BBC Radio & Television - Sounds of 1963 - Jack de Manio, Raymond Baxter, John Arlott ...

Here's an hypnotic soundscape from the early 1960s courtesy of BBC TV and radio.
This series of snippets from BBC television and radio programmes will transport you back in time to 1963 - a time of innocence and carefree abandon for so many of us.
Programmes such as Today with Jack de Manio on the Home Service, Housewives' Choice and Music While You Work on the Light Programme and John Arlott and Raymond Baxter (of Tomorrow's World and The Farnborough Air Show fame) commentating on Grandstand.
We think of the 1960s as the age of cultural revolution, but the early sixties marked a time before the BBC was managed by metro-lefties and militant liberals, when the news didn't have an agenda other than to present information (see below for an exception), when broadcasters were giants in their field, when Woman's Hour was still the preserve of home-making and holidays (rather than the go-to programme for 50 shades of weird stuff) and before television was an appalling expletive zone.
True, there were those cheeky youngsters on That Was The Week That Was, but in general the presenters were polite and had clarity of diction and, even if the the music output was disappointingly staid, at least the programming was family-friendly.
Back in 1963 even those well-spoken grammar school boys such as Tony Blackburn and Simon Dee had not yet been heard on pirate radio.
How things were all about to change!
One important caveat to the above: You will notice that the BBC weather forecaster uses Centigrade ahead of Fahrenheit. This was some 30 years before I heard any member of the British public use Celsius in everyday conversation. This was no accident. The BBC was so in favour of the UK's joining the Common Market in the early sixties that they jumped the gun, embraced all things continental and adopted a pro-EEC editorial position. Jack de Manio was appalled, and often swam against the BBC's editorial tide by offering listeners a counter narrative to that of the BBC's gleeful naivety about the EEC. He was mysteriously dropped as a Today presenter in 1971. Labour's Roy Hattersley later recounted his horror on attending a meeting at which similar action was taken against other broadcasters who were EEC sceptics.
The audio clips on this video are taken from the wonderful British Transport Films title 'All That Mighty Heart' - hence some of the unusual background sounds. It's a beautiful optimistic film of Britain in the early 1960s and is well worth a watch.

[@Buttlands]

Better accents back then.

[@LostsTVandRadio]

Indeed!