Original subtitles

Here, set of aluminium saucepans.

Never seen daylight, moonlight or Fanny By Gaslight.

Growing up in London, me and my mates

used to hear our parents talking about "the good old days".

We asked ourselves, "What was so good about them?"

There was depression, unemployment,

World War Il, the Blitz.

And even when it was all over, food was rationed.

The Cockneys were always looked upon kindly in England,

but in the way you look kindly upon

- Mickey Mouse or puppets, you know? - Yeah, yeah.

They say, "Oh, aren't they nice? Aren't they clever?" You know.

As though they've wound you up and you do something.

Well, along came a generation of which I'm probably about the oldest.

I feel like a grandfather with most of them.

I'm 33.

We decided that we weren't gonna be Mickey Mouse any more,

at least, we'd be people, you know,

whether they liked it or not, and that's what we did.

For the first time in British history,

the young working class, people like me, stood up for ourselves and said,

"We are here, this is our society and we are not going away."

What was it all about?

I'm gonna show you.

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

Britain in the 1950s was stable, conventional,

predictable and dull.

But that's the way our parents liked it.

My generation demanded a new beginning.

I wasn't always Michael Caine.

I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.

My mother was a charlady, a cleaner.

And my father was a Billingsgate fish market porter.

I was expected to follow in his footsteps,

but I hated the smell of fish.

Maurice Micklewhite, are you?

Yes, I am.

No.

Oh, my God, aren't you like your father?

Cos I didn't think anybody would be left down here.

Your mother and I were very good friends.

- Yes, you were, indeed. Yes. - And your dear old father.

The times we used to pick up old Mrs Faulkner.

Yeah! Off the floor.

You remember those times,

- don't you, boy? - Yeah, I remember. I do.

As an English child grows,

he becomes aware he has already been assigned a place in a large game,

a system as intricate and elaborate as a maze.

A maze of tradition,

outmoded rules about who should succeed

in the eyes of the establishment.

Discipline is indispensable to a progressive and mature society.

Given discipline in the home

and school,

in college and at the work bench,

the foundations for happiness are well-established.

My dad was just an East End lad.

My mum wanted something better for us.

My dad was a very talented musician

but he had to go out and work.

- As I'm sure your parents did. - They did, yeah.

So, all his dreams about becoming a musician

went out the window.

As a kid, me and my friends

spent as much time as possible in the cinema.

But the films we saw had nothing to do with our lives.

No heroes we could relate to.

From the way they talked,

I thought all the actors were dukes and duchesses.

Pure satin.

Satin? Lace, actually.

No, Major, I meant your voice.

I'm so desperately in love with you.

Well, you really think you are.

I can't eat or sleep for thinking of you.

- You know Mr Gore-Brown, my new boss. - How do you do?

Sir Henry Hazelrigg

- and Major D'Arcy Davenport. - How do you do?

Well, welcome to the toughest way of earning a living

in this so-called civilised world, Mr Gore-Brown.

Not that my East End mates would go and see Brief Encounter

but for some reason, I saw it.

It was a love story about a middle-aged couple.

And it was funny.

I love you.

"I love you."

You love me, too.

"I love you, too."

Yes.

I don't want to pretend anything, either to you or to anyone else.

What did she say?

And the other one says,

"She says, 'I love you.'

"Shut up."

I look down on him because I am upper class.

I look up to him because he is upper class.

But I look down on him because he is lower class.

I am middle class.

I know my place.

We were supposed to respect our betters.

The nobs, the toffs, the people who had all the power.

The establishment, as we knew them.

We were all brought up to be servants.

I mean, we were never gonna be the masters.

Lady Lewisham, what do you think about our teenagers?

I think they're splendid,

and I'm delighted you asked me that question,

cos I sometimes think they get rather a raw deal.

This was the first generation that had

the potential to make a mark at the time.

But the older generation

still clung to the days

when Britain ruled over half the civilised world.

We'll arise like lions and get our Empire back.

The bloody great British Empire

that your bloody Labour rubbish give away to,

to the people it belonged to.

Whether we like it or not,

the wind of change is blowing through this country.

But we don't need generals any more.

There isn't a war going on.

I wasn't prepared to follow any of the principles,

morals, outlooks on life

of what were, I laughingly call "my betters".

And which is what I was actually taught at school,

I was taught all about my betters.

I never understood who my betters were supposed to be.

I've never seen any of my betters.

I've seen a lot of my equals

but I've still never seen any of my betters.

From my generation,

the Labour government coming in in '45...

- Yeah, yeah. - ...the Health Service,

the change of diet,

- the change of healthcare... - Yeah.

...and good education for everybody. I think that set the '60s up.

I mean, you got a very good education, too.

Yeah, yeah.

we didn't have to pay for education.

I loved it

and I was very glad to go to a grammar school.

- I did. - Did you?

- Grammar school boys! - Grammar school.

Come on! Give it up for grammar school.

Well, I always say to people, you know, I got this real posh education

for nothing.

I always wanted to be an actress

and my father said, "No, no, you can't be an actress.

"It's terrible. It's a terrible profession.

"And I want you to go to a secretarial school

"and find a good man, get married and have a nice life."

There was this kinda science teacher when I was about 12,

he showed me how to develop film.

So I used to go down my mum's cellar.

I used to nick the chemicals from school and process film

from my mother's Brownie

to see if I could photograph birds.

Birds?

Oh, I was quite interested in ornithology.

Oh, I thought... Oh, sorry, I mistook that.

No, no. OK, I get it now, yeah.

When I saw Elvis, it did something to me.

