{"id":945,"date":"2011-03-17T22:38:19","date_gmt":"2011-03-17T22:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=945"},"modified":"2011-03-18T18:15:37","modified_gmt":"2011-03-18T18:15:37","slug":"the-british-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=945","title":{"rendered":"The British At Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been enjoying Kirsty Young’s BBC2 documentary series — The British At Work <\/em>— a complementary series to a similar social history last year on the family. The episode just shown tonight took in the period 1964 to 1980 — the second half of which becomes increasingly distinct in my own memory.<\/p>\n

What I particularly enjoyed about the programme was the music. I often loathe extraneous music piled on to TV soundtracks — more or less any sport documentary attracts it and it seems sometimes that producers like to signal that they’ve got A Big Budget on programmes like Doctor Who <\/em>or Wonders of the Universe <\/em>by plastering some bombastic orchestral music over everything at any opportunity.<\/p>\n

But The British At Work <\/em>used a nice selection of contemporary music — some well known (and quite apt lyrically) like Pink Floyd’s Time<\/em>, Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat <\/em>and Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past <\/em>and others I would never have identified had there not been a really handy track listing on the programme’s page on the BBC website.<\/a> (I’m glad I discovered through this that it was Steve Miller who did the ethereal Fly Like An Eagle.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m already looking forward to next week’s episode because it was trailed with the outro from the Associates’\u00c2\u00a0Party Fears Two <\/em>— one of the oddest tracks of the 80s.<\/p>\n

We’ve had an ongoing debate in the MA workshops about quoting lyrics from pop songs in things like chapter introductions and so on. If a writer even quotes a couple of lines from a song then the song’s publishers are entitled to for royalties, which might be OK if the book is going to sell a lot (royalties like this are often flat-rate) but a significant proportion of income for more modest sellers. Titles are safer — they’re not copyrightable — and if a reader recognises a quoted lyric then these may well be brought into mind by a mention of just the song in itself .<\/p>\n

The programme was also interesting as it featured Charles Handy, who wrote some fascinating books in the 1990s on the future of work, such as The Age of Unreason <\/em>and The Empty Raincoat <\/em>— and I have a signed copy of his autobiography, having gone to an Association of MBAs function featuring him in Oxford. But I wish his prediction of the portfolio career would have become more widespread than it has so far, as it makes an awful lot of sense — and having writing as part of one’s portfolio might be the only practical way for all but the most best-selling writers to make a living (see this very interesting blog entry posted today by Martha Williams: http:\/\/wp.me\/pMRZG-1Yg<\/a>. )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been enjoying Kirsty Young’s BBC2 documentary series — The British At Work — a complementary series to a similar social history last year on the family. The episode just shown tonight took in the period 1964 to 1980 — the second half of which becomes increasingly distinct in my own memory. What I particularly … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The British At Work”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[424],"tags":[192,636,637,575,635,634],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influences-2","tag-bbc","tag-charles-handy","tag-martha-williams-blog","tag-music","tag-soundtracks","tag-the-british-at-work"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":952,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}