1967: Who Are The HIPPIES? | Panorama | Voice of the People | BBC Archive

"If this is a revolution, its slogan is 'make love not war,' and its weapons are carnations and sweet William."
Panorama reporter Richard Kershaw reports on the section of young people that call themselves 'Hippies'. He attends a 'Legalise Pot' gathering at Hyde Park, where hippies listen to the likes of poet Allen Ginsberg, carry placards demanding changes to drug laws and espouse the 'flower power' movement. Are hippies political animals? Kershaw talks to the editor of the International Times - an underground hippy newsletter - to find out.
Then he looks at the hippies' distinctive fashion - what are they trying to communicate with their clothes? And finally, Richard speaks to two young hippies about their attitudes to the older generation and their parents, possessions, love, sex and freedom. If the hippy movement is successful, what kind of world will we see in the future?
Robin Day introduces the report.
Originally broadcast 7 August, 1967.
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[@lukastargazer3089]

That woman at the end with the fun glasses just made good point after good point to me :)

[@potatoface4698]

16:23 "You're assuming that all we are is the clothes we wear and the way we look. I mean that's the least important thing about any of us" 🔥 she says some profound things

[@AngelDelight69]

And sadly even today people judge by who they are

[@skyworm8006]

That's literally all it is though. That's why he's asking. The whole thing is about conventional fashion and sensibilities of the time. She even admitted it herself right after saying that. If conventional clothes are so bad then the clothes you wear and the way you look must be an important thing. No one seriously thinks clothes are a person and that's clearly not what he was asking about. So it's a meaningless quip.

[@danmayberry1185]

This was my childhood environment. With a career in the establishment behind me, I find 1967 once again very appealing.

[@hippiedaze1970]

Reading through these comments is quite depressing. As a hippie myself, I don't understand the disrespect towards us. Like, wtf? I thought in 50+ years things would've gotten better for us but I guess there's still people who don't understand what hippies are about. It's their loss! 🙄

[@nige3801]

I read Ringolevio, Emmett Grogan's novel which hipped me to them times

[@hippiedaze1970]

@@nige3801 Never heard of this book but I'll see if I can find it. I'm currently reading the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. Groovy book! ☮️✌️

[@nige3801]

@@hippiedaze1970 yes I have read it, but srongly recommend Ringolevio...

[@markiliff]

"Such cruel glasses" -Frankie Howerd on Robin Day

[@timcorns9351]

Very insightful questions from the reporter…

[@ScenesFromPalacio]

Yeh he was really good..Insightful questions n not condescending..Not what i was expecting at all

[@paulatkinson5211]

Such eloquence and idealism in a time when some young people thought, perhaps there could be another way. Then it all fell apart in the 80s.

[@navillus15]

Except that it is all idealism and anyone over the age of, at most, twenty and with an IQ above the room temperature knows from experience, that life is at best tricky and at worst incredibly hard and even tragic. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in idealism, e.g. ‘Love for all,’ until you meet someone you can’t stand. The famed orgies that (supposedly some of) the hippie generation had were almost certainly made up of the beautiful people! Some poor sod with a face like a plate of baked beans was probably the guy/girl left to mop up. So, perhaps realpolitik did make a comeback in the 80s, but ultimately it’s more sincere and the only honest approach to life.

[@RowanWiccae]

Then everything changed when the fire nation attacked 😂

[@BillboBirsay]

Middle aged reporter 33 year old. Damn.

[@sourcecode6467]

I thought that too 😮

[@ShamrockParticle]

The hippies did say "never trust anyone over 30". And were some of them over 30?

[@lw3646]

I think that line was said slightly tounge in cheek.

[@TheNobbynoonar]

@ShamrockParticle1 And the punks said “never trust a hippie”

[@jasonayres]

I remember Flower Power. Like, The Day of The Triffids.

[@MeadeSkeltonMusic]

"Ginsburg"... That's all i needed to know. Thanks.

[@marine4lyfe85]

Pedo

[@benscr]

One of the BBC’s middle aged reporters, aged 33 was sent to investigate 😂 ….wow how times have changed as 33yr olds can get young persons discounts on things now.

[@lw3646]

Probably still living with their parents in these days at 33, priced out the housing market, still playing on their PlayStation, wasting hours on Tiktok, about 15 years without a real term pay rise, wondering where it all went wrong.....

[@TheNobbynoonar]

@lw36461 Because the generation being interviewed became the bankers, landlords, business owners and have pretty much got it all sewn up.

[@garryleeks4848]

Year I was born, yea man 🤘

[@LPBineli]

There's so many Hippies in Brighton-Uk

[@_TheRam]

I never knew that people in the 60s used to smoke during an interview, you don’t get that now. It doesn’t get more liberating and free spirited than that.

