Coronation Street

This week is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street. Is this anniversary worthy of a blog about history and politics? Some would say that television programmes and popular culture are too trivial and ephemeral to be of interest to serious historians, and soap operas portray an necessarily exaggerated view of the world for dramatic purposes. Some have also argued that Coronation Street has never accurately represented the urban working class society it was meant to portray, and was considered old fashioned even in 1950.

However, as has been demonstrated by all the fuss about this week's tram crash and live episode, it has proved enduringly popular and has changed (to a certain extent) with the times, allowing historians of the future to chart, for example, changing attitudes towards immigration, class and sexuality based on the activities of characters in the programme. Political students meanwhile could examine how a predominantly working class area has fragmented into a much more socially diverse environment, although it is of course rare to find the characters discussing political events themselves!

This BBC article (accompanied by these pictures) argues hard for why Coronation Street should be considered important in the history of British Television, particularly as its early episodes (when the only other soap opera available was "The Archers") were made despite considerable reluctance from many in ITV that it could be successful. Do you agree? And should the blog cover more of this sort of thing or stick to "proper history"??

First Light

BBC2 showed "First Light" last night, an excellent recreation of what is was like to have been a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, based on the memoirs of Geoffrey Wellum, who, aged 18 at the time, was one of the youngest pilots in the RAF. If you missed it, catch it on iPlayer. You can also read here how the producers worked hard to make the programme look and sound authentic. It was certainly fascinating to have the film introduced and narrated by Wellum, now aged 89, and was full of personal details that broke through the usual stereotypes.

PS: The BBC's detailed Battle of Britain site is also worth a look, with archive footage and clips from past programmes. Other programmes to be shown in the season can be found here.

Mad Men and the 60s

Here is a BBC article about how "Mad Men" - the drama about the staff of an advertising company during the 60s - covers the decade. Each season covers a different year, so season 4 is about 1964. Key events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy assassination are referred to, and affect the storyline but unlike in Forrest Gump, where our hero is right at the forefront of these events, their position is more oblique. The programme is more interested in the steady changes in culture and society and how these affect the roles of the characters, particularly the women.

Have you been watching the programme? Does it do its History well? Let us know your thoughts as the series progresses.

Katie Rickard on ITV

Katie Rickard, who studied History and Politics at Nonsuch two years ago, has been on ITV news with a group of Liberal Democrats sharing her thoughts on the difficult decisions for her party. The report was shown on Friday, and events have moved quickly since then, but it is always good to see Nonsuch people in the news!

Britain's Real Monarch?

Channel 4 is putting lots of its archive material onto YouTube. This includes plenty of history programmes such as this one which has Tony Robinson investigating the claims that Edward IV might have been illegitimate. He then goes out to find who Britain's "real" monarch might have been if the claims had been upheld, and even produces an alternative royal family tree. The results are quite surprising...and the picture above is of the current "King Michael"!

Here's a link to the other documentaries available from Channel 4 on YouTube. If you spot any worthy of Nonsuch HP readers, please let us know.

Updates: Haiti and Relics

Two interesting recent articles provide further information on topics discussed recently on Nonsuch HP. This quite provocative article in the Times argues that many of Haiti's troubles stem from the legacy of French imperialism. Haiti declared independence in 1804 (it is the second oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere) but was forced to pay a massive fine for the next 122 years. This crippled the economy and left the country vulnerable to weak governments and despotic regimes. In 2004 Jacques Chirac set up a Commission of Reflection to examine France’s historical relations with Haiti. It concluded blandly that the demand for restitution was “non-pertinent in both legal and historical terms".

This article by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian explores the current obsession with historical relics, as seen in the Radio 4 series and David Dimbleby's programme on BBC1. There is even a CBBC programme called Relic where children from Hounslow have to unlock the secrets of historical objects to avoid getting trapped inside the British Museum (has anyone seen this?). Jenkins says, "We once derived mental comfort, uplift and local pride from worshipping saintly relics in church. Now we are supposed to find them in a museum. (Museums) have made the relic more important than themselves, yet requiring their priestly interpretation." What are your thoughts?