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'What we're trying to do is make popular politics': the Birmingham film and video workshop

‘’What we're trying to do is make popular politics” The Birmingham Film and Video Workshop emerged from knowledge transfer principles, a part of the BCMCR’s wider project of advising on archival development and the nature of public history work in the field of cultural studies. Here, my role and interests as researcher in media and cultural history were employed in collaboration with Vivid Arts, a Birmingham-based gallery and animateur. Research was directed at archival retrieval and developing oral histories around the historical project of the local Channel 4 supported workshop. As in previous work in media and cultural history, the aim here was to map and evaluate a largely overlooked story, one which came alive through explorations of connections to local practices and creativity. The research unearthed an interface between legacies of a radical sixties culture, CCCS activities in the city of Birmingham and cultural policy. This work informed a public exhibition in the first instance and initial research led to my contribution of a contextual piece on Channel 4 and the wider socio-cultural milieu of the 1980s, which appeared as part of the exhibition ‘Participation: The Film and Television Workshop Movement, 1979-1991’. In 2012 scholars from Portsmouth University on the AHRC-funded project Channel 4 Television and British Film Culture invited the authors to contribute to a conference of the same name at BFI with the paper commissioned for a special edition of the journal in which it appears. Ultimately, the historical project connects too with research interests in contemporary production, identifying the not so distant roots of contemporary ‘creative industries’ policy and pointing to continuities as well as political and cultural disjunctures.