If you haven’t seen them before, settle down for a fascinating weekend’s viewing of some highpoints of Tony Benn TV retrospectives — the best YouTube has to offer — including:
- Labour’s Lost Leader, the best of the posthumous retrospectives;
- a fascinating round table discussion between Tony Benn, Roy Hattersley and David Owen that coincided with the inter-regnum between Blair and Brown;
- lighter relief from Tony Benn interviewed by Ali G.
Labour’s Lost Leader. Excellent and reasonably well balanced BBC special programme to mark his death, shown on Monday 14 March.
The party leaders’ tributes, ITN, 11 March.
Sky News obituary including Neil Kinnock’s negative comments, 11 March.
GMTV, The Sunday Programme, 4 March 2007, Steve Richards talked to Tony Benn, David Owen and Roy Hattersley. Fascinating and surprisingly good-natured discussion about the period of 1979 to 1983, about the authoritarianism of Tony Blair about which there is quite a bit of agreement (and Owen is very rude about Blair), and about the 2007 Labour leadership non-election (in which Roy Hattersley is very rude about John Reid).
Channel 4 News obituary
Retrospective by global global online video news network, The Real News, based in Baltimore, and Toronto, featuring Socialist Register editor, Leo Panitch.
And for a light relief, Ali G meets Tony Benn. For real.
Finally, if that isn’t enough, and you haven’t seen The Wilderness Years, a BBC series of four hour-long documentaries broadcast in 1995, it’s well worth watching – and you can by following the links available here. Documenting the period of Labour’s history from losing the 1979 election to the election of Blair as Labour’s Leader, it relies entirely on archive footage alongside in-depth interviews with those most closely involved in the events, a format which really does allow the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
