State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In fact the ‘damage’, as Mars-Jones called it, was plain for even the most casual West End visitor to see. In Soho, the obvious district for the pornographers to choose because of its cheap rents, bohemian reputation and criminal connections, it was ‘impossible not to notice the porn shops’, said one report. They were open seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day: ‘they had large neon signs declaring that they sold “BOOKS” or “ADULT BOOKS” and their windows were filled with garish displays of generally soft-core magazines and titillating notices implying – often correctly – that the interested customer would find a wider range of merchandise inside.’ Imported American magazines cost £3 each, sets of still photos £1 a pack, and ‘blue movies’ £15 for 200 feet in black and white, or £30 for colour. Meanwhile, as the journalist Paul Ferris noted, ‘under-the-counter material covered every known sexual activity’, from stories about ‘women being raped, men being dominated, [and] debauched children’ to images of flagellation, coprophilia and even people having enemas. And despite the destruction of the Dirty Squad, Soho continued to thrive: indeed, the sex trade seemed to be more successful and brazen than ever. With Westminster council refusing to crack down on the porn barons – not least because the Obscene Publications Act’s prohibition of material that was likely to ‘deprave and corrupt’ was so vague as to be useless – Soho and sex became virtually synonymous. By the end of the 1970s, the district boasted 54 sex shops, 39 ‘cinema clubs’, 16 strip and peep shows, 11 sex clubs and 12 licensed massage parlours, all packed into a tiny warren of narrow streets and run-down alleyways, and almost spilling over into more upmarket entertainment areas like Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square. ‘It’s become increasing difficult to take a child to the London cinema,’ complained the Tory MP Michael Heseltine in 1975, not without reason. ‘The place is sex mad.’31

  If the porn boom had been confined to the red-light ghetto of Soho, then it might not have been so alarming. In fact, by the time of Heseltine’s complaint it had already spread into almost every corner of the country: by 1975, twelve major soft-core publishers were distributing material through 400 wholesalers and an estimated 20,000 shops, most of them newsagents and corner shops. To anyone who regularly bought anything from The Times, The Economist and the Sun to Horse and Hound, the Eagle and Look-In, the sight of magazines like Mayfair, Men Only and Fiesta on the top shelf was already becoming very familiar. And although very few people admitted that they read top-shelf magazines, the sales figures were extremely good. By 1975 Men Only’s monthly readership was an estimated 1.8 million, with Mayfair and Penthouse close behind on 1.7 million each. And when, two years later, a Home Office committee chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams was asked to look more closely into the obscenity laws, it reported that a staggering 4 million people read one or more porn magazines every month. Most readers, it turned out, were a far cry from the dirty old men of tabloid stereotypes: the majority were men under the age of 35, many of whom were married, and readership was strongest among the skilled (i.e. supposedly respectable) working classes. Since the pornographers knew their customers, no doubt this explains why the magazines of the 1970s often had an aggressively populist feel. The sleaze baron David Sullivan, for example, specialized in selling magazines that invited readers to send in explicit pictures of their wives – a self-consciously democratic approach that saved money on models and also made him enormously rich. What Sullivan also realized, though, was that once the legal shackles were off, many readers would demand more and more hard-core material. ‘Strength sells,’ he told a documentary in 1977 – and curiously, it sold even better when the models literally were the girls next door.32

