Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The first draft of this Quatermass had been written in 1972, having been commissioned by the BBC, but the piece did not emerge until it was finally made by Euston Films for ITV and broadcast in November 1979, by which time it seemed even more potent, even more cataclysmic than it would have done a few years earlier. The voice-over at the start of the first episode seemed to capture perfectly the current mood of confused despair. ‘In that last quarter of the twentieth century the whole world seemed to sicken. Civilized institutions, whether old or new, fell as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself. And men asked themselves: Why should this be?’

  12

  Race

  ‘I was born here just like you’

  The conception that in Britain everyone is fair-minded, tolerant and free from colour prejudice is such obvious nonsense that the most remarkable feature of this change in our way of life is that it has not fulfilled the blood-curdling predictions of Enoch Powell. That in itself is a tribute to the innate decency of the British people rather than to the wisdom of their rulers.

  Robert Mark, In the Office of Constable (1978)

  LONDON TAXI DRIVER: Oh, it’s changed all right. Chinese, sooties, towel-heads, Yanks, Eyeties, bubbles – there won’t be a Londoner left in the smoke soon.

  Trevor Preston, Out (1978)

  The National Front are fascists;

  We don’t hate the black kids.

  The National Front are fascists;

  Ain’t nothing wrong with the black kids – no way.

  The Pigs, ‘National Front’ (1977)

  In January 1970 a character named Melanie Harper, played by black actress Cleo Sylvestre, walked into the Crossroads Motel and asked the receptionist, ‘Could I speak to Mrs Richardson, please?’ She added, ‘Tell her it’s her daughter, Melanie.’ And as Tony Hatch’s theme tune struck up, and the credits rolled, millions of soap viewers felt the earth move under their feet. For matriarch Meg Richardson was the fans’ favourite, and the idea that she had a daughter of whom we had not previously been aware was shock enough; that she might have a black daughter was positively seismic. In the following episode it emerged that Melanie was in fact adopted, but the impact of the character was nonetheless significant, particularly in the West Midlands where the series was set and made. ‘It did a tremendous amount of good just having an ordinary character in there who happened to be black,’ Sylvestre commented later. ‘It is important to remember this happened around the time Enoch Powell was making all those terrible “rivers of blood” speeches, and British television audiences needed to see someone like Melanie every week. She was someone they could identify with.’

  Crossroads went on to be the first British soap to feature a black family – the James family in 1974 – and to have, in the mechanic Mac (Carl Andrews), a black character as a long-term regular, with eight years’ service. Its chief rival Coronation Street was much more timid, fearful that the mere presence of black people on the screen would somehow raise ‘issues’ that would be incompatible with the domestic dramas of Weatherfield. The limited horizons of its production team were apparent when Janice Stubbs (Angela Bruce) appeared in a 1978 storyline that saw her having an affair with Ray Langton, the first of Deirdre’s many husbands; on the wall of her bedsit was a poster for the group Boney M, an entirely implausible choice for the character, even if the band members were black.

  The paucity of these roles was an indication of how few opportunities there were for black actors on TV, though they were still a considerable improvement on previous decades. Elsewhere, a handful of entertainers emerged from The Comedians (Charlie Williams, Jos White) and from the talent show New Faces, which made stars of Patti Boulaye, Gary Wilmot and Lenny Henry, then a sixteen-year-old specializing in not very good impressions of the standard targets of the day – Tommy Cooper, Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em – but winning over the audience by cheerfully admitting: ‘You’ve seen them before, but not in colour.’ He went on to star in the first black British sitcom, The Fosters, produced by LWT in 1976. The same company later gave us Mixed Blessings, a comedy about a newly-wed white man and black woman, while Thames TV’s children’s series The Tomorrow People featured a racially mixed cast.

