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More than just a cultural trend – counter-culture became a social movement so powerful it shaped institutions, businesses, politics and the attitudes and aspirations of whole generations – including everything from haircuts to voting choices. In fact, it became so prevalent that it’s sometimes hard to remember how things have changed under its influence.

Comedian Stewart Lee presents a five-part series exploring the evolution and key ideas that have driven counter-culture from its beginnings with the Beats, folk and jazz in the 1950s, to its heights in the 1960s and 70s - including the hippies and the early tech-communalists, the new liberation movements and punk, to the 1980s and early 90s, where political power on both sides of the Atlantic pushed back against the values of the ‘permissive society’.

Talking to artists, musicians, writers, activists and historians, Stewart continues to the present day asking where we are now, in the digital age of social media silos and the so-called ‘culture wars’ – what’s happened to counter-culture? Was it co-opted, did it sell out? Or did its ideas of freedom and identity become so entrenched within mainstream culture it’s legacy has become unassailable? Or has it migrated politically to the Right? Throughout the series, the counter-culture is explored not only in terms of its history, extraordinary cultural output and key events – but also its deeper political and philosophical impact, its continued meaning for our own age.

Leading to the revolt and turbulence of May 68 in Paris, London and around the world, this episode explores how the ‘revolution in the head’ fuses with the revolution in the streets as counter-culture becomes more expressly political and actively dangerous to the forces of order. From attempts to levitate the Pentagon in Washington to organising conferences on liberation and violence in London, Stewart investigates the influence of the Avant Garde in the politics of ‘68 in Paris, of the flourishing of Black counter-culture and free jazz in America, especially the work of musician Sun Ra. ‘Happenings’ in London become more participatory and political, anticipating future technologies – even as the new tech-communalists of the West Coast dream of a fully networked planet, laying the foundations for the internet in the name of a non-hierarchical counter-culture.

Contributors include musician Damon Albarn and artist Hazel Albarn, author Iain Sinclair, journalist and author John Harris, founding member of Blondie and specialist on counter-culture and the occult Gary Lachman, poet Sonia Sanchez, author and critic Kevin Le Gendre, artist Nelly Ben Hayoun, French historian Richard Vinen, writer on cyber-culture Fred Turner and author-musician Robyn Hitchcock.

Presenter: Stewart Lee

Producer: Simon Hollis

A Brook Lapping production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4