[cma-l] Guardian Letter: John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins continued to promote the idea of community media

[Peter Lewis]

Thank you for re-sending this, but I thought list subscribers might like 
to see (below) what I originally wrote before The Guardian edited it.

Best wishes
*
*
*Peter Lewis*

_*Obituary by Peter Lewis March 2015*_

Hoppy’s important contribution to community video in the UK should not 
be overlooked. His work in Notting Hill included a pioneering use of 
video and, describing its contribution to community development in a 
report for the Home Office (Hopkins et al, Video in Community 
Development, 1972) he was the first to refer to Canadian experience in 
the Challenge for Change/Societé Nouvelle project. About this time I saw 
him on a BBC Late Night Line-up programme in which he contradicted the 
mainstream assumptions of the presenter, angrily waving a copy of the 
Challenge for Change newsletter, Access. Following this up in research 
for an article for New Society, I was able, thanks to a tutorial from 
Hoppy at the New Arts Lab, to write with more understanding about the 
opportunity small-scale video presented to the experimental cable 
licences then on offer from the Heath government. Certainly Bristol 
Channel, Swindon Viewpoint and Channel 40 in Milton Keynes were 
influenced by the Canadian experience Hoppy had introduced us to. He 
continued to promote the idea of community media when, after the close 
down of most of the cable stations, COMCOM (the Community Communications 
Group, the forerunner of the present day Community Media Association) 
was formed. He produced an ad for COMCOM which was screened on London 
Weekend Television and his JCATS, Journal of the Centre for Advanced TV 
Studies, carried articles on the topic from across the world. JCATS was 
produced from Fantasy Factory in the Gray’s Inn Road where for a time he 
and Sue Hall generously gave me a room in the attic. In the evenings we 
watched endless episodes of The Prisoner and fell about laughing at the 
clunky bugging of their phone by the Special Branch.

Ends

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