Modern Victorians Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You

This programme contains some strong language.

# Walk on by... #

In the middle of the 19th century, Britain's most celebrated author

began to take long walks through the streets of the nation's capital.

Britain's Industrial Revolution had transformed the world economy

and Britain's empire now encircled the globe.

But what Charles Dickens saw in his own back yard shocked him.

"The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London

"can hardly be imagined.

"Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper,

""every room let out to a different family."

The poverty that Charles Dickens saw on these streets would inspire

some of the greatest scenes in all English fiction,

scenes that reflected a very Victorian anxiety

about the plight of the poor.

What Dickens's writings captured were the moral obsessions

of the Victorian mind,

and the things that troubled Dickens

are still at the heart of our popular culture.

From grinding poverty...

-SOBBING:

-Where's me money?

..to juvenile crime.

"One of the worst sights I know in London," said Dickens,

"is to be found in the children who prowl about this place

"and dart at any object they think

"they can lay their thieving hands on."

That fear of lawlessness still haunts our collective imagination.

And we share our predecessors' anxieties about the dangers

of scientific progress.

The Victorians felt they had a moral mission to spread civilising

British values into every corner of the world.

As Dickens himself wrote,

"I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage,

"I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable

"to be civilised off the face of the Earth."

And like the Victorians, we love stories about crusading heroes

taking British values into the furthest reaches of the universe.

The circle is broken, the Ood can sing!

When it comes to our culture, we're still living in the Victorian age.

We dream the same dreams

and we have the same nightmares.

In the early hours of July the 13th, 1985...

crowds were gathering for one of the biggest events in music history.

CHEERING

With some 70,000 people lining the old stands here at Wembley

and more than 1.5 billion watching on TV around the world,

Live Aid was the most ambitious live music event ever attempted.

It's 12 noon in London, 7am in Philadelphia

and around the world it's time for Live Aid!

CHEERING

# Ah, giddy-up and giddy-up and get away... #

Over the next 16 hours the audience went from ecstasy...

# We will, we will rock you! # One more time!

-AUDIENCE:

-# We will, we will rock you! #

..to despair.

This was a supremely powerful formula,

raising £150 million for famine relief.

But there was more to Live Aid than just the money.

Live Aid was popular culture as an old-fashioned moral crusade,

with Britain leading the world response

to a terrible humanitarian crisis.

Here, rekindled for a new generation,

was the missionary spirit of the Victorian Age.

And for post-imperial Britain that was a refreshing change.

Since the Second World War, British power had been in headlong retreat.

Good evening. I want to talk to you tonight about a new country

that has come into being today.

It's called Ghana.

-Hip-hip-hip!

-CROWD:

-Hurray!

As one colony after another declared independence,

the British Empire had rapidly crumbled into dust.

But although the Empire had disappeared,

its missionary spirit lived on.

The Victorians had believed that Britain had a moral duty

to improve the world,

and as Live Aid suggested, that urge was still as strong as ever.

But the idea of using popular culture as a force for good wasn't new.

In 1981, a well-known rock star

was approached to take part in a charity show.

Since the producer had already secured both Eric Clapton and Sting

he was naturally confident of getting another yes.

What he actually got was this -

-"It's a

-BLEEP

-waste of

-BLEEP

-time.

-"You

-BLEEP

-hippies. All the

-BLEEP

-same.

-"You

-BLEEP

-think you're going to

-BLEEP

-change the

-BLEEP

-world

-"with your

-BLEEP

-stupid

-BLEEP

-charity show."

Well, after a full and frank exchange of views, the rock star

was persuaded to change his mind.

Perhaps it's just as well that he did,

because for Sir Bob Geldof

life would never be the same again.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Secret Policeman's Other Ball.

The night that changed Bob Geldof's mind,

and British music history, was the Secret Policeman's Ball,

held here at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1981.

It brought together some of Britain's best known comedians and rock stars

to raise money for Amnesty International.

Ladies and gentlemen, before we start the show...

It had all begun in 1976

when John Cleese arranged a charity comedy gig with a few pals.

We really do want to thank each and every one of you,

even those of you right up the top there.

LAUGHTER AND CHEERING

Who only paid the-the... Well, the minimum of £6. Thank you.

-MAN:

-£3.50.

What?

£3.50.

You bastards! I mean, people...

LAUGHTER

..people being tortured to death all over the world

and you're prepared to cough up the price of a prawn cocktail!

Comedians and rock stars were increasingly seeing themselves

as actors on the world stage.

