Intermedial Relationships of Radio Features with Denis Mitchell’s and Philip Donnellan’s Early Television Documentaries

Writing of the closure in early 1965 of the Radio Features Department, Asa Briggs identifies one of the reasons for the controversial decision as ‘the incursion of television, which was developing its own features.’ ‘[Laurence] Gilliam and his closest colleagues believed in the unique merits of “pure radio”. The screen seemed a barrier’ (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 5, p. 348). Rather than the screen being ‘a barrier’ for them, a number of the creators of the emerging television documentary were from the late 1950s onwards able to transfer and transform distinctive techniques of ‘pure radio’ into highly effective visual forms. Two key figures were the producers of ‘poetic’ documentaries Denis Mitchell and Philip Donnellan, who employed layered voices, imaginative deployments of music and effects, and allusive juxtapositions of sound and image, to develop an alternative (although always marginal) tradition to the supposedly objective approaches of current affairs and, later, verité filmmakers. And a dozen years after the dismemberment of the Features Department, Donnellan paid tribute to it in his glorious but little-seen film Pure Radio (BBC1, 3 November 1977). Taking important early films by Mitchell and Donnellan as case studies, this paper explores the impact of radio features on television documentaries in the 1950s and early 1960s, and assesses the extent to which the screen in its intermedial relationships with ‘pure radio’ was a barrier or, in the work of certain creators, an augmentation

From Hodge to Lob re-inventing the English farm labourer

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'Blue rembered hills': painting and history

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'Those lost landscapes', ruralism. Englishness and historical change in the countryside 1890-1990

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From Diggers to Dongas: the land in English radicalism 1649 - 2000

This is the text of a professorial inaugural lecture given at the University of Sussex in October 2001. It seeks to present a broad picture of English Radicalism in which the land has a central, if changing, place. It argues that the idea of the land as a lost ‘birthright’ has consistently informed radical movements from the Diggers in the seventeenth century though to the ‘tribes’ associated with anti‐globalisation protests in the twentieth. However, this movement is not, and was not, one simply of ideas, rather it reflects the actual practice of radical and popular movements even where they had little or no ‘political’ programme. Thus land occupations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries ‘act out’ the more formulated ideas of the Diggers or the Chartists. But these are not simply archaic or backward looking movements but reflect the changes in the social and economic structure. Thus while they draw on the past they also adapt to their different presents emerging and re‐emerging in new ways which deny the wish of many historians to consign the land and its associated issues to the dustheap of history. The piece is offered in the spirit of a lecture not a finished academic article in the hope it will provoke debate, argument and hopefully revive radical and socialist historian's interest in the land

Land, locality, people, landscape: The nineteenth century countryside

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Rurality and English identity

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The death of rural england. A social history of the countryside since 1900

Alun Howkins' panoramic survey is a social history of rural England and Wales in the twentieth century. He examines the impact of the First World War, the role of agriculture throughout the century, and the expectations of the countryside that modern urban people harbour. Howkins analyzes the role of rural England as a place for work as well as leisure, and the problems caused by these often conflicting roles. This overview will be welcomed by anyone interested in agricultural and social history, historical geographers, and all those interested in rural affairs

Qualifying the evidence: Perceptions of rural change in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century

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Death and rebirth? English rural society, 1920-1940

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