Notes on ITV's Lucan

Caught the first episode of this last night. So far it's fine social-realist TV drama in the tradition of Our Friends in the North, Tinker Tailor, Red Riding, etc, and certainly better than anything the Beeb have done this year I reckon. (Definitely better than last year's shambolic effort in this regard.)

 

There's quite an interesting political thread running through it, too. Christopher Eccleston is deliciously demonic as gambling club owner John Aspinall. An unusual amount of script space is given over to Aspinall's Randian dialogues full of references to Alpha Males, biological determinism, the survival of the fittest, the importance of accepting the growth of an inferior underclass, and all that shite. He's basically a walking Adam Curtis theory, a right-wing crank grumbling about the power of "the Miners" in social-democratic post-war Britain, a sinister Blimp full of embittered determination to reassert what he calls the "natural order". Of course, the character is all the more shady because his views will become depressingly mainstream some ten years after the early-seventies moment that provides the backdrop to Lucan's narrative.

Another interesting thing is the way this class narrative is synthesised with a powerful feminist argument. Egged on by Aspinall's reactionary Alpha Male spiel, Lord Lucan starts to intimidate his wife Veronica - mentally and physically - in an attempt to get her committed so he can win custody of his children. Fortunately, this is the progressive early seventies rather than the Downtonite 1920s, so the courts decide in favour of the independent, sound-of-mind woman against the imperious, bullying aristo. The tragedy is that the working-class nanny who has supported Veronica in the run-up to the trial is bludgeoned to death by a crazed Lucan at the end of the first episode.

The symbolism here - of a brutal, quasi-Darwinian patriarchy reasserting its authority after a period of "effeminate" egalitarianism - is not difficult to grasp. The unheimlich contemporary relevance - bearing in mind certain recent uber-Darwinian pronouncements of the British Conservative Party - is also striking.

And then you realise who Aspinall's step-nephew is:

There can be no more denying it.

The conspiracy theory is the true realist art form of the twenty-first century.


[Cross-posted from http://thefantastichope.blogspot.co.uk/]

Freedom is a myth

Troyer: This is a kind of banal question I guess, but if you could leave one sentence or phrase or paragraph in the head of everyone who watched The Prisoner series - the whole series - one thing for them to carry around for a while when it was over, what would it be?

McGoohan: [immediately] Be seeing you.

In 1977 Patrick McGoohan gave one of only a few interviews during his career on the subject of The Prisoner, a 1960s ITV series that already had a dedicated cult following. The interview, conducted for Canada’s TVOntario by Warner Troyer, is respectful and contemplative, with audience and host both perfectly comfortable dealing with the ideas behind the series. McGoohan as usual manages to seem like he is either about to drift into an intellectual reverie or explode with righteous anger at any moment. He is always part prophet, part priest; part curmudgeon, part playboy.

While keen to emphasize the collaborative and improvisatory nature of television production, he is utterly certain of the meaning behind the programme. Passive aggressive language, mechanical bureaucracy without a single, controlling administrator, and the impossibility of escape: these are constant, he is sure of that. While The Prisoner is about the struggles of an heroic individual against the system, McGoohan’s outlook is far from romantic. "Freedom is a myth", he spits.

What is interesting about this show, apart from the old fashioned assumption that the audience aren’t morons, is how it contrasts to the reified status of Cult TV today. The Prisoner is talked about in the past tense, but there is no need to insist that it is still relevant. McGoohan mentions that he had to sign-in to be allowed access to the studio as if it was a terrible imposition. That everyone reading this now gave their details for access in some form is probably not worth remarking upon today.

Sadly, the retro process was already underway in the 70s. After The Prisoner, McGoohan worked on episodes of Columbo, very much aware that he would never be given the chance to shake off his albatross. In the 90s he said of his Braveheart co-star and director that “Mel Gibson will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a number”. His character in one Columbo episode from 1975 constantly uses the “Be seeing you” catchphrase seemingly well beyond the point of self-parody. McGoohan’s is a CIA operative who murders his colleague – played by a pre-PoMo Leslie Nielson – after he discovers that McGoohan is a double agent. McGoohan’s character bugs Columbo’s home and has him followed, as well as other Mission: Impossible shenanigans, but Columbo is able to make McGoohan crumble with the flimsiest of evidence. It’s striking how weak this episode is and how hackneyed the stock spy tropes and in-jokes are – it’s bad precisely because of the “Be seeing you” retro call backs. The little flourish to please trainspotting fans only highlights the flimsy and unambitious pastiche of this episode.

