Jonathan Coe on Kenneth Williams, sex and the Sixties

The novelist Jonathan Coe reviewed The Kenneth Williams Diaries for the London Review of Books when they were first published:

Williams found the perfect expression for his personality in the Carry On films – despite their superficially heterosexual orientation – and became such a cherished emblem of sexual insecurity for gay and straight audiences alike. 

For above all this series represents (and celebrates) a peculiarly English sexuality, one in which an addictive, almost obsessional interest in sex is combined with horror and gaucherie at the prospect of actually performing it. 

In this respect they preserve a far more accurate record of the sexual atmosphere of the Sixties than films of ‘swinging London’ like Blow Up or Darling, which offer adolescent fantasies of sexual freedom when the reality for most punters must have been closer to Carry On Camping, with Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James making a pathetic pilgrimage to a nudist camp in order to gaze longingly at the ‘birds’ – pop-eyed, helpless and fundamentally out of the running. 

What Williams and the leering, pickle-nosed James had in common, then, was their status as sexual spectators, mesmerised but fearful.

I remember being taken to see Carry On Camping at the cinema, when I must have been nine. 

But then I was taken to see Danny La Rue's Christmas show when I was eight. I was one of the children who came up on stage halfway through the show. For some reason, there weren't many children there.

Festive Francis: Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii!

It was a mark of my mother's liberal parenting that. aged 9 and 10, I was allowed to stay up late on a school night to watch Up Pompeii! I later found from a Twitter conversation with the novelist Jonathan Coe that he was granted the same dispensation.

In my case, at least, it worked. I passed O level Latin, despite receiving free school meals and having Allison Pearson in the same class.

Watching Up Pompeii! today, it stands up pretty well, notably the clever formal device whereby Howerd is constantly breaking the fourth wall to criticise the script or the audience, but none of the other characters ever does.

And the show was comforting in that it was the same every week. Poor Lurcio never got far with the prologue before Senna the Soothsayer came along, and then there was Nausius with his ode and inability to find a rhyme.

Throw in an element of plot involving high Roman politics or Lurcio's master Ludicrous Sextus's love live and you had your show.

There were a lot of nubile young women on show – a reminder that the permissive society came before feminism – but I think they were safe with Frankie. 

Note the contemporary jokes about Waggoners' Walk and decimalisation. And note Pat Coombs enjoying herself immensely as the sorceress – you never knew who would turn up in the cast.

The Joy of Six 1287

"Kemi maintained her attack on the machine. Everything was their fault. The previous Conservative government was entirely blameless. Especially her. In her own mind she was the saviour of the post office operatives. Though judging by the laughs from the back of the room, they don’t see it in quite the same way." John Crace says Kemi Badenoch was seen at her brittle, narcissistic worst while giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

Alwyn Turner tells a story that has dropped out of remembrance of the first world war: "On 19 July 1919 - declared by the government to be Peace Day - parades were staged all over the country to mark the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and at many of those parades there were demonstrations and protests. A banner in Glasgow sarcastically announced: '400,000 unemployed ex-servicemen. A grateful country will never forget you'."

Patrick Howse asks if Labour will restore the BBC to the national broadcaster we need it to be or believe it can benefit from a subservient corporation afraid to hold power to account.

"Many of the jokes, besides being hilarious, are jaw-dropping in their audacity. And there is sex, too: masses of it, sometimes erotic, sometimes shocking, but always - like the rest of the book – profoundly truthful. Fundamentally is certainly a wild ride, but besides being one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long while, it will also leave you deeply moved and (incidentally) much better informed than you were before about one of the key political crises of our time." Jonathan Coe chooses five favourite recent political novels.

Hannah Long believes that Night of the Hunter is a Christmas film. Hear her: "This promise - that evil is powerful, but ultimately ridiculous and defeatable - carries us into the final hope of the last scene, set at Christmastime. It says, in the least sentimental way possible, that it’s possible to move beyond abuse."

