The Culture Wars Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words

Culture once seemed so easy to define.

It was ballet...

..theatre...

and the finest paintings.

The highest of artistic achievements,

to be enjoyed by a refined audience at their leisure.

But with the advent of broadcasting, this polite world was blown apart...

What do you think of this one?

It's not too bad,

but what's the point of all this here art?

And culture became a battlefield.

Most people, when they hear the word culture, have a vague notion

that one's talking about classical music.

That's not the sense in which I use it.

I know very well there's nothing difficult about what I'm saying,

but there is a terror of understanding it.

This is the story of the culture wars of the 20th century.

And how thinkers used the BBC to fight for nothing less

than the future of civilisation itself.

Some wanted to show the values of high culture to the masses.

What is that I hear?

That note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger.

Yes, it's Beethoven.

But radical thinkers

were to fight to seize culture from a narrow elite.

Nearly everything that we learn or read about art encourages

an attitude, an expectation.

Borders, I think, are meant to be crossed.

And finally, thinkers took to the airwaves

to expose how culture is used as a political weapon.

You can't pretend that they are factual or scientific

generalisations, they are rooted in rule.

Culturally, we're in the kind of phase of permanent revolution.

In 1922, Britain was rocked by a quiet revolution.

It was to wrench culture from the grasp of the upper classes.

For the first time, ordinary people were given entry

into the finest offerings of art, literature and music.

All at the flick of a switch.

'This is London.'

The invention of the BBC was to spark a battle over culture

which still rages today.

And it was all the brainchild of an eccentric Scots engineer,

John Reith.

He had a bold vision -

to bring the best into every home.

The only problem was that he didn't have

a single qualification for the job.

I didn't know what broadcasting was.

How do you mean you didn't know what it was?

I literally didn't know what broadcasting was.

The advertisement was attractive.

I thought it was the sort of thing I wanted, and I applied.

And did you really have qualifications

at that time for this job, do you think?

Oh, I had qualifications for managing, I thought, almost anything.

-That all right?

-Fine, yes!

'He was a figure and a half, I can tell you.'

I mean, he was very tall and he had this great scar

across the side of his face.

And he looked as though he'd been hewn from granite, Aberdeen granite.

Reith had been shaped by an austere Presbyterian upbringing.

And his high moral values had been instilled in him by his father,

a minister in the Free Church of Scotland.

Were you very conscious of religion in your family life?

Yes.

Perhaps more conscious of that than anything else.

In what sort of form? For instance, family prayers with full ceremony?

Indeed, morning and night.

And how often did you have to go to church?

Every Sunday, twice,

and Sunday school as well.

And when I got older, the Wednesday evening prayer meeting.

-I liked to go.

-Sure.

I liked to go. I enormously admired my father's preaching

and the music was very good.

I enjoyed it.

Reith felt he had an almost religious obligation

to improve the nation, and he used the BBC as his pulpit.

He achieved this by broadcasting only the very best of culture.

'To appreciate Shakespeare's significance, one must first look

'beyond the man himself and at the England into which he was born.

'The potential genius...'

What Reith produces is actually a set of values

that it should inform, educate and entertain.

Perfectly legitimate public service purpose.

The notion that you would take a mass form of entertainment

and turn it into a vehicle of improvement,

which always sounds grim and lectury.

'It was a time of intellectual flux and material change.'

But actually, improvement is what everybody wants.

It's hopeful.

Over 15 years, these Reithian values

became ingrained in every BBC broadcast.

Reith's control was total, as he dictated both what was said and how.

Good evening, everyone.

Here are details of alterations

to two of our programmes for this evening.

He explained the BBC's received pronunciation to Malcolm Muggeridge,

as he looked back on his life.

What I tried to get

was a style or quality of English

which would not be laughed at

in any part of the country.

But the interesting point is

that this particular accent somehow

identified the BBC as the organ

of the, as it were, genteel and respectable elements in society.

Anything wrong with that?

'The sort of puritan side of him was easy to satirise.

'He became almost a figure'

of mockery, if not denigration.

