Cold War Britain: Fifty years in the shadow of the bomb (422)

19:31Fraser McCallum:And at the time, the press would promote that as, well, homosexuals can't be trusted. They're deviant. They're inclined to be traitors. But of course, the reality is that because being openly gay was illegal, they were ripe for blackmail. And this, of course, happens, particularly with the Vassal affair John Vassal was not really a particularly good guy he's not someone he should hold up as a hero he was vain he was very arrogant he liked the trappings that came with the money that he got from spying for the Soviets but the only reason he ended up spying for the Soviets is he was honey trapped in a homosexual liaison and that's not necessarily the case with Philby and Burgess and some of these other the Cambridge spies who had you know who either were gay or at least had bisexual relationships back in their university days, but there becomes this sort of mass hysteria around homosexuality and spying, which at the same time, the inquiries that become the Wolfson Report, which then ultimately lead to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

20:42Fraser McCallum:The great irony, of course, is that probably the most famous spy scandal and the one that had the potential to be the most serious is an entirely classic, sleazy, heterosexual government affair that you would recognise from, you know, throughout history and that's of course the Profumo scandal which touches on everything, right? It touches on race relations, it touches on the fear of communism, it touches on the decline of the establishment and the increasing lack of deference in society. it brings in the great satire boom of the 60s so it's a really you know it's a really fascinating little snapshot and at the core of it is this cold war uh paradigm this this idea that the minister for war has had an affair with a a woman who's also allegedly sleeping with the soviet naval attaché.

21:41Fraser McCallum:And of course, that just is ripe for a salacious rumour mongering and scandal.

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23:36Ian Sanders:Harry Palmer's probably my favourite one. I'm a Bond fan, I would say, but Harry Palmer, I love the style of those movies.

23:44Fraser McCallum:The original Ipcris Fowl film, I've not seen the recent TV version, but the Ipcris Fowl movie that was one of the many films in a row that makes Michael Caine this huge 60s icon is a great film and is the anti-Bond, really. But Bond, though, is the key one because of its international reach. again we've talked about Britain being in a period of decline I've referenced Swing in London that will come later in the 60s but there's this period in 1962 where on the exact same day the film adaptation of Doctor No is released and the Beatles first single Love Me Do is released and it's like these are the two totemic parts of British culture that dominate the 60s the Beatles arguably still untouched really in the pop music pantheon and Bond you know still you know we're waiting the announcement of who the next Bond will be has made something like 11 billion dollars over the past 60 years at the box office it continually reinvents itself and it you know becomes one of Britain's great cultural exports of course the Bond movies have their roots in the novels written by Ian Flebing who you know could take it back further has worked in and and espionage during the second world war and you know there's whole loads of great stories there and mincemeat and all these sort of things.

25:01Fraser McCallum:That's obviously for another podcast. But the Fleming novels undergo this huge transformation because if you read them, and they're still worth them, and some of them are really good, but they are fused with incredible snobbery, very, very racist and incredibly misogynistic. Now, the Bonner films obviously have elements of that, and certainly the misogyny is part of the early ones in a way that doesn't survive to the recent Daniel Craig version. But the films become much lighter, much more confident, much breezier. Even the most serious ones like From Russia With Love, which is a proper sort of Cold War espionage thriller, have a lightness of touch that isn't there in the novels.

25:45Fraser McCallum:And that really comes down to the initial director, Terence Young, who's also an invertebrate snob, but is very keen on style. And the actor Sean Connery, who brings obviously muscular charisma, but also an easygoing charm and these films become sensations but the other thing is that they influence, they inspire all these other things so Len Dayton who had written some great non-fiction books around the Second World War, actually quite provocative some of them and absolutely worth reading Bales has this huge canon of spy books and he has this unnamed operative who becomes known as Harry Palmer and the epicist file played by Michael Caine, he becomes another you know 60s icon but very very different to to bond and as you said at the same time jean le carrie is writing his his novels which become adapted slightly later first of all that the spy who could bring from the cold which is my favorite of all the espionage films um i could talk at length about that movie and the novel uh and of course later on in the 1970s they do the sort of definitive mini-series of Tinker Tail Soldier Spy.

