THIS PROGRAMME CONTAINS SOME STRONG LANGUAGE.
BIG BEN CHIMING
"And here, in Trafalgar Square,
"it's midnight 1959 going out and 1960 coming in.
"A Happy New Year to you all.
"The forecast is that 1960 will start with mild weather."
And strangulated, Southern voices on the BBC, as usual.
But 1960 would be the year a new voice was heard,
and it would come from the North.
Like Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, it was cocky and defiant.
What I'm out for is a good time, all the rest is propaganda.
Arthur was part of newly prosperous generation loudly asserting itself.
This is not defeated, downtrodden, "oh, woe is me" North, this is entirely different.
This is the North virile and passionate and colourful, and it's remarkable.
The North of England would go from economic engine room of the country to its cultural powerhouse.
It would be become fashionable.
And in literature, theatre and film, a new kind of Northerner would be depicted -
working class, affluent, stroppy, sexy.
So here's Arthur Seaton on screen, a heat seeking missile, hell bent on
sinking a dozen pints, having a ruck and a...
well, a good time with the ladies.
With Arthur, the old deferential North could step aside, or be pushed aside.
Mind what you're doing!
It was a time of immense freedom and hope and optimism.
There was nothing like us, so we thought.
I mean, we were the start of the '60s, that revolution.
In at the start of this revolution was a young writer from Salford.
In 1960, Shelagh Delaney's play, A Taste of Honey, was on Broadway, and soon to be filmed.
It introduced a new kind of Northern type.
I am extraordinary person.
Characters on screen with a wayward exuberance and sex lives.
Suddenly we didn't have to be embarrassed, we didn't have to be ashamed,
we were ourselves, there we were on the screen, we were stars.
But by the end of 1960, it would be television
and the start of Coronation Street that would bring this explosion of Northern creativity
into the front rooms of Britain and confirm 1960 as the year of the North.
A fine son you are, that tongue of yours will get you hung one of these days! Give over.
MUSIC: "A Wondrous Place" by Billy Fury
# I found a place full of charms
# A magic world in my baby's arms
# Her soft embrace like satin and lace
# A wondrous place... #
In 1960, sometime Liverpudlian docker Ronald Wycherley,
AKA Billy Fury, sang about A Wondrous Place.
For Billy, this place was anywhere in the immediate vicinity of his girlfriend.
But he might have been talking about the North of England.
And for those down south like photographer John Bulmer, who took these pictures,
here was a faraway, almost exotic place.
Anything north of Watford was like a foreign country.
To me it was like going to New Guinea or something, it was so different.
There were so many wonderful images there to be captured.
I think the cultural North in 1960 was anywhere outside of London.
Birmingham, where I am from, was very much the North.
Anywhere that had chimneys, anywhere that was a bit dark and dingy, that was perceived as the North.
So it didn't have to be in the North literally.
Nottingham fitted the bill, and it provided the setting
for one of the most powerful expressions of the new, Northern stridency -
Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.
The film version begins with the ultimate source of Northern power,
the factory floor, with the machines pounding like a migraine.
The factory was a dynamic place, something to rebel against,
but it also provided the cash to fund that rebellion.
I worked in a factory in Metalastic, we used to do rubber/metal bonding.
it was just like the beginning of Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,
you used to go... "230, 231, 232...
"When's the tea break?" You know?
You see Arthur Seaton and it's yourself.
Nine hundred and fifty-four...
..nine hundred and fifty-bloody-five...
The film was based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe, who grew up in working-class Nottingham.
Sillitoe really did have it rough.
For much of his childhood, his family were homeless, his father being an impecunious drunk.
For a time, Alan followed his father onto the factory floor at Raleigh, making bicycles.
The opening scene was shot here. The workers are real workers,
living a life that Arthur Seaton seeks to transcend
through sheer physical pleasure.
He was cocking a hoop at authority and he didn't give a damn,
and when he was doing his thing at the machine at the beginning,
"£14 a week and all the rest is bloody propaganda,"
that opened the film, he was saying,
"Sorry, but...I'm here."
Arthur is almost an exemplum
of the new, affluent worker who earns such a large pay packet
that his foreman tells him not to reveal what it is to his workmates.
He spends his money on nice jackets and ties.
There's a scene where he lovingly brings back his jacket
from the dry cleaner and puts it on
and knots his tie very carefully
before going out for a night on the town.
Clearly he is someone who is almost too big for his surroundings.
You see him leave his back-to-back house
and almost pushing people out of the way - it's as if
his surroundings are too cramped for the way he wishes to live.
Mind what you're doing, can't you?!
The 1960 moment was not only important for Northern writers,
it also allowed a new generation of Northern actors to shine.
Arthur Seaton was played by Albert Finney in his breakthrough performance.
Before 1960, sex symbols did not tend to come from Pendleton, Salford.
His co-star was Shirley-Anne Field, who grew up north of Bolton.
