Knitting's Golden Age Fabric of Britain

SHEEP BLEATING

Britain is home to 32 million sheep.

And for centuries, we have relied on our four-legged friends

for wool to knit with.

But it was only in the 20th century

that knitting rose from a humble craft...

to the height of popular fashion.

Over six glorious decades from the Roaring Twenties to the 1980s,

knitting would become the staple of every wardrobe.

Well, I wonder if you've noticed the sweater that I'm wearing.

It's, I think, just about the chunkiest sweater I've ever seen!

Young and old,

male and female,

and in every style imaginable.

From hand knits made from real wool -

soft and fluffy, or a bit scratchy -

but also smooth knitted fabric made on machines,

and synthetic knits - colourful,

and even sexy.

You know where you are with knitting needles.

There's something safe, secure, and methodical,

and, at the same time, creative.

During this golden age,

the art of knitting would come to define Britain.

In days of leisure,

but also times of hardship.

We just knitted, and...

giggled and knitted and giggled some more and...

It was good.

It's a craft that has captured our national spirit.

I think that knitting is particularly British

because it's thrifty, it's hard work,

but also, it's great fun.

It's quirky, it's about sharing,

and it's full of humour.

This is the story of our nation told through two needles

and a length of yarn.

A golden age of British knitting.

For hundreds of years, the knitted jumper was a functional garment.

A working class staple - cheap to make, warm and practical,

worn by the army, sailors and fishermen.

One thing a knitted jumper was not...

was fashionable.

JAZZ MUSIC

All that was to change in the 1920s,

with a new generation of bright young things,

who wanted to put the misery of the First World War behind them,

and begin a new age of fun and frolics.

And it all started with one man.

The pin-up of the age -

the Prince of Wales.

This was the '20s - people were looking for colour, fun,

and generally more relaxed living.

I think the Prince embodied this youthful spirit.

And so he was extremely popular as a prince.

He was considered to be very handsome, although he was minute,

and, of course, photography was getting better

so the newspapers carried reports on him.

And everyone could go to their cinema

and they would see news programmes of the prince

on these royal tours that he went.

And he really was a breath of fresh air,

and people adored him.

On 27th September, 1922,

the Prince of Wales stepped out

on the golf course at St Andrews in Scotland,

in front of a huge crowd.

All eyes were on his outfit -

knickerbocker trousers

stuffed into socks,

and on his head, a cloth cap.

But it was what he wore under his tweed jacket

that was to cause a sensation.

A Fair Isle jumper...

later immortalised in a painting.

With its bold geometric pattern,

no-one had seen a jumper quite like it in society,

let alone on a prince.

Made on a remote Scottish island

and entirely hand knitted,

this was a fisherman's working garment,

reinvented as high fashion.

It was quite startling to journalists

and fashion commentators at the time.

Almost vulgar in its brightness,

and in the way the knitwear

offered a sense of informality

that was quite shocking but very, very chic.

So, what Edward really did was he brought the comfort

and the functionality of knitwear

into a fashionable context.

The Prince's wardrobe choice

was to put Fair Isle,

a tiny remote island off the north coast of Scotland,

firmly on the fashion map.

In the 1920s,

the islanders were flooded with new orders

for their hand knitted jumpers.

But making a jumper was hard work.

The whole process - from plucking the fleece

to spinning the yarn - was done by hand.

Knitting was an income,

it was a livelihood,

it wasn't done as a hobby

as it might be done now.

It was done to supplement the subsistence incomes

they had from farming and fishing.

And so they would take every opportunity to knit,

because it was very precious time to be spent,

so they really had to knit as fast as possible.

They could knit whilst walking along,

and so they were never idle, and their hands were always working -

whether they were walking or tending to flocks.

So they were really doubly employed a lot of the time.

And the knitting of the Fair Isle jumpers from the '20s

became so fashionable,

this was a real income for them.

Fair Isle has its own unique style -

hard-learned and complex to do.

Always a lovely knitter - so even!

I learnt to knit egg cosies.

You got three and sixpence each when you sold them,

so that was the pocket money.

