Southbank Show 1981

Stephen Sutcliffe, artist

As a naive student on the MFA at Glasgow School of Art, I once approached Scottish Screen about funding for a new video. Whilst waiting in reception, there was a temptation to browse through some folders on display. One listed a collection of videotapes recorded from TV, so I enquired whether they were available to view. A week later, in a small room with a TV and VCR, I was able to view the first of a number of boxes filled with cassettes. They had belonged to Lindsay Anderson who, after falling out out with the BFI, had gifted his archive to Scottish Screen, a decision possibly influenced by his family heritage. I spent the next few weeks returning to watch as many tapes as possible, taking friends to show them interesting footage.  

Lindsay had a habit of recording over things or stopping a recording when he got bored. Sometimes an important documentary would fizzle out into the snooker. In time, I was trusted to collect the boxes from storage and it was there, in a bin, that I found a damaged tape which I was able to repair. The salvaged tape had the usual eclectic content but what interested me most was an interview between Lindsay and the poet Christopher Logue who had appeared together on an episode of the South Bank Show. Like a malevolent Jimminy Cricket, Lindsay challenged Logue’s optimistic observations about artistic experience. Their conversation became the basis of at least three of my future video works, including ‘Come to the Edge’ which was a breakthrough in my career. The archive, including the collection of videotapes I viewed, is now held at Stirling University and I still return to it for inspiration. Someone once said that Lindsay Anderson was the conscience of the Free Cinema Movement and from what I have read he seemed to be….”…just three balls to go now for a break of 135. Ray Reardon has sat in his chair the whole of the whole of this final frame. Fantastic! and Embassy snooker champion for 1982 is Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins!”. 

(Images: photographs of Lindsay Anderson’s VHS collection.)