Edward Heath night 

22 July 2015 tbs.pm/6748

While many of us have got our hopes up at repeated rumours of BBC Four – or even BBC Two – becoming something of a BBC Archives channel and seen them dashed, BBC Parliament continues to run some gems from the vaults whenever parliament itself is not sitting.

This Sunday, 26 July, they’ve done a trawl of the Panorama film cans to find a bunch of features about Edward Heath and are showing them with the thin, but welcome, excuse that it is 50 years since he became Conservative Party leader.

The night starts at 7pm UK time with a 1965 interview between Heath and Robin Day; then a Panorama talking to Tory activists (hold your nose and watch, honestly, it’s fine); the BBC news profile of him from when he became PM; Heath and Day are talking again for Panorama in 1971 at 8.20pm, then it’s Michael Charlton grilling him about the EEC for another Panorama from 1973 at 9pm.

At 10.05pm, Michael Cockerell reports on the Tory leadership election in 1975 that saw MPs vote for Mrs Thatcher while expecting everyone else to vote for Heath. The final item, at 11.10pm, is an edition of Omnibus shown ten days after the general election of 1970, where Brian Magee talks to Heath about his love of music.

All of these are worth a watch (or a timeshift on to a PVR if it’s a bit of a slog), so break out the Blue Nun, make yourself a fondue, whip up some Angel Delight and warm up the television set for a night of 1970s political theatre.

You Say

2 responses to this article

Applemask 6 August 2015 at 5:34 pm

Or maybe the excuse was that they’d heard on the grapevine that they’d only have a couple of weeks to do something like this.

Russ J Graham 6 August 2015 at 6:03 pm

Although the accusations turn out to be false: the main “witness” who was quoted liberally as “confirming” his supposed crimes has said she never even met Heath and is at a loss as to why people have put words in her mouth.

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