Learning on ScreenUPITN – September 1973: A Month in the Life
UPITN – September 1973 can act as important corrective to a collective recollection fuelled in this way by providing a contemporary assessment of what was newsworthy. Viewed as a whole, the collection clearly reflects the diplomatic axes on which the world turned as the Cold War played out across the globe. Every day brings high-level meetings indicating shifting positions in this complex series of international relationships: France and China; Cuba and India; Romania and Peru; Egypt and South Vietnam and crucially the USSR and USA. This key meeting took place at the United Nations (UN), highlighting the core role it occupied during this period. Its leader, Kurt Waldheim is also shown meeting various parties in relation to the Middle East crisis reflecting its position as broker. At its headquarters in New York, the UN acts as a forum for international opinion, the ongoing debate in relation to the Chile coup is a case in point.
The substantial coverage of the Conference for Non-Aligned Countries in Algiers reminds us of an important movement established in reaction to the Cold War. It consisted of states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc and although it struggled with internal contradictions it fills a significant position within international relations at this time. The arrival and press conferences of participants highlights the key players including Fidel Castro (Cuba), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya) and Yasser Arafat (Palestine Liberation Organisation). This diplomatic activity took place against a backdrop of conflict as the war in Vietnam continued to de-stabilise the region with both Cambodia and Laos increasingly drawn in and violence, as the hostage siege at the Arabian Embassy in Paris demonstrates.
Closer to home the collection highlights a curious blank in our own collective memory of Britain at that time. This is the extent of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) mainland campaign and the impact it had on the day-to-day lives of those living in major cities and beyond. A basic chronology of related stories highlights the frequency of bomb blasts:
8 Sept – Victoria station, London
9 Sept – Shops, Manchester
10Sept – Kings Cross station, London (also one at Euston station)
12 Sept – Prudential offices, Oxford Street, London
13 Sept – Servicemen’s HQ, London
17 Sept – Army tents and office, Surrey and Birmingham
These are bookended by the Prime Minister Edward Heath’s speech on the IRA on 4 September and his interview on 18 September after visits to Belfast and Dublin, providing the context for the concerted nature of the campaign in September. It is worth emphasizing that UPITN were an international agency so these stories are by no means definitive and do not include the firebombs discovered at Liberty’s in London and Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham on 10 September or the Bank of England and Oxford Street blasts on 15 September, for example. They do, however, indicate the significance of these domestic stories within an international news market.
… UPITN – September 1973 gives us a thirty-day snapshot of the world and its concerns
Whilst the depth of the collection can reveal the day-to-day development of a news story, it can also lay bare the ‘wallpaper’ of the time. These are the elements that require no explanation because they are intrinsic to the day-to-day experience of the time. They could be acronyms such as OPEC, GATT and NATO or part of long-running stories, such as the items on Iceland that relate to the fishing dispute, or Cod War, with Britain. The prevalence of seemingly mundane items, such as the reopening of the Moscow Technical Institute, are stories because they give viewers a brief glimpse behind the Iron Curtain, revealing how little was known about life in the Eastern Bloc. There are also stories that gain significance with time because the future depicted then is now part of our present. Models of the Channel Tunnel and the innovative use of television surveillance to aid the fight against crime are good examples of this.
Ultimately UPITN – September 1973 gives us a thirty-day snapshot of the world and its concerns. For a small island used to viewing the world in relation to itself, this international dimension might provide the greatest corrective of all.
Linda Kaye
