by Alwyn Turner
Though seldom expressed in the media, it was Whitehouse’s conviction that the perceived assault by both the BBC and the pornography industry on the moral standards of British society was inspired and funded by Moscow, in an attempt to bring about the downfall of democracy. Her husband, Ernest, believed that the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament prophesied the (temporary) triumph of communism, and she herself had no hesitation in seeing reds both under and in the bed: ‘They’ve infiltrated the trade unions,’ she argued. ‘Why does anyone still believe they haven’t infiltrated broadcasting?’ Whether or not she was correct in attributing a controlling interest in pornography – capitalism’s most profitable industry – to the Soviet Union, at a time when that country was not renowned for its ability to foster enterprise, she herself was undoubtedly convinced of the truth of the claim, and her faith that she was struggling against the forces of evil sustained her through her long guerrilla war against modern culture. While public attention was focused on her criticisms of, for example, Till Death Us Do Part, for using the word ‘bloody’ and suggesting that the Virgin Mary might have been ‘on the pill’ (the BBC apologized for that one), there was also a strictly political agenda that was less noticed; a tough Panorama interview with the Northern Ireland prime minister Brian Faulkner prompted her to ask ‘where the sympathies of the BBC lie in relation to Northern Ireland’, while during the three-day week she complained that the Corporation was ‘committed to polarization of public sentiment in favour of the miners’.
The twin themes of politics and obscenity came together when Whitehouse took on the new administration at the Greater London Council. Labour had captured the GLC in 1973 on its most radical ever manifesto, uncompromisingly titled A Socialist Strategy for London, and, amidst the promises of a massive programme of house building and a freeze on public transport fares (‘as a first step towards their eventual abolition’), the most controversial aspect of its policy turned out to be its position on film censorship. The passing of movies for public screenings, and their classification, was primarily the responsibility of the British Board of Film Censors, but this was a self-governing body set up and run by the industry itself, and its decisions were always potentially subject to being overturned by local authorities, which had a statutory duty to license cinemas in their areas. And of those local authorities, the GLC was far and away the most important, with one seventh of the nation’s cinemas coming under its jurisdiction. So it was a relatively big news story when Enid Wistrich was appointed the first female chairman of its Film Viewing Board (her vice-chairman was a newly elected councillor named Ken Livingstone), and even more so when, the following year, she volunteered the effective abolition of her own job; in her own words, she proposed ‘that the Council cease to exercise its powers to censor films for adults over the age of 18 with the effect that any film which did not fall foul of the law could be shown in London’s cinemas’.
By this stage Whitehouse had already come into conflict with the new regime. The full version of Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film Blow Out (La Grande Bouffe) was refused a certificate by the BBFC, but Wistrich’s committee passed it uncut, with a condition that a warning be displayed in the foyer of the cinema, together with a synopsis of the plot, to ensure that those liable to being shocked might be deterred from entering. As the dramatist Ted Willis had recently pointed out, however: ‘People go to an extraordinary amount of trouble to be shocked.’ Whitehouse duly went along to see the movie at the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair and, discovering that the warnings were indeed entirely accurate, she fulminated against such depravity to the press (‘the most revolting film I have ever seen’) and then ‘dashed off to the nearest police station to lodge a complaint’. When the police declined to act, on the grounds that there was no law against it, she instead launched a private prosecution against the Curzon under the Vagrancy Act, arguing that this was indecency in a public place. The case was a failure – the magistrate reluctantly decided that a cinema did not constitute a public place as defined in law – but it gave her a taste for legal action that would become more apparent as the years went on, as well as alerting her to the dangerous subversives at the GLC.
