Gay Britannia; BBC announces major new season

[doversoul1]

I think programmes that look at how our (producers, critics, and audience) perceptions have changed would have been interesting.

[Conchis]

Man Alive from July 1967:

https://youtu.be/K43SA70GBUk

There's a follow-up programme specifically on lesbians.

These documentaries seem a bit po-faced nowadays but I welcome the seriousness with which they were made.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think programmes that look at how our (producers, critics, and audience) perceptions have changed would have been interesting.

Yes - and something in the "Timewatch Guide to" series, showing the differing ways in which television has portrayed gay characters over the past sixty years. These would be very valuable programmes.

[Dave2002]

Programmes on Tchaikovsky, perhaps?

The irony being: Tchaikovsky would almost certainly have been opposed to legalisation of homosexuality and would be a big Putin cheerleader if he was alive today.

I really don't see how you can make that assertion. What is your basis for that?

[richardfinegold]

Politically, Tchaikovsky was a total Tsarist reactionary.

A lot of Russian intellectuals were. They had a notion that the evil Romanov dynasty was going to be replaced with something far worse

[Lat-Literal]

Fine - but as with race relations we are in an entirely different terrain. As oppressed and marginalized minorities grow and build substantial power bases, integration is increasingly to be expected. All else is mainly historical sentiment. There are losses for those in such categories and those who embraced them - a loss of often appealing and novel cultural colour. But we are old now and a bland homogeneity is the price of a reasonable society. Some kinda' gain, especially those affected. Much is lost on an artistic level. See also "progress" in the round.

(In a sense it is has become pure - irrespective of colour, religion ,sexuality or anything else, those of us who seek out the artistically distinctive will do so on merits until our graves)