And it was the four of us together.

It's not just an island tradition, but a family one -

passed down generation to generation, mother to daughter.

Fair Isle knitting is a very clever way

of creating very complicated colour patterns

but working just with two colours in a row at a time.

I'm holding the two colours in my right hand -

alternately, I'm knitting three stitches of the cream,

and then one stitch with the brown colour.

Three of one colour, one of the second colour in this row.

And that will change row by row,

so that I can then create the colour pattern.

The colour which isn't being knitted at the time,

it waits until I need it next,

and then I have to knit that loop

and by bringing it forward, it creates a strand.

And it also makes the fabric very thick and warm and cosy,

and that was something that in Fair Isle they really needed.

And the first Fair Isle items were actually hats and gloves

and scarves, before they did sweaters.

After the Prince, it wasn't just Fair Isle that became popular,

but hand-knitted jumpers of every kind.

What you see in countless photographs of the 1920s

of middle class and lower middle class men

is the mass adoption of knitwear.

Jumpers and socks made at home,

with love, become acceptable presents.

So, you suddenly see the man's wardrobe,

the husband's wardrobe,

the son's wardrobe,

transformed by this knitting craze.

And knitwear wasn't just about jumpers.

There were knitted vests,

long johns

and women's all-in-ones.

Chief of the knitted underwear industry

was Derbyshire company John Smedley.

With a history stretching back nearly 230 years...

today, it's the oldest factory in the world still in operation.

John Smedley still makes some of its garments on knitting machines

similar to the ones used for underwear in the 1920s.

Operated by hand, machine knitting is a skill in its own right.

First of all, you have to set the width of the garment

that you're starting at.

That is done with the levers on the end.

You can select "widning", which is to widen,

or "narrowing", which is to narrow.

You put the bar in.

And we put weight on it.

Then on an outergarment, we'd normally have 12 plain courses.

So you would do

one,

two,

three,

four...

That counts the courses.

In a garment you might have, say, 269 plain courses.

A lot of knitters could actually keep count in their head,

but you've only got to let your concentration wander

and you're thinking, "How many?"

Some of the original underwear is still kept in the mill's archives.

One of the other great advantages of being able to knit garments

is you can shape them to fit -

what we call fully fashioned fit.

And Smedley was doing that from quite early on.

So you can see on these garments, you can see evidence of them

shaping the leg or the arm

or the body,

and for the breast gores, as they're called,

you can see they were capable of shaping the garment to fit.

So this means that they're very comfortable.

And, of course, they have to be worn in combination with corsets.

So something like this would sit very comfortably under that.

And it did enable you, obviously,

to have something you could wash and change frequently

because the outer clothes weren't washed or changed so frequently.

And, of course, these garments enabled people to survive in houses

which didn't have central heating.

When you're wearing a garment like this,

there are certain practical details which have to be remembered.

And right up until the 1920s,

women wore undergarments with open gussets,

because they had long skirts

and for simple practicalities, you needed relatively easy access.

But the world of machine-knitted fabric was about to explode.

The fine knit material so suitable for underpants and long johns

had attracted the attention of a woman

who would become one of the most famous designers in the world...

..Coco Chanel.

The woman's wardrobe would never be the same again.

Coco Chanel, of course, is somebody

who is really credited with bringing

modern dressing for women to the fore.

And she was very much about comfort and relaxation and wearable clothing.

She worked with a lot of British knitwear companies

to produce knitted suits and lots of jersey garments within her designs.

Really, knitwear provided a revolutionary way of dressing,

because it meant that soft separates were available for the day,

and women were no longer constrained

to tightly tailored and corseted garments.

So it's really the beginning of the modern way of dressing.

Chanel was the first to introduce the idea of wearing jersey layers,

which would become the basis for that quintessential British look -

the twinset.

A matching jersey and cardigan... worn with pearls.

It's really a code of dressing that's actually incredibly hard

to get right and incredibly hard to read.

You either end up looking like a prim Sunday school teacher...

or you can look like the most glamorous thing

that's wafted in from the Continent.

