A historical account of the responses to questionable comedy within or in response to the BBC can be divided into two very different eras of conflict. The first of these, the internal ‘war against smut’, stretched from the very inception of the BBC in 1922, when it was given a monopoly over all UK radio, and later television, paid for by a compulsory licence fee, to 1960, when Sir Hugh Carleton Greene became the new Director-General. His appointment was a response to the crisis within BBC Television caused by the ending of its monopoly in 1955, when the Independent Television Authority began transmitting programmes funded by commercial advertising. Before Greene’s appointment, the producers of comedy that might offend were involved in an endless on-going internal fight with the BBC bureaucrats who tried to repress anything they found offensive. Greene gave the producers their freedom, but this only moved the conflict somewhere else, for the freer broadcasting of offensive comedy led to a culture war with those outside who vigorously objected to it.
During the time of its monopoly, and for a few years afterwards, the BBC operated almost as if it was a branch of the civil service when providing public service broadcasting. It was independent of the government, but the way its administrators were organized in a hierarchy, the outlook that went with this and the enormous emphasis placed on enforcing policy from the centre and on formal paperwork was that of the mandarins of the British civil service. Censorship of comedy was rigorous, particularly in relation to humour about sex or scatology, to the use of ‘bad language’ or to the mockery of religion. An elaborate code of prohibitions was imposed on radio and TV producers, and through them on performers and writers. There were even occasions in the 1940s when the Director-General himself, rendered apoplectic by a single joke contrary to ‘policy’, would intervene, firing off irate memoranda and demanding that those responsible for it be chastised.
The situation changed radically when a new libertarian Director-General, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, was appointed in 1960. Greene unleashed the producers and the comedy writers, and they came up with a series of comedy programmes characterized by bad language, smut and irreverence to the Christian religion that caused great offence but attracted exceptionally large audiences. The old-style administrative hierarchy were so conditioned to accepting and implementing orders from the top that they gave up ‘the war against dirt’ and became the enablers of the new comedy. Some of them disagreed with the changes, but the party line had changed and democratic centralism prevailed. The younger ones among them, particularly those recently recruited to run the expanding television service, welcomed the changes. It was anyway a time of very rapid social change in the wider society, changes that had nothing to do with the BBC, and the new generation saw the world very differently from their elders. Thanks to Greene, the comedy producers could now defy the administrators with impunity. The upholders of the old order still in office were not always happy with this, but they were well aware that the tide of social change outside the BBC was running strongly against them, and it was easier to drift with it rather than fight the new Director-General. Even so, John Arkell, Director of Administration, wrote to Greene opposing, in Tracey’s words, the new ‘untrammelled freedom of the producer’, with the role of the layers above being not to control but to cushion the pressure from outside. If this were BBC policy, Arkell added in an acid aside, ‘then the TV service is being run by a staff with an average age of twenty-seven’ (Tracey 1983, 219). However, the centre of the conflicts had now moved from inside the BBC to being one between the BBC and its external critics.
Those who resented most this new wave of smutty and irreverent comedy were the people outside the organization who had loved the ancien régime, the old BBC known as Auntie, precisely because it was prim and proper, respectable and responsible. In particular, their indignation was expressed through the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) led by Mrs. Mary Whitehouse. They were quite unable to accept the new comedies that Greene had enabled. They campaigned strongly against them and with considerable personal hostility to Greene himself. They fought a long war of attrition against the transformed BBC and won several tactical victories, including the toppling of Greene himself (Thompson 2012, 87–88). But despite these victories, they lost their war against the new permissiveness in broadcast comedy. They lost mainly because the wider social changes that had enabled the BBC to change direction continued, and the large and vocal minority who supported their campaign shrank in size. The remnant lost confidence in its ability ever to reverse the unwelcome shifts not just in the BBC, but in society at large. British society had become more secular, freer in its sexual behaviour and attitudes and increasingly tolerant of homosexuality. The critics lost the culture war and failed substantially to curb BBC comedy in the ways that mattered to them.
The Era of the Little Green Book
From its inception, the BBC had strongly curbed comedy, which was easily done when radio programmes were made in the studio using carefully vetted scripts, but tensions arose during World War II when outside radio broadcasts became common, often with a live audience of men serving in the armed forces, who were used to ribald humour. This led to transgressions that provoked a series of vigorous interventions from as high as the Director-General himself that could reduce the minions dealing with comedy to a state of obsequious groveling. On 30 January 1941, the comedian Sydney Howard introduced an unscripted off-colour gag into a forces programme to the horror of the producer D. Miller and of Jack Payne who was in charge of musical continuity. A badly frightened Payne wrote a very angry letter to Howard, accusing him of doing it maliciously. Payne was minding his back, for he also wrote demeaning letters of apology and exculpation to Roger H. Eckersley, Organiser of Programmes, to John Watt, Director of Variety and to the Director-General F.W. Ogilvie himself, until he felt he was entirely in the clear and could write, ‘I am glad to know, Director-General, that you don’t blame me’. The joke had proved to be no laughing matter. 1
At the end of the war, the BBC began codifying its censorship of comedy into a set of mandatory written rules. In September 1945, Michael Standing, the Director of Variety, drew up a formal censorship code insisting that programmes be entirely free of obscene and blasphemous language. There was to be no use of ‘God! Good God! My God! Blast! Hell! Damn! Bloody! Gor Blimey! and Ruddy!’ It was followed by the Television Policy Censorship Code of January 1947. In 1948, Standing produced the definitive BBC Variety Programmes Policy Guide for Writers and Producers that came to be known as The Green Book. 2 The little Green Book stated sternly that:
There is an absolute ban on the following:
Jokes about—Lavatories, Pre-natal influences, Marital infidelity, Effeminacy in men, Immorality of any kind (as well as) suggestive references to Honeymoon couples, Chambermaids, Fig-leaves, Prostitution, Ladies Underwear e.g. winter draws on, Animal habits, e.g. rabbits, Lodgers (and) Commercial Travelers.
