We live in divided times.
CHEERING
An age of rising populism
and tribal identity politics.
SHOUTING
But many of the arguments that divide us today
have their origins decades ago.
CHANTING
Since I was born in 1945,
epic changes have marked our country.
The end of empire.
The tide of Britain's imperial power has ebbed.
The dawn of mass immigration.
The Empire Windrush brings to Britain...
Social and sexual revolutions.
Fierce battles over our land.
Time and again, these transformations have made us ask,
who are we now?
We can't look for answers just in the speeches of politicians,
the daily news cycle,
and certainly not in the blare of social media.
Rather, we should search where
the beating heart of a society truly lives -
our common culture.
Culture is always upstream of politics.
That's why culture matters.
It's the arts that have heralded dramatic changes in our lives.
It just made you think, "Oh, yeah, we do exist
"or we do count in some way."
Movies that bite back against convention.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
That's one thing I've learned.
Paintings that turn the tables on those who look
and those who are looked at.
Music, poetry and fiction that cross tribal boundaries.
I'm often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman.
New breed, as it were.
In the most tumultuous times,
our culture does more than merely capture
the changing face of Britain.
The arts connect us in rare and precious moments.
Together, they tell us the complicated,
gloriously contentious story of us.
I was three months old when the Second World War came to an end...
..arriving into a Britain jubilant in victory...
..but broken and bankrupted by what it had taken to achieve it.
A country divided by class and much else
had pulled together in the war.
But could that unity hold?
What did it mean to be British now and in the future?
Was it the defence of tradition, or was it its opposite -
our no holds barred talent for reinventing ourselves?
One answer, improbably, came out of the ruins.
In these painful, dark years after the war,
there was rubble everywhere.
I remember saying later on to my dad,
"Did you realise when the war ended and everyone was so joyous
"that there was going to be another six years of heaviness,
"of real difficulty?"
And he said, "No, you know, we all thought
"it was going to be like the night the war ended, really."
Kind of knees up forever.
No, knees were very definitely down.
What was needed, the new Labour government decided,
was a great national cheering up, an antidote to bleakness.
It's now been decided to hold a Festival of Britain in 1951,
and the site has been selected on the South Bank of the Thames.
I see this festival as a symbol
of Britain's abiding courage and vitality.
Come to see what this old country can do.
I declare the Festival of Britain open.
So from the bombed-out wastelands of the South Bank of the Thames
arose a thrilling vision of modernist architecture, art and design.
A huge exhibition that romanced the British past
while it heralded a jet-propelled techno vision of the British future.
It was 1951.
When the six-year-old me came,
it was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
Apart from the broken buildings,
everything was like the Houses of Parliament or Trafalgar Square.
It was dark and heady and solemn.
This was light and bright and screamingly coloured.
There was a belief that Britain had
tanks of joy and creativity
and brightness and experimental bravery.
The first thing I ever fell in love with, bug-eyed, rapturously,
was a gleaming, tapered-steel cylinder
which seemed miraculously to float and bob above the crowds.
Here we are speaking to you now from the very top of the Skylon.
How high is it?
300ft from the ground to the tip.
The Skylon.
You couldn't look at it and not be completely spellbound.
This 300ft tall, beautiful,
pointy-ended piece of metal
that wanted to ascend.
It was the Britain that was going to literally take off.
And it was just a thing of beauty.
It seemed to me to come out of some perfect comic book.
You know, um...
Dan Dare Space Travel.
It was a way to feel that Britain,
of all places, embraced the new.
Actually, the happiness of being British
was the sense that now we would call cutting-edge.
This lovely thing is the official programme
for the Festival of Britain.
You needed to have it because there were so many pavilions,
22 really big pavilions.
But it's also a kind of manifesto
of what the point of the Festival of Britain is.
It says, "The festival is nationwide,
"all through the summer and through the land.
"Its spirit will be finding expression
"in a variety of British sites
"and the great range of British sounds.
"Taken together, these will add up to one united act
"of national reassessment."
And every so often in British history, that's what you need.
People could think for a moment
about what it meant to be British.
You know, what this particular moment in time -
we'd won the war, we'd survived the worst that Hitler could throw at us -
where does Britain go from now?
Throughout the summer of 1951, the exuberance of the main festival
was reproduced in countless events all over the UK,
from travelling displays on land and sea
to exhibitions in Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast.
Almost every city, town and village held their own celebrations...
Britain's festival was on show last week.
There was always a shin-kicking contest.
..with British eccentricity doing its thing.
They included such sports as pitching the sheaf.
All part of Chipstead's festival celebration.
Presiding over it all was one ubiquitous icon.
The figure who designed the cover for the programme
was one of the great British geniuses of design -
a man called Abram Games.
The son of East End Jewish immigrants,
Abram Games was Britain's official World War II poster artist,
unmatched for his brilliant visual marriages
of modernism and patriotism.
In 1948, he won a competition
to create the symbol of the festival...
