The shadow of the lion; Young Blood of Britain

It'll be the shadow of the lawyer. Emerging from a memorable immovable Britain today faces the task of defining. A story or two. This is bottom yesterday. Mrs.. Temple transition. Is common in company in Oxford and. Rhythm

revolution. Program seven Youngblood of Britain. Indiana University Radio documented essay about contemporary Britain. We present the shadow of the lion with William Kinzer as your narrator. Listen a schoolteacher the teenager on the hold. A rough diamond is rough because.

I think myself that parental control has been the result has been the blame for the teenagers but name aside I use club executives. The difficulty I think is to have a middle course between the conviction that they are on the how a very good luck that there is good and bad parents and that when the right kind of challenge or the right kind of training is put to them that an immediate response but that sequelae that is the difficult element sometimes overestimated about that. The world all round them present them with problems that are very much great and very much more difficult than perhaps that pace. Yeah the kind you have to go a social worker.

I find mixing with young people that they have a very refreshing slant on life. They tend to get it out about documents often cautious optimism. The consensus of many adults for the tremors of teenage vibrations are being felt throughout the land and troubled parents and officials puzzle over the rumbling revolution like young people the world over the youth of Britain are yearning for recognition for a voice and the purpose of the rule of importance to play in the structuring of present day society. And no other element underscores more dramatically the change that is currently taking place. Life on the island for a long time now has been a wicked often weird and we would excitement that is modern youth. The essence of pop art and vitality emanating from Lancashire Middletown

was from the back streets of London inundating the prim provinces of the United Kingdom bridging class barriers captivating the populace and circling the globe. And there has emerged an image of you lacks long haired loose limbed loud and coarse candid generation of dubious morals and tastes yet exhilaratingly free forthright and sealed with a promise of the future. People have the time to be admired or admonished or perhaps despise for good we've got it I think. I like to think that I think Adrian to address this. The horrible children who produce singing in a self that a medic can be. Wearing. G thing I this is an importation but I because I quick to say that it's been a very popular lap this brittle

observation comes from a person many see is a professional cynic he's Malcolm Muggeridge and the ex editor of punch makes no bones of his dislike for Teenage idols and aberration or indeed for a patronizing society that permits at 7:08 it would seem to me that this. All despicable adulation of the young which is coming to power. It read I would have thought originated in that. Where you had this hot ODay Anders. I actually almost worshipped the heir to the ark because Malcolm Muggeridge is not alone in his view that British teenagers have been greatly influenced by America. You wonder are teenagers of the two countries alike. You talk to Jim Hunter. He's an author and a teacher. He studied in the United States for a number of years and has had the

opportunity to observe young people on both sides of the Atlantic rather differ from the MP of America. They are much less should and less when I say perhaps I meant that I did not think it are a god that emancipation is in time a good thing. And some of the concern that the merit in getting at is should not to get the sort of tensions imposed upon them of trying to live like little adults which American teenagers seem to have yet. Mr. Hunter who was an English instructor in one of Britain's top grammar schools acknowledges the growing freedom of fermenting restlessness and the effect of a newfound affluence among the young people of his country. He observes that they're suitably skeptical partly because of war partly because of the country's position as a buffer between two great political powers the United States and the communist world. For the most part he feels they remain uncommitted preferring to

pick holes in both sides. Some people accuse all young people of apathy. I don't think it is going to this morning I don't think that more apathetic and the young people of any other generation. It's difficult to define the character and motivations of modern youth on one hand they seem to reflect the attitudes and insecurity of their elders. They seen him day and hobbled by a society that they've inherited you know but they seem to have broken free to establish their own code their own value their own. Good thing there isn't a good thing for a particular age group to try and sort of packet fail or present. A question is asked by a sushi allergist at the University of Glasgow. And in a Lancashire hole. A mother is seriously perplexed as she says. They never sucked into to a lot of

young people today. They have never satisfied. Our resident on the Cornish coast coming through the day when they leave school. Well of course there is no manual labor. But then I look for our reactor and a housewife in Yorkshire offers this of can. Function of a fraction of them that no dr did and. There's no need to. Every minute of what you call you come from somebodies. But growing up in somebody's cool they've gone to the cinema. They're going

to the clubs that we have created the children that you know that products are homes that are patient blood products of our homes or our institutions of our society and I sometimes wonder whether the children are named. I'm not the ages so we were made with everything to an aside and with the inhibitions were drawn. Father ignored this under Catholic assistant to the head of religious broadcasting at the BBC ponders a predicament that is not entirely the adequacy of you. I wonder if they did nothing wrong but I don't think there's all that wrong. Pruett Jeffcott is a research sociologist at the University of Glasgow. She echoes father Andrew's opinion and opinion incidentally shared by almost everyone concerned with you in her words. I think perhaps there's more wrong with her in general.

All right. That's us you and me and everyone. And what do we do. Time passes. Life moves on. Attitudes conventions come and go. And the chasm between the young and the older seems to widen with each passing year. The need to explain the generations to one another. To this about to understand the teenager to see the ways in which help needed to appreciate the further contribution they can make. I would put it priority number one in many ways. Priority number one spanning the great gulf between generations. She was a kindly lady of considerable charm. Her eyes filled with vitality and interest in the responsibility of her task. You were talking to Leslie Sewell general secretary of the National Association of youth clubs in Great Britain but they were rather a tragic addition to

that is that there are a great many parents who will turn to people working in the same station like this to say in effect come to help us to understand I don't teenage children we find them so extraordinary. So there are many ways. Do you understand them and if so did you know about them. Lesley Sewell was educated at a girls public school and Cambridge received training in social work at the London School of Economics was an ambulance driver during the war has been in her words in social work practically all of her life. Today she directs the government supported consultative organization which seeks to serve a large number of volunteer youth clubs and she sees the need for adult concern for adult assistance for the I think the if you like in this country with some of the management is that your out of say 25 leaders

23 will be men and it concrete in the difficult to find women who can give the time and the help which many of the gals and some of the boys need from them. Miss Sewell is disappointed at the number of amateur was involved in youth work and not enough of those. One is very much aware that many of the people who perhaps 20 years ago would have given boundaries that is in the home. For a variety of reasons I'm not there today partly because the service then came from people with much more leisure and possibly more money they were able to give their time and work to young people probably because they were in generation brayed in a way I don't think we are quite brave in the same way to today to expect to get that kind of service and regarded as part of their job. And thirdly it because to many people the young of today appeared to be well difficult for the problems and probably

possibly beyond the reach of the well intentioned and out who are willing to help. Doesn't he have to do it. If I may put that even more bluntly that a tremendous number of add up today who are frankly frightened of the teenager. Dondre disenchanted uses come up like fun over brick and the I O still hears the rumble of revolution and the bears witness to the seemingly endless orgy of pop culture. Food lands in Dutch boy caps and down to the shoulder here do is my own Jim idle packs in lieu shirts and tight trousers and Lady long haired Mina skirted females frequent discotheques and coffee bars and countless booty. And both are possessed of a quest for truth. The pounding pulsating rhythm reaches the closed eyes and contorted faces of the young crowd as five idols gyrating and shout their song to electronic

accompaniment in the dimly lit cavern like basement club and summer dance summer dreaming but the dreams seldom involve just tomorrow. The shifting restless pattern of teenage pursuits happenings lovely arms and cunts and queer haunts for the affluent young creating an easy carefree existence belying both the responsible and the delinquent. People seem to be lacking their own good I could day at rather an early age I am. They seem to been more independent and not so much that the type of the apron strings affect parents and whilst MP Niger's can cope with that some contra go wrong because that is the view of the minister of state for the Home Office. Miss Alice speak them and you wonder about delinquency among teenagers in Britain at the University of Sussex.

You ask sushi ologist Norman McKENZIE I think that have been an increase of delinquency and it's noticeable that it is statistically provable that it was greater among those who were small children during the war. In other words the people who have recently been adolescents are those who grew up in disturbed homes being evacuated being bombarded with their father the way. Mackenzie feels there's another reason too for the wayward tendency among certain teenagers. I think there's also been a decline in parental control in much greater permissiveness. Now I am not an advocate of authoritarian rental methods but I think that very often modern computers hurt you with a bat in other words. Parents are afraid to exert their authority because they want their children to love them because of this fear among parents to be firm. Many young people are confused. They have no sounding board to determine

right and wrong. They seek answers in themselves. So cycles of delinquency have hit the 10 people who use the mobs and rockers but on the whole Despite this I would say that this is really the best generation of young people that I've seen in my lifetime. I think that's terribly good on the whole. Leslie Sewell suggests something fundamental as a key to young people that of relationships were really just a practical in many ways but terribly important today really for young people. One of her relationships if you want to have a really lively discussion with young teenagers. It's a question of relationships in one form or another parent and child. The unfailing start all the work I do have to come in at night. Employer and employee. Why is the boss as he is what is

my function in relation to my work. What's the point of working in the school master and pupil. And of course above and beyond or boy and girl so that this mutual relationship in one form or another and or I think that the key to the answer of the teenagers and the pink effective problem in making them what they are. There is little doubt in misuse mind that more work is being done for the teenager today than ever before. But on the other hand the challenge she's great in many ways it's a more complex problem because where I think in the days when I started off there were the glaring at the core needs as compared to straight forward you really got to walk down the street. He was doing and no days you're meeting up a property which is mental poverty if you like of spiritual poverty rather than acute physical property. There is this desperate need to provide cheap dinners on jumble sales or that it might

be that there's need to be to have a greater understanding of the people a more tentative kind of awareness to their needs and this. A plug of slow growth some 27 national voluntary youth organisations with a combined United Kingdom membership of three million young people seek to establish this understanding. But it's not quite as simple as that. Sociologist Pearl Jeffcott conducted a special study on the use of leisure time by young people ages 15 to 19 in three different Scottish communities. The results were surprising. She found that commercial types of leisure cinema dancing Cafe going were by far the most popular. But she found that formal groups like youth organisations were at the very bottom of the list of teenage preference.

You wonder why we think we've found out some of the reasons why did we kick it. That way that the formal you said the scripts were rejected. And one of them was turning to do with what we do think now that the youngsters are going over authoritarian. They were too much run by adults or young people. And young people didn't feel they were in their groups that they were contributing sufficiently. Moreover miss Jeffcott discovered that those who made use of youth club facilities were those with more education who lived in better environments. In short who probably needed it least. Often we see you as through a prism a juxtaposition of light and shadow of good and bad. A curious He's hard to police values a refracted view reflecting

only the sensational the obvious the comprehensive. I think it's a difficult to be an adolescent at the present time I don't think I would like to be one prude Jeff good feels that used to be. He says many conflicting codes which leaves them torn between total independence and a desperate need for others. She puts your finger on use by pointing to a picture. This really drew on outside a little cafe in the small mining town x mining town I was telling you about. This is any evening about seven o'clock. This is how these young people are spending this. You look at the picture. You can sense a certain peak force the pressure of idle easy hours. She describes

the picture. Two. Fashionable hairstyles. Chatting. A boy with a bike about to check up windows I would say. A couple of boys at the back. Looking in the window. These people will be in and out of this cafe all of the other three cafes in this little tavern. And this rapid walking round is what they'll do with most of that evening. This is their leisure. I don't know what else is it much to do in that town. There's one cinema. There are a few youth clubs but they're all. Either attached to a school or a church. So if a youngster it was a given in the school. Or if you begin church that cuts out the youth. There's their regular dance

tradition. If they were. To see a bit more life they have to spend one and fourpence in bus fares into the nearest little tram was about four miles away. You look at the picture and you see loneliness in a crowd. Not all British you are irresponsible or simply adolescent. And or industrial countries as we know there's a tendency towards the lowering of the age of puberty a very interesting phenomenon the fact that girls and probably boys are physically maturing at an earlier age. Norman Mackenzie notes early maturity in the rising generation. And there's evidence for some British youth are both businesslike having created within the dimensions of their own world pop culture and a demeanor imitated by others fashions for

instance. While still in her teens Mary Quant began making mud clothes in her London flat and had the model of knightly in her Chelsea shop. And today educated later she does an annual retail turnover of more than two million dollars yet for every one inventive Quint there are usually two middle aged entrepreneurial media men riding the crest of youth image. But here's a market not normally bound by the responsibilities of a budget. So capitalizing on the novelty the now thing many enterprising personalities and many of them quite young have invaded the fashionable scene. There are useful photographers like David Bailey hairstylists like Beetle Sassoon models like Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. I'm well known to the whole world has become a narrow three block long avenue called Carnaby Street where still is found a sartorial glimpse of tomorrow's youth.

And pop music too. In the wake of their meteoric rise the Beatles bequeathing the hypnotic beat of them the sound an aura of teenage I do elation and the novelty of long haired loud harmony and the inevitable failings of amplified guitars cymbal and snare out of this era emerged many strange sights and sounds. Groups like the Rolling Stones hermits The Yardbirds Procol Harum the Vanilla Fudge individuals like Cilla Black Tom Jones particular Clark and Donovan all of them have traveled this trend to fame and fortune significantly. It's not only been pop music for teenagers but for the most part it's being created and developed by teenagers. Will. The British cinema too has enjoyed a renaissance and found in youth a theme and a thorough

fare for box office Bonanzas youthful stars like Julie Christie Rita touching a Michael Caine David Hemmings and Terence Stamp all personify the manners and mores of modern Britain's gay reckless generation. And it's true you know Britain today has been reinvigorated by a Go-Go generation and it seems straight quite unusual to see this staid old country in the grip of a youthful rebellion yet. Out of their own eccentric and psychedelic world. The mobs have rocked the kingdom with great fervor and excitement and influence. The spirit of youth is freely flowing through the hardened arteries of haughty England rejuvenating revitalizing replacing worn traditional TDM with a life that is livelier and infinitely more robust.

But is it more meaningful. Editors ask and wonder at what seems a wilder one more depraved generation. A lineage of free loving drug taking deluded degenerates. And while there is evidence of a free wheeling philosophy masterminding the restatement of use in British society its more the threat to the status quo the sacrilege in temperate change that startles and shocks the establishment. For if nothing else the Teen Age revolution has turned many heads toward the future and beneath the front Valente the swinging swagger of a beauty in its arrogance. Many feel there may be an answer for England's tomorrow. BRABANTIO got a university radio Youngblood a Britain

programme seven special series of documented essays about contemporary Britain entitled The lion as written by Luke ROY BENNETT But the narrator was working in concert production assistants were John Hopkins and joy it was a conspiracy the engineer Jack Tracy program consultant David canard. This is John gimmick speaking. The shadow of the lion has been a series made possible by an Indiana University faculty research grant and is a presentation on Indiana University Radio. This program was distributed by the national educational radio network.