Speaker: Graham Peet - The talk to be a focus on his work to record oral history, the stories of ordinary people in 'Yesterday's Witness'.

Filmmaker behind Yesterday's Witness

Steve Humphries

Fri 17 Feb 2006 00.11 GMTShare

In 1967, when Stephen Peet, who has died aged 85, joined the BBC documentary department, he sent a memo to the then BBC2 controller David Attenborough. "I have an idea," he wrote, "for an inexpensive film series of ordinary people talking about their memories of historic events or periods." The immediate result was the first six Yesterday's Witnesses. Stephen had become the founding father of television oral history.

Between 1969 and 1981 Yesterday's Witness popularised history from below. The series - ordinary people telling extraordinary stories, usually with broader social significance, using family photos - ran to more than 80 programmes and documented events, now mostly beyond living memory, which form an important document of life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Venue: Shifnal Village Hall