And it wasn't just the song,

and it wasn't just the fact that everybody was talking about it.

It was something animalistic.

I'd seen someone that was free.

Completely and utterly free.

And I thought, "I've gotta do that. I've gotta do... I've gotta be...

"That's what I wanna do."

I wanted to be an actor from the age of 10

but I mean, people with my accent and background

hardly ever became actors.

But I was in a school play

and when I came on,

I immediately got a laugh

because my flies were undone.

But

I was hooked.

So, you know, when he was working,

he was always miles away, you know, dreaming what he was gonna be

and what he wasn't gonna be and

- we used to think he was a bit cranky. - We used to think he was a nutcase,

didn't we? Let's face it.

To be honest, I was happy

just to make a few quid being an actor in repertory.

Playing in draughty theatres,

living in draughty rooms.

I never thought that I would be famous.

Never.

And so you've got a long way to go.

Don't become too good too early.

So, I was in rep, doing a play up in Liverpool

and we used to go out and have coffee and sandwiches

at lunchtime at this coffee bar.

And it was always smothered in girls.

That's gonna get you down there.

Yeah.

That was us, yeah.

To get in, you had to kind of bluff a bit.

- It was officially a blues club. - Yeah.

We didn't know any blues.

- It was all rock and roll, what we knew. - Yeah, sure.

We were getting notes from the guy.

"This is not blues!"

Anyway, we bluffed it.

I mean, I had my guitar.

Mick Jagger had his in London,

and Eric Burdon was up in Newcastle

and we're all going through the same changes at once.

And you could make it without

college and education and all those things, you know?

Of course, with being very poor.

there was no way I was gonna be able to buy a guitar.

Yeah, how do you start? You gotta get musical instruments.

Yeah, so I went out and bought some wood

like so many of our guys did.

We all went out and made our first guitars.

- Made them? - We made them, yeah. We made them.

And they weren't very good. And they didn't last very long.

But all you needed to do was have something that made a noise.

Really?

And if you learnt three chords you can play many, many songs.

And after they learned those three chords,

most kids headed for London.

It's where everybody who wanted to be somebody

wanted to be.

You might be out of work,

you might be broke,

but it was cheap

and you lived within two miles of Buckingham Palace.

Oh, that was a great time.

We all used to just go round London in our cars

and meet each other and talk about music.

And we were very close to the Stones.

I spent a lot of time with Brian and Mick.

And I admired them, you know.

I dug them the first time I saw them in Richmond.

And you know we wrote their first number one?

Wait a minute, what one was that?

So, one day, me and John were in Charing Cross Road

cos that was where all

- the guitar shops were. - Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

And we used to go down. That was like our mecca.

And we were coming out of a shop one day

and we saw this taxi with Rolling Stones

and we were, "Hey!"

So, we got in, and we're talking, and they say,

"Oh, we got a record contract with Decca, you know? Great."

And Mick said, "Trouble is, we haven't got a song."

And I go, "Drr-drr-drr!"

I go, "Well, we've got one."

I thought the Stones wrote that one themselves.

No, we wrote that when we were so high.

How do you compare your group with The Beatles?

I don't know. How do you compare it with The Beatles?

I don't compare it at all, you know. There's no point.

Well, let's get right down to the brass tacks.

Do you think you're better than they are?

At what? You know, it's not the same group.

- It was part of a movement. - Yeah.

Because while we were still up in Liverpool,

we were seeing people like you,

Albert Finney, Courtenay,

who were ordinary, working-class boys,

who talked with regional accents.

I've only clocked you, that's all, you're...

You're Crafty Arthur from the Basin.

I shouldn't worry too much, sir. We can always shut down a reactor.

Yes.

Pity if we had to, though.

Don't let the bastards grind you down!

That's one thing I've learned.

Ordinary lads, you know, and they were now making it.

- You were expected to sort of talk posh. - Yeah.

And we didn't or couldn't, and didn't want to.

My real name was Maurice Micklewhite,

which is a bit of a mouthful for an actor.

So I changed it to Michael White.

Then I came to London

and every night I used to go to Leicester Square,

in a phone booth,

and call my agent to see if there was any work.

And one night she said, "I've got a job for you.

"It's on television."

She said, "And you've got to join Equity, the trade union."

So I said, "OK, I'll join it." She said, "But you've gotta change your name."

She said, "Because there's another Michael White

"already in Equity.

"So, I want the name now."

She said, "Obviously, you can keep the name Michael,

"but I want another surname."

So, I looked round Leicester Square at the cinemas

and there was my favourite actor, Humphrey Bogart

in The Caine Mutiny.

And I thought, "This is fantastic."

So I said, "Michael Caine." She said, "How do you spell it?"

I said, "C-A-I-N-E."

And that's how I became Michael Caine.

If I'd have gone to the cinema next door

I would've been "Michael 101 Dalmatians."

Music in this country was very watery and weak

and not really worth talking about.

Then all of a sudden, you know,

the kids in England were thinking for themselves, you know.

They were beginning to sort of build up their own ideas about fashion.

And build up their own ideas about music.

I really don't care whether they think we're a load of yobs or not.

It doesn't worry me.

Cos maybe I am. I don't really care. I'm just what I am.

It was like slaughtering a beast.

The thing could howl, it could scream.

It was doing all kinds of noises...

...that you could only do by smashing it.

We were led in through that period of the Cold War

- where we were with the Cuban Crisis. - Exactly! Yeah.

We had three minutes to live. You just did everything now.

Twenty years ago, it was music,

it was melody, you wanted to dance to it.

This is London calling the British Empire.

This is the BBC Light Programme.

