Talk:Listen to Britain

What was the music?
I recognized it as a 'famous' classical piece, but what was it? (the Myra Hess piece). --Dan|(talk) 09:36, 3 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Is it "Myra Hess Playing the First Movement of Beethoven's Sonata in F Minor Op. 57 (Appassionata)" ?


 * Nope (I just listened to that one). Seems it should be Beethoven though. --Dan|(talk) 13:03, 15 November 2008 (UTC)


 * actually it's | Mozart K.453, like the Beethoven in Diary for Timothy, showing GB protecting Germanic culture from the Nazis Ganpati23 (talk) 18:39, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Request change in the class rating
Ganpati23 (talk) 14:21, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Previously, the article had 2 paragraphs amd one quote. The 2nd paragraph 'Plot' was solely a quote it claimed was from the film's introduction. This was wrong. This introduction was only added for the US release by a 'nervous' civil servant who feared the Americans would not understand the ambiguity.

This is important as the whole point of Jenning's film was to make the world Listen to Britain without using any speech. The introduction went against the whole point of the film, so it should be known that this was only added for the US and without Jenning's consent.

I've added a section on Propaganda, Poetry, Myth and Ambiguity explaining its function as a work of war-time propaganda.

Also the refernces and bibliography.

I'm aware that to improve the page, it would require a scene by scene analysis, though I do link to a google book chapter by Leach that does this in detail, and have now found online links for 4 of the 6 sources allowing some of my refernces and arguments to be checked.

I believe that I have shown the latest expert views on the film as propaganda (with refernces) and have corrected the error about the film's introduction in the 'plot' section.

I therefore believe that it should be considered for reassessmnet as it is now surely more than start class.

How do I ask for a reappraisal? And how can I find out what the new class would be and what would be needed to improve the article (and hence its class rating) further?

Many thanks.


 * I notice this article has been upgraded to B-class despite the fact it does not meet the criteria. While it is reasonably referenced, quite bit of it is dependent on a self-published blog. The cope of the topic is pretty poor: there is no coverage of the film's production and teh coverage of the film's reception is very basic. In fact the coverage is so lacking it is not even C-class level. Admittedly the grammar, punctuation and spelling is good, but as the template at the top points out it is not written in an encyclopedic style. The structure of the article is incoherent and does not observe the manual of style for films. Betty Logan (talk) 03:31, 29 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree with what you are saying about the film stuff, but I know little about that, it's not an area of expertise. I thought the point of wiki was that many different contributors could build up a page.  I was coming to it fro a mil-hist perspective.


 * All I found was the spoken intro, which wasn't in the original and was only added by nervous civil servants for the US release as they feared the Americans wouldn't get it.


 * I was simply adding a section about the film as a work of propaganda and the its relevance to GB's myth of national unity in a period of war socialism. In discussion with the mil-hist project, they raised that to a B.  I wouldn't have expected the film lot to consider it much more than a stub.  Ganpati23 (talk) 20:57, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Who exactly WAS the "nervous civil servant" who feared the Americans wouldn't get the point? The Wikipedia article on the Crown Film Unit says nothing whatsoever about how it was run, or who was running it - not even the source of its budget. Surely such things are not still even more secret than the existence of Bletchley Park was for so long?Delahays (talk) 01:00, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Not exactly the answer to the nervous civil servant problem, but whoever he was, he would have had to convince the head of the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, Kenneth Clark (who sits on the left hand of the Queen in the Myra Hess sequence), and presumably, if the future Lord Clark of Civilisation had been impossible to convince, the Minister himself, Brendan Bracken, who was generally regarded as a tough nut. The BFI copy currently on DVD has the US market preface, which destroys Jennings's concept simply by its tone, as any fool can see.Delahays (talk) 01:17, 25 November 2020 (UTC)