But I remember reading his memoirs,

and there was a phrase in it which stuck in my mind because,

at the time, I was running BBC Two.

And he said, "It is royal to do good and receive abuse,"

which is not a bad notion, actually.

But while Reith was trying to bring the arts to all,

another thinker despised everything the BBC stood for.

From the elite colleges of Cambridge emerged one of the most

controversial thinkers of the 20th century.

The literary critic, FR Leavis, thought

that high culture was being diluted, dooming us to moral depravity.

Leavis was proud to be an elitist,

but he wasn't your typical Cambridge figure.

Leavis always thought of himself as some kind of outsider.

He was unusual because he didn't come from the traditional

well-off background.

And, in fact, was local to Cambridge.

His father ran a piano shop in Cambridge, and so Leavis was,

in that old dichotomy, he was a town boy, before ever he was a gown boy.

So he had, I think, some of that,

as it was from the early 20th century, lower-middle-class English

earnestness about what he came then to devote his life to,

and which he brought to the study of English.

English literature had, for too long,

been treated as a mere pastime.

Nothing more than a pleasant hobby to be enjoyed at one's leisure.

But for Leavis, it was far more serious than that.

His 1948 book, The Great Tradition,

argued that great works of literature should be venerated,

because they could teach us to live better lives.

The problem was that very few novelists

could live up to Leavis' high ideals.

By the time I arrived at Cambridge,

there was an approved list, and that approved list was incredibly short.

And if, like me, you were interested in the literature

that had just gone before you, if you named Auden or Orwell,

I remember arguing about Orwell.

If you named Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, they were so unapproved as

to be a complete joke, because they did not belong to something that

was called "the great tradition".

Leavis was an incredibly passionate defender

of high culture and literature.

For Leavis, high culture was a religion really.

He thought that it contained all the best that had ever been

said or thought in the whole of human history.

And he therefore felt that it contained these nuggets of universal

wisdom that taught us about the higher spiritual purposes of life.

With his deep distrust of broadcasting, he never appeared

on camera, and only once permitted the BBC to record a public lecture.

Frankly, Leavis' lecture was pretty po-faced,

but there was one extraordinary moment in it,

when the academic facade slipped

and he launched into this outrageous rant against the working classes.

I mean, it was such a shockingly elitist outburst.

You could actually hear the shock and horror rippling through

the audience as he said it. But this wasn't really an outburst,

this was the absolute crux of what Leavis felt about culture.

Leavis felt that he was living in an age of enormous cultural decline.

He felt that the rise in democracy, the rise in public education

and universal literacy had created this monstrosity.

Elitism became a persistent criticism.

Leavis was a man who inspired as much hatred as he did adoration.

My principal problem with Leavis was that, given that

the values were meant to be, in quotes, "life affirming",

then why did the study of this life-affirming literature

produce so much meanness and spite?

The Cambridge English faculty in the '50s and '60s was a snake pit.

The atmosphere was foul.

And you just looked at these horrible people being horrible to each other,

and you thought, "Well, if this is

"meant to be the civilising effect of the study of literature,

"I don't want anything to do with it."

When Leavis' rigid views were challenged

by a fellow Cambridge don, he unleashed his righteous fury.

He sought to destroy his adversary,

a mild-mannered physicist turned novelist called CP Snow.

'Somehow I seem to have touched a nerve which I can't explain.'

It's rather odd to find oneself suddenly either passionately

defended or passionately attacked.

And this vicious attack was prompted by Snow's lecture

called The Two Cultures.

It argued that the high-minded values

held by the likes of Leavis were

out of date in the 20th century,

and that science was as important to cultural life as literature.

The lecture wasn't recorded,

but some years later he explained to the BBC

that the literary world's version of culture was full of empty promises.

On the whole the literary world had, since roughly the turn of the

century, become increasingly antisocial in just that sense.

They tended to be more optimistic about the human condition, you know,

slogans about life and so on, like DH Lawrence's which were meaningless,

were being brandished, but about the realities of this world,

and they're very important realities,

on the whole they were on the despairing side.

I think that is genuinely true.

Leavis' fury knew no bounds.

As well as attacking Snow's arguments, he accused him

of being a failed scientist with no mind.

Leavis' response to Snow's lecture was, in its day, notorious.

It caused a scandal.

And I think the main reason for that was that it was thought by

many, many readers to be absolutely unpardonably personal.

Did you expect it to cause

the extraordinary furore that it did cause?

No, not in the slightest degree!

No-one was more astonished than I was with this hullabaloo afterward.

You see, it seemed to drive some people really quite wild.

For instance, Professor Leavis said that you were quite negligible, had

no mind, knew nothing of history, were completely naive

and your lecture was ridden with cliches.

Had you offended him in some way?

Not as far as I know, no.

I was as surprised at this as anyone could be.

You knew him, did you?

I met him several times, yes...

What do you think got into him?

-Mmm?

-What do you think got into him?

I haven't the faintest idea and I still haven't.

The face-off between Leavis and Snow wasn't simply an academic spat.

It was a sign that the bastion of elite values,

defended by the likes of Leavis, was finally crumbling.

Until now, the word "culture"

described the high-minded ideas of an academic elite.

But in the 1950s, a new generation started looking at other areas of

life, asking, "couldn't the experiences of ordinary people

"be part of culture too?"

The first of these thinkers to break away from the old crowd

came from the Black Mountains of Wales.

Raymond Williams was a very unorthodox Cambridge don.

Born into a working class family in a tiny Welsh village,

he was the first person in his family to go to university.

An unusual background for a Cambridge academic,

it was to give him a totally fresh perspective.

Raymond's basic conviction was that the "culture", to use his words,

that he came from was infinitely more profound and more sensitive

and in a profound sense, educated,

than the culture to which he went.

And he never let go of that conviction.

And, for that reason, I think of him

as a very noble person. He was a noble man.

In Culture And Society, Raymond Williams delved into history,

interrogating how the word "culture" had been controlled

by the ruling classes for the last 200 years.

Williams wanted to seize the word back from the elites.

He said culture should mean a whole way of life,

to include areas like his traditional Welsh background.

He wants to say, culture comprises all sorts of other things.

We can't reserve the word culture for this area of art and literature.

We've got to see culture as something which arises from the practices

of ordinary people, working class people,

everyday people in their lives, what they produce, the views,

the ideologies, the notions, the productions, the arguments,

everything there counts as culture.

Williams joined forces with the BBC

to make a film called Border Country.

In it, he crossed the cultural borders

between the two worlds of his home...

and his work.

In Cambridge he found more borders still,

between the life of the university and the people in the town.

When I first came here, I used to walk out past these gates and walls,

out of historic Cambridge and into another and very different Cambridge.

'You can feel almost at once the change in the atmosphere.

'A different feel, a different sound in the air.

'This again is crossing a border.

'If we'd come to Cambridge as a family,

'this is where we would have lived.

'Just back down there, down the road, is that enclosed quiet world.

'Learning, yes, but also implying and owning.

'This is where people come from to work in the colleges.

'This is where the colleges are not teachers but landlords,

'and it feels often like a place that is just used, a back yard.'

He even took the cameras behind the scenes at one of the colleges

to interview staff about their day-to-day lives.

The people who work in the colleges as waiters,

porters, gardeners,

are still called servants. I find that very strange.

It's a way of seeing people I never learnt to share.

They're always on the want.

You know, "Get me this, get me the fresh spuds,

"and get me more greens, and get me water, get me bread,

"get me more cutlery."

Sort of posh grads, they don't really want to know us,

but you know the people who are

the scruffiest ones, I don't mean the long-haired ones, the scruffy

ones that haven't got long hair, they sort of talk to us all right,

but the, sort of, white-collared ones, they don't

want to know, and these long-haired blokes don't want to know either.

Just think we're there, you know, sort of slave sort of thing.

'The border country is everywhere.

'In so many places now,

'people are moving out and being moved, from old settled ways

'into new ways, unprecedented ways, which have to be felt, recognised,

'understood, responded to, altered.'

Borders, I think, are meant to be crossed.

Williams showed that there was culture beyond the academy.

And another thinker celebrated the special character

of working class life.

Richard Hoggart, a lecturer not from Oxbridge but Hull,

seriously studied the lives of the urban working classes.

Coining a new term, "cultural studies", he investigated

an ignored culture, of pubs,

of racing and music hall songs.

Hoggart's personal experiences, of growing up in the slums of Leeds,

was to shape his most famous book, The Uses Of Literacy.

With its candid look at the commonplace,

the book became a surprise bestseller.

He explained his radical ideas to the BBC.

What I mean by a cultural study of a society

is trying to understand better, and to interpret therefore, the

whole way of life of that society as it shows itself

in the way it goes about its daily business.

When Hoggart came to write about the working class, no-one thought this

was a culture worth bothering with.

60!

There's no-one as easy to rob

of a culture as them that don't know they've got one.

And that, in a way, epitomises what Hoggart is doing.

He's saying, just a minute, there is a great deal here

that you've never looked at, that you've never noticed.

The smells, the taste, the touch, the sight,

the business of eating fish and chips out of a bag

and licking the salty newspaper after you've eaten it.

Most people, when they hear the word culture,

have a vague notion

that one's talking about opera and classical music, and

high-brow books and so on, that's not the sense in which I use it.

The way we walk, the way we gesture, the way I'm talking to you now,

the way my voice is going up and down in that way,

the way young people dress today, all these are heavy.

They're pregnant, they're imbued with the values,

the attitudes of a society.

And it's getting hold of that and interpreting them

that I mean by cultural studies.

Hoggart's battle for a broader definition of culture played out

in the highest court in the land.

In 1960, he was the star witness

when the State tried to ban DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Hoggart defended the book's sexually explicit language as true to life.

The trial symbolised, encapsulated, brought to a head,

showed us, that changes had been taking place underneath

for at least 20 years, ever since the war,

and more, that there was a gulf in British society between those who

thought of themselves as the guardians of established morals

and most people.

Hoggart had been central to Penguin's victory.

As the book hit the shelves, the cameras rushed in.

Are you going to put this book on the open shelves?

-No, we shan't do that.

-Why not?

The reason for that is that we don't want the book

to fall into the hands of any unsuspecting people.

Thank you. One copy only. Thank you.

-Two please.

-One only.

Excuse me, sir, why do you want a copy of Lady Chatterley?

-Can you tell me why?

-It'd be rather exciting to read.

-Madam?

-I'm buying it for somebody else.

-And why do you want a copy?

-For my wife.

For your wife?

The trial was a watershed moment

and the starting pistol for the permissive '60s.

Liberated from the control of the elites,

people were now claiming culture for themselves.

And they looked, not to gloomy Britain...

..but to glossy America.

In the '60s, Britain was assaulted by a new world of sexy advertising,

glamorous movies, all that you could desire, direct to your sitting room.

The BBC tried to catch up with the new pop culture.

And in 1962, the subject was rather apologetically broached

for the art strand Monitor by Huw Wheldon.

Our programme tonight is about four painters

who turn, for their subject matter, to the world of pop art,

the world of the popular imagination, the world of film stars,

the twist, science fiction, pop singers.

A world which you can dismiss if you feel so inclined, of course,

as being tawdry and second rate, but a world all the same

in which everybody, to some degree anyway,

lives whether we like it or not.

But by the mid-Sixties,

Monitor was embracing all that America had to offer.

And nothing embodied this brash and progressive spirit

more than hip young academic, Susan Sontag.

This is New York.

Eight million people live, work and die here.

This is my city.

In her film about New York architecture,

she took a maverick and unstuffy approach to culture.

I moseyed over to Philip Johnson's modest stash on Park.

The Seagram building gleamed like a switch blade in the autumn sun.

The elevator swished up like a gigolo's hand on a silk stocking.

Sontag was an academic high-flyer,

studying at Harvard, Oxford and Paris.

But she became famous for her offbeat ideas.

She was like nothing anyone had ever seen before.

And this was a woman that in the mid-1960s

was one part intellectual, one part rock star.

She was one of the first people actually to break down this barrier

between high culture and popular culture.

She was one of the first people to devote serious intellectual energy

to cinema, and science fiction, and pornography, and camp,

all these things that no-one had bothered to look at before.

We have an historical piece, five years old...

Through her unscripted personal journeys,

Sontag was taking a far more informal view of the arts.

But Monitor's sharp change in tack wasn't to everyone's tastes.

On Tuesday, the BBC's cultural programme, Monitor,

reappeared with a new editor, Jonathan Miller,

new techniques in the studio very much so,

and a new approach to its subject, which was summed up by

the Daily Mirror's TV citric as "a bright look at the arts".

But how much of the arts are we actually going to get a look at?

Warhol. Scene one. Take one.

We were promised a feature on New York culture,

including an interview with the pop artist Andy Warhol.

The high point of her Warhol film

showed her failing to secure an interview with the artist.

Andy!

Andy! He's got the radio on.

-Hi.

-Is Andy in?

-HE LAUGHS

-Camera's already rolling.

-Is he here?

-No.

-Oh, Christ! He told me to come today.

-I know.

-You know.

-So come on in.

-I brought the BBC with me.

-Who are the BBC?

The reaction to the film was savage and immediate.

Seven, take four.

Just days after it was transmitted,

this spoof was put on the BBC's weekly satire programme.

Oh, where do I get a ticket?

No, last programme started at a quarter to eight, madam.

Christ.

I've brought the BBC with me.

No, it's too late, dear, I'm sorry.

Sontag caused such a furore

Monitor's editor, Jonathan Miller, was hauled in.

I thought it was horrific and nauseating,

because it was in the true sense barbaric. Here were people

dealing with ideas about art and literature and theatre,

all the most important things in our civilisation,

and they were really debasing them.

They were dealing with them like a lot of hustlers.

-She's obviously got a woolly and undisciplined mind.

-She doesn't.

-If indeed she has a mind at all.

-She does have a mind at all.

She happens to be rather an intelligent and cultivated person,

who happens to have, at this time in her life, made a switch from

rather high-level academic work to a kitsch and popular culture.

British critics love to wrangle over high versus low culture.

-Would you explain what that meant...

-But hot on Sontag's heels,

the next cross-Atlantic thinker was to sweep this whole debate aside.

Marshall McLuhan said it didn't matter what we watched

on our screens...

..because society, and even our brains,

were being changed by the very technology of TV itself.

Everything under electric conditions is looped.

You become folded over into yourself,

your image of yourself changes completely.

McLuhan coined an enduring slogan...

But we can only understand the impact of new technologies

by examining how they affect human life.

And in 1965, he explained his ideas to the critic, Frank Kermode.

You use a kind of slogan, I think, the expression

"the medium is the message."

Would you like to illuminate that?

Well, I think it is more satisfactory to say that any medium,

be it radio or be it wheel,

-tends to create a completely new human environment.

-Yes.

The human environment,

as such, tends to have a kind of invisible character about it.

What you're saying is that there is a kind of built in...

This interview was never transmitted,

because it was too bizarre.

The great communications guru

struggled to communicate his own ideas.

I'd like now just to ask you about the distinction that you draw

-between different kinds of media within the electric technology.

-Yes.

You call some, such as television, cool, and some, such as radio, hot.

Now what does this mean?

Yes. Cool in the slang form has come to mean involved,

deeply participative, deeply engaged.

Everything that we had formerly meant by heated

argument is now called cool.

They obviously thought, "We must do Marshall McLuhan.

"He's an important American thinker who's thinking about the future."

And so they go and interview him,

and he utterly perplexes the poor interviewer, who scratches his head

and, you know, tries to interpret, in that wonderful BBC way,

"I think what you might have just said is that."

And then McLuhan says another set of bewilderingly, perplexingly,

long worded things that you can't make head nor tail of.

There's a kind of paradox, there are many paradoxes, but the one that

I'm thinking of at the moment here is that a lot of people would

suppose that television is something before which you slump...

-Oh, no.

-..so you don't participate in it.

They're paying attention only to the programming, the content,

which has nothing to do with TV.

That's right. So you would say that the fact that some people

may still be struggling to follow our conversation,

that's not what we mean by... It's not our conversation that's cool,

our conversation is hot, presumably, is it?

Well, insofar as we're managing to be relatively detached and urbane,

-we're real...

-We're cool.

-No, we're square.

-Oh, square. Oh, yes, another concept altogether.

Yes, we're a couple of squares all right...

So he seems to me a very unscholarly person that all over the world was

deified, and still is actually,

partly because he says things that nobody can understand.

I know very well there's nothing difficult

about what I'm saying, but there is a terror of understanding it.

People don't want to understand what I'm saying.

They're terrified.

Through the Sixties,

ideas of culture had become wilder and wilder.

For some it seemed that not just culture but civilisation itself

was under threat.

One man took up the challenge to restore order and calm

to a world that seemed to be spiralling into chaos.

A 13 hour television series, celebrating the finest high culture,

was made by the art historian Kenneth Clark.

It ushered in a new age of colour television.

And he called it, rather audaciously...

Clark was the epitome of the arts' establishment.

He'd been the youngest ever director of the National Gallery,

keeper of the King's pictures and chairman of the Arts Council.

He'd famously saved Britain's art collection

from the bombs of the Blitz.

Now, in 1969, he turned to television to save civilisation

itself from popular culture.

What is civilisation?

I don't know. I can't define it in abstract terms...yet,

but I think I can recognise it when I see it,

and I'm looking at it now.

With an enormous budget, Civilisation was incredibly lavish,

and it was commissioned by the then head of BBC Two, David Attenborough.

Kenneth Clark was the obvious man.

He was a populariser, but also a great scholar of the arts.

And so I took him to lunch and put this idea in front of him.

And he says in his memoirs that I used the word civilisation,

and it was that that ticked off in his mind.

He said he hardly was aware of what else was going on round

the conversation round the lunch table,

because he was plotting in his mind how he would do it.

And he did it, of course, miraculously well.

At this point I reveal myself in my true colours as a stick in the mud.

I hold a number of beliefs that

have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time.

I believe that order is better than chaos.

Creation better than destruction.

Above all, I believe in the God given genius of certain individuals,

and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

With its familiar and old-fashioned sense of what art

was supposed to be, the series became a worldwide success.

But even as they were filming, the barbarians were at the gate.

The problem with Kenneth Clark

was he was completely and utterly out of touch. He knew it himself.

I mean there's a wonderful moment in Civilisation where

he confesses himself to be, I think he calls himself a stick in the mud.

But Clark wasn't just stuck in mud,

you know, that man was stuck in primordial sludge.

And to see exactly how out of touch he was, all you need to do is see

the very beginning of Civilisation.

The opening sequence is set in Paris

and you see Kenneth Clark wandering peacefully past the Louvre.

And that beautiful Paris sequence was filmed in May 1968.

Now in May 1968 Paris, and indeed the whole of France,

was engulfed in this cataclysmic kind of civil war.

And there was Kenneth Clark in his suit, in his tie,

prattling on about civilisation.

What a charming room.

And I think that says it all.

Of course it's an adaptation of an antique room.

Almost as soon as the series ended,

it was challenged by Ways Of Seeing.

Presented by the Marxist intellectual, John Berger.

I want to question some of the assumptions usually made

about the tradition of European painting.

Where Clark wanted us to bow before the genius of high art,

Berger set out to prove that in the modern age,

paintings had become commodities like anything else.

The process of seeing paintings, or seeing anything else,

is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe.

It isn't so much the paintings themselves which I want to consider,

as the way we now see them, now in the second half of the 20th century,

because we see these paintings as nobody saw them before.

Where Clark had seen Civilisation as just this great timeless parade

of wonderful universal achievements,

Berger saw Civilisation as a battleground.

A battleground between the classes.

A battleground between the sexes.

A battleground between the races.

