Tony Garnett

Arnold Wesker, Jim Allen and Perdition

The controversy over accusations of anti-semitism in political parties coincides with the death of Arnold Wesker. There is a connection.

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Junior doctors are the new miners of 1984

Ominous noises from the Tories. They see the doctors as the miners in 84-85. So, a high stakes fight to the death. Whose death will it be?

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Off-Cut: Attachments

As the internet gained momentum I made plans to work on it, thinking everyone would be as excited as I was. The only way to learn to do it, is to do it.

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Tory sale of council houses and Labour’s PFI. A connection? Sure!

Show they’re just two wings of same party. But they don’t want you to know that.

Callaghan’s Labour government in the ‘70s favourably discussed plans for the sale of council houses but lost to Thatcher before it became settled policy; the Tories thought through the wizard idea of the Private Finance Initiative. A no brainer. Build new hospitals and keep the debt off the government books.

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Socialism without the free artist becomes Stalinism

I’ve been a trade unionist all my working life. I have always believed that in unity is strength. But for me economism, the trade unionism of not a penny oﬀ the pay, not a minute on the day, is not enough. I’ve always been on the side of revolution, by which I mean a qualitative shift in the power relations of society, so that workers control capital.

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The inspiration behind ‘The Spongers’

I see that Elizabeth Windsor is 90. I congratulate her.

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Football is about family

I wrote this seeing my granddaughter in an Aston Villa shirt. Aila’s three. I wish Barry Hines had read it. He would have understood. Why do so many of us give pain to our children? We knowingly condemn them to suffer, year after year. Then watch this pain with pride. Are you one of the guilty parents?

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Nurturing creativity in filmmaking

Management was one of the biggest con tricks of the Twentieth Century. It was a useless and exploitative artefact, turning a simple job into a “profession”, with its own jargon and meaningless qualifications.

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Steve Hilton Today

Steve Hilton’s defence of capitalism on Today was the mirror image of those Stalinists defending socialism in my youth. He should read Adam Smith:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. – Wealth of Nations, 1776

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Blair, Milburn and Hattersley: a modern morality

Blair, the man who stole the Labour Party and delivered it to Thatcherism, is now in a different frame of mind. A Land Tax, no less. A tax proposed a century ago by the Liberals, taken up later by Labour, and defeated by the land owning Tories in the Lords. It is indeed a no brainer.

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CBEEBIES

Sitting with my granddaughter, 3, happily watching Bing. What, never heard of him? Well, you’re not a parent, a grandparent or around 3, are you? I never miss Bing.

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@yanisvaroufakis – find your answer to Europe vote.

Read him in today’s @guardian. Brilliant. Read “The Global Minotaur” plus “And the Weak /suffer What They Must?. And weep”.
But wait? Democracy in Europe for sure, but what do you think about democracy in Britain?
Probably the same as Gandhi thought when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation. “I think it would be a good idea”.

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On Performance

Although performances have been my life, or at least my profession, I have no answers. The idea of performance is slippery and mysterious to me.

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The Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture, 2060

New technology wonder – just arrived, from the future. How do they do that? Here it is:

SICK TO DEATH

The founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, died one hundred years ago.

Under him, after a long struggle, at last Britain had a health service free for all at the point of delivery. It was 1948, just after WW2, and it was a miracle.

The second struggle was seriously engaged around 2020.

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Crisis – Ending Homelessness

I was brought up in Birmingham and now live in London, so I went to Edinburgh with some humility, remembering that from the great Enlightenment thinkers on, Scotland has so often led the way in thinking about social policy. But even there the problem of housing and the homeless persists. I feel privileged to support Crisis’s new policy. A novel ambition. It wants to abolish itself through solving the homeless crisis. I spoke in support at a conference this week,

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Orgreave

Orgreave? Never heard of it, sorry. Under 40, why would you? Here’s why you need to know. It’s your fight too.

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Remembering Jim Allen

The screenwriter, Jim Allen, as the old saying had it, didn’t just want a few reformist crumbs from the table, he wanted the whole bakery.

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The Day The Music Died

Some memories are stuck in aspic, vivid and unchanging, and I play them like tracks on an album. My memoir, The Day The Music Died, is officially in your hands now.

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Google Tax

Jan 31 imminent. The day we own up to the tax man. But did you know MPs don’t even claim all their allowances? It’s immoral, apparently. Tax avoidance, joining illegal tax evasion, as unacceptable behaviour.

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Tracking Changes – BFI Interview 2014

BFI Retrospective, Interviews, Tony Garnett

‘I’ve never got locked up in the idea of “art cinema”. That’s masturbation.’ Never mincing his words, producer Tony Garnett reflects back over his groundbreaking work in television and film, as a two-month celebration of his career – from Cathy Come Home to This Life – plays at BFI Southbank.

Chris Fennell
Updated: 27 January 2014

Born in a working-class suburb in Birmingham, Tony Garnett was one of the first of a generation of revolutionary TV creatives who sought to address serious social and political issues in their influential BBC dramas of the 1960s and 70s.

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