  What is notable is that these were all ITV productions. The BBC – allegedly the home of dangerous subversives and revolutionaries – showed little enthusiasm for putting black faces on television, a fact which didn’t escape attention at the time: ‘You’ve never seen a coloured comedian on the BBC, have you?’ joked black stand-up Sammy Thomas. ‘BBC – it stands for Ban Black Comics.’ The contrast between the channels could be seen most glaringly in the BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part and in ITV’s derivative Love Thy Neighbour. The latter, with its continual stream of racist abuse from Eddie Booth towards his next-door neighbours, never won any critical plaudits and was regarded in polite circles as being well beyond the pale, but it did at least provide work for the actors Rudolph Walker and Nina Baden-Semper. Till Death, on the other hand, was still featuring Spike Milligan made up as an Indian as late as the 1974 episode ‘Paki-Paddy’. In the same way Michael Bates continued to black up for It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (also on the BBC) right up until his death in 1978, all the while keeping up a humorous banter about ‘we British’ as opposed to ‘these damn natives’, and amusingly mangling the English language: ‘Shut your cakey hole!’

  Nor were Milligan and Bates alone. The Goodies had a fondness for donning blackface, as in a storyline that saw them making a promotional film for apartheid with Tim Brooke-Taylor blacked up. ‘We thought it was funny,’ he said in retrospect, ‘but we upset a lot of people, and were in trouble with the BBC.’ It was just possible to offer a defence that there was a political point being made here, however muddled, but the same was hardly true of a subsequent show when Bill Oddie turned up wearing shoe polish and claiming to have joined the Black Muslims, having changed his name to Rastus Watermelon. In both instances, an absurd parody of a black American accent was affected.

  And behind these examples was the extraordinary twenty-year success of the BBC’s light entertainment series The Black and White Minstrel Show, which finally came off air in 1978 (though it continued on stage, with Lenny Henry appearing for three seasons as the resident comedian). Descended from the minstrel troupes that had sprung up in America in the mid-nineteenth century, and had played to packed houses in Britain whenever they toured, the show featured white singers, wearing curly wigs and with their faces covered in black greasepaint save for exaggerated white mouths and eyes, as they ran through medleys of singalong numbers in heavily choreographed routines. Initially the blackface make-up was worn by all the singers, but early on it was decided to restrict it to the men only, presenting the culturally curious spectacle of white women dancing with caricatures of black men, as though such a depiction might inoculate the nation against the possibility of miscegenation. The result was a show that won both the Golden and Silver Rose at the first Montreux television festival in 1961, and which the BBC’s director of television, Kenneth Adam, said was proof ‘that the popular song need not be vulgar, ruin public taste or symbolize degeneracy’. It was, in short, the antidote to the mixed-race messages of rock & roll. The series was hugely successful, and though audiences declined a little in later years, the 1976 Christmas special was still amongst the top five most watched programmes that week. It was also increasingly controversial at a time when sensitivities were becoming slightly more attuned. Indeed as far back as 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement in America, That Was the Week That Was had drawn attention to the incongruity of its existence, with a parody of the Minstrels singing merrily about lynchings in Mississippi.

  By the time the Minstrels were finally pulled from the schedules, doubts were being raised over the entire nature of television’s treatment of minorities. At the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1978, a series of speakers denounced the stereotyping that had become a stock part of entertainment, not merely in relation to bl
ack people but also the Irish, with the writer Brian Phelan arguing that the comedian’s caricature of the Irishman as being ‘lazy, ignorant and incredibly stupid was the media’s way of telling mothers of soldiers killed in Northern Ireland that their sons were being killed by savages’. Less emotively, Howard Schuman, writer of Rock Follies, spelt out what was to become the new agenda for humour: ‘Comedy that diminishes the already powerless I find despicable and increasingly obscene.’ And Trevor Griffiths explored the same territory in his 1975 play Comedians, in which a music hall veteran, Eddie Waters – played by Jimmy Jewel in the original production, and by Bill Fraser in the subsequent BBC adaptation – teaches a class of aspiring comedians the tricks of the trade. Or rather, he teaches them to ignore accepted commercial wisdom and to pursue comedy as truth, beyond stereotypes. ‘A joke that feeds on ignorance starves its audience,’ he insists. ‘Most comics feed prejudice and fear and blinkered vision, but the best ones, the best ones illuminate them, make them clearer to see, easier to deal with.’

