If you’ll excuse the poor quality of this screencast, I just found it on my external hard drive, from March 2010:
I appear for about 6 seconds in 2 different places!
Keep Calm and Carry On for the BBC (March 2010)
BBC2: How We Won the War
There’s a series currently in planning for BBC2, to be presented by Jules Hudson, for Autumn 2012, a travelogue across the UK uncovering civilian stories of the Second World War.
Having come across ‘The Art of War‘ at the National Archives (which they hadn’t realised was written by me), and then I guess coming across my website, I have just been in talks with them about being an expert for an episode on government propaganda (before they talk about black propaganda). I am anticipating talking about:
- The MOI and its production/planning of posters. What purpose they thought it would achieve.
- The artists who produced these posters, professionals, but civilians, encouraging people to partake in war.
- Digging around in my research for reference to competitions held in factories/schools re posts.
- Why were particular ‘famous faces’ chosen for some posters in The People’s War
- Stats which demonstrate any effectiveness of posters, or why this can’t be established!
Look out for more info…
TweetSee @RealScottMaslen, in #scd training, wearing #KCCO
Suspect that will lead to another burst of interest in the poster!!
The Culture Show
Here are “my” posters again… well, I have written the most about them
I’m still watching the programme, and it seems to be mostly about “Art” with a capital A, which many posters are not considered as, but the initial summary shows Presenter Alastair Sooke talking to the Art Dept @ the Imperial War Museum about the Keep Calm and Carry On Posters.
See just before 25 minutes in … straight in with Keep Calm and Carry On… but no mention of the fact that Keep Calm and Carry On was never used, and the great quote I believe I used in my thesis, Times describing ‘Freedom is in Peril’ as ‘patronising & insipid’. YES – the posters are more iconic than much art, because they faced everyone (and his name is Abram Games, not Abraham Games
!)…
Poster Spotting on Dr Who
17th April 2010: “The Doctor is summoned to Blitz-torn London by Winston Churchill, and the Daleks are waiting for him!” Visit the BBC site.
Interestingly, I didn’t recognise any of the posters, but the above is MOST DEFINITELY not a real wartime poster (here’s one of the real ones), interesting decision by the BBC not to use real posters!
http://imdoctorwho.blogspot.com/2010/04/dalek-victory-poster.html
http://lifetheuniverseandcombom.blogspot.com/2010/04/doctor-who-daleks-wwii-keep-calm.html
TweetBBC: Inside Out: Tonight
I will probably be one of the last to see it, as I will have to wait for iPlayer, but you can watch on Sky if you have it! Filming was undertaken at the Imperial War Museum about a month ago… it was quite a rush to get there in time, but a novel and enjoyable experience being interviewed by Linda Barker (Changing Rooms fame)
Once Linda had finished interviewing Richard Slocombe (who I must contact!), Curator at the Imperial War Museum, we disappeared into the new “Ministry of Food” exhibition, which would open two days later. We found a set of posters which the Museum had indicated would not cause copyright issues, and took around an hour to pull some footage together. The entire segment is expected to be 9 minutes, so I look forward to my 30 seconds of fame… no I don’t know which bits they’ve used either!
TweetThe Ministry of Food (The Imperial War Museum)
A great video from the Imperial War Museum, for the newly launched exhibition “Ministry of Food“. “During the Second World War, getting the most from your little plot of land was crucial. This film, produced by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1941, explains how to prepare an area of ground for growing your veg, and shows why not having space is simply no excuse.”
The Imperial War Museum can be found on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, so plenty of ways to follow the exhibits.
There’s a great bit of coverage in Culture 24, and I hadn’t realised until we came to the end of filming last Wednesday (for BBC Inside Out North East, interviewed by Linda Barker, don’t know when it’s going to be aired yet), that the exhibition hadn’t yet opened. The Museum has put on a display a number of it’s great Home Front posters, and a number of displays which attempt to “give a sense” of what life was like on the Home Front in the Second World War.
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