Cold Warnings: Armageddon in the National Curriculum
Keith McDonald and Adam James Smith secured Arts Council funding for the Cold Warnings: Armageddon in the National Curriculum project.
‘The idea for this project came out of a symposium held at York St John University in the summer of 2022. The symposium, named Horrifying Children, concerned, among other things, the often deeply disturbing television and literature aimed at children in the 1970s and 80s and the ways in which they have shaped contemporary popular culture. Topics included spectrality in the 1989 BBC Television Series Tom’s Midnight Garden, coming of age in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and my own contribution, which concerned Cold War fears translated into American sci-fi in the TV series “V”. One paper that particularly stayed with me was Hollie Adam’s though-provoking exploration of the difficulty in selecting potentially disturbing and traumatic material on the secondary school curriculum. This led me, and my co-investigator for this project Dr Adam J. Smith to develop Cold Warnings. As conveyed in the testimonies of a wide range of people now in their middle-age, the sight of the television being wheeled into the classroom was both a source of joy and, as we would come to realise, dread. ‘ Dr Keith McDonald.
The film and more information on Cold Warnings can be found here: https://coldwarnings.co.uk/
Minutes to Midnight: Yorkshire Air Museum
Robert Edgar, Chris Price and Ian Horwood (Senior Lecturer in History) provided input and copy for the Yorkshire Air Museum’s Minutes to Midnight Cold War exhibition, April 2024
