The Lonely Shore

Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s.   

Following an undisclosed apocalypse that, in 1962, decimated Britain, the film is told from the perspective of a future archaeological team examining the finds an earlier team left scattered on a beach after their deaths.  As the narrator comments, interprets, and invents uses and meanings, the camera roams from object to object, lingering briefly on each so that we can appreciate the incongruity of it's setting, the mundanity of the thing and the bleak humour in the description.

Looking very much like an early set design for the later Spike Milligan and John Antrobus' post-apocalyptic satirical black comedy 'The Bed Sitting Room' while walking a similiar path, 'The Lonely Shore" presents a gently biting satire on the time it was made that still feels worryingly apposite today. 

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