Between the World War II-era tone of the narrator and background music, and the look and mannerisms of the folks actually onscreen, you can see the British culture and counterculture of the late ’50s and early 1960s clash over coffee in this amusing Rank Film short on British coffeehouses of the early 1960s, found via the mid-century modern Ultraswank Website (which is worth exploring in depth in its own right). Long before this year’s riots, the British counterculture depicted in the clip below would be eviscerated several times over, first by the mods of the mid-’60s, then the hippies of the late-’60s, and then of course, the punks of the mid-1970s:
[youtube B92MnoPVtGs]
And just a few years later after the above clip, and Rank discovered that it’s a mod, mod, mod world. In contrast to the distance maintained by the previous short’s narrator, the chap in the video below is trying so hard to fit in, he ends up sounding so arch and silly that forty years later, it’s painful to the ears:
[youtube tBq7icqGxB4]
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