Me, Myself and I Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You

This idyllic seaside village,

perched on the northwest coast of Wales,

is a popular tourist town.

# Out in the country

# Far from all the soot and noise of the city

# There's a village... #

But for one man in the late 1960s, it became a living nightmare.

Where am I?

In the Village.

Who are you?

The new Number Two.

You are Number Six.

I am not a number! I am a free man!

LAUGHTER

The Prisoner was the ultimate cult hit.

A TV series about a secret agent who is kidnapped

and held captive in the mysterious Village - his name,

his very identity, erased and replaced with a number.

He is Number Six.

And from the Village,

there is no escape.

Wait, wait, stop! Turn back.

MAN SCREAMS

At the heart of The Prisoner is a simple but very powerful message -

repeated at the beginning of every episode.

I am not a number! I am a free man!

Then he must no longer be referred to as Number Six.

Or a number of any kind.

He has gloriously vindicated

the right of the individual to be individual.

The cult of the individual has been THE central

theme of our post-war culture.

From the celebrated actor

to the celebrity artist,

the bestselling author

to television's endless talent shows,

from pop stars...

to Popstars.

This constant emphasis on the value and potential of the individual,

on the importance of identity and self-realisation

feels excitingly modern.

But as with so much of our popular culture,

the foundations were laid by the Victorians.

Hello, and welcome to The Voice.

As the competition intensifies...

The coaches go all out to grab the best talent.

I want to be your coach!

# I got all my sisters with me... #

The Saturday night talent show.

A prime time orgy of highly personal successes...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..and crushing disappointments.

The BBC's version, The Voice, features gladiatorial

battle rounds in which ambitious young men

and women try to turn their talent into fame and fortune.

# Just beat it. #

APPLAUSE

The modern talent show is based on one simple, fundamental principle -

the idea that all of us,

irrespective of our education or our background

and armed with only a little talent,

can make something of ourselves.

As the judges are always telling the contestants,

all you need to do is to work hard and to believe in yourself.

# I am the one and only... #

You can go the whole way in, I'm not kidding you,

but you have to believe in your own talents.

# I am the one and only... #

The first thing you have to do is believe in yourself or you

won't get it across to the people.

You see, success isn't just about being able to sing -

it's about self-belief, self-confidence and sheer hard work.

As one guru put it,

"The difference between one boy and another consists not

"so much in talent as in energy."

But you know the man who said those words wasn't Simon Cowell or

indeed any other talent show judge

but a much earlier advocate of individual self-improvement.

In the early 1850s, the Scottish writer Samuel Smiles came here

to what was then the Mechanics Institute

at Woodhouse, in Leeds.

# Strange brew

# Killin' what's inside of you... #

He had come to give a speech to an assembly of local working men.

# Strange brew

# Kill what's inside of you... #

The lecture that Samuel Smiles gave here that day was entitled,

with typical Victorian directness,

The Education Of The Working Classes.

And what it reflected was Smiles' fervent belief

in the power of education and in the importance of self-fulfilment.

The central message was this -

every human being has a great mission to perform,

noble faculties to cultivate, and a vast destiny to accomplish.

MUSIC: Fame by David Bowie

As messages go, this was pretty powerful.

And in 1859, Smiles committed it to print.

His book was called

Self Help - With Illustrations Of Character And Conduct.

And appropriately enough, Smiles self-published.

Smiles' book was basically a series of examples of poor boys made good,

from the playwright William Shakespeare

to the industrialist Richard Arkwright.

But the Victorians loved it.

It sold a quarter of a million copies

and made Smiles a national hero.

And at its heart was a simple but very powerful idea -

that with the right ambitions and the right work ethic,

you could do anything.

MUSIC: Teenage Kicks by The Undertones

For Smiles, the foundation for individual success was very simple -

education.

Only education for all, he argued,

would give people the confidence to change their own lives.

-I'm going to stay on at school and try and get my GCE.

-Why?

Well, I think I'll have a better chance of getting a job

if I have that behind me.

And after 1945, Smiles' dream became a reality,

as post-war Britain provided more and more educational opportunities,

from grammar schools to universities.

But there was one particular part of our educational system

that stood out - a remarkable engine of creativity,

fostering some of our brightest cultural stars.

Could we have some quiet, please?

I've called this assembly because, as you probably know,

we are in a critical time for art education.

In September 1957, a precocious and perhaps rather self-absorbed young

man arrived here for his first term at the Liverpool College of Art.

From the very beginning,

he was determined to stand out from the crowd.

The other students all wore baggy jumpers and duffel coats,

but he was dressed as a teddy boy, with greased back hair,

a drape jacket, and drainpipe trousers.

Here was an ambitious young man

absolutely determined to make his mark.

