In the summer of 1966 Peter Kennedy recorded a series of 45 minute radio programmes for the BBC. Folk-Song Cellar was presented as ‘an informal get-together’ in a fictional ‘folk club’ hosted by Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor and over the 39 broadcast episodes featured over one hundred performers from Britain and Ireland. The programmes were recorded in the basement studio at Cecil Sharp House, London. Anne Briggs, billed as “from Nottinghamshire comes Anne Briggs to sing some of those unaccompanied songs she heard first from the gypsies”, sang three songs during the launch episode of Folk-Song Cellar, broadcast on Saturday 13th August 1966. Remarkably these beautiful performances have survived for half a century.
BBC
Auntie Beeb
Johnnie Walker obituary
Former pirate radio disc jockey who went to Radio 1 and later became a stalwart of Radio 2
By Nigel Fountain
Johnnie Walker, who has died aged 79, began his career as a disc jockey in the offshore pirate radio era of the mid-1960s. He was one of four pirate DJs – the others were John Peel, Tony Blackburn and Kenny Everett – who came to symbolise that time and continued to prosper in its aftermath.
The pirate radio stations, of which the most famous was Radio Caroline, were set up on ships and disused forts in the North Sea, avoiding British regulation by broadcasting from international waters and providing pop music to a British teen market not catered for by the BBC stations of the era.
BBC’s Peel Acres with guest Johnny Flynn
Tom Ravenscroft invites actor and musician Johnny Flynn to Peel Acres: the home of his dad, former BBC Radio DJ John Peel, who passed away in 2004, and his legendary music collection.
LISTEN HERE:
The Collection – Peel Acres – Johnny Flynn – BBC Sounds
Tracklist
1 Johnny Flynn & Laura Marling “The Water”
2 Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band “Dachau Blues”
3 Doug Kershaw “Spanish Moss”
4 Peter Green “Burnt Foot”
5 Mike Seeger & Tex Logan “Katy Hill”
6 Bob Dylan & The Band “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (Take 2)
7 Pixies “Gigantic”
8 The Cramps “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?”
9 Autopsy “Retribution for the Dead”
10 Michael Chapman “Wrecked Again”
11 Leonard Cohen “Bird on the Wire”
12 Peter Green “Bottoms Up”
Nuclear apocalypse film “Threads” was ‘the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’
Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984
ne Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city.
Made by British director Mick Jackson with Kes author Barry Hines, and set in Sheffield, it begins with a young couple, working-class Jimmy and middle-class Ruth, dealing with her unexpected pregnancy in familiar kitchen-sink drama surroundings. International tensions build slowly in the background as the minutes tick by, bursting in through newspaper headlines, radio and TV news, and the ominous words of narrator Paul Vaughan, known then as a presenter of BBC science series Horizon.
Then come CND protests; council officers being summoned to an emergency bunker; and animated films on TV instructing people how to survive. Forty-seven minutes in, a nuclear bomb drops. The film ends more than a decade later with Jimmy and Ruth’s baby, Jane, now an adolescent, giving birth in a world devastated by nuclear winter.
Bringing horror into the homes, shops and streets of a very ordinary world, Threads is a brilliant, terrifying film, and for anyone who has seen it (I watched it in 1999 on a dusty VHS), its effects will have been long-lasting. To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, I have examined its creation and legacy for a forthcoming radio documentary, Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On, digging into the BBC vaults to show how the film has influenced writers, politicians and fans (including Jim Jupp of the brilliant Ghost Box record label, who has created an exclusive soundtrack for the programme).
The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does.
In a light-dazzled sunroom in Santa Monica, California, Mick Jackson, director of LA Story and The Bodyguard, is remembering the film of which he’s most proud. “You know that on the Internet Movie Database, at the end of each entry for a film, there’s a space for people to write their own comments? I’ve checked that page for Threads practically every year. It varies with the state of tension in the world, but regularly there are [new] entries there saying: ‘I saw this as a kid sitting around the door when I was supposed to be in bed’, or ‘I came to this because people had talked about it and it’s the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’.” The latest reviewer, jotchy-14285, posted in June, saying: “Just watch it people, judge for yourselves and hope that the ones with their fingers on the buttons have seen it as well…”
A science documentary-maker in his early career, Jackson joined the BBC in 1966, soon after the corporation decided to ban another film it had commissioned about the effects of a nuclear bomb: Peter Watkins’s The War Game. Blending documentary, newsy vox pops and a cast of amateur actors and extras, it was dropped from the schedules following advice from the Home Office, but later won the 1967 best documentary Oscar after a cinema release. “So I entered a corporation where everybody felt a great deal of shame, that the BBC has somehow betrayed them,” Jackson says.