Forum

Last year six of us, two producers and a researcher from BBC Open University Productions, and three Open University historians, returned from a research trip to the United States involving visits to various museums and film archives. We are already far advanced on a series of eight programmes, 'America and Britain: Some Visual Evidence', which will form an integral part of our new history course, 'Themes in British and American History: A Comparative Approachcirca 1760 – circa 1970'. Getting the series approved within the Open University involved many battles with the holders of the purse-strings, and many arguments with, properly, sceptical colleagues. Putting previous knowledge together with further discoveries in the United States, we can now, without reservation, envisage a superb eight-part discussion of some crucial visual sources for comparative American and British history. Unfortunately, many of the items we would like to use are so expensive that the budgets we are currently operating on will not permit us to use them.