"blah blah be seeing you blahblahblah"

Don’t get me wrong, Columbo was one of the finest police procedurals ever made, but this episode – before VHS and PoMo – illustrates one of the points McGoohan made in the interview. The costumes and catchphrases of The Prisoner may be very important, but they are also disposable and interchangable. Authoritarianism is not neceesarily the bleak, grey, “totalitarian” harshness of a boot stamping on a human face forever. It can be colourful and polite, full of whimsy and charm – but stray outside the accepted boundaries or ask the wrong questions and you’ll see the mask slip. McGoohan knew that not only is there is no puppetmaster controlling everything in the shadows, but that social control is most effective when internalised, that even if you managed to get to the centre of the conspiracy you would only be faced with yourself – The Self.

Every episode of The Prisoner began with Number Two obliquely replying to Number Six’s question “Who is Number One?” with the statement “You are Number Six”. Is he/she avoiding the question? Or answering it: “You are, Number Six”. McGoohan himself also knew something that Number Six never found out. In response to Number Two’s deflection/answer, Six defiantly insisted “I am not a number, I am a free man!” The opposite was true. Freedom is a myth.

If Any One Can, Cannon Can

Of all the Seventies TV detectives, my favourite show is probably the one I last saw the longest ago. I was rarely able to get past the answerphone intro to The Rockford Files (the concept of the answerphone being so cool, you didn't need to see the rest of the show), and Kojak, well, for all Telly Savalas' awesome mana-charisma, it was just a bit too pedestrianly-paced for us under-tens. Fortunately, we had the action-packed Cannon to compensate.

Frank Cannon was the original fat, middle-aged gazelle. Combining the acceleration of Usain Bolt with the staying power of Paula Radcliffe, no athletic young hood could expect to escape his clutches for long. Undoubtedly the inspiration for The Bill's beer-bellied cheetah DC Tosh Lines, the Los Angeles private detective has suffered from the fickleness of fate, (or rather fickleness of licensing rights) and been away from our TV screens long enough to fade into the barest fringes of collective memory.

A shame.

Suburban Salvation

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Friederich Nieztsche 

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

Oh, Before You Go Sir, There's Just One More Thing I Need To Ask...

SHUT UP!!!!!!

Of course, what really differentiates a Seventies blog from an Eighties or Nineties blog is that the former has to deal with social attitudes and assumptions, and therefore cultural products, that may have been worthy on their own terms, but totally unacceptable decades later.



The above song, which was a number one hit during the long hot summer of 1975, was performed by two regulars of the most popular World War II based comedy of the 1970's, written by "Dad's Army" writers David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Only it wasn't the rather lame and over-polite "Dad's Army" that they came from; it was from a much more prickly, class-conscious show. Alas, it was also a show in which the common racial stereotypes of the 1970's were upheld. That said, much of the rather treacley over-fondness that is now ladled over "Dad's Army" is partly due to a sense of guilt over the deliberate forgetfulness applied to "It Ain't Half Hot Mum".

The military is always a good medium to examine and ridicule class relations, and "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" was a more acidic dissection of the underlying tensions of British society than "Dad's Army". Like the latter programme, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" offered a gallery of British class stereotypes - from blithering idiot upper class officers to the resentful members of the lower ranks, all held together by Windsor Davies' Sergeant Major Williams; the classic foreman, elevated from the working class to lord it over the rest of them, his small advance in rank provoking a torrent of gleefully malevolent abuse on those who were now below him.

Set on the Burma Front of 1945, Williams was forced to oversee an ENSA concert party full of female impersonators, intellectual Oxbridge-graduate musicians, and physically stunted tenor sopranos; all terrified of the Japanese and unanimous in their desire to escape Army life. Windsor Davies' Shut Up Williams was the most memorable character in the show, and indeed one of the great comic characters of the 1970's. The sheer physicality of Davies' perfomance was on a par with Leonard Rossiter's Rigsby in "Rising Damp"; both were minor-league bigots whose slight social advantage was turned into a gleefully malignant sense of schadenfreude.

Where "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" (rightly) falls foul of modern sensibilities is in its portrayal of the Indian manservants employed to keep the British soldiers' lives comfortable. Partly functioning as a kind of Greek chorus of comparative normality in observing the eccentricities of the British (especially the perceptive Punkah Wallah Rumzan), their role was rendered grotesque by Michael Bates' performance as Rangi Ram. Although raised in India and speaking fluent Hindi, Bates's grease-painted Bearer was too much of a caricature to withstand the soul-searching examination of racial attitudes that followed the urban riots of the 1980's. And of course the programme's racial outlook was much closer to that of the mid-1970's than to that of the war that had finished 25 years earlier, which had necessitated a much more pragmatic and respectful view of the cultures of the Indian frontier.