"‘The Whiting’ is an absent-minded vicar so passionate about entomology that he forgets everything in pursuit of an elusive Wood White or a Purple Emperor. Then there’s old Smokoe Joe, a gruff charcoal-burner with a gargantuan nose who lives in the Chase; and the boys’ nemesis, the ponderous local bobby, Sergeant Bunting." Helena Drysdale celebrates Brendon Chase by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford).

The Joy of Six 1253

Tom Forth examines the prospects for HS2 now: "Building a new railway from Birmingham to not-quite-London at Old Oak Common would be ridiculous. It is good that Labour seem likely to continue the railway to the city centre. But it is also painful that a huge national investment sold for more than a decade on the promise to benefit North England is now likely to barely benefit it at all. What little gains remain from the plan will fall overwhelmingly to London."

"Duncan came back to his foster home from college one day and found all his bags were packed. It hadn’t even been a week since he turned 18, and his foster carers were happy for him to stay. He’d been living with them since he was 11. But social services said it wasn’t an option. The police would be called if he didn’t go calmly." Greg Barradale reports on the Staying Put scheme, which is helping reduce homelessness among care leavers.

A year ago, the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket published a bombshell report that exposed many of the game’s ills. Alan White asks why the sport decided to rip the shroud away from itself, and finds out what comes next.

Jeni Rizio on the many good reasons for learning Welsh.

Melina Spanoudi visits Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop: "The bookshop is not located on the high street, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney."

"The sight of glow-worms lighting our way along the hedgerows of a country lane at the height of summer, with all the smells of hay and flowers, is delightful and often unexpected. They are a source of amazement, like seeing a shooting star." Steven Morris meets the glow-worm survey volunteers of Dorset.

Harry and Paul's Panel Show

This is very funny and makes an important point about the uselessness of a common style of comedy.

As Jonathan Coe once wrote:

When Humphrey Carpenter interviewed the leading lights of the 1960s satire boom for his book That Was Satire, That Was in the late 1990s, he found that what was once youthful enthusiasm had by now curdled into disillusionment. 

One by one, they expressed dismay at the culture of facetious cynicism their work had spawned, their complaints coalescing into a dismal litany of regret. 

John Bird: "Everything is a branch of comedy now. Everybody is a comedian. Everything is subversive. And I find that very tiresome."

Barry Humphries: "Everyone is being satirical, everything is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness."

Christopher Booker: "Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now."

Over Sea, Under Stone was dramatised in 1969

Yesterday I tweeted a list of television programmes that only I seem to remember:

Television programmes I remember that no one else does:

Gophers!; Adventure Weekly; Well Anyway; Mystery Hall; Over Sea, Under Stone; American children's series that went on for ever in the 60s and had a water tower; Captain Zeppos; The Best of Football; If You Were Me

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) July 27, 2019

It was a little exaggerated - there is a comment on this blog from the man who wrote the music for Gophers! - but largely true.

In reply, the novelist Jonathan Coe told me he remembered both Well Anyway and Adventure Weekly.

The former was a situation comedy with John Bird and John Fortune from 1976 - years after their fame in the original satire boom and more years before their rediscovery when they appeared with Rory Bremner.

The latter was a serial for children, shown on BBC1 at teatime in 1968 and 1969. In it a gang of children ran their own newspaper and I think it has links with the better remembered Here Come the Double Deckers.

But the programme that got most attention was one that no one else remembered: Over Sea, Under Stone.

This is the first book in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, but is very different in tone from the rest of the series. It starts as a children's holiday adventure of the Blyton or Saville variety, but later takes a supernatural turn.

And it really was dramatised by the BBC in 1969. Although it was, as far as I recall, a fully acted production, it was screened under the Jackanory brand. This was a show which otherwise featured an adult reading its young audience a story.

On Twitter, Matthew Kilburn said it was screened at a time when the BBC children's department wasn't meant to do drama, so badging it as Jackanory was a way of smuggling it past the suits.

Over Sea, Under Stone is on IMDB, but there is no entry for the series as a whole - here is the link for part 1.

