Last week, BBC4 ran a short series of programmes celebrating the commitment of the BBC to its regional TV and radio network.
One of the programmes shown was a 50-minute film directed by Bafta-winning documentarian Rex Bloomstein entitled All In A Day: The City.
Without commentary, the film simply chronicled a series of events that occurred in Sheffield on Wednesday 5 September 1973.
The documentary’s narrative was relatively unremarkable – a birth, a marriage, a retirement, a funeral – yet it was the most fascinating thing I’ve seen on the box in months.
It was a very real depiction of the mundanity of real life, far removed from the so-called reality shows of the 21st century – much more human and much, much more humane.
It also generated a bizarre feeling. The things recorded in this film happened in my lifetime; indeed, they happened down the road from me – I was born two years earlier in a town neighbouring Sheffield. Yet so much has life in Britain changed – at least in some ways – in the subsequent 35½ years, that they might as well have been recorded by pioneering film-makers in the Victorian era, so removed are they from life in 2009.
It’s difficult to explain – I watched the film on Saturday and have been trying ever since to figure out how to describe how it made me feel – because in some ways, paradoxically, very little has changed – babies are still born; couples still marry; people still die.
Yet, despite these events literally being within my lifetime, they seem utterly alien. As a boy I remember an ITV daytime programme featuring newsreels from that week 20-25 years ago; black and white footage of a life where streetlights were gas-powered and London lived under a perpetual pea-souper. Even if I could recognise an occasional odd face or landmark, the life shown in those newsreels had no resonance with what I recognised as life around me. So it was with All In A Day: a snapshot of a way of life that now seems archaic.
This film made me remember that, growing up in the late 70s, I went to school with kids whose families really did only have an outside toilet, like one of the families in the film. It wasn’t necessarily the norm – and my own upbringing was resolutely upper working/lower middle class, so this is not a Monty Python sketch about a working class boy made good – but nor did having a privy represent grinding destitution; I used outside loos plenty of times when I visited friend’s houses yet now indoor plumbing, double glazing and central heating is the norm.
In some ways, it’s made me revisit some of my own assumptions.
There is, shamefully, still poverty in Britain in 2009 – and, thanks to the recent efforts of a few thousand cunts in the City, there will be a lot more by the end of 2009 than there is today – but there is no doubt that just watching this film, which at times looks like the inspiration for a thousand Hovis ads, brings home the inarguable fact that Britain in 2009 is a wealthier society in which to live.
Were a miracle to occur and the Minister’s Wife find herself in an NHS maternity unit about to pop a sprog, she would not have a midwife pressing a listening horn to her stomach to monitor the baby’s heartbeat; she would be surrounded by and treated using more computer-driven, electronic technology than put men on the moon.
Those material gains do not, however, mean 2009 is necessarily a better place in which to live than 1973.
Sheffield’s steel foundries may have gone – industry replaced metaphorically and physically by the Meadowhall shopping mall – and their passing may not be mourned by those who spent their entire working life sweating in such a place, but lost with them has arguably been a sense of community and a national self-confidence brought about by actually making things.
“You can’t stop progress”, as Muriel’s Wedding had it: but with the ever-quickening pace of life and pace of change within that life, it doesn’t half make you wonder where we’ll be come 2044.
(In the Minister’s case, probably dead.)
The film is sadly not available on the BBC iPlayer, but can be viewed in two parts on Veoh and, if you didn’t catch it on BBC4 last Thursday, I heartily recommend it:
Part One -
Part Two -
Dear Minister,
This may be little more than a stream of consciousness before I lapse in to unconsciousness by hey, that’s one up on most of my offerings. (Mrs Baby has just looked over my shoulder and said, “What are you replying to? It’s always abusive what you write.” Cheeky cunt.)
But anyway, this is not abusive. I have to say I didn’t know anyone with an outside khazi, despite growing up in t’proper t’north (as opposed to the Minister’s “third way” between the North and the South). I encountered my first outside lavvy at a house Mr Fabulous was renting. Ironic given that he now owns two houses and had to give up a large portion of his docklands flat in a divorce. Anyway, it made me realise how lodged in suburbia I was. But a very particular suburbia. Post 60′s. In fact there is a curious architectural bifurcation where I come from. Buildings are either a few ancient farm buildings or post 60s and 70s housing. And the airport.