Simultaneously crass, brilliant and stupid, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" is a classic example of the kind of priceless yet objectionable entertainment that the era threw up. There's a full episode below - make of it what you will.

Rhythm Of Cruelty

There are few more relentlessly tragic and depressing stories in the history of showbusiness than that of Lena Zavaroni. Born and raised in Rothesay, a town on the Western Isle of Bute in Scotland, and a star as soon as she entered her teens, she would die alone at the age of 35 in a council flat in Hoddesdon, a claimant of disability allowance, plagued with a neurological illness that defied all attempts at diagnosis and cure.

Zavaroni’s career began, ominously enough, when in 1973, at the age of ten years old, she won "Opportunity Knocks", the premium television talent show of the day, hosted by Hughie Green, a man who made the likes of Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh appear comparatively mild. Green was probably the most psychotic individual in the history of post-war British entertainment (and believe me, there’s some stiff competition there) after himself suffering a traumatised youth as a deeply reluctant child star. Green’s appeal largely consisted in professing his sincerity in the grotesque tones of an American huckster, an act that went down oddly well in an era before the emergence of irony as the dominant national sentiment. Unfortunately he was also something of a jinx, and spent his adult life both wittingly and unwittingly destroying all those around him.



The following year, Lena had her first top ten hit with "Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me", and was the youngest person to ever appear on Top Of The Pops. Over the next five years, her career as a wholesome light entertainer was spectacularly successful, with her own TV shows, international tours, and even an opportunity to sing before the US President, Gerald Ford. By 1977, having moved to London to join the Italia Conti stage school, she was estimated to be Scotland’s richest teenager.

In 1979 she spent her 16th birthday in Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital, complaining of stomach upset and listlessness, the early signs of the anorexia with which she would battle over the next two decades. Lena herself was convinced that her problems were neurological, and referred to the overall complex of symptoms, which also included agoraphobia and chronic depression, as "static". Throughout the 1980’s she would vacillate between futile attempts to restart her career, attempts to live a "normal" life (such as a short-lived marriage to a computer programmer) and inevitable regressions back into her illness. Numerous family tragedies, including the suicide of her mother, would also take their toll. Her rare television appearances were memorable chiefly for the shocking impact her appearance had on the audience, especially as her most appealing trait, her genuine sweetness, was all too apparent. Despite dogged efforts from herself and on the part of others to effect a cure, she died of pneumonia in 1999, having stated "I feel as though I’ve given away my soul, I don’t have it any more, I’m dead inside."



Ultimately what Lena Zavaroni lacked was what Wilhelm Reich called "character armour". For Reich, character armour was the tell-tale posturing and formation of the body that a person accumulated over their life both to protect themselves from external emotional threats and the expression of culturally inappropriate internal desires. Reich considered all character armouring to be psychologically unhealthy - the distorted signature of repression. For him, Western culture created an excessive amount of armouring from the moment a baby left the comfort of the womb to the alien hands of the nurse and the sealed isolation of the incubator, and it was Reich’s (often physically) shocking approach to the breaking of his patients’ armour that would lead to his disastrous encounters with the authorities.

However, in a culture as impersonal and hard-driving as that of the West, to be one of the few who is without such armour can make one extremely vulnerable indeed. For Zavaroni, who claimed never to have seen traffic lights or escalators before visiting London, full exposure to the insistent demands of an entertainment world that was in itself evolving into an ever-slicker, ever-crueller spectacle was unbearable. Lena Zavaroni, like Karen Carpenter, was an anachronism, their careers flowering at a time when showbusiness could still pretend to support such tender blooms. Nowadays such an illusion can no longer be maintained.

All dying civilisations have their theatres of cruelty, and ours is the media matrix of digital radio, satellite television and the internet. Celebrities are the gladiators of our age, and the most elite corps of these warriors are female vocalists. Artists like Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, Beyonce and Lady Gaga must be some of the psychologically toughest people who have ever lived. Nominally in competition with each other (because of course Capitalism mandates competition) their real opponent is the vicious contemporary superego that subjects them to 24-7 surveillance and mercilessly punishes any display of weakness. Make no mistake, the concentrated venom that tabloid newspapers, gossip magazines and 24-hour infotainment channels can direct against you is lethal. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can give you bulimia.

