Learning on ScreenA Technicolor Ride through the 60s and 70s
Linda Kaye provides a guided tour of Roundabout (http://bufvc.ac.uk/roundabout), the Technicolor cinemagazine that in the 1960s and 70s helped the government promote Britain as a progressive world leader to South and South-east Asia and which is now available to view online.
About the Author: Linda Kaye is the BUFVC’s Research Executive and is resposnsible for the News On Screen web resource and is part of the team behind the Channel 4 and British Film Culture project (www.c4film.co.uk/). Her publications include Projecting Britain: The Guide to British Cinemagazines (2008), co-edited with Emily Crosby.
A Free Technicolor Ride through Britain and Asia in 1960s and 1970s
One of the most exciting new features to the BUFVC’s News on Screen resource has been the addition, in partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI), of 600 freely available films from the Technicolor cinemagazine Roundabout (1962-1974). The BFI has recently restored this monthly topical news series from the original 35mm elements and the result is truly stunning.
… it was a potent and popular mix that entertained audiences from Cambodia to Korea and Burma to Brunei
Produced by the British government through its Central Office of Information (COI), Roundabout was designed promote Britain as a progressive world leader to South and South-east Asia. Every issue was packed with stories that portrayed Britain in the vanguard of research, the forefront of manufacturing, the driving force of the Commonwealth as well as the creative edge of the arts and design. If the message could be summed up in a single word it would be ‘modern’, the idea being that Asian cinema audiences were presented with a vision of what their future might look like and how Britain was helping her to realise it. Technicolor was a vital element in the transformation of this content within the cinema programme, constructing an important and innovative bridge between the black and white newsreel and colour feature. It lent a gloss to fashion and dynamism to factory lines, imbuing the topical with the glamorous sheen of the fictional. It was a potent and popular mix that entertained audiences from Cambodia to Korea and Burma to Brunei. With its infectious music and spinning carrousel Roundabout’s opening sequence promised a dizzy ten-minute ride around diverse topics and locations seamlessly stitched together by a deft commentary. It constitutes a unique record of Britain and Asia during a period of rapid change and development.
Roundabout was one of a raft of cinemagazines that the COI had been producing since the mid 1950s. This marked the point when the British government fully embraced the necessity of national projection to articulate the transition from Empire to Commonwealth to an international audience. The global potential of television as a transmitter of this ‘soft propaganda’, as civil servants of the time termed it, was recognized and supported by a substantial increase in the COI budget for the next decade. The television stations that gradually emerged across the globe were hungry for content and happy to use freely supplied material, dubbed in the required language. By the time the first issue of Roundabout was released in May 1962, hundreds of stories from series such as Transatlantic Teleview, Dateline Britain, This Week in Britain, Middle East Newspots (Letter from London) and Portrait had already been watched in the United States, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. In the midst of this increasing volume of 16mm black and white material targeted at television stations came Roundabout, a 35mm colour series targeted at cinema audiences.