  These new images of comedy were to become a powerful force by the end of the decade, but there was a high degree of resistance from established comics and their audiences, those who agreed with Bernard Manning’s maxim ‘You never take a joke seriously; it’s a joke.’ Indeed Manning himself came to epitomize for many the unacceptable face of comedy, a man who continued to tell jokes about race long after they had been deemed inappropriate for television, though there was little in the ’70s to indicate that he would become such a symbolically charged figure.

  Like many other comics from the Northern clubs, he made his TV debut on The Comedians, a series that had no pretensions to being anything but a succession of gags, cutting from one performer to another as soon as each joke was finished. Frank Carson, Jim Bowen, Tom O’Connor and Mike Reid were amongst those who made their names on the show, but the most accomplished was undoubtedly Manning; while the other comics would telegraph their wisecracks and be the first to laugh at their own jokes, Manning’s delivery was casual to the point of contempt – virtually motionless, and with a Mancunian monotone, he would throw away his punchlines as though he didn’t much care either for them or for his audience. Technically he was head and shoulders above his rivals, with a unique sense of timing and a commanding stage presence. His material, however, was not particularly racist by the standards of the time, and when a spin-off series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, set in a fictitious Northern club, was launched in 1974, he was the obvious choice to be the host compère. It was not until the 1980s, when television came to regard certain subjects as being off-limits, that Manning acquired his reputation as the king of politically incorrect comedy, since he – unusually amongst his contemporaries – refused to adapt his material. Indeed, it almost seemed as though he deliberately emphasized jokes about race in a defiant response to the new orthodoxy, revelling in his new role as the most controversial comic in the country, even if he was seldom seen on TV any more and had clearly lost the ideological battle.

  Similar arguments were also heard in other fields, particularly in education. Earlier Bridget Harris of the pressure group Teachers Against Racism had called for the book Little Black Sambo and its sequels to be removed from schools and libraries, because they ‘have become both dangerous and obsolete in the multi-racial Britain of 1972 where people of good will are trying to foster respect for black people among white children, in order to avoid the kind of terrible race tension and separatism which has occurred in the United States’. As was to be expected, such statements provoked an outcry amongst some commentators, who denounced what was seen as censorship, and who defended staunchly the charm of Helen Bannerman’s books. But the Children’s Rights Workshop (Book Project) broadened the scope of the attack on the canon of childhood literature: ‘Where is the rest of the world in children’s bookland? Where are the working class, black people, the handicapped, travelling people, the children with one parent or none?’

  These disputes were to become very familiar over the coming years, with the positions on both sides entrenched at a fairly early stage. Camden Council in London became in 1978 one of the first to introduce the concept of positive discrimination in its employment policies. ‘If two people of equal ability apply for a job and one of them is Indian, Pakistani or West Indian, then I would appoint from the second group,’ explained Alan Evans, chairman of the council’s staff committee, in defence of the new practice. ‘Are there any real racial differences?’ pondered Daily Telegraph columnist Robin Page, from the other side of the political spectrum. ‘Anybody who asks the question honestly, or who suggests that race is more than a matter of skin pigmentation, is immediately accused of being a “racist”.’

  More serious was the warning from the Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Sir Andrew Huxley in 1977 that scientific research was being hampered by political pressure, particularly in the study of whether intelligence was hereditary. Professor Hans Eysenck, a leading figure in the field, unsurprisingly agreed, having had a resolution passed against him by the National Union of Students, and having been physically assaulted when trying to deliver a talk at the London School of Economics in 1973. His opponents, he claimed, were enemies of both free speech and of science, using ‘every power within their means – breaking up scientific meetings or lectures, beating up opponents, boycotting their public appearances, threatening arson and violence to booksellers who dare to stock books of which they disapprove’.

