In our series on individual episodes of British television, FINLAY McLAREN gets nostalgic over highland crofters, pub pianists and the morning commute.
The first recorded case of nostalgia in British medical literature comes from 1787, when an army surgeon named Dr Robert Hamilton found himself faced with a young Welsh recruit who appeared to be dying of homesickness.
This boy, fresh from the valleys and green as spring grass, came to Hamilton complaining of a ‘universal weakness’. A phrase which, in eighteenth-century medical terms, could mean anything from a mild cold to imminent death.
And so into hospital the lad went, where he spent three months lying in bed, slowly being absorbed by the sheets. Eventually, Hamilton made him a promise. If the boy showed the slighte…
In our series on individual episodes of British television, FINLAY McLAREN gets nostalgic over highland crofters, pub pianists and the morning commute.
The first recorded case of nostalgia in British medical literature comes from 1787, when an army surgeon named Dr Robert Hamilton found himself faced with a young Welsh recruit who appeared to be dying of homesickness.
This boy, fresh from the valleys and green as spring grass, came to Hamilton complaining of a ‘universal weakness’. A phrase which, in eighteenth-century medical terms, could mean anything from a mild cold to imminent death.
And so into hospital the lad went, where he spent three months lying in bed, slowly being absorbed by the sheets. Eventually, Hamilton made him a promise. If the boy showed the slightest hint of improvement, he could go home. Six whole weeks back in the Welsh hills, among the sheep, the drizzle and whatever else passes for beauty in that part of the world.
Reader, it was a miracle. Muscles spasmed back into life, colour flooded into his cheeks and within days the boy was leaping around the ward with the sort of sudden vitality usually associated with Evangelical revival meetings. By the end of the week he was already halfway to Wales, marching with such purpose that even his own shadow must have struggled to keep up.
Of course, these days Hamilton could have solved the whole thing in under a minute. He’d simply Google ‘the Welsh valleys’, show the lad a photo of some misty hillside, then send him back to the battlefield with a comforting nod.
And that’s the thing about nostalgia now: the past doesn’t go away anymore. Instead, it sits patiently in our pockets, waiting to be tapped open. Old songs, old pictures and old videos. All available in seconds. There’s never been a better time to be nostalgic. Which is ironic really.
Nowhere is the digital revolution’s impact on nostalgia more apparent than in the BBC Archive.
For the uninitiated — and let’s face it, this is the Lion & Unicorn, there won’t be many of you — BBC Archive is a YouTube channel (with sibling accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) that uploads clips from the organisation’s back catalogue of factual programming. From skateboarding ducks to East End fishwives, from Fyfe Robertson to Fred Dibnah, the archive has it all.
Part of the channel’s appeal is the nostalgia it conjures up. It pulls us back toward pre-digital Britain, a country that existed only five minutes ago and yet already feels as distant as Camelot. That world of clattering typewriters, steam-fogged phone boxes and milk floats bubbling down the street lives on, preserved by BBC Archive.
I want to look at three clips that capture this pre-digital world at its best, and — hopefully — to explain why, for so many of us, the channel’s daily uploads have become a vital refuge from the white noise of modern life.
Our bibulous starter comes courtesy of Nationwide and concerns a twenty-two-mile cross-country hike, a Highland crofter and an industrial quantity of whisky.
**Big Jim’s Big Boozy Bike Trip to Braemar **(Nationwide, 20 Jan 1976)
In the foothills of the Cairngorms, in a wee tin-roofed bothy that exists in permanent negotiation with the weather, lives Big Jim Collie. His is a bucolic existence: remote, rustic and blissfully unbothered. With sheep to herd, a melodeon to coax into tune and a steady relationship with the bottle.
Despite all the excitement of Highland life, the highlights of Big Jim’s social calendar are his pilgrimages to the nearby village of Braemar, some sixty miles away by road. Fortunately, Jim knows a shortcut: the Lairig Ghru — the highest pass through the highest mountain range in Scotland — which threads its way across the Cairngorms. Comprising quiet tracks, babbling burns and sweeping vistas, the Lairig Ghru cuts the journey to a mere twenty-two miles. Though perhaps ‘mere’ is a word only a Scotsman or a masochist would use here.
And so, Big Jim mounts his trusty steed, a rust-flecked bike he bought for six shillings in 1945, and sets off for Braemar and, more crucially, for the company of the widow Annie MacDougall.
But the Lairig Ghru is not for the faint-hearted. Boulder fields, icy streams and avalanches all conspire to test both man and bicycle. You’ve got to admire Big Jim’s spirit — and not just the liquid kind, though he has hidden bottles of whisky along the path like wee, glass Robert the Bruces after the Battle of Methven. (Other, less Scottish, analogies are available)
Eventually, after six hours, twenty-two miles, a hantle of whiskies and a smattering of pints at the Mar Lodge, Jim Collie — the big crofter who could — arrives at Annie MacDougall’s front door. Annie isn’t home. And so, Big Jim turns around and marches off into the Highland night to begin the long journey back to his croft.
Big Jim — real name James Alexander Collie — died in 1997 at the age of eighty-two. His gravestone describes him as ‘a man of the hills’, and that he was. Watching him pedal, march, drink and grin his way across the Cairngorms, you see a romantic figure stitched into the landscape as firmly as the heather itself. I like to imagine that, even now, American backpackers and unsuspecting Duke of Edinburgh groups still stumble across the odd bottle from Jim’s secret stash.
Here’s to you, Big Jim. Slàinte mhath.
**Meet one of the UK’s best pub pianists **(Look North, 15 Sept 1981)
Pub pianists are a dying breed. Those half-jukebox, half-auntie figures, who once soundtracked the British night out — and were every bit as essential as a packet of Embassy Regal and a liberal splash of Brut 66 — have slipped clean off the cultural map. Gone the way of dimpled pint glasses and the right to smoke absolutely everywhere.
The digital age, with its omnipresent sound systems and omniscient mobile phones, has done them in. A kinder country would have designated pub pianists a protected species, with grants and tax breaks handed to any hostelry willing to keep one alive in the wild. But we are not that country.
We are, however, the country where someone had the foresight to send a BBC camera into the back room of the Engine Inn to meet Peggy Fullerton, the Mrs Mills of Newcastle, after she was nominated for Pub Pianist of the Year.
Around Peggy a loyal phalanx of ladies-of-a-certain-age has gathered. Handbags clutched and perms immovable. They all, clearly, adore her. ‘It’s my night out,’ one tells reporter Ian Proniewicz. ‘Coming out for a singsong.’
Peggy sits at her upright piano — complete with cigarette burns on the top keys — and tells us that a round of applause from her regulars means ‘more to me than all the money in the world.’ And you believe her. You believe her absolutely. You also can’t help wondering why on earth we ever allowed people like her, and the culture that sustained them, to disappear.
Well, not quite disappear. You see, earlier this year, a man called Dan Gray was idly scrolling through Instagram reels (who among us, etc), when he stumbled upon something he’d been searching for, off and on, for more than three decades: a clip of his gran — Peggy Fullerton.
For years after Peggy died, her family had been hunting for the Look North report, convinced it must exist somewhere in the BBC’s archive. And then, one Tuesday morning, there she was.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Peggy’s other grandson Matty revealed that his gran had always been happiest on a piano stool, first entertaining the troops with ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association), later running a dance band, and then, in the Eighties, being ambushed by her grandkids humming requests from Top of the Pops. She could play anything, he says, as long as you poured her a whisky and water first.
**Meet the Commuters **(Nationwide, 4 Oct 1976)
Our final excursion into the archive ushers us onto the rail network of 1976, just in time for the morning commute.
We begin at Waterloo, where presenter Bernard Falk interviews announcer Margaret Knight over the tannoy in what could easily pass as a lost scene from a Tara King-era Avengers episode. Next, we meet Michael Gilbert, a commuting solicitor who writes paperback detective novels on his way to work. ‘Some people like complete silence,’ he says. ‘I like a bit of hustle and bustle.’ And finally there’s a four-man bridge table, who play hands daily.
But the undisputed star of this commuting circus is Spud, station master of East Farleigh. Viewed from the modern world of electric turnstiles, ticket vending machines and pre-recorded tannoy announcements, Spud is a revelation. He knows every commuter by name. He keeps spare ties and shoe polish for travellers who’ve flung themselves out the door in a panic. He rings the no-shows to make sure they’re awake and, on icy mornings, he hands out hot coffee.
Spud is so caring and dutiful that if a commuter had mislaid even a glove, he’d have launched an informal inquiry and cracked the case by teatime.
The moment that truly snaps the twenty-first-century viewer in half comes courtesy of Falk’s narration. Describing ‘these people who jostle every day for the privilege of spending an hour in an overcrowded railway carriage,’ we cut to footage of a busy morning train. Reader … everyone was sitting down. In seats. Actual seats. I don’t mind admitting I gasped.
It’s impossible not to wonder what each of these characters would look like now, reimagined in the stark fluorescence of the digital age.
Big Jim wouldn’t stop for whiskies cached under rocks anymore, instead he’d pause to film content for his god-awful trad-lifestyle TikTok account. Peggy Fullerton would have given way to a Bluetooth speaker dribbling out breathy acoustic covers of chart hits. While Spud — glorious, tie-offering, coffee-dispensing Spud — would have been replaced by a fully automated station, that doesn’t know your name, and doesn’t care to learn it.
Of course, we shouldn’t sneer too much at this space-age push-button world. Digitalisation has given us so much: same-day delivery, on-demand entertainment and the sum total of all human knowledge in our back pockets. That’s not bad. And of course, it’s the digital revolution that lets us see these clips at all — that immortalises Big Jim, allows Peggy’s family to see her again, and keeps Spud’s smile alive.
That’s the funny paradox at the heart of BBC Archive’s appeal: we are nostalgic for the pre-digital world, yet only the digital world can give it back to us.
Now, some insist that nostalgia itself is the problem with the modern world. A dangerous impulse, a moral failing, the first symptom of the dreaded right-wing-itis. That’s nonsense. Nostalgia is one of the most natural human instincts we have. From Swiss mercenaries to YouTube commenters, everyone longs for the past. If you’ve never missed a moment you can never return to, you simply haven’t lived.
The reason why so many people watch these clips and feel like that Welsh soldier pining to go back home is because, between then and now, something has been lost. Not just the fuzzy warmth of analogue, but the human stories and interactions that were once baked into daily life. Modernity has made us quicker, more efficient and more connected; it has also made us less romantic, less tangible and less involved. And the more impersonal our world becomes, the more precious these glimpses of its former warmth feel.
If you feel like me, then go and watch BBC Archive. Lose an hour, lose an evening or just lose yourself in all that clattering, convivial, pre-digital humanity. It may be a lost world but, thanks to the miracle in our pockets, it’s never been closer.
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