00:40:29,080
One felt that they might come over
and strike down or,
if they had stings, sting at one.

481
00:40:29,080 --> 00:40:34,160
So that... The whole thing, really,
grew out of that.

482
00:40:34,160 --> 00:40:40,200
It did seem to chime with prevalent
anxieties about the dangers
of scientific research,

483
00:40:40,200 --> 00:40:42,120
eugenics,

484
00:40:42,120 --> 00:40:48,160
the possibility of weird things
happening in the natural world
that we might be responsible for.

485
00:40:48,160 --> 00:40:54,600
There was this sense that what
Wyndham was writing about could
turn up on next week's Panorama.

486
00:40:54,600 --> 00:40:56,760
He was that much in touch.

487
00:40:56,760 --> 00:41:04,600
Somebody once said
that half of fantasy is
the willing suspension of disbelief.

488
00:41:04,600 --> 00:41:10,240
Well, you must not go
beyond a certain barrier,
if you can find it,

489
00:41:10,240 --> 00:41:14,320
in which that willing suspension
is shattered.

490
00:41:18,680 --> 00:41:23,520
Science fiction somehow chimed
with the mood of the time.

491
00:41:23,520 --> 00:41:29,560
Even otherwise conventional
novelists like Anthony Burgess
found themselves embracing it

492
00:41:29,560 --> 00:41:33,280
as a means of exploring
their concerns about the world.

493
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:42,480
In 1962, Burgess published what
would become his most famous work,
A Clockwork Orange.

494
00:41:43,480 --> 00:41:47,920
Later immortalised by Stanley
Kubrick's controversial film,

495
00:41:47,920 --> 00:41:55,040
A Clockwork Orange offers
a terrifyingly bleak view of youth
and violence in the near future.

496
00:41:56,800 --> 00:42:02,080
The novel follows the character of
Alex, a Beethoven-loving young thug,

497
00:42:02,080 --> 00:42:06,520
who leads his gang on nightly orgies
of violence and mayhem.

498
00:42:07,440 --> 00:42:13,680
But when Alex is arrested,
he is subjected to a brutal
programme of reconditioning.

499
00:42:14,680 --> 00:42:18,720
Burgess even created
his own futuristic slang.

500
00:42:22,360 --> 00:42:25,080
'What's it going to be then, eh?

501
00:42:25,080 --> 00:42:28,720
'There was me, that is Alex,
and my three droogs,

502
00:42:28,720 --> 00:42:32,760
'that is Pete, Georgie and Dim,
Dim being really dim.

503
00:42:32,760 --> 00:42:39,000
'We sat in the Corolla milk bar
making up our rasoodocks
what to do with the evening.

504
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:43,040
'Our pockets were full of deng,
so there was no real need

505
00:42:43,040 --> 00:42:48,680
'from the point of view of crasting
any more Pretty Polly to tolchok
some old veck in an alley

506
00:42:48,680 --> 00:42:52,440
'and viddy him swim in his blood
while we counted the takings.'

507
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:02,840
Partly inspired by the juvenile
delinquency of the '50s and '60s,

508
00:43:02,840 --> 00:43:08,520
Burgess also seemed to draw on
Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World,
a book he admired.

509
00:43:10,560 --> 00:43:15,200
I wish I'd written it. I wish I'd had
the idea and knew what Huxley knew.

510
00:43:15,200 --> 00:43:21,840
The notion of this confrontation
of a world in which a young savage
is brought up solely on Shakespeare

511
00:43:21,840 --> 00:43:26,280
and a world where Shakespeare and
all imaginative writers are banned

512
00:43:26,280 --> 00:43:31,600
and your subject is emotional
engineering, is a great conception.

513
00:43:31,600 --> 00:43:36,440
# Sweet sixteen, goes to church
Just to see the boys... #

514
00:43:36,440 --> 00:43:41,480
For Burgess,
the bigger threat was not the
violence of an unrestrained youth,

515
00:43:41,480 --> 00:43:46,120
but the society that tries to curb
it by sinister or overbearing means.

516
00:43:46,120 --> 00:43:51,720
# Everybody knows
She's only putting on the style. #

517
00:43:51,720 --> 00:43:57,760
I heard talk in the 1960s of the
possibility of getting these young
thugs and not putting them in jail,

518
00:43:57,760 --> 00:44:03,800
because jail is for professional
criminals, but rather putting them
through a course of conditioning,

519
00:44:03,800 --> 00:44:06,320
turning them into clockwork oranges.