The cast is notable, containing both Graham Crowden and Colin Jeavons. David Wood, recently in If...., is credited as "Storyteller", so maybe there was a gesture towards Jackanory's usual format before the drama broke out.

Of the children, only Roland Pickering who played Barney had much of a career as a child actor.

I have never heard anyone else mention this dramatisation and I fear the tapes were long ago wiped.

Boris Johnson? Blame Have I Got News for You and Ian Hislop

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It's too hot to write, but I can't let the accession of Boris Johnson pass without saying it is all the fault of Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You?

You'll have to register with the London Review of Books site to read it all, but back in 2013 the novelist Jonathan Coe wrote an important article while reviewing Harry Mount's The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson.

I am going to do no more than quote a few passage from it and from an article by Steven Fielding to which it points us.

So here is Coe:

When Humphrey Carpenter interviewed the leading lights of the 1960s satire boom for his book That Was Satire, That Was in the late 1990s, he found that what was once youthful enthusiasm had by now curdled into disillusionment. 

One by one, they expressed dismay at the culture of facetious cynicism their work had spawned, their complaints coalescing into a dismal litany of regret. 

John Bird: ‘Everything is a branch of comedy now. Everybody is a comedian. Everything is subversive. And I find that very tiresome.’ 

Barry Humphries: ‘Everyone is being satirical, everything is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ 

Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’

And, says Coe, that observation by Cook was developed into a Beyond the Fringe sketch about a bunch of young, would-be radical journalists who won’t admit they have sold their soul to a rapacious newspaper proprietor:

COOK: Whenever the old man has a cocktail party, there’s about ten of us – young, progressive people – we all gather up the far end of the room and … quite openly, behind our hands, we snigger at him.

BENNETT: Well, I don’t know, that doesn’t seem very much to me.

COOK: A snigger here, a snigger there – it all adds up.

The sketch makes it clear that laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest, but that it actually replaces protest.

And if you do seek out the full article you will find that Michael Frayn, in his introduction to the published script of Beyond the Fringe, made the same point at the time.

Over to Steven Fielding:

The idea that a corrupt elite is screwing a noble people is powerful and pervasive and by no means new. It is therefore no surprise that it is reflected in comedy. It is certainly a view of politics that is popular amongst neo-liberals. 

It was at the heart of the popular 1980s situation comedy Yes Minister which repeatedly showed viewers that their political leaders and civil servants were feather-bedding themselves at the tax-payers’ expense. 

This was why Margaret Thatcher loved the series: it expressed her view that, as representative politics was a moral hazard, it should be replaced as far as possible by the market.

Put like that, satire sounds distinctly right wing.

True, as Fielding points out, few comedy writers and performers are neo-liberals and many were disappointed with New Labour.

However, the cumulative effect of the same jokes ridiculing politicians and highlighting their supposed foibles can only further reinforce mistrust in the public realm, a mistrust that some political forces seek to exploit – and neo-liberals are amongst the nicest of those forces. 

Comedy has always relied on stereotypes. There was a time when the Irish were thick; the Scots careful with their money; mothers-in-law fierce and ugly; and the Welsh stole and shagged sheep. The corrupt politician is one such stereotype, one that is neither racist nor sexist and seemingly acceptable to all.

You'll have to read both article and assemble all the pieces of the argument for yourself - it's this damned heat.

But if you do, you will see why the ascension of Boris Johnson is the fault of Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You?

Later.

Reader's voice: This is all very well, but why is Ian Hislop singled out in the headline?

It's the heat. For Hislop you need to read Martin Kettle:

And what is Hislop's principal message? Week in and week out, it is that most pretty much all politicians are corrupt, deluded, incompetent, second-rate and hypocritical. Hislop's message is delivered with enviable deftness and wit, and very often it is irresistible. But it is also good-naturedly merciless. And extremely repetitive. 

There is never any sign that Hislop allows of exceptions; or that he has a political hero; or even, with the occasional honourable mention for Vince Cable, that there are politicians whom he respects. 

The impression he always gives is that today's politicians are uniformly unworthy of their inheritance, not to be compared with some previous golden age of statesmanlike effectiveness.