Anthony Burgess returns to Manchester

Описание: THE SQUALOR, DECAY, SORDOR AND VULGARISATION OF MODERN MANCHESTER: Manchester in the old days, says Burgess, was home to many poor working-class and lower-middle-class people, of course, but they tended to be respectable. They looked after their little dwellings and shops — like the tobacconist's that Burgess's father ran — and tried to keep them neat. They scrubbed their doorsteps clean. They were people with self-respect. Well, look at degenerate Manchester today. Filth and decadence everywhere you look. Here we witness the decay of civilisation. The people are dissolute, the culture debased, dissipation is all-encompassing. The place is falling to pieces, structurally and in morals, and few authentic values are left. Burgess and the interviewer, a Fleming from Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie, stroll past what was once a Freemasons' Hall, now a West Indian shebeen-cum-shooting-gallery for heroin addicts. They pass the Palace, which had been a beautiful, lavishly appointed cinema but which today has become an unutterably vulgar fleapit reduced to screening disgustingly depraved pornographic films. It draws in brigades of the dirty-mac element from across Lancashire while the police turn a blind eye. Finally they arrive at the place where Burgess used to live, and it has become an ugly piece of waste ground, good only for fly-tippers. It pains Burgess to the heart to revisit the Manchester he grew up in. He calls the experience of returning 'the horror of coming back'.

'UNWORTHY OF MAN'. A hungover Burgess is driven through parts of the city of his birth and youth. ‘The cats roamed at night and screamed — cats' concerts were our only evening music. Dustbins, sly copulation. Squalor, squalor.’

Burgess says he has to escape from the real world; he wants to escape into the past, where this part of Manchester existed, full of living people. Look at it now, he says — it's a street of ghosts. Manchester in the old days, says Burgess, was home to many poor working-class and lower-middle-class people, of course, but they tended to be respectable. They looked after their little dwellings and shops — like the tobacconist's that Burgess's father ran — and tried to keep them neat. They scrubbed their doorsteps clean. They were people with self-respect. Well, look at degenerate Manchester today. Filth and decadence everywhere you look. Here we witness the decay of civilisation. The people are dissolute, the culture debased, dissipation is all-encompassing. The place is falling to pieces, structurally and in morals, and few authentic values are left. Burgess and the interviewer, a Fleming from Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie, walk to the place where Burgess used to live, and it has become an ugly piece of waste ground, good only for fly-tippers. It pains Burgess to the heart to revisit the Manchester he grew up in. He calls the experience of returning 'the horror of coming back'.

Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School closed in 2009 and the buildings were demolished not long after. John Bilsborrow was Bishop of Salford in the 1890s. This footage is from 1987. The name of the school is misspelt in the school's own sign — a distressing indication of the decline of standards in modern Manchester (such lamentable decay is discussed by Burgess here:    • (1/3) Anthony Burgess on the horror of ret...   ) — though Burgess is too polite to point out the orthographic failing. Excerpt from the documentary De Biecht van Burgess (Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie).

Anthony Burgess, or Jack Wilson as he then was, won a scholarship to Xaverian College (in Victoria Park, Rusholme), and began as a pupil there in 1928.

Documentary broadcast in 1987.