# I'm in with the in crowd

# I go where the in crowd go... #

The young man was John Lennon,

soon to become the Beatle who was bigger than Jesus.

# And I know what the in crowd don't know... #

And the place where he began his long march to stardom...

was art college.

If there was one place that fuelled the young John Lennon's

burning ambition and rebellious individualism,

then it was art school.

But in many ways, that was what it was for.

The Liverpool College of Art had grown out of

the Liverpool Mechanics Institute - one of those

Victorian institutions for the education of working men.

Samuel Smiles himself had once given a talk in this building.

It was - and it remains - an institution devoted to giving

ordinary people a sense of self-worth and self-belief.

The art college has had a transformative

effect on our popular culture...

..producing an assembly line of talent,

and not just in the realm of fine art.

It has produced a roll-call of artists,

musicians and designers.

Jimmy Page.

Vivienne Westwood.

Jarvis Cocker.

Eric Clapton.

Brian Ferry.

David Hockney.

David Bowie.

Ray Davies.

Mary Quant.

Keith Richards.

Pete Townshend.

To name but a few.

I think art college was a place for working class teenagers who

had rejected a working-class future.

And what they fostered was a sense of self-belief -

of belonging to a new creative elite -

that was to produce some of the best-loved artworks, films

and music in our modern history.

And it was here that John Lennon began to pursue the one thing

he really cared about.

Himself.

MUSIC: Get Back by The Beatles

Lennon may have become famous as one quarter of The Beatles, but

he always seemed the odd one out, the most outspoken, the most angry.

Seems a bit silly to be in America and for none of them

to mention Vietnam, as if nothing was happening.

You can't just keep quiet about anything that's going on

in the world, unless you're a monk.

# Get back, Jojo... #

And the place that honed and strengthened his sense of

self-possession was art college.

The story goes that one day Lennon's tutor sent the class off to

paint Liverpool docks.

And when they all got back, they dutifully handed in their pictures

of the dockside in the style of LS Lowry or Stanley Spencer.

All of them, except one.

You see, John Lennon had decided to do something a bit different.

Lennon had painted a picture of a docker's boot.

You see, Lennon wasn't really interested in the

industrial landscape, and still less in the people.

What he saw was an opportunity to show off his singularity.

And it worked. Everybody knew John Lennon.

Everybody knew he was going to do something unusual,

something different,

that he had - in Samuel Smiles' words -

"a vast destiny to accomplish."

MUSIC: Come Together by The Beatles

Lennon left art school to focus on The Beatles.

But that single-minded drive, that individualistic streak that the

institution had instilled was never far from the surface.

In July 1968, John Lennon came here to

Mayfair, in London, for the opening of a new art exhibition.

The show's title was You Are Here,

and it was already the talk of the town.

But what made it so eagerly anticipated wasn't the

quality of the work, it was the name of the artist.

John Lennon himself.

This was Lennon's first foray into the rarefied

and sometimes frankly absurd world of high art.

MUSIC: Ballad Of John And Yoko by The Beatles

By this stage,

internal frictions were taking their toll on The Beatles.

And Lennon's relationship with the Japanese conceptual artist

Yoko Ono would see the musician move in increasingly strange directions.

As the highlight of the opening, John and Yoko released

365 white helium balloons,

each with an attached card inviting the finder to send it back

to the gallery with a handwritten message for Lennon himself.

The cards came back in their hundreds,

but the messages weren't quite what Lennon was expecting.

They laid into him for leaving his wife, Cynthia,

they savaged him for shacking up with Yoko Ono,

and they criticised him for his long hair, his money, his politics

and his artistic pretensions.

The message was clear - the man on the street wanted Lennon to

stop messing about, and get back to being a Beatle.

MUSIC: How Do You Sleep? by John Lennon

Alas, the man in the street was too late.

Lennon's course was set.

And a year later, he told the rest of the band that it was all over.

"I always wrote about ME when I could," Lennon once said.

"I didn't really enjoy writing third person songs.

"I like first person music."

Now he was free to pursue his obsession.

There was, I think, always a fundamental tension

between John Lennon's role as one of four Beatles

and his long-cherished self-image as a man apart.

And in that respect, perhaps, even being in the world's most

successful band was never really going to be enough for him.

You know, people often blame Yoko Ono for breaking up The Beatles.

But I think that Yoko or no Yoko,

John Lennon was always on his way out.

# As soon as you're born

# They make you feel small

# By giving you no... #

And his first solo album included the clearest expression

yet of his simmering, restless anger.

# Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all... #

No song better captures John Lennon's disaffected

individualism than Working Class Hero.

It's a bitter, blackly ironic description

of growing up in a society that demands convention and conformity.

