Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Jones concluded that such threats had been curtailed by the public-spirited actions of ‘trade unions and progressive management’ working together to conquer inflation, but the best put-down of such fantasists came in the TV comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin a year later. The focus here was on the mid-life crisis of Reggie himself (played by Leonard Rossiter), but his military brother-in-law, Jimmy Anderson (Geoffrey Palmer), is also struggling against modern society and confides that he’s proposing to recruit a secret army for ‘when the balloon goes up’. His targets are the ‘Forces of anarchy, wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, union leaders, communist union leaders. Keg bitter, punk rockers, glue-sniffers, Play for Today, squatters, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, up Jenkins, up everybody’s.’ To which Reggie retorts: ‘You know the sort of people you’re going to attract, don’t you, Jimmy? Thugs, bully boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-bashers, basher-bashers, anybody bashers, rear admirals, queer admirals, vice admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists, neo-loyalists, crypto-loyalists.’ And Jimmy, with lugubrious enthusiasm, leaps at the vision: ‘Really think so? I thought support might be hard to get.’

  Jimmy Anderson too was probably to be found in the ranks of the comedy characters who would have voted for Thatcher (Reggie was more likely to have spoilt his ballot paper), reflecting a strand of middle-class disenchantment with modern Britain. Right at the end of his life in 1975, the great comic songwriter Michael Flanders said that ‘it puzzled and saddened him to think that all the things he was, and had been brought up to be proud of – solid professional middle class, well-educated at non-snob public school, liberal with a small “l” in politics and morals – had suddenly become bad things, to be ashamed of’. For those like him, and for those, such as Annie Walker in Coronation Street, who aspired to such things, Thatcher appeared the most plausible chance for deliverance, as The Times pointed out in its description of her 1975 conference speech; it was, the paper said, ‘a calculated call to political arms addressed to all those, in every socio-economic class, who identify themselves and their best interests with middle-class moral values’.

  In preparing for that speech, Thatcher had instructed her team to broaden the focus beyond the economy, to look at values and philosophy. ‘The economy had gone wrong,’ she was convinced, ‘because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically. The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation.’ Whether she was correct or not, her analysis chimed with a great swath of public opinion. There was a perception amongst her supporters that a new establishment had somehow sneaked its way into existence, creating a society that elevated the rule-book mentality of Fred Kite and Vic Spanner to the status of standard practice, that bound traditional freedoms in red tape, that believed that the bureaucrat knew best. The trade union leaders, raised in profile by Mike Yarwood’s impressions, were now seen by many as being part of the system, joining the ranks of the bosses, the bankers and the politicians; according to a 1976 Gallup survey, more than half the population saw Jack Jones as the most powerful man in the country.

  Against this establishment the mavericks kicked, the malcontents raged and the fantasists plotted counter-revolution. And Thatcher, revelling in her status as the first woman leader of a major party, and taking on not merely the mantle but also the manner of Enoch Powell, began to build a reputation as one of the few politicians prepared to speak inconvenient truths, to question the very foundations of modern Britain. The Tories had finally found a credible champion who could offer a vision of the future entirely distinct from that of Tony Benn. Her constituency at this early stage was fragmented and fractured, and conventional wisdom still saw the prospects for the country as being dominated by the left, but on the right there was for the first time in a long while some semblance of hope, if only she were capable of bringing the disparate strands together. ‘If this is “lurching to the right”, as her critics claim,’ said the Daily Mail of her 1975 conference speech, ‘ninety per cent of the population lurched that way long ago.’

  8

  Obscenity

  ‘I wanna take dirty pictures of you’

  FLETCHER: I’m talking about standards, moral standards. I mean, what do all these social commentators know, eh? They don’t know nothing about the real world. They all live within a stone’s throw of each other in North West One, don’t they? Never been further north than Hampstead or further south than Sloane Square.

  Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Porridge (1975)

  Every night they watched television: comedy shows, plays, quiz games, anything they could get until the stations closed down for the night. Emily liked the plays, especially if there was what she called a bit of ‘blue’ in them but she wouldn’t let Ernest watch BBC2 because there was every chance that there would be naked women in them, and that was taking things too far.

  Jack Ramsay, The Rage (1977)

  Last night I saw a (uh) strange movie (uh uh), everyone was in bed;

  Last night it made me (uh) feel groovy (uh uh), watching things that they did.

  There was Bill and Sue, checking Sid and Mandy too,

  And they went uh uh uh uh uh uh uh ohhh . . .

  Troggs, ‘Strange Movies’ (1973)

  In a 1977 storyline in the cartoon strip Flook the character Pru Scoop is seen heaping relics from the previous decade onto a bonfire: a Union Flag carrier bag, a copy of Oz magazine, a book by Germaine Greer, an album by the Rolling Stones. Feeling that she and her generation were in some way to ‘blame for today’s football hooligans’, she is seeking to absolve herself of the guilt she feels about the society she has helped bring into being. ‘You are witnessing,’ she proclaims loftily, ‘the middle-class divesting itself of the decadent trappings of the Swinging Sixties.’

