Playing Gay in the Golden Age of British TV

Stephen Bourne

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780750990134
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750993630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

THE TELEVISION SET – the humble box in the corner of almost every British household – has brought about some of the biggest social changes in modern times. It gives us a window into the lives of people who are different from us: different classes, different races, different sexualities. And through this window, we've learnt that, perhaps, we're not so different after all. Playing Gay in the Golden Age of British TV looks at gay male representation on and off the small screen – from the programmes that hinted at homoeroticism to Mary Whitehouse's Clean Up TV campaign, and The Naked Civil Servant to the birth of Channel 4 as an exciting 'alternative' television channel. Here, acclaimed social historian Stephen Bourne tells the story of the innovation, experimentation, back-tracking and bravery that led British television to help change society for the better.

1

Homosexuality, the Law and the Birth of Television

When the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting in 1922 (radio only; television followed in 1936) it did not consider homosexuality a subject that was fit for public discussion. In Britain, sexual relationships between men remained against the law until 1967. In that year, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexual acts. However, the ways such men are described is relatively new. Today, the term LGBTQI+ is considered inclusive and it is frequently used, but in the early part of the twentieth century the word ‘homosexual’ was still uncommon, and used mostly by academics or doctors. Admittedly it was a time of innocence about sex in general, but homosexuality was not discussed in families, or taught in schools. In 1992, James Gardiner explained some of the reasons for this ‘silence’ in his book A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover:

In Great Britain before 1885, homosexual acts were not directly legislated against, but fell within the scope of the 1533 Act of King Henry VIII which made the ‘detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast’ a criminal act punishable with ‘death and losses and penalties of their goods chattels debts lands and tenements’.¹

The 1533 Act remained in substance on the Statute Book until 1967. The last execution for ‘homosexual buggery’ took place in 1832, and the death penalty for the crime was not abolished until the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. After 1861, men who were proved to have had sex with other men were imprisoned for life. With the passing of the notorious Labouchere Amendment in 1885, all homosexual activity became a criminal offence and punishable by terms of up to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

Gardiner added: ‘in Victorian England homosexuality was considered a great evil by society at large, an unmentionable horror. The word homosexual was not even invented until 1869 and, together with its contemporary equivalent ‘invert’, was considered unprintable.’² Prosecutions were seldom reported in the press. Only the most sensational cases, involving members of the aristocracy or public figures, were highlighted, and even then with no real detail. The popular dramatist Oscar Wilde was the first ‘celebrity’ to become a victim of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment and, if his trials were widely reported, it was only to expose his ‘consummate wickedness and show where the paths of such debauchery (particularly consorting socially with the working-classes) might lead.’³ As far as the medical profession was concerned, homosexuality was considered at best a mental sickness, and one that could be ‘treated’ by aversion therapy. Men who were attracted to their own sex had little choice but to view themselves as sick and abnormal, social pariahs and perverts. For decades gay men referred to heterosexual men as ‘normal’, thus excluding themselves from any claim to normality.

Until the 1960s it was considered unthinkable for a gay man to be interviewed on television. That changed with two prominent actuality series: ITV’s This Week (1964) and the BBC’s Man Alive (1967). By the 1990s attitudes had changed, and in 1997 a range of lesbian and gay interviewees were seen on BBC television in the series It’s Not Unusual, a history of lesbians and gays in Britain. They included Ray Bagley, who was born in Warwickshire. He explained what it was like to grow up gay in the 1930s, a time when television was in its infancy. He knew there was something different about himself when he was growing up, ‘but you see no-one talked about this, it wasn’t discussed, there was nothing on the television, in the papers, in books, or anything.’⁴ Bagley’s view is typical of most gay men of his generation; however, by the 1930s, there were gay sub-cultures beginning to emerge in cities up and down the country. Like-minded men began to reach out and meet each other in secret. However, because of the draconian law, which could lead them to imprisonment, discretion amongst gay men was still vital and information tended to be spread by word-of-mouth, much of it around London’s West End in areas like Soho. Yet the experiences of individual gay men could vary. For example, in their autobiographies, the exhibitionist Quentin Crisp (see Chapter 19) and policeman Harry Daley gave contrasting accounts of their lives as homosexuals in London in the 1930s. Unlike most gay men of their generation, neither concealed their sexuality, and in doing so they both took enormous risks. Crisp was subjected to appalling homophobia, both verbal and physical. In The Naked Civil Servant (1968) he recalled:

Blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick, I paraded the dim streets of Pimlico … As my appearance progressed from the effeminate to the bizarre, the reaction of strangers passed from startled contempt to outraged hatred. They began to take action. If I was compelled to stand still in the street in order to wait for a bus or on the platform of an Underground railway station, people would turn without a word and slap my face; if I was wearing sandals, passers-by took care to stamp on my toes.⁵

