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Our Professor of Radio gets Nostalgic On Radio 4's 'Not What it Used to Be' |
Arcadian visions of Britain, in particular England, have long been evoked by politicians, advertisers, storytellers and in prose, poetry and music. Used skilfully, they touch our very souls. Professor of Radio, Sean Street explores the archive of a potent emotion – nostalgia.
'Not What it Used To Be', to be aired on Saturday 18th February, examines nostalgia and its sometimes insidious uses, and explores its fascination.
"The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill…these are the things that make England…" So said Stanley Baldwin, two years before the General Strike. How did Baldwin's words sound to the unemployed in the cities, to miners and steelworkers and families who had lost loved ones in the Great War. And how do they sound today in a multi-cultural Britain?
Anthony Howard probes the way Churchill, Thatcher and Major also invoked a sense of national identity through nostalgia - the pock of willow on leather on the village green, the frothing of warm English beer, spinsters cycling to evensong. This can be dangerous, as in Norman Tebbit's cricket test, harking back to a simpler, but by no means better time.
From Shakespeare ("This jewel set in a silver sea") through Betjamin and Larkin to "The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady", it has been nostalgia that sells to the British. Lisa Jardine argues that it always been there, back to Philip Sidney's Arcadia and that in some ways nostalgia is necessary.
Sean Street sifts the archives to show how the advertisers creatively exploit nostalgia creating an imaginative England which not only does not exist, but is a composite of disparate images. So, to sell Hovis bread a bike is pushed up a hill in Dorset by a boy in a cloth cap while a man with a northern accent tells us of the good old days while a Yorkshire Brass Band intones the slow movement from Dvorak's New World Symphony. Chris O'Shea of advertising Agency HOW decodes the commercials.
There is an aural aspect too, and the composer Michael Berkeley considers how Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams evoking a shimmering rural past. And beyond them and feeding them, the folk song revival, the saving of a fading past by Cecil Sharp and George Butterworth. Tom Robinson reveals how this continues in popular music, the way that, for instance, "Waterloo Sunset" by the Kinks conjures an urban nostalgia. And John Baish, Managing Director of Classic Gold, argues that whole radio networks are founded on nostalgia.
'Not What it Used To Be' questions whether there can be any escape from nostalgia. Evocations of childhood are inescapable – and those are everyone's nostalgia. Today's adults grew up with Basil Brush – they smile misty-eyed at the thought of the puppet with jokes as brash as his tail. Every generation has its icons, and memories. And these can be manipulated to sell us not just products but policies and even identities.
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