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Jill Craigie / Rosamond Lehmann

Jill Craigie / Rosamond Lehmann (Live from Two)

30 Nov 1981
21m

Writer and filmmaker Jill Craigie and novelist Rosamond Lehmann are the guests on this afternoon chat show.

The guests and presenter are witty, forthright and charming in this edition of the weekly Wednesday afternoon chat show, Live from Two, which ran from 1980-81. Eloquent conversation flows freely between the guests, neatly guided by presenter Shelley Rohde.
Rosamond Lehmann, acclaimed author of novels including Dusty Answer and The Weather in the Streets - often cited as pioneering feminist classics - matter-of-factly pronounces that 'I don't consider myself specifically to be a feminist. I'm very happy to be a woman.'
By contrast, ground-breaking documentary film director Jill Craigie (misleadingly introduced as 'Britain's only woman film director in the immediate post-war years') is not shy about professing her own feminism and adds for good measure that 'my husband's a very good feminist.' Craigie was married to Michael Foot, then leader of the Labour Party and a contender to become Prime Minister. She concedes that 'he's a very strong theoretical feminist, yes.' Incidentally, later in her life, she tells Foot on-camera that his feminism was entirely theoretical, which he unconvincingly denies, in footage included in the documentary biopic Independent Miss Craigie (2020).
Much of the discussion is about men, marriage, and women's careers. When the presenter, Shelley Rohde, comments to Craigie that 'you're a very strong career person' she responds by shaking her head and countering 'I've always put personal relationships first.' Lehmann chips in 'So've I' and clarifies that she doesn't 'think of novel writing as a career.' There is some lively debate about the comparative degrees of sexual liberation in the 1940s and the 1980s - Craigie pronounces that 'the pill is basically liberation for men' in an astute observation on the clichéd notion of the freedom sinces the 1960s.

Presenter Shelley Rohde led an adventurous life herself, like her guests, though this is unmentioned in the programme. In her early 20s she worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow for the Daily Express newspaper, and much later in life she went on to write an celebrated biography of artist L.S. Lowry.

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Behind the Screen

Get inside the movies with these illuminating insights from the people who make them.

The movies can make us believe in magic, but what they really serve up is illusion: pull back the curtain and what's revealed is a vast enterprise of imagination, skill and invention. When it comes to feature films, a director may preside over a legion of hundreds of actors, artists and technicians. To outsiders - that's most of us - this complex world can seem mystifying and impenetrable. So an insider's perspective is worth its weight in gold, as these rare interviews and talks by filmmakers and performers show.

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