With these women, with their physiques sculpted like a centurion’s breastplate and their sexuality projected like a mailed fist, the Reichian character armour is explicit. The model for this new type of woman (and occasional man) was of course Madonna, the first megastar to intuit that the secret to survival in the age of New Media lay in disciplining the body; that the shape you were in was an outward manifestation of The Will. And of course it is the body that the media superego is always seeking to attack, searching for patches of cellulite as though searching for chinks in the armour, exactly because they are chinks in the armour; the first sign of a lapse in willpower, of potential psychic confusion, of the opportunity for a story.



Protection is also afforded by the channeling of events through choreographed rituals. Splits with dim, unreliable boyfriends are coordinated during transatlantic flights, so that the tipped hat and mascara-covering Jackie O sunglasses, symbolic of "heartbreak", can yield the requisite photo-op on touchdown. Disputes with their svengalis, often the Senators who first raised their thumbs to them in the talent show arenas, can provide reliable storm-in-a-teacup coverage, with both disputants invariably returning to their prior dependent relationship. These ritualised dramas are effective in dissipating superego pressure by providing a media narrative that ends in satisfying closure.

In its death phase, Western culture has constructed an entertainment culture populated by individuals in the mould of one of it’s prime symbols; beings with the soulless invulnerability of an Apache helicopter, both equally dependent on a complex technostructure that has no future.

The Paleface

We Want the Airwaves

Neilsen Ratings: Top Ten U.S. Television Shows, 1979-1980

1. 60 Minutes
2. Three's Company
3. M*A*S*H
4. Alice
5. Dallas
6. Flo
7. The Jeffersons
8. The Dukes of Hazzard
9. That's Incredible
10 One Day At A Time

Social Sitcom

Steptoe And Son (1962 - 1974)

Rag and bone men Albert (father) and Harold (son) live together in claustrophobic poverty. Harold daydreams of escaping his lonely situation via love, culture and 'bettering himself'. These attempts are doomed to failure, and undermined by his father, who nevertheless wishes to protect his son from disappointment and rejection.

Some Mothers Do 'Ave Em (1973 - 1978)

Accident-prone, well-meaning Frank attempts to hold down a job to support his young family. Despite his enthusiasm and good nature, he always encounters catastrophe at the workplace. He inadvertently inspires outright hostility from employers (sometimes at interview stage), and repeatedly returns to unemployment.

Porridge (1974 - 1977)

Repeat offender Fletcher shares a cell with naive first-time offender Godber. Taking the younger inmate under his wing, Fletcher tries to encourage Godber's attempts to rehabilitate and 'better himself'. However these attempts are frequently undermined by the inherent limits, corruption and brutality of prison life.

Rising Damp (1974 - 1979)

Lonely, petty landlord Rigsby rents out to tenants Ms. Jones, Philip and Alan in his dilapidated boarding house. Despite racial, political and sexual tensions between them, they are united by an acute sense of personal failure; desperately veiled behind fantasy and facade.

Only Fools And Horses (1980 - 1991)

Orphaned, unemployed brothers Del and Rodney (assisted by Grandad/Uncle Albert) aspire to escape their miserable existence in an overcrowded council flat; through farcial, semi-legal business ventures that inevitably end in failure. Yet at the end of the 80s, Del marries and becomes a father; while Rodney secures a well-paid job at a successful IT firm and marries into the upper-middle class. Then, upon randomly discovering a rare antique watch, Del, Rodney and Uncle Albert become multi-millionaires.

Death Of A Princess, Birth Of Enemies

"On April 9, 1980, Associated Television showed Death of a Princess to an estimated 10 million Britons. Although "rejecting Saudi pleas that the film be amended or scrapped..." ATV agreed to include an introductory comment that said: "… The program you are about to see is a dramatized reconstruction of certain events which took place in the Arab world between 1976 and 1978. We have been asked to point out that equality for all before the law is regarded as paramount in the Moslem world. …" And the next day, the British Foreign Office released a statement saying: "We profoundly regret any offence which the program may have caused in Saudi Arabia. We have, of course, no power to interfere with the editorial content of programs, still less to ban them."

"On April 11, the Saudi Embassy in London called "Death of a Princess": "… an unprincipled attack on the religion of Islam and its 600 million people and on the way of life of Saudi Arabia, which is at the heart of the world of Islam." On the twenty-third of April, the government of Saudi Arabia requested Great Britain to withdraw its Ambassador to Jeddah, James Craig. Although a serious step, it was thought to be temporary. The British Foreign Office said that the Embassy staff would stay in Jeddah and the Embassy would remain open."