Until now she'd naturally assumed that all aspiring Northern actors
had to appear Southern in order to get on.
So I went to these painful lessons, one after another, one after another
and spoke terribly carefully, like this, you see,
trying to be like everyone else of that day.
The producer of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was Tony Richardson, who was born in Shipley, Yorkshire.
He'd had great success in the theatre, staging Look Back In Anger.
So he had the reputation and the funding for his mission
to put the life of the North on the cinema screen.
So I auditioned for Tony Richardson and I read in my best English,
and I got to the door and my back was to them, I said, "Thank you,"
and just as I was leaving, he went,
"You couldn't talk in a Northern voice, could you?"
And I went, "Bloody 'ell, I've spent four years learning not to!"
He said, "Get back in here and read again in that voice."
They said, "We've been looking for a working-class heroine."
I was slightly offended by that, I thought, "Working-class?!"
What's your name, duck? Doreen.
In the film, Shirley-Anne Field's character makes
no particular attempt to finesse her social position.
Where do you work then, Doreen? Me? Harris's, the hair net factory, I've been there ever since I left school.
All right, I will have a fag.
But Arthur sees no reason to confine himself to Doreen.
He is also carrying on with the wife of a workmate.
This frank portrayal of sex and adultery was something quite new in 1960.
There was quite a tussle with the censor
about the use of certain words in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.
There was also concern about Arthur and Brenda
being seen in bed together.
There was debate about whether Arthur should have his shirt on or his shirt off,
and therefore there was a concern on the part of the censor
that it was overstepping the mark in terms of its representation
of sexual pleasure and sexual activity outside of marriage.
# All the people down the street, whoever you meet, say I'm a bad boy
# Say I'm a bad boy
# Say I'm a bad boy... #
The film was a smash hit and went on to become one of the top grossing British films of 1960.
It really connected with young audiences, especially in the North itself.
These huge cinemas, 2,000 people in them, and suddenly,
it wasn't Ronald Reagan, it wasn't John Wayne,
you saw yourself on the cinema screen.
Your scowling, Northern, rough self.
It was just amazing and you felt
you no longer needed to be embarrassed,
you no longer needed to be ashamed, you could be yoursen.
MUSIC: "What Do You Want?" by Adam Faith
# What do you want if you don't want money
# What do you want if you don't want gold... #
In 1960, Adam Faith had a hit with a song that beadily enquired, "What do you want if you don't want money?"
It was the right song for a year
in which the pleasures of materialism finally reached the masses.
Between 1957 and 1960, spending on consumer goods increased by nearly 50%.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, venturing into rare colloquialism,
said Britons had never had it so good. It was irrefutably the case.
Industry was booming and workers were doing well out of it.
The weekly wage was 14 pounds, ten shillings - it had tripled since 1950.
I think just the sheer availability of jobs at the time,
kind of semi-skilled and often quite skilled jobs,
and certainly, quite well paid jobs, was absolutely fundamental
to people's sense of being free, almost, to do what they wanted.
I have read a lot of stories of people on a Friday night
telling their boss to sod off and not worrying about it.
They knew they could walk straight into another job on the Monday.
"If you argue with me, piss off!"
And you'd go down the road to the next factory, no trouble.
And people had money in their pockets for the first time.
The factories hummed all day and all night and there was overtime to be had
and trade unions were securing decent working conditions
and you couldn't be pushed around.
Seaton's kind of swagger in that film is
the beginnings of the swagger of the Northern working class.
But in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton insists
that having a few extra bob isn't going to buy him off.
I've still got some fight left in me, not like most people.
I am not saying you ain't. Where does all this fighting get you?
Have you ever seen where not fighting's got you, like my mum and dad?
What do you mean? They've got all they want.
They've got a television set and a packet of fags, but they're both dead from the neck up.
I'm not saying it's their fault, mind you, they've had their hash settled for them
so all the bloody gaffers can push them around like a lot of sheep.
Their 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. He'll get checked one of those days...
AIR RIFLE SHOT Streuth!
There 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 rebellion,
that I will do it my way, not your way.
For the first time, people had a bit of money in their pockets and with that came power.
There was a nervousness among the middle class because when these people were just
48 to a house and dying of diphtheria before they were 40,
that was all well and good. But Seaton represents the rise of a new kind of Northerner.
The Beatles would be that kind of Northerner as well, change the game forever.
Before 1960, there had been a kind of iconoclasm in Northern popular culture.
The North, as any Northerner will tell you, has always had the best comedians.
Hardship bred a sharp wit and a subtle irony.
But the performers who succeeded on the national stage tended to be
buffoonish, somewhat lacking in revolutionary intent.
Thank you. Now I'm going to sing a song and they're going to make a film of it at the same time,
so if you see any flashing, don't take any notice, please.
I don't think the North was so much invisible
as patronised or put into comic effect.
