http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLlKR1x1oWY&NR=1
Dreamland is an amusement arcade in Margate, based, at one time, on Coney Island. In 1953, the-then young Lindsay Anderson made this documentary, fifteen minutes or so long.
It’s incredible to think that this was only fifteen years before he made If… The world turned in such a short time; and if you ever meet anyone of my age or older who tells you how much better life was in the 1950s, look again at this film. Look at the faces. Listen to the music. Look at the artefacts. Look at the way people lived.
I still have to tell people – the 1960s happened because of the way we had to live in the 1950s. That world, trapped in the austerity of the post war era, crushed by a conformity that had dominated our lives since Victoria, was characterised by a stultifying boredom where the need for joy in ordinary lives was addressed by dreamlands like this.
Where they weren’t.
The colour in our lives was finally introduced when some poor white kids in Memphis, such a long way away, started to listen to music that they were meant to avoid like the plague. And started to say, ‘hey!, that Bo Diddley guy wears a pink jacket!