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The '60s - a time of change. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:06 | |
# You will not be able to stay home, brother... # | 0:00:06 | 0:00:09 | |
But in the corner of Britain's living rooms, another sort of revolution was underway... | 0:00:09 | 0:00:14 | |
-Aggregation in the slime mould... -Let's look at some examples... | 0:00:14 | 0:00:18 | |
..one led by really quiet men and women in tank-tops, | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
armed with bits of cardboard and some massive equations. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:26 | |
Their clarion call... | 0:00:28 | 0:00:30 | |
THEY SING THE OPEN UNIVERSITY THEME | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
The Open University is 40 years old, and this is its story. | 0:00:42 | 0:00:47 | |
-It had never been done before. -It was all so crude. | 0:00:47 | 0:00:50 | |
Bizarrely, it featured Darth Vader in a sort of cut-down leotard with a whip. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
Let's summarise the conditions for acceptability. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:57 | |
From a bold experiment that no one seemed to want... | 0:00:57 | 0:01:01 | |
You can't get a degree by watching TV. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:03 | |
Couldn't bear the idea that the public should be able to be educated. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:07 | |
..To the largest university in Europe. | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
Who created it and why? | 0:01:10 | 0:01:12 | |
It's much more than a tale of kipper ties and post-pub TV. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:16 | |
It's an old joke. It's not funny any more. We don't do that. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
Here I am, sitting with a pen. In my life previously, I'd be sitting with a gun. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:23 | |
For God's sake. I deserved a degree. That's what I felt. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:28 | |
In four decades, the OU has taught over 2 million people. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:34 | |
-And I'm one of them. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:36 | |
Feeding in this information. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
Here's my input parameter, parameter S. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:41 | |
CLEARS THROAT | 0:01:41 | 0:01:42 | |
DOES VOCAL WARM-UP | 0:01:44 | 0:01:46 | |
'I don't think I'd be doing Othello if I hadn't done the Open University.' | 0:01:50 | 0:01:55 | |
No, Iago, I'll see before I doubt. When I doubt, prove. | 0:01:55 | 0:01:58 | |
And on the proof, there is no more but this. Away at once with love or jealousy! | 0:01:58 | 0:02:02 | |
'I'd never have come near doing' | 0:02:02 | 0:02:04 | |
a classical theatre piece like this | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
because I just wouldn't have been equipped. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
I had this weird chip on my shoulder about education for quite a long time. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:13 | |
Everybody I knew in the business had a degree, had been to Oxbridge or a red-brick university. And I thought, | 0:02:13 | 0:02:19 | |
"I feel like there's something missing in my life." | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
I left school when I was 16 with seven CSEs. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
I don't even know what they are. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:27 | |
I think they're akin to a chocolate fire-guard. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:30 | |
I didn't have any qualifications, really. | 0:02:30 | 0:02:33 | |
I went to work at British Federal Welders. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:35 | |
Six months in, I was asked to go on New Faces. | 0:02:35 | 0:02:39 | |
I got through it and my life changed. | 0:02:39 | 0:02:42 | |
In 1998, I got an honorary degree from Warwick University. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:48 | |
I'm sitting there with this bit of Warwick honorary thing and it's lovely. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:52 | |
But all these people are getting up who have clearly been working for three years who go, "Yes!" | 0:02:52 | 0:02:57 | |
And their family are in the audience going, "Yes!" | 0:02:57 | 0:03:00 | |
There's Asians and Jamaicans and Africans and women | 0:03:00 | 0:03:03 | |
and people in wheelchairs getting up and going, "Woo-hoo!" | 0:03:03 | 0:03:06 | |
I thought, "I want one of those degrees. I don't want this one." | 0:03:06 | 0:03:10 | |
It took me six years to get it. | 0:03:13 | 0:03:16 | |
Six years of not watching telly after EastEnders | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
or been able to read a book without filling it with sticky notes. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
Basically, the average OU student doesn't get out much. | 0:03:23 | 0:03:27 | |
I've promised my husband that I won't actually do any more OU for at least a year. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:32 | |
Back to having a life back. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:35 | |
That is the biggest thing. I've had no life for four years. | 0:03:35 | 0:03:38 | |
200,000 students, three weeks of graduations, | 0:03:39 | 0:03:44 | |
the OU educates on an industrial scale. | 0:03:44 | 0:03:48 | |
40 years ago, though, the idea of a university open to anyone, | 0:03:51 | 0:03:56 | |
even without qualifications, was revolutionary. | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
And it very nearly didn't happen at all. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:02 | |
Ah, the '60s. This is what it was all about, wasn't it? The breakdown of old social barriers, | 0:04:07 | 0:04:12 | |
hippies, festivals, student sit-ins. Although, | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
if you actually weren't a student, things were not quite so groovy. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
The vast majority of kids left school at 15. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
Girls like me didn't go to university. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
People from where I lived in north London | 0:04:26 | 0:04:28 | |
didn't go to university. What is the point? | 0:04:28 | 0:04:31 | |
In 1960, only a privileged 4% of the population went on to university. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:36 | |
And most of them were chaps. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:39 | |
And another thing we've got to do in the field of higher education is to put an end to snobbery. | 0:04:39 | 0:04:44 | |
-But that was about to change. -APPLAUSE | 0:04:44 | 0:04:47 | |
The Britain that is going to be forged | 0:04:47 | 0:04:49 | |
in the white heat of this revolution | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
will be no place for restrictive practices... | 0:04:52 | 0:04:54 | |
Harold made a speech at the '63 conference, much misunderstood. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
What he actually said was, "We shall all be burned up in the white heat." | 0:04:58 | 0:05:02 | |
i.e. there will be mass unemployment unless we plan the economy. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
SCHOOL BELL RINGS | 0:05:06 | 0:05:07 | |
Part of that planning would mean an opening up of higher education. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:12 | |
Polytechnics, new universities. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:15 | |
Britain needed graduates. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:17 | |
Unfortunately for some, this was going to be all too late. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:22 | |
A lot of very bright people were frustrated | 0:05:22 | 0:05:25 | |
that they hadn't had the chance to go to university. | 0:05:25 | 0:05:29 | |
But they were married, had mortgages, couldn't go to college | 0:05:29 | 0:05:32 | |
and, in any case, there weren't places for them. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:35 | |
I'd like to... | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
study what the intellectuals study. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:40 | |
There were evening classes, of course. | 0:05:40 | 0:05:42 | |
Groups like the Workers' Educational Association had helped bring higher education out of the universities. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:48 | |
But they had limitations. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:50 | |
They couldn't reach everyone. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:52 | |
There was something, however, that could. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:59 | |
By the early '60s, 14 million households had welcomed a new member of the family - television. | 0:05:59 | 0:06:05 | |
Thank you very much. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
Welcome to BBC Two's game of words and wit, Call My Bluff. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:13 | |
Television isn't only a way of watching plays and documentaries and sport and so on. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:18 | |
It is an information channel | 0:06:18 | 0:06:22 | |
and thinking of it for the purpose of education was an imaginative idea. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:28 | |
An idea with an unlikely origin. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:33 | |
The Russians were winning the space race, and some of their engineers | 0:06:33 | 0:06:36 | |
had received a university education without attending a university. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:41 | |
This got the attention of the Labour Party sage called Michael Young. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
It was Michael Young who came up with the idea. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:48 | |
It was his visit to the Soviet Union in the 1950s | 0:06:48 | 0:06:52 | |
where he saw what they were doing with radio broadcasting | 0:06:52 | 0:06:56 | |
to reach very remote communities who needed "continuing professional development", as we now call it. | 0:06:56 | 0:07:02 | |
That's where Michael Young got the idea and fed it to Harold Wilson. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:07 | |
Harold had been doing a bit of travelling as well. | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
In the land of the TV dinner, he had come across an experimental TV college. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:17 | |
And it was on a family holiday that his son saw these ideas come together. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
He had been very excited by certain educational experiments | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
that were taking place through the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Chicago. | 0:07:25 | 0:07:30 | |
I remember being in the Isles of Scilly - | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
