State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  On television, evocations of the past were enormously popular, from The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Long March of Everyman to Colditz and I, Claudius, from Pennies from Heaven and The Duchess of Duke Street to Dad’s Army and Last of the Summer Wine, reflecting not merely the BBC’s unparalleled skill at making costume dramas but also the public appetite for depictions of a quieter, happier age. When the BBC launched The Pallisers, a stunningly elaborate 26-part version of Anthony Trollope’s novels adapted by the rakish novelist Simon Raven, the on-screen world of Victorian elegance and courtroom drama made for a stark contrast with the political headlines of the day – for this was January 1974, with the papers full of the three-day week and the death throes of the Heath government, when some commentators were gloomily pondering a future of authoritarianism or revolution. But as the Radio Times explained, The Pallisers was set in a very different world, when ‘the political affairs of the nation were frequently conducted in the luxurious, and sometimes frivolous drawing-rooms of London Society’. Past and present collided, however, when strikes at the BBC meant that the last two episodes were not finished in time; in the end they were shown five months later, rather undermining the impact of the series.

  In general, though, viewers seemed reluctant to draw contemporary lessons from series set in the past. After the ninth episode of the hugely popular The Onedin Line, a family drama serial based around a Victorian shipping line watched by tens of millions in the early 1970s, researchers asked viewers if they thought James Onedin’s ‘commercial struggles’ had ‘any relevance to the industrial problems of today’. Most saw no link at all: ‘I enjoy the drama and don’t look for hidden meanings’ was a typical response. A similar kind of escapism lay behind the success of perhaps the most successful of all the costume dramas of the 1970s, LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–5), a lovingly detailed portrait of Lord Bellamy’s household in Edwardian London, a vision of Britain as a stable hierarchy in which the lowliest servant had her place, just as the richest aristocrat had his. Yet even in Upstairs, Downstairs, reality has the cruel habit of breaking in: the series ends with the General Strike and the Wall Street Crash, two moments anticipating the industrial conflict and economic crisis that would have been so familiar, and so worrying, to contemporary viewers.31

  Even the clothes people wore often reflected the retreat from modernity into an idealized version of history. When Brentford Nylons, once advertised with unrelenting frequency on ITV by Alan Freeman (‘All right? Stay bright!’), went bust in February 1976, it seemed to set the seal on a period in which the synthetic future of the 1960s had been rejected in favour of a much more organic, folksy, flowing look. In fashion and cosmetics alike, the space-age look was dead, replaced by a druggy pastiche of Pre-Raphaelite beauty which in turn gave way to a succession of retro styles from art deco elegance to Joan Crawford film noir, at once nostalgic, escapist, elegant and camp. For Biba, the emblematic London boutique of the early 1970s, it always seemed to be the day before yesterday, a world of elaborate art nouveau patterns, of muted, swirling mulberries, browns, plums and purples, of impossible glamour and unspeakable decadence. When Biba took over the art deco Derry & Toms department store in Kensington High Street, the result was a vast fun palace of nostalgic escapism, ‘a free ticket to a 1930s Disneyland dropped suddenly in the centre of London’, as one newspaper diarist put it when the store opened in September 1973. ‘It’s like seeing old Hollywood movies on a Sunday afternoon,’ said one shopper, a student from UCL. ‘I can just imagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing over the marble floors.’

  Ominously, though, she had come out without her chequebook, adding: ‘It’s best seen and not bought.’ That was precisely what most people thought about the new Big Biba, and explains why it lasted less than two years. By contrast, perhaps the most influential designer of the decade always kept a close eye on the pounds, shillings and pence, and became a rare symbol of British commercial nous. ‘Her clothes possess precisely the qualities demanded by a certain sort of customer who might once have been considered a bit strange and arty crafty but is now a recognized mainstream in fashion,’ one fashion writer observed in 1972. ‘[Laura] Ashley clothes fit in with hypo-allergenic cosmetics, milk face washes, ethnic dress, conservation and home grown food, and there is no reason why they should go out of style any faster than the ideas they seem to complement so well.’32

  For some people, looking backwards was not enough. Like the hippies of the late 1960s, they wanted to escape inwards and outwards, to slip the bonds of rationality and modernity, to leave behind all reminders of a flawed, compromised, polluted world. In academic enclaves and urban villages, semi-hippyish writers such as Carlos Castaneda, Erich von Däniken and Robert M. Pirsig, with their accounts of prehistoric shamanism, ancient extraterrestrials and the relevance of Zen Buddhism in a technology-obsessed world, all enjoyed brief and highly undeserved bursts of success. By the mid-1970s, no fashionable household was without a copy of at least one of them, often ostentatiously displayed alongside the pot plants, semi-erotic prints and obligatory recording of Tubular Bells. Even more popular, though, especially in the long run, were the works of a writer who had grown up in a world very different from that of macrobiotic restaurants and progressive rock, yet became an inspiration for millions of romantic dreamers not just in Britain but across the world.