Chanel sort of played with those extremes, I think,

and it's a look that British aristocratic women

are very good at pulling off.

In the 1930s, the British had started to lead

a more active lifestyle -

having discovered the health benefits of the great outdoors

and the sun.

You get a new enjoyment of the body and of exercise,

so people are getting outside, they're stripping off.

So all those thin fine undergarments suddenly become outer garments,

and there's something about the pleasure of wearing light layers

that knitwear gives.

Casual sportswear was now such big business

that even traditional underwear companies broadened their range

to make fine knitted tops and leisurewear.

Knits were everywhere... even at the beach,

where the epitome of style was a knitted bathing costume.

WOMAN: This specially woven bathing suit is the very latest for the beach,

and has marvellous sea and sun-resisting properties.

-MAN:

-What's it made of?

Wool, if you must know. Wool!

You know, sheep's hair.

-I say, doesn't she knit fast!

-Quite!

Everybody, really, was wearing them who went to the beach.

It was an extremely popular pastime.

Swimming, as well as all other sports,

had become a hugely fashionable thing to do.

And, of course, for ladies -

they wanted to still look glamorous when they went to the beach.

They were all very fitted

and all were built with what is called "negative ease",

which meant they were all supposed to be smaller than the person wearing them,

so they were very tight and clinging.

Lots of women knitted their own swimsuits in the 1930s.

Using an old pattern from the time,

Susan has recreated one of those original costumes.

This garment here...

is a swimsuit from 1932,

and it's known as Call Of The Sea.

The shorts are built in,

and then it has a skirt over the top,

and then it has these little built-in straps,

and it's got a seagull on the front.

The biggest problem we're aware of with knitted swimsuits of the time,

is the thing that everybody knows about, which is

when you go in the water and you immerse your swimsuit in the water,

the swimsuit does not stay on your body -

it sinks from your body and holds all the water.

So when you try and come out the water,

your swimsuit doesn't want to come out with you!

So today I have got a model friend of mine, Fleur,

who's a very brave young lady,

and she's going to try on this swimsuit,

and she's actually going to go into the sea behind us.

And we'll see what happens to the swimming costume

when she comes back out the water!

It's a little bit heavy.

Erm, not too bad.

Not a lot of support in this area,

but I think I could've lived in the 1930s.

It definitely wouldn't have stopped me going to the beach.

The 1930s knitted swimming costume

is probably the most glamorous swimming costume that you can wear.

And I, for one, think we should bring them back!

But the carefree days of holidays and leisure were drawing to a close.

Now knitting would move from popular fashion to basic survival.

AIR RAID SIREN

From the earliest days of the Second World War,

knitting would become an obsessive occupation through the dark hours

of hardship and bombing raids.

In long-standing community clubs,

there are people who remember those days only too well.

These women knitted during the war as teenagers.

And haven't stopped since.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Dot Bradnam was first taught to knit aged six,

and is still at it, more than eight decades later.

Well, apart from anything else, it's lovely to see something grow.

"I did that", "I can have that", "So and so can wear that".

I used to love it.

And I used to be able to do it an awful lot quicker.

It's nice, knitting when you've got a nice colour.

It makes a difference.

Penny Gabb remembers knitting during the war at home,

with her mother and sisters.

We used to knit in the dining room,

all crouched around the electric fire to keep us warm,

and we used to have, maybe, the wireless on at the same time,

and a round table,

and we just knitted.

And giggled and knitted and giggled some more, and...

We all sat as close to the heater, to the fire as we could,

so the front of our legs was always bright red and burnt,

but the backs were so cold.

It was very cold in the war.

Very, very cold.

I think knitting was vitally important during the Second World War.

It was a really sort of important recreation,

so if you were spending hours on end at night in an air raid shelter,

or in your home with a blackout - not a great deal to do,

you couldn't really go out as such,

so I think it was a very important thing to do,

to keep yourself occupied, really.

It was a sort of social activity, as well.

Knitting was vital for the troops.

They needed lots of warm woollen clothes,

and hard-pressed factories couldn't keep up with demand.

