TELEVISION Stitches in time


First Cut: Made in England CHANNEL 4


ment trade, the collapse in manufacturing has been particularly acute. A caption at the start of “Made In England” (18 February) noted that in 1979 there were 150 clothing factories in the Manchester area, employing 70,000 people. Now there are nine, employing about 1,000. The future, though, might not be too gloomy for those manufacturers who have survived and are prepared to adapt. This cheerful, warm-hearted documentary in the First Cut strand, which showcases the work of young directors, took us into the factory of Cooper & Stollbrand of Salford. It employs 60 people, who between them have some 1,200 years of experience.


S


Among the least experienced is James Eden, a former City trader who bought into the com- pany three years ago and is steering it towards a profitable niche, making short-run coats for high-street retailers and designer labels. His friends, he said, think he is “bonkers”: “I had a fantastic wage, fantastic hours, minimal stress. To throw that away to come and work in a loss-making, precariously positioned fac- tory in the heart of central Manchester was … too ludicrous or hideous to comprehend.” The film introduced us to some of the long-


serving staff and supervisors. One supervisor, Jean Seddon, had been there 55 years. A machinist, Marian Tongue, had served 41


Harris recalled that if the producer wanted to consult him while the show was on air he did it via telephone), had so little funding that bands performed against a bare wall. But these disadvantages, along with the lack of a live audience, worked in its favour: frill-free, unmediated, authentic. No particular dent was made in the ratings, but the people who watched were tenacious in their loyalty. None of this, of course, was indefinitely sustainable. One source of tension could be found in producer Mike Appleton’s habit of commissioning stuff that his frontmen might find hard to present. There was a famous moment when the New York Dolls, louche and drug-addled high priests of American glam, shambled on to the show in 1973, after which Harris, a fan of earnest singer-song- writing, uttered the words “mock-rock”. The New Wave explosion of the late 1970s hit Harris and co. particularly hard, although once they had fulfilled the producer’s require- ment of having produced an album, certain punk musicians – here the star witness was Public Image Ltd’s Jah Wobble – who remem- bered their teenage fondness for the show were unexpectedly keen to appear.


ometimes it seems as though nothing is made in this country any more. In the gar-


Jean Seddon, left, Carole Featherston and Dot Dobbins on the factory floor at Cooper & Stollbrand


asked Marian. “They’re like clowns’ coats.” Fashionable clothes


involve a lot of detailed work, and it is all done on individual sewing machines. There was no computerised assistance. The work was quick and efficient, and when extra efforts had to be made to


years. The scene was set, then, for a clash: thrusting new management against conser- vative workforce, resistant to change and inclined to be bolshie. But nothing of the sort took place. Here were staff who enjoyed com- ing to work, dreaded retirement, and relished the new challenges involved in making lots of different garments at high speed. And, just as important, young James was highly appre- ciative of his highly skilled senior employees. “They are ‘Galacticos’,” he said. “A-listers … Words can’t describe them. They’re just fantastic.” This may be the start of better times for British manufacturing, especially in fashion. Longer lead-times and increasing costs in the Far East mean the advantages of offshore manufacturing are no longer so clear-cut. We saw two garments being made; 50 parkas for a designer label, to be sold at £500 each; and a run of 325 coats for Top Shop, to be run up in just three days. Made in two fabrics, meet- ing in the middle, these were not to everyone’s taste. “Who in their right minds would design a coat, one-half check and one-half ordinary?”


In the end, it was developments in youth


television rather than the music itself that did for OGWT. Channel 4’s bouncy, up-to- the-minute The Tube, which began in the early 1980s with Paula Yates to front it and a live audience to seethe in front of the stages, made deferential interviews with members of the Rolling Stones looking calamitously out of date. This was the dawn of the MTV age. The


days in which Harris and his team offered the only opportunity for fans to see what certain performers looked like had gone the way of skiffle and trad jazz; the plug was pulled in December 1987. The great virtue of Jackson’s elegiac half-


hour lay both in the wide range of interviewees on offer – Harris, his successor-presenter Annie Nightingale, musicians such as Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson – and in a critical stance that emphasised failure as much as merit. As someone usefully pointed out, 80 per cent of the show’s content was made up of the now deservedly forgotten. The other 20, though, hit home in a way that modern music TV can never hope to reproduce. D.J. Taylor


fulfil a rush order, the staff seemed happy to oblige. The parkas proved to be troublesome: the fur trim took longer to make than had been anticipated. “We’re not having a break until these are on the van,” declared one of the supervisors, and all but a handful of the machinists stayed at their posts. There was even a reference to the Dunkirk Spirit. It is customary in this type of documentary for there to be a concentration on a handful of “characters”, and this was no exception. What was interesting, though, was that direc- tor Satnam Authi chose to focus just on the older workers, who were all white British. The younger staff, admitted long-serving director Mike Stoll, were all “foreign girls”: Slovaks, Poles, Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians and others from “all over the place”. We saw them quietly stitching, but heard not a word. “What’s lovely here is that there’s so little


bigotry and prejudice,” said Stoll. He has a simple scheme for easing community relations within the factory. “If somebody foreign comes in with a name they can’t pronounce, give them an English name and get on with it.” If anyone minded, we weren’t told. This was a plain, slightly flat documentary, with no tricks. Conflict, drama and irony were notable by their absence, and the usual jaunty light-orchestral musical accompaniment hinted at a humour that didn’t really emerge. I left with a renewed admiration for the skills of the staff and the pluck of the management, and a sense that British manufacturing might make a modest comeback. Meanwhile, the understatement of the week came from Angie Dymott in Toughest Place To Be A Paramedic(BBC2, 13 February). “It’s not a good place out there on the streets of Guatemala City,” she said, after spending a night crewing an ambulance and dealing with the shooting of a group of innocent university students.


Angie, a paramedic in Cardiff, had never seen a gunshot wound before spending a fort- night living and working with the bomberos of Guatemala. She learned fast. Violence in the city is out of control. “The greatest gift you can have is to wake up alive the next day,” said one of her colleagues, but plucky Angie was not dismayed. “It’s very, very exciting,” she admitted, waving a reluctant goodbye to her new colleagues and heading back to her normal workaday round of fallen pensioners and Friday-night drunks. John Morrish


19 February 2011 | THE TABLET | 27


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40