The Spirit of the Sixties Britain on Film

CLASSIC "RANK" GONG SOUNDS

What about this?

Believe it or not, it's a do-it-yourself railway.

Since 1951, the Tally Clyn gauge railway at Towin

in Wales has been run as a spare time hobby by a group of railway

enthusiasts from all over Britain, who formed a preservation society.

Here are two of them, a post office engineer, and a grocer.

One of their other day jobs in replacing worn out sleepers.

The railway has two full-time drivers, the Jones brothers

whose family has given over 60 years service to this line,

built originally to serve the local slate quarries.

Herbert Jones brings a locomotive into a siding,

while a chemist from Birmingham draws the fire.

Maureen's a London secretary.

She's the sort of girl who watches points.

They've even dug their own slate quarry

to provide ballast for the track.

In between passenger trains, there are 24 a week at the peak

of the season, the ballast train runs up to the quarry,

and then it's all hands to the shovel until every truck's filled.

There's a lot of skilled work to be done behind the scenes.

This chap's a civil engineer.

The Midlander is the only diesel loco on the line.

The servicing of its engine

is in the hands of an account from Chichester.

There's a science student from Derby drilling a cylinder block.

He doesn't want to paint the town red,

he'd rather paint a bogey frame.

Talking of painting,

there she is again, the only girl in the outfit.

I bet she gets all the jobs the others don't want.

Of course, she couldn't do this job.

They're putting a coach on its wheels,

it wouldn't get far without them.

There's only one train on Sunday

and it's nearly time for it to leave on its six-and-a-half-mile trip

into the mountains.

It'll call at five stations and take 45 minutes to do it.

But with such picturesque vistas around,

nobody's thinking of the jet age up here.

Most days the train is packed with society members and holiday makers.

Three o'clock, time to go.

That's another way which this railway is unusual,

the train actually runs to time!

Pop down the road to the Horseguards.

They get changed every day as regular as the sea lions

are fed in the zoo, only here there's no gate money.

If you hit on the right day for strolling down The Mall

you'll meet the Royal Procession

coming back from Trooping the Colour.

Now there's a sight for sore eyes!

But you'll really have sore eyes if you spend too long

looking for the next sight, the fly-past that goes with it.

Motor racing's an expensive sport,

but for free you can watch the finest speedways in the country.

For thrills at top speed

try getting on a bridge across one of the motorways.

Watching people watching is another sport.

You might think this is a standstill motor race

or a new kind of sit-down protest.

In fact, they're watching the gliders, so much safer than

actually going up there, they think.

While the flyer thinks how lucky he

is to be safe, far from the traffic, not to mention the petrol fumes!

Shopping can cost a lot,

but you can pick up many a bargain in your mind

when the shops are closed.

What could be nicer in fine weather than to take a look at the weather.

Stand outside the Weather Shop just below the Air Ministry roof

and make your plans for tomorrow.

Anybody making a hole in the ground

is a surefire draw wherever you are.

The bigger the hole, the better the looking.

In the old days, they used to put up dirty great fences

and you had to peak through the cracks.

# There I was, digging this hole

# Hole in the ground, so big and sort of round, it was

# And there was I, digging it deep

# It was flat at the bottom and the sides were steep

# When along comes this bloke in a bowler

# Which he lifted and scratched his head

# Whoa, he looked down the hole

# Poor, demented soul, and he said...

# Now that's that. #

Now here's Mr HM Hughes of Harlow, Essex.

His projects are relatively small-scale.

This magnificent model of a ship used only 13,500 matches.

As well as the matches,

there's been three years' hard work put into that model.

People are no longer content

to watch others doing the constructional and repair work

around their homes, they're doing it themselves.

A quarter of a million enthusiasts come to this

exhibition in London each year to see the latest developments.

They look at them with professional eyes.

Once bitten by the do-it-yourself bug,

their quest for knowledge becomes endless.

Today, do-it-yourself has spread beyond the home,

and some people have made it quite a business.

It looks very much like any other, but instead of paying a mechanic

to overhaul your car, you "do-it-yourself"

and pay seven and sixpence an hour

for the use of tools and equipment valued at over £1,000.

There's an engineer with 25 years' experience to give you advice

if you need it.

This was the idea of Frank Sawyer, a local haulage contractor.

He finds that motorists take a far greater

interest in their vehicles this way.

They bring them in for regular maintenance

instead of waiting for them to break down by the roadside.

And it's not only old cars that come in.

Does the idea really work in practice?

