I recently came across an archive of interviews on BBC iPlayer, curated by the late TV host Michael Parkinson. Clicking through further suggested content on the site reveals an amazing library of footage from the last century. These include episodes from a programme called Face to Face, which ran between 1959 and 1962, and was resurrected again from 1989 to 1998; clips from Late Night Line Up, Man Alive (or its spin-off, ‘The Man Alive Report’), as well as from talk shows with popular male interviewers Wogan, Frost and Parkinson himself.*
In 1955, American film director and actor Orson Welles (1915-1985) is interviewed on a panel interview show called ‘Press Conference’. The questions are put by three journalists and focus on his work, but also try to probe his political views. For context, 1955 is the height of the ‘Red Scare’, with concern about the threat of communism in America. The period is associated with hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and congressional investigator Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Hollywood became a particular target, with actors and directors perceived to be sympathetic to communism ‘blacklisted’. While the Press Interview journalists appear to criticize McCarthyism, they repeatedly ask Welles why he has recently been in Spain (then run by Communist leader, General Franco) – “it’s just a filming location,” he shrugs. In a line of questions on anti-Americanism, one of the panel interviewers asks Welles, “Do the French criticize the Americans for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons?” to which he replies: “Don’t you think with countries, or races and big national generalizations like that, that the criticisms are always for the wrong reasons?” “Yes, I do” says the interviewer quickly, “And I am very glad you think so too”. There follows the slightest of awkward pauses in an otherwise teasing and fast-paced interview. Welles was well known for his opposition to racism and segregation.
Finally, raising concerns about ‘horror comics’, one interviewer asks Welles whether he thinks American culture has anything to do with the spread of ‘juvenile delinquency’. Welles’ response speaks to the general question of the moral boundaries of art, and the criminological question of the relationship between violent representation and lived behaviour:
Interviewer: “You wouldn’t say that children are imitative, and they tend to imitate what they see or read?”
Welles: “If they were, they would have come from the bear pits of the Globe Theatre and committed some rather extraordinary acts in the Elizabethan age.”
In a 1959 Face-to-Face episode featuring Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), the interviewer asks the poet how she responds to the popular perception of her as “remote, eccentric, forbidding and rather dangerous”. He suggests they first start with discussing her appearance. There is the slightest of smiles below the painted eyebrows and fanned headpiece, as Edith explains that she is “a throwback to remote ancestors”. A woman not of her time. She tells of a privileged though unhappy childhood. Edith is a stickler for manners, though does not tie these straightforwardly with class. She praises American society, claims friendship with Marilyn Monroe and passionately defends Monroe’s appearance in a calendar when it is raised by the interviewer:
Sitwell: “Well, there have been nude models before now: it means absolutely nothing against a person’s moral character, at all. If people have never been poor, perhaps they don’t know what it is like to be hungry?”
Rather, she blames those around Monroe who have treated her “most unchivalrously”.
Featuring in the second run of Face-to Face in 1994, Maya Angelou (1928-2014) is questioned about her engagement in sex work, which she wrote about in her second memoir, ‘Gather Together in My Name’ (1985). She tells the interviewer that young people need to know that adolescence and youth are tough and that people make mistakes, including their own parents. As a modern viewer, you wince at the directness, the quick changing and often gendered line of questioning (at one point, Angelou tells the interviewer to wait while she develops her thought; similarly Sitwell refuses to answer a question on whether she ever came close to marriage). But these interviews are extraordinarily revealing, filmed Mastermind-style with an unwavering close-up of the subject on a chair. The male interviewer is largely unseen, only an occasional back-of-head shot in shadow. As each question lands, the camera picks up the interviewee thinking and responding: small movements in the eyes, brow and mouth, and each intake of breath.
The interview with Martin Luther King (1929-1968) is particularly compelling. We might feel we know something of him from the 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech or from reading his sermons or books. But it is different to see King speaking in this quiet studio in 1961. He is calm, deliberate, reflective. Similar to the Sitwell and Angelou interviews, the line of questioning and language used is jarring to contemporary ears. For example, the interviewer is keen to move on from King’s memories of social exclusion as a child and ask, “but was anyone actually cruel or violent to you”, and later, “but nobody ever beat you personally?” It is not clear whether the questions are meant to elicit a defining moment to explain King’s commitment to civil rights, or to minimize his experience.