  By far the most popular source of soft-core images, however, could be found on newsagents’ bottom shelves, not the top ones. Ever since the Sun had been relaunched as an aggressively downmarket working-class tabloid under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and the editorship of Larry Lamb, it had gone out of its way to emphasize sex. ‘Sex was news. The paper did not invent it,’ Lamb later insisted. ‘Discussion of sexual matters had become publicly acceptable, therefore the paper had a duty to publish it, with taste, and a sense of proportion.’ In many ways he was quite right: the paper’s endless stream of stories about love-nests and sex romps conformed absolutely to the bawdy music-hall tradition that saw sex as both fun and funny, as long as people stuck within a conservative moral framework. The quintessential example, of course, was the Page Three topless pin-up, which first appeared in November 1970 in the form of a ‘birthday suit girl’ to celebrate the first anniversary of the paper’s relaunch. The next Page Three girl, however, did not appear until the following March, and only in 1972 did the topless picture became a regular feature. Revealingly, however, the pictures often ran alongside stories about ‘family breakdown and domestic and sexual violence’: as one academic study remarks, the rather incongruous juxtaposition allowed the Sun both to endorse permissiveness and to distance itself from it. What was also revealing was that in the early 1970s very few of the models were white British women. Many were Swedes and Germans, supposedly much more liberated where sex was concerned, and there were also plenty of black women, to whom nudity supposedly came naturally. So in July 1972, when the Sun decided to celebrate the fact that Britain was overcoming prejudice and ‘Winning the Race War’, the high point was a week of black models. ‘The shape of race relations gets a real uplift from Guyana-born model Minerva Smith!’ one caption claimed.33

  Needless to say, not everyone was delighted by the appearance of girls like Minerva Smith. Even before the introduction of Page Three, in fact, the Sun had been banned from one Yorkshire town’s public library because there was too much sex in it, prompting the paper to launch an attack on the ‘Silly Burghers of Sowerby Bridge’ (‘We should have been thrown out of better places than this’). And although feminists made no secret of their loathing for the paper, the Sun’s executives were much more interested in their booming circulation figures. By 1975, when the Mirror felt obliged to follow suit with topless pictures of its own, the two papers were virtually neck and neck, and at the beginning of 1978 the Sun finally drew ahead. As the former Sun journalist-turned-critic Roy Greenslade puts it, this was ‘an astonishing achievement: in the space of just nine years, the Sun had risen from almost the bottom of the tabloid heap to the top’. Topless women were not the only reason; but as the most obvious symbols of the Sun’s blend of sex, censoriousness, populism and permissiveness, they had a lot to do with it.34

  The deeper importance of Page Three, though, is that it was the most obvious example of what one historian calls the ‘eroticisation’ of British life in the 1970s, something visible not just in the strip-clubs and sex shops of Soho, but in mainstream news reports, in cinemas, in paperback bestsellers and even on the television screens. In fashion, for example, men’s trousers were often crotch-bulgingly tight, while young women now saw nothing wrong in revealing great expanses of cleavage or thigh. In advertising, too, there was now a much heavier emphasis on sexual suggestiveness. And although the blatant smut of Benny Hill’s annual Thames Television spectaculars, with their apparently unvarying cast of nubile young women in bikinis and suspenders, owed something to the bawdy traditions of the music hall, it represented something new on television, something that many middle-class families had never seen before. Even mainstream sitcoms now joked openly about pornography: in the very first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973), Terry Collier complains that, having served in the army in West Germany, he has missed out on ‘the death of censorship’, ‘the new morality’, Oh! Calcutta! and ‘topless waitresses in frilly knickers’. The first thing he does on being demobbed is to visit a seedy strip-club, where he almost bumps into his old friend Bob, a faithful husband-to-be who nevertheless bunks off to Soho when he gets the chance. Even ten years before, such a scene would have been unthinkable at prime time on BBC1; by 1973, however, it was nothing remarkable. Indeed, it was a measure of how far pornograp
hy had permeated the commercial mainstream that Bob and Terry might well have bumped into an up-and-coming popular detective at the Soho strip-club, for in Colin Dexter’s novel Last Seen Wearing (1977) we discover that Inspector Morse has more than a passing acquaintance with the West End scene. In one club, he and Lewis sit through moribund performances by Fabulous Fiona, Sexy Susan and Sensational Sandra, before Voluptuous Vera and Kinky Kate manage ‘to raise the general standard of the entertainment’. ‘There were gimmicks aplenty,’ we are told; ‘fans, whips, bananas and rubber spiders’, and Morse digs his colleague in the ribs as ‘an extraordinarily shapely girl, dressed for a fancy-dressing ball, titillatingly and tantalizingly divested herself of all but an incongruously ugly mask.’ ‘Bit of class there, Lewis,’ Morse says admiringly.35

