State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  By the time Murphy stepped down, A Clockwork Orange had been withdrawn from cinemas anyway. Although Warner Bros. had restricted it to just one West End cinema for the first twelve months, an unprecedented step aimed at dampening the criticism, it had done no good. In the end, the press campaign proved too much for Stanley Kubrick: after allegations that his film had inspired the murder of a tramp in Buckinghamshire, he ordered that it be withdrawn from circulation, and it disappeared from British cinemas for the next two decades. But sex and violence did not disappear from the silver screen, for with audiences in free-fall, what remained of the British film industry had come to the conclusion that only more and more sensational material would get people back in. And by the time of Murphy’s resignation, cinemas were increasingly dominated either by American imports or by perhaps the most embarrassing British cultural products of the decade – the sex comedies typified by Robin Askwith’s Confessions films. Between 1971 and 1975, studios pumped out a staggering forty-three examples, from Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman and Can You Keep it Up for a Week? to Confessions of a Driving Instructor and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate. The titles were almost beyond parody, though thankfully nobody had the courage to make Confessions of an Academic.

  Tens, even hundreds of thousands of people paid good money to see these alleged comedies: indeed, without them, the British film industry would have virtually disappeared, and many ran in provincial cinemas for months on end. The funniest thing about them was the violence of the reviews: one critic thought that Confessions of a Window Cleaner should be renamed Confessions of the British: What They Don’t Know about Making Films, Making Erotic Images, Making People Laugh and Making Love. In some ways, of course, their success reflected the relative severity of the censorship regime, which was still much harsher than those on the Continent: if provincial cinemas had offered genuinely explicit fare, then people would surely not have wasted their money watching Robin Askwith leering through a suburban bedroom window. But they also tapped a rich seam of bawdy vulgarity in British working-class humour, a prurient fascination with nudity and an almost obsessive affection for jokes about breasts and bottoms. Revealingly, the publicity for the Confessions films insisted that they were quintessentially British, part of ‘the long tradition in entertainment in this country of good, naughty laughter – from double entendres in the music hall (Max Miller is a prime example) to seaside postcards, from West End stage farces (e.g. Robertson Hare) to the “Carry On” films’. Indeed, the world of the films – a world of perky, carefree housewives and lecherous young men, of suburban sex romps and ever-available dolly birds – was instantly familiar to anybody who had ever opened a copy of the Sun. And Askwith himself briefly became a cult hero to Sun readers – ‘Randy Robin’, as the paper called him, an expelled public schoolboy turned bawdy working-class hero, a former Queen’s Park Rangers youth footballer who now made a living ‘bonking birds’ – or at least pretending to.42

  And yet for all the talk about bawdy traditions and a rich vein of naughtiness, the Confessions films would never have succeeded had they not seemed to offer something new. Just fifteen or even ten years earlier, a mainstream film with such explicit sexual content would have been simply unthinkable, but now they were merely part of a cultural landscape in which even the BBC, perhaps Britain’s most venerated institution, the national church of the airwaves, made no apology for scenes of female nudity and utter sexual debauchery. In the justly acclaimed I, Claudius (1976), for example, audiences even got to watch the Emperor Caligula organizing orgies in which senators’ wives are auctioned off to the highest bidder, or Claudius’s wife Messalina conducting a love-making competition with the prostitute Scylla. In the same year, ITV showed A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, the story of incestuous passions and a taste for sado-masochism tearing a family apart, adapted from Andrea Newman’s novel. By the end, as the Observer’s Clive James put it at the time, ‘everybody had been to bed with everybody else except the baby’. Even in detective fiction, hitherto one of the most conservative of genres, there was no escape. In Ruth Rendell’s A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970), the plot turns on an incestuous relationship; in P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), a male student is found hanging by his belt, ‘dressed like a woman, in a black bra and black lace panties’; in Julian Symons’s The Players and the Game (1972), one man pays to be humiliated by prostitutes while another molests a 13-year-old girl; and in Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, which began to appear in 1975, sex, pornography and general seediness are inevitably discovered beneath the veneer of Oxford gentility. As the writer Alwyn Turner remarks, the world of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple must have seemed like ancient history.43