  As a distinguished Oxford philologist during the middle decades of the century J. R. R. Tolkien had cut a deliberately tweedy, nostalgic figure. Yet when he died in 1973 his fame had spread well beyond the literary-academic circles in which he was most at home. He had begun work on his Middle-earth stories while recuperating from wounds suffered during the Battle of the Somme: even then, his influences, from William Morris and Richard Wagner to the neo-medievalism and mythological revival of the Victorians, were themselves backward-looking. Yet as early as 1968 – just over ten years after he had published the last part of The Lord of the Rings – his worldwide sales had hit 3 million. By 1979, the Evening News estimated that only the Bible had sold more copies worldwide than The Lord of the Rings, and a year later his total sales exceeded 8 million. And contrary to myth, his readers were not all Californian hippies lost in a fog of marijuana smoke. In January 1972, the Sunday Times reported that the paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was selling a steady 100,000 copies a year in Britain alone. Not even death could diminish his appeal: in 1977, when Allen & Unwin published The Silmarillion, a compilation of Middle-earth legends written for Tolkien’s own amusement, the initial print run of 600,000 copies was a record for a British hardback. But the publisher’s vision was rapidly validated: as they had anticipated, The Silmarillion went straight to the top of the bestseller list.33

  Tolkien’s books would never have been so successful if they had appealed only to the strange coalition of sweaty male teenagers, pale-faced girls and lank-haired prog-rock songwriters with which they became associated. As Tolkien’s Times obituary noted in 1973, his little hobbits ‘embodied what he loved best in the English character and saw most endangered by the growth of “subtopia”, bureaucracy, journalism and industrialization’. As a quiet pastoral people, at home with the land and their pipes, the hobbits made perfect heroes for a generation who distrusted authority and self-aggrandizement, while his portrait of evil – Saruman with his ‘mind of metal and wheels’, the Orcs with their love of ‘wheels and engines and explosions’, the blackened land of Mordor, with its industrial slag-heaps, its air filled with ash and smoke, its Dark Tower dominating the horizon – is a blistering indictment of modernity, industrialization and the contemporary urban nightmare. For Tolkien, as for the environmentalists of the early 1970s, there were few greater crimes than the rape of the landscape. When the corrupted wizard Saruman turns from good to evil, he symbolically cuts down the trees around his fortress to make way for machines. Similarly, when the hobbits return home, they are horrified to find the Shire turned into a modern wasteland, with even their beloved old mill pulled d
own and replaced by a brick monstrosity, used not for grinding grain but for some unspecified industrial purpose. It was little wonder that green campaigners loved the book: when Greenpeace sailed into the French nuclear testing zone in 1972, one of their activists noted in his diary that he had been reading Tolkien, and ‘could not avoid thinking of parallels between our own little fellowship and the long journey of the Hobbits into the volcano-haunted land of Mordor’. The Lord of the Rings ‘is at once an attack on the modem world and a credo, a manifesto’, wrote the former literary enfant terrible Colin Wilson in 1974. ‘It stands for a system of values: that is why teenagers write “Gandalf lives” on the walls of London tubes.’34

  The only book that rivalled The Lord of the Rings as both a bestseller and a ‘manifesto’ was another work of fantasy written for personal entertainment. Its author, Richard Adams, was an Oxford-educated civil servant in (appropriately) the Department of the Environment, who originally made up his story of talking rabbits to amuse his two daughters during a long car journey to see Judi Dench in Twelfth Night at the RSC. Eventually, he decided to write it down and sent it to thirteen different publishers, all of whom rejected it. Only the one-man publishing house of Rex Collings agreed to take it, and even Collings had his doubts. ‘I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ But when Watership Down appeared in the shops in November 1972, its success was phenomenal. Early reviews were ecstatic: the New Statesman’s critic wrote that he found himself ‘checking whether things are going to work out all right on the next page before daring to finish the preceding one’, while The Economist declared that if there was ‘no place for “Watership Down” in children’s bookshops, then children’s literature is dead’. To Adams’s surprise, his book picked up not only the Carnegie Medal but the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, while Penguin immediately snapped up the rights and brought out a Puffin paperback for children and then a Penguin edition for adults. By 1974, when the Sunday Times bestseller list first appeared, Watership Down was Britain’s fastest selling book; by the end of the decade, this epic story of rabbits searching for a new warren, originally written for children, had sold more than 3 million copies – most of them to adults.35

