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The pleasure of watching something like that is twofold: there’s the content, if it’s good or just interestingly outdated, but just as important is the thrill of the clothes (later in the same show, R.D. Laing’s amazing Seventies wardrobe!)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. They’re mixing up the genres a bit here, with talking heads (experts and rent-a-shrinks) sprinkled among the archive footage. We kick off with trenches, bombs, a mushroom cloud, napalm. And then a clip of Jung, from a Face to Face interview with John Freeman (1959), saying, ‘The only real danger that exists is man himself.’
This is a potted history of how, since Freud, thought has shifted about humanity and its appetite for destruction. It’s an interesting attempt to show how man’s ideas about man have changed over the decades, but it’s kind of random in what it chooses to single out, though I suppose that was partly governed by what they dug up in the basement.
From the only recording of Freud’s voice ever made, in a BBC radio interview with him in the last months of his life, we whisk over to Jung, speaking about his break with him. ‘I liked him very much but I soon discovered that when he had thought something then it was settled, while I was doubting all along the line.’ He goes on to say, ominously: ‘We know nothing of man. Far too little...we are the origin of all coming evil.’ The clips of patients in a Swiss mental asylum are rather moving.
From Jung it’s a hop, a skip and a jump to Stanley Milgram, and then to R.D. Laing, to Margaret Mead the anthropologist, to the great childcare guru Benjamin Spock (who was also Mead’s paediatrician), to B.F. Skinner with his points system experiment in borstals. Then we’re in the 1970s again, this time with Desmond Morris and then with Jane Goodall (because, as she explains, the discovery of brutality in chimpanzee groups prompted ideas about it being ‘deeply rooted in our philogenetic ancestry...therefore violence, aggression, warfare in our own species was inevitable’). We end up with Dawkins and an outline of the selfish gene theory.
It’s skimming the surface of half a century’s worth of very diverse disciplines, and the more interesting the clips, the more I wanted to see the programmes from which they were taken. If they dared to be dull, BBC4 could do a series of carefully chosen reruns, perhaps with a bit of subtitled commentary, and it would get an audience of — oof, at least 20 people.
Jung and co. might have had some interesting things to say about General Butt Naked, aka Joshua Blahyi, the Liberian soldier whose all-too-conscious dark side manifested in him and his troop of boy soldiers massacring an estimated 10,000 people during the first civil war, wearing nothing but trainers and wigs. Towards the end of the war Blahyi, like many a Liberian warlord, claimed repentance — Christ appeared to him in an expedient vision — and now he heads up the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries. He does tours apologising to the families of his victims. Some people are convinced; others, who witnessed his terrifying rampages, cynical. The Redemption of General Butt Naked was the latest in the True Stories documentary series on More4 on Tuesday nights — utterly fascinating.