Upcoming BBC documentary on UK martial arts history

Just a heads-up that the hour-long documentary "Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: the Rise of Martial Arts in Britain" will be screening on BBC4 on Sunday Feb. 24th at 10.00 pm. The documentary covers the cultural impact of Asian martial arts in the UK, beginning with Bartitsu circa 1900 and moving through to the Bruce Lee craze of the 1970s.

There's a placeholder website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p2pm6 and apparently there will be some associated short online videos, etc. available soon.

 

There better be boxing and Catch Wrestling!

 

I believe that the director originally wanted to showcase English martial arts and combat sports as well, but it was eventually trimmed down to just Asian styles.

 

For the TiVO-less UK members, BBC iPlayer usually has programmes up for about a month.

 

aw.
i am disappoint that the show isn't celebrating the awesome british martial arts that few british people know of...

 

Ecky Thump?

 

http://www.bartitsu.org/index.php/2013/02/the-first-jujutsu-masters-in-britain/

This is a short (3.49) web video supplement/promo for the full documentary, which will screen on Sunday night. The clip deals with the careers of Bartitsu Club instructors Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi, who are believed to have been the first jujutsuka to have taught and competed professionally outside of Japan.

Unfortunately, because of BBC licence rules, the clip is only viewable by people within the UK.

 

looks like that is going to be a very interesting one! =D

 

Some advance commentary from a "Timeout" reviewer:

"Carl Douglas may have reckoned it was `fast as lightning', but actually the trajectory of martial arts in Britain was surprisingly sedate. This documentary tracks its evolution within Western culture. We begin, most entertainingly, with the notion of the gentleman hard-nut – amid the `garrotting panics' of late Victorian London, it was deemed essential for a chap to know how to look after himself. Then, there were the suffragettes, facing male aggression and expecting no help from the police. Emmeline Pankhurst was escorted by a crack ju-jitsu troupe when she made public appearances.

Eventually, thanks to the likes of Bruce Lee, the discipline went mainstream – but did it lose a little of its soul in the process? It's a good story, engagingly told – the highlight is probably Brit martial arts expert Ian McClaren (`as a Glaswegian, I've always been very interested in fighting'). But overall, this is classic `Timeshift' – quirky, often unconsidered social history, rendered in lively style."

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015d5ft

Bartitsu instructors James Marwood and George Stokoe demonstrate Edwardian-era "antagonistics" in dramatic slow motion for this new promo. for the documentary. As before, because of BBC licence restrictions the clip is only intended to be playable by people within the UK.

 

All I can think is "SHERLOCK HOLMES".

 

Appropriately enough, given that Bartitsu (misspelled as "baritsu") was the martial art that Holmes used to defeat Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls ...

 

I saw a bit of Ian Maclaren's section where he referred to wado ryu as being a form of shotokan and therefore didn't include it as a school in its own right (replacing it with kyokushinkai in his listing of the big Japanese schools of karate).

I can see a bit of wado rage being likely...

 

Yeah I thought that was odd too.

 

Sooo I watched it.



It was a bit dull, dry, and not incredibly informative. and I knew a fair part of it already, and of course Bruce Lee was (predictably) mentioned.

Although I liked the part about Bartitsu, it didn;t go into any great detail about what happened to it, how it ceased and was then revived.



And Wrestling was barely touched upon at all. Not even the stories about Jujutsu guys coming over and fighting Western Wrestlers. Same with boxing, no real mention of it.

 

FWIW, I know that the production team wanted to include a lot more detail than they had time for within a strict hour format; they did a huge amount of fact-checking and so-on, and the interviews were obviously far more in depth than what ended up in the final cut.

IMO the bigger picture is that the documentary introduced the martial arts as a form of cultural history to a large audience of lay-people, and at that level I thought it did a great job.

If you have a particular interest in Bartitsu, here's a whole documentary just about that subject: http://www.freelanceacademypress.com/bartitsu.aspx

 

iPlayer link for those who missed it,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...Fighting_The_Rise_of_Martial_Arts_in_Britain/

 

Yeah, timeshift is very much a social history show, and as such I thought it was very good. It must be remembered that in the time period discussed boxing and wrestling had already transitioned to combat sports and were not viewed as martial arts. It did discuss them within the context of Olympic Judo, which from a cultural history perspective is appropriate.
It did say what happened to Bartitsu, once people got "real" Jujutsu it fell out of favour. The revival of Bartitsu isn't relevant to cultural history unless you're doing a cultural history of martial artists.

 

I agree re. the modern revival but note that Bartitsu actually included "real" jujutsu as a cross-training component, along with boxing, wrestling and the Vigny method of cane fighting. However, that cross-training process was interrupted when the original Bartitsu Club closed under mysterious circumstances in early 1902, at which point the instructors dispersed and Barton-Wright himself effectively abandoned self defence instruction in favour of his interests in electrotherapy.

Pierre Vigny and later others (Percy Longhurst, William Garrud and several French instructors) actually continued to teach "combined" systems similar to Bartitsu. Tani and Uyenishi both continued to teach jujutsu, which was still exotic and received huge press via their challenge matches in the music halls, and were joined by Akitaro Ono, Mitsuyo Maeda and others, expanding the craze that Barton-Wright had begun through to the beginning of the First World War.

It's all concisely described in this webisode from Timeshift: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01580m1 .