438 Voices From The Past

First  viewed : April  1980

I'm  not  expecting  to  ever  be  able  to  find  an  illustration  for  this  one.

Historians  of  the  punk  rock  movement  , when  discussing  the  infamous  Bill  Grundy  interview  in  1976  , usually  throw  in  some  cheap,  lazy  line  like  "Grundy  never  worked  again". That's  not  true . London  viewers  may  not  have  seen  him  on  their  Today  programme  for  much  longer  but  he  certainly  wasn't  short  of  work  on  regional  TV  for  some  years  afterwards.

BBC  North  West,  for  example, employed  him  as  a  presenter  for  a  number  of  shows  and  this  was  one  of  them. I  think  there  was  an  earlier  series  but  I  caught  the  one  that  began  in  May  1980. Voices  from  the  Past, broadcast  in  the  Friday  night  slot  usually  occupied  by  Home  Ground ,  was  a  serious  attempt  to  investigate  whether  there  was  any  truth  in  the  theory  of  reincarnation. It  brought  into  the  studio  a  number  of  people  who  believed  they'd  enjoyed  past  lives  and  put  them  under  hypnosis  to  probe  into  their  "experiences ". The  one  I  remember  best  was  a  middle  aged  lady  who  answered  the  expert  interrogator's  questions  as  a  Jacobite  soldier.

Grundy. who'd  made  his  reputation  in  the  sixties  as  a  dependable  anchorman, was  a  sceptical  but  not  hostile  host  who  discussed  the  findings  with  the  experts  in  good  faith.  The  programme  employed  reputable  archivists  to  dig  into  the  records  to  find  out  if  these  past  people  had  really  existed  and  the  answer  came  back  negative. At  the  end  of  the  series  Grundy  announced  that  there   was  no  evidence  of  reincarnation  but  that  the  experiment  had  been  a  worthwhile  investigation  into  a  psychological  phenomenon.  I  tend  to  agree  with  him.