The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
This film is part of Free
Sports Time
From the rich man’s sport of power boats, to the poor man’s scrambling, and in between the mad lot playing football driving around in Cortinas.
From the collection of:
Overview
It’s the 1970s and the world of sport activities, building on the post-war boom in leisure hobbies, is growing and becoming ever more experimental. Doug and Norah Brear of Wakefield Cine Club have made their own documentary capturing many of these, including yachting, gliding, powerboats, scrambling, go-karting, car football and grass tracking, adding a wry and understated commentary to the often crazy goings on.
Doug and Norah Brear made over 60 films between 1960 and 1985, and showed them at film shows across Yorkshire up until the 2000s. All the sports on view are fairly long established and still going strong, although grass tracking, or autograss, was only established in the 1960s. Car football however, unsurprisingly, is the exception, with little evidence for it outside car television programmes or the odd advertisement. The one anomaly in the film is the presence of the ABC (The Associated British Corporation) camera crew at one of the events as these merged with Rediffusion to become Thames Television when new television company contracts when awarded in 1968.
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