Other remarks, including those about the Queen, made us feel very relieved that last night was the last performance of this series, and we devoutly hope that such a series will not again appear.
I am sorry to say so, but very many people feel that murders, thefts and many other crimes are encouraged by Television, and I only wish that programmes could be checked on a much more severe basis before being shown to the public.
With best wishes for the New Year,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd) [Lord] BROCKET
CHAPTER TEN
THE PROFUMO AFFAIR
In June 1963, between the two series of TW3, John Profumo resigned as Minister of State for War. In March, he had made a personal statement to the House of Commons in which he had denied any impropriety in his relationship with model and showgirl Christine Keeler. Three months later, in the wake of constant rumours that simply would not stop even when he threatened libel actions against any organisation that published them, he was forced to admit that he had lied to the Commons.
The Conservative Party was in meltdown. ‘A great party is not to be brought down by a proven liar and a woman of easy virtue,’ shouted Lord Hailsham. A scapegoat was necessary to draw the heat away from Macmillan, the government and the Conservatives with a general election only a year away. Stephen Ward – osteopath, sketch artist and full-time hedonist – had introduced Keeler to Profumo in August 1961 when they met at the swimming pool outside Lord Astor’s stately home, Cliveden. Ward, along with the two young women to whom he had offered accommodation, Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, were at the centre of the subsequent scandalous revelations and hence the obvious candidates. The girls were threatened with prison; Ward was arrested.
Ward was charged with living off their immoral earnings although it was perfectly clear to everyone that although they slept with men quite promiscuously and accepted money or dinners from them, they were not professional prostitutes and Ward was not their pimp. The Establishment, however, in a year that saw the Great Train Robbery in which the public took the side of the robbers as well as its merciless lampooning by TW3, was determined to have its revenge. The biased summing-up of the judge left Ward in no doubt that he would be found guilty and imprisoned. The humiliation and unfairness was impossible to bear. The night before the jury was due to return he took an overdose of sleeping pills.
The case had caused the BBC some problems as the following letters make clear. The Profumo Affair, as it had come to be called, was yet another indication that society was moving in a new and strange direction. Upper class men had long enjoyed their dalliances with lower class girls but rarely had the news been spread over the popular press. News of orgies attended by High Court judges and prostitutes and of whipping parties in Mayfair were printed alongside The Times Law Reports and the county cricket scoreboard. Newspapers realised that there was an insatiable thirst for knowledge of the details of the affair, and for the revelations of the girls’ behaviour in Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews. Christine Keeler sold her story to the News of the World for £23,000, an unheard-of sum for the time.
The BBC was faced with the problem of reporting the details of the trial on its news bulletins. The detail was undoubtedly salacious but the detail was what most people wanted to learn. The BBC could choose to edit its reports to omit some of the salacious detail, but it prided itself on presenting the news impartially and in full. Its distinguished reputation really rested on the manner in which it had dealt with the news during the dark days of World War II.
There is no doubt that had John Reith still been its Director General, not a hint of the two-way mirrors permitting viewers a sight of the sexual shenanigans allegedly going on at Wimpole Mews would have been broadcast. Reith, however, was long gone and in his place sat Hugh Carleton Greene, a man with a very different approach to public morality. As Stephen Ward stood in the dock and BBC reporters told their listeners and viewers what had been said in court, the letters began …
London EC4
28 June 1963
To: The Director General, B.B.C., Portland Place, London W1
Dear Sir,
This is to confirm my telephone call at 6.30pm this evening to your Duty Officer, in the News Room, expressing my husband’s and my disgust at the first item in the six o’clock News this evening. For about six minutes we had the details of what Miss Keeler wore in Court, the men she had slept with and so on. There can be no justification for compelling us to listen to all this before coming to the serious news, there was no question of National security or other public interest to be served.
We hope that you will yourself personally ensure that the normal high standards maintained by and expected of the B.B.C. will in future be adhered to.
Happily we were alone in our home at the time. Had we had young people with us as is sometimes the case, we would have been very embarrassed, and there must be millions of homes where the six o’clock news is a family event and where this nauseating stuff had to be listened to.
Faithfully,
Mrs. M. J.
Calne, Wiltshire
28 June 1963
To: The Editor, News, B.B.C., Broadcasting House, London
Dear Sir,
Both as a parent of young children and as a Headmaster I wish to register a very strong protest at the reporting of the [Stephen] Ward case given on the 6 o’clock news of the B.B.C. sound programme today.
The selection of items, their presentation and the amount of absolutely gratuitous detail seemed, to my incredulous ears, to have reduced the whole thing to a standard of sensationalism worthy of the most sordid elements of the gutter press. The whole tone of the report, not excluding the announcer’s expressive voice, could not fail, in my opinion, to have a most corrupting influence on the minds of young people who might well be expected to join their parents in listening to the six o’clock news.