  What one cultural critic calls the spread of ‘permissive populism’ – ‘the trickle-down of permissiveness into commodity culture’ – was particularly noticeable in the film industry. The astonishing collapse of cinema-going as mass entertainment, with weekly audiences having fallen from a third of the population to just two in a hundred people between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, meant that studios were desperate for any gimmick that would drag people away from the television, and sex seemed the ideal candidate. Under the leadership of John Trevelyan, the British Board of Film Classification had moved steadily towards a position of greater permissiveness, particularly where so-called ‘art’ films were concerned, and the introduction of a new classification system – in particular, the AA category for those aged 14 and older, and X for those 18 and older – seemed an invitation to produce more explicit material. What was more, the system was full of loopholes. If a film was denied a BBFC certificate, it could be submitted for a licence to individual local authorities, some of which took a decidedly permissive line. In October 1970, for example, after the film version of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer had been rejected by the BBFC, it was promptly given a licence by the Greater London Council, much to the horror of the Conservative press. And with family audiences in deep decline, many cinemas – especially in big cities – decided that only ever more adult material would guarantee ticket sales. By April 1971, when the Evening Standard published a major investigation of film-going in London, no fewer than 31 out of 60 films showing in the capital had X certificates, with a further 12 being ranked as AA, 5 as A (suitable for older children) and just 12 as U. Among the X films, the paper noted, ‘nudity had become commonplace, full-frontal female nudity was almost so, full-frontal male nudity becoming so’. Half of the films either depicted or referred to homosexuality, and a quarter depicted or implied masturbation. Perhaps it was no wonder that only four months before, John Trevelyan had decided to throw in the towel. ‘I am simply sickened’, he said, ‘by having to put in days filled from dawn till dusk with the sight and sound of human copulation.’36

  Given what happened next, Trevelyan was probably wise to get out when he did. Almost as soon as his successor, a shy, chain-smoking Scottish TV executive called Stephen Murphy, had moved in, he found himself embroiled in a blazing tabloid row about Ken Russell’s wildly overwrought film The Devils, a story about witchcraft in seventeenth-century France, complete with enough torture, madness and sexual obsession to satisfy even the most jaded palate. After months of negotiations between the director, the studio and the BBFC, the film came out in July 1971; but although Warner Bros. had taken out scenes of nuns sexually assaulting a statue of Christ and Vanessa Redgrave masturbating with a dead priest’s charred bone, what remained was bound to inflame conservative critics. ‘Redgrave’s perverse Mother Superior licks the stigmata of her lover who is represented as a crucified Christ figure,’ wrote the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker. ‘Impromptu medical examinations are performed on the altar table; nude nuns massage phallic candles with lubricious relish; hot-water enemas are applied in a brutal pantomime of purgation; and the vomit of those accused of being possessed by the devil is picked through in the hope of discovering a crumb of undigested demon.’ Not altogether surprisingly, seventeen local authorities banned the film, and in London the GLC committee decided against a ban, which would have destroyed the film’s box-office prospects, by only three votes. But this was only the beginning of the biggest censorship row in British film history.37

  For all its excesses, The Devils had been enormously unlucky. It went on general release at the exact moment that conservative moralists and Christian groups were launching a campaign against the ‘ravages of permissiveness’, and at a point when, with both crime and unemployment mounting, the press was becoming increasingly agitated about the moral state of the nation. What this meant was that the next major release was bound to face even more intense scrutiny, and unfortunately for Stephen Murphy the film in question was Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, the story of a middle-class couple besieged by rapacious yokels in a Cornish cottage, and an extremely violent picture by any standards. As Walker later wrote, Straw Dogs was ‘putting on indecent display all the nightmares that could affect the British bourgeoisie’, and to many critics the scenes of sexual violence – including the savage double rape of Susan George, haplessly re-edited by the studio so that it appeared she was being buggered and, crucially, was enjoying it – were simply disgusting. And when Murphy defended it as ‘a brilliant but brutal film that says something important’, the press turned on him. On 17 December, The Times published an unprecedented letter from thirteen leading reviewers, including its own John Russell Taylor, Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times, Derek Malcolm of the Guardian and John Coleman of the New Statesman, as well as Walker himself. ‘The use to which this film employs its scenes of double rape and multiple killing by a variety of hideous methods’, they wrote, ‘is dubious in its intention, excessive in its effect and likely to contribute to the concern expressed from time to time by many critics over films which exploit the very violence which they make a show of condemning.’ For some of the critics, the decision to pass Straw Dogs cast a shadow not only over Murphy’s survival as chief censor, but over the ‘continued existence’ of the BBFC itself.38

