Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The ‘young author’ of The Birthday Party was Harold Pinter, who as a jobbing actor called David Baron had written this, his first professionally produced play, during a tour of Doctor in the House. The next morning, few if any of the critics dissented from Heap’s unfavourable verdict. ‘The author never got down to earth long enough to explain what his play was about,’ complained the Telegraph’s Darlington, bemoaning the lot of critics ‘condemned to sit through plays like this’. Alan Dent in the News Chronicle (‘Mr Pinter Misses His Target’) declared, after outlining the plot, that ‘the moral would seem to be that every man-jack of us is a raving lunatic’. And for the Mail’s Cecil Wilson, though not denying Pinter’s ‘wit that gleams through his mist of a play’, it was altogether a ‘baffling mixture’. Pinter himself, some forty years on, recollected in tranquillity the emotion of that Tuesday morning. ‘I went out at 7.30 a.m. to get the morning papers, went to a café and had a cup of tea and read them. Each one was worse than the last. I thought I might give the whole thing up and go and write a novel. But my wife at the time, Vivien [Merchant], said, “Come on, you’ve had bad notices as an actor, pull yourself together.”’ There was still the Evening Standard headline to endure – ‘Sorry, Mr Pinter, you’re just not funny enough’ – but by then the decision had already been taken to pull the plug at the end of the week. Audiences for the rest of the six-day run were desultory, and by the time a eulogising review by Harold Hobson appeared in the Sunday Times – ‘Mr Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London’ – it was too late.7

  Just two days afterwards occured another London debut. Shelagh Delaney, a Salford teenager, had gone to Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme during its pre-London tour and been so infuriated by what she saw as its insipidness that she had rapidly written her own, locally set play, A Taste of Honey. Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Workshop responded positively and, with the Lord Chamberlain agreeing to turn a blind eye so long as the gay character was called an ‘art student’ and things generally were not made too explicit, it had its first night at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, on Tuesday the 27th. That morning the Daily Mail’s gossip column included a friendly item about Delaney. She was 19, lived with her parents in a council house and had worked as a photographer’s assistant. ‘It’s drawn from my observations and some experience,’ she told Paul Tanfield as she sipped lemonade and refused a cigarette. However, the Mail giveth, the Mail taketh away, and next day’s review by Edward Goring was a stinker. After observing that the play ‘tastes of exercise books and marmalade’, he went on: ‘Once, authors wrote good plays set in drawing-rooms. Now, under the Welfare State, they write bad plays set in garrets.’ And after giving a plot summary, he concluded: ‘It hardly amounts to a play, and for all the shouting it says little. It has a few touching moments, but those stem from the touching quality sometimes found in immaturity . . . If there is anything worse than an Angry Young Man, it’s an Angry Young Woman.’

  For the most part, however, critical opinion was positive. The Times praised it as ‘tough, humorous, and close to the ground’; J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times enjoyed the ‘curt, quick, funny’ dialogue and Delaney’s ‘wonderfully non-committal attitude’ towards ‘the grubbier aspects of life’; and Tynan in the Observer, while conceding there were ‘plenty of crudities’ in the play, acclaimed its ‘smell of living’ and called her ‘a portent’. That was also the take of the Spectator’s Alan Brien, who reckoned that ‘even five years ago, before a senile society began to fawn upon the youth which is about to devour it, such a play would have remained written in green longhand in a school exercise book on the top of a bedroom wardrobe’. A vigilant Wesker went during the second week of the run. ‘They shout at each other, interrupt each other, talk to the audience,’ he observed of the characters in his appraisal for Dusty. ‘This seems to be on the way to the real theatre, not quite there but an eye-opener.’8 A Taste of Honey was an important play not only in theatrical history, and not only in relation to social issues (illegitimacy, race, homosexuality), but also in terms of the north of England. So long off the metropolitan cultural radar, it was now just starting to move on to it – a process that had been begun the previous year by John Braine’s best-selling novel Room at the Top.