When therefore the question of the abolition of censorship came before the Council in January 1975, it was a huge media event, billed as a heavy-weight title fight: Whitehouse vs Wistrich. For the first time ever a GLC meeting was broadcast on live radio, with Whitehouse being interviewed in the public gallery, whilst outside County Hall a Salvation Army band entertained the anti-porn demonstrators when they weren’t praying for divine intervention. The four-hour debate encapsulated the long process of decensorship: on the one side was Wistrich citing John Milton’s argument that ‘When God gave Adam reason, He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing’; on the other were those who feared a ‘vicious spiral of ever increasing violence’ and the creation of ‘cesspools of iniquity’. And behind it all was the much vaunted conflict of the elite and the silent majority; as far as Whitehouse was concerned, ‘the Enid Wistrichs of this world are the elitist “experts” who are responsible to no one and whose expressed opinions are so far removed from the experience of the vast majority of people in Britain that their views amount to an almost complete distortion of the national will’. When the votes were counted, the proposal to allow adults to watch what they liked had been lost by 50 to 44, thanks to seventeen Labour councillors who voted against the motion, whilst only two Tories had broken ranks to support Wistrich; one of these latter, she noted, was a woman, and indeed female councillors ‘voted for abolition by a proportion of two to one, demonstrating clearly that it was not women who felt the need to curb visual expressions of sexuality’.
The failure of Wistrich’s bold initiative ensured that anomalies and absurdities would continue to exist in a way that reflected the law more generally. In the late 1970s the BBFC announced that it would in future allow depictions of homosexual intercourse on the same basis as it permitted depictions of heterosexual acts, though any film about homosexuality would still demand an X certificate. And thereby were ushered in all sorts of incongruities. Anal intercourse was then illegal between heterosexuals, however consenting they might be (‘It is as serious as committing manslaughter or grievous bodily harm’ commented a judge in 1974, suggesting that his technique was not all that it might be), whilst it was permissible between gay men over the age of twenty-one so long as it wasn’t witnessed by a third party. No such act could therefore be performed at all by heterosexuals or, in the presence of a camera crew, by homosexuals, but the simulation of it could be viewed – though the reality not practised – by gay men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Elsewhere, the abolition of theatrical censorship by the Lord Chamberlain in the Theatres Act of 1968 had permitted Kenneth Tynan’s sex revue Oh! Calcutta! to become one of the great stage hits of the era, with over 2,400 performances in London, but the 1972 film of a New York staging was banned outright by the BBFC: it was permissible to show what many saw as filth in the theatre, but not the celluloid depiction of exactly the same filth in the cinema. (A British bookseller was also fined for importing copies of the book of the revue.) Similarly, the film of Pauline Réage’s classic novel The Story of O was refused a certificate by both the BBFC and the GLC, whilst the book on which it was based was freely available in a Corgi paperback from 1972 onwards.
In the case of this latter, one can’t help feeling that those who sought to protect society from itself had missed a trick. The movie, directed by Just Jaeckin, was an innocuous piece of high-gloss soft porn that allowed no room for imagination and did a great deal to defuse the power of the original. The book, on the other hand, which came complete with endorsements on the back cover from Graham Greene and J.G. Ballard, was much more disturbing and even downright incendiary. Beautifully written and entirely devoid of linguistic obscenity, it was the tale of a sexually submissive Parisian woman finding fulfilment, first in a secret brotherhood of men at the Château Roissy and then at the ha
nds of an English gentleman named Sir Stephen (the film role was originally offered to Christopher Lee, though thankfully he turned it down). As the first, and most enduring, piece of sadomasochistic erotica to be widely available in high-street bookstores, the novel exerted a huge influence on many who had previously felt that their proclivities were inappropriate and wrong; ‘When I first read The Story of O,’ wrote the Danish feminist Maria Marcus, ‘it filled me with a mixture of sexual excitement, horror, anxiety – and envy.’ It also articulated the nascent sexuality of many thousands of young women who stumbled upon it on the bookshelves of their permissive parents.