I was still a student in those days - | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
we were at the Isles of Scilly on Easter Day | 0:07:36 | 0:07:39 | |
and between church and lunch, he suddenly decided | 0:07:39 | 0:07:42 | |
to map out the whole idea of this university of the air. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:45 | |
It's designed to provide an opportunity for those who, for one reason or another, | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
have not been able to take advantages of higher education now to do so. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:55 | |
It was reported on by only one newspaper - it was largely ignored. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
And it certainly wasn't part of the Labour Party manifesto for the election in 1964. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:04 | |
Nobody seemed terribly interested in Wilson's big idea. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
Once in power, he started planning his new university. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:14 | |
And indifference turn to hostility. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:16 | |
Certainly, the educational establishment was very much against it, as was the tabloid press. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:22 | |
"You can't get a degree just by watching television." | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
The Civil Service was very hostile. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:27 | |
The Civil Service wanted at one stage to turn it into the sixth form of the air. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:32 | |
They couldn't bear the idea that the public should be able to be educated. | 0:08:32 | 0:08:36 | |
Even among his on party, Wilson wasn't feeling much love. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:40 | |
I think there was a bit of a view | 0:08:40 | 0:08:42 | |
on the part of some people | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
that this was all going to be for middle-class women. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:48 | |
These were the people who had missed out in the 1950s. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:53 | |
Wilson's University of the air had become a Cinderella of a project in need of a fairy godmother. | 0:08:53 | 0:09:00 | |
And it got one - Jennie Lee. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:02 | |
The degree of freedom that it will give to creative intelligence... | 0:09:03 | 0:09:10 | |
She was the widow of Nye Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:15 | |
Jennie Lee was | 0:09:15 | 0:09:16 | |
a miner's daughter who came out of the Independent Labour Party - | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
the heart and soul in the campaigning tradition of Labour. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:23 | |
Able-bodied men and women... | 0:09:23 | 0:09:25 | |
She was an MP at the age of 24, before she was old enough to vote in 1928. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:30 | |
During the '30s, she married Nye Bevan | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
and it was only on his death, and Harold Wilson, possibly as a wreath for Nye, | 0:09:34 | 0:09:39 | |
that he asked her to become First Minister for the Arts. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
And then secondly, to take over his pet project, which was a university of the air. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:47 | |
The Prime Minister said, "For God's sake, will you take on this university project?" | 0:09:47 | 0:09:52 | |
And I said, "Harold, I'll take it on on the same conditions as the arts, | 0:09:52 | 0:09:57 | |
"that you'll back me when I need money." | 0:09:57 | 0:09:59 | |
He never let me down. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
I think I only met Jennie Lee once, | 0:10:01 | 0:10:03 | |
and then really I was there just to be indoctrinated, really. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:08 | |
I mean, she just sprayed herself over me, as it were. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
She was a wonderful woman. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
She was an icon. She was there for the spirit, for the ethos. | 0:10:13 | 0:10:17 | |
My father's view was that television and other distance learning techniques | 0:10:17 | 0:10:22 | |
might be used for diplomas or for individual courses, | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
and Jennie Lee's view was, from the very beginning, | 0:10:25 | 0:10:29 | |
that it should be a full-scale university | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
and a university where the standard had to be as good as any other university, | 0:10:32 | 0:10:36 | |
otherwise it wouldn't be taken seriously. | 0:10:36 | 0:10:38 | |
Lift-off. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:40 | |
We have lift-off on Apollo 11. | 0:10:40 | 0:10:42 | |
And they're in orbit. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:46 | |
Two and a half. | 0:10:46 | 0:10:48 | |
Four forward. Houston... the Eagle has landed. | 0:10:50 | 0:10:54 | |
1969, the year of the first Moon landing, | 0:10:55 | 0:10:59 | |
and the University of the Air took off, | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
although it was now, by royal charter, the Open University. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:06 | |
And its troubles were far from over. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
As political battles were being played out on the streets of Britain, | 0:11:14 | 0:11:19 | |
the OU faced one of its own. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
With a general election in 1970, | 0:11:22 | 0:11:24 | |
it looked likely from the polls that a Conservative government would come in, | 0:11:24 | 0:11:28 | |
and Iain Macleod, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, | 0:11:28 | 0:11:31 | |
had made it very clear he was going to scrap it. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:34 | |
The old system made sense in the circumstances of the 1940s. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:38 | |
The OU couldn't be Labour's pet project any more. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:43 | |
It was down to the academics to prove its worth. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:46 | |
And Walter Perry, Vice-Chancellor-elect of the Open University, | 0:11:46 | 0:11:51 | |
one of his jobs was to persuade Jennie to stand back | 0:11:51 | 0:11:54 | |
and allow him to depoliticise the Open University from being simply a Labour instrument. | 0:11:54 | 0:12:00 | |
Walter Perry was a heavyweight academic and another no-nonsense Scot. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
Anyone who came in an atmosphere of scepticism | 0:12:04 | 0:12:08 | |
was putting his or her career on the chopping block, as it were. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:13 | |
He exuded toughness. He looked physically tough, | 0:12:13 | 0:12:17 | |
and when you were there, spoke with a Scots accent - | 0:12:17 | 0:12:21 | |
"I want this and I want that." And that was fine. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
He was fighting his corner, and he did it very effectively. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:28 | |
And round one was a meeting with a future Education Secretary, | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
the politician who stopped free milk in schools - Margaret Thatcher. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:38 | |
And he argued fiercely with Margaret Thatcher | 0:12:39 | 0:12:41 | |
and he thought, at the end of it, he'd blown it. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
He was pulling his hair out. He wouldn't survive an incoming Tory government. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:48 | |
And they said, "No, it was just what she wanted. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:50 | |
"You gave her the arguments, facts, statistics, you were robust. | 0:12:50 | 0:12:53 | |
"She'll run with it." As indeed she did. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:56 | |
Perry had proved they were serious-minded. | 0:12:56 | 0:13:00 | |
The Queen has asked me to form the next government. | 0:13:00 | 0:13:04 | |
All they needed now were students. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:09 | |
They had expected 25,000. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
40,000 applied. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
It was the biggest intake of any British university. They built their own post office. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:21 | |
Of course, the last thing you'd want when you'd 30 tonnes of teaching material to mail out | 0:13:21 | 0:13:26 | |
is a postal strike. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:28 | |
Guess what. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:29 | |
Are you prepared to stay out until we have a settlement? | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
CROWD: Yes! # We ain't coming back... # | 0:13:32 | 0:13:36 | |
There was a postal strike of seven weeks. That meant it all had to be privately delivered through vans | 0:13:36 | 0:13:42 | |
and so on. Walter Perry, the Vice-Chancellor, was one moment | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
negotiating funding, the next rolling his sleeves up | 0:13:45 | 0:13:49 | |
and helping pack boxes of material to be sent out to local study centres | 0:13:49 | 0:13:53 | |
to beat the post office strike. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:54 | |
So what kind of people had signed up? | 0:13:54 | 0:13:56 | |
A great comedian, | 0:13:56 | 0:13:59 | |
Johnny Kennedy. Johnny Kennedy. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:01 | |
I know the OU would love to think | 0:14:03 | 0:14:05 | |
that they're going to attract the working man in his thousands, | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
and I don't think they are. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:10 | |
I think they must reconcile themselves to the fact | 0:14:10 | 0:14:12 | |
that this will never happen. | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
The first time I came up here was because of football... | 0:14:14 | 0:14:18 | |
Johnny Kennedy joined early on. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:20 | |
Like me, he did stand-up and had to fit his studies in with gigging, as I did. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:25 | |
But back in the '70s, hardly anyone knew what the OU was. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:29 | |
I'm reading my book and they're saying, "What's that you're reading?" | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
They think it's the Playboy annual usually. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
When they find out it's something to do with university, they sort of shy away. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:41 | |
"What will you do when Jesus comes to Liverpool?" | 0:14:41 | 0:14:45 | |
