State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Contemporary verdicts on British cinema were not complimentary. For Walker, it was ‘dull, drained, debilitated, infected by a run-down feeling becoming characteristic of British life’; for the director Lindsay Anderson, it mirrored ‘a nation that has ceased to believe in itself, is confused and fatigued, divided and without imagination’. And although academics have struggled manfully to rehabilitate the horror films and sex comedies of the era, the truth is that most were simply atrocious both in design and execution. Horror, for instance, was easily the biggest adult genre of the day, second only to children’s films in terms of production. Yet with producers vainly hoping to win back audiences with nudity, sex and sensationalism, most horror films were wildly overblown, lurid, incoherent affairs, unfit to stand comparison with the products of Hammer’s heyday. Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), for instance, boasted a gratuitous rape scene added over the objections of the director and actors, while Dracula AD 1972 was little better, transposing the Count and Van Helsing to the streets of Swinging London (albeit five years behind the times). It was hardly surprising that audiences stayed away; by the late 1970s, horror production had tailed off, and when Hammer went bankrupt in 1979 it marked a miserable end to what had once been the model of a successful small studio.54

  Hammer’s fate makes a perfect metaphor for what happened to the rest of the British film industry. The second biggest genre of the day, for example, was made up of sex comedies such as Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) and Come Play with Me (1976). Again, some critics have done their best to speak up for them; unfortunately, not only were they not sexy, they were not even very funny. Perhaps the only really remarkable thing about them, in fact, was that by the standards of the time they were astonishingly popular. Eight came out in 1973, ten in 1974 and twelve in 1975, from Penelope Pulls It Off and I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight to The Amorous Milkman and Ups and Downs of a Handyman. ‘They said British cinema was dead. Maybe it is,’ lamented Films and Filming’s review of Confessions of a Window Cleaner. ‘There’s nothing in this sorry tale of the pathetic sexual activities of window-cleaning folk that resembles living matter.’ Indeed, that the adventures of Robin Askwith – the classic working-class hedonist, half-cocking a snook at authority – managed to attract audiences at all was a testament to the rigidity of the censorship laws and the prurience of popular attitudes. By comparison, the Carry On series, which had been emblematic of working-class humour during the 1960s, now seemed tired and tame, and its mid-1970s entries were comfortably the worst of the sequence. Carry On England (1976) effectively sounded the death knell for the series: many cinemas removed it from the schedules within days of the premiere, and it struggled even to cover its filming costs. ‘The Carry On series is in a worse state than the economy,’ remarked the Daily Mirror’s reviewer – and in 1976, that was saying something.55

  Given the fare on offer, it is hardly surprising that most people preferred either to watch American films like Jaws and Star Wars, or just to stay away altogether. By 1970, only 2 per cent of the population went to the cinema once a week, compared with a third in the late 1940s. During the next ten years, audiences continued to collapse: by 1980, total admissions had fallen by half, dipping below 100 million for the first time since the early years of moving pictures. Cinemas themselves were miserable, run-down places, the erstwhile elegance of the art deco façades rather undermined by the holes in the faux-velvet upholstery. By 1980, there were fewer than 950 cinemas left; many had been transformed into bingo halls and nightclubs, shoddily converted into uncomfortable multi-screen complexes, or simply demolished entirely. By this point, it seemed a reasonable assumption that cinema-going would die out entirely in Britain as anything other than a mildly eccentric minority pursuit, like wearing a bowler hat or following West Bromwich Albion.56

  There was, of course, one other popular adult film genre, perhaps the most reliable money-spinner of all. At the end of 1971, the box-office chart showed that the most popular film of the year had been Disney’s The Aristocats, but in second place was a very different kind of picture: the cinematic version of Thames Television’s On the Buses. The adventures of Stan, Jack and Blakey, the stuff of working-class situation comedy, might seem bizarre material for the big screen. But it was not the only spin-off to do well that year; in eighth place was the film version of Up Pompeii, with Dad’s Army in tenth. More sitcom spin-offs followed a year later, and Steptoe and Son, Mutiny on the Buses, Please Sir! and Up the Chastity Belt all ranked among the twenty most popular films of 1972. In fact, few series escaped adaptation for the cinema: 1973 brought Love Thy Neighbour, 1976 The Likely Lads, and 1979 Porridge. A year later there was even a version of Rising Damp, Richard Beckinsale’s untimely death having failed to deter the producers – although, like almost all of these films, it was a pale shadow of the original.57

