The Newcomers
classified 15Before John Boorman went to Hollywood to make the neo-noir cult classic Point Blank, he worked for BBC Bristol making documentaries and docudramas. This little-known period of his life and work is ripe for rediscovery.
In 1964, Boorman helped launch the new BBC2 with a six-part series about Bristol. The Newcomers presents a unique view of the city in the early 1960s – a time of great social, cultural, political and economic change. This series now stands as a kind of filmic time capsule of the city, offering a window into its cultural and intellectual scene.
It is centred around the lives of Alison Kennedy, who came to Bristol as a student, and Anthony Smith (who later took the pen name A.C.H. Smith), who came to work for the Bristol Post and then Western Daily Press. They met by chance, married, and Bristol became their home, with this documentary tracking the five and a half months leading up to the birth of their first child.
Many familiar faces from Bristol at the time feature, including playwright Tom Stoppard (then a journalist) and Patrick Dromgoole, who would later become the dynamic head of HTV in the golden age of regional TV drama and arts coverage. But the real star is the city of Bristol itself, including a run-down Clifton.
The series covers a lot of ground, touching on capital punishment, work and housing, docks labour, dodgy pubs and night life, the NHS and the welfare state, homelessness, an evangelical church in St Paul's, crime and policing, trying to make a living as an artist, and exploring what it means to live the good life in a city like Bristol at the time. There were certainly fewer cars and a lot more smoking! There's even a brief glimpse of Raghbir Singh – the first Sikh bus conductor to be employed by the Bristol Omnibus Company following the bus boycott in 1963.
With thanks to Andrew Kelly (former Director of Bristol Ideas) for his support on this screening.