  For some observers, the pornography boom of the early 1970s seemed a great and noble thing. Among the tiny handful of largely middle-class and very well-educated youngsters who made up the bohemian counterculture, obscenity was a way of challenging the dominant assumptions of ‘square’ or ‘bourgeois’ society. Like overgrown adolescents everywhere, they were obsessed both by sex and by shocking their elders: as the playwright Joe Orton told his lover (and later murderer) Kenneth Halliwell in 1967, sex was ‘the only way to smash up the wretched civilisation … Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.’ The same principle – which was, of course, completely misguided – informed many of the underground publications of the day, from Richard Neville’s infantile and grotesquely misogynistic hippy manifesto Play Power (1970), in which he enthused about the benefits of a ‘hurricane fuck’ with a 14-year-old girl, to the equally infantile and equally misogynistic ‘School Kids Issue’ of the magazine Oz, which was published in April 1970 and became the subject of a protracted but ultimately inconsequential Old Bailey trial a year later. But although the underground rapidly imploded – indeed, virtually the only trace of it left by 1974 was the listings magazine Time Out – its attitudes survived, especially in sections of the academic and media worlds. When Malcolm Bradbury’s loathsome protagonist Howard Kirk takes up his new job at Watermouth University, he soon falls into conversation with the vice- chancellor, a ‘radical educationalist, former political scientist [and] well-known Labour voter’, about a subject Howard is ‘greatly interested in, the social benefits and purgative value of pornography in the cinema’. ‘I’ve always been a serious supporter of pornography, Dr Kirk,’ the vice-chancellor says earnestly – and at his words, the narrator tells us, ‘Howard warmed, and felt at ease.’44

  Most people, however, had rather more conflicted attitudes to the rise of sexual frankness and new availability of pornography. When the Tottenham football squad took the train up to Wolverhampton for the first match of the season in August 1971, their pile of magazines included a copy of Penthouse, from which the full back Cyril Knowles delightedly read aloud before throwing it aside with the words: ‘Disgusting. They ought to ban them. I feel right degraded. Any more?’ He was only joking, of course, but plenty of people did think that pornography was disgusting. For many feminists, for example, it represented a travesty of their faith in sexual liberation, turning women into nothing more than glorified sex objects. And although polls showed that the vast majority of the public took a remarkably liberal view of pornography – in 1973, three out of four people agreed that ‘adults should be able to buy whatever indecent erotic books and magazines they like, so long as they are not on public display’ – a large minority of the population, many of them older women, saw things very differently.45

  For many people, indeed, pornography had replaced prostitution (which had been driven underground after the Wolfenden report in 1955) as the chief ‘moral stain’ on the national flag. Just as moral campaigners had inveighed against the vice of prostitution in the late nineteenth century or the early 1950s, now pornography was seen as the supreme symbol of Britain’s ethical degeneration, ‘the final desecration and commercialisation of sex … a manifestation of decay, a canker at the heart of respectability’. For the country’
s best-known moral conservative, Mary Whitehouse, who had been campaigning to ‘clean up’ television since the early 1960s, pornography was ‘filthy’, ‘sinful’, ‘depraved’ and ‘perverted’. And in January 1976, contemplating the spread of violent and sadomasochistic imagery, even The Times reassessed its previously liberal editorial position. ‘Against this pornography of cruelty we need a defence,’ the paper said; ‘otherwise we may be brainwashed into accepting it, not only in books and magazines, but, as already to a dangerous extent, in newspapers, films and on television … The pornographers are sick-minded commercial men who sell images of hatred, and particularly of hatred of women, for vast profit. We need both a law and a law-enforcement which stops them.’46