Originally published in France in 1954, the novel benefited in Britain from appearing at a time when flagellation was edging its way into mainstream consciousness. When novelist Gillian Freeman was researching pornography in 1966, she reported a Soho bookseller having to disappoint a customer looking for depictions of straight sex: ‘Sorry, mate, it’s all got a bit of fladge in it.’ Within a few years it appeared almost as though the same were true of novels generally, with erotic beating and binding to be glimpsed everywhere from Alec Waugh’s semi-respectable comedy of manners A Spy in the Family (1970), through Christopher Nicole’s black magic thriller The Face of Evil (1971), all the way down to Timothy Lea’s sex farce Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1971). As Terry Collier put it in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?: ‘I know I’ve been away for five years, but dear me, I never realized that bondage was that popular.’ The lightweight simulations in the movie of The Story of O, however, were still considered too strong to be seen by a British audience, a situation that remained until the end of the century.
Despite all the foolish inconsistencies, progress was made in the ’70s in terms of cinema regulations. The X certificate in film classification was revised in 1970 to an age limit of eighteen rather than the previous sixteen (the interim AA certificate, with an age limit of fourteen, was introduced at the same time), which allowed for a broader range of adult themes, and gradually a degree of common sense was introduced. In 1976, for example, James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was finally passed in an uncut version and given an AA certificate; previously an edited version had only been available as an X film. This meant that it was now on the same footing as the final Carry On movie in the original series, Carry On Emmannuelle (1978), which had sufficiently broken with its nudge-nudge heritage to warrant an AA classification. Even so, the marginally increased raunchiness was insufficient to maintain the series in the face of the sex comedies that had emerged in response to the new X certificate, and that soon dominated the domestic film industry: Come Play with Me (1977), featuring Mary Millington, was said to be the most profitable British movie ever, while Martin Scorsese’s 1975 urban masterpiece Taxi Driver was outgrossed in Britain by Adventures of a Taxi Driver in the same year.
On mainstream TV meanwhile, despite Whitehouse’s fears of Sodom and Gomorrah in the homes of England’s green and pleasant land, little had changed; it was not until 1977 that Robin’s Nest – another spin-off from Man About the House – became the first British sitcom to depict an unmarried couple living together, and even then special permission had to be gained from the Independent Broadcasting Authority to show such a thing. Few noticed the storming of the ramparts.
The IBA’s job was to ensure that suitable standards were maintained on ITV broadcasts, and the referral of Robin’s Nest was therefore entirely proper, but an earlier decision by the authority was more tendentious and led to much adverse press comment. In 1975 ITV announced that it was to start showing films during the afternoon hours of children’s broadcasting and the IBA approved the plan, but insisted that certain movies would be inappropriate, particularly those featuring the greatest of all the 1930s child stars: ‘The Shirley Temple films are mawkish and sentimental,’ said a spokesman. ‘Today’s youngsters are more sophisticated than those of forty years ago, even quite little ones aged five or six.’ Quite how this decision fitted into the IBA’s remit was unclear, particularly since they approved Will Hay’s films of a similar vintage, and even allowed the frankly frightening drag act of Arthur Lucan as Old Mother Riley. ‘Future historians will recall with amazement,’ wrote a correspondent to the Daily Mail, ‘the day when the permissive society was rampant, and film censorship practically non-existent, and a decision was made to ban Shirley Temple’s films by branding them as unsuitable for children.’
In later years, of course, such an attitude would have been damned as political correctness, as would the 1973 decision of the Inner London Education Authority to end the decades-old custom of a schools’ carol concert at the Royal Festival Hall. This, it was explained, was the result of a policy shift away from ‘solemn and formal teacher-directed music’ towards ‘a child-centred creative exploration of the subject’. And instead of the carol concert, a programme by the Spinners, a folk group much in demand on light entertainment TV shows, was screened in all ILEA schools.
The media’s happy indulgence in such horrors, however, was as nothing compared to the festival of fun that ensued when the former Labour cabinet minister Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, announced in 1971 that if the government wasn’t going to establish a royal commission to investigate the effects of pornography, then he would jolly well set up his own inquiry to do the job for them. A convert to both socialism and Catholicism, Lord Longford was now in his late sixties and, with an unkempt ring of hair protruding from around his monkish pate and with a look of bespectacled bemusement, he was a gift to tabloid editors, who were quite prepared to attack the porn industry whilst reserving their right to mock those who sought to reform it, particularly when it came to the newly nicknamed ‘Lord Porn’. (In later years, as Longford’s interest in the reform of prisoners led him to call for the release of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, he became simply a hate figure for the same newspapers.)