And somebody wrote underneath, "Move Kevin Keegan to inside-left." | 0:14:45 | 0:14:49 | |
'Today, I wonder how he feels about it all.' | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
I was just an ordinary working-class kid in Liverpool. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:56 | |
I took the 11-plus exam and passed it and went to a grammar school, | 0:14:56 | 0:15:00 | |
which I loved, and that's where I was first introduced to Shakespeare. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
But when it came time to go into the sixth form, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:07 | |
my mum and dad didn't see any point in going into a sixth form. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:12 | |
They needed me to earn some money. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:13 | |
I think our generation and the generation before of parents wouldn't think about... | 0:15:13 | 0:15:18 | |
of working-class parents, wouldn't think about pushing their kids that way. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:22 | |
I really did feel cheated by that. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:24 | |
-I'd gone down roads that I would not have gone down if I'd gone to a conventional university. -Uh-huh. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
And the OU was going to put that right. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
I was going to get the degree that I deserved. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:35 | |
Stand by, please. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:36 | |
Elbow patches freshly ironed, and hair on standby, | 0:15:36 | 0:15:39 | |
in January 1971, | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
the Open University was finally open. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
And cue. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
Good morning, and a very happy New Year to all of you. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
And everybody was going to get a look-in on this university. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:03 | |
Now, do you think that that is what's going to happen on the Moon? | 0:16:03 | 0:16:07 | |
I think that's pretty clear what each of these vectors represents. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
Then it's a simple matter for you to find a restriction on this line h. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:18 | |
Then taking a little grease, put it on an eyelash...if I can find one, | 0:16:26 | 0:16:31 | |
and get the eyelash into the grease at the end. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:34 | |
Right, that's how you make the micro-needle. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:36 | |
I'd like to consider the features that you might say make up the new and exciting Mannheim sound. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:42 | |
But strangely, not a kipper tie in sight. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
I think you'll agree that's a pretty complicated motion. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:55 | |
In the days when there were only three TV channels, and they weren't on all day, | 0:16:55 | 0:17:01 | |
the OU had found a home on the youngest and grooviest. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
In Conversations For Tomorrow, | 0:17:08 | 0:17:10 | |
JB Priestley entertains two distinguished guests to dinner. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
Part of the mission of BBC2 was to put further education on television - | 0:17:14 | 0:17:19 | |
evening classes for the nation. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:21 | |
Let the vegetables just sweat for about ten minutes. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
The OU programmes had been more or less imposed on the fledgling BBC2, | 0:17:25 | 0:17:30 | |
and the new controller HAD to find a place for them. | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
I wanted my further education programmes to be very attractive. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:37 | |
I didn't want to start off with | 0:17:37 | 0:17:39 | |
some really boring programme about quadratic equations. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:43 | |
These are the only two possibilities. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
So I had the invidious position of having to say, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:50 | |
"I want these hours to do general programmes | 0:17:50 | 0:17:53 | |
"and I will stick Open University programmes | 0:17:53 | 0:17:57 | |
"somewhere where most BBC2 viewers won't mind." | 0:17:57 | 0:18:02 | |
These were programmes for where the sun don't shine. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:05 | |
I expect you regard this as all rather trivial. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
Kepler's study of planetary motion... | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
And when showbiz met academia, it wasn't always a happy marriage. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:14 | |
Colin Robinson directed some of the first programmes. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:19 | |
We were given the studios which News had just vacated at Alexandra Palace. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:24 | |
It was stripped of gear, so our engineers had to go out on a lorry, | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
literally, and scrounge bits of kit from other bits of the Beeb | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
to put together a black and white studio. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
The OU might have been paying for the programmes, but the BBC were calling the shots. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:38 | |
In social sciences, | 0:18:38 | 0:18:39 | |
we're using television essentially for three purposes. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
I thought it was very difficult at times, | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
because the BBC was an established, | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
well-recognised, well-thought-of institution, and the OU was not. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:53 | |
We said, "We're making the programmes," and I did have conflicts with academics over that. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:58 | |
Right down to the detail of them saying, | 0:18:58 | 0:19:00 | |
"I will give my lecture," in effect, and we would say, "Well, no." | 0:19:00 | 0:19:04 | |
The student, he's never heard the story before and he's on his own. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:08 | |
He's sitting there with the telly. The telly's only eight feet away. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
There's you and there's him. There's nobody else. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:13 | |
One example of what I call "BBC bullying" in a way. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
I was sitting up here and I had a phone call from the producer. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:21 | |
Said, "Mike we've got a crisis. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
Jim Barber is refusing to take off his shirt, which is brown. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:28 | |
"We cannot have a programme with a brown shirt." | 0:19:28 | 0:19:31 | |
And I said, "Surely you can get somebody to..." | 0:19:31 | 0:19:34 | |
He said, "You've got to be here, in Alexandra Palace. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
"Otherwise I'll wipe the programme. | 0:19:37 | 0:19:40 | |
"That's 40,000 quid gone." | 0:19:40 | 0:19:42 | |
They were academics. They were teachers. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
They were not expecting to be used as puppets in a TV studio. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
Drove all the way down to Alexandra Palace. When I got there, | 0:19:48 | 0:19:52 | |
of course he'd changed his shirt for a blue shirt with one of the technicians. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:57 | |
Don't expect a conventional documentary television programme. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
The other thing that is remarkable now is that it was all so crude. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:06 | |
That vector represents... | 0:20:06 | 0:20:08 | |
A bit tricky, actually. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:10 | |
Very primitive models, graphics where you had to pull bits of cardboard and they would fall over. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:15 | |
It was hilarious, in many senses. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:17 | |
They were not there to seduce people into knowledge. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:22 | |
"I will tell you what a quadratic equation is and this is what it is." | 0:20:22 | 0:20:26 | |
Except that this time I want to solve it using orthogonality. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
You rehearsed for two days. | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
And then, in the last hour, you then shot the whole thing. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:38 | |
He was showing this damned thing off to the left. It looked awful. | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
The programmes were 25 minutes and we had an hour to get things right. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
Take three. Go on, let's do it again. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:47 | |
It's much easier to do it now. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:49 | |
'Very fraught, very stressful in that hour.' | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
The senior producer was, I thought, particularly obnoxious in regard to this. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:57 | |
So you had a sense of family, we had a sense of family - yours was a dysfunctional one. | 0:20:57 | 0:21:01 | |
Last time we ended in a state of confusion, to say the least. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:05 | |
The television programmes are simply the cherry on the cake. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:12 | |
I mean, the hard grafting... is done quite differently. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:16 | |
It's got nothing to do with television. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
The brains of the OU operation were 45 miles up the motorway | 0:21:20 | 0:21:24 | |
in a place that almost no-one had heard of until the '70s. | 0:21:24 | 0:21:27 | |
Wouldn't it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes? | 0:21:27 | 0:21:31 | |
The grid system is based on roads spaced one kilometre apart. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:45 | |
It will provide a uniformly good accessibility throughout the whole area. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:51 | |
I didn't really have much connection with Milton Keynes when I started to study with the Open University | 0:21:51 | 0:21:56 | |
