This article reassesses Paul Rotha’s tenure as BBC television’s Head of Documentaries (1953–55), primarily by reconsidering his signature television series, The World Is Ours (1954–56), as a more hybrid and collaborative production than has hitherto been acknowledged. It relates Rotha’s BBC work to the British documentary film movement’s embrace of a specific variant of postwar internationalism, to the changing style of his preceding film projects during the 1940s and early 1950s, and to emergent practices within postwar British factual television. This article broadens understanding of a period when new televisual forms were being developed and the question of television production for international markets gradually became more prominent.
Martin Stollery (Tue,) studied this question.