Family Britain, 1951-1957 (69 page)

Yet Albion in 1954 was no longer – if it ever had been – in a convertible state. ‘Well-dressed young mothers air their bonny babies, well-washed matrons and healthy looking men pace the streets,’ had been Gladys Langford’s experience a few weeks earlier in the East End as she walked ‘the length of Commercial Street’, which she had known half a century earlier. ‘ “Itchy Park” is no longer a weed-ridden waste but a well-planned garden and its benches are no longer tenanted by lousy tramps and aged crones. Well-dressed young housewives wheel fat infants along its paths.’ That same Saturday, 9 October, Nella Last in Barrow was chatting to the manager of the local ‘Co-op Furnishing Shop’, and he told her, ‘I can sell more washing machines & these new “steam” electric irons than anything else.’ White goods mattered, as an unwell Judy Haines reflected on the last Monday, ie wash day, of November: ‘Thanked God and Abbé for the washing machine – but I let it over-run! Mopped up half a bucket of water.’ Apart from some concerns about inflation, running at around 3.5 per cent, the economic indicators for the year had been undeniably good – industrial production, employment, exports and consumer expenditure all continuing to rise – and in mid-December the finance subcommittee of Labour’s National Executive Committee discussed, at Crossman’s suggestion, ‘the problems of Socialism in a boom’:

Gaitskell was in the chair and immediately suggested that we should ask the opinions of four representative economists on the prospects of the boom’s continuing. After some consultation with Harold Wilson, Gaitskell named Richard Kahn, Austin Robinson and Sir Donald MacDougall. I myself was baffled as to what these eminent gentlemen are to do and, as a division bell rang at that moment, I asked Gaitskell in the lobby. He explained to me that, from his strict economic point of view, the sort of questions I was putting were irrelevant: I was talking about a psychological boom, not an economists’ boom.

‘He seemed to feel,’ added Crossman even more tellingly, ‘that I should be content with this reply.’
⁶

Radio still largely meant BBC radio, but one evening this autumn Gladys Langford rather surprisingly went to ‘the Lucozade sponsored Quiz programme run by Radio Luxembourg’. The compère was Hughie Green – ‘a poor comedian I thought’ – and Langford was struck by how he ‘in many instances practically put the words for answers into the contestants’ mouths’. As for those around her, ‘the majority of the audience was of the charwoman and “Teddy boy” type’. On the BBC itself, this was the autumn that the Goons, with their fifth series, were at their hugely popular zenith. Certainly it was the high point of John Lennon’s addiction to them, an addiction that involved a mastery over all the voices and catchphrases, not least Bluebottle’s ‘Dirty rotten swine!’ Episodes in the series included ‘The Whistling Spy Enigma’, ‘The Affair of the Lone Banana’ and ‘Dishonoured, or The Fall of Neddie Seagoon’, but probably the most celebrated went out on 12 October, three days after Lennon’s fourteenth birthday. ‘The Goons (Home) have been talking, rather confusedly, about batter puddings,’ was the somewhat starchy reaction of the
Listener
’s drama critic J. C. Trewin to ‘The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea)’, written wholly by Spike Milligan. ‘There were sharp crackles, “By the light of a passing glue factory I saw that Eccles was wearing only one boot”; and only once or twice I heard a curious hissing noise and knew that my teeth were bared.’ A crucial part of
The Goon Show
mix, and presumably appeal, was its jibes against such sacrosanct institutions as the church, the army and the Foreign Office – jibes ‘embedded in the madness’, in Philip Norman’s apt words, ‘like hooks in blubber’. But late in the year, in ‘Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest’, they went too far by including a banquet scene in which Churchill (impersonated by Peter Sellers) was under the table ‘looking for a blasted telegram’, prompting the BBC to ban forthwith any further such impressions.