  Oddly enough, the figure most associated with both the pornography boom and the backlash against it was not a prototypical porn star such as Fiona Richmond or Mary Millington, but an elderly peer with an unrivalled reputation as an endlessly well-meaning do-gooder of semi-comic proportions. As a veteran of both the Attlee and the Wilson governments, a crusader for unfashionable causes and a tireless campaigner for penal reform, Lord Longford was one of Britain’s best-known aristocratic socialists, a passionate, deeply religious but ultimately scatty figure who seemed oblivious to the ridicule his escapades attracted from the media. He first made the issue his own in April 1971 when, having initiated a debate in the Lords about the ‘incipient menace of pornography in Great Britain’, he invited the press to accompany him on a tour of Soho’s sleaziest establishments. These included a ‘sex supermarket’, various seedy cinemas and a strip-club called the Soho Stokehole, where Longford solemnly watched a girl whipping off her knickers to reveal what one reporter called ‘nothing so startlingly out of the ordinary as to justify the long preliminary posturings’. Ridiculous as it was, however, Longford’s Soho excursion paled by comparison with his next expedition, which saw him fly to Copenhagen on behalf of an unofficial fifty-two-member ‘commission’ on pornography and violence, which he saw as ‘a chance to work out a coherent policy of resistance’ to the tide of obscenity. To the press, however, the fact that the commission’s members included Jimmy Savile and Cliff Richard, as well as Kingsley Amis, hardly a paragon of sexual sobriety, lent it an unwittingly farcical air. In his own mind, Longford was a brave crusader for decent moral values; to the Sun, however, he was simply ‘Lord Porn.’47

  In an era when the headlines seemed all too often to be dominated by reports of strikes, terrorism and economic disasters, Longford’s expedition to Denmark in August 1971 came as welcome light relief. He was joined on the trip not only by five other commission members, most notably the former Oxford Union president and future teddy-bear collector, puzzle-book compiler and European Monopoly champion Gyles Brandreth, but by members of the press corps, who treated him with scarcely concealed hilarity. The trip kicked off with a visit to two Copenhagen sex shows, in which women were paired with men, other women and animals, but Longford found it all rather too much. He only lasted five minutes in the first club, walking out in disgust with the manager trailing behind him saying: ‘But sir, you have not seen the intercourse. We have intercourse later in the programme.’ The second club was even worse. Here, according to an amused reporter, ‘a half naked girl thrust a whip into Lord Longford’s hand and invited him to flagellate her. He declined and after she had playfully mauled him by thrusting the whip around his neck and pulling violently on it, he got up and left.’ By contrast, his colleagues stuck it out rather longer, were much less shocked, and disagreed with Longford’s verdict that this kind of thing was likely to encourage sexual violence. Brandreth even announced that he would like to see the Danish laws introduced at home. Not surprisingly, this all made splendid reading, but it also made it hard for people to take Longford seriously. When his report finally came out in September 1972, much of the press treated it with open disdain, while the Heath government summarily rejected his calls for a more precise definition of obscenity to include anything that outraged ‘contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large’. In fact, Longford’s recommendations were reasonably sensible and well intentioned, if rather too vague, but forever lurking at the back of readers’ minds must have been the image of the elderly peer being strangled with a whip in the clubs of Copenhagen.48

  Despite its ridiculous tone, Longford’s investigation reflected a broader sense in the early years of the decade that cultural change and sexual frankness had gone too far, a gathering undercurrent of moral unease running through the heart of British society. It was at the very beginning of the 1970s, for example, that politicians and pundits alike first began to debate ‘permissiveness’, a word almost always used pejoratively, knitting together a host of related anxieties from pornography and promiscuity to supposedly lax sentences for criminals and falling standards in education. Permissiveness had become a ‘political metaphor’, and from this point on, protecting the embattled family was at the heart of conservative rhetoric. One account traces this as far back as 1966, when the newspapers were full of angst about the horrifying Moors murders. In any case, by 1970 ‘the language of crime, violence, chaos, anarchy’ was becoming very common in the Tory press. In January 1970, for example, Edward Heath’s future Lord Chancellor Quintin Hogg insisted that rising crime ‘cannot be separated from private dishonesty or public demonstration in defiance of law’, and warned that ‘the permissive and lawless society is a by-product of Socialism’. A year later, the journal of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association sounded a remarkably similar theme, claiming that ‘obscenity in the paperbacks and magazines and on the motion picture screen is a basic and contributing factor to violence’. ‘The “Permissive Society”, with its much vaunted “freedom”, is now seen for what it is – a bitter and destructive thing,’ insisted the Autumn 1971 issue of Viewers and Listeners. ‘The arts are degraded, law is held in contempt and sport fouled by outbreaks of vandalism and violence. The national purse takes the strain of a health service overburdened with increasing abortion, drug addiction, mental disturbance, alcoholism and an epidemic of venereal disease.’49

