Arts
1 hour 43 min podcast version. Not safe for work. Contains some swearing and adult themes. Interesting people talk about the music, films and music for films which have shaped their lives. Roz Kaveney, Tim Concannon and their guest Andrew Smith wander down busy Caledonian Road in North London, to Housmans peace bookshop near to Kings Cross station. They discuss two linked technologies produced by the atomic age, computers and nuclear arms, and the ways that the peace movement and radicalism have responded to both being part of modern armed conflict. The starting point for the conversation is Pete Watkins’s 1965 film for the BBC, banned from broadcast at the time, ‘The War Game‘. Made two decades before ‘Threads‘ and Raymond Briggs’s ‘Where the Wind Blows‘, Pete Watkins’s film is a documentary-style depiction of Britain under nuclear attack. It was withdrawn before transmission by the BBC under government pressure, but went on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary. Caledonian Road is notable for two things: its longstanding Irish community and Housmans Bookshop, opened in 1959 and named after Laurence Houseman the gay, pacifist playwright who suggested the Peace Pledge Union establish a permanent base in 1948. As well as publishing Peace News, it became a focus of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament . The two worlds converged in 1974 when an IRA bomb blew up the pillar box outside the shop. The explosion incinerated all the copies of Campaign Against Arms Trade’s first newsletter. More... * The War Game en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game * Housmans Bookshop www.housmans.com/ * Campaign Against the Arms Trade www.caat.org.uk/ Join CAAT or make a donation here: www.caat.org.uk/support-our-work/donate