520
00:44:06,320 --> 00:44:11,960
No longer organisms
full of sweetness and colour and
light, like oranges, but machines.

521
00:44:11,960 --> 00:44:16,200
I feared this and that's why I wrote
the novel. I feared the possibility

522
00:44:16,200 --> 00:44:22,920
that the state was all too ready
to start taking over our brains
and turning us into good citizens.

523
00:44:26,600 --> 00:44:31,120
Anthony Burgess made science fiction
about the here and now.

524
00:44:31,120 --> 00:44:37,360
It was territory
that another novelist, JG Ballard,
had already begun to make his own.

525
00:44:39,160 --> 00:44:45,200
I had felt, when I began writing
science fiction in 1957, at the time
of the launching of Sputnik One,

526
00:44:45,200 --> 00:44:51,440
that science fiction should turn its
back on the far future and on
alien planets and alien universes,

527
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:55,480
that the real subject matter was
here, in the present day.

528
00:44:55,480 --> 00:45:00,080
I felt we should have a science
fiction based on the present.

529
00:45:00,080 --> 00:45:04,360
Instead of outer space,
it should be based on inner space.

530
00:45:17,400 --> 00:45:23,840
For Ballard, the modern world was
as strange and alienating
as any space-based science fiction,

531
00:45:23,840 --> 00:45:28,080
the real world far more interesting
than fantasy worlds.

532
00:45:32,120 --> 00:45:38,200
The blueprint for the world
which we inhabit now was being
laid down then.

533
00:45:38,200 --> 00:45:44,040
A world of consumer goods, of package
holidays, jet travel, high rises,
motorways, computers,

534
00:45:44,040 --> 00:45:49,320
the first hints
that space travel was around
the corner. Change was in the air.

535
00:45:53,600 --> 00:45:59,640
In 1962, Ballard published
The Drowned World, a novel
based on the outlandish idea

536
00:45:59,640 --> 00:46:06,080
that our world might become
irrevocably transformed by global
warming and rising sea levels.

537
00:46:07,320 --> 00:46:14,160
'The bulk of the city had long since
vanished and only the steel-supported
buildings of the central commercial

538
00:46:14,160 --> 00:46:19,040
'and financial areas had survived
the encroaching flood waters.

539
00:46:19,040 --> 00:46:24,880
'The brick houses and single-storey
factories of the suburbs
had disappeared completely

540
00:46:24,880 --> 00:46:27,640
'below the drifting tides of silt.'

541
00:46:28,840 --> 00:46:30,680
He was always

542
00:46:30,680 --> 00:46:36,200
a decade ahead of everyone else
in his apprehension of the present

543
00:46:36,200 --> 00:46:40,840
and his sense of the future and
the direction things were going in.

544
00:46:40,840 --> 00:46:48,040
And capable of writing
the creamiest prose
of anyone in the century.

545
00:46:48,040 --> 00:46:52,000
# Woke up this morning
with light in my eyes

546
00:46:52,000 --> 00:46:56,560
# And then realised
it was still dark outside... #

547
00:46:56,560 --> 00:47:01,000
Toward the end of the 1960s, Ballard
had moved on to a new obsession

548
00:47:01,000 --> 00:47:06,400
which he was to explore in his
writing and in a film for the BBC.

549
00:47:11,440 --> 00:47:15,360
I think the key image
of the 20th century

550
00:47:15,360 --> 00:47:22,000
is the man in the motor car.
It sums up everything. The elements
of speed, drama, aggression.

551
00:47:22,000 --> 00:47:28,960
The junction of advertising and
consumer goods, the technological
landscape, the violence and desire,

552
00:47:28,960 --> 00:47:36,600
power and energy, the shared
experience of moving together through
an elaborately-signalled landscape.

553
00:47:38,120 --> 00:47:45,160
These ideas were ultimately to find
expression in his best-known
and most controversial book, Crash,

554
00:47:47,400 --> 00:47:52,240
a novel that links car crashes
with explicit sexual fetishism.

555
00:47:53,520 --> 00:47:57,560
'The overlay of her knees
and the metal door flank.

556
00:47:57,560 --> 00:48:03,400
'The conjunction of the aluminised
gutter trim with the volumes
of her thighs.

557
00:48:06,800 --> 00:48:12,840
'The crushing of her left breast by
the door frame and its self-extension
as she continued to rise.'

