Fun and Games British Passions on Film

'Tom Ingledew, a North Country labourer, thought he would make a cathedral.'

Britain is a nation of hobbyists.

'So he bought some very simple tools and got on with it.'

We are collectors. We are model makers.

We are a people that have always used our spare time

in all manner of playful ways.

Having a hobby was something you were kind of supposed to do.

Our pursuits define us, both as individuals and as a nation.

A genuinely British hobby has a kind of slight air

of eccentricity about it.

It maybe even is the defining characteristic of the British hobby,

that you make something

which no-one in their right mind would ever want.

The 20th century saw the heyday of the pastime.

The devil made work for idle hands,

so the British made sure their fingers were always fully occupied.

The truth is, you can trust someone who has a hobby.

Someone who doesn't, you get a bit anxious, don't you?

During the 19th century,

leisure time was the near exclusive preserve of the upper classes.

The moneyed elite would gather at the racecourses

or while away the hours with genteel games like tennis or croquet.

For those of lesser means,

the working week was often a long and joyless one.

But eventually, the great British worker

would discovered the pleasure of spare time.

We see hobbies and leisure really increasing by the late 19th century,

when you see the Saturday half day and Sunday as leisure time.

And leisure events are placed on these days, such as football matches,

music halls are booked on Saturday afternoons

and Saturday evenings for the first time.

And so, you see leisure beginning to be part of people's lives more.

By the start of the 20th century,

workers' free time was often well structured and organised.

Employers like the General Electric Company started social clubs

that offered their staff their own sports facilities.

Funfairs and fetes were greatly anticipated events,

where people wore their Sunday best and made merry.

These social gatherings would become central

to Britain's emerging leisure culture.

Hobbies in the earlier part of the 20th century are seen to be

more collective in form, so people would describe their hobby as

going to see a football match, or going to the cinema,

quite collective activities, where people would participate

in a large event.

Yet by 1914, the national mood was anything but playful.

Europe was lurching towards its bloodiest conflict ever,

as a generation of young men was dispatched to the trenches.

In these serious times,

the frivolity of pre-war pastimes

gave way to more productive pursuits.

For the women left behind, free time was not to be taken lightly.

Those ladies disinclined to engage in the grubby business of war work

were exhorted to help a nation in peril and get their hands dirty.

They buckled to and they joined the hastily mustered Land Army.

They went to work in munitions,

which was a vital part of keeping the war effort going.

And they did innumerable other things.

All jobs that previously had been done by men.

Four years of war took a catastrophic toll on the country.

Over 700,000 British servicemen perished at the front.

That had a profound impact on the gender balance of British society.

When the census was taken in 1921,

there were two million more women than men in this country.

And those women were described as pretty much surplus to requirements.

And those single women had to find something else to do,

they have to make their own living, they had to find their own identity,

it was a very interesting social phenomenon,

because all these women flooded the market

and they changed how society worked,

in a very significant way.

The new confidence women acquired in the post-war workplace

trickled into their leisure time.

Trailblazing ladies began to storm

the hitherto male dominated worlds of sport.

'This is to introduce Miss Molly Gourlay.

'She has the distinction of being the present holder

'of the English Close Championship and the French Open Championship.'

In the field of sports,

there were women who took up mountaineering,

there were women cricketers, there was a champion woman sculler

in the 1930s.

So, really moving into male dominated areas in sport.

And of course, they were moving into male dominated areas

in all other fields as well, whether it was the law, the arts, medicine,

science, politics, trades unions,

open any male door

and you will find a woman slips in there, in the inter-war period.

Some of the old class divides also started to blur.

What had traditionally been working-class pastimes

found new followers in all strata of British society.

'If you like to be a perfect little devil with a dart, gather round.

'The board is usually of elm.

'Its face, 18 inches across and divided into 20 equal segments

'and numbered, but not consecutively.

'It's hung on a wall with the centre five foot eight from the floor

'and the player stands nine feet away.'

For most working men, this would be second nature.

But it was very clearly aimed at a more middle-class audience.

'The game is now the industry of Islington

'and the craze of Kensington.

'The board with the double and the trouble has even invaded the shingle.

'So far, there is no special costume for darts,

'but those will do quite nicely, thank you.'

I think it is a good illustration of how that cultural divide

really went through hobbies, as well as everyday life in 1930s Britain.

During the inter-war years, a new world of leisure started to emerge.

With the growth of the suburbs,

more people had the space to enjoy hobbies at home.

Handicrafts enjoyed unprecedented popularity,

as people experimented with new techniques

and some unconventional materials.

'Mr Newman is an entomologist. That isn't his fault.

'It's the way they playfully refer to people who collect insects.

'Our friend preserves butterflies for decorative purposes.

