Episode 2 Happy Birthday BBC Two

This is BBC Two.

Faster!

I've got a story to tell you.

What happened?

# Muh-na, muh-na, do-do-do-do-do! #

Gissa job.

My darling John.

I miss him, but I know I shouldn't do this.

Hello and welcome to this week's Whistle Test.

BBC Two hit the air on the 20th of April 1964.

This anniversary series tells the stories

of some of the programmes that shaped it.

This programme contains some strong language

MUSIC: "Another Green World" by Brian Eno

'Arena came about as a sort of alternative arts programme.'

It was a programme that could put popular culture and high culture

side by side so that you didn't really quite know

what you were going to get one week to the next.

If I had to compress Arena's signature style

into a short sentence -

an everyday household object seen from an unusual angle.

'Twas November 1970.

We were expecting in our family.

We were not going to have a he or she,

but a brand new 1600E.

She's cherished and cared for, like my old dear,

I hope they are with me for many a year.

She cost £1,200 before inflation was rife -

that was for the car, not for the wife.

The programmes people remember, of course, are Ford Cortina and My Way,

the sort of wayward ones, but there were many more traditional ones.

# I can make you mine

# Taste your lips of wine

# Any time, night or day... #

There's a whole lot of things I'm supposed to have said

that really come from me not hearing very well

or not being as good

-a linguist as I pretend to be!

-HE CHUCKLES

Law & Order was a hard-hitting drama by new writer GF Newman.

Shown in four parts, it was to shatter many of society's illusions

about the police and every aspect of the criminal justice system.

The assumption was that,

yes, there are occasionally examples of a corrupt detective,

erm, and we root them out.

Listen, you wicked bastard,

you can whine for your brief and about your rights

but it won't do you any good.

You've got information we want.

So you'll be here assisting us with our enquiries as long as it takes.

'What we did with Law & Order'

was make the assumption that the corruption was endemic.

-It costs me nothing sitting here, does it?

-No, you're right.

-Stand up then!

-You bastard, let go!

MAN GROANS

'It looked like a drama doc,

'as though they were following a copper round.'

-Excuse me, sir, Mr Redfern's on the phone.

-Fine.

There's me taking brown manila envelopes with money in 'em,

fitting people up and being a real horrible, mm, you can imagine.

POLICE SHOUT ORDERS

'We found the firm that made the furniture for the prisons

'and asked them to give us that furniture.'

Tortured, mate?

You probably killed that officer you just hit!

-Want to be topped?!

-No, he's too good for that.

And then we had a phone call from them

to say that they couldn't supply us

because the Home Office had got wind of this film

and had threatened to withdraw their contract.

PRISONER GROANS AND SCREAMS

Hold him, stupid!

I'll kill you!

Well, we thought there'd be a little bit of a reaction, and there was.

SIRENS

Don't panic!

What else is there to do?!

HE GASPS AND WAILS

Shh! We will call O'Reilly!

He made this mess, he can come and clear it up!

WAILING CONTINUES

Oh, just pull yourself together!

Come on!

Again!

Harder!

Right, I'll call O'Reilly!

# Empire Road... #

Empire Road was a drama series with humour

about a Caribbean family in Handsworth in Birmingham.

'The main character, played by Norman Beaton, was Everton Bennett.'

He was looked up to by people in the street,

in the area where they lived,

'as someone they could turn to at times

'and bring their problems to.'

I'm not asking for no free gift.

I'll pay you back every penny.

But help me, Mr Bennett!

Help me, man!

'The black audience'

were actually saying,

"There are people like us on television."

MUSIC AND LAUGHTER

'And people can remember when their parents used to say to them,

'"Come and sit down and watch this. We're on TV."'

You had things that you had to deal with back then.

'I had a character who had Rasta locks.'

Help us, sir. Any job?

You could really help us if you wanted to.

'BBC, Rasta locks - they looked so odd'

that the next time you saw them they'd had a haircut.

-I like your, your head.

-Yes, thank you, Walter.

Can't stop, Mum, I'll see you later, right?

Empire Road was part of something

that I perhaps will never quite know again

because it was of its time but also the first of its time.