# A girl while bathing close to me shouted out, oh!
# She said, I think I'm drowning and you'll save me, I know
# I said, well, if you're drowning, do you mind letting go
# Of me little stick of Blackpool rock... #
It's certainly seen as a comic place,
both in the sense of a place where comics come from,
the great Northern comics, Gracie Fields, George Formby,
and I think it's also a place that is seen as somehow funny,
and the accent and the lifestyle is the object
of some easy humour, south of the Trent.
Even in sport, there was a North/South divide in 1960.
Down South, it looked like this.
"When the sun beats down, you need a hat. And where will you see
"better hats than at Royal Ascot in June?" But up North,
sport was more like this.
The North even had its own form of rugby, League as opposed to Union.
Rugby Union was a game for gentlemen amateurs
and these being thinner on the ground in the North,
the players of Rugby League got paid,
so more was at stake and the games were harder and faster.
In his novel of 1960, This Sporting Life, David Storey viewed the North through the prism of Rugby League.
Storey was of impeccable Northern pedigree.
He was born in Wakefield, the son of a miner, and he played Rugby League himself.
The book really began in a match in Leeds when
in the middle of the game, I suddenly realised
if I picked up the ball, which had just come loose at my feet,
I would get my teeth knocked in.
It happened in a fraction of a second and I hesitated,
and an old pro was playing with me,
and he just instinctively picked it up and lost his teeth.
The film version of This Sporting Life shows the brutal world of a Northern alpha male, Frank Machin,
a coal miner trying to make it in Rugby League.
The opening game, if we can even call it a game,
the gladiatorial combat, in This Sporting Life,
he becomes a relentless juggernaut
smashing his way through opposition.
We have got a ruthless, vicious machine of bone, muscle and sinew.
It's a very compelling vision that we see in front of us.
This Sporting Life was directed by Lindsey Anderson,
a founding member of the Free Cinema group of documentary makers.
Moving into feature films, they carried a realist style
into what became known as the British New Wave.
So Anderson's film features real players,
with real crowds looking on,
and real cooling towers in the background.
Frank Machin was the first starring role for Richard Harris,
who might himself have played Rugby League were it not for a bout of tuberculosis as a young man.
Frank Machin in Sporting Life
is not really someone you would like to know, again, he's an anti-hero,
he's ruthless in his own little goldfish bowl.
He uses the women in his life, he uses the men in his life.
Frank is signed up for the huge fee of £1,000,
but he is still a man in a donkey jacket surrounded by men in suits,
and treated accordingly.
Don't spend it all at once, will you, lad.
THEY LAUGH
In some ways, Frank pre-dates what we've seen happen in football,
where people from what is sometimes patronisingly called by people
humble origins and humble beginnings,
become multi-millionaires through their expertise in sport.
Frank's success allows him to come into contact
with a higher echelon of Northern society,
and funds his own personal class war.
The restaurant scene where Harris's character
goes out for a meal in a posh restaurant
is really, cringingly embarrassing.
He just does what he wants to do and he doesn't give a damn.
Watch you don't burn his whiskers, love!
We shouldn't have come here if you're going to behave like this.
We're paying for it, aren't we? That's all they're interested in.
Many of the films have a strong sense that the North is masculine.
There are common images of the North as tough, as hard,
that stands in contrast to the rather soft, effete South,
and that is quite a popular image of the North/South contrast.
I think these working-class films celebrate a certain masculine aggression,
a certain masculine virility and toughness
which is part of their power and vitality.
In the end, This Sporting life is difficult to watch and harrowing,
not least because Frank Machin does not confine his violence to men.
"It was a year of upheaval..."
Beyond the turbulent North of England inhabited by Machin,
a wider populism was asserting itself in 1960.
In Africa, Harold Macmillan made a historic speech, signalling the end of colonialism.
The wind of change is blowing through this country.
In America, Kennedy was elected President.
His appeal was a new, youthful open-mindedness.
National effort will be needed in the years ahead
to move this country safely through the 1960s.
In the North of England, the new optimism was underscored
by the coming of free, universal, secondary education, ideally at a grammar school.
Now life need not mean years of hard labour on the factory floor, you could escape by brainpower.
The aspirations of a Northern grammar school boy were the stuff of a 1960 West End hit, Billy Liar.
The play was from the novel by Keith Waterhouse, who was born in Leeds.
Later filmed, Billy Liar is the story of a young clerk
who doesn't see why suburban Bradford should hold him back.
There is a fantastic scene in Billy Liar where Billy's dad says,
"You should be grateful for your chances, because I never had them."
You want to be grateful you've got a job in an office.
Grateful for this, grateful for that, that's all I've ever heard.
Grateful you let me go to the grammar school.
Been like that the first day I went there. It's a chance we never had.
And don't we bloody well know it! I had to be grateful for winning me own scholarship!