Apart from the frequent references to intercourse, the following points are among those I found most offensive:
The reference to the fitting of the mirror and its purpose, with the detail ‘he hoped people would pay to come and watch.’
The quotation of Ward’s comments to Miss Keeler about other girls (what sort of news is this?)
The glorification of the two witnesses (themselves involved in these disgusting forms of vice) implicit in the description of their costumes, including gloves! This sort of thing might be news for the lower gutter press but surely not for the B.B.C.
Is it too much to ask that the B.B.C. should consider that they have serious responsibilities to the family circle in their 6 o’clock news bulletins (T.V. or sound)?
Yours faithfully,
N. T.
National Council of Women of Great Britain
23 July 1963
To: Hugh Carleton Greene Esq., Broadcasting House, London W1
Dear Mr. Greene,
My Council wishes to register a strong protest against the way in which the news of the Profumo affair, and of the preliminary hearing of the case against Dr. Stephen Ward was presented both on radio and television.
While the National Council of Women appreciates that news should not be withheld from the public, it is strongly felt that far more detail was given than was necessary.
My Council is of the opinion that Radio and Television are not suitable media for the detailed presentation of such subject matter.
Yours sincerely,
C. G.
The New Daily London WC1
22 July 1963
To: Director-General, British Broadcasting Corporation, London W1
Dear Mr. Carleton Green,
The sordid and unsavoury Ward case is expected to open at the Old Bailey to-day. We believe we speak for millions of people when we ask you to give instructions that it shall not be reported on radio and television in a way that will cause embarrassment and offence in the homes into which your broadcasts go.
What we are asking is that, particularly on the six o’clock news wh
en millions of children are still up, words and phrases shall not be used that cause embarrassment. The phrase to which objection was taken during the Police Court case was chiefly ‘intercourse’ and ‘sexual intercourse’. Mothers said that they had been asked by children of seven and eight who heard it on the news to explain what it meant. [Also] that your reports shall not glamourise common prostitutes by describing their appearance and what they are wearing.
Everybody who installs a radio or television set pays a licence fee does so on the implied understanding that certain standards shall be maintained. You are the guardian of those standards.
If you wish to refresh your memory as to what they are please read the Dedication in the Entrance Hall to Broadcasting House placed there by Sir John Reith in 1931, and particularly the phrase ‘that all things hostile to peace and purity may be banished from this House.’
Sincerely yours,
E. M.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NOT SO MUCH A PROGRAMME, MORE A WAY OF LIFE
That Was the Week That Was ended its second and final series just after Christmas 1963. The BBC placed it into permanent limbo on the grounds that 1964 was an election year and political satire might affect the Corporation’s impartiality, a claim that was fiercely disputed by the show’s supporters. However, there remained a desire to retain as much as possible of what had made the original programme a success, so Frost returned the following autumn with Willie Rushton and a number of new performers – John Bird (who would have presented TW3 in preference to the unknown Frost had he not been previously booked to go to the United States), John Fortune, John Wells and Eleanor Bron.
The programme was made up of a mixture of sketches and conversation and it was transmitted three times a week, late at night on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. As with TW3, the opening song (sung by three different singers on the three nights that constituted the weekend) contained the convoluted title and the menu of what was to follow:
Not so much a programme
More a way of life
And a way of looking
At the world
One eye opened wide
One eye closed
And between the two the picture gets composed.
There was much that was well received in the new format. John Bird’s impersonation of Harold Wilson, the new prime minister, was better than Mike Yarwood’s because it had more political bite, but his politically incorrect caricature of an East African politician, though greatly enjoyed at the time, would never have been allowed on the screen a decade or two later. Eleanor Bron played Lady Pamela Stitty, a well-meaning lady of the Conservative party, a running character invented by Peter Cook.
The chat show’s regular guests resembled a Ned Sherrin dinner party: Harvey Orkin, an American talent agent; the eminent philosopher A.J. Ayer and his American wife, the newspaper columnist Dee Wells; Mark Boxer, the founding editor of the influential Sunday Times colour magazine; and, perhaps most successfully, the witty, stuttering Irish aristocrat Patrick Campbell, later one of the captains on Call My Bluff. Bernard Levin returned to cause more widespread fury, particularly when he insulted Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Leader of the Opposition, by calling him an imbecile and a cretin. It was undoubtedly cruel, but it sprang from the former prime minister’s admission that his knowledge of economics was so poor that he tried to understand the nation’s finances with the use of matchsticks. He was the last of the grouse moor Etonian Tory leaders. The following year the party elected the grammar-school educated Ted Heath as its new leader.
Not So Much a Programme began in November 1964, a month after Harold Wilson entered Downing Street for the first time, but it was not considered a success. Despite the BBC’s initial encouragement, NSMAPMAWOL did not trip off the tongue as lightly as TW3 and the series came to an end, largely unmourned, in April 1965. By this time David Frost was building his career in the United States, and when Sherrin returned with a new late-night Saturday show in the autumn of 1965, the presenter was not Frost but Robert Robinson.