CHEERING

'It was absolutely clear to me that, erm,'

the natural world was the obvious thing to do.

'I mean, I thought it was just the most thrilling thing,

'but I couldn't possibly do it and be an administrator.

'I was just terrified

'someone was going to put out this idea before I did.

'But I just made it in time.'

Slow motion shows how expert it is in keeping its bill

perfectly steady in relation to the blossom,

even while its body moves in all directions.

When specimens of this creature first reached Europe,

people refused to believe their eyes.

They said it was a hoax.

Bits and pieces of different creatures

rather crudely sewn together.

But it's no hoax. It's a platypus.

The gorilla family spends its day gently grazing,

and there's plenty of time for play.

Sometimes they even allow others to join in.

I've got a story to tell you, it's all about spies.

With the intrigue of the Cold War

still fuelling the nation's imagination,

BBC Two decided to dramatise John Le Carre's classic novel

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Centred around the search for a Secret Service traitor,

the series' success depended on the casting of the central figure,

spy catcher George Smiley.

'Alec Guinness was always the person

'that we all wanted to play George Smiley.'

And none of us really thought,

because he'd never done television, that he would agree.

George, I've been sent to deliver you.

'Oddly enough, it was all very simple

'because it was a character that he'd always wanted to play.'

I've been reviewing my situation.

After a lifetime of living by my wits and on my memory,

I shall give myself up full-time to the profession of forgetting.

'If you get an actor like Alec Guinness,'

you're free to go to almost anybody.

Erm, and we did assemble a fantastic cast.

Poor George.

Life's such a puzzle to you, isn't it?

City Removers here, I believe you wanted an estimate.

So who's pulling the strings for Percy Puppet?

Bad boys like Ricki.

Cultural attache? Balls! Army written all over him.

Heap bad story.

Bad for our big chief.

'I had been asked to consider the role of Bill Haydon, the traitor.'

It was probably, second to Smiley himself, the best part.

You know, the baddies always are.

We were able to approach incredible actors and actresses

for really very small things.

I remember very, very clearly the telephone call I got from my agent,

erm, saying, "Patrick, they want you to appear in Tinker, Tailor.

"However, here's the problem -

"the character you're going to play is only in one scene...

"and he doesn't speak, at all."

Could we take those things off his hands?

'"Here's the bonus side to it.

"There's only one other actor in the scene with you,

"and it's Sir Alec Guinness."

I'm not offering you wealth,

or smart women, or your choice of fast cars.

I know you haven't any use for those things.

'Very complicated dialogue to do.'

I wouldn't admit that I didn't understand a lot of it.

Obviously, we needed to be certain Control would rise to the bait.

We had to spell it out that he'd got to send a big gun

to make the story stick.

And someone who spoke Czech, of course.

It had to be a man who was Old Circus.

To bring the temple down a bit.

Yes, I see the logic of that.

I said to him, "Alec, I really must confess

"I find it very difficult to understand,"

whereupon there was a general absolute chorus

from all my colleagues, from Jason onwards and outwards,

saying, "Oh, we don't understand it, either!"

And Alec said very quietly,

"I can see I'm going to have to tell you what it's all about."

And he did!

Following a brief local news item

about Bolton steeplejack Fred Dibnah,

BBC Two gave him his own programme

which led on to a highly successful series

of observational documentaries.

It's going! Going!

HORN HONKS

Did you like that?

Good evening and welcome, at last, to Newsnight.

When it began, we didn't know it was going to go on for more than a week.

On the political front at home, assertions from Liberals and Labour

that there are alternatives to the government's economic policies.

My first recollection of Newsnight is

when it was presented by John Tusa and Peter Snow and Donald MacCormick,

and, frankly, it was a relief to find a channel

where serious current affairs wasn't an embarrassment.

There was less difference between Labour Social Democrats

and Liberals than between them and the National Executive.

We'll see what they have to say.

Why not, since it exists and since it surely can do some good

in terms of amending government legislation, make the best of it?

There was this curious debate going on, which now seems ridiculous

to us all, that news and current affairs are somehow separate things.

Of course there is discussion, of course there is news.