..repurposing Britannia on the British penny coin
as the emblem of the new Britain unveiled on the South Bank.
And then underneath Britannia reimagined is bunting
in the colours of the Union Jack - red, white and blue.
And it was said that he got the idea of bunting
from looking at the washing hung out on the washing line
in the back garden in Golders Green,
which would have been very familiar to me.
Abram Games felt equally passionate about being Jewish and being British.
Games said he felt intensely Jewish,
but his life was devoted to making
the kind of pride and pleasure in being British visible.
And, you know, I think about that now, really,
when we're all imprisoned in our little identity tribes.
And there's so much...
..problematic, not unproblematic,
about which particular version of being British you might be.
8.5 million people visited and enjoyed the different versions
of Britishness on offer at the festival,
which didn't mean it went uncriticised.
As the brainchild of Labour's Herbert Morrison,
it was unlikely to get a warm reception
from Churchill's Conservatives.
It would cost too much,
be a popular flop and so on.
A common barb was that my beloved Skylon,
much like the British economy under Labour,
had no visible means of support.
And the perfect emblem of the new, technologically-sleek Britain
ended up in a breaking yard of a scrap merchant
as demolition of the site rapidly pressed ahead
when Churchill and the Conservatives
narrowly won a general election that October.
We're standing on the balcony of the Festival Hall.
That was all that remained.
Everybody knew that the Festival of Britain was actually
going to be demolished at the end of it.
But when the Lord Mayor of London
declared the Festival of Britain closed,
he was greeted with tremendous booing.
BOOING
People were actually really upset.
Aggrieved, not just sad,
I think aggrieved about it all disappearing.
Symbolically, it felt like the revenge of tradition.
And behind that was the real sense
that the Conservatives had won the election,
Churchill was back in power.
He wasn't going to have any of this,
you know, arty approach that modernism was the new Britain.
Though the public loved the festival,
it could be no more than a fleeting moment of national togetherness,
a hit from a happy pill that was never going to solve
all of Britain's deep-rooted problems...
..especially not the discontents and divisions of class.
At the festival, you could ogle
the finished products of industrial Britain,
but you never heard from the people who made them,
those who oiled the parts,
who felt treated like machines themselves
and didn't much like it.
But by the end of the 1950s,
you could open a book by writers from factory towns and port cities,
or go into a cinema and you'd hear them.
At last, talking back.
The full bloody cheek of them.
954.
950 bloody five.
Another few more and that's the lot for a Friday.
£14 three and tuppence for 1,000 of these a day.
No wonder I've always got a bad back.
I'll soon be done.
I'll have a fag in a bit.
No use working every minute God sends.
A film was made in the streets of Nottingham
from a novel written by a man born there,
Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.
The author was Alan Sillitoe.
The hero of the novel,
the tempestuous man with a profound discontent,
I mean, what is he discontented about?
Well, it depends what you mean.
The discontent could be the sort of human condition,
which I think most of the time is discontent.
And I would say that this discontent
often manifests itself in sort of social ways.
There was a fundamental part of me
that didn't like being told what to do,
especially by those who didn't know what the effort of doing it meant.
I was an individual.
Born into abject poverty,
the fiercely anti-establishment writer Alan Sillitoe
left school at just 14
and worked as a lathe operator at the Raleigh bike factory in Nottingham.
As on the playground and now in the factory, I daydreamed
and fixed the faces, habits and possible histories
of the people around me in my mind,
almost without realising it
and certainly not knowing the use I would one day put it to.
That use would be Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,
a book that in 1959 changed everything I thought I knew
about novels of the people.
And just a year later, the film adaptation,
scripted by Sillitoe, electrifyingly brought to life
his rebellious antihero Arthur Seaton,
played by a young Albert Finney, all Bantam cock strut,
full of beer, sex and devilry.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
That's one thing I've learned.
I'd like to see anybody try to grind me down.
That'll be the day.
What I'm out for is a good time.
All the rest is propaganda.
Arthur's voice is Sillitoe's, of course.
To hell with the pieties!
And us suburban wannabe teenage rebels...
Well, there it is.
..ate it up.
Fantastic kind of holy relic of a revolution, really.
The final draft shooting script
for Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.
The reason why it's so brilliant
is that it's of his own personal experience,
filmed in a world Sillitoe himself grew up in, in Nottingham.
The back streets and the alleys,
the terraced houses and the pubs.
You absolutely feel that authenticity.
Ay up, Arthur.
It was a totally different kind of British film.
Everything about it was sweaty with truth.
You've got to be as cunning as them bastards.
You've got a bit of lipstick on you, love. There.
Pioneering director Karel Reisz
was known for his gritty documentary-making,
and his and Sillitoe's talents together
delivered us our very own Jimmy Dean,
a subversive British Brando for the generations.
I've still got some fight left in me, not like most people.
Whoa! Look at this.
It's so vividly written.
The first thing that Arthur says is,
"950 bloody four."
Whoa! This is a different sort of film.
You know, you see the kind of creative fire burnt into it.
