I recently watched another one of those delightfully obscure BBC4 archive documentaries. This one was called Bristol on Film.
I like archival film footage for what it reveals unintentionally: the incidental details which have nothing to do with the film-maker’s original intent, but which 60 years later reveal how profoundly the world has changed. Like the sign once glimpsed in 1950s Ramsgate: ‘Lift to the seafront 2d — perambulators and wheelchairs 4d’.
There was one such moment in the Bristol programme. It was footage of the Queen inspecting the first Concorde prototype at Filton. What astonished me was that it was filmed in black and white. It’s now hard to believe there was a moment in history when we could build an airliner capable of doing 1,350 miles per hour and yet when colour televisions were so rare you wouldn’t bother using colour film to record it. It shows how rapidly media technology has progressed since the late 1960s. And how slow has been the progress in everything else.
As I have written before, there is a danger that our obsession with information technology will cause us to direct too little of our inventiveness towards the physical world. Steve Jobs has sometimes been described as the 21st century’s answer to Edison, but perhaps we also need a 21st-century answer to Brunel.
The problem facing any latter-day Brunel is that, in Britain especially, doing anything innovative in the physical world is so difficult. You can start an online retailer tomorrow with five friends, a broadband connection and a shed; yet try to start a new bus company and you enter a world of bureaucratic pain. And don’t even think of trying to build anything…
But it isn’t only British nimbyism that’s the problem.
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