Marcel Ophuls, the maker of television documentaries such as The Sorrow and the Pity, Sense of Loss and Memory of Justice, opens his lecture on a biographical note, expressing his admiration for his father, Max Ophuls, and describing how he himself became what he deprecatingly describes as ‘a self indulgent specialist of four-and-a-half talking-head marathons’: i.e. documentaries. Ophuls declares himself the spiritual as well as the biological offspring of his father, sharing fully ‘his assessments of the shallow, anti-creative, anti-humanist and authoritarian theories which seemed to us … the systematic foundations of the naturalist tendency’. His critique of naturalism explores, but strongly contests, themes addressed by John McGrath a year earlier at the initial festival in 1976: ‘John McGrath and I do not agree at all,’ he acknowledges, ‘on the nature, on the causes or the definition of the naturalist tradition.’

Ophuls begins his lecture with a recollection of a damp, November evening in London when, as a freelance seeking a job, he went to a meeting in Golden Square. As the discussion moved to the ‘techniques of naturalism – its social functions and its social mission and its social purpose’ Ophuls recalls the ‘irresistible urge’ to say that he ‘much preferred the realism of Noel Coward's This Happy Breed … to the elaborately bleak naturalism of Cathy Come Home’.