Britain's government might have retreated from empire,

but they believed that they had the power and even the duty

to change the world.

Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night

on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine.

Ethiopia is turning into the worst human disaster for a decade...

In 1984, the shocking pictures of Ethiopia's famine

reawakened their sense of moral duty.

We'll go for one more - now!

And within a matter of weeks, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure

had put together a Christmas single.

Britain's brand-new number one - Band Aid,

Do They Know It's Christmas Time?

# Feed the world... #

Whether Band Aid and Live Aid actually did any good

is still hotly debated.

But they certainly struck a chord with the British public.

And how much would you like to donate?

And if nothing else, they illustrated rock music's

extraordinary sense of moral mission.

Here we have the untapped power of rock music

and, let's face it, it has been untapped for 25 years or so.

It's all now been unleashed on behalf of one cause.

Live Aid was one of the defining events of the 1980s

and yet the impulses behind it were surprisingly old-fashioned.

Bob Geldof was effectively an updated version

of the Victorian philanthropist,

a moral crusader for the MTV generation.

Take the money out of your pocket. Don't go out to the pub, please!

Stay in and give us the money, there are people dying now!

So give me the money. Here's the number...

A century earlier, the Victorians had sent missionaries

out to Africa to save souls.

And in 1985, as this souvenir programme pointed out,

we were sending rock stars out on stage to save lives.

# We could be heroes

# Just for one day... #

That missionary impulse has never gone away.

From Comic Relief to Children In Need,

our cultural heroes can rarely resist a moral crusade.

But Victorian Britain didn't just send out missionaries

armed with their Christian zeal,

it sent explorers, driven by a thirst for knowledge and adventure.

This is one of the most extraordinary museums in Britain.

A collection of the weird and the wonderful

gathered by the Victorian explorer Augustus Pitt Rivers.

Today this museum stands as a monument to the curiosity,

the courage and the sheer love of adventure of the Victorian age.

And it's precisely those values that drive surely the best-loved explorer

in television history.

For more than 50 years, Doctor Who has taken us on an epic journey

through time and space.

# Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world... #

It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard,

and now it's turned out to be quite a...

quite a great spirit of adventure.

I spend all my time exploring new worlds

and seeking the wonders of the universe.

-But you don't know what's out there.

-Then let's find out!

Come on, let's explore.

For a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey,

the Doctor has an oddly predictable taste in clothes.

He might change his face

but never his style.

Whether sporting a fetching cravat or cricket whites...

There you are, good.

..the Doctor remains every inch the Victorian adventurer.

# Let me take you on a little trip

# My supersonic ship's at your disposal.. #

This is the story of an old-fashioned gentleman explorer...

..on a civilising mission to the darkest corners of the universe.

Would you like a Jelly Baby?

It's the story of an indomitable force for good,

who hates violence and always stands up for the underdog.

The ideal hero for a post-imperial age.

FUNKY MUSIC PLAYS

-I don't think we should interfere.

-Interfere?

Of course we should interfere!

Always do what you're best at, that's what I say. Now, come on.

But Doctor Who is not just the story of a liberal interventionist

gleefully meddling in alien affairs.

It's also the story of Earth's greatest champion

standing up to the threat of alien invasion.

When you go back to the stars and tell others of this planet,

when you tell them of its riches,

its people, its potential,

when you talk of the Earth...

then make sure that you tell them this -

it is defended!

But the fear of invasion is nothing new.

To the Victorians and Edwardians, the threat of invasion had seemed so real

that in 1905 they passed an Aliens Act to safeguard Britain's borders.

But, of course, when they talked about aliens they didn't mean

green-skinned body snatchers from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius.

No, their aliens, as they called them, were immigrants - Irish, Jews,

Chinese - flooding into the capital of the world's greatest empire.

-Don't I know you?

-I think not.

I've seen you somewhere before.

I understand we all look the same.

Like any other fictional hero, the Time Lord was,

if you'll forgive the pun, a man of his time.

Good evening, sir.

You know this young female, sir?

Oh, yes, yes, we were attacked by this little man

and four other little men.

And when I started watching at the turn of the 1980s

Doctor Who remained an essentially monochrome show.

You see, the Doctor, the Master, the Time Lords, the companions,

they all had one thing in common -

they were all almost exclusively white.

Yet even as I was cowering behind the sofa, Britain was changing.

By now, decades of mass immigration had begun to reshape our country.

And yet, for many immigrants,

their new home was not quite as welcoming as they might have hoped.

What of the present?

Too many families in houses designed for another age,

a high concentration of immigrants in miserable conditions.

