Yours faithfully,
M.G.M.
P.S. The coverage of the actual wedding ceremony was beautifully done and so right and for that we thank you.
CHAPTER THREE
RELIGION
In the twenty-first century there is no doubt that the United Kingdom is a multicultural society. In the middle of the twentieth century Great Britain, as it mostly called itself then, would more accurately have been described as a Christian country. Many of the letters in this collection, which complain of deteriorating moral standards throughout television during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, refer to the country in this manner. Baby boomers who started school in the 1950s and 1960s saw few faces there that were not white. Schools made little or no provision for children of faiths other than Christianity.
The school day invariably began with an assembly which included Christian prayers and the singing of Christian hymns. Jewish children in state maintained schools, if there were sufficient of them, were allowed to withdraw from these assemblies when they moved from the ‘parish notices’ of regular school life to the daily service of worship. They were allowed to miss school during the Jewish holidays and to go home early on Friday afternoons during the winter, but if they knew what was good for them they did not draw attention to themselves. What had happened to the Jews of Europe was a recent memory.
The FM channel was not available at this time so the Daily Service was heard on the Home Service until the start of Radio 4, before it was relegated to the long wave where it now sits oddly alongside Test Match Special. The founding father of the BBC was Sir John Reith, a formidable six foot six inches tall, an unbending moralist the seventh son of an austere minister in the Church of Scotland. Informed that one of his announcers was getting divorced, Reith banned him permanently from ever reading the Epilogue again. The BBC’s Christian principles derived from the influence of Reith and remained after Reith left the Corporation in 1938.
During the 1960s, the slot in Radio Four’s The Today Programme, now called Thought for the Day and which reflects on topical issues from the perspective of faith, was called Lift Up Your Hearts and preceded the weather forecast and the 8 a.m. news. The difference in titles gives an indication of the difference in content.
The BBC was reflecting the centrality of Christian faith in the life of the country. Shops were closed on Sundays, which were regarded as a day for quiet contemplation. The decline in church attendance had already set in and certain sections of the church were seeking to engage with the social problems in their dioceses and parishes but, as far as the letter writers were concerned, people who called themselves Christians were expected to go to church as their parents and grandparents had. Whichever way they voted at a general election had no bearing on the expectation that they would continue to celebrate their faith. It was a Christian country and the BBC, particularly given its Reithian origins, had to conform in the programmes it produced. Reith had ordered the consecration of Studio 3E in Broadcasting House shortly after the building had opened so that the Daily Service could be broadcast from there every day.
Throughout the 1960s, the BBC maintained its commitment to religious programmes of a Christian nature but the people who made other programmes were starting to include ‘clever young men’ (and it was almost exclusively men) who had been to grammar school and university and wanted to make a splash in the attractive new world of television. One way they could do this was to thumb their noses at the Royal Family and at the established church. The chapters on Swearing and Bad Taste as well as this short one on religious programmes, tells of the reaction.
The Archbishop of Canterbury writes of his mystification because he doesn’t have a television set. The Church of Scotland is equally and pardonably mystified as to why the BBC transmits programmes likely to appeal to its congregation at exactly the time on a Sunday when it is trying to get prospective worshippers out of their living rooms and into church. Many of the other responses to the blasphemies committed by comedy and satire programmes are contained in the chapters dealing with those programmes.
Lambeth Palace London SE1
2 November 1957
To: C. Beadle Esq. C.B.E. [Head of Religious Broadcasting] Broadcasting House London W1
Dear Mr. Beadle,
When I get complaints about things on T.V., I am in a hopeless position as I do not possess a set, and the only time I see T.V. is when I am staying in somebody else’s house. But I have received a complaint which I think I ought to pass on to you. It comes from Oxford and is a criticism of the T.V. programme on Tuesday night last at 10.35. The writer says:
‘It was called Life Line. The three debaters were good and respectful and dignified. The 4th person, apparently a recent undergraduate and now a Don at Christ Church, behaved disgracefully. He derided the idea of the Incarnation, the Resurrection. He described the Creed as mumbo-jumbo, he ridiculed the Communion Service and was blasphemous about the holiest and most precious beliefs of Christians which he said were no doubt good enough for ignorant peasants of long ago.
I have learned to distrust many of these complaints which reach me – on the other hand sometimes there is something in them, and all I can do is to ask you whether you would look into this particular criticism and let me know whether there is any justification in it or whether it is just the reaction of a person too easily shocked.
Yours sincerely
Geoffrey Cantuar
[Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury]
The Church of Scotland, George St., Edinburgh
27 December 1963
To The Controller BBC Scotland, Queen Margaret Drive, Glasgow
Dear Mr. Stewart,
I am instructed by the Church and Nation Committee to write to you seeking information on the following two matters.
1. Sunday Morning Educational BroadcastsIn view of the fact that certain education programmes are being transmitted on Television at an hour when many prospective viewers in Scotland are attending Church, would it be possible for these transmissions to be repeated on another day of the week or at an alternative time? The programmes on Crafts and Skills (Home Dressmaking etc.) on Sundays 11.45 am – 12 noon have been specifically mentioned to us.
