Following recent posts about the cats with a bank account and the survivor of the Titanic disaster, I have been browsing further through the BBC archive. This 7-minute gem from 1973, from the Nationwide reporter Bernard Falk, would not have looked out of place in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is about the god-forsaken East Yorkshire seaside resort of Hornsea, and a controversy about a proposed nudist beach that had the locals spitting venom:
“It’s objectionable. All this sex and every wretched thing, more and more of it.”
“I’m telling you it will attract the wrong class of person ... The hooliganism ... Drinking and everything else. ... You’ll get all the scoundrels out of hell coming ... all the riff-raff out of Hull, Leeds and all over ... And they’ll be breaking in ... And crime.”
“What difference does it make covering their private parts up to their health? I ask you that much. Not the slightest.”
“I don’t think children should be watching people in the nude. This is a family resort. ... Why don’t they find themselves a little plot, fence it in, and cavort about to their hearts’ content?”
“I don’t think I’d like to meet a party of nudists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZWHVpB21ec
Good East Riding folk like these were in abundance where I grew up, less than forty miles from Hornsea. I sometimes went to a friend’s caravan there, and in the nineteen-thirties my great-grandfather’s cousin owned a newspaper shop in the town. They could be my distant relatives. However, as you may know, Yorkshire Pudding’s formative years were spent not a beach pebble’s throw from the place. Could that man in the Fedora be his dad?
"Down With This Sort of Thing!"
ReplyDeleteThey should have interviewed Father Ted, too.
DeleteAs I'm just emerging from your suggested series"Back in time for the week-end" - (and I watched the decade of the 50s and say hurray that I was happily too young to be used as a helping hand for the poor house-wives, really prisoners of the house, AND I had no brother), I can only raise my eyebrows on such silly notions as nudist beaches - tut, tut"
ReplyDeleteBut the ex-mayor in the film said that they were widely accepted in Germany.
DeleteWishful thinking? :-)
DeleteWhat amazes me, after growing up on the northeast coast, is how hardy you have to be to go to the beach without a warm coat and flask of hot tea. In July.
ReplyDeleteUnless you are as well-covered as Bernard Falk.
DeleteWhenever the word 'nudist' is mentioned, I can't help but thinking of Angela Merkel, Germany's former chancellor. I've seen a photo of hers , nude, with two other nude students, taken at the nudist beach in Costinesti, Romania.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that mental image. I greatly appreciate it.
DeleteOr, as they say: A problem shared is a problem halved.
DeleteDisgusted of Tunbridge Wells would have had something to say - D of TW always had an opinion .
ReplyDeleteThere seem to have been a lot of Disgusteds of Hornsea.
DeletePrecisely! I was an art school model. Love nudity. Might raise a smile or two and I am all for that. Interesting when I have posted today about trying to find something to smile about!! Think comments these days might be rather more risque!
ReplyDeleteMost of the people in the film would have been before WW1 without much exposure to the sophisticated ideas we now see all the time in the media. Small-town salt-of-the-earth.
DeleteEnglish weather? what was the ending please, did they get the nudist beach?
ReplyDeleteA bit of Googling suggests not, but there was one further up the coast nearer Bridlington which later had to close because of undesirables.
DeleteThat was hilarious, and VERY Monty Python. I can't imagine a place I'd less rather be naked. (Well, maybe Greenland.)
ReplyDeleteAll the local characters made for great interviews! I bet Bernard Falk was freezing. God knows how he managed to keep his teeth from chattering.
Well, he is rather 'well covered'. I thought it hilarious too, and so well done, the way he lets the characters speak off the leash. Most people of that age were unsophisticated then, having left school at 14 with little formal education. I looked Bernard up, and sadly he died of a heart attack aged only 47, in 1990.
DeleteI loved Hornsea as a boy. My first girlfriends were from Hornsea and amongst many other acts I saw Roxy Music and Tim Hardin there - in the Floral Hall. I grew up just six miles inland from Hornsea and I would never, ever describe it as "god-forsaken". Hornsea is very special in my memory.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed visiting there too; the friend's caravan was on the West Cliff site.
DeleteDid you swim nude in the sea? Did you hang your underpants on one of those horrible projections the man in the film mentions?
I think he was referring to groynes. I like a nice groyne. And yes, very early one summer's morning when I was eighteen, I did go skinny dipping at Hornsea.
DeleteThat's hilarious. But it seems as if nudists would want a warm place. If it is really cold, men would have to worry about shrinkage. They'd be self conscious. I'd be disappointed.
ReplyDeleteWere you one of those women in the film shouting "can we have some men?"
DeleteHa. I enjoyed watching that clip. I love that first lady and the way she pronounced the word more in "more and more of it".
ReplyDeleteBless them.
She sounds as if she might originate from further north.
DeleteVery amusing. I did like the delivery by the woman who said 'cavort about to their hearts' content'.
ReplyDeleteCouncillor Mrs Johnson. I wonder what became of her, and all the others too.
DeleteNought wrong with Angela Merkel (or anyone else) in the nude. She's a human with a less-than-perfect body, like most of us. (Besides, apparently the photo of her in the nude was when she was a student, many decades before she became the woman whose looks were not exactly jaw-droppingly great, but unmistakeable.)
ReplyDeleteI quite liked her, not that I know much about German politics, but she was around a long time. There seems to be a growing tendency to choose politicians for their looks and personalities, which is wrong. I'm sure she would be fascinating to talk with.
Delete🤣🤣🤣 NE coast in summer cold enough to freeze the ....s off a brass monkey. There would be nothing to see surely?
ReplyDeleteIt's like that everywhere for most of the year in the UK.
DeleteThe joys of local news reporting
ReplyDeleteNationwide went out on the full BBC1 network. Fyffe Robertson and Alan Whicker in the early days.
DeleteI've been trying to find out the rest of this story. Did Hornsea wind up as a major naturist recreational site? Did the moral fiber of the town collapse? Did women in head scarves fall to their knees blinded by the sight? Every time I try to google it, I wind up back at this clip. Inquiring minds want to know.
ReplyDeleteThere was a nudist beach a little to the North nearer Bridlington, but the council changed their minds about it many years ago because of unwanted behavious. I don't think there was one at Hornsea. The town had a successful pottery for many years, and then a remaindered goods shopping estate, both now defunct.
Delete