So women and children knitted them so-called "woollen comforts" of every kind.

Oh, Lord, yes.

I can remember Mum teaching me to do socks.

We'd sit and do socks.

And that was quite fun.

Oh, no, we did knit masses of socks.

Balaclava helmets, gloves... Gloves, socks galore.

Masses of them. And scarves!

I nearly forgot the scarves.

Terribly monotonous.

Soul destroying.

Knitting for the troops got so huge

that people from every walk of life joined in.

'Twice a week the Queen joins the ladies

'in the blue drawing room of Buckingham Palace

'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!'

Everybody wanted to feel they were doing their bit,

and really helping the war effort.

And knitters were a big part of that

because knitting, whether for the troops and knitting comforts,

or knitting for your own family,

you're still doing your bit, and really helping Britain.

Soldiers too were taught how to knit.

And it came in especially handy when they were captured by the Germans.

An extraordinary collection of jumpers

still survives in the Imperial War Museum.

Hand knitted by British prisoners of war.

This jumper was made by a prisoner of war called Ronald Eastman,

and one of the things we know about him was he was a handicraft teacher

before the war, so probably knitting was something

that he was already skilled at.

It does look like it's been very well made.

It's got different stitching around the collar.

It does look like a very nice jumper to wear.

The other thing we know about him

is that because he was skilled in all sorts of craft activities,

he was actually used for forging German documents in the camp

which were used in escape attempts.

So, obviously, a very skilled individual.

This jumper again looks like its been made out of scraps

of different wool because the colour varies,

the sleeves have these different coloured bits at the shoulders

and down the arms.

It's also possibly been made by a prisoner whose knitting skills

weren't up to the level of some of the others,

because it's a little bit uneven

in that one of the arms is a little bit longer than the other.

This jumper was made by a prisoner of war called James Graham.

And we know that this jumper was actually made by using a pair of homemade needles.

He made them out of a Red Cross box.

But obviously he's still managed to make a very skilful job of it

despite using improvised materials and equipment.

All the jumpers look like they'd be really nice to wear.

They look like they'd be very warm.

And I'm amazed by the level of detail that's gone into them -

like the stripes on this one,

the cable knit on the one over there.

I'm always impressed by anything made by a prisoner of war,

they showed such ingenuity and skill,

and often in very difficult conditions

with only improvised equipment.

As the war dragged on,

the wool supply in Britain virtually dried up.

So the Government introduced the Make Do And Mend campaign,

to ensure clothes had a longer life.

The greatest enemy in this particular battle

wasn't the Nazi bomber...

..but the moth!

MAN'S VOICE: The eggs have hatched and they've started chewing their way

through tweed and twill, worsted and wool.

But stop - you can still win!

Get busy at once, let the air in, let the light in,

brush your clothes, shake 'em,

beat 'em, hang 'em out in the sun.

People were also told to recycle their old wool.

When a knitted item wore out,

you just pulled the whole thing apart.

You used to sit, pulling it apart,

and wind it into a skein.

Wash it, and wrap it round a ball while it was absolutely wet.

And sort of hung it till it drip-dried.

Then we had to knit it all up again.

We had to recycle it.

I can remember sitting with Mum like this.

All the bits that were all right, we used again.

I'd forgotten that!

Lots and lots of bits and pieces were reused,

so two-colour knitting came back big style.

Things like Fair Isle were very popular

because it only involved small amounts of different coloured wool.

Sweaters got shorter and tighter,

because, of course, you were re-knitting a lot,

so you didn't have quite the same amount of yarn

as you might have done.

When the war finally came to an end in May, 1945,

relief and joy were universal.

The country was in a mood for change.

The newly elected Labour government promised comfortable new homes

and free healthcare for everyone.

Women now put war work behind them, and focused on the home.

The post-war years brought a baby boom.

And who better to knit for than your little one?

There was a real move towards domesticity

and a focus on the family.

And knitting, of course, is very much about love,

and nurturing and protecting.

So, ultimately, knitting became something that demonstrated

firstly, housewifery skills,

but it also demonstrated how good a mother you were going to be.

