British Low Culture

From Safari Suits to Sexploitation

Leon Hunt Unpr Chq, Leon Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415151832
• eBook ISBN: 9781136189432
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Identifying 'permissive populism', the trickle down of permissiveness into mass consumption, as a key feature of the 1970s, Leon Hunt considers the values of an ostensibly 'bad' decade and analyses the implications of the 1970s for issues of taste and cultural capital. Hunt explores how the British cultural landscape of the 1970s coincided with moral panics, the troubled Heath government, the three day week and the fragmentation of British society by nationalism, class conflict, race, gender and sexuality.

1

‘THE DECADE THAT TASTE FORGOT’?

Revisiting the 1970s

There is a kind of self-hatred in the eager embrace of mediocrity which characterises so much contemporary nostalgia. The spiritual impoverishment on show in Are You Being Served? makes you worry for a decade that could have found pleasure in it, but even more for one that would want to watch it again.

Ben Thompson (1993: 59)

Like a ‘return of the repressed’, the 1970s have in recent years come to exert a grip on the popular imagination. The signs of it have been everywhere; nostalgic archival television such as Sounds of the 70s (BBC 1993), Channel 4’s ‘Glamrock Weekend’ (1995) and Match of the Seventies (BBC 1995), a series of football snapshots where sideburns shared equal billing with golden goals; the glorification of period muzak in the so-called ‘easy listening’ scene; reprints of ‘youthsploitation’ fiction published by New English Library; the recirculation of 1970s television on video and cable, with sitcoms and safari-suit crime-busting (Jason King, The Persuaders!) particular favourites; the annual spectacle of Gary Glitter prising himself back into his silver suit for his Christmas Gang Show; the rediscovery of British cinema’s last popular cycle, the sexploitation film; the rehabilitation of lava lamps and flares.

In popular accounts of the period, it’s the ‘decade that style/taste forgot’, an object of pleasurable, kitsch embarrassment. In’serious’ cultural histories, the two most frequently used words are ‘crisis’ – political/cultural crisis, Policing the Crisis – and ‘closure’. The latter is embedded, albeit quizzically, in the title of Bart Moore-Gilbert’s anthology The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? which considers the 1970s as a crisis in the grand narrative of progressive, politically and aesthetically enlightened culture. In his introduction, Moore-Gilbert offers the concept of ‘post-avantgardism’ as a negotiation of this ‘closure’, a more fragmented cultural production associated both with the impact of black, feminist, gay and lesbian politics and with new outlets and material bases for such work (workshops and specialist bookshops, for example) – ‘the context of reception and modes of address offered by a given work of art thus becomes at least as important as subversion of stylistic norms in determining political effectivity’ (Moore-Gilbert 1994: 21). Inherent in this progressive narrative is the legacy of the 1960s, characterised by an earlier volume (again with a qualifying question mark) as a ‘cultural revolution’ (Moore-Gilbert and Seed 1992). This is an important narrative, but not the one with which the present book is directly concerned.

If, ‘post-avantgardism’ notwithstanding, ‘high’ modernist narratives flounder or pause to re-gather their forces in the 1970s, the ‘low’ flourishes, particularly through an unholy alliance with the ostensibly progressive notions of sexual liberation and permissiveness. A central organising theme in this book is what I shall call ‘permissive populism’, the popular appropriation of elitist ‘liberationist’ sexual discourses, the trickle-down of permissiveness into commodity culture, the 1970s as a particularly cruel parody of the 1960s.

This book revisits an important and comparatively neglected part of British cultural history, examining shifts in understandings of class, sexuality and ‘Britishness’ through a variety of critically disdained texts. But my own positioning has some relevance here. I’m in my mid-thirties – a teenager when this material first appeared – and very much part of the target audience for the nostalgic recycling of the 1970s. Consequently, this isn’t simply a cultural history – it isn’t just about ‘then’ – but considers, also, that important component of any nostalgia, the way that memory ‘directs our attention not to the past but to the past-present relation’ (Popular Memory Group 1982: 211). In other words, how do the 1970s speak to the 1990s and how do they figure in its popular imaginary?

