Dare to be dull

After rootling in the BBC archives on the internet recently I started thinking, wouldn’t it be good if more programmes from the past were shown in full? The online archive contains less than a tenth of the total footage stored by the BBC (which would amount to nearly 70 years of TV if you watched non-stop), and only a few hundred complete shows out of so many thousands.

The same thing occurred to me again while watching Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the first in a series of three, which went out on BBC4 on Monday. There is a segment of the episode devoted to a Horizon presented by Stanley Milgram about his notorious electrocution experiment, and a clip in which he speaks about five consecutive sentences to camera without it cutting away to anything else. There’s just a Yale professor in his corduroy jacket, talking to the viewers as though they’re willing to concentrate for full minutes at a time and have no need of visual distraction. I thought it would be great to see the whole programme.

The pleasure of watching something like that is twofold: there’s the content, if it’s good or just interestingly outdated, but just as important is the thrill of the clothes (later in the same show, R.D. Laing’s amazing Seventies wardrobe!) and the manners. That flicker of incredulity/recognition is one of the things fans of Mad Men love. It’s one of the reasons it’s so brilliant to watch Tomorrow’s World episodes from 1968: ‘Plastic grass: showcasing the artificial garden of tomorrow’.

Anyway, Great Thinkers, the first programme of which was called ‘Human, All Too Human’ and concentrated on psychologists, psychiatrists and behavioural scientists from the second half of the 20th century.