The swimming pool

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The swimming pool: Laurie Taylor explores its iconic role in our culture, as well as its unspoken rules, routines and rituals. Piotr Florczyk, forming swimming champion and Assistant Professor of Global Literary Studies at the University of Washington, considers the allure of an azure pool and its place in our cultural imagination, from the Hollywood movie, Sunset Boulevard, to David Hockney's pool paintings. He also asks 'who has access to the pool' and charts North America's shifting attitudes towards race and recreation which turned public bathing into an explosive issue, one leading to violence, segregation and the flight to white suburbia. What is the future of the pool given water shortages and climate change? Also, Susie Scott, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex analyses the unspoken social norms which govern swimmers behaviour, including a respect for personal space, a shared disapproval for the 'hairy torpedo' and the firm refusal to notice 'the elephant in the room' - the fact that we are nearly naked.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:49.2	Hello I don't like to remember my early childhood experiences at a Catholic school in Droitwich.
0:56.8	Being 12 years old and having to get down on my knees in the dormitory and pray that God would
1:02.1	give me a vocation for the priesthood.
1:04.0	Neither do I like to recall the regular canings dispensed by the religious brothers in charge of the school.
1:10.0	But most of all I try hard to repress memories of the one afternoon of the week
1:14.8	when in a neat crocodile formation we were all marched down to the Lido for a
1:19.8	swimming lesson and this wasn't an ordinary swimming pool.
1:23.0	Droitridge it seems is situated on vast deposits of salt
1:27.0	and so many gallons of brine were pumped into the pool
1:31.0	that at the time it was like jumping into well an
	...

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