But putting them together in the same programme

was something that Newsnight was challenged to do.

You really think that the RAF and perhaps the Navy, as well,

could bomb airfields in Argentina itself

without losing a great many planes?

They may lose planes, one hopes they won't lose a great many.

But this is war.

The Falklands fell just at the beginning of a period

when Newsnight, this upstart new programme

looking at the issues of the day in depth, had come on the air.

And it must have been infuriating

for government to have its day-to-day accounts

of what was happening in the Falklands

questioned and looked at analytically

by a programme that was trying to be objective.

How, then, can you publicly endorse a country which bans

political parties, bans trade unions and uses institutional torture?

Do I sometimes set out to wrong-foot people? Yes.

And the reason for that, I think, can be justified.

Well, you know what the accusation is. They say you're a poodle.

I just try to ask the questions that the average,

reasonably intelligent viewer would like to see asked

and, by and large, I think you should ask it straight and direct.

The truth of the matter is that Mr Marriott was not suspended.

-Did you threaten to overrule him?

-I did not overrule Derek Lewis.

-Did you threaten to overrule him?

-I took advice.

There is nothing more maddening,

not just for me as an interviewer, but for the viewer,

than to have someone not answering a question.

I really profoundly believe that the...

the healthy democracy is the well-informed democracy,

and that's how I justify what we do.

The only way to understand the press

is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices.

Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers.

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country.

The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country.

The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country.

The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.

The Financial Times is read by people who own the country.

The Morning Star is read by people

who think the country ought to be run by another country.

And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

LAUGHTER

Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?

Sun readers don't care who runs the country,

as long as she's got big tits.

Conceived as the replacement for Man Alive,

40 Minutes was the place where no subject was off-limits.

In its 13-year run, the series covered subjects

as diverse as battered husbands and prize-winning leeks.

Grandstand had a telephone call from a noisy, posh young man,

saying "My friends and I are going fishing next weekend.

"We're a noisy bunch. Would you like to film us?"

Grandstand said, "We don't do documentaries,

"you'd better talk to 40 Minutes.

I believe discipline is very important.

He will need discipline.

There's only two good reasons for getting married.

One is to have children.

The other one is so that at least

your wife can drive you home when you're drunk.

Oh, dear. We missed. What a shame.

'It turned out'

that there was a very extraordinary film about these four characters

'who represented, perhaps,

'the negative side of Mrs Thatcher's time.'

The unemployed must, in many people's eyes,

represent a threat to security, a threat to stability,

a threat to law and order.

HE LAUGHS

'These three guys saw it together.'

They thought it was wonderful!

They thought it was fantastic. It was home movies to them.

What a load of smart-arses they were.

Don't shoot it, for God's sake.

Not on camera, anyway!

Then of course, when it went out, the roof fell in,

because most of the rest of the world

saw them in quite a different way.

The death sentence is only passed when one is as certain as one can be,

and it's never, ever 100%,

but let's say 95% is good enough for me.

In fact, probably in most cases, 90% is good enough for me.

I don't think they liked it,

but one of them certainly stayed in touch with Paul Watson

and was up for another film, I think, about a year later.

Vanity, vanity.

MUSIC: Brindisi (Drinking Song) from La Traviata

In 1981, La Traviata became the first opera

to be relayed live from across the Atlantic.

-Sit.

-No, that's very weak. Sit!

-Say "wait".

-Wait!

-No, that's a squeak, Mrs Murray.

Set off with the word "walkies!"

Not upwards, downwards. No, over here. Let go.

Oh, he's lovely! He's lovely!

Of course I can cook. Who says I can't?

Won't be long now.

'I know I'll never grow up,

because I still have that kind of childish feeling'

that it isn't fair.

And when I think that something isn't fair,

that's when I go to the typewriter and fight back.

Jesus, don't!

HONKING AND SQUAWKING

It was a scream of anger, really, from Alan,

and a rather operatic picture of hell.

DOGS BARKING

HE SOBS

When you consider at the time that Granada were convinced

they were going to win the BAFTA for Brideshead,

and then all of a sudden,

out of nowhere comes Boys From The Blackstuff.

Have you got a job?

