For the past few months, Collective Encounters has been working with Dr Marcus Collins, AHRC BBC 100 History Fellow and Reader in Contemporary History at Loughborough University, and Dramaturg Dr Alda Terracciano, on a project entitled ‘The BBC and Cultural Change since the 1960s’.
The project involves adapting transcripts from ‘lost’ BBC documentaries from the 1960s and transforming them into a new performance piece called, ‘Auntie [Working Title]’.
Auntie [Working Title] draws on the expectations, contradictions and juxtapositions of women in the 1960s as characterised within BBC archival material. It will be devised and performed by Collective Encounters’ intergenerational group Women in Action with creative support from theatre director Tessa Buddle and writer Amanda Redvers-Rowe.
Over the last year Marcus has unearthed a wealth of BBC social documentary archival material for the Women in Action group to interrogate and explore. This process has enabled the group to identify and pin down five key programmes that tell the story of the distance (or in some cases lack of distance) travelled in terms of society’s expectations for and attitudes towards women and moments when progression has been made on women’s rights and human rights in general. These are
- The BBC Homemaker Competition (1960-61), a televised contest open to married or widowed women that aimed to promote understanding about the qualities that make a good home-maker
- Woman’s Hour: Dropping in at a Meeting of the Family Planning Association (20.10.60), which covers topics such as the dangers of giving contraceptive advice to ‘unmarried girls’ and whether Doctors should encourage ‘less intelligent’ people to have fewer children.
- Four Women in a Man’s World (17.2.66): a series of interviews with professional women with a particular focus on whether a woman can be as intelligent as a man
- 24 Hours: Equal Pay for Women (5.9.68) reporting on attitudes from men and women in industry towards proposed legislation that would bring women’s pay in line with men’s, and
- Man Alive: Living in Sin (2.3.66) interviews with couples who had decided not to have their relationship blessed or formalised by religion or state.
As part of the research and development process Collective Encounters is interested in hearing from people who were involved, or more likely know of family members who were involved, in any of these programmes. In particular, they would like to make contact with family members of the winners of the BBC Homemaker Competition – Agnes Hogarth and Anne Waters. They are hoping somebody may have known these women, or maybe a family member was aware their grandma, aunty or mum had won the competition. Anyone who has a story to tell about this should get in touch.
A work in progress sharing will be taking place in Liverpool on the 9th November. Anyone who would like to come along to this, or watch an online live stream, should get in contact with Collective Encounters.
Alongside AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) the project is supported locally by PH Holt Foundation, Liverpool City Council and Arts Council England.