From Tuesday, 2 November, there was a new entrant in the comedy lists.
Hancock’s Half Hour
, written by the youthful pair Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, made its debut on the Light Programme at 9.30, immediately after John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, and was facetiously billed in the
Radio Times
as ‘the first of a series of programmes based on the life of the lad ’imself from the files of the Police Gazette’. Those appearing, in addition to the 30-year-old Tony Hancock, were the future stalwarts Sidney James and Bill Kerr, Moira Lister (in the unenviable role of Hancock’s girlfriend), Gerald Campion (television’s Billy Bunter) – and Kenneth Williams. ‘BBC 10 a.m. Camden Theatre,’ he noted the previous Saturday. ‘Recording of “Hancock Half-Hour” went very well really, and I got through OK.’ This opening episode was called ‘The First Night Party’, with Hancock hosting a reception for BBC chiefs and newspaper critics. ‘It is easy to imagine the comic potentialities of this idea,’ claimed the
Radio Times
in advance, while afterwards Trewin described how ‘the expansively ecstatic ’Ancock presided, with intermittently contagious good spirits, over a new comic medley (“Higgins!” he cried to the Park Lane butler, “Cut another sturgeon!”)’.

Inevitably it would take a while for the fully formed Hancock persona to emerge (first on radio, later on television also), but once it did it was unique, perhaps best distilled by Roger Wilmut:

Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock II, of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam; dressed in a Homburg hat and a heavy overcoat with an astrakhan collar of uncertain age; a failed Shakespearean actor with pretensions to a knighthood and no bookings; age – late 30s but claims to be younger; success with women – nil; financial success – nil; a pretentious, gullible, bombastic, occasionally kindly, superstitious, avaricious, petulant, over-imaginative, semi-educated, gourmandising, incompetent, cunning, obstinate, self-opinionated, impolite, pompous, lecherous, lonely and likeable fall-guy.

Hancock was undoubtedly
the
comedian of the 1950s, acutely mirroring many of the prevailing aspirations and frustrations, above all social and sexual.
Hancock’s Half-Hour
was also a pioneering type of radio comedy. ‘Non-domestic with no jokes and no funny voices, just relying on caricature and situation humour,’ was Galton and Simpson’s firm intention from the start, and though they were initially thwarted precisely by (among other things) Kenneth Williams’s funny voices, increasingly there was, as Peter Goddard has put it, ‘a naturalism of language, characterisation and location allowing for almost-believable story lines and audience identification’.
⁷

Radio’s nemesis was implacably gaining ground – 163,872 new television licences were issued during October, a monthly record, taking the total up to some 3.8 million – but Gladys Langford continued to resist. ‘I still dislike TV,’ she reflected after watching the arrival of the Emperor of Abyssinia on a fellow-resident’s set at her north London hotel. ‘The figures are so tiny. I thought the Queen looked very drab, the Duke of Edinburgh slouches and the Duke of Gloucester was wearing spectacles. Winston Churchill looks a very, very old man.’ There were three especially notable new series.
Fabian of the Yard
was a Scotland Yard drama series filmed in documentary style and based on a real-life detective;
Zoo Quest
, produced and presented by a very fresh-faced David Attenborough, had not only film of an expedition to West Africa but also, in the studio, some of the animals brought back to London Zoo; and
Ask Pickles
was self-explanatory. ‘As soon as I saw that lean face, perfectly creased by years of practice into the right, warm smile, leaning into my parlour to say “ ’Ow do,” ’ wrote a relieved James Thomas in the
News Chronicle
, ‘I thought: “Doan’t thee wurry, lad, tha’s picked thisen another winner.” ’ Thomas did identify a possible problem of intrusiveness, but overall applauded Pickles because he ‘risks putting before the biggest audience in Europe an unrehearsed string of ordinary folk who make you wonder what they are going to
say
next’. Bernard Hollowood disagreed, laying into the blessed Wilfred in his regular
Punch
column on television. He accused Pickles of wallowing ‘smugly in a nauseating glue-pot of mawkishness’ and making ‘a public parade of emotion that is essentially private’, as he ‘unites long-separated lovers, friends and relatives, parades the afflicted, champions the hopeless ambitions of the untalented’. In short, declared Hollowood, he ‘persuades millions of viewers to become Peeping Toms, eavesdroppers, keyhole snoopers’.
⁸