  For the unknown Wesker, the hour was almost at hand. ‘I suppose I’ll be branded an angry young man for it,’ the 26-year-old told the Coventry Standard’s ‘Thespis’ over coffee at the start of July, ahead of Chicken Soup with Barley’s one-week run at the Belgrade Theatre before going straight to the Royal Court for another week, as part of its Repertory Festival. ‘My limitation is that I can only write about things that happen to me – but it is also a strength.’ Calling his play ‘one of a trilogy’, he also elaborated on his politics. ‘An ardent Socialist,’ duly noted his interviewer, ‘Arnold Wesker sees Socialism as an attitude to life rather than a political quality. He considers present-day values topsy turvy, producing people in a kind of “rat race”. He has strong views on education, and sees much of his art in terms of education.’ The week beginning the 7th presented Coventry’s theatregoers with strongly contrasting attractions: on the one hand, at the brand new civic theatre, the Belgrade Theatre Company (including Frank Finlay) performing Wesker’s semi-autobiographical episodic chronicle of a Jewish – and Communist – family in London’s East End between 1936 and 1956, culminating in the anguish of Hungary; on the other, at the long-established, commercial Coventry Theatre, a comedy called The Bride and the Bachelor by the future Tory speechwriter Ronald Millar, starring three old warhorses in Cicely Courtneidge, Robertson Hare and Naunton Wayne. Conceivably, some may have stayed at home to watch Ask Me Another and the Phil Silvers Show on BBC, or Wagon Train followed by Free and Easy (starring Dickie Valentine) on ITV.

  Wesker won on points in the local reviews. According to the Standard, the Millar farce ‘failed to evoke more than a titter for the whole of the first act’ and was ‘a misfire’, while Chicken Soup was ‘full of life and colour and detail’, and was ‘quite moving’, but ultimately left ‘deeply etched outlines that form an unsatisfactory whole’. The Evening Telegraph was equally scathing about the ‘feeble farce’, whereas the Wesker was ‘the stuff of life’ and ‘never fake, never touched up with sentimentality’. On that first night there were cheers and applause at the end, and even the shout of ‘Author!’, though Wesker preferred to stay in the wings. He was less satisfied on the second evening. ‘The audience laughed in all the wrong places, and displayed such stupidity it was unbelievable,’ he told Dusty. ‘They are so used to seeing corny films and drawing-room comedies that when they come up against a little real-life drama it embarrasses them and they have to treat it as a joke.’

  Then came the Royal Court. Not everyone went overboard – a play ‘built for pygmies’ thought Alan Brien; ‘a documentary rather than a play’ reckoned Eric Keown; while Harold Hobson found it ‘often impressive’ but was more interested in Five Finger Exercise at the Comedy by Peter Shaffer (‘may easily become a master of the theatre’) – but the general tone was positive. ‘John [Dexter, the play’s director] and I stayed up all night walking from Sloane Street in order to get the papers as they came out,’ Wesker reported to Dusty. ‘The Daily Mail calls me a playwright of “rare ability and even rarer promise”. The Standard says I have “rare understanding . . . passion and urgency”. Even The Times and Telegraph are favourable.’ The longer wait was for the increasingly influential Tynan, who on Sunday heralded Chicken Soup as an ‘intensely exciting play’ and asserted that if Wesker could ‘survive the autobiographical stage’, he was ‘potentially a very important playwright’.9 Tynan called it right: if there was one dramatist over the next few years who would command the most intense attention, and simultaneously capture and chase the moment, it was undoubtedly Wesker.

  Tonight continued this summer to consolidate its hold as television’s most popular current affairs programme. Hen
ry Turton in Punch rounded up some of the ‘splendid’ team under its unflappable MC: ‘high-pitched, querulous’ Fyfe Robertson; ‘neat and impish’ Derek Hart; ‘smooth’ Geoffrey Johnson Smith; ‘crisp and alert’ Polly Elwes. The leading soap remained Emergency—Ward 10 – ‘the interminably incident-packed saga of that nice hospital full of photogenic nurses and terribly British doctors’, noted Turton, but ‘well done according to the soap-opera conventions’ – while Take Your Pick and Double Your Money were the two dominant quiz shows. ‘Last week’s star,’ recorded John Braine in May about the latter, ‘was Plantagenet Somerset Fry, who decided to keep the £500 he’d already won but just out of curiosity asked what the £1,000 question would have been. He could have answered it.’ That same week, Take Your Pick (hosted by Michael Miles, with Alec Dane on the gong) was the second-most-watched programme on either channel, but the most popular (viewed in 4.17 million homes) was The Army Game. ‘These slapdash proceedings arouse feelings in me which verge on the sadistic,’ recorded Turton, who saw it as a particular waste of the talents of Alfie Bass, ‘that subtle and delicate droll’. Such was the show’s popularity, however – reflecting in part the widely shared experience of National Service – that in June its signature tune went to number 5 in the charts, as, a few months later, did Bernard Bresslaw, aka Private ‘Popeye’ Popplewell, with an in-character rendition of ‘Mad Passionate Love’.