"Don't let the bastards grind you down.
"That's one thing I've learned."
This, for us, was the modern Shakespeare. It really was.
"What I want is a good time.
"All the rest is propaganda."
Throwing a Molotov cocktail at British self-satisfaction.
I'm a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come.
I'm me and nobody else.
Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not.
Because they don't know a bloody thing about me.
Most British films were nourished on heroics.
They were always kind of working class types who were doing the,
you know, the kind of wartime equivalent
of tugging a forelock a bit.
They're cheerful in adversity.
Arthur is the opposite, you know?
Oh, strewth!
This is not. It's, "I don't give a shit."
This is a really wonderfully
kind of bloody cheeky antihero.
CHEERING
It's an attitude that stayed in the DNA of British culture.
Decades later, I heard it in punk and then again in Britpop...
# You wanna live like common people... #
..through the wicked cleverness of Sheffield's Jarvis Cocker and Pulp,
for whom Sillitoe and Seaton were a big influence.
# You wanna sleep with common people like me?
# But she didn't understand
# And she just smiled and held my hand
# Oh, rent a flat above a shop... #
Pandora's box is open.
Yeah, I know.
I think the first time I saw the film,
I wasn't sure what to make of him
because he looked like kind of rough kids at school
who would pick on me, basically.
Yeah. I wasn't a hard kid.
Yeah. Even though he scared me a bit,
it was something recognisable, you know,
it was something that I recognised from my life.
One thing that wasn't familiar about it was that he was working.
Because when I left school, that was around the time
when all the industry ground to a halt in Sheffield.
It was, like, the late '70s, early '80s.
So the world that's portrayed in the film had already disappeared,
like a lot of places in the North. Yeah.
That's what I was born into.
That kind of feeling, you know? Yeah.
"What is everybody going to do now?" Yeah.
Films like this were a big inspiration.
To discover these things through seeing them on the TV,
you know, it would be exciting.
In that first monologue that he does, and he said,
"Don't let the bastards grind you down." And it...
..gave you some clues.
Or some kind of, I don't know, validation in some way
because of the attitude. Albert Finney is so cocky in this.
So this sort of cheeky swagger,
you know, up-yours attitude really. Well, yeah.
Jarvis Cocker, lead singer of British band Pulp,
ran onstage.
He danced and allegedly made v-signs at Michael Jackson
before being bundled off by security staff.
These things, they were quite precious, you know,
to people from the north, because
it just made you think, "Oh, yeah, we do exist,
"or we do count in some way."
Seeing this film and others like it were an encouragement,
I suppose, to realise that you could write about your own surroundings.
You didn't have to kind of tune in to some interstellar frequency.
# Oh, we were born within an hour of each other
# Our mothers said we could be sister and brother... #
It's hard to imagine that there was a big sector of society
that was invisible in terms of culture in the '60s.
When this film came out, it was like a revelation.
It was like, oh, you know, pulling the carpet up
and seeing what was underneath it... Yeah, exactly.
..and making it visible for the first time.
The X-rated film was a staggering success,
making its entire budget back within a fortnight
and winning three Baftas...
What a film. What a performance.
Best British film yet.
..despite courting controversy.
The film is doing outstanding business, except in Warwickshire,
where it's been banned.
A lot of people saying this is the beginning of the end of virtue
and traditional values in Britain.
The MP for Nottingham said this was a foul libel
against the clean living people of Nottingham.
Hey.
Come here.
Predictably, it was the film's unfiltered depictions of sex
that sparked many of the protests.
Oh!
You see him going round to the married woman, Brenda,
with whom he's having an affair.
It's amazing, cos it's not only having sex with a married woman,
but, also, she is so up for it.
Don't let's stay down here too long.
Let's go upstairs.
And they're completely unrepentant.
What a time we had last night.
You know, it was absolutely raw.
This was the movie equivalent of late night fish and chips
soaked in vinegar.
The film didn't turn a blind eye to the consequences
of all that fun in bed.
What's the matter with you tonight?
I'll tell you what's the matter with me, Arthur.
I'm pregnant.
Good and proper this time.
And it's your fault.
Oh, aye, it's bound to be my fault, isn't it?
Well, of course it is, you never take care.
You just don't bother.
Nor did it flinch from the fact that women and men
paid a very different price for their pleasure.
In fact, the tough new wave of British movies were obsessed by it -
all of the most acclaimed appearing just before the contraceptive pill
became widely available.
A Kind of Loving.
A Taste of Honey.
I'm going to have a baby.
Yes, I thought so.
You're in a bit of a mess, aren't you?
And the L-Shaped Room featured women punished
and damaged by their unwanted pregnancies.
But as the '60s started to swing, there were many women
who'd had quite enough of sexual powerlessness.
One of them was a spectacularly gifted artist,
who delivered a whole new kind of female agency.
Pauline Boty - a talent all but forgotten for decades -
was Britain's first woman pop artist.
