Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  This sensitivity towards oil companies was, of course, not unrelated to the imminent advent of North Sea oil, the proceeds of which were seen as the fabled pot of gold at the end of the ’70s rainbow. Even here, though, there were potential ramifications to be explored by popular fiction: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ explains a character in Walter Harris’s The Fifth Horseman. ‘We’re taking out oil and gas, and putting nothing back.’ Sure enough, the seabed collapses as a result of the drilling, and sends a tidal wave across northern Europe. Harris’s book was one of a brace of environmental disaster novels in 1976 that concerned the flooding of Britain, the other being Richard Doyle’s Deluge, which centred on an entirely natural freak weather system, albeit one whose effects could have been avoided: ‘The great barrier project at Woolwich was designed to prevent all this, but since it had been paralysed by strikes, it was now two years behind schedule.’ (Work on the Thames Barrier began in 1974, and it was officially opened in 1984.)

  The reaction against technology was also evident in one of the best-remembered Doctor Who storylines. ‘The Green Death’ (1973) told the story of a multinational company, Global Chemicals, using a disused mine in South Wales to dump the waste from their new oil-refining process. An exploration of the pit reveals a lake of green slime in which a mutated species of giant maggots is growing; these prove to be lethal to humans and almost – though not quite – indestructible. The theme was far from original, but the series did add a couple of radical new threads to the tradition. First, there is a group of environmentalist campaigners, led by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Clifford Jones, who are allowed time and space to put their arguments against the destruction of the Earth. Their approach is strictly scientific, and Jones’s own work centres on developing an alternative protein source to meat, based on fungi. That they are to be seen as the good guys is made explicit by the fact that the Doctor’s companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), is on their side, even before she meets Jones and decides to marry him: ‘It’s time to call a halt, it’s time that the world awoke to the alarm bell of pollution instead of sliding down the slippery slopes of, of whatever it is,’ she declares, in slightly unconvincing tones.

  Second, there is a serious ratcheting up of anti-capitalist sentiments with a direct linkage of big business to fascism. The story opens with Stevens, head of Global Chemicals, addressing a group of miners left without jobs after the National Coal Board closed down the pit where they had worked: ‘I have in my hand a piece of paper which will mean a great deal to all of you,’ he says; ‘wealth in our time.’ Having registered the overt association between Stevens and the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain after Munich in 1938, we eventually get to see who he is appeasing: a megalomaniac computer which makes repeated Hitlerian references to Wagner, Nietzsche and the concept of the Superman. (In this context, the manner in which Jones comforts Jo after the death of a miner – saying that the dead man was unique in the whole history of the world, and would remain so even if the Earth lasted for a hundred thousand years – can only be seen as a very obscure reference to, and rejection of, Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence.)

  Just to add further resonance, the controlling computer is named BOSS, which stands here for Biomorphic Organizational Systems Supervisor, but which also carried echoes of the Bureau of State Security, the secret police of apartheid South Africa. But there is in any event no question of where our sympathies should lie once Stevens tells the Doctor that he intends to create freedom from pain and fear, and the Doctor snorts derisively: ‘Freedom from freedom!’ It was a sign of the politically charged times that such a clearly anti-business storyline was considered appropriate for children’s television.

  On a fluffier level, 1973 also saw the arrival on TV of the proto-recyclers The Wombles, based on characters created by Elizabeth Beresford. These small but long-nosed creatures inhabited Wimbledon Common and spent their time, in the words of the theme song, ‘making good use of the things that we find, things that the everyday folk leave behind’. That song was written by Mike Batt, who, having walked into the offices of CBS Records in a Womble suit made by his mother, managed to negotiate a contract for the ‘band’. A succession of hit singles followed, all of them perfect pop parodies, from the calypso of ‘Banana Rock’ to the bubblegum punk of ‘Super Womble’; as the guitarist on the records, Chris Spedding, pointed out: ‘Mike was very ingenious with his little pastiches of music.’ (At the same time that he was appearing on Top of the Pops in a Womble suit, Spedding was also turning down an invitation to join the Rolling Stones.)

  Bizarrely the Wombles became the biggest-selling singles act in the country in 1974. Even more bizarrely they provoked a series of near-riots when thousands of children turned up that Christmas to see what they thought were going to be gigs by their furry heroes and were instead confronted by a shoddy musical. ‘They had one director and nine casts all in this one rehearsal room,’ said Batt. ‘They rehearsed this really awful show, gave them a load of crap costumes and told them to go out and do it.’ The result was hordes of kids screaming for their mummies, hordes of mummies screaming for their money back, and a deluge of bad publicity for the Wombles that probably prevented them from taking the coveted Christmas #1 spot on the charts with ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’, instead allowing in Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’. Those who went to the Manchester show could at least comfort themselves that they had seen the ironic ’80s pop star David Van Day of Dollar in an early incarnation as American Womble, Captain Yellowstone, as well as hearing music played by future members of the soft-rock band Sad Café, but it was clearly a traumatic event for many: ‘That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ regretted Batt. ‘The other Wombles were out of my control.’ The band split up soon afterwards, though Wellington Womble did release a solo single, ‘Rainmaker’, during the great drought of 1976.

