John Boorman’s sixties Bristol documentary makes a rare return to the big screen

Celebrated director John Boorman is best known for the likes of Point Blank, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Zardoz (Sean Connery in a big ol’ nappy, remember?), Hope and Glory and, of course, his masterpiece: Deliverance.

But back in the early 1960s, before the decade began to swing, he worked at the BBC’s Bristol-based Documentary Unit, eventually rising to become its head. During this time, Boorman made a couple of ground-breaking series that are rarely seen today. Citizen 63 was an observational series focusing on five very different individuals at a time of great societal change. Two of them were from Bristol: police inspector Richard Callicot and Bristol University boffin Frank George – an AI/cybernetics pioneer.

The following year, Boorman made The Newcomers. This was a six-part drama-doc following the lives of a young married couple living in a small flat in Clifton.

The couple are Alison and Anthony Smith, and there are walk-on parts for their chum Tom Stoppard. At the time, Anthony was a local journalist. He went on to become a renowned playwright and novelist under the pen name ACH Smith, his best-known local work being Up the Feeder, Down the Mouth, which explored life in the City Docks.

The Newcomers is a fascinating time capsule of the city as it was in 1964. We see the couple’s dreams of buying their own home in Clifton shattered when an estate agent tells them this could cost as much as £6,000. Other highlights include rug-cutting at Bristol’s grooviest nightclub The Glen (later Tiffany’s and now the Spire private hospital on the Downs), dockers queuing up for work and an evangelical church service in St. Pauls. In something of a foreshadowing of the City’s future, we even meet a pair of vagrant beatniks.

An evangelical church service in St. Pauls, 1964. Screen grab from The Newcomers.

You won’t find any of this stuff anywhere on the internet. But Bristol Ideas is showing all six episodes in a marathon three-hour screening (with an interval) at the Arnolfini on Saturday 9 April, starting at 2pm. Anthony Smith, who’s now 87 and still lives in Bristol, will be present to introduce the event. Before that, from 10:30am to noon, a Newcomers walking tour promises to whisk participants back to mid-sixties Bristol for a look at the series’ locations and an exploration of the era’s media, politics, arts, city planning and hot issues such as the Bristol bus boycott.

Three years after The Newcomers, Boorman was in Hollywood making Point Blank. But before that, he returned to the west country while shooting his feature film debut in 1965. Catch Us If You Can was a pop curio intended to do for the Dave Clark Five what A Hard Day’s Night had done for the Beatles. It didn’t. But you do get to see the now largely forgotten sixties popsters enjoying a fancy dress party in Bath’s Roman Baths.

Go here to book tickets for the Newcomers screening and here for more on the walking tour. ACH Smith’s latest novel, Only the Dance: A Bristol Thriller, is published by Tangent Books.

Main pic: a screen grab from The Newcomers showing (left to right) Tom Stoppard, Alison and Anthony Smith visiting the Bristol Observatory’s camera obscura.