What did you say when I told I'd won it?
That you'd have to pay for the uniform and I had to be grateful!
Generational conflict is obviously a long established theme of literature,
but it's particularly acute in these novels of the '50s and '60s
because people are moving out of their social class.
Education is much of the problem of that generation of parents,
that their children are moving into new areas
that they don't fully understand, and they're being left behind.
Billy Liar was directed by John Schlesinger
and starred the biggest thing to have come out of Hull, Tom Courtenay.
Courtenay plays Billy as a misfit, like Arthur Seaton and Frank Machin.
But his problem is not an excess of testosterone, it's an excess of imagination.
He's working in an undertakers as a clerk and he finds it deathly boring,
and he had all these ideas that his education might be a ticket to a more exciting life,
as a script writer, which is what he really wants to become.
And so in his fantasy life, he's the leader of the fictional country of Ambrosia.
It gives him a really important outlet.
The film alternates between workaday Bradford, where the story is set,
and the more epic world of Billy's daydreams.
Billy has the command of his environment in his dreams and in his fantasies that he doesn't have
in real life, which is much more drab and constricting than he would wish it to be.
Capturing the North at a moment of change, the film shows Billy caught between the old and the new.
He wants to embrace the new, and the old, quaint North is something to be satirised.
There's a wonderful scene in Billy Liar, set on a slag heap,
where Billy Liar, played by Tom Courtenay, meets Councillor Duxbury,
and what Tom Courtenay does is talk to him in broad Yorkshire.
He actually makes up words.
So, you're planning to go to London, then, eh?
Aye. Just about thraped of this place. How do you mean?
Neither muckling or mickling, is it?
Are you taking a rise out of me, young man? No, sir!
I'm a micklin' and a mucklin', I'm reet thraped
and all that cod-Yorkshire patois he comes out with.
He thinks these people are fools and he's quick-witted enough to want to get out
of that world, but it keeps dragging him back all the time.
Billy reflects the aspirations of young men in the new North.
But the film also introduces a new type of Northern woman,
one who is really in control of her own life.
She is played by Julie Christie, whose hair is shockingly
unconstrained by hat, headscarf or hair net.
Here is the start of the '60s, and take note, it's happening in Bradford.
Liz represents a completely different kind of alternative.
The minute she enters the film,
the soundtrack changes, it's kind of really swingy, jazzy kind of music,
she's swinging her bag, completely carefree, completely rootless.
Liz, the Julie Christie character in the film,
is the role model for Billy,
she is the person that puts her fantasies into reality,
she is the most free-spirited person in the film.
She takes off whenever she likes.
Billy sees her skipping around town one day,
he goes, "Oh, she's crazy, she does what she likes."
I think the theme of escape runs through a lot of these plays and these films.
Characters want to escape their environment.
The irony of Billy Liar is that he has the opportunity to escape at
the end of the film, but by virtue of fiddling with the milk machine,
misses the train to London and Julie Christie goes off to London without him.
To go to London was a remarkable adventure.
To go South was something that very few people from up here managed.
The sense that you are stuck, and you've got to
muck in and get on with it
was very much a part of one side of the schizophrenic Northern culture.
The other side said, we can do anything.
In 1960, an ambitious individual might be just as likely to head North as South.
Certainly, an ambitious film-maker would be.
I think for many of the film directors born in the South of England,
certainly educated, usually public school, Oxbridge,
the North of England just, for them, was a totally exotic landscape.
The North became a magnet for film directors,
fascinated by what George Orwell once called the "macabre appeal"
of its industrial landscape and finding a paradoxical, poetical quality in its backstreets.
One such was Ken Russell, who in 1960 was given a tour of Salford
by the 21-year-old writing sensation, Shelagh Delaney.
She gave him a bittersweet account of growing up in its terraced streets.
And you get these alleyways going on for miles, separating houses
that look as if they'd been built on top of one another.
And because everyone is so close together, they seem to generate a terrific warmth.
Down here you can almost feel the heart of the city beating.
Street living was community, you met people all the time.
You met them all along the road where you lived,
you stepped out and you met people you knew.
People who would look out for you.
Perhaps it's the old cliche, you didn't lock your door when you went out.
There was always someone there who knew who you were.
It became a bit repressive,
because everybody knew everybody else's business. But it wasn't lonely.
It was in this world that Shelagh Delaney found inspiration
for her play A Taste Of Honey, a hit in the West End and about to open on Broadway in 1960.
The film version, directed by Tony Richardson,
introduced the unknown Liverpudlian actress Rita Tushingham
as the central character, the maverick and contentious teenager, Jo.
In the opening scene,
Jo and her mother struggle up steps in a maze of terraces.
But if the townscape looked Victorian,
the plotline certainly wasn't.
She is seeing a culture which is in transition.
She was in Broughton in Salford, which is about as traditional working class as you can get.