Here is the ten o'clock news.

Ladies and gentlemen...

The BBC Home and Forces Programme.

Here is the news.

When I was a kid, the bloke who read the news

on the BBC, he wore an evening suit.

And that was on the radio.

And that attitude still existed

among the stiffs who ran the place.

They didn't want us to be exposed to the evils

of the pop music

of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who.

But whenever the old guard told us what we couldn't do,

we always found a way to do it.

We've records on radio. Lovely!

This is Radio Caroline,

three and a half miles off the coast of Britain.

The last free radio station in the world.

Good morning! This is Radio Caroline,

broadcasting on 259 metres in the medium wave.

And welcome to the show! You're with the Admiral Robbie Dale

through till 9:00 this evening. Remember, of course, it's 259...

We want food! We want food!

All broadcasting, ultimately, was responsible to the government,

to the representatives of the government.

Now, these people are not. They are a law unto themselves.

They are, in fact, pirates. The word is a correct one.

They are pirates. They are, in fact, outlaws.

If a new animal comes into a group of animals

that are already together, the other animals will attack it.

Because they don't know it, and they're afraid of it.

The pirates are a menace, and I don't believe at all

that the public wouldn't support action to enforce the law.

We broadcast 24 hours a day

to Britain, France, Holland, many other European countries.

We fight for freedom.

And we will fight until we are physically put down.

The old rule book was being torn up

and thrown away.

It was happening in my profession, too.

I was up for a big film, to play a Cockney Corporal.

And I had to go to the audition

and I didn't have a phone at that time.

And when I got to the audition,

the director said, "I'm terribly sorry."

He said, "We couldn't get in touch with you.

"We've cast that part already." You know?

So, I was turned down.

But I'd been turned down so many times it didn't matter.

And the room was very long,

which was fortunate for my movie career,

cos by the time I got to the door,

the director said, "Come back a minute. Come here."

Now, I was very slim, 6'2", long, blond hair.

He said, "You sort of look like

"an officer type, you know?"

So I said, "Thank you." He said, "Can you do a posh accent?"

I said, "I have been in rep for nine years,

"I can do any accent you want."

I was very nervous, I remember.

I remember Cy Endfield, when he did the first take,

said "Cut!" halfway through the very first take

and he said, "Michael, " he said, "your voice has gone up about three octaves."

And my voice was up here with nerves and they could hardly record it.

And we had to start again, and then I brought my voice down.

But what had happened was, is everybody had come out

because they were sure this Cockney couldn't speak like that.

Who said you could use my men?

They were sitting around on their backsides doing nothing.

Rather you asked first, old boy.

That's how I got a starring role in a movie for the first time.

The thing is if that director hadn't been an American

but had been a British director,

through no malice or no fault of his own,

he would never

have cast this Cockney boy as an officer,

not in a million years.

That's how strong the class system was in England back then.

And suddenly,

people realised that the working class wasn't as thick as it looked.

- And it had talent. - Yeah.

There was very talented people.

It was a revolution.

And I don't agree with anything that they do.

Young people are like they are

because our society is throwing up this sort of problem.

I think the whole thing is a lot of unfresh rubbish.

I just thought

there was more of us than there was of them.

Do you know, that never occurred to me?

But it seems to me

that a good time is...

is much easier had by all now than ever before.

Any one thing that's preached by our people in particular

it's that you do what you wanna do, when you want.

This isn't the first generation that's questioned the moral values

of the last generation.

You know, on recent trips to London

you don't see any people older than 25 or 30.

It's as though they lock them up somewhere.

I think they've all moved out and left it to the teenagers.

London, as far as I'm concerned, as far as I can see,

it's all young people the whole time now.

Taste no longer comes down from the rich.

It often rises from the young,

many of them from the working classes.

They now seem the pace-setters. They set the taste.

In fact, the whole strength of this came from the young themselves.

They knew what they wanted. They didn't want to imitate sort of

Countess Biggleswade, you know? They had their own ideas.

I looked at the cover of Time magazine

and I read this article just talking about

what was going on in London, the nightclubs,

the restaurants, the clothes,

and I thought, "How do I get to London, you know, like, tomorrow?"

You know, when people say

The Beatles made swinging sixties, they didn't.

London made The Beatles.

Never before had so many young people

lived away from home.

Their parents began to worry about them.

If their kids when to art school,

they would've worried even more.

I don't know whether they learned anything about painting,

but they certainly had the prettiest girls and the best parties.

The pop art scene

began to transform the face of London.

People said, "It's a dull, grey world."

Or "Everything's black and white post-war."

Even though people said that, it was literally true.

Everything was dull and grey

and we wanted colour, we wanted to introduce colour into London.

If we could have had coloured concrete, coloured cement, we'd have used it.

The world of pop art. The world of the popular imagination.

The world of film stars, the twist.

Art schools were the centre of everything.

Well, they provoked so much excitement and interest.

And we didn't even know you could have art students.

It was wonderful thinking you could use anything.

Paintings based on a packet of tea,

just because the packets of tea were there.

And I used to write on the paintings then.

A lot of graffiti.

Some of it, I remember finding in the toilets in Earl's Court Tube station.

I often take the moment

before something has actually happened.

And you don't know if it's going to be terrible

or it might be very funny.

The sort of stuff that I'm doing is absolute ephemera.

It's do it today and I wanna forget about it by midnight.

And I'm on to something else.

This is how I see.

You know, if anything is pop, it's pop for the minute.

It's much easier for a girl to drift into trouble in London.

The streets themselves, it's true, are clear.

But there are more temptations,

it's more easier for anybody who wants to exploit a girl

to sweep her underground.

"I just happened to be there, that's all."

That's a Bob Dylan line.

They said, "Would you like to come to a party in London?"

And I said, "Oh, I've never been to a party in London."

Pretty girl with a lot of very pretty friends.

- Yeah. - My friends were gorgeous, you know.

We all went to this convent and we were fabulous looking,

and my God, the role model was the Virgin Mary.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what made convent girls so sexy.

And hard to get. Yeah.

Don't know about that.

The Rolling Stones were there and Millie and The Crystals,

and all these people,

and I was looking very shabby.

Very, very... So shabby. It was awful.

I was stood there.

And then people started whispering and sort of saying, you know,

being very embarrassing for me.

And they came up and said to the person I was with,

"And can she sing?"

Andrew Oldham, you are the person who discovered Marianne Faithfull

at that party.

Is it literally possible to go to a party and pick out someone

with no evident talents and make a star of them?

- Uh, yes. - How?

Um, I think the first thing is you have to be drunk.

- He had an instinct. - Yes.

I think, that's what Andrew... I was very good at that.

And he guided you through...

- He guided me through nothing. - Really?

He knew whatever it was I had he could market it.

He just saw what he always called a "commercial face".

Which you did, yeah. I mean, you were so pretty.

If you can see that perspective. I can't see it myself.

Take my word for it.

OK.

I fell in love with Mick.

Mick was young, rich and a rock star.

Bailey, the same. Probably you had your moments, too.

Though you took your work very seriously.

I did, indeed.

It was a whole team of very,

very naughty boys, really. Very naughty.

Yeah, well, we couldn't help it.

Where I grew up, it was a bit like

Sicily in terms of morals and sex.

If you kissed a girl, her brothers'd come round with a shotgun

and say you've gotta get married.

Well, all that went out of the window.

Women also were turning into voyeurs.

They also liked the look of men.

Given the Pill was the only contraception that actually worked,

a woman could then really be in charge of her own life.

It's smaller than an aspirin tablet

and it is commonly and widely called "the Pill".

A revolution is on the way.

All over the country, young girls are sprouting, shouting and shaking.

And if they terrify you, they mean to.

I wanted to run and jump and dance

and go on at night, straight away to a nightclub and dance.

A friend of mine said he was gonna take me

to the best disco in the whole world.

It was at the top of a very high building,

just behind Leicester Square,

in a club called The Ad Lib.

And I'm looking round to see what sort of people we've got here.

On the dance floor, every single Rolling Stone

and every single Beatle.

And I thought, "Boy, this must be the place."

I met Albert Finney, I met Michael Caine,

I met Sean Connery.

I met Stevie Winwood, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones.

John Lennon was there. I met Julie Christie there.

It was insane.

And they were all mates, weren't they?

It was all mates. I taught Nureyev how to twist at The Ad Lib, yeah.

And he was very stiff. I mean, he could do all that Swan Lake shit,

but he couldn't do the twist.

We didn't have cell phones in those days.

We didn't text each other. We talked to each other face-to-face.

And that's what bred creativity

because people could meet each other and exchange ideas.

And anyone with talent could be a part of it.

We started a shop in the King's Road called Bazaar.

It just hit the spot from the first day.

Why was that, then? Was that because of the miniskirt?

Because I made the skirts much shorter than anyone had seen at that time.

They were provocative, you know?

Well, I can't say that I particularly approve of some of the styles

and particularly the more outré ones.

But I do appreciate that they're the expression of, what shall I say?

The exuberance of affluent youth.

City gents

on their way to work used to bash on the window and shout,

"Disgusting! Outrageous! They should not be allowed!"

and all the rest of it, yeah.

I'd have thought they'd have been sitting outside watching.

Yeah, you're right.

I had the shortest skirts ever.

So short I had knickers made to match my skirts.

Yeah, micro-mini. They were like a belt.

One day in the '60s, my mother said to me, she said,

"I keep reading and hearing about all these miniskirts."

She said, "I've never seen a girl in a miniskirt."

I said, "Right, Mum, I'll show you," I said.

So, what I did is I took her to King's Road in Chelsea

on a Saturday afternoon,

and we got out of the car and of course, almost immediately,

there's a young girl in a miniskirt.

I turned to my mother and I said, "Well, Mum, what do you think?"

And she said, "If it's not for sale, you shouldn't put it in the window."

That about sums her up.

Oh, well, fabrics are made flat and women are round

and there's this terrible problem of putting the two together, you know?

Which is why I want to make round clothes

with no seams,

so that it can be rounder and smoother than we are.

The whole young

London thing was happening.

In a big way.

And I was working with Mary Quant

and she was working with us.

I was doing her show, she was doing ours,

and we were developing this whole thing, in a sense, together.

I was walking down Bond Street

and there was this stunning photograph of a girl

with her hair cut short

and it said, "Vidal Sassoon."

And I went up the steps

and right at the top,

there was a kind of kitchen.

Vidal was cutting hair.

Cuts.

Great noise, that scissor.

And he was chopping hair and it was flying everywhere.

And he was such a show-off, as you can imagine.

- No, I know. I knew him well, yeah. - Yes.

Do you remember when we were open one week in 108?

Right.

And in those days,

when we first opened, we used to write our name in script.

Because we thought it was very chic.

And it was gonna look marvellous, you know?

And, um, the postman,

You couldn't tell whether the F's were L's or S's.

You couldn't tell what they were.

- Do you remember this, Bob? - That's right, yeah.

The postman came up with the first letter

and he'd walked up three flights of stairs.

And he opened the door and in broad Cockney,

he looked around and said,

"Here, which one of you lot's Vifal Faffoon?"

Vidal Sassoon invented the geometric,

angled style of hairdressing.

It was cut almost like a fabric and it was treated like a texture

and it was free and alive.

And so he did the hair and, you know, I did the outfits.

Very often, when somebody's had one of our haircuts,

they come back again.

And in two weeks' time they've changed their shoes

and their skirts are a little shorter.

And within six months, their whole look has changed.

I think the point of clothes

for women should be

one, that you're noticed.

Two, that you look sexy.

And three, that you feel good.

I can't see that we wear them to keep warm.

It's all got to stop. They've had enough.

The worms are turning.

The rebellion of the long hairs is getting underway.

We've had comments like "Darling!" and "Can I carry your handbag?"

thrown at us.

I think it just had to stop now.

I don't like men with long hair.

Or curlers. I like them normal.

Well, I find it terribly difficult with some of these long-haired young men

to differentiate between the sexes.

And this could be a matter of considerable inconvenience.

I think they're absolutely atrocious. I like men to look like men.

Why not for a man? Why not? Tell me why not for a man?

It's all right if your colours go together.

Why not for a man? Any colours go together.

That's beautiful. What's wrong with that?

Our parents didn't have much sex before marriage.

A lot of 'em didn't have a lot of sex after marriage.

And by the time they made a bit of money,

it was too late to enjoy it.

It can't have been easy for them to see us having so much more fun

than they ever thought possible.

David?

You up there?

Nice! Good girl. Good.

That's good. Hold it. Good.

Good.

Make that... Let me... No, Deb, who told you to move?

Go back to where you were.

Come on. Back to where you were. Good.

And that flipping hand.

Yeah. Good. There. That's good.

Stay like that.

I was very much influenced also by the photographers at the time.

The new, I suppose, typically young Cockney photographers

that were happening and were our great friends.

And I'm sure we sort of bounced ideas off each other.

It's the easiest thing in the world to be a photographer.

All you have to be is a bit rude,

grow your hair long and wear a leatherjacket

and buy a Pentax and you're a photographer, cos there's no union.

The winsome David Bailey.

This is marvellous. Good. Open your mouth slightly. Good.

David was famous for a saying.

"David Bailey makes love daily."

He wore a vest, jeans, Cuban heels

and had a cheese sandwich for lunch.

And he photographed the most beautiful women in the world.

Lucky bugger!

Bailey was extremely attractive.

And every woman in the world seemed to want to have

a little bit of him.

Well, a particular bit of him.

Just stand with your legs apart and face me.

He came to New York

to collect me, to take me to London.

Completely fell in love with him within about five minutes.

It was pathetic.

He sort of rang the doorbell at my house.

My mother came to the door,

and as soon as she saw it was Bailey, she tried to slam the door in his face.

He said, "Don't worry about it, love. Could've been worse.

"It could've been a Rolling Stone."

That was it. I grabbed my suitcase and I was gone.

Just stay like that and bring this,

slowly bring this hand down. More, more, more. And put it there.

Go on. No, lower down, on your thigh, or whatever it's called.

Good. That's good.

And look at me, like... Don't twist away.

Just keep where you are. Good girl.

Good. There. That's lovely.

Good, angel. Yeah.

And it's nearly right, if that hand was nicer.

To the public, the camera doesn't lie.

And therefore the best photographer is the biggest liar.

There certainly is a school of English photographers.

I call them the "black trinity" of Duffy, Donovan and Bailey.

Keep your legs... Swing your arms away from your body.

Move your legs out.

No, you've moved. Come up, come up, come up, come up, come up.

And what one's trying to do is to try and make her look beautiful.

If you don't do that, then you'll lose out.

And she loses out, and then it's a bore.

I think there is an actual pleasure in making someone look beautiful.

Duffy's great to work with, cos he's...

You go in there and sort of three hours later

when you've finished all the bottles of wine that are lying around, you know,

you've sort of talked about everything, listened to 100 records

of old war songs.

Somebody arrives with a sort of handful of clothes, you know.

Out come all the paper flowers.

And he's standing there with a camera and you have to go on talking.

He makes... He makes you sing, you know.

He won't take the shot and he gets bolshy.

"I"m not taking the picture unless you sing. Go on, sing."

So you have to sing. Stand there, singing in the studio. It's great.

So all the pictures are sort of dodgy birds with teeth showing,

but they're natural.

If women are attractive,

doesn't matter what they're wearing.

It's only packaging.

Like wrapping up soap in something.

It's not any more complicated than that. It's nicely wrapped,

you look.

If not, you don't bother.

An ideal woman?

Well, that's sort of difficult cos I think

every woman is sort of my ideal woman.

I mean, they're all lovely.

Some are just lovelier than others.

Which brings us to Jean Shrimpton.

Yeah.

Half the studio and there was Duffy, photographing this girl.

He put up a blue background, a sky blue background.

She had these incredible blue eyes.

When I looked at her, I could see through to the background.

And I said, "Who's that?"

He said, "Oh, it's just a girl I booked."

He said, "Do you like her?"

I said, "Yeah."

He said, "Oh, she's too posh for you, mate."

I said, "Oh, we'll see about that."

He was probably right.

And so I booked her

and I sort of fell in love with her, really.

- You did, didn't you? - Yeah.

Being with him is an influence, you know.

He began to influence my movement and my dress.

And then when he'd get me on the set, yeah, he'd put me into shape, you know.

And he'd encourage certain expressions.

Then I began to feel something inside which I didn't know existed.

I photographed her every day for about three years.

