Can't Get You Out of My Head

We are living through strange days.

Across Britain, Europe and America,

societies have become split and polarised,

not just in politics, but across the whole culture.

There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption

and a widespread distrust of the elites.

Yet, at the same time, there is a paralysis,

a sense that no-one knows how to escape from this.

Even in America, where there is now hope with the new president,

there are also fears that, despite the growing crisis,

the system will just return to normal.

This paralysis is also fuelled by a technology, driven by the aim

of giving you today another version of what you had yesterday...

..and never a different tomorrow.

These films are a history of how we got to this place

and why both those in power, and we, find it so difficult to move on.

They will trace different forces

across the world that have led to now,

not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well.

And they are told in a different way.

They are an emotional history of what went on inside the heads

of all kinds of people.

Because in the age of the individual,

what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of

were going to become the driving force across the world.

And to understand the present, you have to go back and see

what happened when those hopes and dreams and uncertainties

inside people's minds met the much older forces of power.

Often power that was decaying

and desperate to keep its ascendancy.

These strange days did not just happen -

we, and those in power, created them together.

In the late 1950s, as the British Empire was falling apart,

there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong

under the surface.

It was a feeling of unease, that despite all the reforms

after the Second World War and the welfare state,

the old forms of power had not gone away.

And neither had the violence and the corruption

that had always been a part of that power.

The court opens with the traditional reading of names

and the wide experience available to the bank as apparent.

Mr Cobbold, Mr Minors,

Sir Charles Hambro...

Senior director...

The bankers in the City of London

had been at the very heart of the Empire.

In 1958, two of the most powerful of them,

Lord Kindersley and William Keswick,

were accused of using insider information

to make millions for themselves.

..Lord Kindersley...

Chairman of Rolls-Royce, merchant banker.

..Mr Keswick...

Hudson's Bay Company and Far Eastern merchant.

The evidence against them was very strong.

But when Keswick was shown the evidence, he dismissed it

with a phrase that became notorious.

"It is difficult," he said,

"to remember conversations one has whilst shooting on a grouse moor."

A government inquiry said the two men were obviously innocent.

At the same time, reports had started to come back

from one of the last parts of the Empire - Kenya -

that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control.

They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau.

The report said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put

into special camps, where they were going to be

psychologically adjusted.

The British were trying to manipulate

what their chief psychologist called the "African mind".

But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness.

The British used mass torture and killing

as they desperately tried to hold on to power.

The government in London denied all the accusations,

but the rumours of violence and horror continued.

But what had also not gone away was the fear and hatred

inside the minds of many of the British of the "others",

the people the British had ruled over

who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.

Now, listen carefully to this Indian's conversation

with a white barber when he entered a saloon with a BBC radio microphone

in his pocket.

No! What's the matter?

No!

Is there anything wrong?

Yes! What is it? I said no.

But I'd like to know what is the matter. I'm closed.

There's another half an hour... Well, I'm closed now.

But you didn't put the closed sign outside on the window, did you?

Will you clear off?

Look, if you give me any reason why, what is the matter,

then I shall go if you tell me...

I've told you - I'm closed!

You're not closed.

You're not... You're not closed yet.

Well, I am - to you.

Those who came from the Empire to Britain

were shocked by the strange country they found.

Michael de Freitas had come from Trinidad.

He had grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland

at the centre of the Empire.

Instead, what he found was, what seemed to him,

a sad and frightened country.

You must remember that, that when we came to this country,

we were not travelling to a foreign country.

We were taught, I was taught when I was a young man,

that my country, Trinidad, was an extension of this one.

We were weaned on the concept of the Empire.

When I was a young boy, I stood in 90 degrees of sun

day after day and sang all kinds of silly things

like God Save The Queen, Land of Hope and Glory,

"Britannia rule the waves",

with the greatest of fervour and believed every word of it.

To come here and discover that not only wasn't I not travelling

to the capital of the whole thing, which we were led to believe was so,

but in actual fact, we weren't wanted

has been a very shattering blow.

Many people in this country who think that we are very hateful

are so wrong.

You see, this is the great mystery.

When you came here, you say you found you weren't wanted.

Why, then, did you stay?

Why did you choose to stay here?

This was the heartland of the whole thing

and one hoped against hope that what one saw was not right.

Song for Zula by Phosphorescent

Mao Zedong's wife was going mad.

She was called Jiang Qing.

She lived alone, surrounded by pet monkeys

and nurses, who she was convinced were conspiring against her.

Those in charge of the revolution in China

had completely marginalised her.

She was too dangerous, they thought, to be allowed anywhere

near her husband or power.

They had even sent her to Moscow to be locked in a sanatorium

with real and imagined illnesses.

But now Jiang Qing's husband was facing disaster.

The revolution had led to horror.

30 million people had died from starvation

in the past three years.

The other leaders wanted to get rid of him.

And suddenly, he called for her.

Jiang Qing was an extraordinary person.

She believed in nothing except the power of her will to shape reality.

She had begun as an actor in films in Shanghai in the 1930s.

The other actors looked down at her for her driving ambition.

She liked to be on the top, always.

She's a very ambitious woman and she liked to be top

and she plays with the, you know,

with all the directors, cameramen,

make them...make them, you know, pay attention, you see,

and the interest in her

so she can have a better part of the film.

She married a quite famous writer called Tang Na

and after married, she doesn't feel

very satisfied by her husband

because her husband is not the very, very strong man.

And she left him and he jumped to the river,

and then the water was very cold, so he jump up again, you see?

So... You mean he tried to commit suicide?

Yes, he's trying to commit...commit suicide.

After the suicide attempt,

Jiang Qing wrote a long letter to her husband.

It said she was leaving him

and also explained why with an extraordinary openness.

There were powerful forces inside her, she said,

that kept driving her towards fame and power

and it was only those forces that held her together psychologically.

"Nothing must hold them back."

It ended, "What matters is that you remember me

"as a woman who never caves in before anyone

"and who will never bear to be treated as inferior to men."

But Jiang Qing failed to become a star.

The men who ran the studios scorned her ambition.

Her most famous part was as a supporting actor in a film

called Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.

The star of the film was called Li Lili.

Jiang Qing was convinced that Li

was trying to upstage her all the time

and she became the focus of all Jiang Qing's anger

over her treatment by the Shanghai establishment.

Hua Yang De Nian Hua by Zhou Xuan

Bitter and disillusioned, Jiang Qing left Shanghai

and travelled to join the communist resistance

on a remote mountain in Yan'an.

The camp was an intense, exciting place