And underpinning it is Lennon's fierce belief in the right

of the individual to reject the expectations of his elders.

"There's room at the top, they're telling you still,"

he says, "but first you must learn to smile as you kill."

# But first you must learn how to smile as you kill... #

The sentiment seems brutal.

But - like Lennon's streak of individualistic ambition -

it actually reflected a much broader cultural phenomenon.

# A working class hero is something to be... #

John Lennon was far from alone in his single-minded obsession

with making something of himself.

But he was a product of a very particular moment in Britain's

post-war history, when bright, young, working-class men,

determined that their lives would be different from their fathers,

were striking out for new horizons.

And this was a theme that dominated the books,

the plays and the films of the '50s.

Is that what you really want?

A clerk's dream?

A girl with a Riviera tan and a Lagonda?

That's what I am going to have.

# I'm so tired of working every day... #

The authors of these works became known as the Angry Young Men.

They included John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis

and the playwright John Osborne,

whose 1956 play Look Back In Anger gave them their name.

What the term captured was a very distinctive post-war mind set.

The Angry Young Men always hated the label.

By and large, they weren't angry, most of them weren't even young.

They were men, I suppose.

The Men.

Well, as labels go, it's not exactly very catchy.

What united them, I suppose, was their outlook.

Like John Lennon, writers such as John Braine and Alan Sillitoe

dreamed of throwing off the fetters of class, convention and community.

And it was precisely this restless, driving ambition that

propelled the heroes of their most successful books.

Look, Joe, there's the top. That's where the money is.

Lots of lovely houses up there, you know, Joe.

I'll have one of those.

I'm going to have the lot.

-LAUGHING:

-Oh, no you're not. Not in local government you're not.

Did you ever work it out, brother?

In 20 years' time, you could be sitting in Hoylake's chair,

and that's as high as you could go.

And that means a thousand a year, a semidetached down town

a second-hand Austin and a wife to match, if you know what I mean.

I know damn well what you mean.

That's why I am going to have the lot.

-HE CHUCKLES

-Oh, no...

Well, first of all, there has been a change from what

I once called a wet hero to the dry and reasonably...

reasonably tough hero,

but most important...most important of all,

at last, I mean, English novelists are doing

what the American novelist has always been doing.

And that is to say that they now feel themselves free to write about

any part of the country

and about any kind of person,

any class of person whatsoever.

And this is a definite advance.

MUSIC: The Boy With A Thorn In His Side by The Smiths

And the key to this advance was the new social landscape

of post-war Britain.

# The boy with a thorn in his side

# Behind the hatred... #

For working class boys like John Braine,

if they had the right talent

and they worked hard enough, there was now a way out.

# How can they look into my eyes...#

With grammar schools and full employment

came a growing sense of individual opportunity.

A sense that bright, working class boys and girls could do a lot better

than follow their parents into the factory or down the pit.

So this was an age not just of social mobility

but of unashamed aspiration.

The novelist John Braine was once asked about his great

ambition as a writer.

"What I want to do," he said,

"is to drive through Bradford in a Rolls-Royce with two naked

"women on either side of me covered in jewels."

MUSIC: Let's Stick Together by Bryan Ferry

But social mobility brought with it a growing tension

between the individual and the collective.

And it was this changing balance that would come to

define our modern culture.

The Victorian period had been the heyday not just of liberal

individualism but of the co-operative spirit,

symbolised above all by the new trade unions.

For Samuel Smiles and his Victorian contemporaries,

this ethos of collective cooperation,

of working together for the greater good, had been an important

counterweight to the idea of individual self-improvement.

But over the next 150 years, as our collective institutions began to

decay, so our culture focused more and more tightly on the individual.

THEY SHOUT INSULTS

In late 1984, the miners' strike had become one of the longest

and most divisive disputes in modern British history,

characterised by violent clashes between the police

and striking miners.

These men were fighting for their livelihoods,

for their very identity.

And it was against this violent, masculine backdrop that

one 11-year-old boy decided that his destiny lay elsewhere.

He would become a ballet dancer.

Regardless of what his family thought.

Ballet?

What's wrong with ballet?

What's WRONG with ballet?

It's perfectly normal.

Perfectly NORMAL?

I used to go to ballet.

See?

Aye, for your nanna. For girls. Not for lads, Billy.

Lads do football, or...

..boxing, or...

..wrestling.

Not frigging ballet!

Billy Elliot is the story of one boy's struggle to overcome

the expectations, the constraints

and the prejudices of his local community.

To leave these rundown streets in search of something better.

It's a funny and moving tale of individual self-expression

and self-realisation, worthy of Samuel Smiles himself.

Although when Smiles wrote that "every human being has a great

"mission to perform," I'm not sure this is quite what he meant.