The first to make the way women were looked at,
and the way they looked back, the driving theme of her work.
ARCHIVE: A revolution is on the way.
All over the country, young girls are sprouting, shouting and shaking.
And if they terrify you, they mean to.
They're not going to be squashed,
and certainly don't intend to be wallflowers.
Until Boty showed up, men had overwhelmingly monopolised
images of the female body as objects of male desire.
Men are the ones who talk, who act, who do.
The little woman won't be heard.
We'll never know what she thinks.
And it's assumed she doesn't.
But Boty sure did.
Her subject was sex - the way women saw it and wanted it,
starting with her own passionate fantasies.
Instead of art being absolutely turgid with what men
fancy in women - hello, the whole history of the nude -
this turns the tables completely.
This is the first of her big, colourful paintings.
It's the first time you've got a visual representation
of female, lusty desire.
This fabulous hot crush of a painting
is of film star Jean-Paul Belmondo,
who featured in new wave French cinema.
Pauline Boty absolutely lusted after him.
She's painted his face, of course, in the movie black and white
in which she saw him.
And everything else, these very hot colours, this gorgeous orange.
She said orange, you know, is the colour of desire for her.
And on top of the straw hat is this massive rose.
It doesn't take any feat of the imagination to look at that flower
and its centre to see what she's getting at.
This, you know, growing sense of massive bodily lust.
This painting, Belmondo, is...
"How about my desire? This is done for me."
The red rose was a recurring feature in Boty's smash and grab reclamation
of female pleasure.
But she was an unlikely rebel.
Before escaping to Wimbledon Art College, where she specialised
in stained glass, she was raised in a strict suburban household,
where her accountant father overcompensated for
his Belgian-Persian background by obsessive devotion
to English habits.
Her dad, who was the most uptight, conservative, super English person -
have to have trimmed cucumber sandwiches every day
at 4:00 in the afternoon - but whose obsession was rose gardening.
And her dad was the person who said, "You're not going to art school."
So, this is revenge on Dad's gardening.
This is erotic horticulture.
It's really completely wonderful.
She has herself photographed naked in front of this painting.
You know, it's a playful thing, but it's sort of incredibly original.
It's really brazenly powerful.
Sort of switching from being an object to actually saying,
"This is how I feel. Live with it."
There was no stopping her.
When she had herself photographed with the Belmondo,
she was violating one of art's most sacred principles -
the model doesn't get to be the artist,
much less have fun switching roles,
taking control, doing a double eyeful.
Poor, retiring English females, so unsure of their sexuality,
their femininity.
Some women just don't want to be a female nonentity.
All the while confronting the viewer as both a sexual woman
and a serious artist.
I'm the artist as nude. I'm the nude as artist.
A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy.
Even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman.
Award-winning writer Ali Smith found Boty a powerful muse
for her 2016 novel, Autumn - weaving the artist's story
into the narrative.
"Artists from the 1960s," Elizabeth says.
"The only British female pop artist."
"Ah," Zoe says, "I didn't know there were any."
"There were," Elizabeth says.
Ali discovered Boty by chance, when an image in a magazine
caught her eye as the artist's work began to be revisited
after years of being overlooked.
Who is this artist? Who is this person?
Extraordinary artist, like nobody else.
Ahead of the game, ahead of the time.
A proper pioneer in all of the forms that she used.
Yet our only record of some of Boty's paintings
are the photographs of her with them.
Foremost is a painting of Christine Keeler,
the model and showgirl caught up in the Profumo scandal
that rocked British politics in 1963.
ARCHIVE: Mr Macmillan walks through Euston station
to the biggest domestic crisis of his life, the Profumo affair.
The war minister was involved with a girl who was close
to a Russian naval attache...
Mr Profumo resigned, saying that he had misled Parliament
about his relationship with Christine Keeler,
in which there had been impropriety.
Power and politics in the early '60s turned on Christine Keeler,
who had been reduced, famously, you know,
to that photograph of her naked.
What you've got in Scandal '63, in this missing picture,
Boty takes an image which looks like a really famous image
of Christine Keeler,
except Boty shuts it a couple of frames along.
And she goes, one hand, like The Thinker.
She lets Keeler be The Thinker. Yeah.
She takes an image, and she just... just slightly skews it.
She is pointing out the inequalities.
She is making clear how imagery is used.
There's power, there's politics, and there's sexuality,
and there's distraction.
The distraction is Keeler - there she is!
She's a naked woman on the back of a chair.
So that you won't think about the nuclear powers, and the spies,
and the things which have actually happened
which are behind the lies in Parliament.
And she was asking those questions then in a way that nobody else was.
That's the finger pointing at you.
The bomb.
More than any artist before, and from personal experience,
Boty understood the way women's lives and images are manipulated,
and so, too, the trap of glamour.
Here's Pauline Boty painting one of the people she loved
and admired most, Marilyn Monroe.
Very importantly, in 1962, in the year of Marilyn Monroe's death.