  Eysenck’s experience inspired a key plotline in The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury’s 1975 satire of pseudo-revolutionary politics in a red-brick university. As the freewheeling protests of the ’60s are supplanted by the attritional class war of the Heath years, the left-leaning members of the faculty find themselves floundering in a world where intellectuals appear increasingly irrelevant, and none more so than sociologist Howard Kirk. He comforts himself by alternately bullying and sleeping with his students, and by manufacturing a confrontation with a visiting geneticist named Mangel, of whom he and his colleagues disapprove. ‘It’s all been exposed by the radical press,’ explains one of them, as though further argument were neither necessary nor possible. ‘Jensen, Eysenck, Mangel. It’s all been shown to be racist.’ Regrettably Mangel dies on the eve of his visit, but the demonstration goes ahead regardless, an unsympathetic lecturer is hospitalized and Howard declares it a ‘famous victory’. The TV adaptation, screened in 1981, ended with a mischievous caption pointing out that Howard voted for the Conservatives in the 1979 election.

  In the face of such controversies, even the BBC was catching up with the idea of a multiracial culture. In 1978 it launched Empire Road, a drama series set in Handsworth, which lasted for two seasons, with a black and Asian cast and with a black writer and producer (Michael Abbensetts and Peter Ansorge). More enduring, in critical terms, was the earlier Gangsters, which had begun as a film in the Play for Today slot before spinning off into its own series. Also set in Birmingham, it featured all the usual locales and themes of underworld thrillers – strip club, snooker hall, drug dealing, protection rackets – but added new elements, not merely in its depiction of the city’s wide ethnic diversity, but in having a racially mixed partnership at its centre. Mr Khan (Ahmed Khalil) is an undercover security agent seeking to deal with corruption in ‘positions of power in the established worlds of business, politics and the law’, a task for which he needs to recruit ex-SAS man John Kline (Maurice Colbourne), who’s just been released from jail, having served time on a manslaughter charge. For once the denunciations of modern Britain are articulated by a non-white face. ‘Corruption is a cancer that has spread through the Midlands,’ explains Khan. ‘It needs a surgeon to cut it out. I require the anaesthetist.’ And Kline, the white man, shrugs his reply: ‘The problems of the National Health don’t concern me.’

  Beyond drama and comedy, the situation in popular culture was much the same: few opportunities for anyone not possessing the requisite shade of skin. Black music, for example, where o
ne might have expected a degree of visibility, was fine when it was imported – and a brace of British singer-songwriters, Labi Siffre and Joan Armatrading, thrived away from the public spotlight – but when it came to home-grown soul and rock, the British record industry was out of its depth.

  Eddy Amoo, for example, started his career with Liverpool doo-wop band the Chants, whose first gig saw them singing at the Cavern Club with musical accompaniment by the Beatles. But even this high-level endorsement counted for nothing when they did finally get a record deal: ‘In that era,’ remembered Amoo, ‘most black bands in this country, those that were ever recorded, were recorded like white bands, and they sounded like white bands.’ The Chants, despite some fine releases, never realized their potential, but among those who did have hits were the Foundations and the multiracial London band the Equals, the latter featuring the songwriting talent of Eddy Grant. With a series of bubblegum pop singles behind them, the Equals adopted a much more militant approach on their 1970 funk classic ‘Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys’ (they ‘ain’t gonna fight no doggone wars’), which was inspired by witnessing a fight at one of their gigs between a white man and a black man; when a police officer attempted to break it up, they both turned on him instead. To mark their newer, angrier incarnation, Grant announced that he’d burnt the white wig he had been sporting, ‘because black musicians are people to be respected’. The single was the band’s best work, but it was also their last hit, and Grant left the following year, to launch a solo career in which he would be beholden to no one: he wrote, performed and produced his records, which were issued on his own label and even manufactured at his own pressing plant. Eddy Amoo also finally made it big when he joined his brother Chris in the Real Thing, recording a #1 disco-pop single in ‘You to Me Are Everything’ (1976) and a groundbreaking album, Four from Eight (1977), which was the closest that Britain got to the ethereal polemics of Curtis Mayfield.