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LOOK, STRANGER - "THE ROSE AND THISTLE SHOW" 1971 - 1972, BBC2 reviewed by Robin Carmody |
August
2001
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So the '60s burnt out and Harold Wilson's dreams of a new world collapsed in a haze of cynicism and self-examination, and some on the cultural left retreated to the geographical fringe areas, those places still seemingly immune from change and the tumult of the era. Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Richard Thompson, all mined this vein of ruralist cynicism, this intriguing balance of love of and disconnection from Britain's landscape and traditions. Coming up on the rails was David Bean, whose involvement turned this film (and another in the same series from 1971, "No Place Like Home") into an incredibly evocative time capsule of Britain's self-doubts over its identity and future 30 years ago. The film - only 20 minutes in length - opens with footage of the Cheviot Hills, on the border between England and Scotland, with Bean's lugubrious voice commenting that this disputed land was a kind of British Vietnam, except that here tribe fought against tribe not for ideology, but for important things like sheep and cattle. Before long, we explode into the agricultural show which gives the film its title, named after the national symbols of England and Scotland. What instantly hits home is the dowdiness of dress of those milling around, and the sense that this is a parallel universe to all that was fashionable and contemporary in 1971: the only real sense of the time comes from a few teenage girls who have the same dress sense and hairstyles common in the Top of the Pops audience of the era. The faded colour gives the film a strange, otherworldly paleness which also evokes exactly the right mood. Bobby Dixon, a local farmer and secretary of the show, and his wife Maisie are the only people to speak to camera in the film. Their simplicity is instantly endearing especially from a 2001 perspective of Foot and Mouth and the poor reputation that farmers have developed over BSE and the supposed paranoia over Blair. It's impossibly piquant - reminiscent of a distant time when farmers were still seen as "the backbone of Britain". Dixon's son, Richard, looks, appropriately, rather like Nick Drake, and the broadness of Dixon's accent is hard to imagine among younger men today. The various competitions - cakes, paintings, dressed walking sticks and shepherd's crooks - are described with a sardonic detachment unthinkable in such a film only two or three years earlier, when bold, authoritative tones were still de rigeur. It's hard to work out whether Bean means it as a compliment when he says that this remote part of Border country still holds "the capacity for enjoyment of simple things that seemed quietly to have slipped down civilisation's plug hole in other places": is he praising its resilience and identity or warning of the inevitable revolution still to seep through into these parts? The greatest sense of the isolation of this community from the global revolt and cultural shifts of the era comes when Bean comments, on the inaugural Alwinton beauty-cum-personality contest, that "you've no Women's Libbers [a classically early '70s phrase] in miles to disrupt it all by suggesting that it's an affront to female dignity to be judged by a retired police chief, a television personality, a local landowner and the wife of the master of foxhounds". Maisie Dixon summarises things by talking of the "enjoyment" and "satisfaction" the show provides before the credits roll as the people dissipate, and Alwinton prepares to return to its long year's quiet. From 30 years' perspective, we know that this isolation, this inoculation, this way of existence, has not survived the 20th century, and nor perhaps could it. Bean seems to have sensed this back then, but his cynicism is tempered with a certain affection, however evasive his tone may be. As with Martin Parr in his recent collections of photos and postcards, it's impossible to work out exactly what Bean thought, and this is the key to the beautiful uncertainty and ambiguity of "The Rose and Thistle Show", which deserves a place in the pantheon of British documentary film along with the works of the GPO Film Unit in the '30s, the Crown Film Unit in the '40s, and British Transport Films in the '50s and '60s. |
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