Art was not this wonderful, timeless, pure thing, it was

as dirty and impure as muddy as everything else in society.

I don't want to suggest that there is nothing left to experience before

original works of art, except a certain sense of awe,

because they have survived,

because they are genuine, because they're absurdly valuable.

A lot more is possible,

but only if art is stripped of the false mystery

and the false religiosity which surrounds it.

Art had finally been dragged off its pedestal.

Age old boundaries, between high and low culture, lay shattered.

And in this revolutionary spirit,

the culture wars moved to new grounds.

The 1970s witnessed the final death throes of the British Empire.

And this independence, a traditional flag showing exercise,

in some ways is also a very unusual one.

The Belizeans are saying goodbye to British rule...

And back in Britain the legacy of Empire could be felt on the streets.

Immigration meant the nation became more diverse than ever.

Questions had to be asked about how imperialism had shaped our culture,

and what it meant for Britain's future.

Now a new school of post-colonial thinkers came to the fore.

CLR James was born in the British West Indies in 1901.

He showed how Empire had used culture as a tool of control.

He made his home in the London borough of Brixton

and became a figurehead for black academics.

And his books were among the first to show the importance

of a forgotten black history.

Towards the end of his life,

he appeared on the BBC's All About Books

to talk to Russell Harty about his work.

Now then to matters more immediate, as they say.

Let me tell you a bit about Mr James first before we start talking.

He's taught revolutionary politics with Trotsky.

He's been put under house arrest and, as well as a lot else,

he's made a reputation...

He appears in front the camera as a black intellectual.

An intellectual!

Well, you know, the shock in encountering a black intellectual,

who could imagine that?

I was tired of reading how blacks were in trouble in Africa.

Then they made the middle passage they were in more trouble.

Then they landed in America and they landed in the Caribbean

and they were constantly in trouble.

I got very tired of it. I said, "I want to find some story where

"blacks are doing things to people and not being done things by people."

But James went on to explore Empire

through a new and surprising prism -

sport.

Growing up in Trinidad,

the young James had become obsessed with cricket.

In Beyond A Boundary, James tells the story of how cricket

was used by the British to instil their cultural values

on the unruly natives.

In 1976, an elderly James travelled to his childhood home with the BBC

to show how this legacy of Empire lives on.

The game is very much as I used to play it years ago.

The routine, the regularity, the instinctive discipline of the game

that has forced itself back on me very strongly here this morning.

It's a book which is addressed in a sense to the immediate historical

moment of its publication, where we've got these rising independent,

post-colonial independent nations, and it's asking questions

about the politics of culture in the context of decolonisation.

But it doesn't tell you it's doing that,

it tells you it's a book only about cricket.

Nobody shouts, nobody's making any scandalous noises.

They're going ahead and at the end of six balls,

they will change over as if it's a military organisation.

We had learned it in books like this, The Captain.

And when we were watching, we often had a copy of The Captain near to us.

And these magazines all were governed by the principles

which you found in the old ideas of public school behaviour.

And we accepted that, we swallowed it down and we read them all

and thought that that was the way to behave.

Beyond The Boundary's not saying we'll teach everyone

to play cricket, but it is saying that we, in this decisive moment

of world historic change, at the end of imperial systems,

can learn something about the value, about the morality,

about the ritual, about the relationship with oneself that

one gets through playing this game.

This seemingly trivial thing,

which becomes culture in the sense of it being a way of life.

Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it.

When I did turn to politics, I found that I didn't have much to learn.

CLR James had broken new ground.

And others were to follow in his footsteps

to reveal the full impact of Empire on Western culture.

Edward Said, a lecturer of English literature, challenged

the racist stereotypes that prevailed in the wake of the Empire.

What do you think of when you think of an Arab?

Somebody with a towel on their head.

Camel and maybe some sand.

Want to throw a pyramid in there?

Well, guess who's here?

Edward Said joins us.

Said investigated the art of the world's empires.

And what he found was nothing less than cultural hijack.

He challenged how the West dominated the East, not simply by guns

and direct occupations,

but in the way it portrayed what the East was to its own people.