[@cheeseapples27]

that reporter has definitely been smoking the devils lettuce when he is on the couch he is blazed as haha

[@gilaschannel1855]

1967 summer of love

[@choozu]

33 years used to be 'middle age'? Huh...

[@SoulStylistJukeBox]

That was sarcasm.

[@TheNobbynoonar]

We want to be different, just like everyone else.

[@pawnotdaw4559]

They are all so posh!

[@TheUltimateBlooper]

Hopefully the girl at 16:26 is doing well :)

[@thecaveofthedead]

BBC: Won't it be funny when the next generation revolts against the hippies! The Sex Pistols: God Save The Queen! The fascist regime! BBC: OMG!

[@andrewlavinski1917]

6:59 when the presenter partakes 🙂

[@gstree]

Most of us that were there when it was all happening live a different lifestyle, however some of us still love to savor those amazing days while we can and try to show what it was like to the newer generations. kzbin.info/www/bejne/j3rNf2qAh5udkMU

[@mikemickeals3045]

That's how empires fall .

[@hilaryepstein6013]

I feel quite sorry for them really. They were after a utopian world which never happened. They are now in their 70s and young people of today probably feel about them the same way they did about the older generation in 1967.

[@heraldeventsandfilms5970]

Many young people have similar ideas. Anybody that doesn't is worthless.

[@lewis7515]

They were quite different, philosophically - mainly in that they actually had some kind of philosophy. I expect hippies would consider Gen-Z as fundamentally shallow, self-regarding without being self-reflecting - and, as a result, being totally unenlightened and nihilistic: and they might well be right. By that exact token, I doubt Gen-Z - infamously detached from history and context - has much to say about hippies, other than considering them anachronistic - and that's if they even know what hippies stood for, at all. The wicked irony in it being that hippies were the pioneers that carved out the societal space for, "wokeness", that Gen-Z seems to think they have the entitlement to own, and totally distort... It's all a bit sad, really.

[@makara80]

The inevitable problem with a ‘utopian world’ though is that it won’t be utopia for everyone. Indeed, one suspects the indolent Timothy’s and Cressida’s of the late sixties still expected the lower classes to undertake all the ‘icky’ jobs in their envisioned utopia whilst they embarked on a life of Bacchanalian self-indulgence, copious chemical infusion and speculative ‘creativity’… And some still claim it was Thatcher and the eighties that practically invented greed, narcissism and selfishness… 😉

[@stocktonjoans]

i wonder how many of the people in this piece went on to become bankers and office managers?

[@hschsc1300]

Young people today are much poorer than young people in the 1960's and 70's.

[@gan9e]

I'd just like to say... I'm as high as a goose right now

[@makara80]

…Some claim that _working class_ hippies really did exist whilst others insist they’ve seen the Loch Ness Monster. The latter group are the more credible though I think… 😉

[@randybackgammon890]

I seem to remember(first hand albeit through the soft focus of childhood)working class lads in our 'hood playing at being hippies for one weekend in July '67…...Soon went back to being mods and proto skins though

[@mikesaunders4775]

More working class hippies than one might expect, but the majority were middle class.also the very posh ones had an access to the media unavailable to the rest of us.

[@ClearLight1967]

Yep, only the well off could afford to "drop out" and bugger off to Nepal.

[@hickoryhippie]

I can't believe 33 was considered middle age.

[@nobordersnoflags9905]

the woman in the latter part of this absolutely nailed what it should be all about. fabulous!

[@pmajudge]

AAAAAh!! From, U.K. (2024).

[@leejohnson3209]

They're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths man...

[@garryleeks4848]

Are they which branch 🙄🙄

[@thebossman80s]

We have failed to paint it black ✌️

[@garryleeks4848]

@@thebossman80s The Rolling Stones man 🤘

[@lindasmith6072]

Presuming Ed

[@barrycalvillo2466]

Many people who have taken lsd will say thats beautiful or your beautiful, it does change you to a certain extent.

[@charlesloukas1946]

Can anyone on here identify the 2 young ladies?

[@charlesloukas1946]

They should be Interviewed again

[@spooley]

How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? -- John Lennon They didn't appear to be inhaling, at least not the one on the right.

[@JohnSmith-rw2yn]

It is sad that my father and my mother are late baby boomers, never got the full 60s as they were too young, but we're aware, so the 70s was there decade and it was grim, but my grandparents who were born during the war, when they were in their early teens as the 60s came around, they saw people being hippies but just said that they didn't get involved as they had mouths to feed, rent to pay and work to get on with. They said it was a city thing mainly, not your average town in the UK and if it was it was a minority. But it boils down to that family members of say 18 or lower now say to their grandparents of baby boom age "OK boomer" insulting basically people who may have appeared in this video, yet they, though not successful in a utopian society, definitely laid the foundations for what Gen Z can do, say and act now. Each generation gets on its soap box.