2. BBC 2
(a) Could you advise the Committee as to whether the National Broadcasting Council for Scotland will have the same powers for BBC 2 as it now has with BBC (TV)?
(b) Who will be responsible for religious broadcasts on BBC 2?
(c) Will the ‘closed period’ on Sundays, 6–7.30p.m., operate also on BBC 2?
The Committee is aware that BBC 2 will not come to Scotland for some time yet, but if it were possible for you to give us some information and guidance on these points, it would greatly help us in making our report to the Church of Scotland and we would be very grateful.
Yours sincerely
T. M.
Crawley, Sussex
9 Dec 1966
Dear Sir,
I have watched your school programme ‘1940’ today. One part of the film was of a starving Jew lying in the street with people walking by without taking the slightest notice of him. The commentary was that the German people had given their conscience to Hitler and did not care any more what happened to other people.
I am Austrian by birth. I was ten years old when Austria was annexed to Germany and the Jews in my hometown left. They sold their belongings in an orderly fashion and I remember that we felt very sad for the people who had to leave their homes. One family returned from America after the war and are living happily in that town again. I never saw a starving Jew anywhere in the streets. We knew that concentration camps were awful places but no one really knew what went on inside them any more than the people of Shepherd’s Bush know what goes on inside Wormwood Scrubs.
[There was] no mention of the suffering the German people had to go through when their towns were bombed far, far worse than London ever was. I am thinking particularly of the terrible air raid[s] on Dresden
. There was no mention of the many cripples and the suffering of the German and Austrian people after the war when there was no food, no fuel, no jobs and so many were homeless. I could tell of some things the Russians did in Austria.
I think it is a great pity that children in this country are brought up with all this hatred of 20 years ago. If you have to show films like ‘1940’ I think you should show them late at night at least and let the children grow up unbiased and unprejudiced.
Yours faithfully,
Mrs. I. B.
Crawley, Sussex
28 Dec 1966
To: Mr. Kenneth Adam, BBC Television Centre, London W.12
Dear Mr. Adam,
Thank you for your reply to my letter on the programme ‘1940’. I am sorry I have to write once more because it is quite obvious that you did not read my letter properly.
My intention was not to minimise the happenings in concentration camps but to show how little ordinary people knew of what went on. My former French teacher did actually help a Jewish lady to leave Austria. Concentration camps were understood to be for political prisoners. You don’t need to tell me that I ought to know of the atrocities which were committed against the Jewish people. I do know NOW but I did not know BEFORE 1945 and neither did any of my friends and relations in Austria and Germany. We feel very sad indeed that people of our country were capable of these crimes but that does not make 80 million of German speaking people guilty for the murders that were carried out by a few thousand fanatics. [O]ne would think there had been a poster up in every German town ‘Come and watch the execution of the Jews’ or ‘Free trips around the gas chambers’. These killings were done in the greatest secrecy and I fail to understand how one can accuse people of having let things happen when they did not even know what was going on. The camps were visited by International Red Cross officials which goes to show that even [they] do not have a chance to find out everything or else these killings could not possibly have taken place.
‘Truth will out’ is an old saying. It came out what happened in the concentration camps; it will also come out there are millions of decent German and Austrian people who had nothing to do with any crimes whatsoever.
Yours sincerely
Mrs. I. B.
West London Synagogue, Seymour Place, W1
6 May 1968
To: The Controller of Programmes, B.B.C. Television, Television Centre, Wood Lane, London W12
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you in connection with the programme ‘The State of the Jews’ broadcast on 2nd May and to register my strong personal criticism and protest over the way in which the Jewish community in this country was portrayed.
As a string of clichés was being unravelled, it became increasingly difficult to see the point of the programme. It showed some of the worst features of Anglo-Jewish life – some standard footage of Israel. Not a word was said about the contribution of Jews and Judaism to the social, political, scientific and cultural life of this country. And to have social welfare activities portrayed by a bread line in the East End is a gross distortion of the much positive realities. It was also regrettable that Mr David Wheeler had to go to California to get the one articulate contribution on Reform Judaism–there are some 45,000 progressive Jews in this country who were completely ignored.
If there were regular programmes on Jewish life I would just let it go as another programme that did not come off. But since there are no more than three or four hours of programmes dealing with this subject in any given year, I must express my deep regret at having lost an opportunity for an intelligent presentation. I trust that the B.B.C. will find it possible to set right this situation by showing some of the other and infinitely more wholesome aspects of our community’s life and problems, its aspirations and achievements.
Yours faithfully,
Rabbi Hugo Gryn
Anglo Jewish Association
14 October 1963
Dear Sir,
I should like to preface this letter with a comment that neither I personally nor this Association is over sensitive to references to Jews in popular entertainment.
I was, however, somewhat disturbed and surprised by the edition of Z Cars on October 9th.