MUSIC: Town Called Malice by The Jam

The film's turning point comes when Billy's father,

returning from the pub one night,

finds his son dancing in the local community hall.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

Instead of retreating, Billy dances on.

It's a wonderful scene.

Initially outraged by Billy's ambition to be a ballet dancer,

his father suddenly understands that his boy has a gift.

And that he has the chance of a better future

than a life down the mines.

The principle of the individual having - in Samuel Smiles' words -

"a vast destiny to accomplish" is the central,

driving theme of Billy Elliot.

But 40 years earlier,

another Billy was wrestling with a very similar idea.

In 1959, the journalist Keith Waterhouse had

published his first novel, Billy Liar.

It tells the story of Billy Fisher,

a young lad who grows up in an obscure fictional Yorkshire town

and dreams of breaking free of his family and of his class.

Now, for Billy Fisher, escape comes not in the form of ballet

but in the exaggerated fantasy world of his imagination.

For God's sake, Billy, why don't you tell the boring little man

where to stick his job?

And in his enduring ambition to move down south to London.

Because for Billy Fisher, London represents freedom.

"A man," he says, "can lose himself in London."

-Hello, Liz.

-Hello, Billy.

Billy's yearning for London becomes the crux of the story -

a point of deliberate contrast between Billy

and his free-spirited girlfriend, Liz.

-I've been offered a job in London, script writing.

-No!

Well, when're you going?

-Oh, soon.

-When's soon?

Well, as soon as I can manage.

It's a bit vague, isn't it? Why don't you go now?

Why, it's difficult.

No, it's not. It's easy.

You get on a train, and four hours later, there you are in London.

It's easy for you. You've had the practice.

MUSIC: London Calling by The Clash

For all Billy Fisher's daydreams, London remains eternally

out of reach - four hours by train, but it might as well be on the moon.

But 40 years later, Billy Elliot achieves what Billy Fisher -

and his own father - never could.

So what's it like, like?

What's what like?

London.

I don't know, son. I've never made it past Durham.

Have you never been, like?

Why would I want to go to London?

It's the capital city.

Well, there's no mines in London.

Christ. Is that all you think about?

# London calling

# I never felt so much alike, alike, alike. #

The two Billys effectively bookend the post-war period

and I think their different experiences are very revealing

about the changing balance between the individual and the collective.

Now, both Billys want to get on,

they both want to better themselves and liberate

themselves from the shackles of family, class and social obligation.

In Billy Elliot, the community is fracturing around him

and the old collective loyalties are rapidly disintegrating.

He knows, as we know, that they won't survive.

But Billy Liar was written in the 1950s, and Billy Fisher's community

is still strong - ultimately too strong for him to break free.

MUSIC: Every Day Is Like Sunday by Morrissey

Billy Liar ends at the railway station, where Billy has

arranged to join Liz, the girl he loves, on the last train to London.

For Billy Fisher, freedom is so close that he can almost touch it.

But then the moment comes and he just can't do it.

He can't bring himself to board the train.

The leap is simply too great.

But while Billy Fisher can't turn his dreams into reality,

Billy Elliot can and does.

And the reason, I think,

is that in the decades that separate the two Billys,

something has changed.

The old ties of class and place have come undone.

And so Billy Elliot is free, free to pursue his destiny as an individual.

MUSIC: Swan Lake Op 20

In the final scene of Billy Elliot,

a grown-up Billy steps on stage in London to play the lead in Swan Lake.

-Billy, your family are here.

-Thanks.

Watched by his father and brother.

In Billy Elliot, set at the height of Thatcherism

but made in the warm glow of New Labour inclusiveness,

the triumph of the individual - over apparently insurmountable odds -

provides the suitably uplifting climax to the film.

And so a joyous audience applauds the sentiment

that anyone can do anything.

But there is a less joyous side to Billy Elliot's triumph.

He may have escaped the constraints of class and community...

..but for the people left behind, the outlook was bleak.

With the collapse of industry came the collapse of community,

and the fraying of the old collective bonds.

In a colliery village, over the years,

we've all looked after each other.

And that'll go as people move away.

It's breaking up a community spirit.

MUSIC: Straight To Hell by The Clash

Millions found themselves abandoned on the scrapheap of unemployment.

The growing power of individualism in our culture -

and in our society - has come at a price.

But, for better or worse, it has been an unstoppable force,

transforming our attitudes not just to class and community

but to something even more personal.

MUSIC: Everybody's Talkin' by The Beautiful South

On the evening of 20th October, 1953,

Britain's finest stage actor was strolling home

after a late night dinner when he felt a call of nature.

# Only the shadows of their eyes... #

Ducking into a public lavatory,

he found himself face-to-face with a handsome young man.