Such a project inevitably overlaps with the critical remapping of British culture, and particularly, in the final three chapters, of British cinema history, which tends to skip hastily from the 1960s ‘boom’ to the alleged renaissance initiated by Chariots of Fire in 1981. The metaphor of unexplored territory is a recurring one in accounts of British cinema – large areas remain ‘unknown’, or constitute, in Julian Petley’s words, a ‘lost continent’ (1986). Some of these continents are generic, some belong to ‘lost’ historical moments (silent cinema, for example) or marginalised audiences (women’s pictures). This critical remapping has, however, tended to congeal into a new orthodoxy – out with documentary and kitchen-sink realism, in with Powell and Pressburger, Gainsborough melodrama, Hammer horror. If something like Carry On is still comparatively marginal, it’s because this process of recuperation has often been dominated by a rather simplistic opposition between an implicitly ‘realist’, critically respectable British cinema and ‘non-realist’ genres such as horror and melodrama which were critically despised but often very popular. Barr (1986) and Cook (1996) have taken issue with this opposition; Barr observes the way the two strands intersect and coexist within a range of films, while Cook identifies ‘a kind of reverse elitism … the reclaiming of critically despised films for an alternative pantheon of the Romantic/Gothic smack of a distaste for commercialism and entertainment’ (23). But even she can’t avoid it entirely, and simply replaces the word ‘realist’ with ‘consensus’. It’s a stubbornly persistent conceptualisation of British popular fictions. Petley, for example, characterises the critical underdog as a ‘repressed side of British cinema, a dark, disdained thread weaving the length and breadth of that cinema, crossing authorial and generic boundaries, sometimes almost entirely invisible, sometimes erupting explosively. always received critically with fear and disapproval’ (1986: 98).

This is a very specific ‘lost continent’ – fantastic, poetic, flamboyant, unrestrained and pretty damn sexy. The problem is not with Petley’s metaphor; rather, that so many ‘lost continents’ begin to look more like the Bermuda Triangle. Reclaiming melodrama and the Gothic is one thing, but sexploitation and low-budget sitcom movies are clearly something else.

A useful point of reference would be Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), the recuperated text in British film history. Its qualifications are impeccable – the right kind of ‘bad taste’ (the bourgeois press were suitably appalled), a misunderstood auteur and a theory-friendly subject (even the characters talk about scopophilia); a victim of repressed, dreary, pathologically literal-minded Britain. But Peeping Tom belongs to another trajectory within British popular culture, one its detractors recognised more successfully than its rescuers. The film’s historical moment is also that of the emerging British sex film, a generic link it acknowledges in the casting of Pamela Green, one of the most famous ‘glamour’ models of the 1950s/60s. The film’s publicity made great capital out of her presence – a forty-foot-high cut-out of her was placed above The Plaza, Piccadilly, at the film’s premiere. Green was best known for her work with George Harrison Marks, an ‘art’ photographer/pornographer whose career encompasses 8mm striptease loops like Xcitement (1960), the nudist film Naked as Nature Intended (1960) – both featuring Green – Mary Millington’s most successful film, Come Play With Me (1977) and, more recently, artefacts even further downmarket than this book travels, ‘CP’ (corporal punishment) videos. Peeping Tom meticulously reproduces Marks’s sleazy mise-enscène in the nude photography sequences – Powell was an admirer, and employed him as stills photographer on the film. In so far as Peeping Tom’s relationship with pornography is acknowledged, it is assumed to be a critical one – one of the aggressive ‘regimes of looking’ it pathologises – but it is doubtful whether audiences in 1960 would have seen it like that. Powell’s film is a rich and fascinating one, as its numerous rereadings attest, but it’s also a sleazy, exploitative one and its canonisation has in some ways closed off some alternative routes through British cinema which would include the more titillating ‘social problem’ films (Beat Girl, 1960, The Yellow Teddybears, 1963), the censor-friendly ‘instructive’ nudist films, Hammer’s downmarket rivals Tigon, who also made skin flicks, and Pete Walker’s grim horror-thrillers.