"The decision to make this request, reached at a meeting of the Council headed by then Crown Prince Fahd was, according to the government-owned Saudi press agency: "… in the light of the British Government's negative attitude toward the screening of the shameful film." At that time, the Saudis also issued a statement saying it had carefully examined economic relations between the Kingdom and Britain, and especially the activity of British companies in the Kingdom. …"

Naughty, But Nice

Quatermass Vs. The Me Generation

 

The last - and least celebrated - of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass serials gains resonance in terms of the surrounding decades. Already heralding the tyranny of reality TV with 1968's Year of The Sex Olympics, in 1979 Kneale concluded Quatermass (A.K.A. Quatermass Conclusion) to low viewing figures and a tepid critical response. Even after Kubrick, Spielberg and Star Wars, it refused to pander to sci-fi's young audience. It was received as the dour grumble of an angry old man, perplexed by the aftermath of the 60s, with a foreboding glance at the ascending Thatcher revolution. Not only was Kneale unhappy with the state of British society, he also publicly expressed disappointment with the production itself, not least its casting.  Highly personal but deeply flawed, this dimly remembered serial is difficult to find on DVD even now.

As with every Quatermass serial, a mysterious alien menace threatens human life. Yet here the herd-like cult of the Planet People welcomes its mind-altering influence, congregating at various neolithic sites in anticipation of transportation to another world. They are actually 'harvested' (vapourised) in such numbers that their gaseous remains turn the sky green. Terroristic street gangs and accelerating social decay conspire to frustrate Quatermass' search for his granddaughter, whose membership of the cult contributes to his heart attack. Only the skepticism, values and expertise of older characters provides a frail path to sanity. The young remain in thrall to trend-following, malign influence, and the nihilism of easy answers. Their natural vitality (protein) is the substance valued by the aliens; whose targeting of youth with visual spectacle and mass persuasion is redolent of the aggressive but 'concealed' methods of advertising; not least in reshaping social relations.

Quatermass is also prescient on the darker urges that would spring from the Age of Aquarius. The Planet People, hippies in the final production, were at one point intended to be punks. To an an ageing iconoclast like Kneale, the youthful rush towards the 'new' was but another aspect of a declining west; in thrall to consumerism, individualist lifestyle politics and social breakdown. The uglier aspects of youth were an ongoing concern for Kneale. In 1965 he wrote the censored, unproduced screenplay The Big, Big Giggle, about a teenage suicide cult; and Biff! Pow! Zap! (1969), which dealt with that most ancient of grumbles: juvenile deliquency. In the 70s, apocalypse tended towards the youthful, or at least fetishised the virility of its struggles. Quatermass views collapse from a rare elderly perspective. 

Like an inconvenient grandparent, this once-popular character was relocated, operated on (re-edited or shortened for foreign markets and repeats), and subject to disputes beyond his control. Ahead of imminent privatisations, the BBC (who found it too gloomy) passed its ailing Cold War icon to Thames TV, who boosted the budget and promoted it as a flagship summer 'event'. However continuity was broken by a three month ITV blackout due to industrial action. Ironic in that Kneale was partly inspired by the winter of discontent. Interrupted broadcast and audience indifference were perversely appropriate to its autumnal despair. Belated conclusion in a colder season only emphasised its most glaring theme: the fragile terrors of ageing, and how the culture of youth grows ever more alien with the passage of time. In Quatermass the elderly are immune to alien manipulation, yet besieged by alienation. 

Charlie Don't Surf

Note: Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher (actual son of Doris Day and executive producer of her TV show) were the friends and 'intended' victims of the Manson family, for petty showbiz reasons - not 'race war', helter skelter or any other hippie/punk/industrial rock bullshit.

A Taste Of Fanny

"As the nation declines in power and wealth, a universal pessimism gradually pervades the people, and itself hastens the decline. There is nothing succeeds like success, and, in the Ages of Conquest and Commerce, the nation was carried triumphantly onwards on the wave of its own self-confidence. Republican Rome was repeatedly on the verge of extinction—in 390 B.C. when the Gauls sacked the city and in 216 B.C. after the Battle of Cannae. But no disasters could shake the resolution of the early Romans. Yet, in the later stages of Roman decline, the whole empire was deeply pessimistic, thereby sapping its own resolution. Frivolity is the frequent companion of pessimism. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The resemblance between various declining nations in this respect is truly surprising. The Roman mob, we have seen, demanded free meals and public games. Gladiatorial shows, chariot races and athletic events were their passion. In the Byzantine Empire the rivalries of the Greens and the Blues in the hippodrome attained the importance of a major crisis.