[@ClearLight1967]

Hippiedom in the UK during the Sixties was the preserve of the indolent upper classes as they could afford to "drop out", the US hippie scene was much more egalitarian as they were not bound up by an entrenched class system.

[@dougie1968]

Pretentious, middle class drop-outs. One of the reasons why Punk happened. Punk was the nuclear attack on the detestable hippie movement which wiped a load out, and from which it never recovered. There's still the odd survivor skulking around though.

[@matthewtrow5698]

Very much a middle class movement very much overstated by the media. Just listen to the young people being interviewed - all very well educated and well spoken. That was very much evident in all footage from this time. In centuries past, probably referred to as Dandies and Fops. I've chatted to so many people who were in their late teens through to early 20's in this era and almost all of them weren't really involved or really knew much about Hippies at the time. Rather, fashion spawned out of that movement into the mainstream and long hair, colourful clothes, the design ethic etc. became normalised. There's a silly saying "If you remember the 60's you weren't there" which really says it all - total load of bollocks. The absolute cold concrete fact of the matter is that 99.999% of people globally were _not_ involved in any of this movement. It's influence on culture after wasn't very deep at all and that's somewhat sad. It was more the shallow that became commercialised, normalised and the very disjointed message got lost. Perhaps that was half the problem - there really wasn't much of a message, love each other, peace, get stoned, have fun. Quite childish in a way, but adoringly so. By the mid-70's, less than a decade after, even Policemen had longer hair. Ordinary people's wallpaper and curtains had eastern or art deco inspired design. As the 1960's turned into the 1970's it all got very ugly indeed. The culture of free love and the deep involvement with mind altering substances spiralled out of control. Either way, Western societal and cultural changes way before this movement were far more profound - and led to more wealth, the middle classes expanding and the children of now better off families having the freedom of better education, to take drugs and attend "happenings" and also to travel more widely around the world. Sure, there was the idea of the expansion of the mind - but all of that was ancient and from another culture and a lot of it was bogus, misunderstood and based on being stoned. Behind the scenes, however, a great deal was happening unrelated to the Hippies which did indeed change society and culture. So perhaps the best thing that can be said about the movement is that it fast forwarded the _idea_ of cultural mixing - it was probably inevitable anyway, due to the aforementioned aspects of society and culture that preceded the movement. More money, greater travel opportunities, greater expansion of experience and ideas and a more liberal society already taking shape. Still, it remains cool to this day - despite the fact much of it was cooked up by the media and that it only represented a near infinitesimal fraction of global population at the time. Like I said, middle class movement = the people involved or on the periphery were able to promote it considerably. It was really Eastern cultures influencing and being adopted by the West that was the main driver of change, regardless of the Hippies. More travel, more mixing. Mass media. People having more money and free time... in the West that is. More _colour_ - perhaps that was the most profound influence. In a Western world where everyone was wearing fairly drab clothing, there was this sudden explosion of Eastern influences.

[@spiritof6663]

Boy, you *really* don't understand what was going on back then, do you? "More color"? That's it? And everything else was a garbled mess? Only the middle class, btw, could have had the luxury of exploring the things the hippies did in the 60s. When you're poor you're just trying to survive; spirituality and sociocultural revolution aren't on the menu out of sheer necessity. Trying to slam the hippies as "middle class" like it was a sin, is silly; what happened was exactly what was supposed to happen--the increase in wealth and appearance of a middle class in Western societies after WWII finally allowed (as you note) masses of people the leisure to afford to look beyond gross physical subsistence and moneymaking and into things like human consciousness expansion--and just because 'spirituality' existed before the 60s doesn't make the insights gleaned in that decade irrelevant (LSD alone was different from any consciousness expansion experienced before). The era produced a flood of relevant New Age thinkers who ended up revolutionizing modern spiritual thought; it was NOT just a recycling of ancient Eastern practices (although even that would have been a good thing). Yes, it all fell apart later but that doesn't mean the initial zeitgeist wasn't worth having, nor that it still can't be mined for both entertainment and insight 56 years later. The music alone is entirely worth what happened--I mean will we ever hear the like of "Pepper", "Are You Experienced?", "The Doors" or "Disraeli Gears" ever again? Hey, if you don't care for the hippies, you do you. I think I'll go get stoned to "The Notorious Byrd Brothers", thank you very much! PS for a movement for which only .1% of the population participated (as *you* claim--I would say it was a lot more people than that, although I recognize it was a minority), it sure has had an outsized influence on our culture since.

