HOW would Tom and Barbara
have coped with the reality of The Good Life? While
Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal donned chunky jumpers and set
about their back garden with suburban enthusiasm, the real pioneers
of the environmental movement were slumming it in a shack at a
disused slate quarry in Machynlleth. The Centre for Alternative
Technology, as we heard in The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday),
was born of the same sense of excitement and urgency as inspired
The Good Life, but with fewer of Barbara's
blandishments.
Liz Todd had to bring up
two children in the quarry settlement, which had no mains water or
electricity. There was plenty of muesli to eat, but if you wanted
some proper sustenance, you had to sneak off to the town and wolf
down a surreptitious Full English.
There was a great deal of
joking among Sue MacGregor's guests, brought together again to
reminisce about this pioneering experiment, but there was no hiding
the fact that this was a tough ordeal, which brought with it family
tensions as well as ideological conflict.
Inevitably, the Centre
attracted people with strong opinions about how the world could and
should be saved, and one of the challenges for the residents was to
negotiate the fine line between practicality and eco-puritanism,
particularly with regard to the way they were perceived by the
media.
Today, the innovations
that came out of the Centre are part of the mainstream - wind- and
water- turbines, solar heating, and ecological waste-management -
but in the 1970s they were regarded as subversive: The
Times refused the Centre's first advertisement for volunteers,
on the basis that it believed the group to be anarchists.
Yet the Centre's founder
was Gerard Morgan-Grenville, an Old Etonian businessman, who
delivered instructions to his team on embossed writing paper.
Despite a brief stint in California, from which he returned smoking
joints, he was not someone who had a natural affinity with
communist principles, and there was a sense of a distinct frisson
between him and some of his co-pioneers. It might have been yet
more entertaining had these tensions been more articulated, but
this was nevertheless a splendid snapshot of the counter-culture,
British-style.
While our former
Archbishop gave the media just a whiff of a bardic counter-culture,
the new one is being created in a very different image. In the last
incumbency, the Archbishop could be found moonlighting on radio
shows about poetry and Russian literature; but I have a feeling
that with the new one I will be tuning into more shows such as
The Week in Westminster (Radio 4, Saturday), which
followed up Archbishop Welby's speech about banking ethics with an
interview with George Parker from the Financial Times.
As one of the two cross-benchers on the Parliamentary Commission
on Banking Standards, the Archbishop is facing many questions about
God and bonuses. There was a satisfyingly hard edge to his
responses on this occasion which bodes well for the future. At one
point, you might have mistaken his script for that of The
Sopranos: "I don't like ruffling feathers, but sometimes
feathers get ruffled."