  This retrospective dislike of what was pejoratively termed the permissive society became one of the key pillars of the right-wing renaissance in the ’70s. ‘The 1960s saw in Britain the beginning of what has become an almost complete separation between traditional Christian values and the authority of the state,’ wrote Thatcher in her memoirs. ‘People in positions of influence in government, the media and universities managed to impose metropolitan liberal views on a society that was still largely conservative morally.’ The primary political cause of this supposed separation was the raft of legislation in the late ’60s that legalized abortion and male homosexual acts, that ended capital punishment and the Lord Chamberlain’s control of the stage, and that restrained racism and facilitated divorce. But there was too the wave of decensorship that had started with the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 and that had inadvertently democratized pornography, making available to the many what had previously been the province of the few. And here was the ground on which some of the key cultural battles were to be fought in the next decade, making some unlikely bedfellows along the way; the Tory minister Viscount Eccles declared in 1971 that ‘Pornography is the ugly child of the permissive society,’ a right-wing precursor to the radical feminist slogan ‘Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.’

  The rearguard fight against obscenity was led not by a politician, but by a woman who – in the mythically innocent days of the mid-’50s – had lived just two doors down from Enoch Powell in his Wolverhampton constituency. Mary Whitehouse was then an unremarkable teacher and mother, but in 1963 she was to launch herself on the public scene, leading a seemingly doomed campaign against the perceived permissiveness of the era and, particularly, against what she saw as an abandonment of standards at the BBC. By the 1970s, as the tide showed signs of turning against liberalism, she found herself – like Powell – hated and fêted in almost equal measure and, like him, seen by many as the spokesperson for ordinary decent folk feeling excluded from the political consensus. Even her most sympathetic biographer, however, felt the need to point out in 1975 that ‘she was very def
initely not a Powellite’, an indication of how far beyond the pale Powell was by now deemed to have strayed.

  The popular perception of Whitehouse was of a neighbourhood busybody in horn-rimmed glasses and surprisingly colourful print frocks, somewhat akin to Edna Everage before the damehood; she was a self-appointed censor, a woman who objected above all to the depiction of sex on television, in the cinema and in pop music. But that tells only part of the story. When she began her campaign, her primary target was not the presence of explicit sex scenes on TV, since these did not then exist; rather she was prompted by ‘the irreverence of the late-night “satire” shows, and by the kind of plays put out by the BBC’; many years later she was still insisting that such programmes ‘played havoc with everything that the vast majority of people hold dear’. The key, however, was that word ‘irreverence’, for Whitehouse was essentially a traditionalist, reflecting a middle-class, Anglican vision of Christianity that was rooted in social order and stability, a mindset that had reached its best-known expression in Cecil F. Alexander’s hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:

  The rich man in his castle,

  The poor man at his gate,

  God made them, high or lowly,

  And order’d their estate.

  Or, in her own words, ‘Freedom dies when moral anarchy takes over. It lives when citizens accept limitations upon themselves for the greater good of the community as a whole.’

  This happy state of affairs was apparently threatened in 1963 by the arrival on BBC TV of the satirical show That Was the Week That Was, with its Oxbridge assaults on the establishment, by the Profumo scandal, and by the Bishop of Woolwich’s book Honest to God. Convinced that this unholy trinity might shake the very foundations of civilization, Whitehouse initiated what was first known as the Clean-Up TV Campaign and later as the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (VALA). She was thus amongst the first to register that the 1960s were marking a radical break from the past, and she was determined to do all that she could to put a stop to it. For much of the decade she was a thorn in the flesh of the BBC, denouncing perceived lapses of taste and judgement, expressing outrage, and arguing that licence-payers’ money should not be spent on undermining the family values that she considered essential to a stable society. But a thorn was all that she was, for, despite the sound and fury, and despite the widespread exposure she received in the newspapers, she was then a marginal figure with few positive results to show for her efforts, save the support of those who thought of her as the voice of the silent majority – over a third of a million signed a petition in 1965 expressing concern at the ‘low standards’ of television. In the words of her friend Bill Deedes, Tory MP and future editor of the Daily Telegraph: ‘The 1960s were rough times for people with the message Mrs Whitehouse sought to deliver.’ The victories were not to come until the ’70s.