But it's on the verge of the docks, the edge of the docks and therefore it is open to other cultures.
Shelagh Delaney was amazing.
16-year-old schoolgirl
writes a play all about a Salford schoolgirl
who falls in love with a black sailor,
gets pregnant,
brings up the child with the help of her gay best friend.
This is a plot which should be a drama series in 2010.
Regarding her friend's sexuality, Jo comes quickly to the point.
Who did she find you with?
Your girlfriend? Of course not.
It wasn't a man, was it?
'This was ordinary street, this was the gays that we knew.'
These were just normal and he was just normal.
This is what it was, it was the normality of us.
But perhaps the most touching relationship in the film
is between Jo and her equally spiky mother, Helen, played by Dora Bryan.
For me, Jo and Helen are two of the best characters in literature. They really are.
I've got something to tell ya.
Jo, I'm going to get married again.
Helen's in the bath and she's telling Jo that she's going to get married again,
and Jo's response is so telling.
She wants her mum to herself, she wants her mum to be a mum,
but her mum doesn't want to be a mum, her mum is 40 and she wants to have a good time.
I wish you wouldn't talk about me as if I'm an impotent old woman.
You're not exactly a child bride.
I was once. I want to be dead and buried by the time I reach your age.
Jo knows her mother inside out.
You've got the young person's coming distrust of the older generation.
The idea that the older generation was something to be looked up to
and valued and trusted is not there in Taste Of Honey.
Jo is like what The Beatles are going to usher in as well,
a kind of cocking snook and making fun of the older generation
for being kind of stuffy and hypocritical in their morality.
What these films did for the first time is give a picture of working class people having inner lives
and having unique individual lives and unique perspectives on the world.
And even though there's a collective shared experience of difficulty and adversity,
and to some extent grimness, there is an awful lot of joy to be had.
There's the scene in A Taste Of Honey where Jo and Geoff
are talking to each other about how unique and how marvellous they are.
To hear two working class people who are really in quite a pickle,
in terms of the circumstances of their lives, she's pregnant
and he's gay and has got nobody to turn to, both of them affirming each other's value
for the first time on film to everyone is just fantastic.
My usual self is a very unusual self, and don't you forget that, Geoffrey Ingham.
I'm an extraordinary person. There's only one of me like there's only one of you.
We're unique. Young! Unrivalled!
Smashing! We're bloody marvellous!
MUSIC: "Walk Don't Run" by The Ventures
1960 would prove to be a big year for a rather more conventional family unit down south.
The head of the family, Elizabeth Windsor, had a new baby, Prince Andrew, here making his TV debut.
Then her younger sister Margaret got married.
But whilst all the glitz and glamour seemed to be confined
to its usual southern haunts, the North would keep crashing the party.
The judges of the Miss Cinema 1960 competition seemed to know which way the wind was blowing.
The final was on Halloween at the Lyceum ballroom.
Third prize went to 18-year-old Ellen Lloyd, a London girl.
The first went to Nottingham, a city famous for its pretty girls.
Then an infamous son of Nottingham, DH Lawrence, stole the limelight from beyond the grave.
In 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.
Lawrence, although he's obviously long dead,
but he is a working class writer from the North,
and he's a sexual revolutionary, I mean genuinely.
And also he's actually a literary revolutionary in the sense
that he puts explicit sex into a novel like Lady Chatterley's Lover.
In the Old Bailey courtroom an elemental culture clash was played out.
Much of the argument of the learned friends centred on the F-word,
and its function in working class speech.
The literary critic Richard Hoggart, who'd been born in Leeds, was called to give evidence for the publishers.
One of the key moments in the whole trial, at least in my dad's evidence,
was that he was asked about the use of that very bad four-letter word.
He was asked about the use of the word "fuck".
In the courtroom there was a sort of frisson.
Somebody had said that word which was never used in polite society.
Dad said, "Yes, I was on my way to the Old Bailey here,
"I heard the word used many, many times when I walked past a building site.
"That's what people do, that's the word for it."
What he was saying was, if you don't like it
then you're going to be very unhappy, because it's a very, very commonly used word.
But the pivotal event of the trial would prove to be a fatal aside
by the rather patrician chief prosecutor.
His speech to the jury was going very well and he allowed himself an ad-lib.
And the ad-lib he used was, "Is this a book you would want your wife or your servants to read?"
That was at the very beginning of the trial, on the opening day,
and the trial was probably lost at that point, when this ancient attitude was revealed.
With victory for Penguin the book became a mainstream best-seller,
another breakthrough for Northern culture in this year of 1960.
CRASHING
Just as a tale of cross-cultural sex was erasing ideas of taste and decency,
so the old North was being physically erased.
The dark satanic mills, and correspondingly gloomy houses
were being replaced by something more salubrious.
And this modernisation was welcomed by many.
The kind of suburban dream that starts filtering through to northern working class communities
at this time is of the new house on the outskirts of town.