In a time of austerity and rationing,

the art of making baby clothes would reach new, exalted heights.

This is a small collection of matinee jackets and cardigans.

They're very beautifully made, these cardigans, they're very fine.

They require special skill to do the fancy patterns,

and the edgings and so on.

So, they're really, um, a labour of love, I suppose.

This one is particularly fine,

because it has the little bits of embroidery here,

and the little lace motifs, and a little smocking detail here, which is rather nice

and gives it its fullness.

And knitted in very fine yarn -

it would take a long time to knit something like this,

on very fine needles.

And this little group is some toys from the 1950s.

And this is what women would have done with leftover scraps of yarn,

odd ounces, and so on.

And it was a way of both using up that wool,

and providing children with play things, of course.

This little doll has the most gorgeous knitted outfit,

which is beautifully, beautifully made,

with the little dress

and little coat,

two little tiny booties,

and then even a little knitted pants and vest.

There was no end to women's ingenuity with odd scraps of wool,

especially when it came to making presents for family and friends.

Women could buy patterns to knit fancy cosies

for the teapot...

in every design imaginable...

..to adorn bathroom items...

the husband's golf clubs,

not to mention the family dog.

There was even an elaborate knit for your favourite tipple.

Ah, the knitted poodle cover is one of the icons of the 1950s.

It's a very beautiful and delicate object,

which is intended to go over a bottle of alcohol.

And it ties in with the idea of exotic holidays,

predominantly American culture,

and, you know, those Elvis Presley movies and the Hawaiian shirts,

and all of that kind of exoticism that one wouldn't normally see in the UK.

If you weren't sufficiently skilled to knit a baby bonnet or a tea cosy, help was at hand...

..for this was the golden age of the women's magazine.

I think the magazines were important to women of the time because

they reflected this sense that being a housewife was a proper job.

It wasn't something that they did just as a leisure activity.

It showed them how to clean properly,

how to look after the family,

lots of articles about what to do

if you're worried about your children, and recipes,

and things that made them feel part of a club.

All the magazines had a sewing page and they had a knitting page.

And judging from the number of magazines that I've found

that had the knitting pages torn out of them,

it appears that knitting was very important.

This is Woman's Own from Thursday, September 15th, 1955,

and if we turn to the knitting pattern, that's about halfway through,

through past some fictional stories, some romance,

we get to "plain and patterned."

And this is a picture of a very complicated-looking pink jumper.

Apparently, it's easy to knit.

It has an open work medallion pattern,

which is worked on the front of the jumper only, and the back is

worked in an unusual rib design, so it's really quite complicated.

The insert picture shows a girl wearing it, having made it,

and there's a man on a telephone, who is ogling the young lady.

But certainly the jumper seems to have struck the mark somewhere.

In terms of knitting for your man,

there are the classic sort of chunky knits,

but also some waistcoats which look absolutely horrendous, I have to say.

And socks, which had very complicated patterns,

so again, it really shows the skill these women were expected to have.

New automatic home knitting machines promised a new age of convenience.

But it wasn't always that simple.

It looks easy, but, actually, it's very technically difficult.

The yarn has to be hooked onto each piece,

and also, it's very labour intensive.

Because it's like doing vicious ironing.

So it's like this, and its very wearing,

and although people said you could make a dress in 85 minutes,

I think anybody would be hard-pressed to do that.

I think a lot of knitting machines were

given as gifts from husbands to wives.

And I imagine most of them weren't opened and remained in their boxes.

Even without the aid of a new fangled machine,

women were reaching ever higher levels of sophistication in their knitting.

A small book from the time gives a tantalising glimpse

into the skill of the '50s housewife at her craft.

This is really an amazing book of stitches, stitch patterns.

And there's a huge range of them, and they're absolutely fantastic.

This page has got three samples on.

The first one is cloud souffle stitch,

which I think is rather a nice name.

And this is called candlelight stitch.

So this is quite an intricate stitch, which actually you can see

there's a lot of decreasings and increasings within the pattern

to make sort of leafy shapes and... I suppose it's like candle flames.