I think there is a sort of double edge, really, about her relationship
with the kind of blonde sexuality and enormous appeal
of Marilyn Monroe, in that Pauline Boty was known as glamorous.
She revelled in her own beauty.
She'd been called the Wimbledon Bardot when she was
at the Wimbledon College of Art.
But at the same time, of course, she also saw that when you did that,
you could become objectified.
And it grates on her, makes her feel pissed off.
No-one would expect you to have a brain - she often said this -
to have a mind, if you were so beautiful and so sexy.
And Marilyn Monroe, she felt, classically, had made a career
out of this astonishing sensual appeal,
and was a terrible victim of it.
The year she paints this is also the year in which Andy Warhol
very famously produced his first multiple silkscreen portrait
of - who else? - Marilyn Monroe.
But apart from that, the two approaches
could not possibly be more different.
What Warhol's interested in is a Marilyn Monroe in which
the human personality has been completely emptied,
has been kind of transformed into the equivalent of a soup can.
This is precisely the opposite.
You have an incredibly immediate - and even though she's dead -
a sort of living, breathing, warm, pulsing personality close up.
So, you're in the kind of aura of this particular woman's warmth,
in all her glory, and all her tragedy.
It would prove hauntingly prescient.
A terrible coda awaited both she and her husband,
the cruellest fate conceivable,
one that turned her own body into a fatal enemy.
She gets pregnant.
During an examination, it's discovered she's got
a terrible cancer, and she decides against radiation therapy,
so that the baby won't be harmed,
and sacrifices herself.
She died on July 1, 1966, just five months after giving birth.
She was 28 years old.
Very touching and...
..desperately sad.
And, yet, the last thing she painted - while she was very ill -
was, in its rather glorious way, peak Pauline.
Bum was commissioned by her friend, Kenneth Tynan,
for his erotic cabaret show, Oh! Calcutta!
A winking title that also meant in French, "Oh, quelle cul t'as!"
"What an arse you have."
Boty's painting was a final cheeky provocation.
And for a great many people, it, and Tynan's play, were the last straw.
Things had gone too far, too fast.
What were your particular objections to Oh, Calcutta?
Well, the sickening perversion I found in it.
The abolition of theatre censorship in the late 1960s,
amid a flood of pornographic materials,
would prove a flash point for the soul of the nation,
evidence of a descent into a moral abyss.
I cannot believe for a moment that the British public would ever
tolerate the sort of thing I saw last night.
The fightback was spearheaded by a Labour peer, Lord Longford,
who set up a commission in 1971 to investigate the impact
of pornography on society.
Surely every decent person is biased against pornography.
You might say it's simply being biased against filth.
The question is, how to overcome pornography.
Harnessing culture for the cause,
he persuaded a pop megastar to join him.
What made you agree to take part?
Well, only that I think if I can be part of something
that is going to help, I mean, combat immorality, and so forth,
I think I'd like to be part of it.
How serious do you think the situation is at the moment?
I mean, it doesn't look particularly healthy.
I mean, the attitude that general people have towards pornography
and the sort of permissive, you know, so-called society.
It was an intriguing new role for a man whose youthful,
hip-swinging exhibitionism was once branded too sexy for British TV.
Is that all right?
# Come on, pretty baby Let's move it and groove it... #
Cliff Richard was our first home-grown rock and roll hero,
and a teen idol of mine.
I wanted to be you.
You know, fat chance of that!
Oh, thank God you didn't make it.
No, no!
An irrepressible mainstay of British culture, he's the only artist
to have had hit albums in eight consecutive decades,
selling 21 million UK singles along the way.
My band and I made the first real rock and roll record in Britain.
Move It just took off.
It just exploded.
# Let me tell you, baby It's called rock and roll... #
Almost a year later, 1959,
I had my first number one. Yeah. Living Doll.
# Got myself a crying, talking, sleeping... #
Suddenly, we've become...
..rock and roll stars!
# To do my best to please... #
And our lives changed overnight.
# She's a living doll... #
It was very important for kids like me, actually...!
That this could happen in Britain was incredibly exhilarating for us.
Suddenly we were followed by fans everywhere. Yeah, the screaming.
It's hard to express it, because it's...it's so unexpected.
But in a move none of us saw coming,
Sir Cliff rebelled in a very different way in 1964...
I felt that there was something missing.
..finding religion and becoming an evangelical Christian.
Before you actually, you know, went public with becoming
a committed Christian, I was wondering whether or not
you were anxious about it being against the anything-goes ethos
of rock and roll, or of the '60s, generally?
I was aware that I was doing something that was, erm...
..a little bit dodgy for a pop singer to do.
That this is not going to be easy.
Please join the queue on your right.
Unreserved, please join...
He kept his faith private.
Until, in 1966, he appeared at a rally held at Earls Court,
in London, headlined by the massively popular American
evangelist, Billy Graham.
It is much bigger than Haringey, isn't it?
19,000 fervent Christians revealed a religious Britain
often overlooked in the glam and glare of swinging Britain.
