Time Shift: A Brief Interlude (2003)

I'm not a gambling man but I would still bet that if Mitchell Hadley (at itsabouttv.com) is kind enough to mention this post in his weekly round up of TV blogging he'll say this post is eccentric or else comment on what the interludes say about how British television was run in the 1950s. All TV fans have clear ideas of how the medium should be run, after all.

In my last post I commented that I had a few things to say about 1950s TV (although this will probably be it until Christmas), although I'm delighted to see that the subject of this post goes back as far as the 1940s. I was also very mindful that I was writing about truly legendary television, so was probably uncharacteristically deferential, however the subject of this post is a very brief documentary about possibly the best known British television in history. I refer, of course, to what we all think of as The Potter's Wheel, that is the Interlude films. If you don't know what I mean, have a look at a bit of this Interlude from the BBC archive:

That's it. That's all there is to it, it's just someone potting set to music. Isn't it magnificent?

Time Shift sets the scene very well for these films that we all know about, but a dwindling number of people remember. The show gathers academics and the intelligentsia together to give the best background to these films I have seen. Amid pictures of TV presenters in evening dress, they describe how TV was considered the poor relation and not really very respectable. They delineate a fear that it would intrude into people's homes and corrupt them, so efforts had to be made to make TV as high culture as possible.

In the past I've blogged about the difficulty TV had delineating itself from cinema and theatre. That is very apparent in this brief documentary, where it describes how the drama in the evening would have an actual interval for the actors to have a rest, just as you would in the theatre, and so Interlude films were made to cover that. I can picture everyone at home waiting for the play to pause to rush to the sideboard and fight over the gin and tonic, also like you do at the theatre.

It turns out there was also something known as 'the toddler's truce'. At the end of children's broadcasting, the BBC just didn't broadcast actual programmes for an hour to give parents' time to drag their kids away from the TV and put them to bed, and then the grown ups' programmes would start. Interlude films were also made to fill this gap.

In the pursuit of respectability the subject matters were quite carefully chosen to reflect the Britain that people had been fighting for in the war, reflect patriotism, and reflec t middle class values. So we had a kitten playing with wool, a ploughman ploughing a field, a woman spinning at a wheel, and so on. The connection is made that the choice is very much out of the school of William Morris: it's a crafty, worthy reflection of an unending past. That said, some of them were made to reflect the broadcast; for example the Interlude in the interval of 1984 showed Big Brother looking out at the viewers.

This is a fascinating very short documentary which has introduced me to new aspects of a fascinating part of TV 70 years ago, and I have no criticisms.

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