Day Return to Oxford

49 years ago, in the glorious summer of 1976, I was lucky enough to persuade ATV, then the ITV company for the Midlands, to let me go back to my old Oxford college, New College, to make a film about how things had changed since I had left eight years before. The result was a programme called 'Day Return to Oxford' which can now be viewed online thanks to MACE, the Media Archive of Central London. This is the link https://www.macearchive.org/films/day-return-oxford

One of the big changes the film focuses on is the admission of women to what had been, in my day, exclusively male colleges, and one of the interviewees is the first female cox of Brasenose College's rowing eight. Then there is New College undergraduate (student) Miles Young, talking about his sadness at leaving Oxford and about how hard it was to find a good job. After a distinguished career in advertising, he would go on to become Warden (i.e. boss) of New College. There is also a veteran 'scout' (college servant) giving the lowdown on what is was like cleaning up after privileged young men, and the head of the careers service discussing the challenge of finding Oxford graduates the job of their dreams.

Other vexed questions tackled included: how much work did undergraduates do, and what was it like for young men and women to be in a university where the sex ratio was still about four men to every woman. But because the weather was so wonderful, the real star of the film was Oxford itself.