'A deft manipulation of a strand of wire

'and Madame Butterfly is ready to keep a date with the calendar.'

There is an estimated 200,000 self-styled artists

in the 1930s in this country, making the most extraordinary things

And employing their weird and wonderful talents.

'To see a piece of wood in the raw

'is like a pain in the neck to Mr Denton.

'He must turn it into skyscrapers, or boats.

'In fact, anything from a felucca to a flagship.

'And after 20 years, he has made about 4,000 of them.

'Eileen and Audrey are art students, and their hobby is making

'masks of film stars with ordinary paper and extraordinary skill.

'The lovely, long, silken lashes are really gorgeous dog hair.

'So is an old newspaper transformed into a beautiful film star.'

With the outbreak of the Second World War,

many British women were urged to apply their craft skills

to help the nation once more.

'In the shade of the sheltering palms on the banks of the Nile,

'girls of the ATS arrange classes

'to teach Tommy Atkins how to sew and darn.

'At first, their fingers are all thumbs, but soon, they can sew a shirt

'on a button or patch a hole as neatly as a first-class plumber.'

Skills and pursuits that were merely recreational before the war

were now applied to the war effort.

Women welders, who were doing almost as masculine a job

as you could hope for.

It turns out that welding was a very skilled and precise job

and these women were partly selected because

they had worked in confectionery and had done cake icing.

There was the feeling that women had to be doing things that they

were fitted for, that were appropriate for them.

'The Queen joins the ladies in the Blue Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace.

'The ladies are members of the palace staff

'and these twice weekly meetings are Her Majesty's idea, to work

'for the Red Cross or do knitting for the troops.

'There's a complete absence of formality.

'It's just a job to be done - an example to us all

'of the way to win a war.'

My grandmother would unravel a jumper and re-knit it.

When you'd grown out of it, the wool would be re-knitted

and for years, I half-believed that all wool was kinky

because it had been unravelled and had the old shaping in it.

With the war uppermost in people's minds, it's not surprising

that military icons inspired the nation's craft enthusiasts.

It was an age when you could find a Lancaster bomber

in your neighbour's back garden.

'Dad is tuning up.

'The air screw turns and very soon, they'll be on their way.

'It's a grand trip.

'They've run into a lot of flak and the pilot's taking

'evasive action, but do they reach their target?

'Well, look. Bomb's gone.'

The scale and ambition of these creations testify to British

resourcefulness in a period of prolonged privations

and severe shortages.

After the Second World War, Britain is exhausted -

it's bombed out, it's hidebound by rationing,

it's a very grey country in the late '40s and early '50s.

People did things that were generally cheap.

'They're just oddments from grocers' packing cases yet they're

'the basis of a toymaker's art.

'Yootha Rowes discovered her talent during the war

'when she was an evacuee on a Dorset farm.

'She's come a long way since making toys for that Dorset village,

'but the memory of the country is with her

'as she puts the finishing touches to her midget stagecoach.'

In ration-book Britain, many hobbies embraced affordable and quirky

pastimes, but demanded dedication and perseverance rather than cash.

Many turned to pursuits that indulged the more obsessive

aspects of our national character.

The reason this country is fundamentally sane

and has survived so long and well is that we are all mad.

And the thing we're most mad about is collecting.

This is a nation of collectors.

The desire to collect, to classify, that is very distinctively British.

Which foreigners find baffling.

'Another LIGHT subject - matchbox labels.

'79-year-old Mr Charles Crabton collects them.

'He's done so for 50 years.

'Today, he has 42,000 from 83 countries.

'these labels from Korea could tell a story.

'A truer one than these Japanese wartime propaganda epics.

'They're just a lot of flaming nonsense.'

Perhaps driven by the constant struggle against never-ending

shortages, many British collectors started to amass ever more

unlikely items.

When I was a little boy,

I had the best collection of cheese labels in Southwest London.

'Three years ago, Mrs Mabel Smith,

'a South London housewife, started collecting cheese labels as a hobby.

'she found interest in this hobby so widespread that, last year,

'she started to go into the cheese label business.'

The most brilliant one, if you loved cheese, was to collect cheese labels

because you can ring up cheese producers

and say, "Could you send me

"a selection of your cheeses cos I'm going to promote your labels."

'With the support of cheese importers who save labels

'she's able to fulfil her orders.'

'Since she started in business,

'she's bought more than 600,000 cheese labels and sold 200,000.

'She says it's work she'll never get CHEESED OFF with.

After the war, an abundance of war-related mementoes was

readily available for even the most cash-strapped collector.

My dad liked to collect bits of bombs that had dropped.

And bullets and bits of armoury.

That was a big thing for working class kids.

The more agile and less scrupulous even managed to build

impressive collections out of what had once been public property.