Not surprisingly, people are trying to make their political voice heard.

REGGAE MUSIC PLAYS

For many of the immigrants who settled in Britain

in the post-war years, daily life was blighted by prejudice.

And what it produced was a cultural voice unlike any other -

raw and alienated and angry.

Far from meekly accepting the legacy of empire,

many of the newcomers' outspoken voices, such as the dub-reggae poet

Linton Kwesi Johnson, vigorously railed against it.

You say we are in for some "pretty dread times."

What exactly do you mean by that?

I think things will probably get worse for blacks in this country

before they can get better, because we've made some progress over

the last 30 years for ourselves,

we're beginning to establish some kind of permanency in this country,

and...there are various political forces which are trying to rob us

of the progress we've made over the years.

Inglan is a bitch

A noh lie mi a tell, a true

Inglan is a bitch

Y'u haffi know how fi survive in it.

But during the 1980s and 1990s, the outsider's voice

moved from the margins to the mainstream.

# Workin' so hard like a soldier

# Can't afford a thing on TV

# Deep in my heart I am warrior

# Can't get food for them kid

# Good God, we gonna rock down to Electric Avenue... #

By the end of the century, resentment at racial discrimination

had evolved into something rather more positive -

the celebration of diversity.

# Back to life

# Back to the present time... #

No longer the voice of minority Britain,

this was now the voice of modern Britain.

And it could be heard in everything from music and film

to literature and comedy.

Yes, it is me, Africa's leading Irish man, Katanga.

HE SQUEALS

# If you hurt what's mine

# I'll sure as hell retaliate

# I was looking, I was, I was looking

# To see if you were looking... #

And what drove this new multiculturalism was not

so much the moralistic lectures of Britain's politicians

as the moralising example of our popular culture.

And in the vanguard, yet again, was the Doctor.

Are you alien?

Yes.

-Is that all right?

-Yeah.

When the BBC relaunched Doctor Who for a 21st-century audience,

the producers turned it into a well-meaning advertisement

for a diverse Britain.

There we go, perfect landing!

The all-white casts of old were gone

and soon the Doctor had even acquired his first black British companion.

-What are you doing here?!

-I'm returning this.

-Thought you might need it.

-How did you...?

I heard the explosion, I guessed it was you.

In 20 years the voice of Britain's immigrant communities

had become a fundamental part of our cultural identity.

But Doctor Who's commitment to diversity goes well beyond race

or religion. Because no cultural phenomenon on Earth has done more

to break down the prejudices that for far too long have blighted

relationships between ordinary British women

and lesbian crime-fighting lizards.

'I can't do it. I can't.

'Be brave, my love.'

Back in the '60s and '70s, few people could have imagined that one day

Doctor Who would give us TV's first inter-species kiss.

Share with me.

What better example, though, of British culture's adaptability,

its inclusiveness, its moralising mission?

But while the Doctor grappled with sapphic reptiles

and the legacy of empire,

another enormously popular series of the early 1960s

had more mundane concerns.

Social change was remaking the landscape of '60s Britain

and at last television was catching up.

# It's my life and I'll do what I want

# It's my mind and I'll think what I want... #

One day in 1960, a young scriptwriter arrived at Granada Studios,

demanding to write about something new.

The story goes that Tony Warren was sitting up on the filing cabinet,

kicking his heels in frustration,

when his boss finally pointed out of the window and said,

"OK, write me a story about a street out there."

And this is what Warren came up with -

the very first episode of a new series called Florizel Street.

Now, if you haven't heard of Florizel Street, don't worry,

because they changed the title just before broadcast

after a Granada tea lady told them that it sounded like a disinfectant.

They called it Coronation Street

and, unlike so much TV drama of the 1950s,

this was a show about ordinary people leading ordinary lives

on an ordinary street in the north of England.

# It's my life and I'll do what I want

# It's my mind and I'll think what I want

# Show me I'm wrong... #

And that's because, like its creator, Coronation Street was the product

of an era defined by economic affluence,

free education and the welfare state.

# It's my life and I'll do what I want

# It's my mind... #

Tony Warren was a walking advertisement

for the new opportunities of Britain in the post-war years.

Born in a non-descript street in a Manchester suburb,

he was a grammar school boy

who'd landed a job as a TV scriptwriter by the age of 23.

And what he really wanted was to put his own experience on television,

to write about people like himself and to give audiences a show that

captured the new social realities of Britain in the age of opportunity.