  From terrorists to Wombles, there was for a while what seemed an almost insatiable appetite for eco-fiction of all shades. How much the concern was matched by individual changes of behaviour on a wide scale was more arguable. The split between private concern and public self-interest was evident in the growth of out-of-town superstores, or hypermarkets as they were originally known, following the Continental model. For those in doubt, The Architect magazine provided a definition: ‘An isolated store sited either in a green field location or a suburban or new town district centre. It will have a total floor area of between 60,000 and 100,000 square feet, of which about sixty per cent will be sales area.’ The size was crucial. In 1972 the Department of the Environment issued a circular requiring any local authority receiving a planning application for a store of 50,000 square feet or above to refer the application to central government; it wasn’t long before a way around the regulations was found as ‘one local authority issued planning consent for the development of a supermarket occupying 49,999 square feet of space’.

  The message was anyway somewhat confused, for the previous year government had given ‘the go-ahead to local authorities to grant permission for out-of-town hypermarkets provided they presented no environmental problems’. Under this guidance, the French retail group Carrefour had obtained permission for Britain’s first hypermarket, a 60,000-square-feet store in Caerphilly, ‘which during its initial period was besieged by traffic jams, resulting in appeals to people to keep away’. The definition of ‘environmental problems’ was to evolve in later decades, but what was clear from an early stage was the demand from retailers for such developments and, it had to be assumed, from the public as well. By March 1972 it was being reported that Lancashire alone had received sixty planning applications for such hypermarkets, and despite reservations in some quarters – a spokesperson for Which? warned that ‘consumers have to be careful about the concentration of power in large retail groups’ – it was evident that this was the future face of shopping. The erosion of the high street and the encouragement of excess traffic were fears yet to come.

  Indeed, what is notable about
this first eruption of environmentalism, in light of future concerns, is the priorities it established. As early as 1970 the Labour conference was passing a motion that ‘viewed with alarm the increasing pollution of land, sea and air and called on the Labour Party to demand the necessary controls’, while earlier in the same year Prince Charles had written to the prime minister complaining that salmon stocks were in danger of being overfarmed in the Atlantic and that the species was threatened ‘by modern methods which give it no chance’. He added: ‘People are notoriously short-sighted when it comes to questions of wildlife, and several species have been wiped out because no one has woken up in time to the danger.’ Even the fictional detective James Hazell was aware that something was happening: ‘My dad says the weather’s changed because they’re cutting down forests in Brazil.’ But in political terms, such voices were way ahead of their time; much more typical was the Liberal Party spokesman, John Pardoe, arguing in 1977 against further taxation on motoring: ‘Liberals, he said, had always been opposed to higher petrol prices and car taxes because of their effect on low-earning rural areas, where cars were essential for people to get to work.’

  What was clear even at this stage, however, was the scientific warning of imminent catastrophe. Professor Dennis Meadows of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was reported in 1971 to have produced a computer model showing ‘that man is using up his natural resources too quickly, that population is growing too rapidly and that economic growth is leading to pollution levels which will end in disaster’. The reports added that: ‘If present trends continue, it is estimated, the disaster will overtake the world in thirty years.’ In a foretaste of political short-sightedness to come, government scientists were said to be supportive of Professor Meadows, but to have been overruled by Ted Heath, who was in a state of panic over unemployment and remained committed to growth. The conflict between immediate economic crisis and medium-term environmental catastrophe was already evident.

  As the decade continued and the economy showed little prospect of improving, so the initial wave of enthusiasm for environmental issues receded somewhat. In 1975 the BBC launched what was to become one of its most cherished sitcoms, The Good Life, in which Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall) opt out of the middle-class rat race to take up a life of self-sufficient farming in the garden of their Surbiton home. Inspired by the likes of smallholder John Seymour, author of The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency – which sold remarkably well in the wake of the TV show – The Good Life was intended to tap into a public desire for a less stressful life, partly in response to the message that small was indeed beautiful. The most revealing feature of the series, though, was the way in which it drifted from its ecological roots, and turned into a much more conventional domestic sitcom, as the Goods’ next-door neighbours, Jerry and Margo Leadbetter (Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith), still fully immersed in the suburban mainstream, emerged as figures of equal standing to the Goods. So powerful a figure was Margo in particular, displaying both ludicrously exaggerated levels of snobbery and genuine warmth, that by the end she dominated the programme.

  And as she grew in stature, so too did the viewing figures: the first episode to attract an audience of over 10 million was significantly also the first to centre on a Leadbetter story. That was towards the end of the second season, and the lesson was clearly learnt; from the third series in 1976, the relationship between the two couples had become the focus, with the result that one of the episodes that year reached the giddy heights of 17.7 million viewers. With yet another immediate economic crisis to be faced, the nation evidently found conventional comedy easier to digest than purer pro-environmentalist fare.

  4

  Violence

  ‘It’s the only thing that’ll make you see sense’

  It can generally be assumed that demos, in the liberal sense, are no longer ways of ‘voicing our opinion’, but ways of showing our collective strength and solidarity.

