Dancing in the Street and Ai Weiwei

27:37My wife and I actually darted him and mobilised him and put a collar on him. So that was the kind of first time I sort of had hands on the animal. He kind of lived in an area where there's a lot of photographic tourism and safari guides drive around in their vehicles and they show their guests lions. And so he was living in that area and he got really used to the sort of photographic vehicles and the people. And so he was actually really relaxed around vehicles. That ease around humans is later thought to contribute to the lion's death. In July 2015, Professor Loveridge is on holiday on the other side of Zimbabwe when a member of his team tells him Cecil is dead.

28:17Cecil was the star attraction of the Hwangi National Park, an iconic and rare black-maned lion. But this week Cecil's carcass was discovered skinned and headless. Conservationists say Cecil was baited into leaving the protected reserve by hunters who tied a dead animal to the back of a truck, luring the line to a neighbouring farm. The hunters had a bait. I think it was an elephant carcass. And so when Cecil started feeding, they were waiting there and the hunter had a bow. So it was a bow hunt and they shot Cecil. He was wounded, was at night. He ran away. Obviously they lost him. And he only died about eight hours later actually.

29:00I mean I think it's pretty horrific to think of anything suffering for 8 hours, especially with a kind of catastrophic arrow wound. So yeah I think you feel very bad about that kind of thing for sure. And yeah knowing the animal I guess you know you do you get very emotional about that kind of thing. I think most trophy hunts are fairly humane if you can put it that way and fairly quick. So this was probably quite unusual in the fact that the animal suffered for a long time.

29:30Zimbabwean officials say Walter Palmer paid$55 ,000 for a permit to kill a lion. A seasoned big game hunter, Palmer has travelled the world in pursuit of animal trophies. The media attention was huge. So once the kind of story was out there, I mean, my phone just didn't stop ringing for about a week. And people I'd never heard of before were trying to get a hold of me. So that was pretty disconcerting for me. I'm still a bit bemused as to why it did become worldwide news. It's a story that kind of grew from sort of local roots, was picked up by social media, I think, initially. And then was really amplified by, you know, sort of celebrities kind of getting involved, particularly a guy called Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show in the United States.

30:11And he ran a story on it. And that's sort of when it kind of exploded and really went viral. I'm not against hunting. If you're hunting to eat or to help keep the animal population healthy or it's part of your culture or something, that's one thing. But if you're some a-hole dentist who wants a lion's head over the fireplace in his man cave so his douchebag buddies can gather around it and drink scotch and tell him how awesome he is, that's just vomitous. This is that clip from the Jimmy Kimmel live show on ABC. If you want to make this into a positive, you can... Sorry. OK, I'm good. Make a donation to support them.

30:49At the very least, maybe we can show the world that not all Americans are like this jackhole here, this dentist, the top dentist. Their chants were impassioned. All your money, all your lies, we will never compromise. And full of purpose. Extradite Palmer. Protesters called for Walter Palmer to be extradited to Zimbabwe to face poaching charges and the killing of Cecil the Lion. This is just so he can slap a head on his wall. you know he beheaded the animal and skinned it they turned the parking lot of the dentist's office into a rally to revolt against the killing and to honor a lion beloved by many it's just sad and mean and wrong i think you know the sort of optics of a guy with a nice big white smile and you know a bow you know posing over an animal's body is certainly not something that um you know a lot of people are very comfortable with today the minnesota dentist defended his actions.

31:47I had no idea that the line I took was a known local favourite until the end of the hunt, he said. I relied on the expertise of my local professional guides to ensure a legal hunt. Officials confirm Walter Palmer will not be prosecuted as he had obtained the legal authority to hunt. A Zimbabwe court also rules that poaching charges levelled against the local guide were too vague to enable him to mount a proper defence. Amid calls for a ban on trophy hunting, airlines including South African, Emirates and American say they'll ban passengers from travelling with animal trophies such as elephant tusks and skins from tigers or lions.

32:29You have to understand that at the root of this is that African countries are very poor. They have to pay for conservation of animals in the country, habitat in the country. and one of the ways they do that is through trophy hunting. So they generate revenue and that revenue is used to conserve actually vast areas of habitat. So there's about 1.2 million square kilometers of hunting area across Africa. That's five times the size of the United Kingdom and that harbors vast numbers of lions, elephants, all sorts of other species. So if you lost that habitat, those species would face extinction. So I think it's an important kind of tool in the sort of conservation toolbox from that point of view.

33:13But at the root of it is the need for these very, very poor African countries to pay for conservation. Cecil's story raises awareness of the fact that lion numbers are in decline. There's actually been a lot more support for conservation and conservation of lions since then. And so, for instance, there's a big fund called the Lion Recovery Fund that puts several million dollars into lion conservation every year. And that was started in 2016, probably as a result of the whole Cecil thing. So there's actually a lot more conservation funding available to conserve lions and other species. Professor Andrew Loveridge still studies lions in Zimbabwe.

33:55He's also written the book Lion-Hearted, the Life and Death of Cecil and the Future of Africa's Iconic Cats. He was speaking to Vicky Farncombe. Next, the origin of a phrase which has become a touchstone for debate in this age of climate change consciousness. For this, we're going back to 2008, when the slogan, Drill Baby Drill, much loved by President Donald Trump, was first coined. It wasn't a Trump original, and Marco Silva has been speaking to the American politician who first used it. It's the 3rd of September 2008. In St Paul, Minnesota, the Republican Party's national convention is in full swing.

34:38Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, takes the stage for a speech. Thank you. He wants to make the point that the US should produce its own energy and rely less on other countries. I started to speak and started to push and sort of excite the audience a little bit more. And then when we got to that line, let me make it very clear. Drill, baby, drill and drill now. It landed like a bomb going off in the room in a good way in terms of just amping up the energy. And people started chanting it. You could tell the look on my face was like, oh, snap. They like this. And then I started chanting with them a little bit.

35:25Yeah, I want to drill, baby, drill. All right, let's do that.

35:32Michael's one-liner had just entered the language of U.S. politics for good. But as he worked on his speech the night before, he never imagined the impact it would have. It's like two o 'clock in the morning. You know, I'm supposed to give this speech at the convention the next day. And I'm still writing it. And folks aren't too happy about that. Michael is stuck. He wants to make the point that the U.S. should not rely on foreign oil and gas and instead produce them at home. And he's looking for a catchy way to sum that up. So I'm getting to this part in the speech, and as I'm sitting there with an adult beverage, trying to figure out what should go there, it just struck me.

36:14I reread it over and over again, and it just naturally flowed out. Drill, baby, drill.

36:23In US politics, it's at national conventions that parties nominate their presidential candidates. Think of them as these big get-togethers where the great and the good of the party give televised speeches in support of their candidates. Folks knew who I was. I was a former elected official, been involved in a lot of the national politics in all 50 states. So then there were people who were pretty excited to know that I was speaking. I can see we're ready to party in this house tonight. So I'm kind of looking out over the crowd and there's a main camera with a teleprompter in three spaces, but the one in the middle is really far back.

37:05So unless you've got really good eyes, you're trying not to squint. Tonight, my friends, we gather not as Republicans, but as Americans. As Michael works his way through his speech, trying not to squint, he gets to the section that kept him awake the previous night. Then let's reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil and promote oil and gas production at home. I didn't know, to be honest, did not know what the value of that would be until I said it. Drill, baby, drill, and drill now. And the hall erupted, and folks started chanting.

37:51After which you go back and everyone is like high-fiving after the speech, going, oh my God, that was amazing, and started greeting me with Drill Baby Drill. And so the funny part was I called up my assistant, and her first thing was, we got to put that on a t-shirt. And I'm like, okay, go do it. If you go online today, you'll find a broad range of garments bearing Michael's slogan. There's some pretty creative ways of using that phrase. From t-shirts to underwear. Though admittedly, that's not a business venture Michael ever got on board with.

38:30This thing just sort of took life of its own in that moment. And it just became the theme, not just for the rest of that evening, but for the rest of that convention. It was at that convention that Senator John McCain formally accepted the Republican Party's nomination as their presidential candidate for the 2008 election. His running mate, the then-Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, who took a liking to Michael's newly minted slogan. The chant is drill, baby, drill. And that's what we hear all across. It wasn't enough to sway voters. The Democrats won in the end. Barack Obama was elected. Governor Palin came by to visit and we had a good laugh about the campaign.

39:20And, you know, she just again congratulated me for giving the campaign that kind of energy. John McCain and I never really talked about it, although he did. The one time I saw him later on, he did smile at me and just say, drill, baby, drill. And that might have been the end of the story had it not been for one Donald J. Trump. We are going to, as I use this expression now, everyone else is using it, so I hate to use it, but drill, baby, drill. You know, he's going to take credit for stuff he didn't do because that's his M.O. After announcing that he's running for a second term as president, Donald Trump starts dropping the slogan in speeches, rallies and interviews.