SIR CLIFF: When Billy Graham was coming through, I'd been a Christian
by that time for about two years.
And I got this letter saying he's heard of my conversion,
and would I be prepared to sing and say something?
And I said, OK, I'll come and do it.
# This is my story
# This is my song... #
You see, the human soul is so large that the world cannot fill it.
All the popularity, and all the money, and all the sex experience -
everything - cannot fill your soul.
Only God can fill it.
It was the most nerve-racking, because I knew now
there were going to be press there.
It was frightening to me to think, I'm going to say this thing.
I'm going to sing.
Cliff, we're delighted to have you.
Let's welcome him this evening as he comes.
And I chose the gospel song that I heard on Elvis's album.
# It is no secret
# What God can do
# What He's done for others
# He'll do for you... #
And I thought, "Oh, my God, my arms."
I couldn't bend my arms from clutching the podium.
That's how terrified I was to become publicly known.
Right.
And, of course, the press said, "Oh, Cliff's got God."
And, "He's got religion." You know, and all that went on.
But I got over that.
In fact, his conversion struck a chord with a great swathe
of the public increasingly and confidently vocal in their faith...
Do you think there's a religious revival taking place in Britain?
Definitely, yes.
What's the evidence?
Well, the evidence is going to be here tonight.
..and united by their growing concerns
around a permissive society.
This Manchester rally reaffirms the stand which Christians are taking
against the rising tide of pornography.
It all came to a dramatic head in 1971 with the Festival of Light,
a nationwide Christian protest against moral pollution.
Welling inside the British people is a desire to rebuild
the moral fibre of this country, which has been under attack.
There's no doubt about that.
The festival was driven by Lord Longford, founder of the Pornography
Commission, and other well-known Christian campaigners,
like Mary Whitehouse, and the broadcaster, Malcolm Muggeridge.
This is the light of our Festival of Light!
Praise the Lord!
It culminated in a mass rally in Trafalgar Square
and a concert in Hyde Park.
The headline act - who else?
# Throw down a line
# Help a poor boy who's hanging in a nowhere tree
# Have you got a place for me? #
How do you feel now about the Festival of Light,
looking back on it?
I am not bothered about whether people read the Bible,
or don't read the Bible, or have something that they found
called the light, or whatever it is. Right.
All I know is that the thing that drew me to Christianity
was the fact that all of it was based on love. Mm.
And with people that don't seem to be immoral. Right.
None of us are perfect.
I'm, happily, not a judge any more. Right.
When I first started, I was a bit judgmental.
You know, I thought... About what?
About the religion and my faith, and everything.
And then, suddenly I remembered, no, no, it's...
This is you.
I do not judge other people now.
ARCHIVE: Meanwhile, mainly on the perimeter,
a certain amount of opposition was being offered
by the forces of permissiveness,
under the banners of gay lib and women's lib, and the like.
Yet, at the time, there were those for whom some of the festival's
rhetoric clashed with their own hard-won freedoms
and belief in individual self-expression.
We had been out all day demonstrating
against the Festival of Light.
And one photograph captured the tensions between progressive
and conservative factions.
This is Hyde Park in September 1971.
Suddenly, we found ourselves arrested.
The police had just grabbed our arms from behind.
You can see in the centre my friend, Nicholas Bramble,
being violently pushed by the policeman.
And there's me you can see through the window of the police van.
We were a group of feminist men within GLF,
the Gay Liberation Front.
We wanted to be seen as homosexuals on the streets,
so we decided the best thing to do is to wear drag,
and to be everybody else's, you know, worst nightmare.
What the Festival of Light people were saying made us angry.
We weren't prepared to go back in time.
All these demands that they were making.
Ideas that we were all perverted people.
And then, of course, seeing us, it was like seeing
a vision from hell, as far as they were concerned.
We were angry, but not so much at the people,
but at the people who had organised, who were behind it.
These establishment figures manipulating people
in their speeches made us feel that we were
up against the moral majority.
So, was liberation the midwife of a great British fragmentation?
With clusters of the like-minded forming identity camps,
assuming anyone not with them was bound to be against them.
It was to head off these brushfires of mutual suspicion
that something astonishing happened at, of all places, the BBC.
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Community Programmes.
Programmes which are made by viewers who have applied for airtime.
In a remarkable moment in broadcasting history,
Sir David Attenborough, then the man in charge of BBC programmes,
signed off on Open Door TV -
an idea which was just that.
SIR DAVID: Voices, attitudes and opinions that,
for one reason or another, have been unheard, or do not derive from
the assumptions of the university-educated elite.
People who have something to say.
I'm sick of this whole pretence that we are one big, happy family.
It was a bold experiment in public access television, open to everyone,
that allowed marginalised groups to speak directly to wider audiences.
So, we ask you to resist the...
A precursor to our digital world of YouTube, social media
and user-generated content.
SIR DAVID: The BBC will provide technical facilities,
but play only a minimal part in editorial decisions.