  Like The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down resonated with readers in the early 1970s precisely because its themes – the individual against the collective, the small against the great, the organic against the machine, the natural world of fields and woods against the man-made one of roads and bulldozers – seemed so timely. What sets the narrative in motion is the destruction of the rabbits’ home to make way for ‘high class modern buildings’, as a sign puts it, and everything man-made – cars, roads, traps, gassing devices – seems alien and threatening. As Christopher Booker put it, the book offered ‘escape from the unspeakable, inhuman world we are creating for ourselves with technology’, and a ‘dream of getting back to a simpler, natural world’. As in The Lord of the Rings, however, the novel’s eco-politics came with more than a hint of old-fashioned conservatism, showing how the emerging green sensibility blurred the lines between left and right. The critic Alexander Walker called it ‘a cosy idealisation of England’s past … where everyone had their place in the warren and kept to it, women were thought to be satisfactorily defined by their role as home-makers, and the Welfare State had not yet turned hardy individual initiative into marrowbone jelly. In short, a High Tory myth.’ But of course there was more to the book than political symbolism, not least an exciting story that entertained readers of all allegiances. In the midst of juggling briefs on the planned Sex Discrimination Bill, the new government’s plans for massive industrial intervention and a bitter battle about pay-beds in the NHS, Labour’s Barbara Castle retreated to bed one Saturday in July 1974 with a copy of Adams’s bestseller. ‘It was bliss to give in and to be able to read something other than an official document,’ she recorded. ‘I found great comfort in Watership Down.’36

  Most writers of the mid-1970s, however, portrayed nature in a much darker light, emphasizing its propensity to fight back against human exploitation, even to destroy mankind itself. In 1976 alone, two competing pulp thrillers, Richard Doyle’s Deluge and Walter Harris’s The Fifth Horseman, showed Britain being engulfed by monstrous floods. In the latter, in good science-fiction style, the terror has been unleashed by man’s own arrogance, with North Sea oil drilling (then a topical subject) having destroyed the seabed and brought a tidal wave crashing over Britain’s shores. As one character sagely puts it: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum … We’re taking out oil and gas, and putting nothing back.’ But the book that really set the standard for nature biting back was James Herbert’s gory blockbuster The Rats (1974), whose terrifyingly graphic vision of feral black rats swarming across London, leaving a trail of mutilated corpses in their wake, drew ferocious criticism from shocked reviewers. As the writer Alwyn Turner points out, while the murderous rats obviously tapped readers’ ‘folk memories of Pied Pipers and plagues’, they were also inspired by contemporary headlines. There had been fears of rats running amok during the council workers’ strike of October 1970, when bags of rubbish lay uncollected in the streets. Five years later, after an unofficial strike in Glasgow left more than 50,000 tons of ‘rotting garbage’ in the city’s streets, some in piles twenty feet high, the army had to be called in to deal with the infestation of vermin. Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that giant rats featured as deadly adversaries not only in The Rats, but in television adventure series such as Doomwatch (‘Tomorrow, the Rat’, 1970), The New Avengers (‘Gnaws’, 1976) and Doctor Who (‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’, 1976). In Turner’s words, nothing better symbolized ‘the inability of science to deliver a brave new world’ than the rearing figure of a giant rat – even if it was played by a glove puppet.37

  Television played a central part in framing the new environmental concerns of the day, especially through the semi-fantastic adventure series that were so popular with children and adults alike. Doomwatch was a particularly prescient example: first broadcast in February 1970, it was partly conceived by Dr Kit Pedler, the head of electron microscopy at the University of London’s Institute of Ophthalmology. As the unofficial scientific adviser to Doctor Who, Pedler had co-created the Cybermen four years before as a way of articulating his concerns about the effects science and technology would have on man’s essential humanity, but now he wanted to take a more realistic approach. As his long-term collaborator Gerry Davis told the Radio Times, they wanted to create a series that would investigate ‘what was happening in the world’, questioning the narrative of ‘scientific progress’ that had dominated the headlines in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Doomwatch follows the activities of the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, a government unit set up to appease the green lobby, but which acquires more teeth than its sponsors expected. Its director, Dr Spencer Quist (John Paul), worked with the Americans on the atomic bomb during the war, but has become a haunted and brooding man after his wife died of radiation poisoning. Meanwhile his deputy, Dr John Ridge (Simon Oates) is a Jason King-esque playboy with extravagant shirts, a Lotus Élan and a penchant for slapping his female colleagues on the behind. Each week, more than 12 million people tuned in to watch them confront the latest man-made menace, from a plastic-eating virus in the first episode to chemical waste, computer brainwashing, factory pollution and nuclear weapons. Thirsty for profit and indifferent to the ecological costs, big business never emerges in a good light; neither do the government nor the civil service, both of which try to obstruct Doomwatch at every turn. A thick but enjoyable streak of paranoia ran through the programme, epitomized by the moment in the third series when Ridge, driven to a breakdown by the government’s refusal to tackle pollution, steals some phials of anthrax and threatens to hold the world to ransom, presenting viewers with a rare chance to see an eco-terrorist in a cravat. Needless to say, the press loved the show: whi
le the Mirror’s television critic initially claimed that Doomwatch was ‘unbelievable’, the global pollution scandals of the early 1970s gave it a sense of context, and before long Davis was telling the Daily Mail that it was ‘a staggering coincidence that many of the programmes we put out turn into reality a few days later. Of course we do our research in scientific journals but that does not explain everything.’ The Mirror even set up its own ‘Doomwatch’ unit to investigate environmental issues. ‘Call in Doomwatch!’ the paper urged its readers. ‘They are ready for action!’38