Judging by the time and space allotted to them in the Press and television, football and baseball are the activities which today chiefly interest the public in Britain and the United States respectively. The heroes of declining nations are always the same - the athlete, the singer or the actor."

Sir John Glubb - "The Fate Of Empires" (Blackwell, 1978)

Of course, Sir John’s pantheon of the heroes of a declining nation should also include chefs, whose celebrity incarnations have spread like a plague across the nation’s television scheduling hours since the beginning of the Blair era. Although the 1970’s are frequently considered to be an era of decline for Britain in particular, there is much evidence to suggest that in many ways the country still possessed a formidable fortitude and virility. This was not least manifested in its dire cuisine, prudishly coy "sex industry" and dilapidated sports stadia, all of which suggested that the British public were a long way from being the passive spectators of spectacle and addicts to instant gratification that Neoliberalism demands.

British food in the 1970’s was heroically Spartan, with the meat-and-two-veg wartime/austerity culture still lingering two decades after it had become redundant, and combining with industrially derived "instant" foods such as Cadbury’s Smash and Angel Delight. With its powdered vegetables, powdered desserts and substitute fruit juices, the average British family ate like NATO soldiers on exercises or Soviet Cosmonauts. The late ‘50’s had nevertheless seen the appearance of the first real celebrity chef in the bizarre Norma Desmond figure of Fanny Cradock, a viciously snobbish petit-bourgeois matriarch with pisshole-in-the-snow eyes and a back story out of a Catherine Cookson novel. Although Cradock’s menus appear rather modest by today’s standards, at the time they were considered to be almost impossibly grand and pretentious. Nobody who watched her show was remotely interested in emulating her cookery - the main sources of entertainment were her waspish asides to her dipsomaniac husband Johnnie, who would wander haphazardly around the rear of the set, bottle in hand, pausing only to get in his wife’s way.

There was always something poignant and sympathetic about the Cradocks, however. They were the kind of archetypal couple that don’t exist anymore - the type that stayed married for reasons of business respectability, regardless of how incompatible they might be. Fanny’s ruthless social climbing was of the desperate kind that had to derive from real experience of poverty, and her underlying insecurity was always bound to lead to disaster sooner or later. Nemesis was to occur in 1976 when she verbally flayed amateur cook Gwen Troake on BBC’s "The Big Time", an incident that so appalled the public that it effectively finished her television career.



Fanny’s position as the Nation’s most recognised cook was taken by the Gwen Troake-like Delia Smith, an innocuous working-class girl who created the kind of pleasant, unpretentious recipes that met the overwhelming approval of the British public, who still very sensibly confined oral gratification to the margins of their culture. It couldn’t last however, and a combination of the instinctive cultural cringe towards the "food culture" of the Continent, American standards of big-portion gluttony, and the vast loosening of credit standards following "The Big Bang" allowed an entire collection of wide-boy entrepreneurs and metropolitan food-snobs to open ever more exotic restaurants and otherwise dine in them. The end result is a gruesomely disgusting food-fetishism in which a whole slew of vulgar public schoolboys can appear on our televisions flambé-ing veal steaks with arc-welding kits on improvised sets in the open countryside.

The deeper tragedy of course is that the public of the 1970's would have been far more fit to face the austere future we are being promised following the collapse of Neoliberalism. When future generations get to laugh at our decline, you can forget about news reports about George Osborne. It’ll be footage like this that will be the focus of their derision:

The Neoliberal That Came To Dinner

The Abuse Of Sex

The Greco-Armenian mystic and esotericist G.I. Gurdjieff held strong opinions on what he considered to be "the abuse of sex". For him, this constituted not the everyday perversions that are the subject of boundless wobbly camcorder footage on the internet, but rather the channeling of sexual energy into non-sexual activity. As he himself put it:

"The energy of the sex centre in the work of the thinking, emotional, and moving centres can be recognised by a particular ‘taste’, by a particular fervour, by a vehemence that the nature of the affair concerned does not call for. The thinking centre writes books, but in making use of the energy of the sex centre it does not simply occupy itself with philosophy, science or politics - it is always fighting something, disputing, criticising, creating new subjective theories. The emotional centre preaches Christianity, abstinence, ascetiscism, or the fear and horror of sin, hell, the torment of sinners, eternal fire, all this with the energy of the sex centre……Or on the other hand it works up revolutions, robs, burns, kills, again with the same energy. The moving centre occupies itself with sport, creates various records, climbs mountains, jumps, fences, wrestles, fights, and so on.

