History of England 1-6

The play was jeered and heckled at its opening. Sir Ralph Richardson, who played the charming, sinister and palpably insane Dr Rance, was advised from the stalls to ‘give up your knighthood!’ Orton’s penchant for ‘black farce’ had its counterpart in what has been called the ‘comedy of menace’. Where theatre was concerned, black was a tone that leaked into the brightest palettes of the time. Harold Pinter gave tacit approval to the expression ‘comedy of menace’, but the comedic quality was not always easy to discern. He had begun to write in the late Fifties, but it was in the Sixties that his reputation began its true ascent. The Caretaker was performed in 1960, and The Homecoming six years later. In The Homecoming, the tale springs from the common motif of two strangers coming to town. In the course of the plot a husband returns from America to his workingclass family, all male, with a woman he announces as his wife. She behaves in a remarkably unwifely manner, proceeding to seduce two of his brothers in front of him. It soon becomes clear that the brothers and paterfamilias want to keep her, as sister, as mother, and as something else – a something hinted at in the word ‘business’. The husband departs for America, leaving his willing wife in the hands of his father and brothers, who comprise a brood as clinging as it is predatory. Pinter’s gift to the theatre of the Sixties was his willingness to carve in negative space, to saturate the pause and the silence with generally malevolent intent. Asked what his plays were concerned with, even what they were about, he replied, ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.’

As if in harmony, the dystopian strain in English fiction returned. Anthony Burgess composed A Clockwork Orange, ‘being the adventures of a young man whose principal hobbies are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven’. Set in a not-too-distant future, it lays out a society at once authoritarian and feckless, in which the untrammelled young have adopted an argot called ‘nadsat’. The intent behind the devising of this patois, a kind of thieves’ cant of the future, was to render the book ageless. It incorporates English, Romany, and cockney rhyming slang, but above all, Russian. In a West that had heard Khrushchev’s grandiose threat ‘We will bury you!’, it was all too plausible that Russian should become the language of power.

The young man, Alex, has nothing to complain of. He is clearly of the middle class, and as clearly a sociopath. There is no reason behind his savage quest for unending self-gratification – indeed, it is his lack of obvious criminal motivation that makes him so unsettling, particularly to those who look for some ‘trauma’ to explain the existence of evil. He leads a gang of three ‘droogs’ on night-time escapades which reliably end in careless and sickening violence. When not with his pals, he is given to the casual rape of underage girls, and to Beethoven. When the gang turns against him, he finds himself in prison. There he is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, a kind of extreme aversion therapy which renders the patient incapable of violence or lust. When he is released into the world, his former victims, finding that he is helpless, beat, humiliate, abuse and incarcerate him. At last Alex is given the opportunity to reverse the treatment, an opportunity of which he happily avails himself. In the last chapter (omitted from the American version), a sedate and subdued Alex realizes that the lust for destruction has ebbed from him. Rather than remaining a ‘clockwork orange’, he may find the will to rejoin the human race.

Of the many people anxious to let wholesome light into this dark world, Mary Whitehouse, a Warwickshire housewife, was the most vociferous. Spurred on by what she considered the moral cowardice, even treachery, of the BBC, she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in the early Sixties. From the pens of the bespectacled, redoubtable Whitehouse and her followers poured a steadily swelling torrent of complaint. Once, asked whether she had actually seen a programme that had so offended her, she replied with mocking disdain: ‘I have too much respect for my mind!’ When it was insinuated, in an interview with Johnny Speight, that her views were fascist, Whitehouse successfully sued the BBC. It was one of several private prosecutions she mounted – few had the same success, though many proved influential.

Those who disagreed with her were apt to do so in satirical fashion. Soon after the Speight affair, Till Death Us Do Part, a television series written by Johnny Speight which depicted the comically hapless struggle of Alf Garnett against the forces of progress, had Garnett reading one of her works and cheering every line. Whitehouse had objected to the repeated use of the word ‘bloody’ on that programme; in that episode, the ‘bloody’s flowed without cease.