Mass-Observation

Yeah, yeah.

I think, I suppose one thing to just say about the stereotype that you picture, which is to some degree is okay but I work with this group called Mass Observation that's been working with kind of empirical studies from the 1930s and one of the interesting things there they did this big study around Bolton around the industries around Bolton and they'd find okay during the week working-class men would be wearing kind of flat caps and drinking in the public bar where the beer was a penny cheaper But at the weekend, they'd be wearing suits, they'd be wearing different hats, and they'd be in the snug bar where the beer was a penny dearer.

Now, I think there's something interesting in that.

So one of the things that they talk about in the 50s and 60s is you're seeing, like, car workers.

[instrumental music]

Almost 100 years ago, British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings' Mass Observation Project documented the real lives of real Britons without professional editors or polished presenters narrating them.

In the 1930s, as the social consequences of the Depression began to be felt, particularly in the traditional heartlands of industry, a generation of journalists, writers, photographers, and filmmakers set out to document what they believed to be the facts about life in industrial Britain.

I'm a lorry driver, just under 30, married, with half, two children.

My first introduction to Mass Observation came through a newspaper article in which a miner gave an account of a day's work.

How interesting to think our rough shoulders played darts, swapped stories with miners, yet knew so little of how they lived.

So I joined Mass Observation because I was glad to tell how we really live and not how some misguided people imagine we do.

But 100 years on, reality TV as we know it today is a bit different, but it still pulls a crowd on live TV.

Then you go back to the, the mill towns.

That's where all the great inventions took place, factory developments, things like-- even cultural things like Mass Observation, which we take for granted now with, like, 7Up.

That began in Bolton.

You know, that, those experiments took place in Lancashire.

Over to you, John.

So this comes from a project called Mass Observation.

It was set up in the 1930s when experts at the University of Sussex wanted to find out what made people tick.

And they asked people to keep diaries.