This film is part of Free
Jane Gaskell
London swallowed up by the green belt? Fantasy and horror writer Jane Gaskell muses on how the future looks for the hippie generation.
Overview
Flower power, wheatmeal bread, drooling Mods, LSD and voting Tory - fantasy and horror writer-cum-journalist Jane Gaskell shares her views on 1960s culture and looks to the future in this unbroadcast interview with Bernard Braden. Some of her insights are surprisingly prescient, while others - legalisation of marijuana, London being swallowed up by the green belt - seem almost comically idealistic to 21st century ears.
Gaskell is the great grandniece of Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell, and had her first novel, Strange Evil, published at the age of 16. In 1968, when this interview was filmed, she published her fourth novel All Neat in Black Stockings, a comic take on the permissive society. A cinema adaptation was released the following year. This interview is one of several hundred with public figures recorded for Now and Then, a television series devised by Canadian broadcaster Braden. Since the programme never made it to the airwaves, the interviews remain in their unedited original state. A number of Braden's other interviews for the series are also available on BFI Player.
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