  At this stage the BBC’s main weapon against The Army Game in the comedy stakes was Benny Hill at least as much as Tony Hancock. ‘Benny Hill is the king of comedians,’ acclaimed one viewer after his show on 26 April; ‘he never fails to amuse, is never monotonous and abounds with natural fun and humour.’ A rare telerecording of that show survives, revealing a still traditional Variety format – fillers include a glee group, Alma Cogan and a circus double-act – while Hill himself sings two suggestive faux-medieval songs and is the central figure in a series of quick-fire, inventive sketches, with one in drag. The show ends, in his biographer’s words, ‘with Benny stepping out of character and, for just fifteen seconds, appearing as “himself”, accepting the applause of the studio audience, waving, winking at the camera and – for the only time in the entire hour – looking a little uncomfortable’. For straight-up-and-down, middle-of-the-road music, few programmes beat The Billy Cotton Band Show, with the good-looking Russ Conway by this time as resident pianist and the host himself one evening remarking to applause that ‘skiffle’ rhymed with ‘piffle’. Cotton would not have enjoyed Oh Boy!, ITV’s new pop show (masterminded by Jack Good), which made its bow late at night on Sunday, 14 June and, noted an appreciative Tom Driberg, ‘crowds more bands and girls and vocal groups on to the stage than you’d think possible and is faster and more frantic than Six-Five Special’. The determinedly au courant Labour politician went on to express himself especially partial to ‘the wonderfully Dadaist Marty Wilde’. Most adults preferred to look elsewhere. ‘One of the few singers who sings modern songs pleasantly and quietly, and doesn’t fling himself about while performing – such a relief,’ declared one such viewer later in the summer after The Perry Como Show had ended its series, adding that ‘his quiet natural charm and delightfully unassuming manner are most endearing’. Such was the residual dislike among many BBC viewers of almost anything American that another conferred still higher praise on Como: ‘Perhaps the least offensive of the all too many imported American show business personalities.’10

  Was it all too much? ‘I have been reading your long article on Television in our lives, sitting out in the warm sun overlooking the sea,’ Enid Blyton wrote in April from the Grand Hotel, Swanage to the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer. ‘It was time that someone gave us a clear view of TV and all its implications!’ ‘I myself,’ she added, ‘do not watch TV very much but love the things I do watch – Peter Scott’s programmes, some plays – Dr Bronowski’s programmes – good talk – & really funny programmes.’ Gorer himself was a man of broad human sympathies, but in his Sunday Times series he came down hard on working-class viewers. Not only did they eschew ‘topical programmes, discussions and brains trusts, serious music and ballet’, instead obstinately preferring ‘films and serials, variety, and quizzes’, but almost half of them were ‘addicts’ (defined as watching for at least four hours a night), with as a result ‘all sense of proportion lost in their gross indulgence, and their family life, if not wrecked, at least emptied of nearly all its richness and warmth, their children’s education often imperilled by the absence of any quiet place to do homework’. Even worse, whereas five years previously the owner of a TV set had been likelier to be middle class than working class, now ‘there are approximately three owners of a set from the working classes for every two from the middle classes’, with every prospect of that trend intensifying. One reader cautioned against exaggerated alarm. ‘The article is rather terrifying,’ William Empson wrote to Gorer from Hampstead. ‘All the same, the race of man is not destroyed so easily; it seems clear that, in the end, if they have time, they will manage to acquire a “tolerance” for their new poison.’11

  Children naturally were a particular concern. ‘I once asked a child,’ Blyton related to Gorer, ‘why he preferred watching TV to going to the cinema, and he said he liked its “nowness.”’ As it happened, the most extensive, authoritative survey would appear later in 1958 – namely, Television and the Child by the academic Hilde Himmelweit and colleagues, the fruit of several years of research and analysis. ‘Television is not as black as it is painted,’ she found, ‘but neither is it the great harbinger of culture and enlightenment which its enthusiasts tend to claim for it,’ adding that ‘its capacity for broadening a child’s horizons is not spectacularly different from that of any other of the mass media’, not least because ‘television stimulates interests, but only fleetingly’. Four of Himmelweit’s findings had a particular piquancy: that as many as 60 per cent of the children in the survey said that the TV was left on all evening in their homes; that three out of four 10–11-year-olds viewed until nine o’clock; that middle-class children were glued to the box just as much as their working-class peers; and that almost all children seemed wholly blasé about onscreen violence. Gorer, reviewing Himmelweit’s book in the Listener, disputed the worth of her overtly paternalistic recommendations about programme content, but was otherwise of a similar mind. ‘In so far as television has any influence,’ he argued, ‘it is as a leveller; it makes the dull brighter, and the brighter duller.’