'A young man who collects street lamps. Still don't believe it?

'Well, watch his technique as he climbs up to work.'

Is that not just theft?

He's wandered up and gone, "I'll have that," and taken it away.

That's what it looks like.

At every stage, there's no suggestion that he's been given

permission to take this street lamp away.

'Through his collection of lamps,

'dating back to Trafalgar, Peter Barnam has now added one more.'

You're talking about a street thief.

I can't believe no-one stopped him.

As Britain's post-war economic woes subsided,

people had more cash to spend on the serious business of having fun.

The economy went through a great boom in the mid '50s.

Rationing was lifted, full employment,

rising living standards, rising wages.

Britain is going through this economic golden age.

It was a real sense of economic optimism.

From that, you get this vast cornucopia of entertainments.

Increased disposable income gave some Britons an opportunity

to indulge their taste for the exotic.

The relatively drab monochrome items collected hitherto found competition

from a range of new, unusual and colourful objects of desire.

Millicent Rich saw the opportunity to cash in on the increasingly

adventurous appetites of Britain's collectors.

'Now many thousands of these shells and sea phenomena are brought

'to this country by Millicent Rich, Europe's only woman importer.'

I started to import them

when I realised they could be very decorative in the home.

In bathrooms, bathroom ornaments.

You could stick your toothbrushes in them.

You could put flowers in them, you could embed the side panels

of the bath in beautiful patterns with them, every home should have a selection

of shells, cos they attract attention and they're something to talk about

should the subject of the neighbours dry up or anything similar.

'The shells fit ideally into the pattern of modern

'decoration for the subtle colouring and smooth line make a striking

'contrast to the bold shading and right angles of contemporary

'furniture, like that of Terence Conran.'

The jewellery was very successful.

We made rings, inlaid things and we sold quite a lot to Biba,

a very famous shop.

'For after all, she sells seashells from the she... Ahem. Never mind.'

By the late '50s, British tastes were increasingly

influenced by an emerging global popular culture.

Millions of Britons were exposed to American TV and pop music.

Some could afford to travel to Europe

and beyond for the very first time.

With these windows opening on other worlds, there was a new

willingness to embrace leisure pursuits from abroad.

You have things from Europe coming in. For example, the sauna.

The idea of a sauna as a hobby might seem odd

but there were these early pioneers of saunas, birching themselves with

birch twigs and getting very excited with Continental sophistication.

'As you've probably guessed,

'we're at the only private sauna bath in London.'

'The sauna is the Finnish version of the Turkish bath -

'a light beating with the twigs opens the pores

'and stimulates the circulation of the blood.'

Some imported activities were given an idiosyncratic,

yet typically British twist.

'Bullfighting in England is illegal, but that doesn't worry matador Alf.

'He's about to demonstrate his self-taught Spanish style

'and you'll marvel at the capework.'

'If you're disappointed by the sight of Bimbo, the pet ram,

'imagine what a letdown it was for the fans who turned up when Alf promised to face a real bull.

'He had a last-minute change of heart

'and it was probably the best move he ever made.'

Men with rams and women with prams

took on hazardous pursuits in Britain's new leisure age.

'A remarkable woman is Renee Bennett, because her family

'is more than just baby Charles, daughter Julie and husband Howard.

'The other love in her life is motorcycling.'

When I was about...

20 I suppose it was, I said, right, I want to ride a motorbike.

Dad taught me to ride.

Er, bit hairy it was, cos I had no idea how to ride.

'Renee's just about tops

'when invading the skid-lid male world of motorcycle competitions.'

Then I entered my first trial.

I thought, oh, my God, I'll never be able to do this.

When I think now, dropping down the hill, going over,

head over heels, the bike hitting me, covered in bruises.

Anyway, I overcame it, and I just...from then on, that was it.

And I rode for...25 years.

Using your feet too often loses marks.

It must be one of the few times

a woman can't afford to put her foot down.

Meanwhile, I was doing the modelling, film work, stunts.

'Just because you're a woman doesn't earn any favoured treatment

'in this competitive two-wheeled world.'

I gradually became one of them.

I used to beat them anyway, so they couldn't really... couldn't really say anything!

'Whichever way you look at it, it's a puzzle to know

'how Renee Bennett keeps everything going at full throttle.

'But this was one occasion when husband Howard had the last laugh.

'He pipped Renee on the post.'

Throughout the period, most women's hobbies were pursued at home.

Some male pastimes were also based indoors

and would become a source of domestic strife for years to come.

The virtues of home improvement were extolled to television viewers

by the '60s answer to Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.

Hello.

Barry Bucknell is one of the great unheralded figures

of recent British history, because he's somebody who absolutely

pioneers the DIY ethos and he symbolises

the domesticity and the affluence of the sort of '50s onwards.