This is the acid test.

The idea's so successful that more and more garage

proprietors are providing this service up and down the country.

With do-it-yourself, the sky's the limit.

You can even have your own miniature Jodrell Bank.

Frank Hyde, a Clacton radio and television dealer, built this

one himself at Beacon Hill on the Essex coast.

Though it's his hobby, the work he is doing is wholly scientific.

The observation of Jupiter,

the largest of all the planets,

with a diameter 11 times that of the earth.

He's converted this Martello tower, originally built to keep out

Napoleon, into a control tower to translate the radio waves sent out

by heavenly bodies from outside the earth's atmosphere into soundwaves.

It's the first amateur radio astronomy observatory in the world.

The work Frank Hyde's doing is considered so important

that the Americans have helped to pay for some of the equipment.

This section of equipment

is a duplication of what they have in Florida.

This was loaned by a British electronics firm.

And this was bought by Frank Hyde himself.

Jupiter, which is around 400 million miles from the earth, sends out

radiation which has not been found to occur on any other planet.

The experiments are to observe why.

They require observations over long periods

for more than 12 hours at a time.

And these are the sort of sounds you hear from Jupiter.

RADIO FUZZ AND STATIC

The signals come at regular intervals and almost suggest

a form of intelligence, but Jupiter is surrounded by poisonous gases.

With this station, and the one in America working together

and overlapping, information is being gained that will be useful

for future space rocket probes.

Here in a country studio in Kent is Daphne Oram,

a pioneer of a new type of music.

Unlike the traditional composer,

she uses no musical instruments and no musicians.

She produces sounds by electronic devices, some of them

sounds unlike any ever heard before.

She needs no concert hall or opera house to put on a performance,

she can do it on a tape recorder.

The sounds, produced electronically, are recorded on tape.

By mixing the sounds on various tapes together and playing them

at varying speeds, she can produce all sorts of different combinations.

Already electronic music is being used in films, television

and the theatre, and there have been concert performances too.

There are some people that think the music of the future

will sound like this.

CHIMES AND BEEPS

There's music everywhere.

Office workers coming off the train with that Monday morning feeling are

greeted like this.

It's piped music of course, relayed through loud speakers.

Perhaps it gets them in the mood to face that last lap

to work on the bus.

There's no music in London buses...yet!

But once in the office, back it comes.

In the typing pool, background music,

so they say, stops the girls from getting bored with routine.

It helps them concentrate.

Well, there may be exceptions!

Piped music is big business in Britain today.

This one company alone has £1 million's worth of contracts

to supply music 24 hours a day.

On eight-hour tapes,

which automatically change over when completed,

more than 1,000 shops, hotels, pubs, restaurants and factories receive

a carefully worked out music plan, costing from £13 to £300 a month.

It all began back in the '30s when two industrial psychologists

measured the effect of music on productivity,

and found that it certainly helped output.

Music while you work was born.

But the tempo must be just right.

This sort of music would not help to send up

the rate of music at all.

All right for thinking of the boyfriend, of course,

but calculated to take years off the foreman's life.

This would be just as bad.

MUSIC: "Ride of the Valkyries" by Wagner

With music of this tempo you might get a remarkable rise in output,

but think of all the holidays you would need

to recuperate after all that effort.

No, the music must suit the occasion and the mood.

Bright and cheerful for shopping and thinking out prices.

Bright and cheerful to take your mind off the bill.

Even at the hairdressers, there's music to go with the perm.

If you're not musically minded, you can take refuge under the dryer.

Europe is following America and Russia on the way

to the stars, and here's the rocket designed to give her the first big

punch into space, a British rocket with a famous name, Blue Streak.

Not so long ago the work of the dedicated teams of scientists

and engineers who made her was top secret.

Then she was a missile, a weapon.

Today, she's a booster for a space vehicle with a peaceful mission.

Many of Britain's best technicians have helped to make her.

This is her fuel tank, 46 feet long.

Those stainless steel walls are almost as thin as a razor blade,

and they hold 60 tonnes of liquid oxygen and 26 tonnes of kerosene.

After the tank has been made, it's filled with gas

to stop it from buckling.

During flight, these engines develop more than 135 tons of thrust,

equal to the power of 40,000 family cars.

They have got to punch Blue Streak's full weight of 92 tons

to a speed of 8,500 miles an hour.

The countdown has begun.

The control team is ready, in a block house

nearly a quarter of a mile from where Blue Streak stands.