  That the British film industry had been reduced to making feeble spin-offs of Love Thy Neighbour spoke volumes about the balance of power between cinema and television. ‘We don’t go to the cinema very often,’ remarked a Sutton warehouseman. ‘All they have nowadays is sex and Walt Disney and I can get both of those at home.’ Instead, like the vast majority of Britons in the 1970s, he preferred to stay in and watch the box. Watching television was by far the most popular leisure activity of the day, and the one that people said they most enjoyed. Viewing figures were pretty consistent: most people watched for about sixteen hours a week in summer and twenty in winter, far more than in any other European country, and double the rates in Belgium, Italy or Sweden. It seems unlikely that Britons were much lazier than their counterparts: the obvious explanation is that television had spread earlier and more quickly in Britain and was more tightly woven into the fabric of national life and culture. Almost everybody, barring eccentrics, owned a set; by now, people were even buying portable sets for their bedrooms or bathrooms. And more than other institutions, it was the BBC and ITV that defined and disseminated the national experience in the 1970s. Television was everywhere, the stuff of everyday conversations from the playground to the pub: a ‘common cultural skin for the nation’, as one account puts it. For many people, indeed, the fact that television had to close down at 10.30 was the most shocking thing about the economic emergency of January 1974, and the supreme symbol of Britain’s political crisis.58

  In hindsight, one of the remarkable things about television in the 1970s was how ordered and unchanging it was. Viewers could choose from three channels, each with its own familiar and well-defined identity, and the schedules rarely held shocks or surprises. The one great innovation of the decade was colour, which had first appeared in July 1967 but did not become widespread until the early 1970s. By 1972, 1.5 million households had a colour set; by 1978, more than 11 million. This was faster than many people had initially expected, but slower than is often recalled today; it is a shock to reflect that in 1974, there were still more than twice as many black-and-white households as colour ones. Interestingly, take-up was much quicker among working-class families. Having a good television clearly mattered more to people who did not have the money for alternative entertainment, and there was still a strong streak of middle-class snobbery towards television, usually manifested as a deep distrust of ITV. But colour did make one very big difference to the television landscape: it transformed the broadcasting of sport. Football had always been popular, of course, so the gigantic audience for the Chelsea–Leeds Cup Final replay in 1970, watched by 28 million people, was no surprise. But nobody could have anticipated the enormous appeal of sports like darts and snooker, which would have been almost inconceivable in a black-and-white age.59

  Since the 1970s are almost universally regarded as the high point of British television, it is amusing to note that the newspapers were full of doom and gloom about its abysmal quality. Television’s biggest critic, of course, was the former schoolteacher, moral campaigner and president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, Mary Whitehouse, from whose Shropshire home th
ere issued a stream of condemnation aimed at the supposedly Communist-dominated BBC. People watched its programmes, she believed, ‘at the risk of serious damage to their morals, their patriotism, their discipline and their family life’. Since her organization boasted more than 30,000 members by 1975, this was not an entirely isolated opinion. Watching Panorama’s review of the year at the end of 1971, Kenneth Williams fumed that its vision of ‘smoke-filled cities and slag heaps and utter devastation’ was clearly politically motivated. ‘The BBC must be absolutely full of socialistic or communistic sympathisers,’ he wrote in anguish. ‘The organisation is rotten to the core.’60