He tried to explain that even where politics is absent

in the works of great writers, it is there.

And this interpretation

of literature, of course, annoyed the purists and the Leavisites

and people like that, but I think it's a very good way,

an important way to look at literature.

I was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Arab family.

My parents gave me an English education in Palestine and Egypt,

and as a family we lived a strangely hybrid part Arab, part Western life.

Growing up under the British Empire in the Middle East, Said's unusual

background gave him new insights, as he explained to the BBC.

Ever since I can remember, I have felt that

I belong to more than one world.

The essential privilege of exile

is to have not just one set of eyes,

but half a dozen.

Each of them corresponding to the places you've been.

Therefore, instead of looking at an experience

as a single unitary thing, it's always got at least two aspects.

Orientalism revealed the dark side of civilisation.

Arguing that imperial powers had used art to create poisonous myths

about the people they colonised.

I was struck by the consistency and the coherence of pictures

of the East, or the Orient as I called it,

and the extent to which a lot of this material

contributed to creating a kind of unified image of the Orient,

which had a particular set of characteristics that sensuality,

despotism, wealth, promise, cruelty.

I was saying, "Really?" But there is no such thing as the Orient.

The Orient is much more complicated, much more varied,

much more heterogeneous, and above all much more detailed

than any of these grand generalisations about,

"Well, we know that Orientals tend to think in certain ways."

And I was saying all of that's absolute nonsense.

You can't make these generalisations and then pretend that

they are factual or scientific generalisations.

They are rooted in rule.

Said became an increasingly controversial figure

as his work pushed him into real conflicts of the day,

like that of Israel and Palestine.

These are poor people. You're taking their land away from them.

Post-colonial thinkers had proved that culture and politics

could not be separated.

And in Britain this was becoming clearer than ever.

The Seventies and Eighties witnessed brutal race riots,

born of the political tensions of the time.

And for one thinker,

this was yet another symptom of a real struggle over culture.

Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica

and after winning a scholarship to Oxford,

went on to make his name as Britain's leading cultural theorist.

In the 1980s, more and more schools will

be taking in children from diverse family and cultural backgrounds.

Miss, look at the cameras, you'll be on television.

In 1989, Hall saw hope for Britain's future in the acceptance

and celebration of its multiculturalism,

as he explained on The Late Show.

As we slide out of the 1980s into a new decade,

the key question is whether we're moving into new times.

Who's going to define the cultural themes of the next ten years?

No-one thinks harder about this question than Stuart Hall.

You can see the impulse of the British that close in

on old images of themselves in order to, you know,

tight little island, drawing their suits around themselves,

to defend themselves against all this otherness that

is pressing on them. Then I look at young black and Asian kids

in the third generation, who've been born here

and brought up here, so they're not from anywhere else and, you know,

I just think creatively, culturally, they're just on top of the world.

I mean, they don't know where the next meal is coming from,

but culturally they just are enormously in a rich, creative mode.

When Stuart arrives in England, these questions of colour

and differentiation and difference begin to obsess him.

He begins to think, "How do I describe myself?

"What sort of person am I?"

But, of course, the idea of culture in Stuart Hall is very important

because of what he wants to say about

multiculturalism and immigrants to Britain.

The Britishness that might be forced on them in many cases,

as Hall points out, is really a very old-fashioned Britishness.

It's the Britishness of Empire.

It's the Britishness, you know, which has nothing to do with these people.

At the start of the century,

thinkers had fought for a single idea of culture.

But by the end, it was as diverse as British society itself.

And Stuart Hall made it clear that culture

is a constantly changing force.

We don't actually know what we value in culture any more.

Everything's interesting. High culture, low culture, from

advertising to pop art, to great art, it's all in a kind of mishmash now.

But I think that there's a deeper question

lying behind your question to me.

I think you're asking me, how can people live without,

you know, some sense that there's an ultimate truth,

or an ultimate scale of values? And I don't know.

But I don't any longer think that this is just a transitional phase,

and that we're moving on to some other more settled period.

I think, you know, culturally we're in the kind of phase

of permanent revolution.

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