You’ll Never Be Sixteen Again – Episode One – 1945-1956 – BBC Radio 1 – 1985 – Narrated by John Peel – BBC Radio –
I suspect most Americans have never heard this documentary series “You’ll Never Be Sixteen Again”, a seven part series produced by the BBC and narrated by the legendary disc jockey John Peel and first broadcast in the mid-1980s over BBC Radio 1.
First off – the BBC have been known throughout the world as one of the primary forces in the evolution of the Documentary form; film and radio since the 1940s. Their Radio Documentaries have run the gamut on subject matter and each one is assembled with meticulous research which, for the BBC is pretty easy, considering the vast amount of archive material they have to tap from.
Second – this is a series about teenagers in the UK between the years 1945-1985. There are some things distinctly different in the Youth experience between the U.S. and the UK. But – where there are differences there are more similarities. Kids are kids no matter where they live. They all suffer the same anxieties, same fears, same hopes, same chemical makeup – feel misunderstood, feel awkward, feel ugly and go through a galaxy of mood swings that teenagers throughout the world go through, and still go through, on an hourly basis.
The kids in the 1950s are no doubt most of your grandparents – and you may look at them today and find it hard to believe they were the same misguided, misunderstood, horny adolescents in the 1950s as you are in 2022.
It’s universal and once you get over the accents and descriptions, you will find they, for the most part, are you.
I’m going to be running Radio Documentaries for the whole month of August and during that time you’ll hear documentaries about American kids, inner-city kids, problems, solutions and issues. It should make for some interesting listening – I hope so.
Here to start the series off is Episode 1, subtitled: Ain’t Misbehavin” and covers the era 1945-1956, ending just as Elvis Presley arrives; how the world changed forever once Rock n’ Roll arrived (just like it did for everybody at the time) and how it would become the first (or maybe the first actually talked about) generation gaps of the 20th century. Tomorrow will be Episode 2.
Get comfortable and dive in.
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