  A more reasoned version of the same argument came from the conservative writer Antony Jay, the future co-creator of Yes, Minister, who thought that the BBC was run by ‘a small educated left-wing minority’ whose ‘social, political and moral assumptions are opposed to the majority of the country’. There may have been a small element of truth in this: the tiny Workers’ Revolutionary Party did have a significant presence in the BBC’s Plays Department, and counted influential figures such as Colin Welland, Frances de la Tour (Rising Damp’s incomparable Miss Jones) and Vanessa and Corin Redgrave among its members. The head of Equity admitted that he had ‘more members involved in ultra-left activities than in most unions’, but put it down to their histrionic temperament, explaining that ‘there is an air of drama to a life based on a belief in imminent revolution’. At times it certainly seemed that Play for Today had become a branch of some Marxist sect’s public education department. In 1975 alone it presented the story of an inner-city teenage delinquent working on a farm, a harrowing portrait of a day in the life of a mental health nurse, a violent evocation of sectarian prejudice in Northern Ireland, a searing play about a woman facing a mastectomy on the NHS and the four-part story of the betrayal of socialism and workers’ rights in the 1920s.* In this context, Private Eye’s parody – ‘Joe Hartlepool’s Last Fling’, a ‘realistic account of a 60-year-old Rotherham rivet-welder’s mate, Stan Hornipants (sensitively portrayed by Reginald Maudling)’ – was not far wide of the mark. But perhaps we should not overplay this. Play for Today did not entirely conform to the stereotype of single mothers sobbing in council flats and mustachioed Trotskyites on picket lines. In any case, it was hardly representative of the BBC’s total output, and long-running series like Upstairs, Downstairs, The Brothers and Terry and June were not exactly models of left-wing propaganda.61

  The other common complaint about British television was that it was simply no good. As early as 1972, the Daily Telegraph’s Sean Day-Lewis complained that the ‘old peaks of creative writing’ were no longer being scaled and that comedy was ‘almost extinct’, while the same paper’s Marsland Gander (who had first written about broadcasting for the Telegraph in 1926!) complained that much of it was ‘ugly and objectionable … a nightly torment of convention and violence, nudity, bed-hopping and coarse language’. Future generations, however, would not judge the television of the 1970s in quite the same way. Of course there was some dreadful stuff: the BBC drama Churchill’s People, which tried to tell the nation’s history in twenty-six weekly plays, was widely regarded as an all-time low. But not only were viewers offered an extraordinary range of one-off dramas (for many editions of Play for Today were extremely good), the quality of series like I, Claudius, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Pallisers and The Onedin Line was exceptional by any standards. And in Dennis Potter Britain boasted probably the greatest television playwright in the world, whose series Pennies from Heaven (1978), challenging naturalistic conventions, broke new ground for a mainstream drama.62

  There was more to television in the 1970s, of course, than serious drama. What many people loved most was the sheer escapism of light entertainment, from Michael Parkinson’s chat show and Mike Yarwood’s impersonations to the performances of comedians such as Tommy Cooper and Les Dawson, who represented a glorious final flowering of the traditions of the music hall. Above all, there were the double acts: the Two Ronnies, whose show first appeared in April 1971, and the supreme exponents of the genre, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. Morecambe and Wise were steeped in the old traditions of song and dance and Northern working-class comedy, and had paid their dues in seaside resorts, on radio and in occasional appearances on other people’s shows. In many ways their success was down to the public appetite for conservative, even familiar material, harking back to the kind of jokes that had made their parents and grandparents laugh on piers and promenades before the war. But it was also down to the fact that they were enormously likeable, imaginative and well drilled, and their appearances were woven into the fabric of contemporary cultural life in a way that would be impossible today. At their peak, in the Christmas Day specials of 1976 and 1977, their comic dance routines were watched by almost 30 million people. At those moments, perhaps more than ever before or since, Britain came closest to Heath’s dream of one nation united by a common culture.63

