Taming the Tigers

From the collection of

Yorkshire Film Archive
The Yorkshire Film Archive at York St John University save and celebrate screen heritage made in or about Yorkshire. They connect broad and diverse audiences to their cultural and socially significant collection that reflects the life, landscape, and identity of the people of the region since the 1890s. Together with their sister archive in the North East they form the Yorkshire and North East Film Archive, a unique pan-regional resource with over 75,000 moving image artefacts. They unlock the collections for artists, academics, curators, programmers, researchers, and producers to reveal compelling stories from the vaults. www.yfanefa.com

Taming the Tigers

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A professional rugby team, the Castleford Tigers, and their supporters live through a passionate season on a quest for victory.

The Tigers - also known as 'The Glassblowers' because many fans were glassblowers - have a long and proud history going back to their founding in June 1926. Interestingly, it was on 21st June 1926, right in the middle of a national Miners' Strike, and after the collapse of the General Strike, that the British Government introduced a Bill into the House of Commons that suspended the miners' Seven Hours Act for five years. It was thus an inauspicious time to be setting out as a professional rugby club in a mining town. Nevertheless, Castleford won the Yorkshire League title in 1932 and followed this with its first Challenge Cup victory in 1935. They subsequently won back-to-back victories in the Challenge Cup in 1969 and 1970, before doing so again in 1986. One of the founding members of the Super League in 1996, they have been relegated twice, only to bounce back both times - making appropriate the choice of I Get Knocked Down (aka 'Tubthumping') as a morale-boosting song, from Leeds' rebel group Chumbawamba.

The Castleford Tigers RLFC is the subject of this lively and colourful film. It follows five characters from the club as they pursue the Wembley dream in the 1999 Silk Cut Challenge Cup, capturing the magic, passion and humour of this tightly knit community at a very significant time in both the sport of rugby and the club's history.


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From the collection

Yorkshire at the Millennium

Snapshots of a region's life.
"Do they realise that in 50 or 100 years the films that are being made now will be curiosities... all of which are of value to the present generation, but how much more will they be to the men and women of the future?" (Views and Film Index, 1906). In the late 1990s, the Yorkshire Media Consortium was set up as a result of an innovative YFA/National Lottery/Arts Council/Yorkshire Television collaboration from 1997 to 2000, which commissioned 37 new programmes from community filmmakers across the region. It was designed to give independent filmmakers freedom to reflect the concerns of local communities and people across the region, while also creating a valuable new resource, a record of life a century on from the first pioneers of the moving image. The resulting collection encourages individual voices to emerge from across Yorkshire and enables today's audiences to glimpse into people's homes and lives at a key moment in history at the turn of the millennium.

28 videos in this collection

1

The Bradford Festival Mela 1998

2

Bradford Interchanges

3

Curry City

4

Mills and Healers

5

A to B

6

Roots

7

Three for a Pound

8

Angels from Alcatraz

9

Art in the Park

10

Connected

11

Home Grown

12

House of Changes

13

Taming the Tigers

14

Warwick Within

15

Weekend Nights

16

Building Foundations

17

Hands and Voices

18

Play On

19

Scarborough

20

Saying Their Prayers

21

Young Hearts and Growing Pains

22

Never Give Up

23

The Rhubarb Triangle

24

Two World Famous Things About Batley

25

Yorkshire from the Aire

26

The Borrowers

27

Meat Crazy!

28

York's Millennium Year

View full collection