[@barrycalvillo2466]

Even JIm Morrison of the doors said in a youtube interview video, it was a middle class phenomenon , if you was poor and you did not have the ways and means to get around or live on your own for a while or "do your own thing", then you probably was not a part of it, and it was the kids of the establishment or rich people who really rebelled, because they are the ones who had it so good, but decided to do their own thing different from their wealthy families.

[@ClearLight1967]

The only coppers with longhair were undercover DS.

[@darin3212]

Middle age reporter, 33.

[@palianshow]

Say it again!? - "33yo middle-aged"!?

[@ultimatemagic2125]

33 is middle aged?!

[@heraldeventsandfilms5970]

He was being sarcastic. Even that low level of wit was lost on you.

[@ultimatemagic2125]

@@heraldeventsandfilms5970 Jeez, why are you so aggressive?

[@joshuataylor3550]

People didn't live long back then.

[@TheNobbynoonar]

@ultimatemagic It is if you die in your 60’s

[@aJJMakesSense]

At least half of the people in this video voted brexit.

[@MeadeSkeltonMusic]

Then they aren't so bad after all

[@TheNobbynoonar]

@aJJMakesSense2 They weren’t all brain damaged by the drugs.

[@hanniffydinn6019]

Simpler times man! Division in society is a lot worse now! 🤯

[@randybackgammon890]

Not really....Mods, Rockers,Mids,Mockers,States,7/6s(sic)...Beatniks,ton up boys,peanuts never mind hippies,skinheads and hell's angels.....I,m getting the mentals😜

[@hanniffydinn6019]

@@randybackgammon890 leftists are literally ruining society now! They weren’t in the past! 🤯

[@theendofeverything6356]

'Ginsberg', you say? 🤔

[@stocktonjoans]

come on, be honest, Ginsberg was a bit of a prick

[@keithallen5795]

The past looks very sad in black and white. All they did is nothing. Life poor is dull. If alive their 90. Young before Aids hit.

[@iseegoodandbad6758]

British people didnt need to be hippies in the 1960s in my opinion. 1960s Britain was still a environmentally friendly with organic food and a calm car free environment!!!

[@Chipsandgravy202]

I dunno about that the industry in the uk back then smog on the streets of the north in the mornings clearly your from the nice south we sat in factory’s our economy was built on coal burning that opinion is laughable

[@lw3646]

Less cars yes but motorways were starting to spring up, cities bombed in WWII were rebuilt for car usage. Chemicals were not always disposed of properly but often ended up in rivers. People no doubt suffering from lead poison too from petrol fumes.

[@marine4lyfe85]

This is Britain, but the guy speaking at the "picnic" is clearly American.

[@randybackgammon890]

They were,generally speaking,.more intelligent,articulate thoughtfull and refleclve than todays lot by miles.But there were still plenty of fruitcakes and dimwit philosophy on veiw....then as now

[@stephenlegg262]

If they wanted to go against their parents why did they smoke. I thought they wanted to be different from than.

[@TheNobbynoonar]

@stephenlegg They wanted to be different, like everyone else.

[@thomasm1964]

14:27 "I don't want her to smoke it at about three because she's going to get lung cancer" ... whereas if she was 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or any other age she wouldn't! With logic like that, no wonder this country is in such a mess now!

[@heraldeventsandfilms5970]

Join a literacy class and maybe return when you can converse at a relatively coherent level.

[@richguest]

They really were rather clueless..... 🤣

[@FordPrefect-Earth]

An awfully Upper Middle Class bubble, mostly out of its head and up its own arse.

[@Mrrobackenson1]

All terribly posh 😅

[@stephenlegg262]

All middle class. Probably from families with money.

[@borderlands6606]

Just like today, they were the establishment pretending to be the alternative.

[@rabbieburns2501]

All middle class 'hippies' though who can afford to "drop out" whilst using mummy and daddy's purse strings

[@heraldeventsandfilms5970]

Ah, a Scottish bigot.

[@joshuataylor3550]

No it was just a much cheaper cost of living and easier to get work.

[@ganbaroteam6547]

No mate. My father was a brickie. He did go and work for two years in india for food security in 69-70. Then he moved to australia and built a pretty off-grid 100 acre property and raised his kids with some damn good ideas. Working class hippies knew that capitalism would end up like it has, and were trying to warn us.

[@heraldeventsandfilms5970]

You have no ability to recite and no intelligent person calls our best-ever poet 'Rabbie'. You bring shame to Scotland.

[@charlesloukas1946]

Some were on National Assistance