Looks were exchanged. A glance. A smile.

And before he knew what had happened,

he'd been arrested for soliciting.

The handsome young man was an undercover policeman.

So the actor quickly gave a false name. Arthur.

Arthur...Gielgud.

Let me see.

As pseudonyms go, this was not a good one.

Not least in light of the fact that Arthur was John Gielgud's

actual first name.

Here hung those lips which I have kissed I know not how oft.

Where be your jibes now?

In fact, only months earlier, he had been knighted by the Queen,

becoming Sir Arthur John Gielgud.

Sir Arthur John Gielgud was charged.

The very next morning he attended Chelsea Magistrates' Court,

where he was fined ten pounds and ordered to see his doctor the moment

he left the courtroom.

Unfortunately for Gielgud,

a Fleet Street reporter was also in the building that day,

and he could scarcely believe his luck when he heard the most

distinctive voice in British theatre echoing down the corridors.

A few hours later,

the Evening Standard carried the news on its front page.

For Gielgud, it was a disaster.

In 1953, homosexuality was still illegal,

and it would remain so for another 14 years.

Public lavatories like this one were notorious cruising spots - places

where gay men could take their pleasures quickly and anonymously.

But they were also the target of regular police raids.

In the early 1950s, the police were making some 10,000 arrests a year.

For Gielgud, the public humiliation was almost too much to bear.

He even contemplated suicide.

At the very least, he thought, his acting career was over.

MUSIC: The Show Must Go On by Pink Floyd

'Arriving to the show is that great Shakespearian actor,

'Sir John Gielgud.'

Gielgud had just finished rehearsing a new play, A Day By The Sea,

in which he was starring opposite Dame Sybil Thorndike.

It was due to open here, at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool,

only days after his arrest.

The house was packed.

# Must the show go on? #

Gielgud stood here in the wings, waiting nervously for his cue.

And then the moment came, and he couldn't move.

He was paralysed by nerves.

On stage, Dame Sybil Thorndike saw him standing there,

and she strode across to the wings, grabbed him,

and whispered fiercely in his ear,

"Come on, John, darling, they won't boo me,"

and she led him out on stage.

# The show must go on. #

The response was overwhelming.

When Gielgud stepped out here, the audience gave him

a standing ovation.

The message could hardly have been more clear.

They didn't care about his private life,

they loved him as an actor.

APPLAUSE

For Gielgud, it was a moment of indescribable relief.

But it also had a wider significance.

John Gielgud was an early, and very reluctant, example

of a phenomenon which has become more and more pronounced over the years.

The increasing prominence and acceptance of gay performers.

From Stephen Fry and Rupert Everett to Boy George and Elton John,

I don't think there's any other country in which gay artists

and gay entertainers are quite as visible as they are in Britain.

Ours is a culture of tolerance, driven by individual talent.

It's all done in the best possible taste.

# You say you want a revolution

# Well, you know... #

And it is this cultural tolerance that has helped drive a wider

social tolerance.

If somebody says to me, "Are you gay?" - "Are you bent?"

is the used expression in the East End -

I'd say, "Yes, I am."

From the legalisation of homosexuality to gay marriage.

If you want a good example of the power of popular culture,

then just think about the actor Ian McKellen.

McKellen came out in 1988 to fight the Section 28 legislation

that effectively banned schools from promoting homosexuality.

McKellen was well aware of his influence as an actor.

"People," he said, "might take comfort that

"if Ian McKellen was on board, then perhaps it would be all

"right for other people to be as well, gay and straight."

In fact, I think the key figures in the fight for gay equality weren't

Parliamentary politicians, they were actors, artists and musicians.

Police in Los Angeles have confirmed that they've arrested the

singer George Michael on suspicion of committing a lewd act of...

45 years after Gielgud's brush with the law, George Michael was

arrested in a public toilet in Los Angeles

for the very same offence.

But his response, unlike Gielgud's, was neither despair nor shame.

Instead, he went on CNN to fight his corner.

And I feel reckless and weak for having allowed my sexuality

to be exposed this way. But I don't feel any shame whatsoever.

# Let's go outside

# In the sunshine... #

And for his very next single, Outside,

he filmed a deliberately provocative video.

# In the moonshine

# Take me to the places that I love best... #

He released it on an album with a truly inspired title.

Ladies And Gentlemen.

By the late 20th century, the Victorian ideology of liberal

individualism had evolved into an ethos of individual liberation.

Britain had entered the world of identity politics,

and the new emphasis on individual talent was eroding the old

prejudices about sexuality.

Or indeed, sex.

You know, the Victorians hadn't even given women the vote,

but it was their belief in ambition, hard work

and self-fulfilment that fuelled the rise of the independent woman.