Far more controversial, though, was Nigel Kneale’s powerful television adaptation of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four
, including a particularly disturbing brainwashing scene. It went out live (including a live orchestra) on the evening of Sunday, 12 December, immediately after
What’s My Line?
, and starred Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Although ‘put on with many a caution toward the kiddies and old and susceptible’ (in Philip Hope-Wallace’s caustic words), the protesting phone calls flooded in almost from the start, followed over the next few days by press outrage and Commons motions accusing the BBC of needlessly frightening its viewers. ‘Many said it should not have been broadcast on a Sunday – the evening of “family viewing”,’ was a common opinion among the BBC’s Viewing Panel (giving a Reaction Index of only 39), while ‘ “it should not have been broadcast at all, because it wasn’t entertainment” was a frequent statement’. Among those also watching was the writer Sid Chaplin. ‘Bad, I thought, in several ways,’ he told a friend. ‘Reaction of many shocked people was I think a true instinct – human beings have proved themselves bigger than the diabolical torturers pictured. The end was just disgusting.’ He did add, though, that it was ‘good that 1 mill – perhaps more – should see this exposure of social engineering’. On Thursday the 16th a second performance, this time straight after
Sportsview
, won the biggest television audience since the Coronation. It was, predictably, a talking point on next evening’s
Any Questions?.
‘I like to see the BBC showing a bit of courage,’ declared Anthony Wedgwood Benn from the County Secondary Modern School at Ilminster, ‘and if there was public protest about this I think it was quite right in view of the nature of the play for the BBC to go ahead with it. (
A little applause
.) I’m glad anyway one person in the audience agrees with me.’

‘Two hours of absorbing horror comic for the delectation of millions,’ was Hollowood’s verdict on the adaptation, and amid a renewed storm of public outrage about American horror comics the allusion was deliberately topical. ‘A bit of Christmas shopping (I am getting on very early with it, this year),’ noted Madge Martin in mid-November, ‘then to an exhibition, held in the N.U.T. [National Union of Teachers] headquarters near St Pancras, of “comics” for children. It was to show how dreadful the “horror” comics are, and a campaign is being launched, successfully, to ban them. They certainly are revolting.’ Soon afterwards, Peter Mauger in
Picture Post
reiterated his call of two years earlier, declaring that ‘either we can protect the “freedom” of a few unscrupulous publishers to make money by degrading the minds of our young people – or we can protect our children’s freedom to develop normally, free from this dangerous drug’. But given that the sales of such comics were in fact far lower than those of British comics, was legislation to ban them really the answer? ‘A sample number of copies were produced and handed round by the Home Secretary,’ a flippant Harold Macmillan recorded after a Cabinet discussion in early 1955. ‘There were not quite enough copies for us all – so cries were heard “come on, now, David, let’s have a look” or “I say: Fred, you might give a chap a chance” and so on . . .’ Eventually, bowing to public opinion and resisting Roy Jenkins’s stirring parliamentary defence of freedom of expression, the government did go ahead and legislate.
⁹

Freedom of artistic expression was probably not Gladys Langford’s credo either. ‘I shall go to no more modern art shows unless they are free for I get no pleasure out of contemplating modern art,’ she reflected in October after inspecting an exhibition of ‘British Painting & Sculpture 1954’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She had wisely (from her point of view) skipped the solo show by the 26-year-old John Bratby. ‘Bratby does his vehement damnedest to extract the last ounce of desperate passion from the spectre-eyed ladies and the higgle-piggle of objects crowded on the kitchen table that are his subject matter,’ reckoned the
Spectator
’s M. H. Middleton. ‘On goes the paint, trowel-thick, in great linear strips that follow the form like livid weals.’ And overall, ‘the result too often suggests rather a desperate desire for intensity than a desperate intensity’. Other critics, though, were much more receptive: John Russell in the
Sunday Times
asserted that Bratby’s rendition of a cornflakes packet edged Velázquez’s
Rokeby Venus
;
Studio Magazine
ranked him with Rembrandt and Goya; and in the
New Statesman
the young, very left-wing John Berger declared that Bratby had created a style entirely his own: ‘To enter the Beaux Arts Gallery is to enter Bratby’s home. This is partly because his subjects are his wife, his sister-in-law, his kitchen table, his dog, his groceries: but far more profoundly because you are compelled to share his most intense and personal emotions. His personality is a desperate one and you are held by his glittering eye.’ Indeed, asserted Berger, he paints ‘as though he sensed that he only had one more day to live’, and ‘a packet of corn-flakes on a littered kitchen table as though it were part of a last supper’.