Which is where I meant to start. I was going to offer this point of view a few weeks earlier when the Minister mentioned the protest about the third runway, but I knew it would come across hostile, when in fact it isn’t meant that way. Perhaps I can say this. I come from a mining village. Men, and indeed women, work at the mine. You can spot them with distinctive dress. Various companies own an enormous number of houses. All my summer jobs were spent “down t’pit”. The only difference is that at my pit 19,000 people are directly employed, 23,000 in support industries and literally hundreds of thousands dependent on the pit that is Manchester International Airport. For fuck’s sake my sister at her first job marekting widgets to give as freebies to doctors had to go there once a week for I don’t know what reason. Curiously it was always after the Colombian flight…
What I realise now is that I had the benefit of It; the Minister, his family friends and community had the worst of It. (It = modernisation of industry). Whilst I learned to hate Thatcher, it was something I had to learn and when I did I can remember my Grandma was most surprised. I suspect the Minister *knew* to hate her, because she was fucking up the world immediately around him and his many beloved.
So when I read of the protest against the third runway I wondered how many have worried about the change in shift allowances; how many knew the value of an airside pass or recognise the true authority of a hi-viz jacket. They’ve also probably never sold an anti-terrorist copper cigarettes with a sub-machine gun slung casually round his neck either. Don’t cough, and ask for the money politely is my advice.
Coal pits each employed thousands (I’d argue not as many directly as airports, but will happily concede I’m wrong) and millions depended on them. But now they’re gone, the lights and heating still work, because the technology they powered has moved on. All those people (I’m deliberately not distinguishing between employees and their dependents) were royally screwed over in a manner not seen before or since, and without the benefit of vaseline, and I honestly believe that is the basis of many of the problems we have to day, and that I as a family lawyer have to pick up the pieces for on a daily basis (strip the dad of his job and you take his identity. Take his identity and offer nothing in its place you have quite literally nothing – particularly when the labour laws kept women barefoot and pregnant. You had girls and boys who are now mothers and fathers who have never seen a breadwinning leader in the house. Sorry, could someone stable my highest horse for me?)
There may be many arguments against a *third runway* – but against expansion of air travel in all of the South East? There may be many sentimental reasons against the runway there, but that argument does assume aerospace technology will also remain static. But fuck it, in the fuel crisis last summer the airlines managed to save 2% on their fuel bills just by flying slower (now there’s a mathematical equation with a finite practical application…)
Technology may remove the need to move people around the world for business purposes, but you still need to move the business. As the Minister says, “you can’t fight the feeling, and you can’t stop progress”. I just don’t accept that Heathrow would become the *most* polluting place in the country. More than a coal burning power station providing heat and light to thousands? And that is the curious thing. Whilst we all look back rheumy eyed at the coal miners, what is the difference between stripping the earth of a primary asset and burning it for fuel, and taking a refined primary asset and sending people over the world? They both did, and do, employ thousands.
What I’m trying to say to the Minister is that he’s right, that the world has changed, particularly industry. But people, and their jobs, still need not just defending, but promoting. We still have our mines, and our mining communities. We’re just burrowing in to the air, not the ground.
But I will admit defeat when it comes to mastering this fucking blogging technology. Editing comments after they’ve been posted Mr Minister?
The additional point I’d make is that the maths for the argument that Heathrow would become the most polluting site in the UK don’t add up because extended logically it would mean that somewhere there is an airport that causes no pollution.
The EU is also doing something right because the US are mighty fucked off over a European insistence that fuel efficiency is raised beyond most American airlines current capabilities.
And my line about the bifurcation of architecture would have been a piece of poetry. If only I coulda…
(a) I’ve amended you from ‘Author’ to ‘Editor’ so if you’re logged in, there should now be a purple ‘Edit This’ link next to your posts. Is it there?
(b) Good points. Genuinely. I will return to the subject of the third runway in due course.