In the late 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard was funded by a succession of European television companies to make programmes, which they invariably shelved when they discovered their politically militant nature. These included British Sounds, which was commissioned by London Weekend Television (LWT) in 1968 and produced by Kestrel Productions.

According to Godard, he had originally wanted to make British Sounds (sometimes referred to during production as Some English Voices) as a series of ten-minute blocks to be broadcast weekly over a three-month period. This was refused, so he conceived instead an experimental leftist tract made up of six distinct sequences, which he shot in March 1969 in collaboration with the young Maoist Jean-Henri Roger in various locations in the UK, including at the British Motor Corporation factory in Cowley and Essex University. 

Faced on its completion with what they deemed an untransmittable film, and in an attempt to dispel accusations of censorship, LWT devised the idea of screening it to an invited audience of students, workers and intellectuals in the ICA cinema and filming a debate about it there afterwards. A heavily edited version of this highly charged discussion, accompanied by a handful of clips from British Sounds, was duly included in the first edition of LWT’s new arts show, Aquarius, presented by Humphrey Burton, which was broadcast on 2 January 1970.

This long unseen legendary programme includes some memorable interventions, including from British Sounds co-producer Irving Teitelbaum, Agitprop co-founder John Hoyland (who was also on the editorial board of the leftist newspaper The Black Dwarf), literary agent Clive Goodwin (of both Kestrel Productions and The Black Dwarf), film critic Alexander Walker, and two unidentified workers.

Shelved by LWT, British Sounds was acquired by the newly formed The Other Cinema, who premiered it on the big screen at The Place in Dukes Road, London, on 1 May 1970. Fourteen years later, Channel 4 commissioned another TV documentary from Godard, this time titled Images of Britain (a topic proposed by Colin MacCabe and conceived as a complement to British Sounds). It was be shot on film and video at locations throughout the UK and broadcast at the end of a retrospective of Godard’s post-1968 work that Rod Stoneman was preparing for Channel 4.

The delivery deadline came and went and it became clear that Images of Britain would not materialise. The project was eventually replaced by a very different one in which Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville would interview one another about their lives and work. This became the highly personal Soft and Hard: Soft Talk on a Hard Subject Between Two Friends, which the duo delivered just in time for it to be subtitled and broadcast as planned in August 1985 as the concluding showpiece of the Channel 4 season.

Programme
British Sounds, dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger, UK 1969, 52 min
Aquarius: The Skin Game/The Case of Jean-Luc Godard, dir. Derek Bailey, UK 1970, 39 min
Soft and Hard: Soft Talk on a Hard Subject Between Two Friends, dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, UK/Switzerland 1985, 52 min