  Perhaps the emblematic genre of British television in the 1970s, though, was the sitcom. Sean Day-Lewis’s claim that comedy was almost extinct seems particularly bizarre given that the schedules were so packed with situation comedies. In 1973 alone, for example, keen viewers could see the first episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, Open All Hours, Porridge and Man About the House, while It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Rising Damp followed in 1974, The Good Life and Fawlty Towers in 1975, and George and Mildred and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in 1976. The work of a single author (or writing duo), unlike their team-written equivalents on American television, their quality was often underrated. ‘How that ever became accepted for television is beyond me,’ recorded Kenneth Williams after watching the prison comedy Porridge in December 1975, calling it ‘sickening and disgusting’, a bit rich from someone who was soon to make Carry On Emmannuelle. Even at the time, however, some critics recognized that they offered unparalleled glimpses of the values and attitudes of ordinary British families. Writing in The Times in 1973, Stanley Reynolds argued that Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? had ‘built up a better picture of sociological and structural change in the regions than a hundred hours of straight documentary’. Even the much-derided On the Buses, he thought, offered ‘a window on to the real working-class world where worries about jobs and the colour of your neighbours and the price of a loaf or the slightest deviation from the sexual norm are matters of great significance’.64

  Although sitcoms were often derided as formulaic and predictable, the half-hour format actually permitted tremendous variety. BBC sitcoms, for example, ran the gamut from the nostalgic character comedy of Dad’s Army and the thinly veiled political commentary of Till Death Us Do Part to the smutty historical parody of Up Pompeii and the out-and-out farce of Fawlty Towers. The stereotype of sitcoms being filled with middle-class reactionaries in nasty trousers arguing about the summer fête, too, is not quite fair: both The Good Life and Reginald Perrin poked considerable fun at suburban conservatism, while On the Buses revelled in anti-establishment populism, mocked middle-class prudishness, and made one of its lead character a proud shop steward. Almost all of these shows, in fact, were steeped in class anxieties: many presented a lead character desperate to rise above his social situation, from Basil Fawlty and Rupert Rigsby to Bob Ferris and Captain Mainwaring. A classic example is the second run of Steptoe and Son (1970–74): while Albert, the father, is comfortable in his working-class rag-and-bone world, his son Harold hates his dirty environment, reads voraciously to improve his mind, and is desperate to get out and mix with more middle-class people. Like so many of these shows, the series glories in his frustration: many episodes end with Albert triumphant, and Harold dragged back into the bosom of his working-class home.65

  One sitcom character who does manage to clamber up the social ladder, though, is Bob Ferris, the awkward Northern product of a secondary modern school, played by Rodney Bewes in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Better than
any other series of the day, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s show captured the changes that affluence had brought to working-class life. In its predecessor, The Likely Lads (1964–6), Bob was an electrician; when we see him again in January 1973, however, he has become a surveyor for a wealthy builder and, thanks to his engagement to the librarian Thelma, is moving into higher social circles. He has bought a semi-detached house on a brand-new estate, is a proud member of the local badminton club, takes skiing holidays in Norway and fancies himself as a wine buff, with comically disastrous results. But like Edward Heath, Bob occupies an uncertain position in the class structure. A dinner party with a middle-class family goes horribly wrong when they start arguing about their working-class roots, while his best friend Terry Collier (James Bolam), just back after serving in the army in West Germany, makes no secret of his contempt for what Bob has become. Terry is the epitome of the old, ‘rough’, defiantly masculine working-class culture: he loves nothing more than an honest pint, a glance at the racing paper and a trip to the bookies. ‘I love Andy Capp,’ he snaps when Bob teases him. ‘Just because you’re flirting with the lower-lower-middle classes, just because you’ve got yourself an office job and your fiancée lives in a Tudor estate with a monkey-puzzle tree … I’m working-class and proud of it.’ ‘So am I,’ Bob insists, passionately but not very convincingly. ‘I’m no less working-class than you. I went to the same school, grew up on the same streets, lived in the same draughty houses. But that’s my point: you still want to live like that, you like the old working-class struggle against the odds. What you won’t realise is that some of us won the struggle and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.’ But faced with the evidence of Bob’s brand-new suburban house, his sharp suits and his pronounced views on dole recipients, Terry is having none of it. ‘You still lost something in the process,’ he says firmly.66