The new estates, and you can see in Manchester that happens, and in Sheffield and Liverpool.
And the dream is to get out of these overcrowded, grimy, run-down inner city areas,
and you can understand quite why centrally heated, properly ventilated,
clean homes on the outskirts of town were a dream for people.
There were going to be parks and fields.
Instead of the bath house, you'd have your own bath.
There'd be the municipal laundrettes, there'd be garage parking,
there'd be roadways in the sky.
We'd probably go to school with jet packs, I don't know.
It was going to be everything that you'd ever seen in encyclopaedias of the future.
But even in 1960 there were those, like Shelagh Delaney,
who worried about what was being lost.
They're tearing down whole parts of Salford and building them again.
They're tearing them down and they're not putting the people back there, they're sending them away.
Far away, to places where there's no city and no...
Just sterile places, nobody knows anybody on it.
And when they're building these places they never think
of putting anything in them like a theatre or something.
Another writer looking warily at the changes taking place in the North
was that star of the Lady Chatterley trial, Richard Hoggart.
His book The Uses Of Literacy was one of the talking points of 1960.
It examined the shifting dynamics of northern working class life,
not so much with a magnifying glass as a very powerful microscope.
He was writing about working class people as having a real culture of their own,
almost as though they were as strange and as different
as the Trobriand islanders anthropologists had written about.
But at the same time very much part of our world, our society and our nation.
So that came as quite a surprise to a lot of people.
It also came as a tremendous surprise to a lot of people who came from that background.
They had never seen what they took for granted,
the way they were schooled, the streets they lived in,
the attitudes their parents and friends had. They'd never seen that written about.
A fan of Hoggart's book was writer Stan Barstow, from Horbury near Wakefield.
Barstow was a grammar school product, the son on a miner.
He worked in the drawing office of an engineering firm before becoming a novelist.
I think The Uses Of Literacy, it certainly influenced me.
It gave me an insight into what...
..somebody observing working class life with an acute insight.
And it excited me very, very much,
and I think I wasn't the only one who found it very, very valuable
in its reporting from the grass roots.
In 1960, Barstow's debut novel, A Kind Of Loving, was published.
It tells the story of Vic, an ambitious, upwardly mobile young draughtsman.
A film version starring Alan Bates and directed again by John Schlesinger
was shot in various northern locations.
They just caught the industrial North,
just on the change when four or five years later all kinds of things would've changed.
The film counter-poses the aspirant with the traditional North.
Unlike his father, Vic goes to work in a collar and tie.
He "kept a clean collar", as the phrase had it.
Alan Bates is shown at work in an office that is both literally
and metaphorically above the factory floor.
We've got this perfect character, this cipher for "Man 1960."
Who's not a coal miner, who's not a factory floor worker,
who is somebody who could rise to a lower managerial position if he played his cards right.
Or if he married the right girl.
All these things are possible.
That notion of the white collar job and the factory job,
the manual job and the office job, is absolutely massive in the Northern culture at the time.
Your mum would want you not to have to do what your dad had done and she had done,
ie, not be in factories, or be in a coal mine or whatever.
I remember growing up thinking that working in a bank was the ultimate accolade,
because you could wear a clean shirt to work and you didn't come home covered in soot,
or tired, or with a broken arm.
Not unless it had been a particularly hectic day at the bank.
But against that feeling that this was a nice job was also this feeling,
and you heard it expressed by older guys sometimes,
that it wasn't quite a proper job for a man, that it was a cushy number.
Pen pushing. "Oh, he's a pen pusher."
Vic's father, a cheerful railwayman,
evinces all the inverted snobbery of the old-fashioned northerner.
Where's my tea, then? Tea?
White collar workers don't get tea.
You want to get a day's work done before you get tea.
Vic's caught between the values of the old traditional working class
and the temptations and the pull of the new working class.
It is Vic's girlfriend Ingrid who represents the dreams now on offer.
Vic is living in two worlds.
His loyalties are divided.
You see him running backwards and forwards
between the new houses on the aspirational housing estate, Ingrid lives in a semi-detached house,
and then him running back to the terraces, which is where he's from and where he also belongs.
The dilemma is awareness of what is possible
and the danger of leaving behind the parts of it
that are very, very valuable which have made him and given him his stability and given him his values.
When Vic does the decent thing and marries his pregnant girlfriend,
he is claimed by the semi-detached suburbia that was beginning to rise up around northern towns.
My favourite scene is when Alan Bates comes home drunk and it's not his home,
it's his mother-in-law's home where he's having to live.
How dare you say such filthy, disgusting things?!
You filthy upstart.
You come into the house drunk, filthy drunk. You're filthy.
You talk filth, you are filth.
He turns and vomits, and she looks at him with utter disgust and calls him an animal.
You filthy pig!
And it's a classic example of not just the generations clashing but the classes clashing.