But then the other half of the swatch shows that

it's also been beaded, and that would mean beads were threaded in

because they would always knit the beads in -

they don't sew them on top - so they have to be threaded onto the yarn

and then pulled up at the right place.

All of these would have been complicated and also time-consuming

to achieve, so they were working at the highest level.

But the gentle domesticity of the 1950s was about to be shattered.

Now, knitwear would get sex appeal.

# Well shake it up baby now Shake it up baby

# Twist and shout Twist and shout. #

This is one of the Beatles first TV appearances for Granada Television.

It's 1963 and they've recorded their debut album

and they are a band on the way up.

They are wowing audiences all over England.

And this is one of the first times that Britain as a country

has sat down and seen this group

they'd started to hear quite a lot about.

And the fact that for this very important show,

they are wearing black roll neck sweaters, means that thousands

and thousands of young people will yearn to look like John, Paul, George and Ringo,

and to do so, they will go out and buy roll neck sweaters.

Beatle fans picked up on the roll neck very quickly,

and you can see the popularity of this and how clever they were,

because they started a fan club called Beatles Monthly,

which was growing at an incredible pace.

And the first thing they offer to their fans to buy

is a roll neck sweater with a little inscription with the Beatles on.

It was in one size so that all girls could wear it,

and boys could as well.

So it's just very significant that that is the very first thing

they're offering their fans, you know, a roll neck sweater.

Just as the Beatle boot was associated with the band,

the Beatle haircut, so the roll neck sweater.

And sales would have soared, absolutely soared - if you were

manufacturing roll neck sweaters in 1963, you had a very good Christmas.

And it wasn't just the Beatles.

The characters who tended to wear the roll neck sweater

were kind of antiheroes, such as Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

Um...they were cool, as in Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

And he was somebody who was using the roll neck sweater

to disassociate himself from the past,

from the tie and the shirt and the suits.

That was gone now.

Now we had a younger, new model.

Cool, reserved, antihero, intelligent,

and, of course, devastatingly attractive to women.

Thank you.

'He doesn't say a lot in Bullitt.'

People in roll neck sweaters don't say a lot, you know.

They let their jumper do the talking.

And if men had the roll neck, women had the sweater dress.

A virtual uniform for young girls in the '60s.

The look was finished off with a pair of long knitted socks

or patterned tights.

And queen of the '60s mini-dress was designer Mary Quant.

She was very aware of the possibilities of jersey and knit,

and often incorporated knit in her designs.

For example, we have this fantastic dress in the V&A collection,

which is a mixture of a woven fabric,

but also, it has wonderful hand-knitted sleeves

and a patterned neckline.

The '60s was a time of liberation,

with people embracing exciting new fabrics and man-made synthetics.

And that went for knitwear, too.

The introduction of synthetic knits and textiles in the 1960s

are incredibly important.

I think one of the big challenges with knits

that we all might be familiar with is they're very difficult to wash,

and that they take ages to dry.

With synthetic knits, of course, you can now buy

cheap, washable, durable knitted garments

that last much longer.

And it allows, for example, Lurex or elastic

to be knitted into the fabric

and to produce a much more figure-hugging, shiny,

patterned, brightly-coloured sense of knit

that's far sexier, far more clinging

and far more visually startling.

This, of course, is the era when new forms of dance

and the introduction of the disco

allow knitwear to take on a new role, to take on a new image.

Creativity knew no bounds.

And now, knitwear would become art.

These are art sweaters by Ritva.

And Ritva was a label that was established in 1966

by Ritva Ross and her husband Mike Ross.

And subsequently, they produced this line of art sweaters.

Each of the sweaters are made by different artists.

This one is by Elisabeth Frink.

And as you can see, on the label, it says 100% acrylic.

Which today, um...is obviously not a covetable material as such,

but at the time, acrylic was a great new fabric

and people were really interested

in the fact that it had a washable property.

This sweater here is by David Hockney.

Of course, at the time, he was known for his paintings of California.

These wonderful blue skies

and a lovely palm tree in the centre.

