'Raymond Williams - A Journey of Hope' (1990 Documentary)

A documentary about the life and work of Raymond Williams by Bloom Street Productions for Channel Four, broadcast in January 1990. Directed by Karl Francis, it features Raymond's wife Joy and his daughter Merryn alongside Gwyn Alf Williams, Dai Smith, Terry Eagleton, Margot Heinemann, Anthony Barnett, Kim Howells, Bob Rowthorn, Iain Wright, and John Casey. Based on an idea by John Osmond, there are readings and dramatisations of Williams's novels 'Border Country' (1960), 'Second Generation', and 'The Fight for Manod' (1979), as well as his BBC TV play 'A Letter from the Country' (1966). Starring Juliet Stevenson, Roy Marsden, Robert Blythe, Barry McCarthy, Philip McGough, and Ronan Vibert.
Taken from the Williams family archive and on loan to the Raymond Williams Society from Merryn Williams. Digitised and uploaded by Phil O'Brien, society secretary.

[@whosiskid]

Williams - and Terry Eagleton, who was interviewed here - played a signficant role in my own intellectual development. I found myself loving Marx, but detesting Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and even Trotsky. In the late Seventies and Eighties there was still so much Soviet baggage attaching itself to Marx in the US, where it was assumed that it was almost impossible to be a Marxist without more or less approving of the USSR and Mao. But Williams and so-called Western Marxists like Ernst Bloch helped me to distinguish between what was living in Marx, while feeling free to reject the entire Soviet experiment, which I never felt had much of anything to do with Marx. Then later, as someone who maintained a passionate Christian commitment while also finding so much in Marx to agree with, Terry Eagleton, who combines Marxism with Catholic faith (and also Charles Taylor, who seems to have moved away somewhat from Marx while remaining on the Left and continuing a Catholic commitment [I think - I'm not 100% certain about Taylor's religious beliefs]) gave me more courage to come out as both a Marxist and a Christian (actually, a Baptist, which puts me in a very small group indeed). I do think it is easier today to be a Marxist where his ideas are not longer tied up with the Soviet Union, and after we've seen a loss of faith in the long term viability of Capitalism in the wake of 2008 and 2020 to the present. In a way, people like Williams (except when he writes about television - I think many of the top shows of today, combined with time shifted viewing, instead of the programmatic viewing he critiqued), Christopher Hill, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and their ilk are more exciting to read today, when history has confirmed the validity of their ideas more and more as time goes by, than they were in their own day. I doubt that there are any Communists left today, but more and more Marxists or Socialists every year.

[@RYBATUGA]

28:36 - Popular Culture!

[@RYBATUGA]

38:33 - Demolish the pastoral myths! Labour skills are the roots of culture!

[@RYBATUGA]

11:40 - Antediluvian Left!

[@whosiskid]

I know! A precious idea. And why not. A lot of right wingers self-identify as Paleo-Conservatives, why not antediluvian leftists?

[@RYBATUGA]

9:12