Gissa job. Eh?

I'd be all right if I had a job.

Honest.

Well, the irony about the way in which

The Boys From The Blackstuff was perceived

was that it was a righteous and virulent attack

upon Thatcher's Britain.

I'd be all right. Oh, yes!

The irony being that I wrote four of the five episodes

of The Boys From The Blackstuff before Thatcher came to power.

God's sake! For once in your life,

why don't you stand up for yourself?!

The aim of Secret Society

was to take a range of subjects

in which secrecy about important issues was not acceptable.

When Duncan Campbell first set out to make a television series

on the subject of secrecy in Britain,

he began a chain of events

that was to lead to a full-scale political row.

The programme which the series became absolutely known for

was about how the Government had secretly committed

half a billion pounds to building Britain's first ever spy satellite,

an utterly top-secret project which no-one knew about,

but which flouted an important parliamentary agreement.

That satellite was to have been called Zircon.

-MARGARET THATCHER:

-In October 1986,

the Government learned of the BBC's intention

to show specific material on a secret defence project.

There came a moment

at which we interviewed a senior Ministry of Defence former scientist,

and explicitly asked him about Zircon.

And it was the epochal moment of the programme.

What difference to the situation for Britain and NATO

will be made by the Zircon satellite?

I can't talk to you about that, I'm afraid.

You're saying that everything about Zircon is classified?

Yes, I'm sorry about that.

-REPORTER:

-Special Branch officers raided the homes

of Duncan Campbell and his researchers

and, a week later, BBC Scotland's offices in Glasgow.

'Government solicitors obtained an injunction from the High Court'

and then attempted to serve me personally.

The reaction in Downing Street

when the story was published in magazines and newspapers,

having tried to prevent it being shown on BBC Two, was outrage.

Good evening.

The Director-General of the BBC, Alasdair Milne, has resigned

and tonight there's growing speculation

that he was asked to leave.

After the controversy and during the controversy, of course,

Mr Milne was sacked by the Governors.

Later on, when I came to know Alasdair Milne,

he told me something of the intense pressure he'd been under

in dealing with the programmes before he was sacked,

and I've also heard it suggested by those who knew him

that the pressure went further than he's prepared to speak of,

even to this day.

I can't talk to you about that, I'm afraid.

My goodness, it smells of chlorine.

Municipal swimming baths, through and through. Disgusting.

Better taste better.

'When I arrived on BBC Two,'

there were quite a lot of lifestyle programmes, surprisingly,

though none of them...

In fact, I can hardly remember the names of any of them,

except Food And Drink.

Food And Drink was detested by a series of controllers of BBC Two.

First, there was Alan Yentob, who became controller in 1988.

Cool, trendy Alan Yentob.

What was this programme with people in sweaters?

Hello, and welcome to the ultimate Food And Drink in the series.

The only way we managed to keep the show on air

was because it regularly got 4 million viewers,

and in the end they couldn't do without it. Nyah!

A sort of mouth-filling feel...

..attacks you in your balloon-blowing muscles...

..lactic, pastry edge to it...

-And, and...

-Hot Bakewell tart...

..really does whoosh up your nose...

..desperately disappointed...

If we mentioned a wine on the Food And Drink programme,

there would probably be additional sales

of a quarter of a million bottles the following day.

You need that firmness in the mouth.

HE LAUGHS

Hold on to it overnight.

What Def II means

is actually quite a good question.

I think a lot of people got slightly confused by it.

You should ask Janet Street-Porter.

I don't know, I've forgotten!

Def II, I think, means exactly what you want it to mean.

It's like respect to, or something like that.

Some kind of rap twaddle like that.

Def II, bluntly, was the BBC's attempt

to sort of cater for an audience

that didn't know where BBC Two was on the dial.

It was just a good way of creating a channel within a channel.

That was the concept.

Def II's pretty responsible for a lot of good stuff, as well.

Def II was the banner for a mixed bag of programmes,

all aimed at the youth market.

This week, the Rough Guide comes to you from Havana...

A city where time seems to have stood still...

Frozen in the moment on New Year's Day 1959,

when the revolutionary hero Fidel Castro...