  By and large, however, most senior politicians hesitated to touch the issue of permissiveness during the Heath years. Economic affairs naturally dominated Westminster debates, and although the Wilson government had been instrumental in supporting the private members’ bills that decriminalized homosexuality and legalized abortion in the late 1960s, many Labour MPs remained deeply ambivalent, even uneasy, about the so-called permissive society – which was hardly surprising given the cultural conservatism of traditional working-class Labour voters. Perhaps more surprisingly, on the right there seemed relatively little appetite for the kind of ‘culture-war’ politics that was becoming popular in the United States; indeed, in keeping with his buttoned-up image, Edward Heath barely mentioned cultural or moral issues at all. At the Home Office, meanwhile, Reginald Maudling seemed completely indifferent to the murmurs of discontent from the shires, striking a pose of ‘civilised, tolerant weariness and cynicism’. By most standards, in fact, he was a much more liberal Home Secretary than his predecessor, Labour’s bluff ‘PC Jim’ Callaghan. ‘The object of a civilised society’, he remarked in 1971, ‘should be the maximum of freedom as long as the freedom of others is not infringed.’ Despite all the fuss about Longford’s report, for example, Maudling could not even be bothered to read it, and he showed not the slightest inclination to crack down on obscenity, writing in his memoirs that ‘if one adult wishes to write a book or produce a play and show it to other adults, and they wish to see it, what right has the State to object?’ Even drugs did not particularly bother him: in unguarded moments Maudling sometimes told friends that he thought cannabis ought to be legalized, while his teenage sons allegedly smoked dope at parties in his official residence, Admiralty House. If any of this had reached the Tory grass roots, of course, Maudling might well have been finished. But this was an age in which not even the Tory leader gave mu
ch thought to the anxieties of his activists, and in this respect Maudling’s indifference to popular prejudice was typical not just of Heath’s government, but of the liberal consensus that had dominated public affairs since the early 1960s.50

  Ignoring the issue, however, did not make it go away, and since the politicians refused to lead, others stepped forward. In October 1969, a London doctor, Stanley Ellison, had written to The Times calling for a mass effort ‘to resist the destructive and demoralizing trends in our present community’, explaining that ‘the stability of the traditional British way of life is threatened. Venereal disease is increasing. Termination of pregnancy is increasing. Drug addiction is increasing. Smoking is increasing. Gambling is increasing. All being examples of anti-social behaviour.’ To Ellison, a ‘tide of immorality, self-deception, and insatiable appetite for all that is worthless’ was sweeping over the land, and it seemed that plenty of readers agreed: within just a few days he had received more than 200 letters of support, and in June 1971 he joined other doctors and educationalists to set up the Responsible Society. In their opening statement, they explained that while they welcomed the ‘greater frankness and tolerance’ that now surrounded sex, they were increasingly worried about the ‘suffering and social damage which is the direct consequence of an increasingly irresponsible attitude to sex … encouraged by an unholy alliance of commercial sex-exploiters and “progressive” protagonists of sexual anarchy’. The Responsible Society, therefore, would ‘combat the commercialization and trivialization of sex’ – largely, they explained, through setting the facts before the public. ‘We are not killjoys,’ added Dr Anne Williams, an applied geneticist on the governing board of the society. ‘I am not against sex or sex education … I believe sex should be part of a stable, loving society. We need, too, stable homes in which to bring up our children.’51