558
00:48:15,600 --> 00:48:18,880
We now see that what we had to fear,

559
00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:22,920
it's quite interesting
with the Ballard stories,

560
00:48:22,920 --> 00:48:26,560
what we really had to fear
was not the atom bomb,

561
00:48:26,560 --> 00:48:30,600
but the Westway Flyover.
He kind of knew that on one level.

562
00:48:30,600 --> 00:48:35,040
The cementing over of everything
was more terrifying.

563
00:48:35,040 --> 00:48:41,160
The ecological death of the planet
was more terrifying
than the potential of the atom bomb,

564
00:48:41,160 --> 00:48:45,760
which was so terrifying that nobody,
touch wood, exploded it again.

565
00:48:47,040 --> 00:48:52,080
# See, don't ever set me free
I always want to be by your side

566
00:48:53,320 --> 00:48:59,280
# Girl, you really got me now
You got me so I can't sleep
at night... #

567
00:49:00,320 --> 00:49:05,000
As the '60s progressed, anxiety
about the future seemed to subside.

568
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:09,840
The mood was changing.
# Oh, yeah, you really got me... #

569
00:49:09,840 --> 00:49:16,200
Britain may not have been
a world power any more,
but did it really matter?

570
00:49:16,200 --> 00:49:21,320
Social liberalism and sexual
liberation swept the country,

571
00:49:21,320 --> 00:49:26,320
aided in part by the introduction
of the oral contraceptive pill.

572
00:49:28,400 --> 00:49:32,920
The mood was one of excitement,
freedom and fun.

573
00:49:32,920 --> 00:49:35,560
Superficially, it was one big party.

574
00:49:37,160 --> 00:49:41,200
But to some
this party was a bit one-sided.

575
00:49:46,120 --> 00:49:51,160
A lot of people have said this meant
that men did what they felt like

576
00:49:51,160 --> 00:49:57,200
and women didn't feel like that,
but now had to go along with it
because they had pills.

577
00:49:57,200 --> 00:50:03,040
I think I observed a lot of that.
There was a huge rush of liberation
amongst men.

578
00:50:03,040 --> 00:50:06,320
Women liberated themselves
more slowly.

579
00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:19,240
Some women were keen
to redress this balance.

580
00:50:21,040 --> 00:50:28,680
There is this new wave of
articulate, well-educated, forceful,
won't-take-no-for-an-answer women

581
00:50:28,680 --> 00:50:30,920
coming on the stage at that point.

582
00:50:30,920 --> 00:50:36,440
It's possible to say that the '60s
is the women's decade
in British fiction.

583
00:50:39,000 --> 00:50:44,840
It was in this atmosphere
that Doris Lessing, no stranger
to political activism,

584
00:50:44,840 --> 00:50:51,080
turned her attention to female
sexuality and published what would
become her most important work,

585
00:50:51,080 --> 00:50:53,520
The Golden Notebook.

586
00:50:54,520 --> 00:51:00,760
The Golden Notebook examines
mental and social breakdown through
the central character of Anna,

587
00:51:00,760 --> 00:51:06,600
who separates
the different parts of her life
into five colour-coded notebooks.

588
00:51:06,600 --> 00:51:11,440
A friend of mine kept notebooks
and they were Politics,

589
00:51:12,400 --> 00:51:14,840
Psychology,

590
00:51:14,840 --> 00:51:16,880
My Husband,

591
00:51:16,880 --> 00:51:18,800
Children,

592
00:51:18,800 --> 00:51:23,040
you see, Job. And I thought
that was the oddest thing

593
00:51:23,040 --> 00:51:28,680
since when you're living a life
you don't live in this kind of way
at all, do you?

594
00:51:28,680 --> 00:51:34,320
You don't. It's just...inhuman.
There's something wrong with someone
who thinks like this.

595
00:51:37,800 --> 00:51:41,760
The Golden Notebook had
an extraordinary frankness

596
00:51:41,760 --> 00:51:45,600
about women's sexuality,
about women's responsibilities,

597
00:51:45,600 --> 00:51:52,840
and it was extraordinarily rude
about men. I mean, Doris did get
called a castrating woman

598
00:51:53,800 --> 00:51:59,440
and I don't think that pleased her,
but I could understand
why men felt that

599
00:51:59,440 --> 00:52:05,480
because it simply hadn't been good
manners to write about men's sexual
failings in the way she writes,

600
00:52:05,480 --> 00:52:08,320
or indeed their other failings.