Well, there it is. Headlamps in position.

No wiring but, er,

you see that it has given you a really nice furnished effect.

And when you've varnished this and got this woodwork,

which looks as well as anything you'd buy in a shop,

I think you'll be very pleased that you've tackled this bedhead problem.

For me, DIY was too much like hard work.

And Barry Bucknell, too much of a real man.

Next week, the same time, I'll show you how to make the fittings for this wardrobe,

so, till then, I'll say, "Bye, now."

All too easily, private passions can turn into personal obsessions.

'Every part of the house was built by Jack in his spare time

'over a period of six years.

'Jack was advised against building the house by doctors

'because of his thrice-fractured skull,

'first a shell splinter in World War One,

'second a motorcycle accident and third a fall of bricks,

'but it took more than that to stand in the way

'of this proud achievement, truly the house that Jack built.'

Jack Punter wasn't alone in his determination

to realise his grand design.

Many were equally dogged in pursuit of their idea of perfection,

albeit on a much smaller scale.

By the '60s and '70s you have a great fad for models of all kinds,

model cars, model aeroplanes, sailing model boats.

You don't really go to a park now and see people with their model boats.

'Perfect scale models of ships scurry back and forth

'across their tideless oceans on journeys to nowhere.

'But for the men who build and sail their mini fleets

'the worlds of commerce and industry are forgotten.

'On Sundays, their horizons are unbounded.'

Britain's model makers consistently demonstrated remarkable

precision, dedication and fastidiousness.

'It was an old-fashioned carousel like this,

'but lifesize, that inspired Mr Turner to become an engineer.

'Now he's created a model of his inspiration,

'so the old showground world comes round again.'

'This Lincoln bomber, for example, accurate in every detail

'on a scale of one sixteenth, took him six months to build.'

The late '60s were a high point

in the British post-war leisure revolution,

but grey clouds were once again looming over the country's economy.

For many families, there were turbulent times ahead.

I think the kind of optimism and the affluence of the '60s

had really run out of steam by, really, 1970.

People aren't putting the same energy into their hobbies outside the home

as beforehand, cos they're staying in and watching the telly.

Television had a contradictory effect on Britain's hobbyists.

While it distracted many people from traditional pursuits,

programmes like Blue Peter

positively encouraged a new generation of young model makers

and craftspeople to express their creativity.

There was lots of TV programmes that promoted collecting,

like Saturday Swap Shop, Tiswas and Blue Peter,

collecting knick-knacks and making things.

So the TV promoted collection, I think, more in the '70s.

You can decorate them in all sorts of different ways,

with ribbons, with gold doilies, with cut-out bits from magazines.

When they tell you to do something with your sticky-back plastic

and your egg box, you can create a whole world

with bits and pieces you find around the house.

Well, here's one party, though, that never gets rained off.

It's all taking place in a cardboard box,

and if you'd like to make one, I'll show you how it's done.

I used to watch Blue Peter and Take Hart with such a religious fervour.

Really did love them, because I knew I couldn't have done it.

I knew that there were going to be some things where it would be like,

"How can you even see that well, let alone draw that well?"

-Right, now...this one's ready.

-There!

But the computer was to become the game changer

for the British hobbyist.

You can't get away from them.

There are shops in the high street Where you can buy where you can buy

a PET, an Apple, an Acorn, a Tangerine, even a Newbrain.

In fact, computers suddenly seem to be everywhere.

I bet there's hardly a pub in the country

which doesn't have a couple of computers in the lounge bar.

Children who once spent hours with empty cereal packets

and sticky-backed plastic now had their thumbs stuck to handsets

and games controllers.

I don't understand it.

I'm of that age but I don't have the patience to throw a bird off a wall.

If I want to deal wi' an angry bird, we've got pigeons

in the city centre of Glasgow that try and steal your sandwich.

I'm quite happy to do that live.

And I don't have the inclination to sit and say,

"Oh, no, somebody's poured salt on my pine trees."

I need to buy a fur coat for my child's winter months coming on.

Houseville. Seriously, there's stuff happening in the world.

Get off your computer and stop buying sheep.

You live in Castlemilk.

The British treasure their leisure.

For over a century we've devoted hours to making and collecting.

We're resourceful, even when resources are in short supply.

And our ingenuity, perfectionism

and sometimes eccentricity always shine through.

The pastimes of times past show that we've adopted and adapted

the passions of other nations and magically made them our own.

Our obsessions demonstrate that Britons are never more serious

than when we are at our most playful.

Well, I've just taken up ukulele playing.

I've never played an instrument ever. I've learnt four chords. Erm...

my family and friends think it's a midlife crisis and a call for help

but I think hobbies are there for your own enjoyment,

so I enjoy it, even if they don't.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd