Original subtitles

There were two films released in 1970

which balanced precariously on the edge of the two decades.

The first neatly tied up one,

and the second showed us what we might expect from the next.

One of them starred this chap, Nicol Williamson.

Die! Screams!

I may die! Screams!

I shall die! Screams!

Good!

Good, good. End, at last, of part three,

and that's how it was, end of quotation, how it is.

One of the last great actors.

Back when actors were bigger than the stage,

and bigger than the screen.

Nicol was both.

In 1970, he starred in this film, The Reckoning.

He plays Michael Marler, a working-class Liverpool lad

who has successfully reinvented himself in London

as a ruthless but suave businessman.

When his father is murdered back home, he seeks revenge,

but once his inner rage is allowed out,

his London dream is destroyed.

I never knew you were an Irishman.

Perhaps we are to understand the dream of social mobility was a myth.

In Cool It, Carol,

a young, naive couple from a southern village

moved to London with big dreams of success.

Hey, Joe! What? Do you see all the Black men?

Their failure to achieve it

triggers a spiral into drugs, pornography, and prostitution.

Come on, Joe, it's fun!

But it's not the darkness of Cool It, Carol

which would go on to define British cinema in the 1970s for many people,

it's this chap.

We've seen him before.

He was a second stringer in If.

Cool It, Carol was not a big film, but this young man, Robin Asquith,

his face will become iconic in this new era of British film.

Well, maybe not his face.

In these two films, in these two actors,

we see the stark dichotomy

that British film in the 1970s offered us.

Some of the darkest, grittiest moments of cinema history,

and some of the absolutely stupidest.

As soon as 1970 clunked into place,

British cinema woke up to realise that the party was over,

and the come-down had begun.

America had left, and taken its money with it.

Fresh from his US success with Midnight Cowboy,

John Schlesinger returned to London with the last few dollars

and made the ultimate hangover film.

Now tell me if you feel anything at all.

1971's Sunday Bloody Sunday was a sober reflection

on the fallout of free love.

You are a silly tart.

A young bohemian artist juggles his open relationships

with both an older divorced woman and a considerably older gay doctor.

The film is about the pain and consequence of its demise.

It's a film about people,

and the lifestyles they choose for themselves.

I wish they wouldn't cry.

It remains hugely significant

for the part of the doctor played by Peter Finch.

He is Jewish, respectable,

and unburdened by guilt regarding his sexuality.

She said it was a calling. It almost makes me want to be a housemaid!

This is the first affectionate kiss between two men in film history.

It's not designed to shock, it's not a gimmick,

it's beautiful.

The prevailing tone

of the low number of British films being made now

was one of reflection and stoic regret.

Downbeat, quiet and contemplative.

I mean, that was the prevailing tone!

But it seemed that the industry

forgot to tell one particular person.

FANFARE PLAYS

Arghh!

SCREAMS

The one person still spinning wildly on the dance floor

and going for it with the energy of a demon

was British cinema's greatest madman,

maybe British cinema's greatest genius, Ken Russell.

He'd been the last to arrive to the party,

getting his first significant film, Women In Love,

released just under the wire in '69.

In some ways, Russell's 1970s work

is the most 1960s-ish work ever made in its giddy taboo-smashing.

But he had spent the actual '60s

creating his own private revolution on television.

It was his great success in this field,

particularly his biographical films about the great composers,

which brought him to the attention of the film industry.

Ken Russell's first "Ken Russell" film

was an adaptation of the 1920s novel Women In Love.

And, ever the imp,

he was excited to see what he could get away with,

and just how much outrage he might be able to provoke.

The sight of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates' gently-flopping willies

as they wrestled in Russell's debut

might have been a shocking and unexpected sight to cinemagoers,

but his 1971 film The Devils

was unlike anything that had ever gone before.

An assault on religion,

with an intensely realistic use of harrowing sex and violence

that the mainstream was not prepared for.

Warner Brothers, who produced and own the film,

have never made the uncut version available.

Even now, it's considered too shocking and controversial

for general release.

In the same year The Devils was released -

and remember, this is a proper shocking film

with people being burnt alive and masturbating nuns -

in that same year, the exact same year,

Ken Russell put out The Boy Friend...

SINGING

..a gorgeous pastiche of stage and screen musicals

of the 1920s and '30s.

It starred Twiggy... What, me?

..and Barbara Windsor.

And absolutely no masturbating nuns.

This was his range, and his eccentricity.

Oh, and also in the same year,

he had already released The Music Lovers,

which was a biopic of Tchaikovsky.

So he had three whole feature films in the cinemas in just one year.

PIANO PLAYS

The permissiveness of '60s cinema

had begun to erode the notion of what was possible,

both with the censor, and the public.

To many, it seemed that all it would take

was a few daring filmmakers to push a bit

for the whole construct of societal morality to collapse.

Once I decided upon the course to do this film,

then I just had to go along with the truth as it was reported.

The violence and sexual deviance in The Devils

was somewhat justified by its claims of historical accuracy,

but later in the same year,

when renegade American director Sam Peckinpah

unleashed his latest film, Straw Dogs,

the boundaries were tested even further.

Set and filmed in rural Cornwall,

Straw Dogs stars Dustin Hoffman and Susan George

as a couple returning to her home village for a sabbatical.

Tensions between Hoffman's character David and some of the locals swell,

until he finds himself under armed siege, with grisly consequences.

The violence was not at the centre of the controversy.

Peckinpah included two long rape scenes in the film.

One of the scenes was particularly problematic,

as there was an ambiguity

as to whether what started as rape became consensual.

After its initial X-rated cinema run in the UK,

it would be banned, and would not surface again for almost 30 years.

Now, it's all very well for filmmakers

like Ken Russell and Sam Peckinpah to rattle the cages a bit,

because they were on the outside edge of the mainstream,

but what would happen

if one of the world's most revered and respected directors

made a film concerning rape and violence?

Enter Stanley Kubrick.

A British filmmaker

by virtue of having left his native America

to direct Lolita in London in 1962, never to return.

Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange

was always going to be

a controversial choice of material to adapt.

It had been written both as a horrified response

to the emerging culture of juvenile delinquency

he had observed in the late '50s,

but also a story that displayed a wariness of the establishment

and its need to crush dissent.

One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.

Kubrick cast Malcolm McDowell as Alex,

leader of the teen gang the Droogs.

And, as Karel Reisz might have put it, a suitable case for treatment.

Everything about the film was heavily stylised,

especially the sequences of rape and violence.

This scene was like nothing cinema had ever seen before.

The film crystallised the debate which rages on today

through video games and YouTube clips,

the chicken and egg debate

as to where violence in society stems.

Kubrick had no truck with this.

In an interview with the BFI's Sight And Sound magazine,

he argued that:

Yet a year later, he himself had the film withdrawn from British release.

The press had been full of reports of copycat attacks,

and court cases in which young defendants

claimed to have been corrupted by the film into such behaviour.

Kubrick had received threats against his family.

It wouldn't be until after his death in 1999

that the film would become available in the UK again.

As we walked along the flatblock marina...

A lot of the chat around A Clockwork Orange

is still focused on the violence.

But if you stop and look,

there's something really interesting going on in the background.

Have a look.

This scene was shot at Southmere Lake,

on the recently-built Thamesmead estate.

Part of the huge post-war cultural shift in the UK

was a revolution in architecture.

Brutalism was a huge aesthetic leap for a place so steeped in history,

but it was in keeping with a country pursuing socialist,

or just cheaper ideals.

Gone were bricks, mortar and wood,

and in their place were vast geometric structures

made of low-cost concrete and glass.

There is an undeniable beauty in the early modernist visions

of brutalist architecture

as part of a functional, clean,

and socially equable urban planning vision.

But not everybody was sold.

Especially the filmmakers.

As early as 1963,

this new architecture was beginning to play a role in British film.

Here, in director Joan Littlewood's Sparrows Can't Sing,

we see James Booth as Charlie, returning from sea

to find his house demolished, and his wife living a new life

at the top of the newly built Wycombe House high-rise.

You might remember this one shot

from the opening of The Small World Of Sammy Lee.

All new and clean, a high-rise tower.

But is it shown as an aspirational vision, or a foreshadowing?

The 1960s and '70s

saw one of Britain's greatest periods of urban renewal.

This moment in history is captured well

in actor David Hemmings' directorial effort The 14, from 1973.

The family in transition, set against a city in transition,

clinging desperately to the security of their long-condemned house.

The tower blocks were called "streets in the sky",

as an attempt to convince the relocated working-class communities

of their great fortune.

But such a radical change of environment

proved too much for many.

Here is a moment from the comedy.

He won't go up there.

They'll be sorry.

Be sorry when I'm dead.

GLASS RATTLES

Arghh!

1972's Alf Garnett Saga

sees one of the most forthright and confident voices from television

reduced to a state of acute anxiety.

Not everyone felt this way.

This is Cliff Richard,

celebrating the rejuvenation of Birmingham city centre

in his "interesting" 1973 film Take Me High.

Filmmakers of the 1970s were not responding enthusiastically

to the rise of brutalism.

To the artistic eye, these new landscapes

represented an isolated dystopian future.

Sidney Lumet came to, of all places, Bracknell, to shoot The Offence,

starring Sean Connery as a cop who has finally seen all he can take

and begins to break down.

God...

Bracknell had been a village,

but became one of Britain's infamous "new towns" in the post-war period.

A huge regeneration, complete with brutalist housing for thousands,

and a new concrete municipal centre for them all to mill about in.

To Lumet, this new town was a cold, alienating place,

and he used it to frame his story of inhumanity and collapse.

Connery's character lives

in the same real-life tower block, Point Royal,

as the character of Wynne, played by Jenny Agutter,

from the film I Start Counting.

They had a location in common, and a plot point,

that of a series of child murders in Bracknell.

But in I Start Counting, the architecture is used differently.

The brutalist building is not presented so much as sinister

as of the future.

Throughout the film, Wynne spends time in her old house,

marked for demolition,

and her new, clean, futuristic family home.

A teenager suspended between childhood and adulthood,

the past and the future.

This is the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead.

Here it is being demolished in 2010.

And HERE is its big moment.

Directed by Mike Hodges, another talent who had cut his teeth in TV

and arrived in cinema fully formed,

and shot by Sammy Lee's Wolfgang Suschitzky,

Get Carter was a film

which perfectly exemplified the moment in which it was made.

Again, it deals with a character who has made good in London

but must travel north to face his past.

Michael Caine, as gangster Jack Carter,

follows a hunch that his brother's death

was not the drink-driving accident it appeared to be,

and uncovers a grimy conspiracy

that involves his family in a terrible way.

Although it doesn't revel in the gore or delighted violence

that some other films from the '70s did,

there is a uniquely efficient brutality to Carter's journey

as he relentlessly dispatches those involved in his brother's murder.

Get in. In!

The environment of the film is, like the decade, one of transition.

The dingy grimness of the old Tyneside

exists alongside brutalist modern buildings,

and Carter negotiates both with ease.

Get Carter is one of those rare truly iconic British films.

It's so well regarded

that Sylvester Stallone re-made it in the early 2000s.

Even a supporting cast featuring Mickey Rourke, Martin Landau

and Michael Caine himself

couldn't save the project from a critical drubbing.

But it shows that the enduring appeal of the original

is not strictly to do with the plot and the strong cast.

You're a big man.

But you're out of shape.

With me, it's a full-time job. So please, sit down.

You're a big man, but you're in bad shape.

With me, it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself.

It's something else.

Take me back to London.

Don't you think you ought to get dressed first?

There is a distillation of Britishness in Get Carter.

You know you won't use it. The gun, he means.

Tricky to define, but undeniable.

It's in the grimness, in the toughness, the dourness.

But it's also in the humour.

Oh!

What are you doing, then, on your holidays?

No, I'm visiting relatives. Oh, that's nice.

It would be, if they were still living.

Perhaps we see something in Carter that we see in ourselves.

A resilience, a commitment to family,

a stiff upper lip, and a desire to just get it done,

even when it ultimately results in failure.

One truly unique aspect of Get Carter is the music.

Roy Budd's modern jazz score might seem at odds with the setting,

but it's an innovation which feels entirely natural.

Since we're talking about music,

let's see where the music-based cinema of the '70s has taken us.

So, in the '60s, it was all a bit...

FUNKY BEAT PLAYS

And in the '70s...

ROCK RIFF PLAYS

Written by journalist Ray Connolly

and producer David Puttnam - remember that name -

That'll Be The Day, and its sequel, Stardust,

were cold reflections

on the optimism and giddiness

of the late '50s / early '60s rock 'n' roll explosion.

This brace of films pulled back the curtains

and showed their truth of what was happening backstage.

Perhaps most interesting is the central role of Jim MacLaine,

played by David Essex.

This heart-throb lead singer is an empty shell of a man.

In That'll Be The Day, we see him as a child

abandoned by his dad, who has no time for any form of institution,

be that family, education, work, or marriage.

Look after your mother for me, will you, son?

Jim is ruthlessly ambitious and hedonistic

and eventually leaves everyone he knows in tatters, buys a guitar,

and heads off to pursue a rock 'n' roll dream.

Yeah, that'll be all right.

A year later, in Stardust, we see how that dream plays out.

What did you think of the group?

Well, you're never gonna be Buddy Holly.

But you were good tonight.

How his ruthlessness and ambition isolate him,

and how his isolation makes him easy prey

for the vultures of the recording industry.

It's got to be me.

Anything.

When he reaches the apex of his career,

recording a pretentious, overblown opera-based vanity album

before buying a castle in Spain to lock himself away in,

he has neither the soul nor the support to protect him

and, like so many of those '60s rock stars,

his ending is not a happy one.

ROCK MUSIC

Also made in 1974, a surprising film from the band Slade.

Best known for being the chirpy, crazy,

happy, stomping glam rockers of the day,

we might have expected a comedic

Richard Lester-type of offering from them.

But no,

they also wanted to explore the broken '60s dream,

and offered a vision at least as grubby as that of David Essex.

Would you mind being quiet?!

Flame is also an autopsy

on what had happened to rock 'n' roll in the '60s.

In it, Slade play a band who look set to storm the charts

but instead find themselves pulled apart

by corrupt management and corporate indifference.

That wasn't music!

You're just second-rate comics working on a third-rate audience.

With a fourth-rate agent!

This was not the end of rock bands making films,

but the next batch were to be quite different.

We're not there yet.

"Hang on", you might be asking yourself,

"where was Richard Lester all this time?

"He was the guy who invented the very form

"of the rock 'n' roll movie. What was he doing?!"

The answer is not what you might expect.

Richard Lester had spent a considerable amount of the '70s

directing fun historical romps

which soothed the soul of Middle England.

His Musketeer movies were a great success,

and he hired man of the decade Malcolm McDowell

as the lead in Royal Flash,

which was a rare flop for both of them,

but plenty of bawdy period fun.

I see what the trouble is.

You're still too sober to play properly.

His most interesting film of the decade, however,

was Robin And Marian.

There is yet to be a generation of cinemagoers

who have not had their own Robin Hood.

Welcome to Sherwood, my lady.

The core story is one of our greatest national legends.

A man of noble birth turned outlaw

who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.

Have you met them at all? Who? The poor.

Every actor who has portrayed him...

..and filmmaker who has told the story

have focused on different aspects.

Oh, you're a pretty lad. And sweetly tempered.

Some are light-hearted and jolly.

Others dark and brooding.

What we would ask, Your Majesty, is liberty.

Some political.

Liberty by law!

Others spiritual.

Perhaps the interpretation of the legend

reflects the time in which it was made.

Which is why Dick Lester's Robin And Marian is so fascinating.

I want it done.

I fought for you in the Crusades. I fought for you here in France.

Sean Connery plays Robin as a disillusioned older man,

returning from the Crusades,

which he now understands to have been a massive waste of time.

I ordered it.

And yes, well spotted, that is Nicol Williamson as Little John.

This way.

They travel home to Sherwood

to find their Merry Men as a bunch of old geezers

and Maid Marian whiling away her days in an abbey.

Good God, it's Marian.

It's a film with plenty of humour and pathos,

but ultimately, it's a film about defeat and failure,

and the hollow reality of legend.

The cast is exceptional,

with Ian Holm as King John

and Richard Harris as the demented last gasp of Richard the Lionheart.

Robert Shaw, fresh from his success in Jaws,

plays the Sheriff of Nottingham,

and his final battle with Robin is not the usual high point

of swordsmanship and acrobatics we've come to expect.

It's a slow, ugly slugfest,

which is every bit as miserable to watch

as the film's working title The Death Of Robin Hood promised.

What state must this country be in if even Robin Hood is done with?

SOBBING

It wasn't just the mainstream films which were looking backwards.

Horror also took a step away from the modern and the gothic.

Folk horror is a very small, very contained subgenre.

It focuses on rural communities, paganism and superstition.

At its core, folk horror features just three British films,

made within a five-year period.

Witchfinder General had been made in 1967.

Yes?

It featured Vincent Price in a rare moment of non-campyness

as Matthew Hopkins, the eponymous crusader.

Stalking British villages to purge them of their non-existent witches,

and making a pretty profit in doing so.

There is no supernatural element to this film.

The horror is in the corruption, violence and sadism.

There is also a horror in the subversion of the pastoral.

Our romantic notion of the past is one where all lived happily

in the rolling green countryside,

but here, director Michael Reeves shows us this beautiful landscape

whilst reminding us it was inhabited by small-minded people

who were easily lied to and whipped up into a frenzy,

blaming the perceived outsider for their afflictions.

The Blood On Satan's Claw IS a supernatural story,

but also derives much of its truest horror

from the actions of the susceptible villagers.

And then there's The Wicker Man.

Routinely identified as Britain's greatest horror film,

it features no gore, no violence, no real jumps or scares.

It has songs in it.

And yet it haunts the viewer long after the film has finished.

Because what is so terrifying about it

is what it suggests could be possible.

Again, the story is one of a rural community with a secret.

To say much more is to spoil one of cinema's greatest surprises.

If you haven't already seen it, just see it.

Utterly unique, playful, clever, and gloriously weird.

Perhaps the most shocking entries to the genre during this decade

came from two filmmakers you might not have expected it from.

Alfred Hitchcock.

There never has, and never will be another director like him.

There couldn't be.

This is a guy who started directing films in the silent era

and made his last in 1976,

featuring stars from the new wave of American cinema.

He directed films for 51 years,

and, unlike pretty much any other film director,

his star never dimmed.

The quality of his films

and the public's enthusiasm for them globally didn't fade.

He stayed relevant and interesting.

He always worked with, often making, the stars of the day.

For what would be his penultimate film, he returned to London.

Frenzy was a nostalgic trip for Hitch,

taking place mainly in the Covent Garden market.

Hitch's father had been a greengrocer,

but if nostalgia was on his mind,

it certainly didn't play a part in his work.

Unlike his classic and classy thrillers,

this film is violent, graphic and shocking

in how much delight is given to the most macabre details.

Jesus, help me! Help me!

It feels, in fact, so modern

that it seems like a forerunner

to the slasher films of the late '70s and early '80s.

Which encourage the audience to take enjoyment from death scenes

and, in some ways, root for the murderer.

Nick Roeg, by this time celebrated for his film performance,

was carving out a fascinating career.

His 1971 film Walkabout

showed his true capabilities as an artist filmmaker.

Narratives which seem simple become allegorical and complex

as Roeg encourages the audience

to extrapolate their own narrative and meaning from his work.

Even if one doesn't immediately understand it in a traditional way,

when the film finishes, you're left in no doubt

that you've just seen a true artist at work.

Roeg's 1973 film, Don't Look Now, is his masterpiece.

What are you reading? I was just trying to find the answer

to a question Christine was asking me.

It is incomparable to any film before or since,

and is almost impossible to describe to someone who has not seen it

without in some way spoiling the experience.

The plot is simple,

a married couple grieving the death of their young daughter

move to Venice to take on a new project

and grieve away from the home where she died.

From there, the experience of watching the film

is unlike anything else.

It can be stark and verite,

dreamlike and rich in symbolism,

protracted and artsy,

or downright terrifying.

But unlike his other films,

which might leave the viewer speculating on meaning...

..the final shot of Don't Look Now

somehow, incredibly, allows all the pieces drifting around in your head

to fall immediately into place,

and marvel at the genius of the storytelling.

British cinema, however, was about to get even weirder,

in a totally unexpected way.

In this country of ours,

we are facing the gravest economic situation

that we have known for a generation past.

From now on, all of us, except the least privileged among us,

have got to do the shoving for Britain.

By 1974, new Prime Minister Harold Wilson

raised income tax on the top earners to 83%.

Now, these days, we consider tax exiles to be, well, wankers.

But back then, it became a hugely exotic counterculture statement

to sod off to sunnier climes

and avoid a clearly unworkable situation.

Quite a lot of people going abroad, you know.

If you had any talent,

if the Americans in particular,

if the Americans wanted you to employ you, you would...

You bailed, and a lot of people never came back.

A lot of people never came back.

I think the whole concept of fair taxation,

and I'm a member of the Labour Party and always have been,

is a delicate balance.

You actually kill off people's aspirations,

people's instincts of what they might be

or what they might be able to do in their lives.

Where would we find our new film stars?

The producers looked to TV.

Back then, in the days long before streaming

and even the internet, TV was massive.

And in the UK, at that time, there were only three channels.

So pretty much everyone was watching the same things.

And so arrived a curious genre - the sitcom movie.

There had already been a big screen outing

for Alf Garnett from Till Death Us Do Part,

but from 1971, the floodgates opened.

Isn't that typical?

To solve the problem

of transposing a traditional 30-minute sitcom narrative

into a 90-minute one,

pretty much every single one of these films used the same solution.

Send the characters on holiday.

Some chose a camping, or holiday camp, trip in the UK.

Others chose the more exotic luxury of mainland Europe, usually Spain.

BEEPING

Oh, your equipment's working well (!)

I say, fellas, we're British!

Working-class sentiment is an indulgence of...

But there are moments in these films with some cultural resonance.

..for people like you have moved out the Elm Lodge houses...

At the heart of many of them is a probably accidental contemplation

of the deep malaise that consumed the males

of the post-war white, working-class generation.

The Likely Lads were haunted by the onset of urban renewal,

race relations were explored

in a way that would horrify most modern viewers

in Love Thy Neighbour.

And the first of three On The Buses movies

took a stumbling shot at addressing women's lib.

You stupid nit! I can't get out.

Can't you? Try driving a bus sideways.

But it should be said, in all three of these films,

less time was spent on such contemplation

as on long scenes of these same men

being locked out of buildings without their trousers on.

We're going to wave up there.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher, now prime minister,

changed the tax laws in favour of the high earners,

who began to return to work in the UK.

As polarising a figure as the new prime minister would prove to be

to the British people, the one thing we can all now agree on

is that this swift axe drop on the sitcom movie genre

was certainly for the best.

While sitcoms were getting all confused looking like films,

there was another sub-genre

in which films were starting to look like sitcoms.

Remember this bloke? He was about to become iconic.

By making a silly slapstick film

about a silly young man getting into silly situations,

who is part of a silly family unit,

it hit the more base comedy tastes of the era.

Confessions Of A Window Cleaner

was the highest-grossing British film of 1974.

Yes, this film.

This film made more money

than any other British film in that year.

There are different schools of thought as to why.

The first is cultural.

The supporting cast was full of beloved British character actors,

like Miss Marple, Selwyn Froggitt... Don't ask.

Oh, and that guy, Tony Booth,

would go on to become Tony Blair's father-in-law.

The second explanation is, quite simply,

shed-loads of full-frontal female nudity.

Because Confessions Of A Window Cleaner

and all three, yes, three of its sequels

were not just comedies...

Ooh, cop a load of that!

..they were sex comedies.

Welcome to the strangest genre of British cinema.

They're big for their age!

Come on, girls, let's get them!

What a way to go.

Stop that at once!

MOANS, SCREAMS

Those damn woodworm again.

There can be a tendency to embrace the British sex comedy

for its sheer cheesiness.

But it was pretty squalid, even at the time.

That's Mary Millington, the genre's greatest female star.

She was sold as empowered and fun,

but she tragically took her own life just a few years later.

Many of these films paired the women with particularly unattractive men

to sell a dream to their demographic audience.

'I'm very pleased to be able to do so.'

In the cold light of the post-Me Too world,

these films are not as charming and harmless as they thought they were.

The films were marketed to the mainstream

by filling the cast with recognisable comedic faces

from the older generations.

He wants you off the case.

Many an anecdote reveals that these comics

were given scripts without the sex scenes included.

They had no idea what they were involved with.

For some of them, these were their final films.

Anything?

At least in the Confession films, the women usually had the upper hand

and were generally the ones using and objectifying

innocent young Timmy Lea.

Compare it to this scene from the far grimmer

Adventures Of A Taxi Driver,

in which the also far grimmer hero seduces a suicidal young woman.

Or this scene from Rosie Dixon - Night Nurse,

in which an 18-year-old woman is saved from gang rape by a rugby team

and then immediately seduced by her saviour.

Oh, Tom. You were wonderful. Ah, yes. Yes, I was, wasn't I?

Audiences and distributors were complicit

in a false air of legitimacy,

in the questionable notion that these were just fun comedies

and absolutely not pornography.

The truth would out with the emergence of home video recorders,

and eventually, the internet.

The age of men gathering in darkened rooms

under the shared pretext

that window cleaning antics were hilarious was over.

Ah, come on... Grim.

It feels like so much of the cinema of the seventies was grim

in either subject matter or execution.

So who was gonna turn that around?

Maybe this guy, David Puttnam,

the producer of That'll Be The Day and Stardust.

Post-war suburban London, I could walk to five cinemas.

I hated school, I spent as much time at the cinema as I could.

That was what cinema was to me, a place of magic and excitement.

I got this graduate trainee scheme,

so I went through the marketing department and research

and various things, and it was at the agencies.

The quality of work was terrible,

and I started seeing these ads appearing that I thought were great,

and tracked them back to a tiny start-up

called Collett Dickenson Pearce.

And by great, unbelievable good fortune,

I was taken on as their first, effectively, their first employee.

Not long after me, it wasn't a filmmaker,

but Charles Saatchi joined, Ridley Scott was doing work for us,

he was at the BBC but was freelancing.

Puttnam produced each of their first films.

The TV in the early '60s,

we were plugged into daily events in a way that was very formative.

And I think that may have been one of the divisions

between us and the advertising guys,

like Parker and Hugh Hudson and people like that.

And there was distrust between those two camps.

They were rich and we weren't.

They were very, very fashionable,

they were wrong about us and we were quite certainly wrong about them.

And there was a kind of misapprehension

of each to the other.

The one person that they had in common was David Puttnam.

Most of Puttnam's first forays into film were music-based.

We've already looked at the two David Essex films.

He'd also produced two composer biopics directed by Ken Russell.

Puttnam's own first film as a producer

had been with Alan Parker as first-time screenwriter.

Melody reunited the two child leads

from the hugely successful film Oliver, Mark Lester and Jack Wild.

We are gathered here today in the sight of God

to join together this man and woman in holy matrimony.

Melody is a fantastic oddity and a true cult film.

It is intensely loved by those who saw it as children

when it was released.

Puttnam's next film with Parker, who this time wrote and directed,

was Bugsy Malone.

You'd be hard pushed to find any British person

who grew up in the '70s or '80s

who doesn't remember it with great fondness.

An Englishman's pastiche of the American gangster films

of the 1930s

with a cast made up entirely of children playing adult roles.

..than there is time in the day!

Listen, Honey, if I didn't look this good,

you wouldn't give me the time of day.

On top of this, it's a musical

with the kids lip-syncing to adult vocal performances.

They have guns which fire whipped cream,

and travel everywhere in pedal cars.

It shouldn't work, but it continues to.

Dragoona...

The 1970s was an interesting period for British children's films.

Disney made quite a few live action kids' films in the UK at this time.

Bedknobs And Broomsticks saw some British kids join a witch

to defeat a Nazi invasion of the British Isles.

Oi! You leave that alone.

One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing

was a spy romp around London with many famous faces.

Dinosaur!

And that dinosaur skeleton would end up making a cameo

in a very unexpected place two years later.

There goes the 12:20.

Candleshoe saw the improbable transatlantic team-up

of sassy young LA street kid Jodie Foster

and British butler David Niven in a hidden treasure caper.

One area of cinema in which the UK was well provided was kids' films.

Since 1951, the Children's Film Foundation,

a non-profit group funded by a taxation on cinema takings,

churned out a constant stream of intriguing fodder

for the Saturday morning audience.

The '70s were quite a heyday for the CFF,

in which they were producing as many as eight new films every year.

There are common themes.

It seemed, sometimes, like every film they made

was about a bunch of plucky kids

scuppering some kind of grown-up heist.

But there was also some really interesting stuff.

That's a French bird all right!

Amazingly, the legends of British cinema of the '40s and '50s,

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,

made their last ever collaboration for the CFF.

And the film that resulted, The Boy Who Turned Yellow,

was a surreal highlight.

An opportunity of talking about film...

Also producing films for kids was the government's

Central Office of Information,

which produced public information films on many subjects

and offered employment to many British filmmakers over the years.

Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Peter Greenaway and Hugh Hudson.

'But no-one expects to find me here. It seems too ordinary.'

For a brief moment in the 1970s,

the COI launched a bizarre bid to save the lives of British children

by scaring the living shit out of them.

'Only a fool would ignore this. But there's one born every minute.'

Here, Donald Pleasance uses reverse psychology

to keep kids away from water for the rest of their lives.

'Hidden depth, it's the perfect place...'

Help! '..for an accident.'

Oi, look, there's someone in the water. Quick!

John McKenzie, who would go on to direct

the classic British gangster film The Long Good Friday,

offered this film, Apaches, in 1975,

which illustrated to children every scenario

in which they were likely to die on a farm.

CHILDREN CHEERING

BOY SCREAMS

Yes, they actually showed this to children.

Back in the cinema,

the surviving members of this emotionally frazzled generation

were then offered the British rite of passage

which is Watership Down.

..has joined the thousand, For my friend stopped running today.

Watership Down is a British-funded, British-made animated adaptation

of a British book which,

despite being a sublime piece of filmmaking

and being, hey, about bunny rabbits, is categorically not for children.

Yet, it shaped a generation with its graphic bunny deaths,

visions of fields running with blood

and ultimately, a far too premature moment of rumination

on the concept of mortality.

Give me a moment, I've got something in my eye.

This is the film Punk In London.

Punk was a cultural revolution,

a backlash against pretty much everything,

and it didn't take long for it to reach film.

There were pre-runners to this.

A Clockwork Orange has been credited as having inspired punk

by offering young people a vision of their ability

to burn down the society which has rejected them.

There is also a strong precursor to punk element

in 1975's Rocky Horror Picture Show,

which presents a very punk aesthetic

and possibly cinema's most progressive take

on gender and sexuality at that point.

I could show you my favourite obsession.

In the white heat of punk,

the Sex Pistols starred in Julian Temple's

The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle.

It's a glorious mess of a film

which pretty well sells the musical silliness

of the Malcolm McLaren orbit.

Mary Millington and train robber Ronnie Biggs show up,

and ultimately, Johnny Rotten, who'd left the band by then,

described it as "a pile of rubbish".

The Clash's film Rude Boy is a bit more interesting,

if a lot less energetic.

It tells the fictional story of a young man who becomes their roadie

and his story is filmed alongside

what was actually happening with the band at the time.

So it's a documentary narrative from a fictional perspective,

which is interesting.

Punk accelerated change,

and perhaps the biggest result of this to British film

was the emergence of Derek Jarman.

Jarman was an artist and a stage designer for the Royal Ballet.

His first move into film

was as a production designer on Ken Russell's The Devils.

And his next was to raise 100% private funding

to finance his own directorial debut,

one of the most important moments in queer cinema, Sebastiane.

Important because it presented homosexuality as art and as fact

in a narrative film playing in cinemas.

This was the first time graphic male nudity and sexuality

had appeared in anything but specialist pornography.

His next feature film could probably lay claim

to being the only real punk film that wasn't documentary.

Jubilee, released in 1978, was more art film than narrative,

with Jenny Runacre as Queen Elizabeth I,

summoned by John Dee to witness her London in the 1970s.

Thought you bought it from the liquidator.

The cast and soundtrack are full of punk icons

like Jordan, Wayne County, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

And it even gave the world their first view of Adam Ant and Toyah.

All right, girls.

Although the 1960s and '70s

had seen a strong movement in art and experimental film,

it was somewhat of an enclosed community.

Jarman's films were on public release in cinemas,

and were influencing and inspiring

both filmmakers and audiences who watched them.

In 1978, filmmaker Ron Peck brought Nighthawks to the screen.

The first feature film

to really explore the contemporary world of the homosexual experience.

MUSIC PLAYS

How was it?

There is almost a mundanity to it

as it brilliantly normalises the gay experience

and essentially shows us a very normal young man making a living

and looking for love or connection.

It's not a film of bitterness, or high drama,

more a character study.

It does contain this electric scene...

Yes, Christopher? Is it true that you're bent?!

LAUGHING, JEERING

..in which the main character is outed by his students

and attempts to turn it into a learning opportunity.

Are you queer?

CHILDREN SHOUT

There's been a rumour going round the school that you're a queer.

Come on, admit it!

Yes, it's true.

It still, and always has been, a rarity

to find a British film which is centred around anything

but the white, English, heteronormative culture.

Of the few films covering any of Britain's minority cultures,

it's even harder to find any

actually made by filmmakers of those minorities.

Somewhere in the background of this film

is one of Britain's most important filmmakers.

One of the thousands of extras used in 1963's Cleopatra

was Trinidad-born Horace Ove.

Elizabeth Taylor moved the whole production to Rome.

When I got to Rome, I got interested in all the other filmmakers.

You know, De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni,

and suddenly my approach to filmmaking had changed

from the Hollywood, you know, the Hollywood film.

Here I was introduced to the realist cinema, the surrealist cinema.

Working mainly in documentary, and having built a good reputation,

it was surprising how difficult it was

for Ove to raise finance for his very low-budget feature film debut.

Eventually, the BFI's production board and consortium of filmmakers

put the money up.

Everybody looked at me as though I was sick or crazy or something

to try and to make a film about such a heavy Black subject.

And then, coming out of film school,

and hanging out with a lot of filmmakers,

white filmmakers, who I got to know in school,

and Black filmmakers, and people coming up...

We all came together,

and they said, "All right, Horace, we like this story,

"we're into the politics of what's going on today,

"we will help you, we'll give you four or five weeks.

"After that, we're gone, cos we've gotta live."

And that's how it was put together.

Pressure, released in 1975, was the first British feature film

to be directed by a Black filmmaker.

Hurry up, boys! Breakfast's ready.

The story follows Tony, a bright, well-educated

young, English-born Black man,

and the pressures he faces from society.

It was nice of you to come in and see us.

His inability to find work,

despite being better qualified than his white friends,

the subservience of his parents' Windrush generation

to the indigenous white dominance,

and the reactionary anger

of the Black Power group he finds himself drawn to.

It's a really well-made film,

which is just as relevant today as to when it was eventually released.

It took Ove three years to get the film distributed

after it was finished,

as the scenes of police brutality were considered too incendiary.

SHOUTING

Ove only made one other feature film, and that was a decade later.

He was an artist, a photographer, a documentarian,

and a theatre director.

His achievements across the other arts are cinema's loss.

It would be a couple of years later

before Britain got another feature film

about the British Black experience.

And this would be from a white director.

Your passport. Mr...?

Benjamin Adolphus Ignatius Samuel Jones, sir.

Black Joy is less politically charged,

and the kind of film that would be regularly produced

in a more representative film industry.

It's a fun, knowing film

about a young man arriving fresh off the plane from Guyana,

learning to negotiate life, and the local characters

in 1970s Brixton.

Although the main character of Ben is played by Trevor Thomas,

the film is dominated by the raucous presence of Norman Beaton.

And yes, that is Dame Floella Benjamin.

Her portrayal of Miriam, a strong woman, mother and business owner,

is worthy of a film all of her own.

He don't give a fuck. He only want to fuck.

Anyway, Black Joy has faced criticism over the years

for presenting the British Black experience

in a stereotyped comical way.

Having a middle-class white man behind the camera

and a mainly white production team

provoked calls of inauthenticity

and fetishisation of the ghetto culture.

Ultimately, it's up to the viewing audience to decide for themselves.

The screenplay was written by Guyanese-born

Brixton resident Jamal Ali,

and the Black cast of actors have all stood by the film.

Oh, God, the damn thing is black.

Perhaps it was the notion of a comedic tone

when depicting a very oppressed sector of society

which upset certain critics.

But isn't it also valid to depict the resilience and spirit

that go along with such oppression?

The overriding sentiment you feel

when watching either Pressure or Black Joy is,

"Why aren't there more films like this?"

There were more films in the Robin Askwith Confession series

than there were feature films about the Black British experience

in the '60s and '70s put together.

How's that for a sobering thought?

It's a funny thing to ask, but are you from India or Pakistan?

India.

The immigrant experience was also at the heart

of 1974's A Private Enterprise,

which finally presented a British Asian story

to the cinema audience.

Sitting somewhere between the anger of Pressure

and the charm of Black Joy,

A Private Enterprise follows Shiv, an Indian immigrant

with aspirations of financial independence and love.

At a crossroads point in his life,

he is discovering what certain things mean to him.

Community, progressiveness, spirituality,

family, the past and the future.

Pay the legal minimum wage!

Against a backdrop of industrial action

in a bleak 1970s Birmingham,

it's an intelligent and heartfelt film,

with a keen eye for certain human frailties.

What about other immigrant cultures?

Any British films from the 1970s about Jews?

Apparently not.

Oh, hang on.

I'm a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hooknose. I'm kosher, Mum.

I'm a Red Sea pedestrian and proud of it!

Oh, yeah, welcome to the next group of filmmakers

who would arguably go on to be the most influential club

since the Free Cinema brigade.

Monty Python's Flying Circus

had exploded onto British TV in the late '60s.

Filthy! Gaston, find out who washed this up...

What the Beatles were to music, they were to comedy.

Not just in the public perception of it as a revolutionary force,

but also in the work

actually being the most perfectly distilled version of its influences.

The humour of Monty Python was an evolution

of the irreverence of The Goons

and the cultural dismemberment of Beyond The Fringe.

After four series of their TV sketch show,

the ambitions of the six writer/performers

could not be contained in a mere box.

Their first real feature film, Monty Python And The Holy Grail,

was funded in a suitably bizarre manner.

When we got the chance to make a movie,

ie, Monty Python And The Holy Grail,

Terry Jones and I both wanted to be film directors by that point.

Convinced we could do it better than the TV director, or anything.

And we were also at a time

when the taxation in this country was very, very severe.

Pop groups were making a fortune, you know.

Elton John, Led Zeppelin,

Genesis, Island Records,

there were a couple of others...

They wanted to deal with their tax problem,

and we were a tax loss opportunity!

We failed them.

Unfortunately, the film did incredibly well.

It is a totally, utterly British film,

and it was ignored as such, practically.

The one thing I remember from that period was Alexander Walker,

he wrote a book about British cinema

for, I think it was for the '70s...

which we had a couple of films in, Python did.

And we were a footnote.

We were not considered cinema.

We were a bunch of TV guys telling jokes.

But it was their next one which would be the most influential

in relation to British cinema and society.

1979's the Life Of Brian is the story of Brian,

a Jew, in Roman-occupied Judaea,

who just happened to be born on the same night,

and just across the road from Jesus.

The film tells the story of his parallel life,

in which he, too, gets feted as the Messiah

and suffers a similar, albeit more song-and-dance fate.

There was a notable pushback in the UK.

Screenings of the film were picketed by religious groups,

some town councils refused

to allow the film to be shown in local cinemas.

The Pythons attempted to defend it,

but came up against situations like this.

You keep making the basic assumption that we are ridiculing Christ

and Christ's teaching.

And I say that we are not.

Do you imagine that your scene, for instance,

of the Sermon on the Mount,

this scene in your film of the Sermon on the Mount,

is not ridiculing one of the most sublime utterances that...

The Pythons quite rightly contended

that what they had made was not blasphemy.

We're making fun of the guy who's remembered it wrong,

and of the people who don't understand it and miss the point.

From the Sermon on the Mount, it's treated absolutely respectfully.

It was heresy. What they were satirising was religion itself.

Yes, we were provoking, a lot. And that's very important.

Because I think provocation

is one of the jobs of, at least some, cinema.

And that's what I've tried to do.

And that's what Python was doing.

Because if you provoke people,

hopefully it makes them start thinking.

Life Of Brian is a film that should be watched right now.

Everything it's saying is about the world we're living in now.

And I keep trying to encourage people to go and watch it,

those who haven't seen it.

We were way ahead of the curve, folks!

Its crucifixion finale

was an attack on the iconography of Christianity.

Monty Python took down the last big taboo, religion, with laughter.

And ultimately, with a song and a dance.

It was 1979.

Lord Lew Grade.

Look at this guy dance!

It would be wrong to wrap up without at least mentioning him.

King of independent TV,

and self-proclaimed saviour of the British film industry.

He was based in Britain, and he did make a lot of films,

but they were just a bunch

of not-very-well-remembered international films

starring the big Hollywood names of the day.

There wasn't much British about them,

and they don't deserve a place in this story.

But he still deserves a little shout-out.

Without him, we might never have had The Muppets.

So, dance on, you crazy bastard, we love you.

Well, now, what did we have at the end of the '70s?

We had some incredible films made by incomparable artists.

Oh, leave the guy alone!

We had some hilarious softcore pornography.

Get undressed!

We had some pretty good kids' films.

KIDS SHOUT

We had the beginnings of a representative film culture

for minority groups.

Thank you so much.

We had some blistering and committed performances.

We had fun.

We had drama.

Madness.

Weirdness.

And horror.

And we had lost most of our indigenous stars to Hollywood,

and fuck all British films were actually being made.

But that was about to change.

And the person who was about to change it

is someone you might never have expected.

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