  Himmelweit’s was a rather bloodless survey, but fortunately the writer and secondary modern teacher Edward Blishen took charge of a study conducted earlier in the year on behalf of the Council for Children’s Welfare. Some 700 parents (weighted a little towards the middle class) spent at least a fortnight watching children’s programmes with their offspring, and parental positives were more than counterbalanced by negatives:

  It has quietened him down, as he will now sit and watch.

  It helps to keep them indoors in the evenings.

  Lost his fear of dogs, thanks to Lassie.

  Too much violence. It was a sorry day when ITV began.

  It is difficult to get him to bed.

  They don’t want to go to the Scouts or any other movement because there is always something they want to watch.

  Had four books for Christmas, and hasn’t read them yet.

  As for the opinions of the children themselves, Blishen provided a helpful summary of their favourite programmes generally. ‘The boys all plumped for Zoo Time, Zoo Quest, Look, Lone Ranger, The Silver Sword and Little Rascals,’ he found, ‘with, not far behind, Circus Boy, Crackerjack, Sports View, Criss Cross Quiz, Studio E, Onion Boys, Sir Lancelot, Billy Bunter, Popeye, Robin Hood, Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie. Invited to let themselves go on their dislikes, the boys proved to be very highly satisfied with everything.’ For their part, the girls ‘liked most of all Sooty, Emergency—Ward 10, Zoo Quest, Zoo Time, Look, the quiz programmes and Little Rascals’. And they were, he added ‘far more disgrunt
led than the boys, most of them expressing a round feminine displeasure at the many films full of shooting’.12

  There was at this time no set in the Haines home in Chingford, where instead Judy, after the family’s return in early June from half-term week at a Brixham holiday camp (The Dolphin), concentrated on matters at hand. ‘Have decided to work to a routine as from tomorrow,’ she noted on Sunday the 1st. ‘Hope that will get the housework done.’ All went satisfactorily to plan over the next few days, and on Friday the 6th she invited Win, from across the road, ‘to afternoon tea as my routine doesn’t allow of an hour’s coffee time’, but something more exciting was on her mind: ‘I have bought John a summer jacket for our Anniversary. He has bought me a Morphy-Richards steam iron! It is beautifully light and effective.’

  By now the World Cup was about to start in Sweden, but even though all four home nations were represented it was far from an all-consuming event, with few mentions in diaries. Quite apart from the sad legacy of Munich, England’s campaign under Walter Winterbottom was blighted from the start. Fulham’s Johnny Haynes was under attack from the northern press as an overrated ‘glamour boy’; the gifted Bobby Charlton was replaced, amidst widespread criticism, by the dogged but lumbering Derek Kevan; and the Daily Express published, with censorious commentary, a love letter from captain Billy Wright to the divorced singer Joy Beverley (his future wife). England were knocked out on the 17th, beaten 1–0 by Russia. ‘They fought until there was nothing left but heavy hearts and legs wearied to the point of torture,’ proudly reported the Express’s Desmond Hackett. But the match, he went on, ‘unhappily emphasised how wrong England were, from the first kick of this world campaign, to insist that fighting hearts can replace football’. At the end, ‘there was something intensely sad about the shirts stained with sweat from their courageous, but unskilled, labours’. Or, as an Observer headline bluntly put it: ‘Industry Without Skill’. England’s early exit provoked a storm of discontent, prompting Haynes to remark that ‘everyone in England thinks we have a God-given right to win the World Cup’. Nevertheless, one Englishman did get to the final. George Raynor, a miner’s son from Barnsley who coached the Swedish team that lost to Brazil, had previously been in charge at Juventus and Lazio in Italy, and was renowned for his meticulous, ‘scientific’ methods. After the tournament he sought a coaching post in England, but the only work he could secure was with Skegness Town, part-timers in the Midland League. British teams, he asserted mildly but unequivocally two years later in his memoir Football Ambassador at Large, were ‘not yet equipped to win world competitions’.13