The committee of inquiry was, predictably, a farce from beginning to end. Its remit was to discover the ‘means of tackling the problem of pornography’, so no one was much surprised when the membership was packed with Christian cronies of the chairman, and excluded those who didn’t see pornography as a problem in the first instance. And, since a survey in the ’70s revealed that one in five men regularly bought pornographic magazines, it has to be assumed that there were many who didn’t view it in the same negative light. Amongst those who were included, and who stayed the course, were singer Cliff Richard and Radio One DJ Jimmy Savile, alongside more obvious suspects like Malcolm Muggeridge (he had spoken at VALA’s first convention, declaring that ‘if Till Death Us Do Part is life, I cannot see that there would be anything to do but commit suicide’) and the Rt. Revd Ronald Ralph Williams, the Bishop of Leicester, whose response to a Ken Russell film was truly magnificent in its acceptance of the divine will: ‘I never thought that I should give thanks to God for being blind, but since my wife has told me what she has seen in the film, The Devils, I am genuinely grateful that I at least have been spared that.’
The high point of the exercise was undoubtedly a trip to Denmark to witness some of the famed live sex shows of that country, at one of which ‘a beautiful young woman pressed a whip into Lord Longford’s hand and invited him to beat her’. The Guardian report of the incident added: ‘His Lordship declined.’ As he beat instead a hasty retreat, he told his colleague, the future Tory MP Gyles Brandreth, that he ‘had seen enough for science and more than enough for enjoyment’. In the circumstances, it was perhaps as well that he didn’t recognize that the ‘woman’ was in fact a transvestite. On the plane over, Longford had been ostentatiously reading the Bible to put himself in the correct frame of mind, though perhaps he would have been better off having had a word with his newly acquired fellow campaigner, Mary Whitehouse. She had visited Denmark the previous year as part of a World in Action programme and had picked up a magazine in her hotel bookshop containing images so ‘pervasive and corrupting’ that she had to pray to ‘ask the Lord to cleanse her’.
&nb
sp; When the Longford report emerged in 1972, it was an immediate bestseller, largely because it was marketed as a fat paperback with the single word ‘Pornography’ in huge letters on the cover, and because it retailed at a very competitive 60p. Its contents, however, were disappointing in terms both of intellectual engagement with the subject (Bernard Levin dismissed it as ‘heated amateurism’) and of cheap thrills, though there were those who relished such passages as a lengthy account of sex and sadism in a boys’ boarding school: ‘Sometimes the prefects did a lot of the whipping; at other times they made the third-year boys do it as well, or the second-year boys whip the first years and the first years whip each other.’ The most succinct response to the entire enterprise came when the actor Robert Morley told Longford that ‘if somebody liked to dress up in chamois leather and be stung by wasps, I really couldn’t see why one should stop him’.
Whether anyone did seek such an experience is perhaps doubtful, but had they done so, they would certainly have found a place to parade their penchant. As pornography began to move out from the Soho bookshops into more orthodox retail outlets, Forum magazine – which at this stage eschewed all photographic material in favour of text and journalism – acquired a reputation for the exploration of practices hitherto neglected in mainstream publishing; this was particularly true of its letters pages that were widely believed to have been written by its own journalists, seemingly in the spirit of running fetishes up flagpoles in the hope that the odd reader or two might salute. A single issue from 1970 included, for example, not only such well-known tastes as rubber but also a predilection for corduroy, as well as the employment during sex of – inter alia – a vacuum cleaner, wild honey and raw steaks (‘which we beat well with garlic and herbs’). It also found room for the tale of eight men who attached the bells from cat collars to their genitalia and gave a performance of ‘Bells Across the Water’ in the men’s toilets at Victoria Station, ‘much to the enjoyment, if not edification, of many onlookers. The applause occasioned by this rendering encouraged us to attempt, with a notable measure of success, Schillenberg’s mediaeval “Aquascutum in Plasticus”.’