Like all such censorship codes, The Green Book was always being extended to include new words and situations. Nothing was ever deleted, but new forbidden items were added whenever there was unease at the top, making it more and more restrictive over time. The comedy performer Nicholas Parsons could still, decades later, ‘remember being told by one producer when recording a stand-up show that I couldn’t use the word naked as a punch line to a joke, it was a banned word in the little Green Book’s guidance and censorship’ (Parsons 2008). The little Green Book was strict not only on smut but also on irreverence:
Sayings of Christ or descriptive of Him are, of course, inadmissible for light entertainment programmes […]. Jokes built around Bible stories, e.g. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, must also be avoided or any sort of parody of them […]. Reference to and jokes about different religious or religious denominations are banned. The following are also inadmissible:—Jokes or comic songs about spiritualism, christenings, religious ceremonies of any description (e.g. weddings, funerals).
The absolutism of the code is emphasized by the instruction that ‘Warming up sequences with studio audiences before broadcasting should conform to the same censorship standards as the programmes themselves. Sample recordings should be submitted to the same censorship as transmissions.’ In other words, the code was not just a means of avoiding complaints from offended listeners but of upholding the inner purity of the BBC, one of Britain’s sacred hierarchies, a special space secluded from the vulgarity and commercialism of the outside world and its laughter. Those responsible for this code of practice for broadcast humour clearly felt that it might give rise to ridicule, should the general public learn of its existence and detailed content, for the file is marked as being only for reference and ‘not for circulation’, with a further note that it must be ‘kept in the office and not taken away by outside producers’.
The files of the BBC reveal just how emphatically the rules were enforced. They are full of edicts, memoranda, and denunciations from senior officials directed against errant producers of comedy programmes. Their missives tell us all we need to know about the internal tensions within the Corporation. The use of capital letters to indicate shock-horror is particularly revealing:
Cecil McGivern. Television Programme Director to producers. 11 August 1947Subject. Over-runs and smut. URGENT and IMPORTANT.SMUTThere have […] been examples in variety programmes lately of very doubtful gags and songs. If a producer is not capable of deciding what is smut and embarrassing to the average householder, then he should not be producing. 3
Poor McGivern, a gifted enabler of new programmes, was under constant pressure from above. On 8 December 1947 he wrote to his superiors in the hierarchy: ‘You will see from the attached the constant war I wage against dirt. The chief reason for the dirt is that our variety producers are young and inexperienced in BBC ways. They must be trained. And are being so. But alas! it takes a little time.’ 4 On 8 October 1952, Ronald Waldman, Head of Light Entertainment, sent a missive to all producers, saying: ‘Twice in the last five weeks we have been treated to the lavatory gag in Light Entertainment Programmes. It is NOT funny and NOT suitable in television […]. I shall have to treat any further lapses of taste with extreme severity and this must not be considered an idle threat.’ 5 On 24 March 1954, there was a broadside from the Director-General himself, Sir Ian Jacob, to the Director of Television Broadcasting. Jacob complained that the television service was seriously departing from BBC policy and standards, notably in its indecent light entertainment programmes and concluded ‘Unless action is taken soon to stop this kind of thing there will very soon be no standards left and the drift downhill will go right through the Corporation.’ 6
These splenetic letters are an indication of a guerrilla war within the BBC between the administrators and those doing the creative work—the producers and performers of comedy. The administrators waged a ‘war against smut’, by which they meant sexual and lavatorial jokes, innuendo and cross-dressing. Their use of angry phrases such as ‘despite orders, remonstration and constant harping’, ‘serious outbreak of questionable and suggestive material’, indicate how upset they were and their rage was backed up by threats. To mark a memorandum URGENT and even URGENT and IMPORTANT, in capital letters, when it deals with a mere joke, indicates the extent of their bile. The administrators sound like petulant schoolmasters haranguing their impudent charges as when they say ‘dirt and nastiness’, ‘it is NOT funny and NOT suitable’. The use of terms like these is guaranteed to produce smirks and sniggers among those thus admonished. In 1947, Cecil McGivern, Television Programme Director, complained that ‘variety producers tend to smile behind their hands whenever I complain of smut in variety shows’. 7
The administrators saw themselves as part of a strict hierarchy imbued with moral purpose, what they would have called the BBC ethos. Obedience was for them a key virtue and directives from above were responded to with great deference partly because the administrators’ careers depended on obeying orders, and partly beca...