This is by Allen Jones, an artist who's known for his sculpture

and furniture featuring figures of women,

and also his reference to bondage and sadomasochism.

This features a leather-clad boot,

which comes out of a spiral central motif.

Each sweater came as a limited edition

and had the limited number worked into it,

and also came presented with a Perspex box

that they could be placed in and then hung on the wall.

There was one particular artist who treated knitting like painting -

as a canvas to experiment with colour.

Kaffe Fassett.

An American-born male model and artist,

Fassett had moved to Britain in the '60s.

He was first inspired to take up knitting

by the colours of the Scottish landscape.

As I was travelling across Scotland for the first time,

it was such an ancient palette,

and I thought, here are these beautiful colours.

So I grabbed 20 colours, jumped on a train,

asked a woman sitting across from me, "Do you know how to knit?"

And she said, "Yes."

And I said, "I have got a sweater I've got to make!"

And I just started to knit on that train.

Well, this is the very first garment.

And it has all the colours of that Scottish landscape, as you can see.

Beautiful colours. I love looking at it again.

Just that little height of pink there.

And then, of course, my knitting with all the ends hanging out.

Because I absolutely didn't know how to do those in.

That sort of tells the story of how amateur I was.

Fassett would hit the big times

working with top fashion designer, Bill Gibb.

The look was Bohemian romance for the hippy age,

with knitwear in complex colour patterns.

Probably the average that I'd put into a design of knitting

would be about 25 to 35 colours.

But I have gone up to 200 colours.

The shape of the garment never interested me that much.

You know, I was painting a painting.

I was doing a fantastic poem of colour. A tapestry.

One of the things people often say about me is

I'm not interested in fancy stitches, which I am totally not.

I let all the fanciness happen with the colour changes.

The back, I think, shows the design a little better.

So you get these great big sleeves and this very highly-patterned yoke.

You know, it's often asked to me,

"Why is colour important to you?"

As if it's kind of some strange, freaky thing.

And it just astounds me! It's kind of like saying,

"Why is breath so important to you? Why do you have to breathe?"

To me, it's air. It's the air of my soul.

Now, it didn't matter how you knitted or what you knitted.

As long as it was colourful and expressive, anything went.

Knitted outfits that covered the wearer head to toe

in ethnic-style patterned fabric

became the height of glamorous fashion.

The catwalk was awash with draped knits in bold patterns,

flaunted by top models like Jerry Hall.

Knitting now was all about letting your imagination run away.

Even wool had got wild and wacky.

It was goodbye to bog-standard straight yarn

and hello to bright colours, fluffy mohair,

textured yarn with bobbles and super chunky.

There was even a new tool to knit with.

Here, we've got what I might call broomsticks.

And this is the sort of fast and chunky knitting

that really became popular in the '60s and '70s.

People really wanted to knit something in an evening,

and they could do that.

They would knit not just with thick yarn,

but they'd actually work with several yarns at once.

And they had special knitting patterns

specifically written for this.

In the mid '70s, knitting would reach its peak of rebellion,

embraced by a most unlikely section of society.

The punk.

# Don't you like the way I move when you see me?

# Don't you like the things that I say? #

In the mid 1970s, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood

were driving forward a new punk aesthetic

which was really ripping up all that the '60s had represented.

# Something's happening and it's happening right now

# You're too blind to see it. #

Punk costume and punk outfits were all about deconstruction.

They were about pulling things apart.

So suddenly, it was OK to drop a line in your knitting

and to have jumpers with huge holes in them,

to look as if you'd been out all night in a fight,

to shock and to challenge people

through the fact your clothing was half finished

or half hanging off the body.

But a new era beckoned.

Sharp suits and padded shoulders would take over Britain,

and deal a fatal blow to knitwear.

After all, you'd never catch Mrs T in a woolly sweater.

You know, styles do change, even if you think they don't.

Shoulders are wider. And they're higher.

In the 1980s, I think there is something of a decline

in the role knitwear plays.

There's a real shift towards a much more structured, tailored body.

It's all about shoulder pads and tight tailoring.

