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From Socialist Worker, No. 102, 21 December 1968, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
TUESDAY’S documentary The New Radicals on BBC-1 turned out to be a garbled and incoherent mess.
Director James Mossman was determined to be ‘with it’ and he abandoned clarity for a series of jagged shots,switching from subject to subject, interview to interview in a bewildering manner.
And of course it wasn’t very ‘with it’ at all – the style had been around for a decade and was made worse by such mind-boggling cliches as shots of young bourgeois trotting in Rotten Row as socialists harangued the Hyde Park crowds.
No viewer who stayed till the end can be any clearer on the revolutionary movement. Apart from Tom Hillier. who was excellent, no one was able to develop [text missing] and organisational [text missing] the screen were no [text missing] for what they actually [text missing] for.
A large chunk of the programme was given over to an opera on female emancipation, involving a nude girl (my – isn’t the BBC daring) and a robot. Interesting in it’s own right, no doubt, but it totally disrupted an already unbalanced programme.
Mossman returned to discuss the programme later on 24 Hours. Moving from a second showing of those naked mammaries, the interviewer asked: ‘What has that got to do with revolution?’
‘Two very strong reasons, really,’ said Mossman. Indeed.
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Last updated: 30 October 2020