Post by Teddy Bear on May 27, 2014 19:33:35 GMT
I never saw the programme but this journalist did, and recalls that events 50 years ago were not as the BBC wants to portray them.
It's clear that there are plenty of film archives from the time to show exactly what happened then, but the BBC want to present events differently.
It's clear that there are plenty of film archives from the time to show exactly what happened then, but the BBC want to present events differently.
Mods, Rockers and how the Lefty Beeb is whitewashing history: Christopher Stevens reviews last night's TV
By Christopher Stevens
Turkey for Christmas, chocolate for Easter and jam on Bank Holidays — a traffic jam.
These are the British traditions. But 50 years ago, there was a different custom for holiday Mondays: the seaside punch-up.
The sight of young rioters surging down the prom and over the shingle at Margate or Hastings, stampeding through families to lay into each other under the pier, was a frightening spectacle. The battles between Mods and Rockers on English beaches left an ugly scar on the Sixties.
But, according to the BBC, that never really happened. We’re remembering it all wrong.
Timeshift: Mods, Rockers And Bank Holiday Mayhem (BBC4) explained that what really scared decent people, trying to enjoy a picnic on a rare day off work, was not the knuckle-duster and the bike chain. It was Left-wing economics.
It’s sadly usual for the Beeb to put a socialist spin on its history documentaries, but Timeshift did just this, ignoring all the evidence from the old hoodlums themselves — now pensioners, some more respectable than others.
Revisionist historians told us that what scared Britain was the thought of young people with money to spend. Disposable income had doubled for teenagers since the Fifties. Some were splashing a pound every week, a whole 20 shillings, on clothes and dances.
The whole Mods v. Rockers debacle was a ‘moral panic’ whipped up by a conservative media and an establishment that felt threatened by the young generation, insisted the BBC sociologists.
But the archive footage showed something different, and real, and frightening. Herds of louts trampling through family groups on the beach, barging into women and children.
When enemy gangs clashed, rocks flew, and yobs clustered round fallen victims to kick them to a pulp.
This didn’t look like economics.
For many of the youngsters, caught up in a day of bravado that turned into a nightmare, it was terrifying too.
Some of them today were horrified and even tearful at the thought of the violence that had engulfed them.
‘I don’t want to go round kicking people,’ protested an elegant white-haired gent. ‘That’s not my scene at all, you know?’
Others were cheerfully unrepentant. An old greaser chuckled as he remembered how he was slung in the back of an ambulance, his head streaming with blood.
One of his mortal foes, a Mod, was also in the wagon. The two of them beat seven bells out of each other until the driver kicked them out.
Determined to ignore this evidence, the voiceover claimed to have proof that these riots had never happened because the cost of damages was too low.
After one bust-up in Clacton, the bill for insurance repairs was just £500.
But there’s a very different reason for that. Britain in 1964 was not a compensation culture. People just dusted themselves down, boarded up their broken windows and got on with it.
By Christopher Stevens
Turkey for Christmas, chocolate for Easter and jam on Bank Holidays — a traffic jam.
These are the British traditions. But 50 years ago, there was a different custom for holiday Mondays: the seaside punch-up.
The sight of young rioters surging down the prom and over the shingle at Margate or Hastings, stampeding through families to lay into each other under the pier, was a frightening spectacle. The battles between Mods and Rockers on English beaches left an ugly scar on the Sixties.
But, according to the BBC, that never really happened. We’re remembering it all wrong.
Timeshift: Mods, Rockers And Bank Holiday Mayhem (BBC4) explained that what really scared decent people, trying to enjoy a picnic on a rare day off work, was not the knuckle-duster and the bike chain. It was Left-wing economics.
It’s sadly usual for the Beeb to put a socialist spin on its history documentaries, but Timeshift did just this, ignoring all the evidence from the old hoodlums themselves — now pensioners, some more respectable than others.
Revisionist historians told us that what scared Britain was the thought of young people with money to spend. Disposable income had doubled for teenagers since the Fifties. Some were splashing a pound every week, a whole 20 shillings, on clothes and dances.
The whole Mods v. Rockers debacle was a ‘moral panic’ whipped up by a conservative media and an establishment that felt threatened by the young generation, insisted the BBC sociologists.
But the archive footage showed something different, and real, and frightening. Herds of louts trampling through family groups on the beach, barging into women and children.
When enemy gangs clashed, rocks flew, and yobs clustered round fallen victims to kick them to a pulp.
This didn’t look like economics.
For many of the youngsters, caught up in a day of bravado that turned into a nightmare, it was terrifying too.
Some of them today were horrified and even tearful at the thought of the violence that had engulfed them.
‘I don’t want to go round kicking people,’ protested an elegant white-haired gent. ‘That’s not my scene at all, you know?’
Others were cheerfully unrepentant. An old greaser chuckled as he remembered how he was slung in the back of an ambulance, his head streaming with blood.
One of his mortal foes, a Mod, was also in the wagon. The two of them beat seven bells out of each other until the driver kicked them out.
Determined to ignore this evidence, the voiceover claimed to have proof that these riots had never happened because the cost of damages was too low.
After one bust-up in Clacton, the bill for insurance repairs was just £500.
But there’s a very different reason for that. Britain in 1964 was not a compensation culture. People just dusted themselves down, boarded up their broken windows and got on with it.