From the earliest Victorian filmmakers to the news cameras of today, this programme uses moving images from almost every decade in between to tell the story of this fascinating seaside town. With wall-to-wall archive including newsreel, documentary films and entertainment shows, it explores over a century of filmmaking to get to the heart of a remarkable British holiday resort.
Bristol has fascinated film-makers from the moment the camera was invented. From shipping, sherry and tobacco to Brunel, bridges and the blitz, this programme explores the visual archives that document this ancient city.
A record of Britain and its people as seen through the lens of film-maker Harold Baim. Extracts from Baim's archive of bright and shiny cinema shorts from the 1940s to 1980s reveal a world that has gone forever.
From crofters, mountains and midges to hunting, whisky and the Highland Games, key archive gems from newsreel and documentary collections combine to create a portrait of the region and its people.
From bridges to bulldozers and shipyards to sing-alongs, Newcastle is a city rich in history with a thousand different stories to tell. This programme uses archive footage from the 1900s through to the present day to reveal a fascinating glimpse into the life of this great city and its inhabitants.
This first episode shows how Look at Life reflected the radical shifts in the position of women in British society, and shows how the country adapted to the new demands and expectations of women at home, in the workplace and at play.
The second episode looks at the films that recorded one of the great boom industries of the 1960s, the leisure industry. Having left behind the austerity of the immediate post-war period, Britain's increasingly affluent population took full advantage of the new leisure opportunities that made affordable newly-emerging recreational activities at home - as well as exciting holiday adventures abroad.
This episode examines Look at Life's surprisingly entertaining films on the British economy, at a time when industry faced ever-increasing competition from abroad.
Throughout the 1960s, the Rank Organisation produced hundreds of short, quirky documentaries that examined all aspects of life in Britain. Shot on high-quality colour film stock, they were screened in cinemas, but until now very little of the footage has been shown on television. This series draws on this unique archive to offer illuminating and often surprising insights into a pivotal decade in modern British history. This episode examines the films that recorded developments in one of 1960s Britain's most dynamic, innovative industries - the glamorous and fast-moving world of fashion.
This episode looks at the extraordinary advances in technology during a period when automatic washing machines were transforming life in the home, computers were about to revolutionise the workplace and nuclear power was promising to change the world.
This episode examines Look at Life's coverage of what was the most important political conflict of the era - the Cold War. With international tensions rising, the series recorded the enormous anti-nuclear protests in London; the experiences of British forces stationed in Berlin; and visited Eastern Europe, to observe everyday life for the people living behind the Iron Curtain.
This episode examines Look at Life's quirky films that documented unusual or eccentric British customs, rituals and traditions. In an era where many Britons embraced change as never before, these revealing and highly entertaining films show that people were determined to preserve the idiosyncratic aspects of our national life.
This episode examines Britain's ambiguous relationships with animals. Look at Life's coverage - which ranges from the fur trade, fox hunting and animal-based entertainments in circuses to our passion for pets - shows just how far attitudes to other species have shifted since the 1960s.
The series turns its attention to one of our great national treasures: the countryside. Drawing on the archive of high-quality colour films produced by the country's biggest cinema company, The Rank Organisation, this film shows how new technologies and production methods were changing the face of agriculture and records how country life was adapting to the new economic and moral realities of a fast-changing nation.
This episode focuses on films examining the changing shape of the British Empire. At a time when many of its former colonies were achieving independence, Look at Life sent its film crews as far afield as Aden, Malaysia and Ascension Island to record the efforts made by Britain to manage the transition from imperial rule to the leadership of an emerging Commonwealth.
During the 1960s - a decade that witnessed profound shifts across Britain's political, economic and cultural landscapes - many felt anxiety about the dizzying pace of change. Look at Life reflected the increasing social and moral unease in films that tackled subjects ranging from contraception to immigration, from increasing stress at work to the preservation of the Sabbath, and from the environmental implications of waste management to the threat of nuclear weapons. Through these films, we can glimpse many of the seismic societal transformations of the Sixties developments that polarised the nation and changed life in Britain forever.
This episode delves into the fast-changing world of childhood, a life-stage that was being transformed by sweeping changes to the British educational system including the introduction of radical technologies and teaching methods in schools and the emergence of new organised leisure activities that gave a generation of children the freedom to enjoy play as never before.
This episode focuses on the films that examine the implications of Britain's identity as an island nation, a geographical reality that has influenced not just our coastal landscape but our national psyche too. Featuring footage from well-known offshore isles like Wight and Man to the more isolated, culturally-distinctive and splendidly-idiosyncratic places like Harris and Cromer, which was inhabited year-round by just a single family of four.
This episode is devoted to the activity that occupies so many of our waking hours - our working lives. During a period when new technology was transforming our factories and fierce competition from overseas was forcing many employers to make far-reaching changes to production processes and patterns of working, these films hint at the enormous challenges confronting workers in Britain's increasingly fragile industrial economy.
This episode concentrates on the unprecedented upheavals in Britain's transport systems during a period when the popularity of air travel soared, rail networks were comprehensively dismantled and towns and cities were being reshaped to accommodate the unstoppable rise of the motor car.
Look at Life captured almost every aspect of British society and culture, but its producers had a special fascination for one aspect in particular - our inordinate fondness for boats. This episode examines the films that documented a period that saw a raft of British sailors seeking endurance world records; boatmen and women striving to halt the decline of our rivers and canals; and high tension on the high seas, as disputes over fishing rights prompted the government to send gunboats to escort our trawlers.
Archive-based series on British life in the 1960s continues with an episode devoted to some of the most monumental challenges of the post-war period - how to tackle desperate housing shortages, rebuild shattered cities and meet the rising expectations of an increasingly affluent and consumerist nation. As these films show, 1960s Britain embraced ambitious solutions by building high-rise homes in our cities and New Towns in the country.
Look at Life's film-makers also travelled abroad, visiting countries like Australia that were of special interest to British audiences, or to places in the news, including Chile during a state visit by the Queen, or to places of increasing relevance to Britain like Brussels, which was establishing itself as the centre of Europe's new Common Market. Britain on Film features some of the best of the footage captured by Rank's film-makers during their foreign excursions, including rare colour images of the reindeer herders of Lapland and film of the young Dalai Lama living in India following his exile from his native Tibet.
This episode salutes the Rank filmmakers' attempts to reflect our near-obsessive national preoccupation with a range of competitive sports, ranging from golf and cycling to skiing and stock car racing. Featuring vintage prose praising the idiosyncratic appeal of cricket by the incomparable commentator Richie Benaud, as well as rare colour footage of the England football team in training shortly before their greatest-ever triumph in the 1966 World Cup.
Offering more fascinating depictions of the 1960s as witnessed by the cameras of the Rank Organisation, Britain on Film continues with an absorbing exploration of the prevailing attitudes and values that shaped our society. Rank's outstanding and rarely-seen high-quality colour footage captures the post-war emergence of dynamic youth cultures, and celebrates an age when creativity was flourishing in the music industry and an increasingly multicultural nation was embracing more cosmopolitan tastes.