simply because they don't have students at Walton Hall, and you only really post essays here. | 0:21:56 | 0:22:01 | |
I used to go and watch Alexei Sayle back in the day when he used to take the piss out of Milton Keynes, | 0:22:01 | 0:22:07 | |
and he would slightly tease the town planners and say they had to... | 0:22:07 | 0:22:11 | |
they named things like, you know, the Gary Glitter Estate and the Dave Clark Five Roundabout. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:17 | |
Bay City Rollers Boulevard. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:21 | |
A new town for a new way of thinking. | 0:22:27 | 0:22:29 | |
If only it were that noble. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:31 | |
Basically, they thought the Open University should start in a stately home of Britain. | 0:22:31 | 0:22:36 | |
Then an ideology arose around it that this was all about sending signals about a new university in a new town. | 0:22:36 | 0:22:42 | |
It wasn't, actually. It was just available, it fitted, and therefore they went for it. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:46 | |
In those days, the whole campus was a sort of building site, | 0:22:46 | 0:22:51 | |
and there was so much mud around that members of staff were issued | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
with slippers they had to wear around the buildings so as not to spread mud around the place. | 0:22:55 | 0:23:00 | |
It was very difficult to find, | 0:23:00 | 0:23:03 | |
and one day I wasn't being very bright | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
and I seemed to be going round and round the same roundabouts | 0:23:06 | 0:23:10 | |
and there was a little old lady standing by one of them and she thought | 0:23:10 | 0:23:16 | |
I was stopping to give her a lift cos it wasn't a nice day. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:19 | |
But I said, "Can you tell me where the Open University is?" | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
She said, "I don't bleeding well care!" | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
Here was a university that most people would have struggled to recognise. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:36 | |
For a start, there were no teenagers trying to find where the bar was or sign up for Drama Soc. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:43 | |
Just a lot of academics writing lectures for students | 0:23:43 | 0:23:46 | |
they would probably never meet. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:49 | |
Frank, could you summarise what we talked about at that meeting? | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
The most definite thing that came out was a suggestion... | 0:23:52 | 0:23:55 | |
There we were. We had a course team. We had to make a course. Nobody knew how you did this. | 0:23:55 | 0:24:00 | |
Academics were having to bring out into the open | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
their lectures and other materials and they got published. | 0:24:03 | 0:24:07 | |
Actually, the university did quite a lot to lift the standard of teaching throughout the university system. | 0:24:07 | 0:24:12 | |
Units two to three, Hardy And His Influence. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:14 | |
Not too happy about that title. | 0:24:14 | 0:24:16 | |
'And we had to improvise' | 0:24:16 | 0:24:18 | |
every aspect of the whole system, | 0:24:18 | 0:24:20 | |
what sort of course materials are appropriate | 0:24:20 | 0:24:23 | |
for the part-time, distant learner. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:26 | |
Teaching science by post was particularly tricky. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:32 | |
Rock samples for the Earth Sciences course can't be discreetly chipped off with a hammer. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:37 | |
The founding fathers | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
had to put their thinking caps on and really get round the problems | 0:24:39 | 0:24:43 | |
of students who weren't used to handling scientific equipment. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:47 | |
And this is a McArthur microscope. It's very cleverly designed | 0:24:47 | 0:24:51 | |
and you look down there, | 0:24:51 | 0:24:53 | |
and lo and behold, it opens up another world. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:57 | |
This was part of a big home experiment kit. | 0:24:57 | 0:24:59 | |
The answer was the mother of all chemistry sets - | 0:25:04 | 0:25:09 | |
a lab in a box. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:11 | |
Inside those kits were glassware, | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
chemicals, brains, sheep's brains, so that students could look at the cellular patterns. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:22 | |
We'd have a delivery of 7,000 sheep's brains to the campus every year. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:27 | |
I'm told these apocryphal stories about people being brought in to cut these sheep's brains up. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:33 | |
We became very unpopular with the Post Office. | 0:25:33 | 0:25:35 | |
I'm honestly not quite sure what one is going to do with it at this stage. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:40 | |
In the early days, we sent students sound recorders through the post, | 0:25:40 | 0:25:44 | |
because people didn't have cassette recorders. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
Now we have them in the bathroom, the car... Not then. We even sent them slide rules. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:51 | |
Do you know what a slide rule is? | 0:25:51 | 0:25:54 | |
Do you want to see an OU slide rule? | 0:25:54 | 0:25:56 | |
There's an OU slide rule. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:58 | |
No-one had calculators, no-one had computers. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
We had to send this stuff through the post. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:03 | |
Fashions came... | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
and went, thankfully. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:15 | |
.625. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:19 | |
But the OU looked as if it was still stuck in the past. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:23 | |
And the 654... | 0:26:23 | 0:26:24 | |
We made programmes knowing that they would last at least two, three or four years. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:29 | |
What we didn't realise in the early days was that budgets would not be available to remake courses | 0:26:29 | 0:26:35 | |
and least of all to remake what was probably the most expensive part of the course - television. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:40 | |
So, many programmes, made in the days of black and white, | 0:26:40 | 0:26:43 | |
went out for many, many years afterwards and became the butt of comedians' jokes. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:47 | |
Giving us a resultant modular quantity of 0.567359. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:53 | |
Now, this should begin to give us some clues... | 0:26:53 | 0:26:55 | |
Sorry, Brian, I'm sorry... | 0:26:55 | 0:26:59 | |
What's happening? | 0:26:59 | 0:27:00 | |
-LAUGHING -You said 0.567359. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:05 | |
-Oh, no, I didn't, did I? -Yes. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:07 | |
It should be 0.567395. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
I don't believe it! Oh, no! | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
BOTH LAUGH | 0:27:14 | 0:27:17 | |
Oh! BLEEP! | 0:27:17 | 0:27:19 | |
Oh, Christ! BLEEP! | 0:27:19 | 0:27:22 | |
BLEEP! BLEEP! | 0:27:22 | 0:27:24 | |
You'd come in from some working men's club and you'd be tired, you'd had a long drive | 0:27:24 | 0:27:29 | |
and it was on in the middle of the... I didn't like that at all. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:33 | |
There was a man with a very big knot in his tie | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
and Johnny Kennedy hair and sideburns talking about quantum physics. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:39 | |
What will we use for alpha particles? | 0:27:39 | 0:27:41 | |
All right, stop it. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:43 | |
I watched it because it was comical, but no, it wasn't for me, basically. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:49 | |
A visual peg on which to hang the detailed mathematical arguments... | 0:27:49 | 0:27:53 | |
We did have the famous Arthur Marwick, who was the historian, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
and he was known for his cravats. | 0:27:57 | 0:27:59 | |
What is its historical significance? | 0:27:59 | 0:28:01 | |
You'd watch just to see how times he changed his cravat. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:04 | |
But they do not need any obscure theory. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:07 | |
We dressed as we would have dressed if we'd been at a normal university. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:12 | |
To illustrate in visual terms the theoretical work which is discussed in the correspondence material. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:19 | |
Most people had not been to a university, so they didn't know how lecturers looked. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:24 | |
But just let me quickly remind you how it goes. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
'I hadn't done anything like that before.' | 0:28:27 | 0:28:29 | |
I think my programmes were competent. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
Some of my colleagues were real naturals and tended | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
eventually to do far more than their fair share because they did it so well. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:39 | |
We're all accustomed to getting and spending money, | 0:28:39 | 0:28:41 | |
but why should somebody give something useful | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
in exchange for pieces of paper and scraps of metal? | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
Here's one way in which money changes hands. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:49 | |
Could I have a whisky and ginger, please? | 0:28:49 | 0:28:51 | |
I was teaching in Northern Ireland in 1970 in a college of further education, in east Belfast, | 0:28:54 | 0:29:00 | |
and I saw an advert for part-time tutors | 0:29:00 | 0:29:02 | |
for the Open University, and it had just begun. | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
Whether you despise it or desire it just for itself or for what it can buy... | 0:29:05 | 0:29:10 | |
'I was a complete amateur.' | 0:29:10 | 0:29:12 | |
I had no idea how television programmes were made, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
one end of a television camera from another. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:18 | |