Open Door TV, I think, wasn't just an extraordinary change
in what broadcasting was supposed to be.
It was really a kind of mini cultural revolution.
The slogan of Open Door - "your own say in your own way" -
you know, says it all.
It turned what broadcasting was, what it meant to everybody,
completely upside down.
Of the four of us in the studio this evening,
two are transsexuals awaiting sexual conversion surgery,
and the other two, including myself, are what are known as sex changes.
The pioneering father of the BBC, Lord Reith, was always clear
that to educate, inform and entertain meant abiding
by certain rules of top-down propriety.
Did you consciously impose your own view of the world
on the programmes and the practice of the BBC?
That's a leading question, isn't it?
Yes.
Lord Reith wants to pick people up, really, from the pub,
and the gutter, and, you know, football grounds,
from wherever, and improve them.
And Open Door was absolutely the opposite.
It was television from the bottom up.
It was saying, we can have all voices.
Don't care what you sound like, don't care what you look like.
Don't care where you're from.
We're going to give you the space.
That was such a daring experiment.
It was breathtaking.
We're a group of black teachers,
and we made this programme about the poor level of achievement
of black children in the English school system.
That's the problem that's worrying most of our black parents
out there at this moment.
The feminine woman - and by that I mean a proper woman -
has no wish to be manly.
And she finds happiness and fulfilment through her femininity
and natural female role,
which the equality-obsessed fail to comprehend.
I think that a lot of husbands wouldn't batter their wives
if they realised that their wives could get up and walk out.
A lot of men in our refuge have said to their wives,
"Oh, you can't leave. There's nowhere for you to go."
When it comes to fighting racism, the media are part of the problem.
This is a typical example of the type of gardens
you find in Asian areas.
Ever since I started a vegan diet, trying this and trying that,
my health has steadily improved.
You had vegans, anarchists, feminists, anti-feminists.
Anti-racists, anti-immigrants.
Erm, transsexuals.
Sci-fi UFO enthusiasts!
The Northern Unidentified Flying Object Network.
We start with a film of an unidentified flying object.
Chickens Lib learned the inside story of factory farming years ago.
Every single bit of organised, clubby, crusading
campaigning passion had a chance to be on air.
England is our country, and this is the flag of England,
the proud flag of Saint George.
We in Freedom Under Law, think our society is too tolerant
of protest groups which interfere with the freedom of other people.
A lot of the issues are, goodness knows, still with us today.
They were not trivial.
At some point, in nearly all the programmes, they make,
you know, really important statements that make us pause.
Jen, could you give the viewers some brief idea
of the way you find life, at the moment, as a pre-op transsexual?
It's like living on the edge of a volcano. Yes.
Because if anything happened to me,
if I got knocked down by a bus or a car, or anything,
or taken ill, and I was put into hospital,
and they found out I was still biologically male,
I would be put into a men's ward,
which would be too embarrassing for words.
Or if I wasn't put in the men's ward, I'd be put in
a sort of side ward, and made to feel an oddity.
Whereas, I feel I'm not an oddity.
Open Door ran for a decade, from 1973, accommodating
wildly different views, in the belief that doing so
wouldn't produce a destructive cacophony.
But this was one episode, on one screen, once a week.
Open Door was made in an age of innocence, really,
about how benign letting everybody have their own say would be,
how healthy it would be for democracy.
But you can't help, decades on - in the age of the internet now -
thinking about the following problem...
The door is open, but opened for who?
The dawn of social media has seen a rise
in antagonistic identity politics that make it increasingly difficult
to find the nuance in one another's thinking.
Right now, we're in a situation where it's not discussion,
it's screaming and shrieking
and a kind of polemical madness that has overtaken.
So I won't say Open Door wasn't responsible for that,
but in some sense it was a kind of harbinger of everybody
stamping their feet...
A malicious online troll... The dark side of social media and...
..of trolling and fury. In Britain we're on the verge of becoming
an anarchy of the equally self-righteous.
Knowledge and truth are under siege from people feeling entitled to say
whatever the hell they like.
You know, the sort of cultural conflict
which was a symptom of a healthy democracy
now threatens to actually tear it apart.
We're in a different age.
So when the internet hustles us into our particular identity camp,
there to pledge allegiance and plant our flag, it's harder
than ever to think of ourselves as sharing a common national home.
But if culture has any meaningful purpose at all,
surely it is to help bring us together, however fleetingly,
in spite of our differences.
When I was a child, at a critical moment in the ruinous aftermath
of World War II, the Festival of Britain did just that.
APPLAUSE
And in 2012, in a rare recent moment of national togetherness,
the Olympic opening ceremony in London
treated us and almost a billion people watching worldwide
to the unceremonious idea that being British wasn't just one thing
mechanically multiplied, but a gloriously creative chaos.
A hectic explosion...
Well, here comes Mary Poppins... ..of uncontainable energy.
The Windrush. That's the ship that brought the first West Indian
immigrants to Britain.
