Bbc Archive
@bbcarchive·780K subscribers·1.9K videos
1957: The Life of Students | Eye to Eye | BBC Archive
Posted
March 28, 2026
Views
12,365
Likes
332
Comments
74
Engagement
3.28%
March 28, 2026
12,365
332
74
3.28%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
29:16Now Playing*This video contains some graphic imagery.*
"The life so short, the craft... So Long to Learn."
Chaucer's comment, written over 600 years ago, provides the key to this edition of Eye to Eye, a picture of present-day young people. It tells the story of a boat-load of students, from the rival colleges of Battersea and Chelsea, on a summer outing on the Thames; dancing, talking, and thinking about the past and the future.
Made with the help of Battersea College of Technology and Chelsea Polytechnic and School of Art
See foot of page
"The people in tonight's film are all young; and though perhaps not typical of all young people they are typical of students. They are a representative handful of the 100,000 who attend full-time courses (and to some extent are representative of the greater number who attend part-time courses) in our technical colleges and universities. They also represent the people who within the next generation will be the leaders in industry, academic life, and artistic thought.
For this edition of Eye to Eye we have chosen the rival colleges of Battersea and Chelsea, which by the end of the year will be among the first of the eight new colleges of advanced technology that are being set up by the Ministry of Education.
The film itself tells the story of a riverboat jazz party organised by the two colleges, and between dancing and enjoying themselves generally the students get involved in arguments. These, for example, deal with the advantages of going into industry as opposed to teaching; the narrowness of technical training - in which we see a lot of leg-pulling of the scientists by the artists - and finally, as the boat nears home, a discussion on religion. The programme also includes two big student raids."
- Rex Moorfoot, Eye to Eye producer.
Clip taken from Eye to Eye: So Long to Learn, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 13 September, 1957.
You have now entered the BBC Archive, a time machine that will transport you back to the golden age of TV to educate, entertain and enlighten you with classic clips from the BBC vaults.
Make sure you subscribe so that you never miss a single stop on our amazing journey through the BBC Archive
You can also dive into plenty more BBC Archive on our website
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