In all these instances, that is, in the work of the thinking centre as well as in the work of the emotional and the moving centres, when they work with the energy of the sex centre, there is always one general characteristic and this is a certain particular vehemence, and together with it, the USELESSNESS of the work in question. Neither the thinking nor the emotional nor the moving centres can ever create anything USEFUL with the energy of the sex centre. This is an example of the ‘abuse of sex’".

It was fortunate for Gurdjeff that he died before the publication of the first edition of The Guinness Book Of Records, which he would no doubt have regarded with horror as the cultural institutionalisation of the abuse of sex. The brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver in the mid-fifties, the book was a compendium of both natural facts and stupendously useless feats of human persistence, endurance, and megalomania that was annually compiled by twins Ross and Norris McWhirter, and printed every October to cash in on pre-Christmas sales.

It was a measure of that free-wheeling era that BBC bosses considered this filth fit for imposition on the nation’s children, and in 1972 "Record Breakers", a show based around the book, began its long broadcasting run. Light entertainer Roy Castle was chosen to be the main presenter, focusing on record-breaking attempts around the world, and, when not watching people fly upside down under bridges, or the largest aerobics class in the world, channeled his surplus sex energy into breaking nine world records himself.



Tellingly, the McWhirter twins’ abuse of sex manifested itself in other fields. The McWhirters were tireless political activists for a strand of right-wing Libertarianism that culminated in their role in the foundation of The Freedom Association, a pressure group that was profoundly hostile to the trades unions. Ross McWhirter’s calls for harsher treatment of Irish Republicans, the constant monitoring of ordinary Irish civilians living in the UK, and finally his offer of a reward of £50,000 for information on a wave of terrorist attacks in the capital, led to his assassination by the Provisional IRA’s Balcombe Street gang, who were themselves engaged in an increasingly bold and reckless campaign against "ruling class" targets in the West End. This act was weirdly unfathomable to children at the time, like hearing today that Alan Titchmarsh has been singled out by Al-Qaeda.

Roy Castle’s biography was no less unusual. An agoraphobic, he would reputedly take refuge from the vast studios of Television Centre 1 by diving into a strategically placed wicker laundry basket, whose lid would be safely sealed by the weight of Cheryl Baker so as to assure the stricken Castle that there was no chance of it being inadvertently removed. It is difficult to resist speculating that this impromptu, Bucks Fizz-topped structure acted as some kind of primitive Orgone Accumulator, that, as well as curing Roy’s panic attacks, had the accidental secondary effect of charging his extraordinary libidinal surplus.

Crisis and the Big Society Solution

Click to on images to enlarge

Action! was a British comic published from February 1976 to November 1977. It was very popular for its ultra-violent knock-offs of Jaws (Hookjaw - except here the shark always won), Rollerball (Death Game 2000), and the novels of Sven Hassell (Hellman of the Hammer Force, caught between Soviet troops and the meddling Gestapo). But the shit really hit the fan with the serial Kids Rule OK (above).

The London Evening Standard and The Sun ran major articles on the comic. Over the next few months Action was the centre of a campaign led by Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association to censor or ban the comic. In September 1976 (editorial director) John Sanders appeared on the television programme Nationwide, where he tried to defend the comic from a vigorous attack by interviewer Frank Bough. Pressure within IPC's higher management, and alleged worries that the two major newsagent chains, W.H. Smith and John Menzies, would refuse to stock not just Action, but all of IPC's line, led to the 23 October issue being pulped. (Wikipedia)

By the time Action! was off the shelves, IPC moved the ultra-violence to past wars (Battle Action, continuing some Action! serials), or the far future (2000 AD - still going, and as brutal as ever). Below is the accelerated conclusion to Kids Rule OK, after weeks of carnivalesque "aggro", gang war, knife fights, petrol bombings, arson, riots, police brutality and absolute social decay (and where in hell were the girls?). It was never published.
 