Temperatures, pressures, stresses,

vibration, the flow of fuel - all are recorded as the hours,

the minutes, the seconds leave the team with the moment of truth.

Between Blue Streak and a real take-off now

are just four steel bolts.

Blue Streak's days in Cumberland are numbered.

One day she'll fly,

one day she'll help put a one tonne satellite in orbit,

or a 100lb European electronic reporter on the moon itself.

Lilius Tucker is a school teacher in Great Henwood,

a village near Shrewsbury.

Her husband Lawrence is a flight safety observer

in a navigation school.

They are both members of a society called the English Westerners,

which makes a study of Cowboys and Indians in the Old West.

When the working day is over, the Tuckers go home and don

the costumes and war paint and the characters of two members

of the Sioux Red Indian tribe.

Getting ready takes quite a time.

Now for the finishing touches, on goes the chief's war bonnet

and now Qua Shapper and Cumacamita - that's Black Panther

and Pony-In-The-Smoke to you - sit down to smoke the pipe of peace.

Cameras are recording part of a change in Britain.

Today our surroundings, our social life,

our amusements are changing, and this game is a spectacular

expression of that change.

It's only four years since it was

introduced publicly into Britain, yet its already a national sport.

It's one of the few in the world where

equality between the sexes is absolute,

unless you count darts and shove ha'penny.

In one year, 10 million games have been played

by men, women and children.

In the mixed leagues, women champions

are now emerging to challenge the men.

Not superior strength and staying power,

but personal skill is what sends all those ten pins flying.

Southend has a big new bowling centre right on its famous pier with

views all round of the sea and shoreline.

Already there are 70 major bowling centres in Britain,

and in another three years, at the present rate of growth,

there'll be more than 200.

The bowling centres are searching out those places

where people have to wait around.

Several big terminals, such as London Airport,

already have a bowl

for the traveller between planes, the local housewives

and working girls coming off duty, like these ground hostesses.

Skyport fields one of the best teams in the country.

It's a game well-suited to keeping one in good shape.

Another reason for the astonishing spread of this new sport

is that it arrived in Britain fully grown and highly organised.

Now everything is automated to pamper the customer.

Electronic machinery counts the number of games played.

It sweeps the fallen pins clear,

resets those left standing,

and returns the ball to your hand

with the smoothness and care of a well-trained slave.

It dries your palm if it's moist,

and even polishes the bowling lanes all on its own.

In Britain, there are more than 100,000 ardent jazz fans

who buy millions of jazz records every year,

and often travel hundreds of miles

to listen to their favourite jazz group.

At this three-day outdoor festival at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire,

12 top line bands played to 16,000 people.

This worldwide beat of jazz can be cool or hot, trad or modern,

but essentially it's emotional.

A music that has to be felt, almost to be lived, to be really enjoyed.

Maybe the early influence of religious music on jazz accounts for this.

Cleethorpes found their jazz festival so popular, with people

coming from places as far apart as Cornwall and Inverness,

that it's now a standing date on the resort's calendar,

August Bank holiday.

The word jazz is

believed to come from the American negro word, jazzbo, or shuffle

dance, and of the 1,200 jazz clubs throughout Britain, fans either just

listen to the music or dance to it.

But most important, jazz is informal.

It's an atmosphere created by music which affects

people in different ways.

Some people, of course, hate it, but it can't be ignored.

Humphrey Lyttelton, a doyen of post-war Britain jazzmen,

started playing the trumpet at Eton where he was at school.

Today Eton has its own jazz group,

while, for many fans, Humph is the greatest.

Groups of youngsters like these have teamed together

with one ambition, to top the hit parade.

MUSIC: "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" by The Swinging Blue Jeans

The Cavern at Liverpool,

this has been the springboard to fame for many groups.

In Liverpool, there are now more than 300 groups.

Not many of them will realise all their ambitions,

but here's one group that's broken through

the show business barrier, soaring into the hit parade,

The Swinging Blue Jeans.

# For goodness' sakes

# I got the hippy hippy shakes

# Yeah, I've got the shakes

# I got the hippy hippy shakes. #

It's not only Liverpool.

In London, and all over the country there are clubs and ballrooms

where the youngsters can do what they like,

dress as they like, dance as they like.

Some estimates put the total number of beat groups at more than 25,000,

all producing the sort of sound

that has revolutionised the music industry.

It's strange that in this modern form of dancing, it's usually

the girls that like to dance, the boys to watch.

MUSIC: "Long Tall Sally" by The Swinging Blue Jeans

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd