Carry On... #Boomer

Please note that this week's film has been rated  15  in the UK.

Our previous film (Fail Safe) was a reflection of the ever-present threat of global nuclear armageddon that effectively defined the decades following the Second World War.

The assumption was that all-out nuclear war was a virtual certainty; it was only a matter of time before those bombs began falling out of the sky. For the millions of people who had already lived through the horrors of Fascism, the Holocaust and the War itself, this was an exciting new kind of awful.

But there was another group that experienced this era very differently. The end of the war had coincided with one of the largest population explosions in a generation, as all those surviving soldiers returned home and proceeded to do exactly what you think they would do after being away from home for so long.

The Baby Boom (as it came to be called) was the post-war generation of young people who came of age in a world that (they were told) was constantly on the brink of destroying itself in a massive nuclear fireball. They had no memories of the pre-war world that their parents were constantly reminiscing about, and (in the case of children born in post-war Europe at least) had grown up in conditions of deprivation and extreme hardship.

In America, school children were taught to "duck & cover" at the first sign of an atom bomb, but it was also made clear to them that nothing was going to keep them safe from those nuclear detonations that were definitely going to be coming some day soon.

By the late 1950s the leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation was hitting puberty in the certain knowledge that none of them had much chance of ever reaching adulthood.

Over the next couple of weeks I want to explore what that looked like to the older generation as it watched the Boomers growing up. 

This is OK Boomer from the other side.

Okay, Boomer

Beat Girl is a British film from 1960 that dares to show the sordid, murky world of teenage beatniks who inhabit the amoral, undisciplined underbelly of London's party scene. It is shocking (of course) and unflinching (allegedly); raw (probably) and unfiltered (ish).

It is also, needless to say, very very dated.

Featuring a cast that includes teen heartthrob Adam Faith (in one of his first screen roles) and a not-yet famous Oliver Reed, the film follows the fortunes of Jennifer, a rebellious teenage "beatnik" daughter and her complicated, hostile relationship with her "establishment" father.

It has to be said that the film is patently ridiculous. But it also (unwittingly) says a great deal about how the Boomer generation looked to their elders as they began to come of age. 

The young people of this film are all bitter, disillusioned teen rebels who spend their lives in Soho coffee bars, jiving to the beats of American rock 'n' roll and not drinking. Jennifer's father has a grand plan to "fix" the world with his great architectural ideas for the "city of the future" which he actually calls City 2000. I am not making this up.

Basically he has invented the Council Estate.

There's also an important plot thread about the father's new (very young) French wife who of course has a past that she doesn't want to talk about, and Christopher Lee plays a Very Bad Man.

But the heart of the film is its depiction of the beatniks themselves. These are kids who have grown up in Middle Class households with parents who are still living in the withered remnants of a world that the Boomers never got to experience. 

When young Millennials and Zoomers attack the "establishment" generation with the derogatory and dismissive "OK Boomer" they are targeting a generation that tried very hard to be radical and transgressive and "anti-establishment". That's why the dig hurts so much.

Beat Girl may not be the most subtle or profound film ever made, and it may have aged vey badly, but it shows very clearly just what social change looks like to those who are living through it.

It also demonstrates very emphatically that Oliver Reed really can't dance.

We will screen Beat Girl at 7.30 on Thursday, the 9th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Beat Girl is rated  15  in the UK for some very suggestive dancing.