                                

And For Our Younger Viewers, The Class War

Starting in 1968 (!), Magpie was broadcast with the stated aim of being a "working class Blue Peter". Out went the cuddly militarism of the latter's theme tune for the bold electric riffs of the Spencer Davis Group. Good deeds didn't require elaborate gimmicks, good contacts and a well-stocked home. Magpie cut the bullshit and simply asked it's viewers to hand over their money. Beneficiaries of said appeals were not required to keep smiling, and their woes were hardly whitewashed (even the title hinted at childhood's most important lesson: Shit Happens). Regional accents, however broad, were welcome in the studio. Its presenters (resembling characters from Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man) were unafraid to venture outside suburbia, feeling more comfortable with a multicultural, dynamic society than well-groomed pets. Out went rictus grins and polite consensus, in came unscripted interviews and even some debate. To those for whom Valerie Singleton etc. were as alien as daleks, Magpie was a welcome alternative. Within a year of the 1979 election, it was off our screens. Blue Peter continues to this day, a little more multicultural and poptastic, but the smiles and certainties remain in place. Its minor scandals generate headlines, but its doubtful even in the 70s Magpie would be troubled by the revelation that its presenters had sex lives.

In Magpie's final years came the emergence of Tiswas, which made the former look a little too worthy for its own good. Where Magpie asked it's viewers to hang out with them after school and contemplate, Tiswas fully exploited its Saturday slot and the dormant energies of its audience. The new wave bands tentatively welcomed by Magpie were fully embraced by Tiswas, where the Bee Gees were just another joke and Ian Dury was up for having a laugh. Unashamedly regional (Birmingham) and collaged with whatever they could grab (guests ranged from Jasper Carrot to Muhammed Ali, ad lib sketches and fortean mysteries vied with 40s cartoons or clips from Blazing Saddles), it let the kids take over the studio space, where they could throw goo, water and pies at their own parents and presenters, and expect the same in return. By the time of Thatcher's 1983 victory, it too was gone; to be replaced by defeated, deflated imitations. It's influence eventually spread to Janet Street-Porter, The Word and their repositioning of 'youth' as an overgrown eight-year old with too much money to waste.

Ending around the same time as Tiswas was its 'upmarket' competitor Swap Shop, followed by the near-identical successor Saturday Superstore. It was only as 'multicoloured' as the garish products it fetishised. There was no room here for gurning bands, satire, hyperactive audiences or poor housekeeping. Once again, pets were a handy studio substitute for those noisy urban kids. Its main concern was the polite order of a virtual marketplace - where exchange and use maintained steady value (actual labour long banished to schools programming) under the shock-proof, often scolding, business sense of Noel Edmonds and his humourless, ambitious associates recruited from Radio 1. Woe betide participating audiences if they failed to accord pop stars, athletes, entrepreneurs, royals or the Iron Lady herself due respect, never mind bombard them with pies. Keith Chegwin appeared across shows to play the childlike northern buffoon, until his own personal recession made the good cheer go pop. He made a Cool Britannia comeback revealing his Full Monty on Channel 5, to predictable press outrage.

The items exchanged on Swap Shop rarely generated excitement in young viewers. It was rather the system of the shiny tidy Saturday Superswap Store that aimed to enthrall: Bizarre interludes of slow panning across the available tat, with market demands written below in perfect grammar. There were one or two amusing bursts of revolt, but the BBC's micro-managed communications rendered such acts as futile as swearing down the phone at call centre employees. It felt as though the childhood addressed by Magpie was already decades in the past. The BBC embraced the very marketplace that sought to destroy it, and if it meant delivering a pre-teen audience to Mrs. Thatcher, so be it. Everything now had a price, and everyone had to know their place. Children had new rules to learn, before they could grow up to drink a cup of vomit on The Word.

And I Mean It Sincerely, Folks!

Uncharacteristically interesting article from Alexis Petridis (despite his characteristically crass conclusion), if only for the dreadful ghosts it conjures up - the kind that lurk on the edges of popular consciousness, despite the best efforts of our custodians of pop culture. For all the talk of 'hauntological', this is what haunts those of us born before the 80s: something that was very much 'there', and present in every living room, until the manufacture of 'Cool Britannia' and its groovy vicar.

For many who would vote for Mrs. Thatcher (the harshest judge of 'talent' in her time), this was the 'normality' in need of emergency care by 1979. The world of 'decent people', unaffected but deeply troubled by the sexual ambiguities, racial assertions, permissiveness and hedonism of what Mojo-consensus pretends 'we' were all listening to in the 70s. Those who felt at home in the white, smiling, warm world of 'pure entertainment' and its ideology, where opportunity always knocks. The upbeat world of schlagermusik (standard entertainment on both sides of the Iron Curtain) kept it's chin up through the great unrest of the 70s and 80s; confirming final, globalised victory with the resistable rise of this ubermensch:

Stand up and be counted indeed.