Category: film

The 2nd episode of The Newcomers is again well worth a watch for a number of reasons. One of the main of which for me is the ability to see the streets I wander round today as they looked 50 years ago. The sequence that starts at 1:20 passes at 1:33 the house where I live. If you pause there a small boy is just going past the house at that point. The milkman is about to deliver. As the car drives along the road there are a total of 5 cars parked outside houses. Any time of the day now that you drove down there now there would be over a hundred. For a couple of minutes the camera takes us past the streets that I walk sometimes of an evening. Here’s a still which shows one viewpoint where I often pause to look over to Dundry hill and ponder on the distance and the weather fronts that usually come up that way. Once I took tripod and camera and filmed at night for quite a long time. I believe a moon was involved. Sadly I’ve never found and looked at that footage. This is one of the sightings of the building that I currently work in. In fact I spend a frustratingly large number of hours there at the present.

And here’s a distant glance of another house I once lived at which is in the film at 7:39. That was between the years 1999 to 2001. You hope all your years are good some better than others you might hope I think those were good years in retrospect.

The other sequence that grabs me most in this episode starts at 34:25 and is a panoramic sweep taken from the topmost point of The Paragon which pans right to left from Clifton Suspension Bridge to Clifton Wood again passing the place I work which is pictured below. Now I come to think of it, it does certainly look like a prison. Well originally it was a prison for dried tobacco leaves I suppose, but let’s face it they weren’t sentient enough to know that it was prison, life had already lost its savour. I can get to that though. You know there are different types of reality and sometimes the paler, blander ones are fundamentally better.

The final quarter of the episode features heavily the building I worked in before the current one and there’s a still of that below. Actually they’re both pretty decent places to work in. They’re both historical buildings which counts for something to me. You get that element of history that doesn’t come with a modern building unless it’s a top design modern building.

And finally here’s the episode itself – it’s nearly 50 minutes long.

About 15 years ago somebody my next door neighbour I think lent me a VHS tape which contained the 3 episodes of a documentary set in Bristol in the early 60s. It was directed by John Boorman who was working for the BBC at the time. Having 2 VHS machines I took a copy for myself then nearly a decade later I transferred it to DVD and decided to put it up on youtube in a series of episodes each about 10 minutes long. It took me a number of years to get the whole thing done. There was a particularly long gap about half way through when I thought that hardly anybody seemed interested and it was too much trouble to sort it out but I persevered and eventually many people thanked me for doing it and I even corresponded a bit with one of the grandchildren of the 2 main protagonists of the documentary. So when I decided to drop out of youtube I was a bit sorry that it would be no longer available for those who were glad of the opportunity to view it.

I’ve no idea if anyone has reinstated it on any social network video sharing platform but it seemed a good idea for me to host it on my own website. Nowadays it’s more practical to place films of some length on the web so I’m going to post it in the 3 original episodes. Here is episode 1 and I think it is possibly the best of the 3.

Please note that because it’s about 49 minutes long it may take a little while to load.