Nostalgia for the Bad Times

Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry's new selection of films from the BFI National Archive, accompanying his exhibition Unpopular Culture, available in the Mediatheque now.

With the help of the BFI, I have chosen a selection of short films that highlight different facets of Britishness in the immediate post war period. They reflect perfectly the world that the paintings, sculpture and photography in Unpopular Culture sprang from. To us now, Britain sixty years ago is a strange country where everyone smokes all the time and speaks with a comedy accent, even the working classes have impeccable manners.

In the late forties and fifties, people worked hard rebuilding a better life for all and were happy with meagre pleasures. Advertising was quaint and hair was always neatly brushed. Yet there is a darker side to those plucky Brits, be they cut glass or salt of the earth. Lindsay Anderson's film O, Dreamland is a mini masterpiece which turns a day at the funfair into a sinister poem and in Springtime in an English Village the innocuous charm of an English village is put to an unsettling purpose.

Grayson Perry
Unpopular Culture and Nostalgia for the Bad Times runs 18 July - 25 October 2009 at the Longside Gallery, Wakefield. For more information see www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk. Photo of Grayson Perry by Eric Great-Rex.

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