Since the early days of the trade union movement, a compelling slogan had been ‘Knowledge is Power’. The motto of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Co-Operator spelt it out in the 1830s:
Numbers without Union are Powerless And Union without Knowledge is Useless8
So, after long hours on the factory floor, working people took themselves off to Mutual Improvement Societies to acquire the knowledge that would in due course enable them to better their lot. In 1899, the trade union movement set up Ruskin College in the heart of Oxford, to offer degree-level education to workers without the formal qualifications for a university place, and it has transformed lives and opportunities ever since, including those of the former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.
Prescott was also one of the belated beneficiaries of the education revolution initiated by the Wilson Labour government of 1964, which identified adult education as a critical component in the ‘white heat of technological advance’ that they saw themselves spear-heading. There was some jockeying for position between government departments and the BBC over the direction of adult education delivery, but the BBC seemed to have won the day when Don Grattan was made Editor of Further Education Television in October 1964, charged with making ‘five liberal adult education programmes a week’.9Within a few years,
Further Education evolved into a sizeable department making many hours of television a week over a range of subjects from politics and moral philosophy to history and psychology.
Languages formed one of the cornerstones of the department, as a growing number of people were taking foreign holidays and fancied learning a bit of French or Spanish. These were mildly entertaining shows, mostly shot on location with a Pierre or a Pedro engaged in arch ‘real life’ linguistic encounters that enabled would-be tourists to know how to order a loaf or a lunch in the local tongue. BBC Publications did a brisk business in the accompanying workbooks and language tapes, which enabled people to practise in the peace of their own home, or in their cars on the way to work. Although the central programmes were documentaries, these were multimedia propositions before the term had been coined.
History programmes were also popular, and tended to come from a more populist perspective than the A.J.P. Taylor lectures. Milestones in Working Class History10(1975) and The Past at Work11(1980) pretty much capture the flavour. Milestones tracked trade union history from the Luddites to the ‘Red Clydeside’ shipyard workers of the day. It took an explicitly socialist approach to the values of organised labour at a time when mainstream treatment of these subjects with such sympathy attracted widespread odium, as did Ken Loach’s Days of Hope mentioned in Chapter 15. Further Education, consigned to less prominent transmission times at the end of the evening, did not need to satisfy the same political sensitivities. It even managed a latter-day version of those Mutual Improvement Societies in the series Trade Union Studies.
This series appealed directly to trade unionists wanting to learn about better means of industrial bargaining and organisation, but many such FE series fitted within the wider definition of ‘social action broadcasting’. This meant that programmes were intended to stimulate some form of social action in their audiences, from taking further classes to volunteering, but also implied an activist agenda on the part of their producers. Some attended meetings of the social action broadcasting network with fellow broadcasters and like-minded academics, to discuss how better to effect social change through broadcasting. This level of commitment would be seen as diversionary today, if not downright dangerous. But the objectives were not all political, and few interpretable as party-political. The animating spirit of the producers and directors working in the department, which changed its name to Continuing Education in 1978, was a desire to find novel ways of sharing enthusiasms across every conceivable field, much of it achieved by documentaries shot with people already enthused by the subject.
Some quite happily espoused government policy objectives, such as the major adult literacy campaign On the Move12– which showed inspirational stories of people empowered by learning to read and write – and the attempt to persuade Asian housewives to take courses in English as a Second Language, Parosi13– which used Hindustani soap opera to build an audience, but also featured success stories from the communities. Others merely aimed to address a shortfall in home crafts and, in so doing, made stars of their presenters. Delia Smith’s Cookery Course14ran from 1978 to 1980 and made its unassuming Catholic presenter the best-known cook of her generation – long before the later rash of celebrity chefs. The American Kaffe Fossett brought a whole new dimension to knitting and got himself elected the ‘UK’s King of Colour and Design’. And the academic botanist David Bellamy delighted and entranced audiences with his cheeky wit and cheery speech impediment, making him Britain’s favourite environmentalist, at least until he became embroiled with corporate advocacy and global warming denial.15
Arguably the most important and influential FE show was made relatively early in the department’s history. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972)16radicalised art history and pro-moted cultural studies with its original screen essays on aesthetics and perception. Berger’s original take on the uses and abuses of publicity, reproduction and images of women was intensely political and seemed a world away from the more conventional ways of seeing invoked in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation just three years before. Berger’s aim was to educate the public in the awareness that everyday imagery had been subverted to manipulate the masses in much the same way as Marx had identified religion as ‘the opium of the masses’:
Publicity exerts an enormous influence and is a political phenomenon of great importance.
But its offer is as narrow as its references are wide. It recognises nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or needs are made subsidiary to this power. All hopes are gathered together, made homogenous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.17 Berger went on to win that year’s Booker Prize for his novel G, and scandalised literary London by dedicating half the prize money to the Black Panthers, the British branch of a radical black organisation. Not all FE programmes aspired to these iconoclastic heights, but the freedom to think outside the envelope was a given of this work, and a freedom no longer apparent in contemporary television.
Figure 8.1
Front cover of Ways of Seeing by John Berger