Popular memory and the 1970s

In The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade, Christopher Booker asks, ‘what in years to come will evoke the sober, gloomy Seventies … What was the Seventies sound, the Seventies look? What was the Seventies “image”?’ (1980: 4). His answer may come as a surprise to retro-stylists, for he argues that it is ‘hardly a time which in years to come is likely to inspire us with an overpowering sense of nostalgia … we may in short remember the Seventies primarily as a kind of long, dispiriting interlude’ (ibid.: 5). While the latter would have found few dissenters in the immediate aftermath of the period, it now seems extraordinary to say that the 1970s are not stylistically recognisable. Music, film and fashion of the 1970s are ineffably time-bound, and most retrospective pieces at some point include a list of artefacts and garments (some consist of little else) – flares, hot pants, platform shoes, tank tops, Ronco Buttoneers, feather cuts and lots of crushed velvet.

Nostalgia about the 1970s tends to focus on specific parts of the decade – largely pre-punk, pre-Jubilee, pre-Winter of Discontent, and above all, pre-politically correct – and thus offers a distinctive set of pleasures. In May 1995, Channel 4 scheduled a ‘glamrock’ celebration, ‘one night of everything we love to hate about the 70s’, against BBC’s more sober VE Day celebrations. This was a striking opposition: Vera Lynn versus Gary Glitter – a sense of competing nostalgias, one ‘authentic’, the other self-consciously ironic. Only the more visibly contested 1960s come close to competing with the Second World War in terms of the nostalgia industries, whereas the 1970s are not only linked to overtly ‘bad’ memories (power cuts, three-day weeks, terrorism at home and abroad, ‘mugging’ panics) but the epitome of ‘bad taste’, the lack of that thing that the 1980s placed so much emphasis on – ‘style’.

‘Our reaction to Seventies fashion,’ wrote Jon Savage towards the end of the 1980s, ‘is as much a result of conditioning as it is a considered reaction to their cut, style and texture, for they are now directly associated with attributes that have no place in Success Culture’ (1988b: 67). Glam remains an important reference point for 1970s fashion, its excesses and recession-defying bohemianism. When Hebdige (1979) argues that white subcultural style was often a complex negotiation of the impact of black culture, he leaves glam out of the equation, calling it ‘Albino camp’. Yet Polhemus at least notes the sartorial similarities between glam and Afro-American funk styles in the early 1970s, the ‘pimp’ suits and ‘hustler’ style not only worn by musicians like George Clinton and Bootsy Collins but committed to celluloid cultdom by North American ‘blaxploitation’ classics like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972). ‘Funky chic’ fits a familiar ‘aspirational’ reading of in-your-face black subcultural style:

enormous flares in the trouser legs served to focus the eye on the contrasting ultra-tight fit around the crotch and bottom (while the use of expensive materials like suede and snakeskin underlined the Dressing Up, aspirational aspect of the message.)

(Polhemus 1994: 72)

It might be stretching a point to see glam style as white ‘funky chic’. Polhemus links it to the ‘prosperity’ of Swinging London, and yet glam’s historical moment is far from economically prosperous – it coincides with the troubled Heath government and a major recession. Moreover, the more populist appeal of Gary Glitter and The Sweet – Charles Shaar Murray calls them ‘purest meatball’ (1991: 225) – can be seen as part of an aspirational, white dressing-up culture in the face of both an unpromising economic climate and the sense that the original bohemian party had not included them on the guest list.

Nostalgia, according to Stuart Tannock:

invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient present world. The nostalgic subject turns to the past to find/construct sources of identity, agency or community, that are felt to be lacking, blocked, subverted or threatened in the present.

(1995: 454)

How did the 1970s get to be a ‘positively evaluated past-world’?The Popular Memory Group’s ‘past–present relation’ is useful here. Tannock sees nostalgia as a ‘periodizing emotion’ (ibid.: 456), implying that the past-present relation is one of plenitude and lack. He identifies three motifs in imagining this configuration: ‘a prelapsarian world (the Golden Age, the childhood Home, the Country); second, that of a “lapse” (a cut, a Catastrophe, a separation or sundering, the Fall); and third, that of the present, postlapsarian world (a world felt in some way to be lacking, deficient, or oppressive)’ (1995: 456–7).