Vogue wouldn't publish the pictures in the beginning.

- What, of people? - Of my pictures, yeah.

They always wanted a tree in the background or an armchair or...

If I've got Jean Shrimpton, why do I want a palm tree in the background?

There was even models in the '60s Vogue wouldn't use

because they said, "Oh, can't possibly use her.

"Have you listened to her accent?"

But she'll go on until the fashions change

or else some other star

will suddenly come along and take her place.

But you were the first

obviously Cockney young lady to become a model.

- Yeah. - I mean, we heard you talk.

I mean, mostly you didn't hear models speak, you know.

But then you did. I mean, there was a whole personality...

- comes with you. - And they've never shut me up.

I was at school

and I wanted to be a model, you know.

Cos I was thin and that. And, um,

people said, "You ought to try it."

And I thought it would be,

you know, very glamorous and all lovely clothes

and very easy, you know, not much to do, and lots of money.

But it's not, really. I mean, it's very hard work.

If you go out on location in the winter

in a bathing suit or a little summer dress,

it's blooming freezing.

Bit more. There. Perfect. Perfect. Marvellous.

Twiggy's success was phenomenal.

It went far beyond just being a model.

In less than a year, her name, her look, her brand

had conquered the world.

Do you feel out of place

as a success

because you started from ordinary working class beginnings?

No.

No, why should I?

And The Beatles broke down the barrier,

you know, the class barrier and all that.

Yeah, I don't think it really matters what class of family you come from.

If you're good enough in yourjob, you know, you make it anyway.

She's happened because of all that rubbish

about swinging London.

Yeah, I think she's a lovely model.

Super. I mean, she's money in the bank for photographers.

What are your views on serious matters?

Like what?

Well, I don't know. Who's your favourite philosopher?

I haven't got one. I don't know any.

Who's yours?

Oh, I, you know, I like them all.

Who?

- All your basic philosophers. - Who?

Just all of them.

I don't know their names, though. What are their names?

Oh, gee, there's a host of them.

England, where it all began.

I'm going to establish it real quick.

Portland Street is the headquarters

of Twiggy Enterprises.

As short a time as six weeks ago, we were here selling coats.

And here you are, you see Twiggy.

Something's been produced in its tens and tens of thousands.

Just too fantastic an operation.

Don't you think?

Have you seen all the places we've sold to?

Got one in Hong Kong!

Today, these youngsters have got a know-how.

You know?

And that's something that you can't take away from them.

I used to save my pocket money up

and every Saturday, we'd run down the road

and we'd buy something at Biba, cos it was just, like, amazing.

Anybody over 30 would never dare go in there.

They used to just stay outside.

And if clothes were being done for girls, it was done by a woman.

Excuse me.

It wasn't done by a whole load of men in suits.

As a tourist attraction, we were number two

after the Tower of London.

And Buckingham Palace was number three.

I think that's terribly funny, you know.

I told you before to be careful where you put your legs.

I was only trying to be helpful.

I can help meself.

Hello.

They never make these cars big enough, do they?

Well, are you all settled in?

Right, we can begin. My name is...

Alfie?

When I became an actor, I didn't see myself like

playing Hamlet or King Lear.

All I wanted

was a chance to get a true Cockney character

on the big screen.

And I got the chance to do it.

There is a little bit of Alfie in everybody

and people saw things in themselves,

even if it was something they didn't like. I...

I found a lot of things in Alfie.

Especially, as I say, I am a bachelor.

How do you want me?

How do I want you? Well, I've got two positions.

Straight up or sideways, depending on your nationality.

I tell you what, I'll have you against the ships.

All right, I've always been partial to the Navy.

Now, you look a real treat there, you do.

But you see, of course, you can't play Alfie

and be Alfie at the same time,

because playing those parts, it takes up too much of your time.

You have to go to bed early.

I don't think I went out with one girl the whole time I was making Alfie.

I did when I was finished.

We used to call girls, I know it's very male chauvinist,

and I'm sorry, ladies, I don't do it any more.

We used to call girls "birds".

Or in rhyming slang, "Richards", which is Richard III's, birds.

Coffee, love?

And my flatmate was very much a ladies' man.

He had all the Richards.

So, our flat became like an airport.

The birds came flying through there

and I became a sort of flight controller,

bringing 'em in and getting 'em out safely,

and so that no one saw each other and all that.

I was living with my then girlfriend, Jane Asher.

Who I made Alfie... And I met you on the set

cos you used to come on the set for lunch.

You did Alfie with her, yeah.

And so I was staying at Jane's and going out with her.

But I had a piano.

I was living up at the top of the house

and I had a little piano in there.

So, John might write one on his own.

I might write one on my own, so that started to happen.

But we'd always bring it back to each other and finish it together.

We thought after following Buddy Holly records

and seeing how they were made through playing them, you know,

"Oh, maybe we can write this, you know?"

Well, maybe instead of singing "Going back to Alabam" ',

we can sing something about Liverpool, you know?

So it was just after we'd learnt how to, you know...

Oh, you do this, and you do this and how to make the music,

we thought, "Oh, we'll write about ourselves," you know?

And of course, the first efforts were more dumb

or childish than the later efforts.

We'd sit down to write.

And I think we wrote just short of 300 songs together.

Over the period.

And whenever we had a writing session,

always come up with these songs every time.

We never left a session going, "We'll finish it tomorrow."

All these songs just came out of me, you know?

I didn't sit down to think I'm gonna write about

this, that or the other.

They all came out, you know,

like all the best work of anybody's ever does, you know?

No sense of competition or anything?

Oh, no, there was a big sense of competition.