However, Not So Much a Programme attracted more correspondence than its 21-week run appeared to have warranted. The outraged reaction to three sketches makes up the bulk of the complaints. The skewering of the Duke of Windsor, a sketch transmitted within hours of the death of his sister, the Princess Royal, has already been referred to in the section on the Royal Family. Levin’s attack on Douglas-Home provoked considerable sympathy for the man who had been on the side of the Guilty Men of Munich in 1938, but the overwhelming response was to a sketch about birth control.
This was transmitted just over halfway through the run of the series, but by that time the programme had succeeded in getting up the noses of a number of correspondents as it widened its range of targets to include professions who had previously thought themselves safe when attacks were concentrated on the church, the monarchy and parliament. No longer. Even town planners were now considered ripe for satire.
Newport, Monmouthshire
8 December 1964
To: David Frost Esq., c/o Broadcasting House London W1
Dear Sir,
I refer to the Sunday evening edition of ‘Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life’ and to your discussion about town planning. I am particularly concerned about the remarks made by Norman St. John Stevas to the effect that there is no profession of town planning and that no training is required to become a town planner.
This is completely wrong. There is a Chartered Town Planning Institute which requires its members to take Intermediate and Final Examinations of a standard comparable to those of R.I.C.S and R.I.BA. The preparation and tuition for these examinations normally takes five to six years.
Town planning tends to be devalued and not given the importance it deserves. This process has been aided by the Conservative Government’s attitude during their years in office and is given additional boost every time people such as St. John Stevas give voice to ill-considered and inaccurate statements.
I must add in conclusion that although I am a Chartered Town Planner the views I have expressed in this letter are my own and do not represent those of the Town Planning Institute or the Local Authority by which I am employed.
Yours faithfully,
P.R.O.
London SW2
22 November 1964
To: The Controller The BBC, Broadcasting House, London W1
Dear Sir,
As one who has always been proud to be British, and as a Grandfather of 9 grandchildren I must protest most seriously at the production which the BBC allowed to be shown under the heading of ‘Not so much a Programme more a way of life’, at 10.25pm last Friday.
The production was allowed to be an insult to decent people, the coloured gentleman who insulted us ‘Right, left and Centre’ has done more harm to relations between White and Coloured persons than any chalking on the wall could have done and everybody whom I have met during the last 2 days whom [sic] saw that programme are oddly enough entirely of the same opinion as myself so I cannot be very wrong in my complaint and they too await a reply to this letter of absolute disgust.
I am just an ordinary small businessman, I have been a Long Distance Lorry driver, a London Bus Driver, a Flight Lieutenant in the R.A.F. and now run a small Private Hire Business and I have Great Regard for Great Britain and the Commonwealth and its people, white and coloured and I am aware of the difficulties of us living together in harmony.
David Frost and his ‘warped’ cast especially the coloured gentleman, insults the common decency of all clean minded people of all classes. May I respectfully ask you to give me your own opinion on the manner in which our Coloured gentleman insulted all intelligent minded people last Friday night and whether this sort of thing will be allowed again.
Yours truly,
J.E.P.
Exclusive Private Hire by Rolls Royce Limousines for all occasions
Chatsworth, Bakewell, Derbyshire
22 November 1964
Dear Greene,
As a former member of the B.B.C. Advisory Council I write to say how horrified I was by the item called a political broadcast by the fascist party included in the programme ‘Not so much a programme, more a way of life’.
For sheer appalling bad taste I have never seen its equal. Perhaps that is what you wish the B.B.C. to achieve.
Yours?
Sincerely,
[the Duke of] Devonshire
From: The Most Reverend Archbishop Lord Fisher of Lambeth, Trent Rectory, Sherborne, Dorset
23 November 1964
To: Sir Hugh Greene, The B.B.C., Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London W1
My dear Greene,
You very kindly allow me to write a personal letter to you when the spirit moves me. May I say I was deeply moved or rather distressed by the defence which you gave in an answer to a complaint from the High Commissioner of Kenya; caused by a reference to [President of Kenya] Jomo Kenyatta in a B.B.C. programme which was ‘Not so much a Programme as [sic] A Way of Life’.
It used to be thought that when a neighbour complains of something as a personal insult the proper way to reply was to say – I am sorry –. Knowing the whole history of our relations with Africans in general and Kenya in particular it seems to me just simply deplorable that you should defend David Frost & Co. instead of saying wholeheartedly that you are sorry.
I do not watch this programme but I did on the night after the offence by accident see the beginning of it in which David Frost added a little impertinent insult to the injury already done. And all this adds to the intensely difficult task of establishing relations of trust and friendship between emergent Africans and our complex country.
Perhaps I should add that in a world so interrelated as this it is really terribly insensitive to suppose that Kenyatta should have the same sense of humour about a political caricature as we have!
I'm Sure I Speak For Many Others... Page 12