Yesterday's Witness
Specials
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Honeymoon in the Sky
In my aeroplane for two, I will sail away with you. Don't waste any more time below Let's get married and up we'll go. In my aeroplane for two, for miles and miles we'll fly. Oh what a sensation, a honeymoon in the sky. This was being sung in 1904 within months of the news that the first flying machine had actually managed to fly. Tonight's programme starts when the British pioneers were, literally, getting off the ground - ' The only way to learn to fly was to go and teach yourself. You did straight runs, getting faster all the time. And then you looked over the side and found the ground was gone! ... ' Then through to the time in the early 20s when young ex-Royal Flying Corps pilots flew for the world's first international airlines in ramshackle converted bombers.
A Night at the Pictures
Narrated by Benny Green who takes an affectionate look at the first 40 years of English cinema. Pioneer film director George Pearson remembers the golden silence of the first British feature films. Alfred Hitchcock tells how he broke that silence with Blackmail, Britain's first all-talking picture. Alexander Korda recalls how he put British films on the international silver screen with The Private Life of Henry VIII. And with a visit to one of London's handful of unspoilt 30s cinemas - organ and all - we, too, can enjoy 'a night at the pictures' as it used to be.
Stand Up and Be Counted
During the Great Strike a group of coal miners, protesting against their appalling conditions, derail the Flying Scotsman ... in the Great War a group of British conscientious objectors, protesting against conscription, are taken to France and sentenced to death ... in the 30s some farmers in East Anglia stage an elaborate campaign against the payment of tithes; some Welsh patriots take direct action against the building of a bombing training school and a protest in London's East End stops a fascist march by sheer force of numbers. -The British people,' says JAMES CAMERON , have always been given to complaining about authority; often with plenty of reason. When complaining has failed, some have taken direct action; they have stood up and been counted.'
British India - Voices from an Imperial Past
In the twilight years of the Empire between the two great world wars India was still, as it always had been, the brightest jewel in Britain's Imperial diadem. And then in 1947 came sudden independence. The Raj was divided into two quite new, separate states - India and Pakistan - and the British said a final farewell to the subcontinent that they had ruled for some 300 years. But there are still men and women who can remember their lives and service in India before 1947, and 12 of them-soldiers, civil servants, public officials and their wives - now recall the Indian Empire as they personally experienced it in the first half of the 20th-century.
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