  Although Murphy wrote a robust reply defending his censorship policy, he must have regretted that he had ever taken the job in the first place – for as he well knew, an even more contentious picture was coming in January 1972. With its shocking portrait of juvenile delinquency, rape and violence in a nightmarish future London, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novella A Clockwork Orange would probably have stirred controversy whenever it was released. But this was the worst possible time for Murphy to have passed such a disturbing picture, since, as Alexander Walker later remarked, public opinion was ‘waiting for it’, with the newspapers ‘ready and indeed willing to be outraged’ before anyone had even seen it. Even before the film’s premiere on 13 January 1972, the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, told the press that there was ‘a new film out this week that I think I ought to go and see … If things are being shown which one could reasonably suppose are contributing to the degree of violence, I think I ought to know.’ In the event, Maudling watched the film at a special screening and then, as was his wont, did absolutely nothing about it. But his intervention had stoked the flames even higher.39

  As a terrifying vision of utopian modernism gone wrong, teenage thugs running amok in a world of concrete tower blocks and a repressive government struggling to keep the lid on a broken society, A Clockwork Orange could hardly have appeared at a more appropriate moment. By the time of its premiere, the miners’ strike was just days old, while the papers were full of angst at the spectacle of one million unemployed and the mounting bloodshed in Northern Ireland. In this context, Kubrick’s stylized hooligans became the focus for a moral backlash of unparalleled intensity. For the Sun, it was the ‘FILM SHOCKER TO END THEM ALL … unparalleled in its concentrated parade of violence, viciousness and cruelty’, while the Mail’s critic Cecil Wilson wondered ‘what on earth [had] induced our censors to pass those startling scenes of rape and vi
olence’. Even left-wing politicians joined the bandwagon: after a special screening for peers and MPs, Labour’s Maurice Edelman, chairman of the all-party Film Committee, told the press that ‘the film stimulates for two and a half hours an appetite for sadistic violence with the instantaneous communication which the visual arts uniquely offer’. When A Clockwork Orange went on general release, Edelman predicted, ‘it will lead to a Clockwork cult which will magnify teenage violence’.40

  Amid the hysteria, Stephen Murphy’s argument that the film was ‘in its stylised way, simply a vehicle for all kinds of speculation about the human spirit’ and ‘a valuable contribution to the whole debate about violence’ was totally ignored. Instead, critics queued up to denounce Kubrick, Burgess and the BBFC, with A Clockwork Orange becoming a scapegoat for all the ills – crime, pornography, strikes, the stream of national humiliations – that seemed to be corrupting the national spirit. Across the country, local authorities delayed the film’s opening, demanded more cuts or even imposed outright bans. Murphy himself was now under intense pressure to step down: he was ‘out of touch with public opinion’, according to the head of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association, while an editorial in The Times asked ‘Is Film Censorship Breaking Down?’ At one stage, the pressure on the chief censor was such that, with the press camped outside his Soho Square office, he took refuge in a nearby Catholic church. In the end, he managed to tough it out: as one sympathetic journalist observed, he had ‘had a most unfortunate baptism into a job which he himself has said is impossible’. But the controversy had taken its toll on a sensitive and conscientious man: at the beginning of 1975, after just four years, Murphy resigned to return to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.41