Overthrew the corrupt leaders, pimps and mafiosi...

Who had turned the city into one of the most

notorious playgrounds in the world.

It really did change the notion of a travel programme,

and also about the kinds of places you might go to.

You know, Rough Guide

transcended the demographic of its target audience.

We had a surprisingly large number of pensioners watching it.

Don't you remember growing up, how great it was to see people

dancing on telly, because you could check out what they were wearing?

I don't believe this, but it's happening.

I wouldn't be seen dead on television

looking like a muppet tramp with no idea of style.

Easy-peasy, welcome back to the me, the 'Ski, and my dance posse.

The minute we announced the show,

we had hundreds of people who wanted to be in the audience,

and it was a really exciting atmosphere,

because they looked fabulous.

In fact, it was so popular

that even a pre-Spice Girls Geri Halliwell made a brief appearance.

People just wanted to be on the show.

They used to break into the studio,

and they used to get away with it, no-one would know.

Shut your mouth! I ain't deaf.

I've got loadsamoney!

WOLF HOWLS

I think the thing that marked The Late Show out

from the other programmes that were on at the time about art

was one very simple fact,

which was that it was live.

And it was live four nights a week.

And what that implicitly said

was that whatever is going on in the cultural world

is almost as important as politics.

At the time that we were thinking of The Late Show, politics seemed dull.

There wasn't much happening in British politics.

Even in terms of the worldview, nothing much had changed.

And from the moment that The Late Show arrived, the world changed.

Almost from the first programme.

# Right now The Late Show is on the air... #

I was presenting the first programme and I remember

we all went away on Saturday night, and we had four items lined up,

and they were pretty boring and ordinary.

-Good evening.

-# Listen while I tell you... #

-Good evening.

-# Hey, I'm going to tell you... #

Good evening.

# Hey, I'm going to tell you why it's there... #

And on Sunday,

one of the communities in Bradford

burnt a copy of The Satanic Verses.

I remember, I interviewed Salman that very first programme.

As we came off, we all kind of went

"Phew, I see, so that's what live cultural programming's about".

The simple truth is that I haven't broken any laws.

They may wish that I had. They may wish Islamic law

applied in this country and I could be stoned to death.

Special Branch came rushing into the building and ushered him out,

'these big, burly guys.'

'We thought we were making this rather obscure programme'

all about a little corner of society, a corner of life.

And, actually, it's about something that really, really matters.

Are you saying that if it came to it,

you would be prepared to pull the trigger?

On Rushdie?

-I mean, talking seriously.

-I am talking seriously, yeah.

If it came to it, and we were face-to-face...

-..who knows?

-What do you mean, "Who knows?"

I'm saying, who knows? I might pull the trigger, yes.

One of the significant successes of The Late Show

was the fact that it arrived at a moment when things were changing,

and you could report, albeit from the point of view of culture,

on those changes.

It's called Oak Tree, of course, and it's a celebrated piece,

because in fact it holds out a promise

of something that definitely isn't there.

I remember them having a very straight-faced discussion

about when it stopped being a glass of water.

At what point after the water was poured in did it become an oak tree?

Well, it only becomes an oak tree when I put the water into the glass.

So in that sense, beforehand it wasn't an oak tree

and now it definitely is.

You couldn't quite tell

whether they were both in on the joke,

whether Matt was making fun of him. It was very stimulating.

It's uncanny,

because it looks so much like a glass of water on a shelf now.

It does, amazingly. But it is, in fact, an oak tree.

There was a space in which you could say what you really thought,

rather than what you thought you ought to say

about a piece of art or a piece of writing.

He clearly didn't like the magazine,

because we gave his book a bad review.

Oh, that's absolute bollocks. ALL TALK AT ONCE

It's fiction! It's fiction!

This was war.

Do you understand what it's like?

What it's being picked the whole time for this kind of abuse?

Don't give me these patronising lessons, Peter!

Sarah Dunant was always very good with the pencil.

Let's move back... Can I stop you both?

Let's move back to the figure of Kennedy later.

I'm going home, man.

You're so fucking dead!

You really are dead.

MUSIC: "Fawlty Towers" theme