I was quite shy. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:20 | |
It was quite an uphill struggle for me to do all that. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:23 | |
Nowadays, most business is done by handing over cheques rather than by passing over notes and coins. | 0:29:23 | 0:29:30 | |
The OU has always been a boffin's paradise | 0:29:32 | 0:29:35 | |
and, as the technology got more exciting, so did the sets, | 0:29:35 | 0:29:40 | |
while the presenters... | 0:29:40 | 0:29:42 | |
Even with simple queries, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:46 | |
the SQL processor needs to do quite a lot of work. | 0:29:46 | 0:29:49 | |
And then came a piece of TV technology that meant you wouldn't have to try and stay awake. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:58 | |
This old joke about Open University programmes going out at 2am, 3am, | 0:30:00 | 0:30:05 | |
well, when VCRs came in - video cassette recorders - that was no longer necessary. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:11 | |
You could send stuff to students, they could use it, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
you could even give them instructions and say, | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
"I want you to play from here to here, then I want you to stop, read this, do this bit," and so on. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:24 | |
It was interactive before interactivity became a buzzword. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
When I first got a video, | 0:30:28 | 0:30:30 | |
I couldn't actually record them. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:32 | |
For some reason, I couldn't manage to do that. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:35 | |
Remembering to set, whether it was | 0:30:35 | 0:30:37 | |
12am or 12pm and all that sort of thing, getting it wrong! | 0:30:37 | 0:30:40 | |
It was this issue about how many people had VCRs, | 0:30:40 | 0:30:44 | |
at what point could you say, "Yes, now we can send this out, | 0:30:44 | 0:30:48 | |
"because we can expect students to have this kind of technology"? | 0:30:48 | 0:30:52 | |
The OU wasn't the only ongoing experiment in education. | 0:30:54 | 0:30:59 | |
The polytechnics were up and running. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:03 | |
Universities like Keele and Sussex were creating new ways of teaching. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:08 | |
More teenagers than ever were starting degree courses. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:11 | |
And just down the road, another controversial project opened up shop. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:17 | |
...is among the detachment of dons who've dropped this latest bombshell | 0:31:17 | 0:31:22 | |
into the shock-ridden world of higher education. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:24 | |
The University of Buckingham was founded by a group of scholars, | 0:31:24 | 0:31:27 | |
mainly Oxford scholars, who believed | 0:31:27 | 0:31:29 | |
the time had come for Britain to have | 0:31:29 | 0:31:32 | |
a university independent of state funding. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:35 | |
-Elitist? -Elitist, I regard as a term of praise. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:38 | |
The Open University is quite socialistic in its inspiration. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:42 | |
We're the exact opposite, we're quite free market in our inspiration, | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
and the parallel is that we are the two universities, Buckingham and the Open University, | 0:31:46 | 0:31:51 | |
that both come top every year of the National Students Survey. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:55 | |
So what's the one thing we have in common? | 0:31:55 | 0:31:57 | |
Half of the first 75 students have come from abroad to take part in this experiment in higher education. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:03 | |
They'll pay around £5,000 in fees and expenses to get a Buckingham-style education. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:09 | |
We're the only two universities who, for the last 30, 40 years in Britain, | 0:32:09 | 0:32:13 | |
have systematically charged realistic fees. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:16 | |
At a time when 18-year-olds could go to state-run universities for free, | 0:32:17 | 0:32:21 | |
the OU, open to all, was making its students pay. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:26 | |
Up to £500 for a degree! | 0:32:26 | 0:32:28 | |
Not to be sniffed at when the average income in the early '70s was less than £3,000 per year. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:34 | |
I feel that a lot of working-class people will steer away from the OU because of the cost of the degree. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:43 | |
To be fair to the OU, I don't think it was ever part of the original business plan. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:47 | |
They didn't fulfil, and part-time students still don't fulfil, | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
the criteria by which you get full grants. They were forced to charge fees. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:54 | |
They didn't pay full-cost fees, | 0:32:54 | 0:32:56 | |
but they still had to make a substantial contribution. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
I always argued, throughout my time rather later, that it was wrong. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:05 | |
Of course, that has all changed subsequently. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:09 | |
OK, you can switch it on now. | 0:33:09 | 0:33:10 | |
Finding the money isn't the only challenge OU students have faced. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
Turn it off, love, it's flooding! All right... | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
They've always been trusted, more or less, to get on with it. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:21 | |
It used to get us into trouble, occasionally. I'd get a phone call from the Devon and Cornwall police | 0:33:21 | 0:33:26 | |
to say they'd arrested one of our students on suspicion of making amphetamines. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
They'd raided his home and found his experiment kit, but what made it worse | 0:33:30 | 0:33:34 | |
was that we'd written a course unit that went out with the course called Making Drugs. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:39 | |
They put two and two together and made six. | 0:33:39 | 0:33:41 | |
I had to go and appear in court to say that there's no way | 0:33:41 | 0:33:45 | |
that using the chemicals in that box could make amphetamines. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:49 | |
If you could, then I... I wouldn't be working here, would I? | 0:33:49 | 0:33:52 | |
You may get some idea of the frustration | 0:33:54 | 0:33:57 | |
and of the excitement of scientific research. | 0:33:57 | 0:34:00 | |
Just when I thought I could do it, along came the second unit, | 0:34:00 | 0:34:04 | |
and that was on relativity. That really floored me. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:07 | |
Mike Pence came on the television to tell us we could do it. | 0:34:07 | 0:34:11 | |
I'm going to try and shoot a pellet into the tube on top of the glider, | 0:34:11 | 0:34:15 | |
which is there to catch the pellet so it doesn't go flying around the studio, | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
slaughtering everybody and sundry. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:21 | |
And I thought, he's mad! | 0:34:21 | 0:34:23 | |
He's nice, but he's quite mad! | 0:34:23 | 0:34:25 | |
Then there's the question of finding the time to study. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
What with work, family, looking after your 12 children... | 0:34:29 | 0:34:34 | |
I wouldn't have done it if they'd seemed to be reluctant. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:38 | |
We helped you while you were doing it. | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
Oh, yes, they helped a lot. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:41 | |
'One of the things students find quite hard' | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
isn't that they're managing themselves, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:46 | |
but that they're either managing children, partners or friends. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:49 | |
I always say to my students, | 0:34:49 | 0:34:51 | |
"Real life has a habit of getting in the way of Open University study." | 0:34:51 | 0:34:55 | |
I try not to let my studies interfere with family live too much, | 0:34:55 | 0:35:00 | |
so I do most of me work while I'm at work. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
While I'm driving me bus, I go through my texts | 0:35:04 | 0:35:07 | |
and all my OU work is done in this way, actually on the bus. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:12 | |
An individual living in complete isolation, like Robinson Crusoe, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:17 | |
must do everything for himself. | 0:35:17 | 0:35:20 | |
You're on your own a lot of the time. | 0:35:20 | 0:35:22 | |
I get up sometimes before 5am and study then and then go to work. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:26 | |
I work as a dental nurse, | 0:35:26 | 0:35:28 | |
and I've had my notes in my pocket, basically. | 0:35:28 | 0:35:31 | |
Sometimes I've had a situation where I had to take a laptop into the hospital. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:36 | |
I didn't want to defer my exam, my project. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
So I just had to do it at the hospital. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
I study better alone anyway. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:44 | |
You're not joining the Open University to party. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
You're joining it to get that education | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
and the qualifications, or in my case, just to keep the cogs well oiled. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:54 | |
20 hours of study a week can seriously damage your social life. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:58 | |
You can't even watch the TV like anybody else. | 0:35:58 | 0:36:01 | |
How about you there? | 0:36:01 | 0:36:03 | |
Well, can you repeat the question again? | 0:36:03 | 0:36:06 | |
You need SOME human contact. | 0:36:06 | 0:36:09 | |
That's where the OU tutors come in. | 0:36:09 | 0:36:11 | |
The first OU tutor I came into contact with was a Yorkshireman, | 0:36:11 | 0:36:15 | |
and I remember he said, "If you think I'm going to waste my time | 0:36:15 | 0:36:21 | |
"marking a load of crap on these assignments, you've got another thing coming!" | 0:36:21 | 0:36:26 | |
A lot of students come and they say at the beginning, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
"I've come because I was in a reading group, I love reading and I read about three books per week." | 0:36:29 | 0:36:34 | |
And when it comes to it, they realise | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
that reading and being able to write then an academic essay on it | 0:36:37 | 0:36:43 | |
is very different from just the pleasure. | 0:36:43 | 0:36:45 | |
The extraordinary thing about the students was that, compared to us when we were at university, | 0:36:45 | 0:36:51 | |
Open University students were given reading lists and they read absolutely everything on the list. | 0:36:51 | 0:36:57 | |
They would come prepared with questions. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
I felt on my mettle all the time. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
I was studying to keep up with my students. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
They were very dedicated. | 0:37:06 | 0:37:08 | |
The biggest socio-economic group was school teachers, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:12 | |
because school teachers, if they had a degree | 0:37:12 | 0:37:15 | |
as opposed to a teaching certificate, got an immediate increase in pay. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:20 | |
-If I didn't get an A... -You wanted to know why. -Yes, exactly. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
All that work I put in, clearly I got something wrong there. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:27 | |
The essay was well written and I thought I'd made all the main points... | 0:37:27 | 0:37:31 | |
Johnny, you're so competitive! I can't believe how competitive you are. You're a nightmare. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:37 | |
I'll tell you how competitive I am. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:40 | |
I used to go to summer school and work. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:42 | |
Ah, the summer schools. | 0:37:43 | 0:37:45 | |
When conventional universities closed down for the holidays, | 0:37:45 | 0:37:49 | |
the OU students moved in and started to act like... | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
students. | 0:37:52 | 0:37:54 | |
The summer schools were special. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:56 | |
Not only did they offer a week long of very intense activity, | 0:37:56 | 0:37:59 | |
particularly for scientists working in their labs... | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
Cleavage along parallel planes... | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
But also a lot of our students hadn't been away from home for a week without their partner. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:12 | |
I don't think any research has been done on the number of marriages | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
that broke up as a result of studying for the Open University. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:19 | |
It goes far too fast, doesn't it? | 0:38:20 | 0:38:22 | |
I remember one year, all the tutors got a letter from the vice-chancellor | 0:38:22 | 0:38:26 | |
saying we mustn't sleep with the students. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:28 | |
I was 25 or 26, my students were much older than me. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
It was unlikely I was going to seduce them, I think. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
It was quite eye opening to a set-in-his-ways academic. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:40 | |
The showering facilities were, as a matter of principle, shared. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
So I kind of wandered in, having found my way to the campus, | 0:38:43 | 0:38:48 | |
to discover a very attractive girl suddenly appear from the shower. | 0:38:48 | 0:38:53 | |
I thought, "Good heavens!" | 0:38:53 | 0:38:54 | |
The students had paid to go there, | 0:38:56 | 0:38:58 | |
they were determined to get as much out of it. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:00 | |
They'd even ask you questions on the dance floor. | 0:39:00 | 0:39:03 | |
There was always a disco on the Thursday when I'd shake my booty. | 0:39:03 | 0:39:06 | |
But somebody would ask you for a dance only because | 0:39:06 | 0:39:09 | |
they had a question they wanted to ask you, as a tutor. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:13 | |
These were hardcore learners, | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
and it was the summer schools that finally convinced | 0:39:18 | 0:39:21 | |
a sceptical academic world that the OU weren't muckin' about. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
There was considerable doubt, | 0:39:25 | 0:39:27 | |
and if an academic's only contact with the Open University | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
was to see a television programme or hear a radio broadcast, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:35 | |
that was a limited view. | 0:39:35 | 0:39:37 | |
The summer schools really displayed the university at its best, | 0:39:37 | 0:39:41 | |
because so many of them were staffed by a conventional academics. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:44 | |
They realised they were dealing with a body of students that was equal, | 0:39:44 | 0:39:50 | |
if not superior, to the ones they normally dealt with. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:54 | |
ANNA FORD: I think the Open University created enormous change in some people's lives. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:59 | |
I had one or two women who came to me | 0:39:59 | 0:40:02 | |
saying their husbands had told them | 0:40:02 | 0:40:04 | |
they didn't want them to go on studying any longer, | 0:40:04 | 0:40:07 | |
because they were spending too much time over their books | 0:40:07 | 0:40:10 | |
and not enough time looking after their husbands. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:13 | |
The Open University is a bit of a toil, | 0:40:13 | 0:40:17 | |
rather like having another bloke, but you can't chuck him out! | 0:40:17 | 0:40:21 | |
Some changes were more dramatic than others. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:25 | |
I was in prison. | 0:40:25 | 0:40:27 | |
I was in solitary confinement. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:29 | |
I was a very angry young man. I was involved in gangs | 0:40:29 | 0:40:32 | |
in north London. I was robbing banks. | 0:40:32 | 0:40:36 | |
I served 13 years out of 20. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:38 | |
Bobby Cummines now advises the government on prison issues | 0:40:38 | 0:40:43 | |
but, 25 years ago, he was in Parkhurst. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:45 | |
I used to read a lot in prison and I used to listen to Radio 4. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:51 | |
I loved the debates. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:53 | |
I never did that outside. I started becoming inquiring about myself - | 0:40:53 | 0:40:57 | |
you know, why was I different from everyone else? | 0:40:57 | 0:41:00 | |
I started going to education classes. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:02 | |
He said, "Why don't you do an Open University? You've got the time." | 0:41:02 | 0:41:06 | |
I had lots of time on my hands. | 0:41:06 | 0:41:08 | |
I thought, "Here I am, sitting with a pen. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:10 | |
"In my life previously, I'd be sitting with a gun." | 0:41:10 | 0:41:13 | |
It was that bizarre! | 0:41:13 | 0:41:15 | |
I thought, "What am I doing? I can't really be a student!" | 0:41:15 | 0:41:19 | |
And there I was, and someone had given me full marks for my assignment, | 0:41:19 | 0:41:25 | |
and it was such a buzz. It was better than robbing banks. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
It was a buzz and a half | 0:41:28 | 0:41:30 | |
-to know -I -could do it, not just some posh kid. | 0:41:30 | 0:41:32 | |
It liberated me from crime, because I knew I could do something else. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:37 | |
# Let me tell you about a girl who's breaking my heart | 0:41:40 | 0:41:45 | |
# She decided lately to get smart | 0:41:45 | 0:41:49 | |
# But now, whenever I go round to call | 0:41:49 | 0:41:54 | |
# She's reading Lawrence and TH Huxley | 0:41:54 | 0:41:59 | |
# With the Open University. # | 0:41:59 | 0:42:03 | |
One of the unexpected changes for me | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
was that the OU rekindled my love of libraries. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
So, in 2000, I sent off for the prospectus | 0:42:19 | 0:42:22 | |
and I was blown away, really, by the huge range of materials. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
They send you all these course materials | 0:42:26 | 0:42:30 | |
with titles like A210 and A171 and A300. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:33 | |
It's like they're sending you motorways through the post! | 0:42:33 | 0:42:36 | |
I knew about libraries cos my Auntie Pearl made me join when I was nine. | 0:42:36 | 0:42:39 | |
I had to read Little Black Sambo endlessly. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:42 | |
And...I got used to the idea of going to Dudley Library on occasion | 0:42:42 | 0:42:45 | |
but then, throughout school, I didn't really have much to do with libraries. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:50 | |
Rejoining the slipstream of education, for me, in 2000, | 0:42:50 | 0:42:54 | |
reintroduced me to this whole world of - what is a library for? | 0:42:54 | 0:42:58 | |
It actually takes the fear away. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:00 | |
You've got all these books, | 0:43:00 | 0:43:02 | |
people who know where the books are supposed to go. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:05 | |
All the information you need is right here in the library. | 0:43:05 | 0:43:08 | |
It's more tactile than just looking things up online too. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:13 | |
We'll look at this in more detail in the next programme. | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
# To cut a long story short I lost my mind... # | 0:43:16 | 0:43:21 | |
The '80s, and the OU were once again on the political radar, | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
this time because of their teaching material. | 0:43:25 | 0:43:27 | |
At a time when books were being banned or burned, | 0:43:27 | 0:43:32 | |
when you were counter-culture or cash culture, | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
for or against, | 0:43:35 | 0:43:37 | |
the Open University found itself... against. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:41 | |
When the real conflict took place | 0:43:41 | 0:43:43 | |
between the Conservative government and the OU | 0:43:43 | 0:43:46 | |
was actually when Keith Joseph was | 0:43:46 | 0:43:48 | |
the Secretary of State for Education, and when they became concerned | 0:43:48 | 0:43:54 | |
that there were all these left-wing Marxist academics there | 0:43:54 | 0:43:59 | |
who were polluting the minds of the students | 0:43:59 | 0:44:02 | |
by this left-wing ideology and left-wing propaganda. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:07 | |
Would you like to tell me what this is? | 0:44:08 | 0:44:10 | |
-A book. -And its title is Soviet history. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:14 | |
It's part of the reading from my course. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:16 | |
Do I have to draw you a picture? | 0:44:16 | 0:44:18 | |
Oh, would you? With little lambs running through the hills... | 0:44:18 | 0:44:21 | |
Ann, I'm in deadly earnest. Can't you see the chain? | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
-Moscow, Ostend, Dover, Milton Keynes. -Long walk. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:29 | |
Milton Keynes, Ann - the home of the Open University. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
Don't you realise, you have become a pawn of the Kremlin! | 0:44:32 | 0:44:34 | |
'There were course team meetings where' | 0:44:34 | 0:44:36 | |
you actually had to sit down and everybody had to answer the question, | 0:44:36 | 0:44:41 | |
is there Marxist bias in this unit, this television programme? | 0:44:41 | 0:44:45 | |
They had to take a vote. | 0:44:45 | 0:44:46 | |
Well, I think the answer is no. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:48 | |
It did cause quite a lot of worry, I think, | 0:44:48 | 0:44:53 | |
and Christodoulou was the Secretary of the University, | 0:44:53 | 0:44:56 | |
so it cost him his knighthood. | 0:44:56 | 0:44:58 | |
In some ways, it was a very fruitful time to be here, | 0:44:58 | 0:45:01 | |
because there was that sense of pushing against the status quo. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:05 | |
The TV operation had moved to the campus at Milton Keynes, | 0:45:05 | 0:45:10 | |
but they'd already raised a few eyebrows. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:13 | |
Isn't that the Green Cross Code man? | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
..His Lordship and call me Mr Executioner... | 0:45:16 | 0:45:18 | |
There was a version of The Balcony by Jean Genet, | 0:45:18 | 0:45:22 | |
and it featured, bizarrely, Darth Vader, Dave Prowse, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:25 | |
in a sort of cut-down leotard with a whip. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
Hurry up about it. I've got to go and get dressed. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:31 | |
That did prove a little too meaty, so it was indeed banned for a while. | 0:45:31 | 0:45:37 | |
It appears that this version of The Balcony was never transmitted, until now, | 0:45:37 | 0:45:41 | |
and that wasn't the only space cadet they've had on. | 0:45:41 | 0:45:45 | |
Might there not be some charity in sin to save this brother's life? | 0:45:45 | 0:45:48 | |
Please you to do it. I'll take it as a peril... | 0:45:48 | 0:45:51 | |
Later on into the '90s, David Tennant worked with us | 0:45:51 | 0:45:54 | |
on a series called Conjuring Shakespeare. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:57 | |
That was interesting, because we went out for that. | 0:45:57 | 0:45:59 | |
We went to Oxford and shot on location, | 0:45:59 | 0:46:01 | |
as we did for a play that starred the then relatively unknown Daniel Craig. | 0:46:01 | 0:46:06 | |
That was The Rover by Aphra Behn. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:08 | |
It was three and a half hours. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:11 | |
Had she left me my clothes, | 0:46:11 | 0:46:12 | |
I have a bill of exchange at home would have saved my credit. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:16 | |
It was really interesting to work with people | 0:46:16 | 0:46:19 | |
who you've since seen go on and make really good careers for themselves. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:23 | |
-What's that? Is it a man or a bird? -A pig! | 0:46:23 | 0:46:28 | |
Occasionally, though, what seemed like a good idea on the script just didn't do the job. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:34 | |
I had one which was quite bizarre. It was the academic's idea. | 0:46:34 | 0:46:38 | |
-Who are you? -PIG, or Pig for short. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:42 | |
It was called the Problem Identification Game - PIG, or Pig for short. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:46 | |
I don't know what you're on about. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:48 | |
I thought it was very clever - | 0:46:48 | 0:46:49 | |
wonderful, full of gags and jokes and so on. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
The students gave it the biggest thumbs-down ever. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
It's more important to begin a journey than to know where you're going. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:58 | |
"No", said the students, "We don't know what it's about." | 0:46:58 | 0:47:01 | |
The Open University has to conduct a lot of its business in public, | 0:47:03 | 0:47:07 | |
for better or worse. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:09 | |
Like any British university, it has to do research, | 0:47:09 | 0:47:13 | |
and it was an OU team | 0:47:13 | 0:47:15 | |
behind the UK's most publicised step into space - | 0:47:15 | 0:47:19 | |
the Beagle 2 mission to Mars. | 0:47:19 | 0:47:21 | |
Three more attempts to find Beagle overnight, and three more failures. | 0:47:21 | 0:47:26 | |
Our best chance of a communication with Mars | 0:47:26 | 0:47:30 | |
is to wait until Mars Express is available for use. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:34 | |
Milton Keynes can feel a bit like the deserted set of Space 1999 | 0:47:34 | 0:47:39 | |
but, in dark corners, | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
there are researchers handling strange objects. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:45 | |
Mahesh Anand is one of them. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
This is really heavy. What the heck is it? | 0:47:48 | 0:47:50 | |
A piece of our solar system which then entered the atmosphere | 0:47:50 | 0:47:54 | |
of the Earth as a meteorite, which is 4.5 billion years old. | 0:47:54 | 0:47:58 | |
And you can actually examine little slices of it? | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
We also have examples of rocks | 0:48:01 | 0:48:03 | |
that have come from other planets, such as Mars. | 0:48:03 | 0:48:06 | |
-No way! -And our own moon. | 0:48:06 | 0:48:08 | |
Looks like a stained-glass window. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:10 | |
-It's like a piece of art, isn't it? -It's beautiful. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
But you're not looking at the pretty colours. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
There's a point, isn't there? | 0:48:16 | 0:48:17 | |
The larger picture is that | 0:48:17 | 0:48:19 | |
we're trying to understand our own place in this universe. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:23 | |
Not easy to do if your equipment goes missing! | 0:48:24 | 0:48:26 | |
Mahesh, can you tell me about your involvement with the Beagle mission, | 0:48:26 | 0:48:31 | |
which, in the public's eyes, was deemed a bit of a failure | 0:48:31 | 0:48:34 | |
because it didn't actually land? | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
I think that we got a lot out of Beagle, | 0:48:36 | 0:48:38 | |
even though it was not successful in the sense | 0:48:38 | 0:48:42 | |
that actually it crash-landed, most likely, | 0:48:42 | 0:48:45 | |
on the surface of Mars and we never heard from it. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:47 | |
It doesn't write, it doesn't phone... | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
Yeah, it doesn't write, it doesn't phone, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:52 | |
but we must remember that those instruments that were sent on Beagle | 0:48:52 | 0:48:57 | |
are now being planned to send elsewhere | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
in the Solar System exploration missions. | 0:49:00 | 0:49:03 | |
For example, one package on Beagle was going to look for organic carbon | 0:49:03 | 0:49:08 | |
and is now being considered by NASA to send it to the Moon. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
The Open University was born out of the Space Age. | 0:49:19 | 0:49:23 | |
It was driven by new technology. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:27 | |
While the rest of the world was trying to work out what they had to do with it, | 0:49:27 | 0:49:32 | |
the Open University already knew. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:35 | |
They were the first British university to embrace computers... | 0:49:35 | 0:49:40 | |
CD-ROMs... And it launched them into a whole new kind of space. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:46 | |
It's almost as though the OU was waiting | 0:49:46 | 0:49:48 | |
for the invention of the internet. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
When it came, it enabled us to reach people anywhere. | 0:49:51 | 0:49:54 | |
Television had let students study at home. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:00 | |
The internet allowed them to get out and do it. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:04 | |
What we do is just | 0:50:04 | 0:50:06 | |
write your assignment online and e-mail it. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:08 | |
I think people would rather be surfing the net for information | 0:50:08 | 0:50:13 | |
rather than reading books. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:14 | |
I can do online stuff | 0:50:14 | 0:50:16 | |
and I appreciate where people are coming from, | 0:50:16 | 0:50:18 | |
but I just like books. I really like the big thing | 0:50:18 | 0:50:20 | |
when you're starting a new course and your big parcel comes. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:24 | |
It's these lovely, new-smelling, wonderful books. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:26 | |
It's really exciting. | 0:50:26 | 0:50:28 | |
But if you just turn on the computer and it's all there, you think, what the...? | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
With global technology, a global expansion. | 0:50:33 | 0:50:38 | |
-We're going to have an expedition. -Yes! | 0:50:38 | 0:50:40 | |
There are now around 50 open universities in the world. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:47 | |
The earliest ones were probably in India, where we helped to set up | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
the Indira Gandhi National Open University, | 0:50:51 | 0:50:54 | |
which is now one of the biggest in the world. | 0:50:54 | 0:50:56 | |
But strangely, the Open University failed in the country | 0:50:58 | 0:51:02 | |
that gave birth to television teaching, America. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:05 | |
Their culture is so different. Their learning culture is so different. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:08 | |