# There's a crack up in the ceiling

# And the kitchen sink is leaking... #

At first, Granada's bosses were worried that a drama

about working class life would be commercial suicide.

All right, stand by, then, please.

But despite their misgivings, a trial series was commissioned.

And on December 9th, 1960,

the first episode flickered on to television sets across the nation.

CORONATION STREET THEME PLAYS

-Sauce, Kenny?

-No. No, thank you.

Aw, but I got it specially.

At the heart of the first episode is a confrontation

that perfectly captures the anxieties of the era.

-What's up?

-Nothing.

-What's that snooty expression for, then?

-What snooty expression?

Young Ken Barlow is studying for a degree

but his father is worried

that he might be turning into a bit of a snob.

Don't they do this at college, then?

-I bet they don't eat in their shirt sleeves, either?

-What do you mean?

Oh, I've been noticing you looking at me.

-I don't know what you're talking about.

-Oh, yes, you do - we're not

-good enough for you.

-Look, I never said a word and he starts.

The tension inside a family divided by social aspiration

would in 1960 have struck a chord at dinner tables

up and down the country.

As Tony Warren knew very well,

education and affluence were steadily eroding the old tastes and loyalties

of the British class system.

I wasn't born in Coronation Street, but it was there in my background,

my grandparents still lived in Coronation Street.

Looking back, I suppose at the time Kenneth Barlow was the nearest thing

to me. Strangely enough, it seems hard to believe nowadays,

Kenneth was the rebel.

Well, he said that yesterday and then again tonight.

Why do we have to have cups of tea with our food?

Well, I'll tell you for why, I like my food swilled down proper,

that's why.

But even though the Barlow family's anxiety feels like a reflection

of life in '60s Britain, it actually had a much longer pedigree.

A century earlier, Charles Dickens had imagined a very similar situation

in his book, Great Expectations.

Well, um, this is my friend, Herbert Pocket.

In the book, social climber Pip has an uncomfortable visit

from his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery.

Oh, beg your pardon sir, your servant, sir.

For Pip, newly trained in the airs and graces of polite society,

Joe's rather rough-hewn manners come as a considerable embarrassment.

-Sugar, Mr Gargery?

-Oh, er, thank you, sir.

Like Tony Warren, Dickens was fascinated by the texture

of working class life. And, like Tony Warren,

he was writing at a time of profound social change.

But Dickens' novels were far more than

hand-wringing social documentaries.

Dickens' genius was to find those telling moments

of tear-jerking melodrama

that would throw the anxieties of the age into sharp relief.

And it's Coronation Street's fidelity to that Dickensian formula,

social realism meets high melodrama,

that helps to explain its phenomenal popular success.

-But we don't need sewers round here...

-Aye, but there is

something wrong with a woman that can't hang onto her husband!

By gum, all this and the Sally Army, too!

On the show's first birthday, the Spectator magazine

argued that Coronation Street was consistently wittier, healthier

and quite simply better than any of television's

supposedly respectable series.

And the public clearly agreed,

for by now it was the most popular show on British television.

-Hello, love.

-Hello, Mrs Walker.

-You do look happy.

Oh. Er, can I have 20 cigarettes?

-Best?

-Please.

-Evening.

Coronation Street was soon playing a central part

in our national imagination.

Oh, I love it, I love it, yeah.

It typifies us, the north, doesn't it?

Just like life, let's face it, it's like an everyday life.

But I think one of the real keys to the extraordinary success

of the world's longest running soap opera

is the fact that it faces two ways.

Coronation Street is not just about the here and now.

It's always looking back over its shoulder to the reassuring nostalgic

certainties of the recent past.

At heart, then, Coronation Street is not so much social realism

as pure romantic nostalgia.

And in a world of dizzying change,

that was exactly what many people wanted.

But while Coronation Street offers us a rose-tinted vision

of Northern life, one of Britain's best selling authors

specialised in the opposite -

the violence and poverty of life in the working-class North.

One day just before the First World War,

a little girl called Katie McMullen came running into the kitchen

of her terraced house in Jarrow.

"Granda," she said, "Granda!

"You know that little man who that sits on the wall in Ireland

"no bigger than your hand? Well, I've seen him, Granda!"

"You know what you are, Katie?" her grandfather said,

"it's a stinking liar you are,

"but go on, go on, don't stop for one day it will get you some place,

"either into clink or into the money!"

# Dreamer

# You know you are a dreamer... #

And how right he was.

Katie McMullen rewrote herself as Dame Catherine Cookson -

a multimillionaire who sold more than 120 million books.