Thora Hird's character is incredibly aspirational.
She lives in a semi-detached with a nice bedroom suite,
and the new son-in-law is from working class.
She's working class herself, but she doesn't think herself that way.
True to the spirit of 1960, Ingrid and her mother
talk about little else than their latest purchases.
Everything's been going wrong. The new carpet hasn't come.
They promised me it would be down and fitted by the time you came back,
and now they say it'll be a fortnight. Never mind. And the TV's gone wrong.
In The Uses Of Literacy, Richard Hoggart fretted
that the integrity and cohesion of Northern working class life
was being threatened by this new consumer culture.
The key theme of Hoggart's work is the social changes being wrought
by affluence and materialism in that period,
so in many ways Hoggart lays out that concern about the quality of life,
about how we might be becoming economically better off but culturally worse off.
A poignant moment in A Kind Of Loving brings Hoggart's critique to the screen.
Vic Brown's father, as Stan Barstow's father was in real life, was a brass bandsman,
and Vic and his girlfriend Ingrid and her mother sit at home watching the new television set.
There'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.
Vic 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,
nobody is interested in him, watching game shows on television.
And that's all that Ingrid and Ingrid's mother seem to be interested in.
Their superficiality and their vulgarity is something that the film really enjoys.
A common feature of new-wave films was the presence of a TV set,
usually depicted as an agent of moronism.
And your hobbies are gardening and looking at people.
It's very interesting how a lot of these films would have a scene
in which the telly appears, and the telly appears often very negatively.
It's viewed very negatively because it's a threat
to what is seen as authentic, working class amusements.
Down south in 1960, the BBC proudly unveiled its new headquarters in London - Television Centre.
Director of TV Gerald Beadle boasted it was the largest and most carefully planned "factory"
of its kind in the world.
'This 100-feet long studio is one of seven in a building that may well become the Hollywood of television.'
From this manufacturing base, the BBC could take on that upstart commercial television.
The arrival of independent television had introduced
not only a competitor to the BBC, but it had introduced advertising.
It was the impact, not only of advertising on British cultural life, but also what
was seen as increasingly commercial, audience-winning programmes
such as quiz shows with big-money prizes.
They were often seen as a symptom of a new more commercial, material culture.
'A mum is someone who uses Persil in her washing machine.'
'Heinz baked beans.
'Oven-baked to give you that extra Heinz flavour.'
'Glucose and sugar, milk and chocolate are all in Mars.
'Yes, a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.'
By 1960, TVs squatted in three quarters of British living rooms.
The franchise for commercial television in the North
had recently been won by the Bernstein brothers from London.
The north-pointing logo of Granada Television symbolised its geographical orientation.
But in 1960, there was concern within the company
that it wasn't adequately reflecting life in its catchment area.
That changed thanks to an altercation between a studio
executive and a young local writer, Tony Warren.
I climbed on top of a filing cabinet
in a Canadian executive producer's office and said,
"I'm not coming down until you let me write what I know about."
He said, "Well, what do you know about?"
I said, "I know about the North of England and I know about show business."
He said, "Well, show business is kiss of death, but how about writing me the story of a street out there?"
Tony Warren grew up in Swinton, near Salford,
and he knew the Salford backstreets incredibly well.
He'd walked down them, he'd observed them and he'd go through them in a bus.
This is real community and he observed
that and it is his observations which became Coronation Street.
The first episode of Coronation Street
was broadcast on the 9th of December 1960.
The opening scene is a masterpiece,
it was shot in Archie Street in Salford, absolutely captures the
classic back-to-back streets, very much takes its iconography from the new-wave cinema.
And has that marvellous theme tune.
What could be more Northern to a mass audience in 1960 than a cornet solo?
The fact the cornet solo is written by a man born in Croydon perhaps takes a little bit away
from that, but it's extremely skilful at creating a mood
and creating an imaginative setting, just in a few seconds.
CORONATION STREET THEME
Every possible facet of Northern life was reflected in its cast of characters.
We could now examine at our leisure some of the
incendiary types the new wave of Northern writers had created.
Coronation Street had its very own pouting, smouldering bad boy,
Dennis Tanner, played by Philip Lowrie.
In that opening episode we're taken into the Tanners,
Elsie Tanner having a big argument with Dennis Tanner,
she's accused him of nicking two bob from her purse.
Not an hour ago, you asked me for two bob for cigarettes.
And you wouldn't give it me. So you stooped to going in a lady's handbag.
Just listen it! A lady? Is that what you crack on you are these days?
Dennis Tanner in that is absolutely Arthur Seton on the small screen,
with the quiff and the turned-up shirt, and the open neck.
That same kind of slightly brooding, Elvis Presley relocated to Salford.
The grammar school boy burning with ambition to escape, an ambition still mysteriously
unfulfilled after 50 years, is Ken Barlow, played by William Roache.