And I think that sense of amateur production

and craft in the decade of design,

the decade of sharpness, is less prominent.

But for one last, glorious moment, knitwear would be king.

And it was all thanks to television.

It's Breakfast Time. It's 6.30 on Friday, December 9th.

A very good morning to you.

The subject of sweaters looms very large in the programme.

Breakfast television was a brand-new format

that combined news items with informal chat.

Over the UK there, a lot of cloud, you can see.

And this spawned a whole array of novelty sweaters in funky designs.

And no-one was better known for wearing loud,

colourful knitwear on daytime telly...

..than Gyles Brandreth.

He boasted a different sweater for every occasion.

Gyles still keeps some of his old favourites down in his basement.

Well, there you are.

These two boxes contain all that is left

of my once completely wonderful collection of knitwear.

Once upon a time, I had more than a thousand colourful jumpers.

Some of them hand-knitted, some of them machine-knitted,

some of them knitted by members of the public,

some of them knitted by a man who only knitted jumpers for me,

Elton John and Diana, Princess of Wales.

It was a glorious collection of knitwear.

Much loved by me, much derided by some.

So I am going to open the box now.

Up we come, and let's see what we've got.

Oh. Well, I'm not sure about what we're going to start with.

Let's just open them and see.

It's a pig.

Why did I keep this one? I'm not sure.

Oh!

Now you're diddling, now you're diddling!

Look at this! And the texture here.

Look at the wool. Mohair.

It's lovely mohair.

Oh, look! Here's another mohairy one.

This, I rather like. A penguin.

And also, I had little tank tops.

Simply with my signature on.

Why did the lemon gag not work?

Because you didn't do it properly.

The idea with the lemon is you've got to really suck, suck, suck!

Now, this is a jumper created by a viewer.

And... Well, this is original,

it's got applique birds and bees attached to it.

It's made by Karen Mayers.

Karen Mayers! Congratulations, Karen!

Excuse me. Excuse me!

I wore this during my Mick Jagger phase.

Everyone goes through it.

And look at this. Talk about Jack Flash!

Oh! Well, there you are.

State it like it is.

What does this say?

"The amazing, dashingly handsome, elegant, debonair Gyles."

This certainly wasn't one I designed myself.

It must have been sent in by an admirer. Hm!

Oh, look. Christmas is coming.

I had so many Christmas jumpers,

but this, I think, was perhaps my favourite

because it's three-dimensional.

And as I remember, if you unwrap these parcels,

inside are little miniature jumpers.

Hey! A very happy Christmas, if we miss you between now and Sunday.

We hope you have a terrific time.

The novelty sweater or cardigan

is a particular favourite for television presenters

for a whole variety of reasons.

It really shows the TV presenter as being, actually, a cuddly person.

They're not formal or stuffy.

There's no suit, there's no jacket, there's no tie.

It is good old...

It suggests that they're somebody who's fun,

with a good sense of humour

that would be great to have round for coffee.

Perhaps like a next-door neighbour.

Look! Isn't it absolutely stunning?

But in a world of power dressing,

even television presenters couldn't keep the knitwear dream alive.

By the end of the '80s,

knitwear had all but disappeared from our wardrobes.

And the golden days of knitting were over.

But now, something has happened.

# Join our group and you will find

# Harmony and peace of mind... #

Wool shops have started popping up across Britain.

# We're here to welcome you. #

And that can only mean one thing.

Knitting is back!

# Make it better, make it better

# We're here to welcome you... #

Knitting today has so many different people involved in it.

We spend lots of time typing and sending things virtually,

but we don't connect with things.

So this idea that you can make something from basically nothing

is quite appealing to people now.

# How'd you get to be happiness?

# How'd you get to find love? #

There'll always be that room

for a textile that is malleable,

that is soft, that is comforting,

but also flows across the body and can be extremely stylish.

Probably everything that has gone wrong with the world

came about with the decline of knitting.

Now knitting's back, maybe everything will be good again.

Oh, I do hope so.

# Donate all your money We'll make it better

# Make it better

# We're here to welcome you... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd