Banky's 'Dismaland' and the Paris climate agreement

0:00Imagine being here. Scientists have made the atomic bomb. The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning. Here. During the meeting, Mr. Mandela was informed of the government's decision regarding his release. And here. Witnesses have spoken of a wall of water that swept coastlines in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand. Hear from the people who were there. He heard me praying while he was shooting and he just stopped. He said, I'm not going to. I'm going to leave you here to tell the story. Knowing that you have a spy and that you're following a spy, it doesn't get any cooler than that. Witness History brings you first-hand accounts.

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1:00Hello and welcome to the History Hour with me, Max Pearson. History as told by the people who were there. Coming up, Dismaland, the story of the artist Banksy's dystopian theme park. Also, one of the greatest discoveries of the last century, the coelacanth, a fish thought to be extinct, and our ancestor. When the specimen came in and I found it to be something unique, I strove to do all I could to preserve it. The specimen weighed 127 pounds. Plus the trauma thrown up by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the 1975 IRA Balkan Street siege in London. This is Scott's restaurant in Mayfair, the scene of a Chicago-style shooting.

1:41A dark Ford Cortino motor car drove by and an automatic weapon put two bullet holes through these windows. And tension at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015. Whoever was holding the pen changed the word. No one said anything, and it went to print and to distribution for the next day. But first, the opposite of fun. This is from 2015, when the publicity-shy street artist known as Banksy turned a derelict site in the west of England into a dystopian theme park. Dismaland, a bemusement park, offered a satirical twist on mainstream resorts. Reena Stanton-Sharma has been hearing from someone whose job it was to remain dismal in Dismaland.

2:25Welcome to Dismaland. Enjoy. Please have that bit of the ticket ready to be scanned. Every day, 4 ,000 came with tickets booked online. 500 more queued in all weathers for walk-up admission. A lady last week flew in from Japan. She spent over 12 hours on her flight, landed at Heathrow, then got a taxi from Heathrow down to here, which cost her several hundred pounds. She queued in the rain for six hours, got absolutely drenched, went into the site for two hours, got a taxi back, flew home and said it was the best experience she'd ever had. That experience was Banksy's Dismore Land, the street artist's satirical take on the amusement park.

3:07It was built on the dilapidated site of Western Supermare's Tropicana Lido, which enjoyed its heyday back in the 60s and was left to fall into disrepair when it closed in 2000. As a child, Banksy is said to have visited the seaside town in the west of England. He's best known for his spray-painted stencil designs on the sides of buildings. Once in a lifetime, isn't it? Yeah. It's Western Supermire. There hasn't been anything here for ages. Yeah, it's the Tropicana. They're finally doing something with it. Were we really, really excited? It was a bit surreal. Not even that I was a part of it, but for a month and a bit, the eyes of the world were on Western Supermare, the tiny seaside town which I'm from, which doesn't have the best reputation.

3:54Being able to work at this smaller hand was a big honour, really, a life-changing opportunity just to do something different I never thought I'd be able to do. I always think fondly of my time there and the fun I had. That's Curtis Young, who was 21, when he unknowingly signed up to become a steward, believing that he was going to be an extra in a movie. Dismal Land was constructed at night and locals were led to believe it was a film set for a Hollywood thriller. When Curtis was finally told that he wasn't going to be starring in a movie, he had to sign an NDA, ensuring the elusive artist's secret project didn't get out.

4:34After three days of training and acting lessons on staying miserable, His job was to provide a gloomy experience to visitors as a parody on consumer culture. Smiling and being too friendly was a sackable offence at this small land. If you were seen to be being too friendly, you were unfortunately let go. Walking through their doors for the first time, smelling the sea air, smell of candy floss being made. Just looking around this derelict pool, the Tropicana, and what they had done to it with all the installations. Many of them making you think, really, at the time the horse meat scandal was going on and they had a carousel with a little horse hanging from the top with a butcher in front of it.

5:18Also an installation that's still very relevant today, the refugee boats behind the backdrop of the White Cliffs of Dover. There's little remote control boats and you can either control the refugee boats or the force boats. But yeah, even today it's still very culturally relevant to what's happening in our country and the wider world. Every piece was made in a way to make you think, make you step back. It is beautiful art, but it's also got a message to it as well if you stand there and look at it and really think about it. And installations on climate change, war and surveillance did get people thinking.

5:53Tickets cost just£3, that's about$4, and fans scrambled to buy them, crashing the website in the process. Touts even seized the opportunity to make some quick cash, selling tickets for as much as£600 a pair, according to news reports. And Hollywood A-listers even wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. They also had Brad Pitt come on down for a special showing. They closed the park specifically for him. Neil Patrick Harris as well. So yeah, it really did interest a lot of people. And do you have any mementos from your experience? The Dismal Stewards were dressed in a pink high-vis vest with Dismal on the back and a pair of metal Mickey Mouse-style ears made of two paint can lids.

6:38So I was fortunate enough to take some of them home, although I shouldn't have really, but I was told just go for it anyway. I wonder how much they'd be worth now. Yeah, they're worth quite a lot of money. Stewards like Curtis were dotted around Dismaland and one of the jobs was to carry out security checks. So as soon as you walk in, you're greeted by this airport security-style art installation where you're patted down, basically, you're shouted at, you're asked if you've got anything you shouldn't have on you. It was, yeah, black and white cardboard. It's very jarring because it's the first thing you walk into.

7:12It's clinical, dark, dismal. I really wanted to have a go at that one. Because of the way I looked at the time, I had my long hair. I'm a smaller man. I was told by the organisers that I didn't really fit what they were looking for. I wasn't intimidating enough to be an airport security guard. The funny thing is, a couple of years after, I was an airport security guard for real for five years. Over the five weeks it was open, Curtis would get up to mischief by kicking over children's sandcastles, cheating at fairground games and generally causing chaos. This was how a reporter described the dystopian attraction.

7:48This is Dismal Bemusement Park. It looks dilapidated and it's very thought-provoking. So a slightly darker feeling carousel. And as you walk around, there are images everywhere, sculptures, pieces of artwork. This is one of the 10 Banksy's here on this site. A woman covered in seagulls fighting them off, with one just looking at her from the top of the bench. Other artists also displayed subversive and controversial works. Installations included a fire-ravaged castle, a riot police van half submerged in a lake and an upturned Cinderella's pumpkin. Inside the castle, it was a play on the Princess Diana incident with Cinderella's carriage having crashed and Cinderella just hanging over the door of the carriage.

8:40And in front of her were just a number of paparazzi taking pictures. The installation itself was like flash. So yeah, it was just a play on the Diana incident. And I think that was just one of the examples of how you're like, yeah, this is impressive, this is a really good piece of art, but then when you sit back and think and join the dots together, basically, it really does make you think about the world we live in. Here are some of the 150 ,000 people who managed to secure a coveted ticket. It was rather offset by the three-and-a-half-hour wait in the queue, and I've run out of time, so I'm only in half an hour.

9:12But no, I enjoyed it. There's some really odd things going on in there. It's just nice to go somewhere you have to think about things and put the clues together. And it's obviously taken a huge amount of hours of work. Some of the detail in there is just incredible. How they did it all under the cover was just amazing. It's kind of like not what you expect at all, even though you've heard a lot about it. There's so much to do, and the staff are hilarious. Even though he's huge in the art world, and his work sells for millions, Banks' identity remains, officially at least, unknown. A lot of us did notice this certain man wondering about, paying very close attention to what was going on, often moving things around and just working on things.

9:54Very friendly, but not there to have a conversation with you, not there to socialise, just there to do the job. And, yeah, a lot of us did think maybe that's the man himself. Did you speak to him? I smiled at him on occasion, walking past each other, like, hello, how are you? But, yeah, no conversation was had. Not only were you part of his vision, you also believed that you'd met him. That's quite a claim to fame, isn't it? Yeah, and I think I'm very lucky to have maybe have met him, and it's not something I go about bragging about, and I don't like to reveal too much about how he was. That was Curtis Young, one of the employees at Banksy's dystopian theme park Dismaland in 2015.

10:33He was talking to Rena Stanton-Sharma. During its brief existence, Dismaland sold thousands of tickets daily and injected an estimated£20 million, or more than$26 million, into the local economy, which begs the question, is there money in misery? Megan McCausland is a roller coaster enthusiast from the European Coaster Club, which takes a particular interest in theme parks and the rides they offer. Welcome, Megan. So are there other dystopian amusement parks around the world? Absolutely. I would say you really don't get more dystopian than the amusement park in Pripyat in Ukraine, Pripyat being the city that was built to house the workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

11:18It never opened. It was due to open on May the 1st, 1986. And the accident happened on April the 26th. This place has just stood motionless ever since then. So the theme park stands as a monument, if you like, to what happened. And it's still visited today, isn't it? I think they call it extreme tourism because, of course, you know, you think going to Chernobyl, you think radiation levels, is it safe? But it's just, it's so creepy. For example, the dodgems, usually you have a roof over them. And all that's left of the roof is just the skeleton, the framework that would have held the canopy over top of the ride.

12:02And you have, you know, the Ferris wheel, these cars just rusting away. There's a paratrooper. It's all motionless. The wood is rotting. The metal is rusty. Theme parks around the world are famous for the rides that they offer people as well. And, of course, we've got bigger and better, more scary roller coaster rides all over the world these days. But this is a history show. So let's go back to where did the idea of putting people on rides to make them scared come from? The idea of roller coasters is believed to have originated in Russia back in the 17th and 18th centuries, where people would build ice slides and people would just go up and slide down these things.

12:51What about what you might call the first modern roller coaster with cars on wheels going up and down tracks that were supposed to be, well, scary? So the first generally accepted roller coaster, modern roller coaster, would be what was called the Switchback Railway at Coney Island in 1884. And that was a ride in which people sat on a bench-like seat and they coasted down hills. As technology improved and people had a better understanding of how these rides operated, it took over naturally where you'd have designers trying to one-up each other. And the result is, well, what you have now. I mean, there's dozens of ride manufacturers and so many different types of rides and roller coasters.

13:45And some of the theme parks that have emerged are truly strange. So just describe a couple of them that are just basically odd. Yes. For example, there's a park in Italy where that started off as a restaurant and the owner realized that he really enjoyed welding. And many years later, he basically has the coolest backyard of all time with a bunch of homemade human powered rides. There's a park in Japan called Yomiuri Land, and they have what might be the most random and yet so creative water ride out there in that it's a boat ride themed to a ramen noodle factory. And so you're in this little raft and you're floating through a place where there's, you know, you have the noodle conveyor belt and there's displays of noodles and a giant tea kettle with boiling water.

14:40And now there are some truly weird ones in various places around the world. And let me put it to you, people like you who travel long distances to go and try them. What's the furthest that you've been to do a ride? There's no place that would be too far. I have been all over the world. The most recent, I went to South Africa and Botswana for a weekend, which coming from Dublin, Ireland, no traveling all that distance. It's a 10 and a half, 11 hour flight for just a weekend. Sounds absolutely mad. We went there specifically to ride this roller coaster at a place called Lion Park Resort. It's a roller coaster that traveled around the UK for many years before being, I suppose you could say, retired from the European market.

15:31And this place in Botswana took it. And it's a great ride. It's a fantastic ride. That's Megan McCausland, roller coaster enthusiast from the European Coaster Club. In the broadest possible sweep of history, evolutions and extinctions are perhaps the most pertinent stories. How did we get here, and what went before? Every now and then a discovery is made which sheds light on those questions. So it was in 1938, when a South African museum curator called Marjorie Courtney Latimer discovered the coelacanth, a fish that was believed to have been extinct for 65 million years. Rachel Naylor has been listening through the BBC archives to tell the story.

16:13Of all the tales of life on earth, there is one more fabulous than all the others. The story of how we got our legs. Scientists believe that long ago a fish came onto the land, grew legs and started to walk. It is one of the most crucial events in the history of life because that animal is our ancestor. But how and why that fish grew legs is one of the biggest mysteries in evolution. It baffled the finest minds in science for over a century. That is, until 1938. The curator of the East London Museum on South Africa's southeast coast was idly sifting through a fisherman's catch when she spotted something unusual, as she told the BBC in 2001.

17:0322nd of December 1938 was a wonderful day. I came onto this most beautiful fish. It was just on five foot. It was silver and gold and green and blue and had white kind of flecks on it. And to my horror, it had these limb-like fins. And I thought to myself, what on earth can this be? I've never seen a fish like this. That's Marjorie Courtney Latimer. She rushed the 1.5 metre long fish off to have it preserved. Then she wrote to JLB Smith, an ichthyologist or fish biologist, to ask him to come and identify it. Here's the letter, which was voiced by an actor for the BBC in 2018. Dear Dr Smith, I had the most queer-looking specimen brought to notice yesterday.

17:58It is coated in heavy scales, almost armour-like, the fins resemble limbs, and are scaled right up to a fringe of filament. The spinous dorsal has tiny white spines down each filament. Note drawing inked in red. Marjorie went on to describe how she picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish she had ever seen. But this was just before Christmas. It was more than a week before JLB picked up her letter. He sent back a telegram immediately on the 3rd of January 1939, saying simply, Most important preserved skeleton and gills equals fish described. This was the summer in South Africa, and without refrigeration, Marjorie had to preserve the fish by stuffing it, as she explained in another letter.

18:42Dear Dr. Smith, when the specimen came in and I found it to be something unique, I strived to do all I could to preserve it. The specimen weighed£127 and was in good condition, only it was very hot and work had to proceed at once. I have done every possible thing to preserve and not lose any points and feel worried to think in the end I allowed the body and gills to be discarded. Kind regards. Sincere yours. Marjorie Courtney Letimer. JLB was astounded. He wrote back, From your drawing and description, the fish resembles forms which have been extinct for many a long year. I feel it must be of great scientific value.

19:25A month later, in February, J.R.B. was able to visit East London and see it for himself. Here's Marjorie again. He stood at the head of the table and he said, well, lass, this fish will be on the lips of every scientist in the world. It's a silicate. I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was not a shadow of a doubt, scale by scale, bone by bone, fin by fin. It was a true coelacanth. J.L.B. recalled in his 1956 book Old Four Legs. He named the fish Latimeria chalumnai after Marjorie Courtney Latimer and its place of capture, the mouth of the Chalumna River. Coelacanths are elusive creatures that live in depths up to 700 metres below the surface, and they were around 410 million years ago.

20:14They can be huge, up to two metres long, and weigh up to 90 kilograms. The story of this living fossil fish, with its paired lobe fins that move in an alternating pattern like legs, made headlines around the world. Meet Professor Smith of Grahamstown, South Africa, with a model of that famous fish, the coelacanth. Coelacanths are close relatives of the fish that scientists consider as the ancestors of all land animals. I have no doubt that this fish crawls about on the bottom quite easily. Yes, the professor says the fish is a kind of ancestor of man. Poor fish. But JLB knew he would have to find another one to prove it.

20:55He looked for 13 years, until in 1952... It is my astounding privilege to announce to the world the discovery of a second coelacan. The fish was thought so important that a military aircraft was dispatched to retrieve it. JLB flew from Durban, a city on the east coast, to the Comoro Islands off Madagascar, as he told the South African Broadcasting Corporation in 1953. And down we went. We landed. I said, where's the fish? There on the deck, swaled in cotton wool, was the fish. I could not bring myself to touch it. And I asked them to open it, and they did. and I knelt down to look and I'm not ashamed to say that after all that long strain I wept for it was true it was a coelacanth another coelacanth it was more than worth all that long strain he went on to describe how it was caught a lion fisherman armoured Hussian at the village of Dilmoney on the island of Anjuan was fishing in 20 metres of water about 200 yards from shore and caught a large fish on the evening of the 20th of December 1952.

22:15He took it home fortunately did not clean it and next morning took it to the market. As the fish was being sold a native came up, looked at it and said urgently don't sell that and showed the paper there is much money. He ordered the natives to make cuts to put in salt, and most unfortunately they sliced it open all along the body, but no part was lost, and then they covered it with a heap of salt. And so there was the fish, smelly, but the soft parts all there and in good order. Hastily we completed our formalities with no French politeness. I sent cables to my wife and the Prime Minister, and we left at 10 a.m.

23:00and set off down south with the coelacanth and its smell and away from the heat. I was terribly thankful to be in my own country with that fish. The professor unpacked his antique treasure before South Africa's Prime Minister, Dr Malan, who had placed a plane at his disposal to collect the fish before decomposition set in. The coelacanth, thought to have become extinct about 50 million years ago, is described as a fish with arms and may prove to be the link between man and his sea ancestors. If so, we were once a pretty kettle of fish. 20 years later, in 1972, British biologist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough was making a series about the story of life on Earth.

23:44He headed to the Comoros in search of the coelacanth with underwater photographer Peter Schoons. A fisherman had just arrived in the harbour with a coelacanth in his canoe and it was still alive. Peter grabbed his film camera, rushed down to the harbour and persuaded the fisherman to put his coelacanth back in the water. It was not long for this life. Groggily, it drifted along the bottom with feeble waves of its fleshy fins while Peter swam all around it with his cameras. So the first pictures ever taken of a living coelacanth appeared in our programme. The inimitable David Attenborough ending Rachel Naylor's telling of the story of the coelacanth, the so-called living fossil.

24:28Still to come, the tense negotiations over the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, plus a couple taken hostage during a six-day IRA siege in London. This is Scott's restaurant in Mayfair, the scene of a Chicago-style shooting. A dark Ford Cortina motor car drove by and an automatic weapon put two bullet holes through these windows. But first, a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa. Following the end of apartheid in the 1990s, the country had to find a way to confront its brutal past without endangering the chance for peace. In 2018, Rebecca Kesby heard from a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a warning, some of the testimony includes descriptions of violence and torture.

25:13The service to mark the start of the Commission's work is in keeping with the spiritual tone set by Archbishop Tutu. We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past, to lay the ghosts of that past so that they will not return to haunt us. Opening in April 1996 with a religious ceremony led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would hear thousands of hours of testimony over the next two years from victims and perpetrators of human rights violations. I did terrible things. I did terrible things to members of the ANC. Do you remember saying to me that you are able to treat me like an animal?

25:57They put a stick behind your knees and you were hung upside down. Once this was happening, you were suffocating. Open to the public, hundreds of hearings were conducted in town halls, churches and schools across South Africa. It was a most ambitious undertaking and a personal challenge for many involved. As commissioners, we understood that our function was to try and bring people together. But it was a very difficult thing to do as a lawyer because I am black and had myself been a victim of the apartheid regime. Justice Sisi Kampepe now sits as a judge at the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

26:43In 1996, she served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was divided into three categories. One dealt with the recording of abuse, one with the issue of reparations and rehabilitation, And the third was the most controversial of all, the Amnesty Committee, which pardoned perpetrators of human rights violations committed under the apartheid years if they confessed in full detail to the crime. Sisi Campepe sat on the Amnesty Committee. Sitting in that committee was the most difficult because I think victims did not relate to the functions of the committee because people could not understand how perpetrators could be forgiven merely by disclosing the truth.

27:32The granting of amnesty is still controversial even in today's conversation about the legacy of the Truth Commission. The hearings were broadcast on radio and television in all of South Africa's national languages, But as graphic and distressing details of the truth about apartheid were exposed, the far harder challenge of reconciliation remained. I was beaten up. He took my genitals. He squeezed, squeezed my genitals. What are we doing here? The truth, yes, but how on earth are we going to be reconciled? These hearings provide a forum for those who have been treated in the past as if they were rubbish.

28:27Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a priest and in a way it's his job, isn't it, to forgive people no matter how awful the crime. You're a lawyer. Your job is to lock up bad guys. How did you handle all of that on a personal level? Amnesty did not require anyone to apologize for the acts which they had committed. Though there were occasions when people who applied for amnesty did say sorry, those were few and far in between. As a member of the amnesty committee, I had to decide that these people had to be granted amnesty, not because they were apologetic, but merely because they disclosed the truth. That was really difficult.

29:16There was no other way other than to eliminate these people. When you're talking about elimination, you mean to kill them. That is correct. Of all the terrible evidence Sisi Campepe heard, one case in particular stays in her mind. An horrific example of the very worst of the torture some people suffered. There was an activist who was tied onto the tree upside down with his head almost touching the ground. And what they did was then to make fire. The fire roasted her head all the time while she was still alive. That one human being could treat another in such an inhumane was unthinkable to me.