Yorkshire.

"Glens shut in by hills, bluff, bold swells of heath...

"Long grass undulating in waves to the breeze."

This bleak landscape was the unlikely

inspiration for a very unlikely superstar.

Because these moors fired the imagination of a brilliant

young woman, and inspired one of the finest -

and best loved - works in all our cultural history.

An epic.

Written against the odds, and published in a society -

and an industry - dominated by men.

MUSIC: Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush

# Out on the wiley, windy moors

# We'd roll and fall in green

# You had a temper like my jealousy... #

In January 1978, Kate Bush released Wuthering Heights.

# How could you leave me

# When I needed to possess you... #

It took her to number one, making her the first woman to top

the British charts with a song she'd written herself.

She was 19 years old.

# Told me I was going to lose the fight

# Leave behind my Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heights

# Heathcliff, it's me, your Cathy

# I've come home... #

With Wuthering Heights,

Kate Bush had achieved something genuinely extraordinary.

It was a song utterly unlike anything else in the charts

in the late 1970s.

And it seemed to have come fully formed

from the mind of a teenage girl.

What was really remarkable about it, though, was the subject matter -

a haunting Victorian novel by the young Emily Bronte.

And it's very tempting to see the parallels between two young women -

separated by more than a century - defying prejudice and making their

mark through the sheer force of their talent and their self-belief.

The novel Wuthering Heights is a classic of Victorian literature.

A tale of love, loss and jealousy

set on the desolate expanse of the West Yorkshire Moors.

A novel about a young woman struggling to express herself.

Well, I saw a series on the television about ten years ago.

It was on very late at night and I caught literally

the last five minutes of the series where she was at the window

trying to get in.

Let me in.

No. For God's sake. Away.

Let me in.

It just really struck me, it was so strong.

Yeah, I read the book before I wrote the song

because I needed to get the mood properly.

# I'm looking for a hard-headed woman... #

What attracted Kate Bush to the novel was, she said,

the thought of this girl, "in an era when the female role was

"so inferior, coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff."

You know, when Emily Bronte published

Wuthering Heights in 1847, she was still only 29.

She was only able to do it by adopting a deliberately

ambiguous pen-name, Ellis Bell.

But while Bronte was writing in an era when women were often seen

but not heard, Kate Bush was riding the wave of '70s feminism.

The '70s marked a watershed in the battle for sexual equality.

By the middle of the decade,

almost two thirds of Britain's women were in the workplace.

MUSIC: Give Me An Inch by Hazel O'Connor

Do you like being the boss?

-Oh, yes, revel in it.

-SHE LAUGHS

And women were in politics...

..in popular culture...

Good evening, and welcome once again to Top Gear.

..and on our television screens like never before.

You devoted the whole of your life to improving the lot of women,

not just politically but socially, too.

I wonder what do you think of women's liberation?

There seemed no limit.

Kate Bush was in a position to demand control over her own destiny.

When her record company, EMI,

announced plans to release the song James And The Cold Gun

as her debut single, the 18-year-old Kate dug in her heels.

It simply had to be Wuthering Heights.

And so, it was.

A year later, she set up her own management and publishing companies

to ensure complete control over her own career.

And ever since, Kate Bush has made music entirely on her own terms.

# Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Unbelievable... #

She may have appeared a guileless young girl,

soon to be devoured by the music industry,

but beneath the innocent exterior, was a core of pure steel.

I think the main reason why they listen to me is

because I'm paying the wages and it's my music.

And I think they have enough respect for me, I hope, not to

turn around and say, "You don't know what you're talking about."

# They open doorways that I thought were shut for good... #

It has been this combination of single-minded ambition

and raw talent that has seen Kate Bush's career

flourish for more than 35 years.

# And get him to swap our places... #

# Here I go... #

And she remains the only female artist to have had

top five albums in the British charts in five successive decades.

# Going deep South

# Going down, down... #

Kate Bush is, for me, the outstanding example of perhaps

the most striking cultural trend of the last half-century -

the feminisation of our popular culture.

From her debut album, The Kick Inside,

to songs like Breathing and Army Dreamers, her music makes no

bones about seeing the world through the eyes of a woman.

And by the 1990s, when The Spice Girls turned

girl power into a gleeful, high-kicking marketing slogan,

the trend had become irreversible.

From our art and literature to music and even video games,

the female voice has become stronger and stronger.

And what I think underpins this feminisation of our popular

culture is that Victorian idea about individual self-fulfilment.

# Who cares if I wear heel trainers?

# Who cares if I like little girl games?

# Who cares if I run... #

Today, the principle of female self-fulfilment,

driven by education, ambition and self-belief,

has become one of the central pillars of our popular culture.

