Stuart Hall remembered by David Lammy

3 February 1932–10 February 2014
David Lammy on the cultural theorist’s intellectual rigour and authority, his early influence on his ideas via the Open University and their subsequent friendship

• See the Observer’s obituaries of 2014 in full

• Elena Baltacha remembered by Judy Murray

Stuart Hall had a sort of revolutionary fire in his soul. He gave the lie in some senses to that idea of Gil Scott-Heron’s, that “the revolution will not be televised”. I grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and early 1980s, my mother worked nights and I would often be up late watching the Open University TV programmes that came on after the regular channels finished. Stuart was broadcasting in the age of Alf Garnett and Love Thy Neighbour and contradicting every single stereotype that they presented. I grew up without a father, and was completely fascinated by this powerful, highly articulate male talking softly to me at a time when I probably should have been in bed.

There was, above all, a tremendous modernity and countercultural excitement to Stuart’s language – a modernity that challenged everything I was hearing in school, on the news, and in everyday life. There is a generation of social workers, teachers, academics, media studies students, political activists and many others who lived and breathed those OU courses, who were deeply influenced by him.