John Betjeman - Time with Betjeman - BBC Series 1983

[Guest]

All seven programmes in the 'Time with Betjeman' series, first broadcast on BBC2 in
1983. Programme 1 does have some edits due to copyright issues.

Decent 480p quality - to my knowledge this series has never had a commercial release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDlG7_2puao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg3FDwFVPFA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreZrWwKpM8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYC4n6KMOyw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZGWfPQWJ2c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN_TVN9LjDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctEo1WPxCqc

[Serial_Apologist]

Many thanks, KLawrence!

[LMcD]

Tonight's episode of 'Words and Music' was called 'Betjeman's World' - churches, trains, architecture, concern for the environment, death, bells - readings by Tamsin Grieg and archive recordings of JB himself. There was a particularly felicitous segue from the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway - which I think some folk called the 'Slow and Dirty' - to a Somerset Rhapsody by Gustav Holst, and the programme ended with Flanders and Swann's almost unbearably poignant 'Slow Train'.

[Serial_Apologist]

Just too long a programme for a Sunday in my case - I'll be trying to fit this in tomorrow.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001yyzj

[smittims]

Yes, I think it's best to record and watch them one by one. I especially enjoyed the short black-and-white films restored some years sgo under the title 'The Lost Betjemans' and 'Betjeman Revisited'.

[hmvman]

I shall look forward to catching up with this series and it'll be good to see the films again. There was an absolutely wonderful film made in 1977 as part of the Queen's jubilee celebrations called 'The Queen's Realm' which was aerial footage of Britain overlaid with Betjeman's poetry and British classical music. I'd love to see that broadcast again.

[LMcD]

I shall look forward to catching up with this series and it'll be good to see the films again. There was an absolutely wonderful film made in 1977 as part of the Queen's jubilee celebrations called 'The Queen's Realm' which was aerial footage of Britain overlaid with Betjeman's poetry and British classical music. I'd love to see that broadcast again.

It's on BBC4 at 7.00 p.m. on Sunday, followed by lots more Betjeman! (He died on the 19th of May 1984).

[hmvman]

It's on BBC4 at 7.00 p.m. on Sunday, followed by lots more Betjeman! (He died on the 19th of May 1984).

Ah, thank you, I shall make sure to watch.

[gradus]

I watched it last night and it was every bit as good as I expected, a moving combination of poetry beautifully spoken and images put together by someone who loves our country.

[oddoneout]

I watched it last night and it was every bit as good as I expected, a moving combination of poetry beautifully spoken and images put together by someone who loves our country.

I've seen it before*, but it was just as good this time round - a programme to get lost in.
The accompanying music did make me wonder why we don't hear more of it, and I can't find a music list to explore further. Playing "guess the tune" is all very well but without the answers it has limited appeal. The same applies to the poetry used.
Something I did notice was how much better aerial photography is now that drones are used - no wobble, no ground level gales or mass stampeded animals - and fewer issues with how close to cliffs and buildings is safe enough.


* broadcast April 2023 I've just noticed.

[Serial_Apologist]

Yes I'd also seen it before - or at any rate the middle of the 3 programmes, which I taped back at the time of its first broadcast in 2001. I hadn't seen the Monitor, a fascinating insight into his and his fellow poet's feelings about life and death which revealed Betjamen as something of a sceptic, notwithstanding his outward empathies with C of E Protestantism. He was a funny old so-and-so,Betjamen, wasn't, he: on the one hand railing against modern day de-personalisation and its manfestations, particularly as expressed in landscape and architecture, on the other holding to his illusory dreams of a bygone England vested in Crown, Aristocracy and the common peasant! I would still love to write poetry of any kind, let alone as subtle and multilevelled in meanings as he did!

[smittims]

Yes, Betjeman had his contradictions , but I think that's part of his fascination, and why he's so interesting to listen to. . He was from an age when original-thinking people weren't produced by a mass-production education system. We're back to Harry Lime and the cuckoo clock.

It was of course a horribly unfair age riddled with inequalities and prejudice, but it did produce such intersting minds. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Thomas Hardy were agnostics with a deep love of the church and the Bible: it's a complex paradox they couldn't explain.