Peter Hitchens

Why was a brilliant BBC serial kept in its most secret vaults?

BBC Four announced this morning that ‘The Roads to Freedom’ will play on the BBC for the first time since the 1970s on Wednesday 27 July. In May, Peter Hitchens asked why the BBC had kept it in the archive… 

If someone had managed to bottle the essence of the 1960s – the exciting, adventurous bits – wouldn’t you want to take at least one deep draught? I certainly would. I sometimes long for the power to recreate that odd, dangerous, thrilling time, if only to see if I have got it right in my memory. In fact, they did bottle it. But nobody is allowed to taste the vintage. Well, almost nobody, as we shall see.

The BBC possesses, beyond doubt, a full recording of its 13-part 1970 dramatisation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom trilogy. Set mainly in Left Bank Paris at the very end of the 1930s, its action prefigures the late 1960s quite remarkably. And having been made at the very end of that haunted era by men and women then in their prime, it is an astonishing, potent experience to watch it now in 2022, as I have, and you bizarrely cannot. It was first screened on BBC2, then a genuinely highbrow channel, in the late autumn of 1970, just as the 1960s were slipping unstoppably into the past. But mysteriously it has not been transmitted or made available on any platform since a repeat in 1977. We know a complete recording exists because the series was shown over a single weekend at the British Film Institute in 2012. There are no plans to repeat this.

‘There’s a shortage of workers.’

The Roads to Freedom dealt mostly with the months between the Munich agreement and the fall of France. In 1970, these towering events were as recent as the fall of the Berlin Wall is now.

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