For no understandable reason the principal character, an aggressive, cowardly young man, was eventually disclosed as a Jew and his father was portrayed with a foreign accent and questionable business morals.
There was some vague attempt to explain the young man’s aggressiveness by virtue of the fact that he was suffering from a strong inferiority complex, because he was a Jew and, indeed, the story carefully described his father’s non acceptance by local society. The psychology of the piece was so shallow and out-dated that in a popular programme of this kind it might well have done considerable harm.
The foreign accented Jewish businessman is a generation or two out of date and to explain away nasty social attitudes as a result of Jewish background is an insult to the Anglo-Jewish community. Most young Jews from similar backgrounds are not nasty and if they are it is absurd to ascribe their nastiness to their Jewishness. Perhaps the writers were after a little local colour to make the characters more interesting. There certainly seemed no other reason why they should be Jewish.
Yours faithfully,
C.S.
CHAPTER FOUR
COMEDY
When discussing the BBC’s comedy programmes of the 1960s it is understandable that much of the attention is focused on the innovative series: Hancock, Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Spike Milligan’s Q programmes, Dad’s Army and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Although Dad’s Army hardly feels groundbreaking now and is still a staple of BBC2’s Saturday night schedules, it was brought to air in the teeth of opposition from Paul Fox, the Controller of BBC1, who thought it would be regarded as offensive by those who had lived and fought their way through World War II.
It should, however, be remembered that the majority of comedy on BBC television at the time was cosy and unthreatening – Harry Worth, Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, Marriage Lines with Richard Briers and Prunella Scales and All Gas & Gaiters. That is why Till Death Us Do Part aroused such fury when it was first transmitted as a series in June 1966 (just in time for Alf to celebrate the winning of the World Cup by West Ham United) after a pilot episode in the Comedy Playhouse strand – which was the way Steptoe and Son had started four years earlier.
In both cases, what was at the heart of the characters’ conflict was the struggle between the ideas espoused by the different generations. In Steptoe and Son, Harold Steptoe (Harry H. Corbett) was a supporter of Harold Wilson, the Labour Party, political reform and upward social mobility. His toothless father Albert (Wilfrid Brambell), a World War I veteran, was a staunch Conservative and monarchist whose emotional neediness prevented any of Harold’s dreams being realised. In Till Death Us Do Part, Alf and Else Garnett essentially played out the same generational war with their daughter Rita and Mike, their long-haired Scouse layabout git of a son-in-law played by Antony Booth.
Steptoe was criticised for its ‘dirty’ setting in the junkyard of a Shepherd’s Bush rag and bone business, so different from the domestic tranquillity and sitting-room sofa of traditional British sitcoms. Despite his aspirations, Harold is frustratingly shackled to the ‘dirty old man’ set in his greedy ways, so their relationship contains considerable pathos. Steptoe’s creators, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, were more interested in character than social analysis; Till Death contains much more raw anger. Creator Johnny Speight based Alf Garnett on his East End docker father, whose unreconstructed racist views had caused him considerable anguish.
So it was ironic that, confronted by a bad-tempered, ignorant, racist, sexist, foul-mouthed chauvinist, the British public should take him to their hearts. It was the very reverse of what Speight had intended, but the instant and enormous popularity of the show indicated that Speight had touched a prominent nerve in British society. Less than two years
after the first series began transmission, Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and East End dockers marched in support claiming ‘Enoch Was Right’.
The working class of East End London had previously been portrayed as the salt of the earth and Cockney sparrows, stoically picking up the pieces after the latest Luftwaffe raid, singing music hall songs in the Tube during the nightly Blitz, and unfailingly cheerful at all times. It was a shock to television audiences to see a realistically presented working class family so bitterly divided, with parents who should be setting an example to the children instead portrayed as ignorant and stupid.
Alf and Else thought they were doing the right thing – standing up for the monarchy and the Tory Party, idealising Winston Churchill and the Empire, but their battles with their progressive children were not just ideological but generational and cultural. Mike and Rita were relaxed about immigration and the new sexual mores which Alf and Else believed threatened the foundations of society, as did the new music, films, fashions and hairstyles.
It wasn’t so much the ideas that Alf embraced which so infuriated the letter writers as the language he used in trumpeting their values. Alf used ‘bloody’ and ‘bleeding’ to an extent that had never been heard before on television, even though the BBC desperately traded with the writer (whom they were very unwilling to lose), offering, for example, to keep two ‘bloody’s if he would cut another ‘bleeding’.
Alf, of course, was an admirer of Mary Whitehouse. Her public disparagement of the programme merely provoked Speight to write an episode in which Alf is seen reading a book written by the doyenne of the Clean Up TV Campaign. Teased by Mike, who can’t stand Whitehouse, Alf expostulates why he is reading her book, ‘She’s concerned for the bleedin’ moral fibre of the nation!’ The episode ends with the book being burnt.
I'm Sure I Speak For Many Others... Page 5