- Oh, yeah. - Really?

- Come on! Young guys, both writers. - Yeah.

No, it was great. It was really good for us,

and you know, John would say later, he'd say,

"Bloody hell!" You know, he'd hear one of my songs

and go, "Bloody hell, I've gotta write a better one."

- It was like a nuisance. - Yeah.

And then I'd hear one of his and go, "Oh, bollocks!"

The taxi driver the other day had some sheet music of a Mozart thing,

and I said, "What's that?" You know.

And he said, "Oh."

He said, "Oh, that's the high-class stuff.

"You won't like that."

He said, "No, no, you won't like that."

And I said, "Well, what is it?" You know.

He said, "Oh, no, you won't like it.

"You know, it's high-class, that.

"It's very high-brow."

And that kind of way, I always used to think of it.

I used to think, "Well, you know, that's very clever, all that stuff."

And it isn't, you know. It's just exactly what's going on

in pop at the moment.

Pop music is the classical music of now.

All of a sudden,

there was a bunch of people in London

who were considered the most interesting and glamorous people on the planet.

And when people became famous in Britain,

they had one thought in mind.

America.

And they took the party across the pond.

And the British invasion didn't just include bands.

It was writers, designers, artists, actors like myself.

Here they come!

The people that started the English invasion,

the effect here in the United States, phenomenal.

And now, to be Cockney is right at the top, isn't it?

- Yeah, it helps a little. - Yeah, yeah.

It's not doing me any harm in America.

I know.

His name is Michael Caine.

Michael Caine.

I don't know, you know, if you can say that war's no good

and a few people believe you, then it may be good. I don't know.

You can't say it too much, though, that's the trouble.

Seems a bit silly to be in America

and for none of them to mention Vietnam as if nothing was happening.

And the kids wanna be free, man.

Like, that's where it's at.

Youth is always an exciting time.

Well, it's certainly more exciting than it ever was before.

You can do anything, that makes it exciting.

Everything's constantly changing

and attitudes are constantly changing.

Well, everything is happening.

Everything is happening all over the world.

Right over there, the little girl running down,

the famous model just came here from Europe.

What do you think of her?

- What do I think of her? - I think she's cute but I...

I think she's cute, except she's...

I don't know. It'll last a couple of weeks, like everything else.

Will it?

To think that our next generation

is supposed to be taking care of this country.

They don't take no pride in anything, hardly.

I think we have to find out who is to blame for it all.

When they look at me, and I happen to have long hair

and wear kinda freaky clothes, they really hate me.

You can look and you see this hatred in their eyes.

Back home, all was not as it seemed.

It became clear that there was now a campaign

to bring down those the establishment were thinking

were corrupting youth.

The youth didn't need much corrupting, actually.

They were corrupting themselves all up and down the country,

in the newfound freedom,

communicating with music

and smoking a bit of dope.

A brain under the influence of marijuana

distorts the sense of space and time.

Whether it's pills or LSD or cannabis,

the use of drugs as a central part of youth culture

becomes very important in the last two or three years.

I only smoked marijuana once

and I laughed for five hours.

I couldn't get a taxi home.

I had to walk.

I never smoked marijuana again.

Honest.

It was the Mods who started it, you know.

Purple hearts, amphetamines, speed.

But there was nothing new in that. People used to take them in the war

to stay awake.

But they used to take one or two tablets.

The Mods took them by the jarful.

All I really cared about in those days was being...

The band being good. I'd started this band.

And I couldn't take them. They used to dry me up.

- And so I couldn't sing. - Really?

I thought, "Well, these are no good for me, I can't sing.

"There's no point doing this."

So, I had to be straight.

We played one gig, it was just so bad.

The band had been up for three days.

They'd started to take more and more pills.

The songs are getting faster and faster

so I can't get the words in.

I mean, oh, my God, the state of us. Literally, it was so awful

I came off the stage in just a terrible temper.

I've been on pills since I was 15 or...

no, since I was 17.

Since I became a musician.

The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night,

was to take pills.

I've always needed a drug to survive.

I can't... You know.

The others, too. But I always had more, you know.

I always took more pills

and more of everything, cos I'm more crazy.

Do you rely on drugs to keep you going?

No, it just means that,

you know, there are certain things which,

more levels of perception which are opened up by certain drugs.

To many youngsters, the glamour drugs

are those which produce hallucinations.

The best known are marijuana and LSD.

Huxley wrote these two books, he wrote

Heaven and Hell and Doors of Perception.

And of the two, people have taken Heaven and Hell as the symbol,

and they've taken the wrong one.

Because the one that... The really explicit phrase

is "doors of perception", and that is what drugs are.

They are the doors.

They're not anywhere.

I mean, you don't go anywhere. You just see a crack,

like I'm looking through.

That the state that we should be in is perfection.

And that the reason we're here is to find it.

If you haven't heard of LSD, you will.

They can take it if they want, we can't prevent them,

but they're really fooling with dynamite.

Giving us a world we can't handle as it is,

so we're gonna change it.

Because they have shaped their world,

our world, into what it is with guns and bombs.

It's obvious to our generation that their way doesn't work.

It hasn't worked. It isn't going to work.

So, a change has to be made.

And if somebody has to get turned upside-down to do it,

well, then.

The people who lived through the LSD experience

went through a complete facet of learning, you know.

And it's just, you know, it must have been done

some other way when me father was a kid.

Maybe they did it by going to war.

The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars,

middle-class, middle-aged, whisky-drinking generals.

Uh, they're not going to join your corporations,

middle-class, middle-aged, whisky-drinking corporation presidents.