I want to suggest that 1970s nostalgias construct the period as both ‘golden age’ and ‘Fall’, sometimes simultaneously. In the first version, the period is a pleasurable ‘Fall’ within a ‘structure of progress’ (the 1960s were more ‘hip’, the present more ‘enlightened’), recuperable only from a position of irony. In the second, 1970s gaucheness is a signifier of innocence before a Thatcherite, style-obsessed Fall. In the third, we find a pre-politically correct ‘golden age’, and embedded within this is a kind of male heterosexual fin de siècle.

‘If you can remember the seventies, you were there,’ pronounced host Jack Dee with characteristic dourness on Channel 4’s Glam Quiz. Indeed, what such programmes seem to offer is some collective experience of looking at embarrassing pictures of oneself from an earlier time. The subtext of these packaged reminiscences is How Far We Have Come to the sophisticated present day.

Lynn Spigel argues that television’s use of popular memory ‘aims to discover a past that makes the present more tolerable’:

popular memory is history for the present; it is a mode of historical consciousness that speaks to the concerns and needs of contemporary life. Popular memory is a form of storytelling through which people make sense of their own lives and culture.

(1995: 21)

For example, old television is repackaged or ‘quoted’ as camp, so that ‘the past becomes a cartoonish masquerade’ (ibid.: 18) in contrast with contemporary enlightenment. Here’s the Radio Times on Jason King:

Jason King – author, private investigator and offshoot of Department ‘S’ – was the personification of seventies man. Sporting a ludicrous moustache, flamboyant shirts, velvet catsuits and the largest of medallions, he leapt from bed to bed, purring catchphrases like ‘Whenever I feel the need for exercise I lie down until it passes.’ It’s now the most popular show on Bravo, so turn on, tune in and dust off those flares.

(21–7 October 1995: 96)

Spigel is thinking of the way North American cable channels juxtapose sitcoms from different decades, thereby constructing ‘a vision of the past that implicitly suggests the “progress” of contemporary culture’ (1995: 19). This implies a kind of inoculation – laughing at the past to celebrate the present – and there is something of this dynamic about 1970s nostalgia; no need to interrogate 1970s masculinity because it’s too kitsch to take seriously.

Already inherent in the first nostalgia – a superior, knowing relationship with the past – is the sense of a time when things were simpler, even if this involved men talking about ‘crumpet’ and ‘knockers’. In this version, ‘the decade that style forgot’ is less a souring of the bohemian 1960s than a carnivalesque orgy of vulgarity before the designer decade, before Thatcher, before style bibles and Armani-pundits like Peter York. In Peter York’s Eighties (BBC 1996), the eponymous besuited sage celebrated the ‘designer decade’ as ‘an end to everything seventies; the 3-day week, dull clothes, corporatism’. This refrain was also taken up by Robert Elms – ‘Britain in the seventies was somehow a celebration of grottiness. We didn’t know anything in the seventies.’The idea of ‘not knowing’ becomes potentially attractive within a nostalgic structure of feeling, which requires a certain amount of disavowal. Nostalgia, in Simon Frith’s words, remembers ‘a time when we didn’t know what would happen to us, a time before disappointment … A nostalgic judgement is a historical judgement, whether personally, in terms of our own regrets, or socially (so that nostalgia for the 1970s is shaped by the Thatcherite 1980s)’ (Frith and Gillett 1996: 3). This pre-Thatcher nostalgia is evident in Ashley Heath’s largely celebratory account of ‘that tank top feeling’ in The Face:

Post-Thatcher and post-yuppie, our struggling nation is looking back to all that came before the matt-black shoulder-pad talk, back to a time when the miners went on the march – and managed to bring down a government. We were a bit goosed on the economic front then, and we’re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘The decade that taste forgot’?: Revisiting the 1970s
• 2 Permissive populism: Low cultural production in the 1970s
• 3 From carnival to crumpet: Low comedy in the 1970s
• 4 Lads and loungers: Some 1970s masculinities
• 5 ‘Knuckle crazy’: ‘Youthsploitation’ fiction
• 6 Can you keep it up for a decade?: British sexploitation
• 7 Coming clean … From Robin Askwith to Mary Millington
• 8 Grim flarey tales: British horror in the 1970s Postscript: Academics behaving badly?
• Notes
• Select filmography
• Bibliography
• Index