And Kate Bush's emphasis on a consciously individual, female

perspective has become a mainstay of Britain's music industry.

# I wear my mum's clothes Pretend to be old... #

This is the BRIT School,

which opened its doors in 1991 with a distinctly Victorian mission -

to nurture outstanding talent in the performing arts.

You know, the school motto really says it all.

Original, Responsible, Ambitious.

And what it's most famous for is its production line

of internationally successful solo, female talent.

# You had my heart and soul... #

Adele.

Amy Winehouse.

# We only said goodbye with words... #

Kate Nash.

# My fingertips are holdin'... #

Jessie J.

# It's not about the money, money, money... #

Katie Melua.

# This is the closest thing to crazy... #

Leona Lewis.

# I don't care what they say... #

Katy B.

# Oh, when we erupt... #

Imogen Heap.

# Who's getting scared now... #

Basically, Samuel Smiles meets Fame Academy.

# But not in the presence... #

And while the gospel of liberal individualism was making

Britain's popular culture more open and meritocratic,

so our culture, in turn, was sending a very clear message -

you can be whoever you want.

MUSIC: Who Are You? by The Who

And for some people, that was a genuinely life-changing idea.

In the years after the Second World War,

this little corner of East London had entered a long, slow decline.

But then, something entirely unexpected happened.

Fleeing war and genocide in their native Bangladesh

and dreaming of a better life here in Britain,

tens of thousands of Bengalis moved to London.

And they brought with them their language, their food,

their religion and their culture.

And at the heart of their new community was Brick Lane.

# Who are you?

# Who, who, who, who?

# Who are you... #

'More than 40,000 Bengalis live their closely packed lives

'in and around Brick Lane, in London's East End.'

Brick Lane is today synonymous with multicultural Britain.

East London meets South Asia.

But for many of the Bengali immigrants who arrived

here in the 1970s and '80s, there was a tension between the

expectations of their own - relatively conservative -

cultural tradition, and the apparent freedoms on offer in liberal Britain.

This tension between old and new was the premise

for Monica Ali's bestselling and controversial book, Brick Lane,

which was published in 2003.

It tells the story of Nazneen - a young Bengali woman whose

arranged marriage catapults her from a dusty village in rural

Bangladesh to a cramped council flat in East London.

The year is 1985, and Nazneen -

who speaks not a word of English -

finds herself adrift and alone, caught between the bewildering

cultural freedoms of her new homeland,

and the often stifling expectations of her fellow Bengalis.

Largely confined to her flat,

she finds imaginative escape by watching ice-skating on television.

Mesmerised by the grace, the movement, the freedom,

she begins to understand that her life could be different.

The novel's opening chapter describes how,

as a struggling new-born baby,

Nazneen was left to her fate.

Instead of taking her to hospital,

her mother allowed nature to take its course.

Now, Nazneen survived, but that theme of surrendering meekly

to your fate plays a central part in the novel.

"Fighting against one's fate," Nazneen says at one point,

"weakens the blood."

But in the course of the novel, she begins to discover that,

like the heroes of the great Victorian novels,

she can take control over her own story.

"She could not wait," says the narrator at one point,

"for her story to be revealed but had to make it for herself."

MUSIC: Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd

Brick Lane is about self-discovery and self-realisation.

It's about Britain - for all its problems - as a land of opportunity.

After all, in modern Britain, there have been few better

examples of individual drive, ambition and self-improvement

than among our immigrant communities.

As the story unfolds, Nazneen takes control over her life.

She has an affair with a much younger man.

When her husband decides to go back to Bangladesh,

she insists on staying in London.

And by the end of the book, she's even started her own business,

making saris with her friend Razia and supplying them to local shops.

For the first time, she is living entirely on her own terms.

Brick Lane also reflects a much wider cultural context.

Since the late 1950s, the experience of immigration has become

a central theme of our popular culture.

From novels and TV series like The Buddha Of Suburbia...

I am looking forward to this evening very much.

I very much want to learn about your culture.

Where are you from?

Bombay.

..to feature films like Bend It Like Beckham.

CHEERING

These works are often described in terms of a culture clash.

But they're richer than that.

They are about a sense of self,

how individual identity emerges from a cultural melting pot.

In the final scene of Brick Lane, Nazneen's two daughters and her

friend Razia take her ice skating,

something that she has dreamed about ever since she first came to England

and saw Torvill and Dean on TV.

And the book's very last words are the perfect encapsulation

of the idea that you make your own fate.

"Nazneen turned round.

"To get on the ice physically - it hardly seemed to matter.

"In her mind, she was already there.

"She said, 'But you can't skate in a sari.'

"Razia was already lacing her boots. 'This is England,' she said.