Hello. Our guest in Heroes this week is easy to describe.

She is simply Britain's bestselling writer.

# Oh-oh

# What a day for you... #

At the height of her success in the 1980s, a third of all the books

borrowed from Britain's libraries had her name on the cover.

And waiting lists for her latest titles

were more than three years long.

Despite her enormous popular success,

Catherine Cookson has never really had the respect

that I think she deserves.

Banished to the romance section of the library,

she is too often dismissed as Tyneside's answer to Mills & Boon,

all cloth caps and heaving bosoms.

Now, it's true that she was never afraid of a little bit of romance

or a heart-warmingly happy ending.

Here's the final paragraph of The Fifteen Streets -

"His arms, telling his hunger, crushed her to him.

"The faint perfume of her body mingled with the acrid smell

"of iron ore, and in the ever increasing murmur of his endearments

"and the searching of his lips her words were lost."

# I really need you tonight... #

Mary, if I had enough money would you marry me?

Yes, you know I would.

And when her books were adapted for TV at the end of the 1980s,

producers naturally played up the romantic angle.

# A total eclipse of the heart... #

But although romance is certainly a fundamental part

of Catherine Cookson's bestselling formula,

I don't think it should define her.

Because her books also offer an account of working class poverty

and ambition that is just as honest and as moving as anything produced by

Britain's great social chroniclers.

"My books," she once said, "are social histories of the north.

"Full of the bitterness of reality and no fancy frills."

There, in the north, are your characters.

All the substance,

all the love and the hate and the jealousy,

all the tragedy of life.

The sheer bleakness of Cookson's settings reflected the poverty

of her own childhood in Edwardian Jarrow.

And unlike Coronation Street

she never romanticised her working-class communities.

Set in the industrial heartland of South Tyneside,

her books are steeped in the sweat of hard labour.

# She weaves a story of her life... #

In Cookson's world, industry is a monstrous machine,

an endless cycle of low pay, unreliable hours

and sheer hard labour.

"It was funny," she once said, "but that was all life amounted to -

"working for food and warmth

"and when the futility of this was made evident,

"blotting it out with drink."

Her characters are exploited and expendable,

brutalised by a working world that drives some of them

to acts of shocking violence.

The world of The Fifteen Streets is often horrifyingly brutal.

With its uncompromising scenes of violence and abuse,

The Fifteen Streets lays bare the emotional cost of life

in industrial Britain.

And in that respect,

Catherine Cookson's really not so different from Charles Dickens.

Not just in her taste for sentimental endings,

but in her unsparing honesty about the dehumanising effects

of poverty on Britain's working classes.

But even as Cookson's books were chronicling the harsh realities

of industrial life, heavy industry itself was in terminal decline.

And by the 1990s, some writers were asking what would happen

to working-class communities when there was no more work?

MUSIC: Lust For Life by Iggy Pop

Choose life, choose a job,

choose a career, choose a family,

choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars,

compact disc players and electrical tin openers.

TYRES SCREECH

Trainspotting exploded into Britain's cinemas in 1996

and it captured the imagination of a whole generation.

Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance.

Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home.

Despite the controversy over its scenes of graphic drug use,

Trainspotting was more than just a film about heroin.

It was also about WHY so many people felt driven to take it.

Choose your future, choose life.

# Here comes Johnny in again

# With liquor and drugs... #

But why would I want to do a thing like that?

I chose not to choose life, I chose something else.

Set in the bleak estates north of Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh's book -

and the subsequent film - portrayed a world where choosing life

wasn't the most obvious option.

Welsh grew up on the Muirhouse estate in the 1960s

when heavy industry still dominated the local economy.

But by the 1980s, all that had changed.

50 years ago you go to Muirhouse

and it'd be pretty much the same, so pretty drab housing schemes,

not a lot there. But most people would have a bit of work,

and, you know, there'd be a chance to move into something different

and moving on, you know, whatever.

But now that's just been completely cut off,

it's become much more a kind of sort of ghetto.

By the mid-'80s, many of the people who lived here

were bereft of what Welsh called "the drama of work",

leaving them to seek their highs elsewhere.

"Workplaces," he once said, "are packed with narratives.

"If you're not getting them at the workplace

"then you're getting them on the street."

And what more compelling narrative

than the ecstasy and the agony of heroin?

When you live here, you've left school, you no got a job,

you've nae money, you're bored to death.

A lot of people take smack, heroin.

We stole drugs, we stole prescriptions, or bought them,

sold them, swapped them, forged them, photocopied them.

