Merry Christmas! Here's a festive gift marking 40 years since Paul McCartney's Pipes of Peace video, which recreates the 1914 Christmas Day truce on the Western Front of World War 1. How was this video turned around fast enough to be aired on the BBC six days after shooting? Has Paul got the acting bug after spending half of 1983 shooting Give My Regards to Broad Street? Does his decision to play both the English and the German soldier lend a sense of shared humanity and emphasise the futility of war? (Seriously, stay with us here.) And why hasn't the song endured as a peace anthem in the last 40 years, in the way that Give Peace a Chance has?
We used a clip of the charity record He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother by The Justice Collective in this episode, and so we made a donation to The Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance. You can donate too if you'd like to.
- He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother by The Justice Collective, featuring a guitar and a vocal line by Paul