  Agitprop Collective, The Bust Book (1971)

  Whatever these bimbos were protesting about, it was obviously something they were taking to heart rather. By the time I had got into their midst not a few of them had decided that animal cries were insufficient to meet the case and were saying it with bottles and brickbats, and the police who were present in considerable numbers seemed not to be liking it much. It must be rotten being a policeman on these occasions. Anyone who has got a bottle can throw it at you, but if you throw it back, the yell of police brutality goes up and there are editorials in the papers next day.

  P.G. Wodehouse, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974)

  These boots were made for stompin’, and that’s what they’ll do,

  One of these days these boots are gonna stomp all over you.

  Symarip, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’ (1969)

  ‘You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape.’ The most famous line in the 1971 film Get Carter sees Michael Caine as London gangster Jack Carter seeking to avoid a fight with the decidedly portly Bryan Mosley (here playing Brumby, though better known as Alf Roberts in Coronation Street). More revealing is Carter’s next thought: ‘For me, it’s a full-time job.’ He’s not bragging about his propensity for violence, merely stating a fact: he’s a professional who earns his living by his ability to inflict harm on others. And it’s not something of which he is particularly proud. He has come back to his home town of Newcastle – or Scunthorpe, in the original Ted Lewis novel, Jack’s Return Home – to investigate the murder of his brother, a decent, ordinary citizen who he acknowledges to have been the better man of the two: ‘I’m the villain in the family,’ he says, recognizing that his need for vengeance is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

  This self-awareness is crucial to the film named as the best British movie of all time by Total Film magazine in 2004. Get Carter shows in close-up a collection of singularly unappealing thugs, killers and pornographers; with scarcely a redeeming feature between them, they live in a relentlessly vicious world of their own making, devoid of humanity or decency. Behind this amoral group, however, in the background to the action, there is another world entirely, a city that remains untouched by their activities; we see pubs, a dance hall, a bingo hall, a kids’ marching band in the streets, a whole community going about its everyday business and sharing nothing in common with the parasites who prey upon it. It is this community that Carter left behind him when he moved to London, and he is painfully aware of his distance from it. Early on in the film, as he’s leaving a pub, a fight breaks out between two women, a fight that won’t result in anyone’s death or even in serious injury, but is a simple statement of honour. It’s a lifetime away from the industrialized violence of the central characters, and Carter’s spontaneous smile at the uncomplicated honesty of the dispute makes it clear that there’s a part of him that yearns for this society where he no longer belongs.

  At the time, the cold brutality of the film’s violence captured the attention of critics and audiences, but in retrospect Get Carter can be seen almost as an elegy for a passing world, one where there was still an absolute demarcation between the villain and the citizen. Already such innocence was being challenged in fiction, with a spate of crime novels that questioned the complacency of Britain. James Barlow’s The Burden of Proof (1968) drew on the story of the Kray twins to depict a country where a bent lawyer can blackmail an MP into committing perjury, and thereby ensure that a violent thug gets off any charge brought against him. Over this travesty of justice presides an elderly and blinkered judge, who smugly believes ‘that England was unique because her Government and Law were not corrupt. But neither was true any more.’ As the dedication to the novel (‘To the policemen of England, who are still the salt of the earth’) makes clear, however, there is at least one institution on which we can depend: the star of the book, if not the subsequent movie Villain, is an incorruptible copper, representative of one of the last bastions of decency.

  G.F. Newman had no such illusions
. Rejected as a writer for the TV series Z-Cars because his script showed a police officer accepting a bribe, he made his name with his first novel Sir, You Bastard (1970), which sold 200,000 copies and spawned two sequels (You Nice Bastard and You Flash Bastard). Its anti-hero is Terry Sneed, an intelligent young man with a Nietzschean sense of his own destiny: ‘Power, he decided, was the only worthwhile thing having; some thought money, but money amounted to power; others intelligence, but intelligence equalled power, too.’ Sneed would have been plausible as a serial killer or as a putative fascist leader, but instead he becomes a CID officer, ruthlessly ambitious and, inevitably, corrupt as well. For, while he’s clearly a potential high-flyer from an early stage, he’s in no way seen as being different in kind from his colleagues; in fact he’s accepted by them precisely because of what they have in common: ‘Corruption in the CID had reached saturation point and an uncorrupt detective might easily blow the whistle.’

  What had changed between these two novels was the first serious indication that the police might not be as honourable as the public had naively assumed. A 1969 investigation by journalists on The Times had uncovered (with tape recordings to back up the story) three separate detectives taking bribes from a professional criminal in return for dropping charges and allowing him to continue in his chosen career. The traditional excuse in such situations, that there might be the occasional bad apple, seemed to have been undermined from the start when one of the policemen pointed out to the criminal: ‘We’ve got more villains in our game than you’ve got in yours, you know.’ To the relief of the police force, however, an internal inquiry under the leadership of Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Moody, which investigated dozens of officers, could find no traces of widespread corruption; with the exception of one demoted detective, no disciplinary action was deemed necessary.