Harry Daley joined the Metropolitan Police in 1925 and completed his service in 1950. Stationed as a constable in Hammersmith, he did little or nothing to disguise his sexual preferences. In This Small Cloud: A Personal Memoir (1986), he wrote:

My personal background to all this was one of great happiness. It was a period of making friends and enemies – the pleasure brought by the former easily outweighing the worry of the latter. My friendships outside the police were rather unconventional and seemed to be the cause of animosity towards me by certain policemen … The policemen hostile to me were mostly married men.⁶

In the early, formative years of British television, the lives of gay men remained invisible. In 1926, the BBC’s Royal Charter barred the transmission of ‘controversial material’ but homosexuality was not mentioned specifically. The word ‘homosexual’ was not mentioned on British television until 1953, and the first factual programmes about homosexuality were not produced until 1957. In drama, only Patrick Hamilton’s Rope – produced five times between 1939 and 1957 – presented gay characters, Granillo and Brandon, but they were not explicitly gay and, if any viewer was aware of their sexuality, the couple conformed to the popular image of gay men as immoral and unnatural.

When the BBC began its high-definition television service on 2 November 1936, there were only 300 receivers available to pick up their first transmissions, but the new medium soon began to catch on with the public and, according to John Caughie:

Television drama was a central component of the early schedules, both pre-war, in the period up to September 1939 when the service was terminated for the duration of the war, and immediately post-war, when the service was reopened in June 1946. In the week beginning 25 December 1938, for instance, of the 22 hours 39 minutes transmitted, 14 hours 10 minutes were given over to drama (including some repeats) … In the immediate post-war period, drama usually occupied eight to ten hours of a very slightly expanded schedule.⁷

From 1936 to 1955, Britain had one television channel – the BBC – and all of its output was live. In the early years, television was transmitted three hours a day to a limited audience. This was predominantly affluent and middle-class because it was an expensive commodity – a television set cost the same as a new car. Between 1936 and 1949 it was only shown in the London area.

The early television dramas of the BBC were mostly photographed stage plays. For some, it was an exciting medium to work in. When the actress Pauline Henriques was interviewed about her television debut in 1946 in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, she recalled, ‘I thought television was wonderful because theatre came into the sitting-rooms of viewers. We only had one television camera and it was static. It was fixed to the studio floor and didn’t move and yet a sort of magic came out of this chaos.’⁸

From 1936 to 1957, virtually no retrievable examples of drama productions exist. Consequently, it is difficult to analyse the programmes in any depth, as John Caughie explained:

While cinema historians have a continuous, though incomplete, history of films from the 1890s, television has a pre-history in which programmes themselves do not exist in recorded form. Transcription, or recording television on film, was not developed till 1947, and recording on tape was technologically possible first in the US in 1953, and was probably not readily available in Britain till around 1958. Neither was in routine use till the 1960s, and even when recording was possible there is a long chain of missing links which have been wiped from the record either to reuse the tapes or to save storage space … This makes the recovery of the early history of television form and style an archaeological, rather than a strictly historical procedure.⁹

The BBC’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which, in 1954, was telerecorded (filmed on 35mm from a television monitor), is one of the few surviving television plays from the medium’s early years. Sadly, none of the television plays mentioned in this book which were transmitted between 1939 and 1957 exist.

Television has always been looked upon as a poor relation to cinema and other art forms. When the television analyst and historian Keith Howes was interviewed in Capital Gay in 1994, he said: ‘Television and radio are as good as film, theatre, sculpture, painting and any of the other arts but they are totally neglected and derided in this country.’¹⁰ It took the British Film Institute (BFI) over half a century to consent to the National Film Archive (NFA) adding television to its title. The NFA began preserving film in 1933, just three years before the BBC launched its television service, but it was not until the late 1950s that it began to recognise the importance of preserving television. Though the NFA appointed its first Television Acquisitions Officer in 1959, it took until 1993 for the scale of this commitment to be recognised and the words ‘and Television’ were finally added to the title. Consequently, the NFA became the National Film and Television Archive.

Notes

1. James Gardiner, A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover (Serpent’s Tail, 1992), p. 82.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ray Bagley, ‘The Age of Innocence (1920–1951)’, It’s Not Unusual, BBC2, tx 16 May 1997. See also Alkarim Jivani, It’s Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the Twentieth Century (Michael O’Mara, 1997), pp. 85–6.

5. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Ser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Mark Gatiss
• Foreword by Russell T Davies
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note
• The Golden Age of British Television
• Preface
• Out of the Archives
• Part 1: 1930s to 1950s
• Part 2: 1960s
• Part 3: 1970s
• Part 4: 1980s
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• About the Author