601
00:52:08,320 --> 00:52:13,480
She was completely merciless
in her expose of sexual conflict.

602
00:52:13,480 --> 00:52:16,120
When I wrote The Golden Notebook,

603
00:52:16,120 --> 00:52:22,160
which was regarded as a kind of bible
of women's liberation
before there was such a thing,

604
00:52:22,160 --> 00:52:26,120
it never crossed my mind
that that's what I was writing.

605
00:52:26,120 --> 00:52:30,560
I was simply writing
the kind of experiences I'd had

606
00:52:30,560 --> 00:52:35,640
and the kind of...experiences
other women I knew had had.

607
00:52:35,640 --> 00:52:42,080
# Well, no one told me about her
The way she lied

608
00:52:42,080 --> 00:52:45,120
# Well, no one told me about her... #

609
00:52:45,120 --> 00:52:51,240
Intentionally or not,
The Golden Notebook chimed
with social currents of the time

610
00:52:51,240 --> 00:52:57,920
and it seemed to offer a challenge
to some of the less reconstructed
attitudes currently being aired.

611
00:52:57,920 --> 00:53:00,600
# Please don't bother
trying to find her

612
00:53:00,600 --> 00:53:03,240
# She's not there... #

613
00:53:03,240 --> 00:53:09,280
I can't offhand, I think, think
of any contemporary female writer

614
00:53:09,280 --> 00:53:15,200
who I have tremendous admiration for,
but I don't say
you couldn't find one.

615
00:53:15,200 --> 00:53:21,320
Your own sort of relations
with women, naturally,
you use them in your novels.

616
00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:23,760
But they're not portraits from life.

617
00:53:23,760 --> 00:53:27,680
I'm like a Turk. I don't believe
they have souls. Women? No.

618
00:53:27,680 --> 00:53:29,720
But men have? Oh, yes.

619
00:53:29,720 --> 00:53:34,720
# I don't mind
But a guy's dancing with my girl... #

620
00:53:34,720 --> 00:53:39,640
It's easy to see why women writers
wanted to make themselves heard.

621
00:53:41,200 --> 00:53:47,640
The young Margaret Drabble
appeared to embody the spirit
of London in the Swinging Sixties

622
00:53:47,640 --> 00:53:52,280
and she made a documentary
for the BBC at the age of just 28.

623
00:53:53,240 --> 00:53:57,160
# The kids are all right

624
00:53:57,160 --> 00:53:59,480
# The kids are all right... #

625
00:54:01,280 --> 00:54:07,040
I think all writers would agree
that writing is a very solitary
occupation.

626
00:54:07,040 --> 00:54:09,240
Perhaps that's why it suits me.

627
00:54:09,240 --> 00:54:13,920
I say I'm a solitary,
but I'm also hopelessly gregarious.

628
00:54:13,920 --> 00:54:17,760
I think the two things
quite often go together.

629
00:54:19,000 --> 00:54:26,200
But her fiction frequently dealt
with guilt and anxiety, not the wild
abandon of the sexual revolution.

630
00:54:26,200 --> 00:54:33,040
The Millstone, published in 1965,
tells the story of a young Cambridge
graduate living in London

631
00:54:33,040 --> 00:54:37,600
who becomes pregnant and decides
to keep and raise the child alone.

632
00:54:38,560 --> 00:54:41,200
What do you think about abortion?

633
00:54:41,200 --> 00:54:45,640
In The Millstone, the girl doesn't
really want an abortion, does she?

634
00:54:45,640 --> 00:54:52,560
I myself think that the abortion
law reform... The abortion laws were
archaic and wicked

635
00:54:52,560 --> 00:54:55,200
and should have been changed

636
00:54:55,200 --> 00:55:01,040
and, indeed, kind of,
you know, did what I could
to do something about it,

637
00:55:01,040 --> 00:55:08,040
but this doesn't mean I myself...
I have a very strong religious
feeling about unborn children.

638
00:55:08,040 --> 00:55:15,680
Yet I don't feel one can impose one's
own religious or mystical sense about
how marvellous it is to have a child

639
00:55:15,680 --> 00:55:20,120
on a mother of nine who's about to
risk her life with the tenth.

640
00:55:20,120 --> 00:55:27,120
I think it's wicked to impose one's
own rather hazy mystical notions
about the virtues of life

641
00:55:27,120 --> 00:55:29,760
on somebody in a position like that.