The streets are awash with drugs you can have for unhappiness and pain

and we took them all. Fuck it, we would have injected vitamin C

if only they'd made it illegal.

With its infectious soundtrack and jet-black humour,

the film of Trainspotting rapidly became a cult classic,

sweeping audiences along on its nihilistic thrill-seeking ride.

But I think the tone of the book is a little bit darker -

an unrelenting exploration of the moral extremes

to which desperate people are driven.

And nothing captures that better than, for me, the most moving scene

in the whole book, and one that doesn't appear in the film at all.

Our narrator, Renton, is walking with the psychotic thug Begbie

to his flat.

They pass through an abandoned station,

frequented only by drunks and addicts.

In the station they come across an old wino, bottle in hand.

"What are you doing, lads?" he says. "Trainspotting, eh?"

Begbie looks strangely uncomfortable

and it's then that Renton realises

that the old wino is Begbie's father.

A little later, they are walking down the road in silence and then,

"We came upon a guy in Duke Street.

"Begbie hit him in the face and he fell.

"The expression the guy had

"when he looked up at Begbie was more one of resignation than fear.

"The boy understood everything."

# Every day I spend my time

# Drinking wine, feeling fine... #

In his inarticulate anger and terrifying aggression,

the monstrous Begbie somehow speaks for a generation,

sentenced to life on the post-industrial scrapheap.

# Don't push your luck too far... #

And for all Trainspotting's humour and energy,

at its heart is a bleak honesty about life at the bottom.

# In a broken dream... #

What Irvine Welsh understood

was that for people living in emptiness and chaos,

the usual moral conventions just didn't apply.

If you've nothing else to live for,

why wouldn't you choose drugs and violence and crime?

And in that sense, I think Trainspotting IS a very moral book -

a book that squarely confronts the monsters

waiting to be unleashed when society loses its way.

Trainspotting passed a blistering verdict on post-industrial Britain.

But it also played on much older fears

of crime and violence and social breakdown.

The Victorians had been haunted by the fear of crime,

their anxieties fuelled by the rise of Britain's new industrial cities

and the shock of social and cultural change.

But what if the demons of violence and anarchy

broke out of the teeming cities

and into the heart of the gentle English countryside?

Welcome to the strange and twisted world of Agatha Christie -

the queen of crime.

Her books reflect a gnawing anxiety

at the fraying of the old social bonds.

You see, in the old days, everyone knew each other.

And if someone new came to the village,

then they brought letters of introduction.

They had either been in the same regiment or the same ship

or the same colony as someone already living in the village, you see.

-And that no longer applies?

-Oh, gone forever, I suspect.

MUSIC: Black Night by Deep Purple

For more than half a century,

Agatha Christie played on the fears of Britain's middle classes.

It all seems to me to be a most dark and sinister business.

And in order to reflect a changing Britain,

Christie began to rewrite the rules

of the Sherlock Holmes-style Victorian detective story.

# Black night is not right... #

Christie's first innovation

was to ditch her competitors' gentlemen detectives

with their pipes and monocles and old-school ties.

Her great detectives were outsiders - a Belgian immigrant...

Bonjour!

-..and an elderly spinster.

-Ah, the redoubtable Miss Marple!

Christie's killers very rarely leave a smoking gun.

Her murder weapons are rather more mundane.

A golf club, a paperweight, even a meat skewer -

this is murder by domestic accessory,

the violence of the 20th century brought into the heart

of the middle-class household.

# Got a black magic woman... #

For behind the genteel good humour...

Have you ever met a real criminal?

Ah, maybe.

..was a very dark imagination indeed.

SHE SCREAMS

For Christie's books don't just play on our fears

of a changing social order.

At their heart is an outstandingly pessimistic view of human nature

and of man's enduring capacity for evil.

I've long held that Miss Marple has

what I would call forensic intuition developed to the point of genius.

-Ooh, really.

-The result,

she tells me, of a lifetime's education in an English village.

Well, one does see so much evil, I fear.

In a changed and changing world,

Christie was quite brilliant

at tapping her readers' social anxieties.

Again and again the same theme - trust no-one.

And it's this wary, suspicious, even paranoid atmosphere

that hangs over her most successful book, And Then There Were None.

12 strangers are brought together for a house party on an island

just off the coast of Devon.

On arrival, they gather for a drink.

The butler puts on a record,

and then as the 1945 film version shows, the nightmare begins.

Silence, please!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your host, Mr Owen, speaking.

You are charged with the following crimes.