They need to come down and sort these bastards out. Get 'em out!

Bring them down the canal and drown them.

Drown them, that's what you wanna do with them.

Communist muck. Get rid of them.

I haven't got their morals, and they haven't got mine.

They've got all these rules for everything.

Rules of how to live, how to paint, how to make music.

And it's just not true any more.

The government doesn't exist for us,

they exist for themselves.

Sooner or later, the government is gonna find

that there's something going on that they've got no control over at all.

They haven't been fucked since Cromwell, man.

Youth thinks itself wise

just as drunk men think themselves sober.

Youth knows nothing about anything except on massive clichés.

The permissive society is considered by some youngsters

to be trendy and with it.

Personally, I consider it condones moral laxity and promiscuity,

it leads to uncertainty and instability,

a soggy mind and mental impoverishment

and contains all the disruptive elements

which would tear down the pillars of our society.

It really is about time we realised

that the fault lies in the fact that we have created a permissive society.

Now, the epidemic drug taking in this country

is now so extensive that many of you,

whatever your jobs, will have come across it.

We must rid the country of this insidious disease of "don't care".

And I was the first to be busted.

What do you know of this Donovan?

I've had him on the special attention list for some time.

Right.

That next day, when we were let out at 4:00 in the morning,

the phone rang, and it was George Harrison.

And he said, "Is everything all right?"

I said, "Yeah, we're out."

He said, "What you gonna do?"

I said, "We're gonna go away for a while."

He said, "If you want £10,000 by 12 noon..."

I said, "No, I'm OK with the money.

"We're gonna go to Scotland until it blows over."

He said, "It'll never blow over, Don.

"We'll be next."

Paul, how often have you taken LSD?

About four times.

And where did you get it from?

Oh, you know, I mean, if I was to say where I'd got it from,

you know, it's illegal and everything.

It's silly to say that, so I'd rather not say that.

Don't you believe that this was a matter which you should have kept private?

I mean, you're spreading this now, at this moment.

This is going into all the homes, you know, in Britain.

And I'd rather it didn't, you know.

But you're asking me the question. You want me to be honest.

I'll be honest, you know?

But as a public figure, surely you've got a responsibility

- to lots and lots of teenagers? - No, it's you've got the responsibility.

You've got the responsibility not to spread this now.

You know, I'm quite prepared to keep it as a very personal thing.

If you will, too.

What I do with things is I look at examples

of people who do things.

If I saw somebody who took drugs who became

more intelligent, nicer, earned more money, more handsome,

a better lover or got a better physique through it

and he set a good example,

I would be the first to take drugs, and suggest everybody else should.

But most of the people I know who've taken drugs over a period of time

seem to have gone to wrack and ruin and I don't wanna go there.

I never wanted to talk about drugs in public

because I don't want to influence anybody

in anything.

But if you ask me, I guess I have to say that

of course I took drugs, like everyone.

But not because of everyone.

It came from the FBI to MI5 to the...

Really?

- Yes! It's like one of your films, man. - It sounds like it!

You know, we say there were 300 people in the '60s

and all the people who said they were at the Redlands bust,

we would have had to have a marquee on the lawn, you know.

It was basically a party

where good friends got together to take a bit of LSD.

That was one of my first trips.

It was a pretty rough experience, actually...

- Yeah. - ...to have 25 cops walk in.

- Is that what happened? - Yeah, and I was rather naughty, too.

- I'd gone to have a bath. - Yeah.

- I was in a fur rug. - And nothing else?

And I dropped the fur rug.

- And gave a flash at the constabulary. - At the coppers?

And they were so stunned, you know.

I was showing off, wasn't I?

Yeah, obviously. And why not? You were young, beautiful.

I was beautiful, I was naked, I was in a fur rug.

Hey! And I was naughty and defiant.

Evidence that an unnamed naked woman

was sitting on a sofa with a rug around her

when police raided Keith Richards' house at West Wittering

was given in court today.

First of all, they don't like

young kids with a lot of money, you know?

They don't like that anyway.

But as long as you're sort of cool and do your, you know,

and don't...

bother them, you know. But we bothered 'em.

You know, we bothered them

because of the way we look, because of the way we act, because...

And we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever.

This is not Golden Gate Park or Central Park,

this is Hyde Park in London.

And these are British hippies

gathered to protest the heavy sentences

against two Rolling Stones.

Mick Jagger, for having four tablets of Benzedrine in his pocket

and Keith Richards, for allowing his premises

to be used for the smoking of marijuana.

And then I started getting poisonous letters,

basically saying, "The sooner you die, the better."

You know, "You are a contamination on our island's shores."

And I took all this very much to heart.

And I thought I would die and I almost welcomed it.

But I started to get into hard drugs

and that's what did it.

There was a feeling that something special was over.

We'd pushed for change,

now change was pushing us.

Maybe, for some of us,

the party had gone on too long.

We'd sort of done everything we'd wanted to do.

We were getting a bit fed up of having to have a group mentality,

so we were pissing each other off.

Although it was a shock when it actually happened,

nobody was really that surprised, you know.

Everybody knows people that...

You just have that feeling that they're not gonna be,

they're not gonna be 70 years old, ever, you know.

Not everybody makes it, you know.

Looking back, what strikes me most about the '60s

is that it was a time,

maybe the first time,

when the future was shaped by young people.

We were utterly convinced that it was our time.

The best time of our lives.

Youth is not a time of life,

it's a state of mind.

So, they, whoever they are, don't stand a chance,

because they can't beat love.

Never look back in anger, always look forward in hope.

And never, ever, ever dream small.