Later, the interviewer asks what more is needed, given the advance of rights for African-Americans in the United States in recent years. “We have moved on a great deal but we still face token integration,” replies King, before telling the interviewer that African-Americans continue to endure economic insecurity, inconsistent criminal justice and police brutality (for more on the context in 1961, see: The Modern Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration | JFK Library) and listen to era defining songs from the 1930s-1960s such as (Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone and Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit). The interviewer presses King on whether he has any misgivings about his role – aged only 32 – as leader of the civil rights movement in the United States, and whether he can hold people together under the banner of non-violence? King replies to all these questions with disarming honesty and composure: yes, he acknowledges, it is a heavy responsibility but he is sustained by the belief that the cause is just.
The question of pursuing violent or non-violent approaches to social change are explored also in a 1968 discussion, chaired by Joan Bakewell, between Lady Asquith (Violet Bonham Carter, 1887-1969, Liberal politician and BBC Governor) and Lady Stocks (Mary Danvers Stocks, 1891-1975, academic economist and women’s campaigner). The two guests debate whether it was the constitutional or the militant suffragettes which delivered the vote for women in Britain, and indeed, whether militancy delayed the cause. Both speakers appear to agree that the advent of the First World War was pivotal in moving women into the labour force and into public life, and in turn strengthening the demand for women’s suffrage. Stocks and Asquith discuss the exploits of Emmeline Pankhurst and Constance Lytton not as historians but as acquaintances: Asquith was daughter of the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith 1908-1916, who initially opposed votes for women, and Stocks joined Millicent Fawcett’s moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).
Other footage from the 1960s reflects a similar interest in social issues. In the 1967 episode of The Man Alive Report, Michael Dean hosts a discussion about ‘homosexuality’, following the airing of two episodes on BBC2 looking at the lives of lesbians and of gay men. Four guests are invited to discuss the issues and the programme coincides with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, decriminalizing sexual relations between men aged 21 and over. A GP, writer Maureen Duffy, social psychologist Michael Schofield and Conservative MP Ray Mawby discuss the ‘causes’ and ‘risks’ of being lesbian or gay. There is a particular preoccupation with the risk of being sexual blackmailed and it is worth afterwards reading the contributors’ biographies for context.
All of these interviews touch on social issues which intersect with the criminal justice system: restriction of rights due to gendered or racialised identities; moral concern about art, about intimate practices or sexual labour; methods of protest and resistance. But why should we be interested in watching these voices from the past?
The sociologist Max Weber introduced the term verstehen, which means a deep and empathic understanding of another person’s situation. We might think of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (by Harper Lee, 1960) telling his daughter Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.” Verstehen is central to ‘ethnographic’ methods, a form of researching the social world by immersing oneself in the context of interest using, for example, observation, reading relevant texts, and unstructured interviewing. In visual criminology, Keith Hayward advocates the use of audiovisual verstehen (i.e. film and documentary-making) to:
[Intensify] traditional ethnographic attempts by employing digital technologies to capture people’s experience sensorily (not just written down) in order to fill in some of the gaps that have traditionally been absent from criminological knowledge (Hayward, 2018, p.144).
As a resource, the BBC archive has two features which arguably enhance their verstehen value. First, interviews are filmed in close-up observational mode (drawing on Nichols, 2017), devoid of artistic sets and embellishments, which combine to suggest intimacy and perceived truthfulness for the audience. Second, these are films of individuals directly connected with what we now consider ‘historical’ events, including individuals born at the end of the 19th century. The films generally have good visual and sound quality, which has the effect of closing the temporal gap between the subject and the viewer, and concentrating our attention on what they are saying. This is a new (in the scheme of human history) and evolving resource for social research: it means that contemporary footage will be available in 2500 in a way that it is not possible, today, to understand audiovisually life in 1500.
When we watch these interviews, we cannot help but notice the attitudes and tone embedded in how interviewers choose and ask their questions, and we may find some of the language problematic. That is important to recognise and reflect on. What is of central interest however is hearing interviewees describe their experience and understanding of the world in ways which are both historically situated but also surprisingly contemporary and resonant. They point to the perennialism of social concerns. In terms of inequality and injustice, they remind us how far society has come, but how much remains to be done.
*For readers without access to BBC iPlayer, try typing e.g. ‘Face to Face Martin Luther King’ in YouTube to find freely available versions of the interviews.
© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2023.
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