  By then she had become a figure of ridicule in the media. Indeed there had been those prepared to mock from the outset: the character of Mrs Smallwood, played by Margot Boyd in the 1964 serial Swizzlewick, with her advocacy of ‘freedom from sex’, was clearly based on Whitehouse. Later, thinly veiled depictions included the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s ‘Mrs Blackhouse’, Beryl Reid’s incarnation as Desiree Carthorse in The Goodies – ‘You mean you’re going to condemn that film without even seeing it?’ asks Bill Oddie, to which she replies: ‘Why should I change the habit of a lifetime?’ – and Norma Blackhurst in porn star Fiona Richmond’s semiautobiographical film Hardcore. (This latter was played by Joan Benham, better known as Lady Prudence Fairfax in the Whitehouse-approved Upstairs, Downstairs.) She was also the inspiration behind the ironic title of the pornographic magazine Whitehouse, and William Bennett’s power electronics band of the same name, while Pink Floyd sang about her as a ‘house-proud town mouse’ on their album Animals: ‘You gotta stem the evil tide, and keep it all on the inside.’

  The most entertaining caricature of the attitudes Whitehouse was believed to embody was Pete Walker’s exploitation movie House of Whipcord (1974), in which a nineteen-year-old French model (played by Page Three girl Penny Irving) is arrested doing a semi-nude advertising shoot in Kensington Gardens and fined £10 for behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace. There the matter would normally rest, except that the film posits the existence of an alternative, unofficial prison, run by a retired judge and a trio of former prison wardresses. And it is here that our heroine is taken to be tried by the ex-judge: ‘This is a private court. And we are constituted here by private charter within the walls of this fine, historic building, that was once a county jail, to pass what we regard as proper sentence on depraved females of every category, with whom the effete and misguided courts of Great Britain today have been too lenient.’ It proves to be a rigorous regime; for a first offence of breaking prison regulations, the penalty is two weeks’ solitary confinement; for a second offence, flogging, and for a third, hanging. In case the satire isn’t entirely apparent in this women-behind-bars flick, the film starts with a written message: ‘This film is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment . . .’

  But derision was, some felt, scarcely necessary, when Whitehouse herself was so adept at self-parody; in 1972 she was to be found protesting against Top of the Pops playing Chuck Berry’s #1 single ‘My Ding-a-Ling’, not on the grounds that such trite nonsense wasn’t worthy of the man who invented the poetry and guitar style of rock & roll, but because she believed its schoolyard smut was obscene. The BBC chose on this occasion – as on so many others – not to follow her advice, but it could, with the other hand, point proudly to the way it assiduously banned every single record released by Judge Dread, a white British DJ born as Alex Hughes, who specialized in rude nursery rhymes set to ska rhythms:

  Two old ladies sitting on the dock;

  One put her hand up the other one’s frock.

  Dread ended the decade having sold more singles in Britain than any other reggae artist, up to and including Johnny Nash and Bob Marley, but so total was the prohibition on his work that even his 1973 single ‘Molly’, a benefit record for famine victims in Ethiopia, was banned from radio play despite its complete lack of any hint of offensiveness, simply because of the artist concerned. Such anomalies abounded at the BBC during the period, the most celebrated being Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, a single that documented transvestism, oral sex, prostitution and drugs and still failed to earn itself a ban, for reasons that have never been entirely clear.

  Meanwhile, amongst the many other targets at whom Mary Whitehouse thundered in the early ’70s with equal futility, and with no apparent sense of priority, were A Clockwork Orange (‘the most shocking film ever to be shown in England’, she gasped in her habitually hyperbolic way), the swearing on the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street, the horrific content of Doctor Who and the amorality of the BBC series Casanova, an attack that provoked writer Dennis Potter to call her ‘an ignorant and dangerous woman’.

  The repeated calls for the BBC to ban programmes and records that the Corporation decided not to ban might sometimes have given the impression of impotence, but Whitehouse was nonetheless an influential player in 1970s culture. There was, to start with, the long-term self-censorship achieved by her Fabian strategy, as TV writer Wilfred Greatorex pointed out: ‘the sheer noise which has come from her has caused some writers to be inhibited’. Even when a writer was not thus subdued, even when a play was commissioned, accepted and recorded by the BBC, the fear of complaints could still cause panic, as Potter discovered with his 1976 piece Brimstone and Treacle, which was pulled by Alasdair Milne, then the director of programmes, less than three weeks before its scheduled broadcast. The plot centred on a disturbing character, who appeared to be the Devil in human form, visiting a suburban family and raping their brain-damaged daughter; as the BBC press release admitted, it was ‘likely to outrage viewers’, and certainly it’s hard t
o imagine Whitehouse not turning it into a major tabloid issue. (In a complaint about Potter’s later series Pennies from Heaven, VALA called him a ‘brilliant playwright’ but objected, in anatomically tautological terms, to the sight of a woman ‘having painted round the nipples of her breasts with lipstick’.)

  More than this occasionally suppressive effect, however, there was the fact that Whitehouse’s absolute certainty in her own faith ensured that she wouldn’t be deterred by short-term defeats; she was in for the long haul. In this respect she mirrored the ruthless dedication of those she considered to be her ultimate enemies, for behind her anti-permissive rhetoric was not simply a Christian defence of deference, nor solely a concern for the impressionable minds of children, but a passionate opposition to communism.