A few months after Harold Wilson died, the man he removed from Downing Street - Alec Douglas-Home - shuffled off this mortal coil as well. Parliament met to pay tribute to the one year premier.
Black and white TV really did Douglas-Home no favours
I believe I’ve mentioned to you before how amused I was by the ‘who exhumed you’ placard held up in protest to him as PM, but now I see a colour picture of the guy it does drive home how much different media options can change the way people are viewed (maybe Marshall McLuhan was right about mediums and message) because he really did look like someone that placard makes sense about in black and white but in colour he looks perfectly normal
The lovely thing about Alec Home is that his good humour and lack of pretension seem to have been wholly authentic, and there are no suggestions to the contrary. He was a man who knew his strengths and his limitations, and knew (though would never say) that those strengths were considerable. And, as I’ve written before, the 1964 general election, unlike, say, 1945 or 1997, was not “unwinnable”. A few nudges to fate and Alec might have held on, which could have had profound effects (Quintin Hailsham thought the Labour Party would not have survived a fourth defeat in its then-recognisable form).
I comment further about it below but black and white TV really did the guy no favours, and that’s made even clearer when you see the colour photo in this piece
Absolutely. In many ways the remarkable thing about 1964 isn’t Wilson’s victory, but that Douglas-Home came so close to renewing the Tory mandate after 13 years in office.
Black and white TV really did Douglas-Home no favours
I believe I’ve mentioned to you before how amused I was by the ‘who exhumed you’ placard held up in protest to him as PM, but now I see a colour picture of the guy it does drive home how much different media options can change the way people are viewed (maybe Marshall McLuhan was right about mediums and message) because he really did look like someone that placard makes sense about in black and white but in colour he looks perfectly normal
The lovely thing about Alec Home is that his good humour and lack of pretension seem to have been wholly authentic, and there are no suggestions to the contrary. He was a man who knew his strengths and his limitations, and knew (though would never say) that those strengths were considerable. And, as I’ve written before, the 1964 general election, unlike, say, 1945 or 1997, was not “unwinnable”. A few nudges to fate and Alec might have held on, which could have had profound effects (Quintin Hailsham thought the Labour Party would not have survived a fourth defeat in its then-recognisable form).
I comment further about it below but black and white TV really did the guy no favours, and that’s made even clearer when you see the colour photo in this piece
Absolutely. In many ways the remarkable thing about 1964 isn’t Wilson’s victory, but that Douglas-Home came so close to renewing the Tory mandate after 13 years in office.