They have virtual university projects sprouting all over the place. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:13 | |
They don't need an Open University | 0:51:13 | 0:51:15 | |
in the way that Britain needed one and still does. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
The OU was trying to do what lots of other people were already doing. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:22 | |
There had to be the question in the potential customer's, | 0:51:22 | 0:51:25 | |
potential student's mind - why go for this unknown British quantity? | 0:51:25 | 0:51:29 | |
A US OU you had to be abandoned after two years | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
at a cost of £9 million. | 0:51:32 | 0:51:34 | |
I don't think we're ever going to make the mistake of believing | 0:51:34 | 0:51:38 | |
that America is a suitable environment for this kind of university. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:43 | |
Yet it still surprises me | 0:51:43 | 0:51:44 | |
because it's so successful in other parts of the world. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:47 | |
A team of five scientists are on a mission to solve | 0:51:47 | 0:51:51 | |
a series of science challenges. | 0:51:51 | 0:51:53 | |
On the telly, things were moving on too. | 0:51:53 | 0:51:56 | |
The Open University had begun to make programmes | 0:51:56 | 0:51:59 | |
that were not just for its students. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:02 | |
Together we are - Rough Science. | 0:52:02 | 0:52:05 | |
-Mike, if you could shout out the angle. -79.0. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:08 | |
These were prime-time shows with a brain. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
But hang on, how will this help anybody get a degree? | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
The Open University and the BBC thought, let's make programmes | 0:52:14 | 0:52:18 | |
that are available and accessible to the general public. | 0:52:18 | 0:52:22 | |
I think that came about as a recognition of | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
the responsibility that the Open University has | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
to reaching the wider public, | 0:52:28 | 0:52:29 | |
not just its students who are paying for the courses. | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
But it also has an extramural role, if you like. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
Every university has an extramural department. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:38 | |
Ours just happens to be not just UK-wide | 0:52:38 | 0:52:41 | |
through the BBC, our relationship with the BBC, but worldwide. | 0:52:41 | 0:52:45 | |
With a myriad of ways to receive teaching material, | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
the TV programmes needed to be less like lessons. | 0:52:55 | 0:52:59 | |
It led to new, slick-looking co-productions with the BBC. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
The days of the old school were numbered. | 0:53:02 | 0:53:05 | |
That's over a thousand million sides. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:08 | |
And in 2006, we said goodbye to a unique bit of television history. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:21 | |
Nothing to fear, but fear itself. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:24 | |
We hope that your studies... | 0:53:32 | 0:53:34 | |
Those late-night broadcasts | 0:53:34 | 0:53:36 | |
and the production centre at Milton Keynes were no more. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
There was some sadness when those late-night transmissions ended. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:46 | |
Partly because, almost everywhere you went, you'd find people | 0:53:46 | 0:53:49 | |
who either knew somebody who'd done an OU course | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
or they were doing one, or somebody in their family was, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:54 | |
and they loved those transmissions. You'd maybe come in late at night, | 0:53:54 | 0:53:58 | |
after a curry and couldn't quite sleep, | 0:53:58 | 0:54:00 | |
and people would catch something about Schroedinger's Cat. | 0:54:00 | 0:54:03 | |
And that kind of created a community. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:06 | |
Education, education and education. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:11 | |
40 years ago, the OU was pretty much | 0:54:11 | 0:54:15 | |
the last chance saloon | 0:54:15 | 0:54:17 | |
if you'd missed out on university after leaving school. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
Now, British universities compete to attract all sorts of students. | 0:54:20 | 0:54:26 | |
And everyone pays fees. | 0:54:27 | 0:54:29 | |
The space-age technology the OU helped pioneer is commonplace. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:35 | |
Thanks to the internet, we've all become | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
distance learners of one sort or another. | 0:54:38 | 0:54:40 | |
But it's not a university of the internet - | 0:54:43 | 0:54:45 | |
no more than it was a university of the air when it was launched in 1969. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:50 | |
The clue is in the name - the Open University. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:55 | |
Well, it makes an enormous difference to all the people | 0:54:55 | 0:54:59 | |
who wouldn't be accepted by other universities. | 0:54:59 | 0:55:02 | |
You must remember, most universities do still have entry criteria. | 0:55:02 | 0:55:06 | |
The Open University has no entry criteria. | 0:55:06 | 0:55:10 | |
So about one-third of our students | 0:55:10 | 0:55:12 | |
wouldn't be accepted by other universities | 0:55:12 | 0:55:14 | |
and you can be quite sure that makes an enormous difference. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
The reality is, however hard you try to widen access, | 0:55:18 | 0:55:23 | |
university education is essentially for the privileged classes. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:27 | |
You may not feel privileged, but compared to others you are. | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
Within those parameters, I'd say the OU is probably broadest | 0:55:30 | 0:55:33 | |
in its social background than any other, | 0:55:33 | 0:55:36 | |
but probably not nearly as broad as it would like to be. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:39 | |
Where it really succeeds is picking up the individuals | 0:55:39 | 0:55:42 | |
for whom the conventional system didn't work so well. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
Every university almost in the world today sees itself | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
as a version of the Open University. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:50 | |
Every single university I'm aware of | 0:55:50 | 0:55:52 | |
has some form of outreach programme. | 0:55:52 | 0:55:54 | |
But there's no university that any longer sees itself | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
as trapped within their own walls. And it won't be long | 0:55:57 | 0:56:01 | |
before Oxford, Cambridge and the American Ivory League universities | 0:56:01 | 0:56:05 | |
begin to similarly reach out. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:06 | |
I'm at the Barbican. I've got my gown on. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:08 | |
I walk up onto the stage, David Puttnam gives me my scroll | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
and I go, "Yes! This time I've really earned this. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:15 | |
"This is six years of hard slog." | 0:56:15 | 0:56:19 | |
Then a year went by. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:21 | |
And I thought, is that it? | 0:56:21 | 0:56:23 | |
Is that the end of my learning experience? | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
So I decided it wouldn't be. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:29 | |
Now, I'm doing a master's degree in screenwriting. | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
I never would have contemplated that before the OU. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:36 | |
It's opened up a world of possibilities. | 0:56:36 | 0:56:39 | |
This uncertain experiment, | 0:56:43 | 0:56:46 | |
with its roots in Communist Russia, has touched the lives of millions. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:51 | |
The desire to learn has been rekindled in me. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
I don't intend to stop learning, because I think... | 0:56:56 | 0:57:00 | |
..learning is everything, really. | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
..Comedian, Johnny Kennedy. | 0:57:04 | 0:57:08 | |
I've always had the ability, but it did give me that second chance. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:13 | |
It showed me how to use that ability in the most effective way. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:21 | |
It taught me discipline. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:23 | |
Open University changes lives. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:26 | |
If I hadn't done OU, I would've been back robbing banks | 0:57:26 | 0:57:28 | |
and been banged up for the rest of my life or shot dead. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
One of the things that pulled people together was this common enemy. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
The sceptics who said... they pooh-poohed it. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:39 | |
Without any doubt it was the greatest achievement of Harold Wilson. | 0:57:39 | 0:57:43 | |
With 185,000 students now enrolled. 20% overseas. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:47 | |
Highest student satisfaction of any university. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:49 | |
My father was really quite amazed and excited | 0:57:49 | 0:57:52 | |
by quite how much it had grown and how innovative it had been. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:56 | |
I think Jenny would be really pleased, thrilled and gratified. | 0:57:56 | 0:58:01 | |
She believed that she had given to Harold Wilson | 0:58:01 | 0:58:05 | |
a legacy similar to Nye's legacy for the health service. | 0:58:05 | 0:58:09 | |
You want to get on. We're all very motivated. | 0:58:09 | 0:58:11 | |
Open University students are extremely motivated. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:14 | |
If you're no good, you don't pass. You don't get the qualification. | 0:58:14 | 0:58:18 | |
It's no different to university in that sense. There's just no bar. | 0:58:18 | 0:58:22 | |
That can be remedied. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:24 | |
# Suddenly I see | 0:58:25 | 0:58:27 | |
# This is what I wanna be | 0:58:27 | 0:58:30 | |
# Suddenly I see | 0:58:30 | 0:58:32 | |
# Why the hell it means so much to me... # | 0:58:32 | 0:58:36 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:49 | 0:58:52 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:52 | 0:58:55 |