40:01If elected president again, what is the first thing you would do to help bring down the cost to make things more affordable? Drill, baby, drill. I will end Kamala's war on American energy and we will drill, baby, drill. We're going to drill, baby, drill. What I'm saying is that we're going to immediately drill, baby, drill. We're going to get energy down. But Michael says Donald Trump doesn't quite get what his slogan was about. Donald Trump's use of that term misidentifies the moment. And that's because, according to Michael, the U.S. has changed since his calls back in 2008 for more domestic fossil fuel production.

40:44We have done the drilling. We are drilling and supplying a significant portion of our own oil needs and meeting those needs, we are far less relied on foreign sources of oil than we were 15 years ago. And we are now one of the leading producers of natural gas. We are exporting. You know, in this age now, as we're looking at where we are with our energy needs, the crises that we face with the environment. Maybe instead of drill, baby, drill, we should think, baby, think about what we do next and how we do it. It's not just the US president who's rediscovered drill, baby, drill. Around the world, other leaders have, let's say, adapted the slogan to fit their own policy choices.

41:40From French President Emmanuel Macron. Here there is no need to drill. It's just plug, baby plug. To the UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. I say build, baby build. Does Michael think his slogan will live on? I think it'll stand the test of time. I think, again, people will pick it up and use it for their own purposes, and that's fine. Leave a little bit behind, as they say, right? And so, you know, I guess I get to leave a little bit behind for people to go to the playground and have fun with.

42:18I saw something where Daddy had posted a picture of his kid playing in the backyard and he was looking for buried treasure. And he was like, drill, baby, drill. You know, this kid with the shovel full of dirt and dirt all over his face with the promise of finding gold in the backyard. I just enjoy the fact that people have fun with it. That's Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who now hosts a news show on MSNBC. He was speaking to Marco Silva. Now, each week on the History Hour, we go back in time. But for our final item this week, we're going back 40 years in the company of someone who made time travel a cultural phenomenon.

43:04Josephine McDermott has been speaking to Bob Gale, the American co-writer and producer of the film Back to the Future.

43:18In the summer of 1980, I was back in St. Louis, which is where I grew up, visiting my parents, and there had recently been a flood, and my father salvaged a bunch of stuff, and he threw it in a box, and he said, son, go through this and see if there's anything that's worth keeping. Among the things that were in there was his high school yearbook from 1940. Now, I went to the same high school that my dad had gone to. I'd never seen his high school yearbook, so I pulled this thing out and I said, oh, this would be cool. What did my high school look like back in 1940? and I'm thumbing through it and I discovered that my father was the president of his graduating class, something I had no idea about.

44:04And I'm looking at this picture of my dad and he's very, you know, proper and serious and all that. And I'm thinking about the president of my graduating class, who was a guy I would have nothing to do with, right? He was one of these school spirit rah-rah guys. No, no, no. So I thought, was my dad like that? If I'd gone to high school with my dad, would I have been friends with? And that was the bolt of lightning striking me, saying, that is a movie.

44:36But it will be another five years before cinema goers will see the famous bolt of lightning in the climax of Back to the Future, which sees Marty McFly, a high school student played by Michael J. Fox, accidentally sent 30 years into the past. Bob Gale had already written three films with Robert Zemeckis, so you might think getting this film made would be a formality. You know, the interesting thing about life, and Back to the Future seems to become more profound as the years go by, more profound than we thought. The interesting stories are not only about how do we make the movie, but how is it the movie almost didn't get made.

45:14We kept hearing that time travel movies don't make any money, which is a true statement in 1981. one. Bob Zemeckis and I had always kicked around doing some kind of a time travel story, but other than a title, which was Professor Brown Visits the Future, we didn't have any idea what it really was going to be about. We're intrigued that we're in this history and the details. So when you and Robert Zemeckis are in the room writing scripts, can you give us an insight into that process. We always like to use index cards to plot the movie. So we had these big cork boards in our office and we would write the different outlines of the scene on an index card.

46:00So we wanted Marty to invent rock and roll. That was a very, very early idea that we had. So there was a card that said Marty performs rock and roll in the 50s. One of the things that we always try to do is figure out the ending. Endings, as any writer will tell you, are really hard. It's like taking a trip. You need to have a destination so that you know that you actually got there. I believe that in the first draft, the DeLorean wasn't the time machine and the pet wasn't Einstein the dog, as we know him. Can you explain what those changes were? Absolutely, and I'm very impressed, Josephine, that you did your homework.

46:47Yes, in the first two drafts, the time machine was built out of an old refrigerator. It was a time chamber, and Doc had it in his lab. Doc didn't have a dog. He had a chimpanzee named Shemp, after Shemp and the Three Stooges. Shemp is messing around in the lab and accidentally knocks over a bottle of Coca-Cola into the equipment. And that is the secret ingredient that makes the power converter work. The second draft we handed in in April 1981, about six weeks later. And then they just said, well, we're not going to make this. It's very nice. It's very sweet. And we think the audience is looking for things that are a little bit raunch here.

47:36In all, the script was rejected 40 times. They had a last-ditch meeting with a boss called Tom Wilhite at Disney. But the storyline where Marty accidentally tampers with history, jeopardizing his future existence when his mother shows an interest in him instead of his father, was a big problem. I remember we walked into his office and Tom looked at us and he was appalled. He just said, are you guys out of your mind? Do you guys really think that Disney would make a movie about incest. You've got the kid and his mother in the car. We're Disney. We don't do that. So that was the end of Disney. We don't write things off.

48:15That's not in our DNA. If it's a good idea, you put it in a drawer and it's a story of Hollywood. How many stories have you heard about somebody that couldn't get the movie made? They put it in the drawer. A couple of years later, they pull it out of the drawer and next thing you know, they're in production. And that is what happened with us because what changed was Bob Zemeckis went off and he directed a very successful movie called Romancing the Stone. And Romancing the Stone was such a big hit that everybody and his uncle wanted to be in business with Bob Zemeckis and make whatever movie Bob wanted to make.

48:48And of course, the movie that Bob wanted to make was Back to the Future. Back to the Future. And so it was made, starting in earnest at the end of 1984 and at breakneck speed, the star Michael J. Fox having to fit shooting in around his commitment to the TV series Family Ties, as he explained on BBC television. It was a strange situation because I worked on Family Ties from 10 in the morning until about 6 at night and then I'd get in the car and go over to Universal and work until about 2, 2.30 in the morning. The people, the energy involved with the other people in the film was just so great, they were just so inspired.

49:24I hope that everyone here likes the movie. It's a lot of fun. Glad you could drop the MCs. Thank you. Michael Jacobs. His appeal became apparent during the filming. Let's go to the school, which was Whittier High School, and the girls were just lined up seven deep to try to catch a glimpse of him. And we knew, OK, this kid's a really big star. Maybe people are actually going to go see this movie. The first members of the public to see the movie went to Century 21 Theatre in San Jose, California in May 1985 for a taster screening. Bob Gale was sitting in the middle of the auditorium to best gauge their reaction.

50:05They weren't told what they were going to be watching. They knew that it was a movie with Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. There were no trailers yet and it was only about three weeks after we'd finished principal photography. The point where they really understood the movie they were seeing was when Marty goes into the cafe in 1955. Hey, McFly. What do you think you're doing? And he turns around, and then you see his father is in there as a kid, and it's Biff as a kid, and there was this sense in the theater. You could just feel it. Oh, that is so great. Oh, that's so cool. and from that point on the audience was totally with it and even at the end of the movie when the car flies that shot wasn't even finished it was in black and white it didn't matter

51:03they were on their feet they were crazy

51:13they were going insane to such an extent that The theatre manager went over to one of our film editors and said, you've got a hit movie here. Indeed they did. Back to the Future was released across the US in time for the Independence Day holiday on the 3rd of July 1985. It became the highest grossing film that year and won an Oscar. A second and third film followed and a stage musical written by Bob Gale. He was speaking to Josephine McDermott. And if you want to watch an extended version of that interview, you can find one on the BBC World Service's YouTube channel. Just go to podcasts and then witness history.

51:54That's it for this History Hour. We'll be back next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

52:13This was really my worst fear. He found 100 % horse meat that was labelled as beef. Witness the stories that have shaped our world, told by the people he would bear. When he went to the factory, the poodle went in front of him, so the workers only, oh, the boss is here. Many people had many things to lose by our victory. The future was not so bright. Witness history. We had a designer. he brought in a fully storyboarded idea about how the Queen would arrive by jumping out of a helicopter. And we all said, that's brilliant, but it's never going to happen. Witness History at bbcworldservice.com slash witnesshistory or wherever you get your podcasts.

52:59What if I told you that most of history's underwear wasn't remotely close to the underwear you're wearing right now? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of the You're Dead To Me podcast, and we're back with a brand new season. And if you're a fan of fashion trends of the past, you'll love our newest episode on the history of underwear. We explore how our underwear has changed throughout history and whether TV depictions of Regency-era ladies in their lacy underwear are truly accurate. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.