The Village

 "I say people will insist on things being different."

 After Sunday's post I can't stop thinking about Thatcher, so here's some socialism: My parents recommended "They Came To A City", or at least told me they'd enjoyed it. As far as I could tell, the film's an unapologetically utopian thought experiment from pipe-smoker J. B. Priestley, just before Orwell put him on a list, and a lot of it has come true, according to my parents. There's another slice of the film on youtube, but then that's it. What my algorithms then threw up instead was not a third clip, but perhaps the most concentrated dose of Seventies British Programming I've encountered outside of pastiche...

 It's called "No Two The Same". I don't know why. It's from 1970, and features a nervous writer called Ian Nairn saying nice things about a couple of housing estates in Pimlico. Here's Ian with his back to us, interviewing a doctor:

  Initially, I wasn't sure why they were both leaning on a car, but then I noticed Ian having a bit of a sit for pieces to camera other presenters might have remained standing for. There didn't need to be a chair nearby. A wall or a bollard would do.

 I looked Nairn up. He died thirteen years after this was shot. I realise that's morbid, but it's a hard question to ignore while you watch him in action. He's really not comfortable standing.

 But he's talking about hope. Not towering hope like Priestley's, just something on the "oh that'll be nice" scale, and it's a tone I'm unfamiliar with. It's not an unemotional watch. Here's more. 

 Here are lives having attention paid to them, not just by Ian and his film crew, but by the makers of the places they inhabit. 

 It's common to dismiss architects like Le Corbusier for asserting that "a house is a machine for living in", but I'd rather that than the uninhabited gated off from the uninhabitable.

Ian talks of it as a village, but he also seems to enjoy the anonymity these new places afford. It's odd to think hope also looked like this.

 "Nice day for it," he says as he's greeted at the door. I think it's the first time I've heard it said for real, outside of a sketch.

 But all this is real.

  Which isn't to say it's not funny.

  But it's not just funny.

 Here's the full piece:

  P.S. Bonus notice: It opens EXACTLY like an old Dangermouse, to the point where I wonder if it was an influence.