"'You can do whatever you like.'"

And this belief in the right to do whatever you like takes us

back to Samuel Smiles and his creed of liberal individualism.

At the heart of liberal individualism is a simple

but revolutionary idea

that individuals should be free to pursue their destinies -

men and women, rich and poor, black and white.

It's an idea not merely reflected in our popular culture,

but driven by our popular culture.

And by embracing this principle, Britain - from Samuel Smiles

and the Victorians to the writers of the 21st century -

has become a nation defined by its freedoms.

By the end of Brick Lane, Nazneen has overcome her fears

and her upbringing to take control of her own destiny.

And it's exactly that theme that lies at the heart of perhaps

our most celebrated cultural success story.

Edinburgh. Home of the Enlightenment.

University city to the young Samuel Smiles.

And home to a later writer who would come to embody

his principles of self-help to a quite astonishing degree.

The year was 1994, and in this Edinburgh cafe, the staff

would often notice a solitary figure sitting in the corner, nursing

a cup of coffee or a glass of water and scribbling furiously with one

hand and, with the other, rocking a pushchair with a sleeping baby.

It's an image that's gone down in our modern cultural folklore,

because the figure in the corner was JK Rowling and the furious

scribbling was her first book, Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone.

# Could it be magic now

# Now... #

Harry Potter became a publishing sensation,

making JK Rowling rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Hers is the ultimate rags-to-riches tale.

What was it like when you saw your first book in the shop?

That was the best moment of all.

Better than anything that has come since was seeing it,

and it was a real book, in a proper, real bookshop, and it was wonderful.

Today, the story of JK Rowling is very well known.

A single mother, living in an Edinburgh council flat

and - by her own admission - "as poor as it is possible to be

"in modern Britain, without being homeless,"

she is today our most successful living author.

And she did it by virtue of her own talent, ambition,

determination and sheer hard work.

"So far from poverty being a misfortune, it may,

"by vigorous self-help, be converted even into a blessing."

So said Samuel Smiles. And if he were updating his

Illustrations Of Character, Conduct And Perseverance for the

21st century, I rather think that JK Rowling would be top of his list.

Even her own comments about her success have a distinctly

Smilesean flavour.

You will never truly know yourself, or the strength

of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.

Such knowledge is a true gift,

for all that it is painfully won,

and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

There is in JK Rowling's story another nice echo

of the Victorian era.

Like the Bronte sisters, or George Eliot, who'd felt compelled

to publish their books under male pen names, Joanne Rowling

published as JK precisely to hide the fact she was a woman.

The feminisation of British culture had, it turned out,

only gone so far.

Little boys, according to her publishers,

are perfectly happy to buy books by men,

but they drew the line at adventure stories written by a woman.

At least, until they'd read them.

# Every little thing she does is magic

# Everything she do just turns me on... #

Having sold some 400 million books, JK Rowling is now worth more

than the Queen - with an estimated fortune of £570 million.

And the Harry Potter phenomenon has been good news for the British

film industry, too - with roles for almost every household

name in the business.

That was bloody brilliant!

Well, thank you for that assessment, Mr Weasley.

Harry Potter himself is the perfect symbol of self-reliance

and self-determination.

Like the young heroes of Victorian novels such as David Copperfield

and Great Expectations, he starts out right at the bottom -

in his case, sleeping under the stairs in shabby,

second-hand clothes.

There's no such thing as magic!

But like the great Victorian heroes, he never gives up.

And thanks to his character and his courage,

he defies the odds and emerges triumphant.

You know, you could hardly find a better advert for Victorian values.

Except, I suppose, for JK Rowling herself.

MUSIC: Virginia Plain by Roxy Music

And Harry himself is no longer just the hero of a bestselling

series of books.

He is now a global brand.

From feature films...

to theme parks...

..he has taken on a life far beyond his humble

beginnings in an Edinburgh cafe.

The story of Harry Potter and JK Rowling is not just a testament

to the power of individualism, both moral and materialistic.

It's also become an outstanding example of Britain's new

cultural patriotism.

It's through our culture that we now define ourselves.

And it's through our culture that the world now sees us.

A century ago, Britain was still a land of factories

and shipyards, of miners and dockers.

But the mines have closed and the docks have fallen silent.

One thing, though, roars on unabated, driven by the brilliance of

our writers and artists, our actors and musicians -

the greatest workshop of its kind anywhere on the planet -

the great British dream factory.

# Oh, I can't keep it in I can't keep it in

# I've gotta let it out

# I've gotta show the world World's gotta see

# See all the love Love that's in me

# I said, why walk alone?

# Why worry when it's warm over here?

# You've got so much to say Say what you mean

# Mean what you're thinking And think anything

# Oh, why... #