26:55Fraser McCallum:But there are loads of others. You end up with these knock-off versions like The Man from Uncle. There are loads of kind of spy stories. Mission Impossible series in America comes out of this fad. There is a huge spy boom to the point where they bring out lots of toys and things that kids would get at Christmas. Toys that they were still making when I was a kid in the 80s. Little James Bond spy sets in a suitcase, which you probably still get now, but certainly in the 1980s, they were still exactly the same as they were in 1964.

27:26Ian Sanders:I think I had one of those. Never knew what happened to that. You also cover an area of the Cold War, which I think is sometimes forgotten about, certainly not by service people that have served in it, but the hot wars, the conflicts where the British Army was involved in fighting or peacekeeping or where they were in the line of fire?

27:51Fraser McCallum:Yeah, I mean, the Cold War is never really cold. If you've got friends from Asia, for example, the notion of a Cold War is a faintly ridiculous one. If you're from Cambodia or Vietnam or Korea, if you've got friends that lived in East Germany or had family that lived in East Germany, again, very, very different. In Britain, of course, it feels like a Cold War, but what we need to remember is that there are, you know over the piece probably tens of thousands of British servicemen involved in action around the globe a lot of these have been forgotten about sometimes out of shame they're actually maybe enveloped by the whole concept of decolonialisation and the breakup of the empire which is a bigger story than some of these individual conflicts but they all feed into it so you've got British servicemen in Germany from essentially the end of the Second World War until the early to mid 90s you've got um people fighting in korea which is a really vicious war obviously never really declared as a war technically a police action if you talk to you know anyone in america knows it it's a police action um never really comes to an end we still live with the consequences on that border and the tensions that exist around particularly north korea but it's a really vicious war fought in a blazing hot sun and icy cold you know the death toll is really large across the Allied forces, even worse for the Korean civilians.

29:19Fraser McCallum:And of course, there's a lot of what become, what we know as North Korea, North Korean troops and Chinese troops die as well. There's all these other relatively small in relation. And you've got to be aware of mind, we're in the Cold War period is very much in the shadow of the Second World War. So when we describe these as small wars in relation to the Second World War, they are tiny, but they are vicious and they don't feel tiny if you're fighting in them. and the consequences especially for the folks that live in those countries are really severe but you've got british troops in cyprus you've got british troops in malaya you've got british troops in kenya you've got british troops in aid and and all these things you know the some of them are major news stories at the time some of them much less so i mean the coverage of aid in for example is actually relatively small even at the time despite the fact that some big figures come out of these conflicts.

30:10Fraser McCallum:Of course the one that really is probably central to the whole overarching story is Britain's somewhat misbegotten adventure in Egypt around the Suez Canal and that is one that certainly is not a small story at the time the coverage of that was huge and it sees one of the first really major anti-war protests that take place in Britain and particularly in London that we are now used to seeing throughout but Suez is probably the one that defines it all but let's say there are many many others and it's really important to me that working for the imperial war museum you come across folks all the time asking for information or stories on those conflicts and and they are sort of shamefully i think not just but not necessarily by the museum but overall kind of underrepresented absolutely and i'd agree with that i mean suiz is a subject

31:03Ian Sanders:I've wanted to cover for a while and I need to have a look at that. I mean, I think one of the things that's really interesting is how close Britain comes to involvement in the Vietnam War, which is probably the conflict within the Cold War that most people are familiar with. and how the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had to sort of manage the special relationship in a way that the US didn't want us to be.

31:35Fraser McCallum:Yeah, it's really focused around the time that Lyndon Johnson's president, the escalation of the Vietnam War. There's not massive pressure for British involvement during the Kennedy years where that is, you know, people can debate how active America truly is in the Vietnam War at that point. but certainly by the time Johnson has succeeded Kennedy after his assassination and after the Gulf of Tonkin and things start to escalate, particularly as you move into the 65 to 67 period, Johnson's putting serious pressure on British politicians and particularly as he was dealing with Harold Wilson. And famously, Lyndon Johnson is incredibly persuasive, right?

32:15Fraser McCallum:Almost bullying the Johnson treatment a real factor in his how he treats you know other folks in American politics and he doesn't quite do the same with Wilson but he is on at him all the time on the telephone, he's even asking just to send you know like a military band it's not so much that he wants British firepower he wants the perception of a broader coalition and of course you know the Australians for example send quite a lot of troops in Australia the Vietnam War is a pretty significant conflict in their military history and you know again part of the commonwealth so there's a link there but but wilson i mean you could do a whole series of episodes on wilson and the cold war i mean guys obviously accused of being a suspected of being a soviet spy by people there's all sorts of scurrilous rumors around him but he's a really savvy politician and he he really stands for him like he he resists consistently the pressure and I say the pressure from Johnson is intense and he's very good at applying pressure but Wilson resists and keeps Britain out of Vietnam which is probably one of his sort of defining part of his legacy really that doesn't mean that Britain isn't impacted by the Vietnam War clearly later on you know we're all we're all aware of the cultural stuff that goes around there and the Vietnam War you know something a lot of people in Britain are interested in but at the time there's huge demonstrations in Grosvenor Square in fact beyond demonstrations they've become riots and it's all tied up with the student movements and the peace movements that are around the world and around Europe at the time it's the same time that's happening there's things going on in Prague and in Paris and all these things a really great book called 1968 by an author called Mark Kurlansky it's out a few years ago hopefully it's still in print which really demonstrates the global nature of this protest movement but Britain absolutely sees pretty violent reactions to the Vietnam War in London, despite the fact we're never in.

34:22Ian Sanders:And that sort of... When you're 7-Eleven's hottest fire chicken sandwich, people think you're intense. Well, yeah, I'm hot! Oh, yeah, intense.

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35:18Fraser McCallum:So CND, again, that CND logo that I'm sure everyone can just picture in their head that is based on a semaphore signs for CND, is a British invention again. The CND logo is designed by a British artist called Gerald Holtham, which he allows free use of. I mean, he could have made a fortune off a license in it, but he's obviously a much better person than most of us. The CND campaign comes out the late 1950s. A lot of celebrity activists, Bertrand Russell and actors and various other people involved in it. But it becomes this mass movement and they do these marches that go from London to Aldermaston and then eventually reverse them.

36:07Fraser McCallum:These huge marches every Easter, they become these kind of cultural events and they diminish through time a little bit as the perception of the nuclear threat fades. but the influence of CND lasts all the way through the Cold War and you end up with sort of the Greenham Common protests in the 1980s in particular around the American bases in England which have become these iconic moments because they're really heavily photographed and the key thing about them is that 98 % of the people there are women it's basically a women's movement so you see these women of all different backgrounds you see people you'd expect there right proper hippie women but you also see housewives and students and elderly people it's a real broad constituency of women protest and then the visuals of them in their everyday clothes doing you know chain link protests and holding hands and holding placards in front of these really remarkably frightening metal fences behind which sit, you know, weapons of devastation is a really powerful image and makes it really hard for people to criticize them because it's no longer, you know, Reds and Commies and Liberals and Lefties and Trade Unionists.

37:31Fraser McCallum:It's your mum, your gran, your sister. And it's really, really powerful. I was talking to somebody recently who had been a Royal Air Force police officer and he told me that at certain points there were American personnel, they had orders that if the perimeter was breached they were to open fire and these women would shake the fence and then the fence comes down and they start to make their way in and these RAF police officers managed to contain it but these women didn't know how, I mean they were really metres and seconds away from catastrophe and I didn't know that story until somebody told me in a conversation we had so lest it be thought that these people were just singing and chanting and making nice placards and doing it they were actually in real danger and their influence is huge people still talk about that generation we did an exhibition at the museum a few years ago about peace movements from the first world war up to the Iraq war but the bit that absolutely resonated the most was the Greenham Common stuff and I think it's largely due to again the type of folks that were doing it and the imagery that comes out of it there's a load of great anti-war art from that period I'm a huge fan of the artist Peter Kennard who does some incredibly powerful visual work that became posters and covers to protest magazines and you see on placards at demonstrations and he's still active today He's very active in protesting the conflict with Israel and Palestine at the moment.

39:08Fraser McCallum:But his Cold War stuff is incredibly powerful. So he'll take iconography and twist it. So he'll use a nuclear missile and shatter it through the CND logo. Or he takes real classic works of art and manipulates them to show the ridiculousness of nuclear conflict, but also the terror of it. one of the great pieces is the the protect and survive booklet which is a huge thing again for folks of a certain age like it's such an iconic booklet um he has a version of that an artwork called protect and survive which is essentially a skeleton reading the protect and survive booklet which is a booklet about how to protect yourself from a nuclear war which is a a kind of ridiculous piece of a government propaganda that that that artwork that kenard done really puts that in focus

39:56Ian Sanders:I produced a podcast for the Imperial War Museum on the women's peace movement a number of years back. I think it's still on the website somewhere. I'm sure there'll be people should check that out. I'll put a link to that. Now, there's also, you know, attempts with the Soviets to sort of project soft power within the UK. And I think one of the ones that I find really interesting is the visit of Yuri Gagarin to the UK. Now, from what I understand, he was invited by a trade union. So it's a private visit and the government thought, oh God, we're looking a bit out of step here. And eventually invited him to Downing Street and to see the royal family.

40:39Fraser McCallum:That's right. That's absolutely right. It's a very like, you know, the, you know, it's important to say the trade union movement of this period is not all communist, right? But it has an element in it that admires the Soviet Union. And they invite Gagarin over. and like you say the government are sort of a bit taken aback the thing is when Gagarin comes he attracts huge crowds he visits London and he visits Manchester and the the crowds you go into see were massive and he's beloved and the thing with Gagarin is already at this point you know we're depicting this really cold Soviet bloc you know the images of Stalin and people like that and Grun Khrushchev but Gagarin comes and he's incredibly charming.

41:24Fraser McCallum:He's very, very handsome, dressed perfectly in his military uniform. He has this great smile. All the boys and the crowd want to be him. They all want to go to space because this is the greatest, coolest thing that's ever happened, right? This amazing technological achievement. They don't see it as an ideological struggle and the women are just swooning at me. He looks like a movie star. And see, he's very humble and he has a kindly face and he makes a huge impact and it's one of those little moments in time you look back and go that's a kind of sliding doors moment there could have been some kind of you know, element of early detente there but of course it doesn't happen the space race becomes massively politicised and fear but Gagarin's visit is one of those great ones there's other ones I mean the Edinburgh Festival invite Dmitry Shostakovich over which is a huge moment there's a real boom in Russian literature in the early 60s.

42:22Fraser McCallum:People, you know, not discovering for the first time, but rediscovering Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and these kind of authors. So it's an interesting sort of Russian culture. But it goes way back to 1945 when, of course, we're still allies. And, you know, there's obviously tensions, but, you know, the British public view the Soviets really favorably. And as part of that, the Russian football champions Dynamo Moscow are invited over for a tour and they come and they play Chelsea first of all at Stamford Bridge and there's like 100 ,000 people there's photographs of folks sat on the roof of the stadium and it's a really interesting game because they come and they give flowers to the Chelsea players which is very un-English football and of course a bit of a great mind England claims to be the home of football those of us in the know it's actually Scotland but that's a different discussion for another It's another podcast.

43:17Fraser McCallum:Yeah, don't worry. If you ever see me in the street, I will bore you to death with that one. But England, as seen as the home of football, they're very keen to come and play. And they play Chelsea in the first game. And the Russians play this lovely passing football, very different to the English style of the time. And they make this great impression. They then go to Cardiff and they play Cardiff, who are a division below. And there's a whole trade union thing here. And there's a workers thing going on. but then they go and play Cardiff and they beat them 10-1 and it's seen as very unsporting and things start to turn a little bit.

43:51Fraser McCallum:They then play at Arsenal. Now Arsenal, the team they really wanted to play, like Arsenal were the big team of the time, the Manchester United or the Liverpool or dare they say it, the Arsenal of that time, the club they really wanted to play. But they have to play at White Hart Lane, which was Tottenham Hotspur's ground, Arsenal's great North London rivals, because Highbury is still requisitioned by the army and this game is horrific. firstly it's played in thick fog it's pretty violent at one point the Arsenal goalkeeper is knocked out and has to go off and there are no substitutes in these days so they call out for someone to come on and play in his place and fortunately enough the Queen's Park Rangers goalkeeper is in the crowd and he comes out and plays but there's penalties, there's red cards it finishes 4-3 it's very bad tempered and by this point the media have started to turn they play one more match in Glasgow against Glasgow Rangers, which seems to go off without a hitch, but there's plans for a final game against a kind of England select, and that's abandoned, and they go back.

44:54Fraser McCallum:And by the time they go back, there's an air of suspicion around how the Soviets have behaved, how they behave on the pitch, how they behave off the pitch. You know, there's loads more to this story, but it's a real, like, crossroads moment. And actually, to come back to something we were talking about earlier, it's when George Orwell writes another one of these op-eds, and basically decries, he basically says that international sport is a bad thing because it, you know, elicits terrible feelings. And it's where he comes up with the phrase that sport, and in this case football, is war minus the shooting, which again is another phrase that's lasted for a long time.

45:29Fraser McCallum:But that's the first kind of attempt to use soft power. It doesn't really work out, but they return to this time and again. Because there's a lot of interest in Britain.

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46:08Fraser McCallum:The Soviet Union ends up probably with the great moment where they write in the Soviet newspaper that Margaret Thatcher, they call her Die on Lady which they meant as an insult and of course Thatcher did not treat it as an insult and turned into her entire political brand. So we, you know, have the Soviets to thank for that as well. But there's all these interactions on a level below the political or the military.

46:33Ian Sanders:But there's these cultural exchanges going on all the time. I mean, we're sending people from the Royal Shakespeare Company to the the Soviet Union and I think there's that famous there's a play where Guy Burgess one of the Cambridge Five gets into the dressing room of Coral Brown that's right yeah and there's a play or a film about that what that meeting might have been yeah I've never seen it I'm aware of it I'd

47:00Fraser McCallum:like to try and find find you know I don't know if they filmed it or not and try and find that out but I mean the most probably the most famous one is the Bolshoi Ballet come to London in 1956 and it's a huge event and the Queen attends and Princess Margaret attends and it's you know it's the hot ticket in town but of course well the Bolshoi Ballet are I think just as they leave London the Soviet tanks roll into Budapest and it's again one of those great sort of dichotomy moments it's like another one of those points we think well feels like there's progress to be made yearning it's all taken away in the blink of an eye yeah and it's also the same time when

47:37Ian Sanders:british paratroops are dropping into egypt which is exactly serious exactly yeah but um one of the sections i i enjoyed was when you got onto 80s music because that's my my period um you know you talk about uh frankie goes to hollywood and and two tribes which is a real iconic cold war piece of pop music because you've got the start of it you've got this this eerie voiceover of Patrick Allen, who had voiced the civil defence films that were going to be broadcast on British TV. And he's voicing some of the opening phrases of that with an air raid siren going in the background. I mean, it's a really haunting opening to a piece of music.

48:23Fraser McCallum:Yeah, it's really powerful. This is the 12-inch Annihilation remix. Now, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, people might not, you know people that are younger won't appreciate how massive they were i mean they're the biggest pop act of the day and that album welcome to the pleasure dome is is huge relax of course this massive controversy so they're as big as it gets and they re-release uh two tribes like every few weeks with the new mix and it stays you know near the top of the charts it sells silly numbers every you know feels like everybody owns a copy the annihilation remix is the is the key one though because that's where they bring in this you know the core track is a is very clearly a two you know two tribes go to war is the the refrain but the annihilation remix really doubles down on this and brings in these things including the reagan impersonator as well and i'm not entirely sure but somebody once told me it was chris barry that did it i don't know how true that is i wouldn't want to be quoted on it but patrick allen as you see he had done the original civil defense films which are the precursor of the Protect and Survive booklet.

49:23And he was brought in, and he basically does it from memory,

49:26Fraser McCallum:although he changes it ever so slightly because he'd signed the Official Secrets Act and he's obviously very worried that he's going to end up prosecuted. But he does it from memory. That's one of the reasons he does it from memory, so he can alter it a little bit. And it's really powerful. And then, of course, the video is impersonators of Reagan and the Soviet premier in a sumo ring, a wrestling ring. It's very, very funny. but the the annihilation track is um it's incredibly dark as those lines about you know if a member of your family should die put them outside tag but don't forget to tag them for identification purposes all these really dark things but at the same time it's this like dance floor banger you know it's like a great a great dance track with that trevor horn hook through it so it's really interesting but the other thing is like there are so many of the kind the big acts of the day are reflecting on the Cold War.

50:17Fraser McCallum:Now, in the United States, you've got all this great music in the 60s and the early 70s that are reflecting on Vietnam, for example. We don't have that in the same way. There's songs like We Gotta Go Out This Place by The Animals, who are obviously a Newcastle band, very much an English band, but they aren't really looking at America. By the time you get to the 80s, though, there's a lot of these great acts from Britain are reflecting on the Cold War, and particularly the renewed fears around nuclear war that come in that period of Reagan and Thatcher and the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union. So you've got Queen, U2, admittedly not a British band, although British Isles certainly.

50:56Fraser McCallum:Kate Bush has a great track, Sting's doing a track called Russians. Sometimes if you go into academia and they'll talk about music and things and it'll be stuff that is fairly obscure and has taken on a greater residence. this is as mainstream as it gets at the time charting high and you know the other great one of course is a german one but it's huge in britain that's the key thing the book is all about britain and i know this is a german group but nina's 99 luff balloons or 99 red balloons is a massive hit in britain i think that's the way it sells the most records so and it's a huge hit all over the world but in britain especially but you know this is like you're talking number one top of the pops as mainstream as it gets.

51:38Ian Sanders:Now, we can't talk about the British experience of the Cold War without mentioning The War Game and Threads, two unbelievably disturbing films for their time and still very haunting if you watch them now.

51:54Fraser McCallum:Yeah, and I believe certainly Threads is on BBC iPlayer for the foreseeable future. I don't know about The War Game, although they did recently re-show it. The War Game is a film by a great filmmaker called Peter Watkins, who made his name with another brilliant film called Culloden, which is a really innovative approach to covering an 18th century battle, as if it's happening live with news footage. And it's really worth checking out. That's a huge success, critically acclaimed, very popular, wins loads of awards. So he essentially gets almost a blank check to do whatever he wants to do next.

52:28Fraser McCallum:And he wants to make a film about nuclear war. and he develops this pseudo documentary called The War Game which is made in 1964 and then is due for release and the BBC shelve it is too disturbing. It does play at the what is now the BFI the National Film Theatre and it does play in America in the festival circuit and actually wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature although again it's not really a documentary.

52:57Ian Sanders:And C &D groups have it as well. They do. So they're showing it at meetings. And that's when I first saw it. I went along and...

53:05Fraser McCallum:So it has this afterlife, despite being officially shelved. And if you go to the archives on this, the correspondence on it is amazing. The internal debates from the BBC. There are a lot of people at the BBC really want it shown, but absolutely there's no chance it's going to happen. So it lives on in limited circles, and people are aware of it. And it's this great what-if. and it actually shows 20 years later around the same time that the BBC have brought out at the same time BBC have made their next kind of nuclear apocalyptic film which is Threads now Threads is for my money the most frightening film I've ever seen it's incredibly realistic it's set in and shot in Sheffield the actors don't feel like actors, it's incredibly naturalistic, it looks like a cross between kind of kitchen sink dramas and eastenders and coronation street and i don't mean that to belittle it i mean it feels like everyday life and it's incredibly terrifying i don't want to get into the details because i really want people who haven't seen it to watch it although watch it during the day and maybe watch a disney something after it to reset yourself a little bit but it's incredibly powerful and it plays as part of a season around the anniversary of, well it plays and it plays again, it's part of the season around the dropping of the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, that would be the 40th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb alongside the war game, it's like I can't remember if it's consecutive nights but together, and it has a huge impact, now I'm not entirely sure the viewing figures but they're pretty big, I mean by modern standards they're huge, but it's still a relatively niche thing, and it's not shown again very often, I think it's only shown another sort of two or three times in the in the next 20, 25 years and say now it exists on, you know, Blu-ray and you can stream it on BBC iPlayer.

55:00Fraser McCallum:But it held this, you know, but the people that saw it were so badly frightened by it that it kind of has another relaunch of the anti-nuclear movement. It's safe to say it's not a date movie, that one. And of course the other one is When the Wind Blows, the adaptation of the Raymond Briggs kind of graphic novel or comic strip. which is an animated film. So, you know, I mean, I had a short time working in a shop that sold records and DVDs and things. And I do remember seeing a little kid picking it up and the grandmother unaware of what it was. Oh, we'll get you that one. And I'm like diving, like Kevin Costner and the bodyguard to knock it out of the hand going, don't do it.

55:45Fraser McCallum:Because it's a particularly, you know, grim and really moving. It's very moving. And again, it's soundtracked by David Bowie and Roger Waters. I mean huge huge names but those three really always make a kind of trilogy but certainly the war game and threads are ones to I mean you must see must see stuff I think I might

56:04Ian Sanders:still have it actually I had a compilation album called War in the European Theatre and it was made in the 80s and it was loads of bands with nuclear war apocalyptic themed songs so you had Going Underground there might have been a Nola Gay on there The Stranglers it was a it was a really really interesting album and some great you know some great songs

56:30Fraser McCallum:you've touched on it there I mean these are songs people like Humming the Car right you know Going Underground by The Jam and London Con by The Clash I mean these are like totemic that was on there you know and they all even if you don't know it they're all touching on Nuclear War the one I always come back to is Ghost Town by The Specials which has been claimed by multiple different you know lots of different interpretations around that but to me when I listen to it, it's very much a kind of post-apocalyptic thing. I'm going to plug a little bit. I did do a playlist for the book, which you can find on Apple Music and Spotify, which goes through a lot of these songs that either are in the book or touch on the themes of it, which was a little bit of a personal indulgence, to be honest, because it was great fun to do.

57:12Fraser McCallum:But it gives you a flavour of some of these things.

57:14Ian Sanders:We'll definitely link to that. We'll definitely link to that. The book is called Cold War Britain, 50 Years in the Shadow of the Bomb. It's published by Collins. And you've been listening to Fraser McCullen. We have only scratched the surface of the book here. There's loads more detail in it. I really enjoyed it. And if you want to buy it, there'll be links in the episode information, which will help to support the podcast. Thank you, Fraser, for coming on Cold War Conversations.

57:44Fraser McCallum:No, thank you for having me. It's real good fun.

57:46Ian Sanders:the episode extras such as videos photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information the podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and i'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road the cold war conversation continues in our facebook discussion group just search for cold war conversations in facebook thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week.