General Sir John Mandrake, that you did deliberately

send your wife's lover, Lieutenant Arthur Masefield, to his death.

Thomas and Ethel Rogers, that you brought about the death

of your invalid employer, Mrs Jennifer Brady.

SHE SCREAMS

Emily Brent...

By the time the message ends, each of them has been accused of murder.

From the doctor to the secretary, they all have blood on their hands.

And this, I think, is Agatha Christie's really disturbing insight.

We're all flawed, we're all sinners,

and, potentially, at least, we're all killers.

In an age struggling to explain man's weakness and wickedness,

Agatha Christie looked deep into the human soul.

To me, what makes Agatha Christie feel so enduringly modern

is her unflinching honesty about the nature of evil.

Or as she put it, the "lust for cruelty" within us all.

You know, you can walk into any bookshop today

and you'll find hundreds of blood-splattered thrillers,

but you won't find any author who's quite as dark and as clever

and as quietly effective as Agatha Christie.

What Christie's books also reflect, though, are the Christian principles

she'd learned as a girl in the last years of the 19th century.

But in the 20th century, those values would be challenged

by state-sponsored evil on a scale unprecedented in human history.

LOUD ARTILLERY FIRE

After the slaughter of the two world wars,

there could be no doubts about the depths to which humanity could sink.

The horrors of those conflicts

hung like a shadow over Britain's post-war culture.

And one book above all

reflected the 20th century's fascination with power and evil.

The Lord Of The Rings is a novel steeped in the pity of war.

Its author, JRR Tolkien, had seen action at the battle of the Somme.

By 1918, he said later, "all but one of my close friends were dead."

20 years later, with Britain poised to enter

a second and even deadlier world war,

Tolkien began work on his great epic of good and evil.

CROWD: Heil Hitler!

This was the age of the dictators,

in which rival despotisms were tearing Europe apart.

And at its heart,

The Lord Of The Rings is a book about the temptation

and the arrogance of power.

Tolkien's epic revolves around one of the great

symbols of evil in all 20th-century fiction - the ring.

Not just a magic weapon of incalculable power,

but the perfect metaphor for what Tolkien saw

as mankind's greatest flaw - our lust for supremacy,

not just over one another, but over nature itself.

In effect, the ring is the embodiment of that great Victorian saying -

"power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

MUSIC: Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin

For Tolkien, a devout Catholic,

the carnage of the world wars was a chilling reminder

of the darkness and the demons lurking within us all.

But The Lord Of The Rings is not just a book about the legacy of war.

Tolkien's story begins in the Shire,

a lost paradise of ancient woods and sparkling streams.

In the last years of the 19th century, Tolkien had grown up here

in the leafy tranquillity of the north Worcestershire countryside.

And in his loving description of life in the Shire,

we hear his hymn to rural England -

pastoral, peaceful and untouched by modernity.

These are limes.

However old they are, they are lovely green in spring.

I have always for some reason been enormously attracted by trees,

I should have liked to be able to make contact with a tree

and find out what it feels about things.

But in the last pages of his novel,

Tolkien presents a very different vision of the Shire.

Chimneys and quarries blight the landscape.

The trees have been felled, the ancient hedgerows destroyed.

For many readers, the scouring of the Shire feels a bit unsettling.

And, of course, the films left it out completely.

But I think it was one of the most revealing things Tolkien ever wrote.

His hobbits have destroyed the ring

and they have made their way back home and you think that it's all going to be

back-slapping and parties and dancing round the maypole.

But while they've been gone, their country has changed.

Their pastoral Eden has gone, a victim of industry.

At the heart of the new society is its brutal new water mill.

A temple to mechanical progress, wheels and contraptions,

smoke and stench all in the name of profit.

"It was one of the saddest hours in their lives.

"The great chimney rose up before them

"and they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness."

You could hardly want a more powerful metaphor

for the dangers of modernisation.

In a way, it's a very Victorian thought - the dark Satanic mill

at the heart of England's green and pleasant land.

But it's also a remarkably prescient warning

about the fragility of our environment

and about the heavy price that we're still paying for progress.

And for Tolkien, this was personal - a protest against the concrete

and tarmac that now smothered the Midlands countryside

he'd loved as a boy.

For me, the real enemy in The Lord Of The Rings is our shared obsession

with power and with progress.

Tolkien believed that in our technological hubris,

we were sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

And to Tolkien, the news of the first atomic bombs only confirmed

his belief that scientific arrogance would lead one day to catastrophe.

