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Sports Time

From the rich man’s sport of power boats, to the poor man’s scrambling, and in between the mad lot playing football driving around in Cortinas.

Amateur film 1971 17 mins

From the collection of:

Logo for Yorkshire Film Archive

Overview

It’s the 1970s and the world of sport activities, building on the post-war boom in leisure hobbies, is growing and becoming ever more experimental. Doug and Norah Brear of Wakefield Cine Club have made their own documentary capturing many of these, including yachting, gliding, powerboats, scrambling, go-karting, car football and grass tracking, adding a wry and understated commentary to the often crazy goings on.

Doug and Norah Brear made over 60 films between 1960 and 1985, and showed them at film shows across Yorkshire up until the 2000s. All the sports on view are fairly long established and still going strong, although grass tracking, or autograss, was only established in the 1960s. Car football however, unsurprisingly, is the exception, with little evidence for it outside car television programmes or the odd advertisement. The one anomaly in the film is the presence of the ABC (The Associated British Corporation) camera crew at one of the events as these merged with Rediffusion to become Thames Television when new television company contracts when awarded in 1968.