Scene - Looking for a Fight (16.02.1975) [BBC]

Описание: The BBC's Scene series featured dramatic, often gritty, stories for teenagers. The episode titled "Looking for a Fight" looked at the declining popularity of Boxing gyms and asked if there was a connection to the increasing popularity of martial arts thanks to the Kung Fu Craze which had started the year before through the influence of Bruce Lee.

Martial artists featured in the episode included Chee Too (Tai Chi practitioner and fight choreographer of the 1960s TV show "The Avengers"), Lajos Jakab (martial arts trainer of Roger Moore for "The Saint" and the 1974 James Bond movie "The Man with the Golden Gun") and Ticky Donovan (European and World Karate Champion). Filmed at the height of the Kung Fu Craze, the episode also featured Rhona McVay, the president of short-lived Official Bruce Lee Fan Club

Repeated several times over the rest of the decade, this episode featured the only other known interview with the Official Bruce Lee Fan Club President Rhona McVay. A brief clip of this interview appeared in the BBC2 documentary "The Kung Fu Years" in 1997 but the interview had not been shown in its entirety for over forty years.

On 16th January 2024, the BBC Archive put a segment on YouTube. Though not the full episode, it did feature the footage of Rhona McVay speaking from her West London bedroom and was longer than the clip used in 1997's "The Kung Fu Years".

The original preceding footage to the clip featuring Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris from The Way of the Dragon was missing from the segment released online, possibly for licensing reasons. I managed to locate the full episode, though it is unfortunately of a lower resolution, watermarked and timecoded.

With some editing and converting, I have managed to piece together the full episode from all available elements such as the watermarked and timecoded start of the programme, scenes from the Hong Kong Legends Way of the Dragon DVD (squeezed to 4:3 as was the original), the footage put online by the BBC Archive and the watermarked and timecoded finale to the programme.

This is currently the best quality and most complete version of this programme that it available for public viewing and exists purely for historical preservation and research purposes and gives a view of the rise in popularity of martial arts in the United Kingdom at a time when it seemed that almost everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.

An unwatermarked version of this video for use in projects can be obtained from the page admin at [email protected]