642
00:55:33,600 --> 00:55:40,200
'I think I was writing my books
because there weren't any like them
and I needed there to be.'

643
00:55:40,200 --> 00:55:44,240
I wrote my books because
there weren't any books like mine.

644
00:55:45,800 --> 00:55:49,440
I didn't feel I was angry
all the time

645
00:55:49,440 --> 00:55:55,960
and being of a conciliatory spirit
I hope I've redeemed some of
the moments of anger that I had.

646
00:55:55,960 --> 00:56:01,400
But I did feel indignant
about some of the choices
women were obliged to make

647
00:56:01,400 --> 00:56:06,040
and some of the restrictions
that were imposed on them.

648
00:56:11,160 --> 00:56:15,800
'I see them all and I can't think
how they put up with it.

649
00:56:15,800 --> 00:56:22,040
'I tell myself that they don't really
mind ending up spending their lives
trudging the street with heavy bags,

650
00:56:22,040 --> 00:56:25,480
'or being shut up with babies
in top-storey flats

651
00:56:25,480 --> 00:56:30,120
'or dragging themselves to the Post
Office for their old age pensions.

652
00:56:30,120 --> 00:56:35,880
'Though surely they must have
expected something better
when they threw snowballs at school

653
00:56:35,880 --> 00:56:41,520
'or gossiped with their friends.
I try to persuade myself
that they don't mind,

654
00:56:41,520 --> 00:56:48,160
'but I know they do because they
write and tell me so. There's just
absolutely nothing they can do.

655
00:56:48,160 --> 00:56:52,000
'The shopping, the washing,
the fatigue.

656
00:56:52,000 --> 00:56:55,920
'I couldn't do it.
I wouldn't survive.'

657
00:57:00,360 --> 00:57:04,200
There is a bleakness
about some of her early books,

658
00:57:04,200 --> 00:57:08,320
just as there is about the books
of her sister, AS Byatt.

659
00:57:08,320 --> 00:57:15,000
They were both exponents of a genre
you can see beginning to take shape
very early in the 1960s

660
00:57:15,000 --> 00:57:19,440
and that's the anti-Sixties novel,
the novel by the clever novelist

661
00:57:19,440 --> 00:57:24,280
who looks around at the new freedoms
and ways of enjoying yourselves

662
00:57:24,280 --> 00:57:28,040
and realises
some of the moral consequences.

663
00:57:33,960 --> 00:57:40,400
I feel there was a terrible innocence
about the people of the '60s who
thought now anybody could do anything

664
00:57:40,400 --> 00:57:43,040
and everything would be all right

665
00:57:43,040 --> 00:57:45,680
because what it does

666
00:57:45,680 --> 00:57:49,200
is flick into cruelty very quickly.

667
00:57:49,200 --> 00:57:51,240
# I'm so glad

668
00:57:51,240 --> 00:57:55,320
# I'm so glad, I'm glad
I'm glad... #

669
00:57:55,320 --> 00:57:59,560
I really thought everything was
hopeful until the '60s came,

670
00:57:59,560 --> 00:58:03,800
then I saw human nature goes round
in eternal cycles of folly

671
00:58:03,800 --> 00:58:07,840
and - what's the word I want -
absolutism

672
00:58:07,840 --> 00:58:10,480
and telling everybody what to do

673
00:58:10,480 --> 00:58:16,320
and calling something a revolution
when actually it's a putting down
of somebody else.

674
00:58:16,320 --> 00:58:21,160
I just got very depressed
in a half-amused kind of a way.

675
00:58:21,160 --> 00:58:26,800
For a free Open University booklet
featuring some of
our best-loved writers,

676
00:58:26,800 --> 00:58:30,840
or to explore the connections
between authors, call:

677
00:58:33,400 --> 00:58:35,440
Or go to:

678
00:58:38,000 --> 00:58:42,040
Follow the links
to the Open University.

679
00:58:42,040 --> 00:58:44,560
# You've got some plans for the night

680
00:58:44,560 --> 00:58:48,880
# And then I stop
and say, "All right"

681
00:58:48,880 --> 00:58:54,320
# Love is kinda crazy
with a spooky little boy like you

682
00:58:58,000 --> 00:59:00,240
# You always keep me guessin'

683
00:59:00,240 --> 00:59:04,480
# I never seem to know
what you are thinking'... #