We move into the Barlows and there's young Ken
and he's still at college, and Ken is looking down his nose
cos they've put a bottle of brown sauce on the table.
What's up? Nothing.
What's that snooty expression for? What snooty expression?
'Duffle-coated Ken Barlow'
looks like he's just come from the Aldermaston March.
You see this idea of the new educated working class lad,
who is going to go away to university and all the attendant problems that will bring.
He'll love his mum and dad and love his culture and be slightly ashamed of it as well.
You're not so much getting a sense of the new economic prosperity
but you are getting the idea of new values coming into the North.
Embodying the sexualisation of Northern culture was Pat Phoenix,
as the vampish Elsie Tanner.
Elsie Tanner is a fascinating character
because she is a new cultural phenomenon, a single mum.
We've had widowed mums, who are honourable.
Elsie Tanner is a single mum and she is loose.
In a scene between Elsie and her daughter, Elsie's erotically
adventurous past is firmly, if glancingly, established.
You haven't been doing anything you shouldn't, have you?
How do you mean? You're not a kid anymore.
It's no secret round here why your dad left me.
'Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street dressed very glamorously on very little money.'
And that kind of older, evidently sexually-active woman
character was really much at odds with the more kind of battleaxe,
harridan Ena Sharples character.
If Elsie represented the turbulence of a new, more liberal era, Violet Carson as Ena Sharples
seemed to personify about 200 years of Northern rectitude.
The North was and is a matriarchal society.
Men are there and thereabouts, but they at work or they're in the pub.
That's not a cliche, I think to a certain extent men were important but kind of shadowy figures.
Daily life as it was lived, on the streets, in the shops,
and in houses and in factories, is dominated by women.
Ena Sharples' arrival into the corner shop
is an absolute tour de force.
She's incredibly intrusive. One of the first questions she has for
Florie Lindley is, has Florie thought about where she is going to be buried?
And in and around that, she's punctuating acute and precise
observations about the locality with her shopping order.
You a widow woman? Well, yes.
I thought so. I'm the caretaker at the Glad Tidings hall.
That's just across the street, isn't it?
What's your place of worship? I don't really do much about it.
Oh, I know, C of E.
'What Coronation Street is giving us'
is the rhythm and the tonality and the inflection
of Northern dialogue, Northern speech.
Within a week you'll be received, christened and confirmed.
Within a fortnight she was sitting up all night sewing surpluses. I'll take a packet of baking powder.
'And suddenly we hear Northern voices on TV.'
Apparently, papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express, in 1960,
published little explanations of what "owt"
meant or "eccy thump", or what have you,
so that southerners wouldn't be baffled by the language of Coronation Street.
All the stressful argy-bargy of Northern working class life enshrined on TV.
Well, it took some getting used to.
When Coronation Street was first transmitted in 1960, lots of people didn't know how to take it.
Some people thought it was real life and these characters actually existed,
because they'd never seen a soap opera before like it.
And a lot of people were expecting a comedy because they were used to the
Manchester accents being from the comedy acts of the music halls,
like George Formby and Gracie Fields.
But the viewers did acclimatise, and Coronation Street, originally
commissioned for 13 episodes, soon became unstoppable, a hit all over the country.
I think Coronation Street is in many ways the most
revolutionary of all the products of this Northern movement.
By 1961 it's got 24 million viewers, so it's reaching a far bigger
audience than any of the other cultural products.
And it, along with Granada Television and the other regional television companies, was inserting
the North of England in the national culture in a permanent way, that simply hadn't happened before.
The North has always had its moments of fashionability in 1840s, '50s, 1930s, but they came and went, and
it was television that really meant the North could never go away again.
By the end of 1960, the North had attained true glamour.
It was unignorable, and if you tried to patronise it, you risked looking stupid.
If you wanted iconoclasm, humour, style, music, you looked north.
And this was only the start.
I am certain we, in some way,
paved the way for the Swinging Sixties because,
before we came along,
the Northern accent certainly wasn't acceptable accept as a caricature.
The Midlands accent was unheard of, and now suddenly in 1963, we had people like The Beatles.
IN LIVERPOOL ACCENT: They were Liverpool and talk like that,
at the beginning.
I don't think they would have got away with it if we hadn't started the trend for regional accents.
The Beatles, right from the word go, speak in their own voice, they speak
in their own argot and the world is ready to fall in love with them.
So instead of finding it upstart or vulgar, they find it charming
and it's the beginning of the idea of the kind of impishness and vitality of the North.
And The Beatles take that and make it global.
Out of this is the beginning of the '60s and maybe a kind of more exciting '60s.
# Love, love me do
# You know I love you
# I'll always be true
# So please
# Love me do
# Whoa, love me do... #
# The whole world used to pass me by
# I'd sit home all alone and cry
# No-one stopped me to say hello
# But now I'm someone they want to know... #