The CAMRA never lies

I am taking refuge from the political-social horrors of the present by paying attention to the political-social woes of yesteryear - YouTube's ancient episodes of World In Action are particularly diverting.  

Like this 1970 one - which docufiction style recreates the recent misadventures of a young man who left his hometown for London and almost instantly became homeless. The young man, now safely reintegrated into the fabric of society with a job and a place to live, reenacts his own experiences sleeping rough, bathing in public bathtubs, doing heroin, etc. Learned a cool word watching this - "derry" - short for derelict, as in a derelict house, rather than unhoused person.

Or how about this one from the late '80s about the Docklands redevelopment scheme and its deleterious effect on local residents? This is an issue I would have been aware of in vague terms at the time, but not with this concrete detail and vivid grimness. And I would not have seen this program then partly because I didn't own a telly or have ready access to one, but mostly because I was out and about seeing bands or just being young. 

An earlier program on the decline of the Docklands, from 1976

This is the opposite of how nostalgia usually works. Generally, nostalgia involves fixating on the "fun" bits of the past, like music or other forms of entertainment, fashion, maybe sport, or just something quirkily of its time - and screening out the shite: urban blight, political strife, racism-sexisim-homophobia, mass poverty and the sheer impoverishment of the look of things in run-down post-WW2 Britain....  The backdrop, the context, drops away, and just the redeeming or charming or daft bits are focused on: the escapism rather than the things that necessitated escape. Which then creates a completely distorted, unfaithful sense of how fun and cool the past was. 

But what I'm doing is finding distraction and even relaxation in the bad bits of the living-memory past.  It's not even warts-and-all retrospection - I'm zooming in on the warts and nothing but the warts. 

But there is also lighter fare on offer - via the bonanza that the BBC Archive has recently been offering  up, here's a 1977 program on the brewing industry in U.K. and the Campaign for Real Ale.

Fascinating stuff, from the space-age control room of the gigantic industrialized brewing works to the struggle for control of the drinking map of the country between the different cartels of beer makers (whose tentacles also extended into spirits and wine, many well known brands)  and then finally to the earnest activists of the pressure group CAMRA, with their conferences and drably written and drearily delivered speeches, not to mention their clothes (lots of sweaters and sideburns). Surprisingly there are actually some women visible at the meetings, if not on the podium. 

I feel like this information came up in some recent blog comment, or perhaps I just saw it on someone else's blog - but CAMRA put out a record. A selection of beer themed tunes, performed  for some reason in a lite jazz-rock mode, as performed by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. One of the tunes is by the great Neil Ardley. 

To be honest, even if I didn't direly crave relief from the present, I'd probably happily spend all my TV-time watching these old currents-affairs programs and investigative reports from the 1970s and 1980s.  Joy's patience for it, though, is limited.

Then there's the light entertainment fare of the time, astonishingly bereft and often outrageously reactionary. 

But that's a whole other story - indeed there's a blog post I have been hatching for a while now, working title New Faeces. 

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Suddenly occurred to me this blog has basically become a 1970s blog - or 70s / 80s blog (if factoring in the Bad Music Era postige). 

Bit like a cross between those decades blogs of yore and Found Objects....