Artistic director Danny Boyle's Isles Of Wonder, created
with a crack team that included the children's book laureate
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, had something for almost everyone,
defining the story of us
through a moving sense of cultural connectedness.
Perhaps the most British thing about it is that people's
expectations of it were so low!
You know, "This is going to be dreadful and we're all going
"to be very embarrassed." Why do you think they said that?
Because it's just a national habit?
Well, partly that's a national habit. Yeah.
We are... Eeyore is a very British figure. Yeah!
And so the kind of ecstasy of its reception
is the surprise that it was good.
Danny's big watchword was visceral.
He wanted people having big reactions.
It was to be moving.
Emotional.
They are producing something very special, forging a moment
and an image that will live with us forever.
CHEERING
Most ceremonies for the Olympic Games always seem to be
modelled on kind of military perfection.
And this could not have been more different.
You know, so culturally driven.
Tell me what it was like to dream that up.
It was incredibly exciting at the beginning.
None of us knew what we were doing because none of us had worked
on an opening ceremony before.
And there was no point asking the Chinese because their answer
would be "send in the troops"!
DANNY BOYLE: Beijing was extraordinary.
Ours might be more modest, but it will be just as spectacular,
but maybe in different kinds of ways.
There was a washing line, which was our timeline,
and we would pin things on the timeline as they came up.
But I still remember Mark Tildesley, who's an incredible designer,
coming in and hanging up the storyboard
that he'd drawn for the Queen jumping out of a helicopter.
And everybody else going, "No, we can't do that."
BOND THEME PLAYS
My God, it worked!
THEY LAUGH
Innovation comes from people who have the self-assurance to try
stuff without knowing how it's going to turn out.
Looking back from this distance, there was not one particular
exclusive vision of what Britain should be.
I mean, every different kind of feeling British
somehow cohabited merrily on that night.
It seemed to deliver the distinctiveness of British culture.
Yeah. That was the key thing, that it would feel like a collage.
That there would be all these things that co-existed in the same space,
and things that perhaps contradict each other.
What sort of things contradicting each other?
Well, like, on a bigger picture, this is something
that celebrated struggle.
You know, the suffragettes.
The Jarrow marches are in there, but it also celebrates royalty,
the military, the NHS - that take of, like, just putting things
alongside each other and seeing
what happens between them, what the chemistry is.
Of all delectable islands,
Neverland is the snuggest.
You didn't have to root for one side against another.
That is Britain as well.
AUDIENCE CHEERS
Stand by for pandemonium.
Bombs three and five, balloon children.
Go!
Good luck, everybody. Have a ball.
Powered by a cast of 10,000 volunteer performers,
the ceremony generated a feel-good factor
that, for a short time at least, invigorated these islands.
I think we...we knocked the spots off Beijing last night.
I think it was a brilliant, brilliant opening ceremony.
Everyone's talking to each other, saying, "Where are you going?
"What have you got tickets for?" It's just fantastic.
I want to cry, actually, it's so good.
The thing that I found most moving about it
is that culture at its best is just a pretext to bring people together.
So I really love the fact that we did that for that moment.
What a night to be British.
Pathfinding...
But then there's this narrative that comes of, like,
"Wasn't everything great then?" Mm. And everything was not great then.
It wasn't paradise in 2012. That was the height of austerity,
and the security issues around the Olympics
were very controversial. Mm.
And there was a tweet from an MP - I think his name is Aidan Burley,
who said it was "leftie multicultural crap".
And that's a voice that's got louder. Mm.
And maybe part of the glow around the opening ceremony
is how much louder that voice has become
in a way that it wasn't at all. It was... Mm.
It was for everybody.
Ladies and gentlemen, the inventor of the World Wide Web,
Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
At the time, "This Is For Everyone" was an explicit theme,
in part a celebration of the British scientist who created
the World Wide Web and made it available to all.
And yet, over a decade on, even the ceremony has become a focus
of toxic online conspiracies.
So the NHS sequence with the children in beds...
..there's a whole group of people for whom that is a pre-visualisation
of the "plandemic".
Oh, the pandemic? So the pandemic was a planned thing...
Oh, my God. ..and these big beds are an image
of the Nightingale hospitals.
And I do, like, children's book events where people will stop me
and say, "Did you do that on purpose?"
HE LAUGHS
You're kidding, Frank?!
It's become a site of disinformation itself. Wow.
In this digital moment, we are constantly being siloed
and batteried and divided.
If there's something that can bring people together for an instant,
it holds out that hope of...of proper peace between people
and respect between people.
And I think that's kind of what the real core of culture is.
I'm not so naive as to think that culture can fix everything
that might be wrong with our country, but I do know this -
that whatever does or doesn't work,
one constant of our national life over centuries, and certainly now,
is the bottomless creativity of our culture.
Its capacity to surprise and shock
and delight us. And if this country is to flourish in the future,
it will be because we cherish and nourish that culture
so that when the next chapter in the story of us is written,
it will absolutely be a cause for celebration.