He was "stunned", he wrote, by "the utter folly

"of these lunatic physicists calmly plotting

"the destruction of the world!"

MUSIC: Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

Only one thing, he thought, would be left standing - "the Machines".

And that fear of technology takes us back to Victorian Britain.

The 19th century had been an age of extraordinary

scientific advances, from Darwin's theory of evolution

to radical new developments in medicine and genetics.

But while some people found progress thrilling,

others saw only the terrifying dangers.

Modernity, they argued, threatened the moral and physical health

of the human race, heralding a future of degeneration and decline.

And it's that fear that has inspired

some of post-war Britain's most chilling visions of the apocalypse.

A man wakes up in a deserted hospital.

Hello?

HELLO!

So begin both Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later

and John Wyndham's novel, The Day Of The Triffids.

There is, I think, something oddly unsettling about a hospital.

It's a place of safety and sanctuary, yes,

but it's also one of decrepitude, disease and death.

Where better to kick off a terrifying journey

into the darkest corners of the imagination?

And there's something else, too.

This is a temple to medical science

and in the debris abandoned on the hospital floor there is,

I think, a subtle clue to the origins of the apocalypse.

In 28 Days Later, it's our scientific curiosity

that brings civilisation down.

In a top-secret laboratory, scientists have deliberately

infected apes with a terrifying virus.

-The chimps are infected!

-Infected with what?

-In order to cure, you must first understand!

-Infected with what?!

Rage.

When animal rights activists try to free one of the apes,

the virus crosses into humans and practically overnight,

almost all of Britain's population

are transformed into slavering blood-crazed zombies.

You could hardly find a more visceral example

of a scientific experiment gone disastrously wrong.

Stop! You have no idea!

SCREAMING

And in The Day Of The Triffids, the premise is remarkably similar,

only this time, the scientists have delivered an oil-rich plant,

a Triffid, which turns into a man-eating monster.

Yet again, it is our thirst for knowledge that proves our downfall.

BOY YELLS IN PAIN

In both cases,

mankind faces a terrible price for trying to play God...

THROATY GROWLING

..which can only be paid in blood.

Man-eating plants and rampaging zombies

might sound a little bit far-fetched, but for me,

the real resonance of The Day Of The Triffids and 28 Days Later

lies in their chilling vision of a very British

and very domestic apocalypse.

'You carry your invention

'to a point where'

it is acceptable to your reader.

For instance, your English reader

does not care for the idea of spaceships.

I don't quite know why he does.

Your American reader loves spaceships.

As Wyndham knew, the more plausible your nightmare,

the more frightening it becomes.

And that is why 28 Days Later and The Day Of The Triffids

are much more disturbing than any big-budget Hollywood apocalypse.

Hello!

The premise that we could be eviscerated by ourselves, really,

is an absolutely plausible one. One of the reasons the film works, I think,

is that people do connect with it

to a kind of malaise they feel about life at the moment.

And certainly a kind of threat,

amongst ourselves as human beings of what we are doing to each other.

In both cases, the real architects of disaster are us.

It's our curiosity, our folly, our arrogance,

that brings down nemesis upon us.

Her birth caused a sensation -

Louise Brown was the world's first test-tube baby.

Many have been horrified by Dolly,

saying that this time scientists have gone too far

in manipulating the fabric of life.

For centuries,

British scientists have been at the forefront of progress.

But every new breakthrough awakens fresh anxieties.

What are the costs of our meddling with nature?

And at what point will we finally have gone too far?

And it's those questions that hang in the air as the heroes

of The Day Of The Triffids

and 28 Days Later wander through their abandoned cities.

It is, I think, no coincidence

that both open in an eerily empty London,

its streets deserted and its population vanished.

There could be no better symbol, after all, of the precariousness,

or the sheer fragility of our supposedly mighty civilisation.

And all this, you know,

would have struck our Victorian predecessors as distinctly familiar.

Today we tend to remember the 19th century

as an age of supreme cultural self-confidence.

And yet their imagination, just like ours, was haunted

by the anxieties of progress, and a dread of inevitable disaster.

Like the Victorians,

we live in an age of extraordinary social and technological change.

They grappled with the rise of industry

and the consequences of empire.

while we have had to confront the decline of British manufacturing

and the eclipse of British power.

But when it comes to our culture, we really haven't changed a bit.

We may like to pride ourselves on our fashionable modernity,

but in our dreams and our nightmares,

we still live in the shadow of the Victorians.

Next time - how British culture celebrates

the triumph of the individual.

Stories of self-expression,

self-realisation and sheer individual genius.