My favourites of his shows were the Q-series on BBC2, which began in 1969 with Q5. The shows were brilliantly anarchic compilations of (sometimes unfinished) sketches featuring memorable creations such as The First Irish Rocket to the Moon, the Pakistani Daleks, the Cock-A-knees (cockneys) and Adolph Hitler doing an impression of George Formby.
Some people didn't get Spike's humour, but few would have wanted to censor his TV shows for tastelessness or "political incorrectness", because social and media taboos then were not the same as they are today. In those days, parents might happily let their offspring stay up to watch Q5, but leap into disapproving action at the slightest hint of nudity, blasphemy or realistic violence, yanking the TV plug from its socket and shooing the kids quickly off to bed.
It's not that parents in those days were especially prudish, it's just that most of them didn't regard explicit sex and violence as suitable material for youngsters. It seems strange now to think that people were so reserved about such matters, but the truth is that the "let it all hang out" revolution of the swinging sixties might as well have happened on the planet Jupiter, for all the effect it had on the average British family.
In the forty years since, we have seen an almost complete reversal, with the BBC and commercial channels nightly pouring a stream of unpleasantness into British living rooms, whilst restricting anything that might infringe the complex, unwritten codes of multi-culturalism. Thus, programme makers can revile Christianity with impunity, but can say nothing against Islam. They can heap contempt upon white Anglo-Saxons, but cannot make jokes about minorities. They will screen graphic images of people being knifed or shot, but say nothing that might link such crimes with particular ethnic populations. They will broadcast detailed discussions of sexual deviancy, but will never assert that heterosexual marriage is the more likely route to happiness and fulfilment.
Seeing how innocent was the TV output of forty years ago compared with today, it is surprising that public opposition to broadcast violence, pornography and bad language was much stronger and more vocal then than it is now. Chief among the opposition groups was “Clean Up TV” (later the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association) set up in 1965 by the formidable Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her supporters.
Mary Whitehouse was a housewife and art teacher, whose strong Christian faith impelled her to do something about what she saw as the nation's ”moral collapse”. She took on the might of the media establishment, who at first treated her with condescension, refusing to meet her and ”losing” her letters. But she continued undeterred: the membership of the NVLA soared (eventually reaching a peak of 150,000) and the middle-aged, West Midlands housewife could no longer be ignored.
Mrs Whitehouse's campaigning achieved some notable successes: in 1976 she received an apology from the Director-General of the BBC in response to a complaint about undue violence in an episode of the children's sci-fi drama Doctor Who; and the following year she achieved a successful private prosecution of Gay News for blasphemy. She influenced the formation of several pieces of legislation, including the Protection of Children Act (1978), the Indecent Displays Act (1981) and (following a campaign against ”video nasties”) the Video Recordings Act (1984). In 1988, she was involved in the establishment of the Broadcasting Standards Council, the precursor to present-day Ofcom.
Whitehouse became a national figure, attracting admiration and ridicule in equal amounts. The establishment tried to paint her as a small-minded, small-town prude, unhealthily repressed and out of touch with the modern world. But her efforts resonated with many people around the country, especially parents concerned about the corrupting influence of increasingly liberal television and radio content.
Today, the situation seems immeasurably worse, and to give an idea of how low media morality has sunk during the last four decades, I've compiled a random list of things that can nowadays be seen or heard on news programmes, or enacted in TV dramas or adverts, that would have been unthinkable in the 1960s:
sex acts, heterosexual and homosexual
masturbation
dildos and other ”sex toys"
urinating, defecating and vomiting
sadism, masochism and bondage
cross-dressing
real-life vampirism
violent assaults
bloody crime scenes
voyeuristic features on the sick or disabled
sexual battery and rape
stabbings and shootings
anti-Christian blasphemy
sex-change operations
close-ups of genitalia
intimate medical examinations
graphic descriptions of sexual acts
genital and scatological "humour"
repeated use of the F-word
smoking, snorting, eating or injecting of drugs
people dying in wars or disasters
dead bodies.
Drama and documentary makers try to justify the tide of crud by telling us that it is their duty to reflect "contemporary reality". But reality where? In some dysfunctional, ethnically-brutalized, crime-ridden inner-city? Thank God, such places are still unrepresentative of Britain as a whole: you could spend months in my town without witnessing first-hand any of the above, and mercifully, the same is true of most places where traditional values still hold sway. I suspect that the extremes depicted on our screens are not so much reflections of life as it is, but of British life as some would like it to be.
The media establishment further assures us that young people are protected by the 9 p.m. UK "watershed" for the broadcasting of "adult" content. But the watershed is made meaningless by pre-watershed repeats, downloadable programmes and the sheer pervasiveness of TV (almost every teenager now has a box in their bedroom, beyond parental control).
The Internet is a particular worry for parents, because within its deep and murky waters lurk all kinds of depraved material, from sadomasochism to bestiality and beyond. I doubt there is a single pathological perversion that is not catered to by at least one of the many thousands of websites dedicated to exploiting and corrupting natural human curiosity – especially youthful curiosity – about sex.
To those parents anxious about the possibility of their teenage children viewing web pornography I would say, you're probably too late. Accessing such material is easier than sending email, and it is a fair bet that your computer-savvy fourteen-year-old has already been exposed to a bewildering array of bizarre sexual practices, and all kinds of ugliness and violence, courtesy of digital technology and lax legislation.
Psychologists use the terms "desensitisation" or "inurement" to refer to the process of continual exposure by which people are decreasingly affected by things that might once have given them great anxiety. Many of the items on the list above have been thus normalized, and accepted as part of the common language of the mainstream media, and of society at large. Few of us today would bat an eye at language and imagery that would have shocked and outraged our grandparents; and by the steady drip, drip, drip of these contaminants, traditional morality is corroded, with unpredictable consequences.
Perhaps because of desensitization, some of Mary Whitehouse's campaigns seem to us obsessive, even ridiculous. That she was old-fashioned is undeniable, and in her trademark horn-rimmed glasses, she looked more than a little puritanical. But now that the mass media are awash with every type of brutal violence, sickening perversion and cringe-makingly crude "comedy", who would say that she was wrong to try to hold back the tide? It is clear (e.g. from research conducted by mediawatch-uk) that most people don't want it; so the question is, why is it filling the airwaves night after night? The inescapable answer is that some of those who control the broadcast media must have an interest in corrupting our society, perhaps with a view to irreversibly weakening it.
Mary Whitehouse never lost sight of her mission to restore some traditional morality to TV and radio, and for that she was pilloried, especially by the liberal establishment and by media controllers and performers. However, she was not without influential supporters, and in 1980 was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for public service.
Mrs Whitehouse died in November 2001, coincidentally the same year as Spike Milligan. But the association she founded lives on as mediawatch-uk, and its members remain as committed as ever to restoring public accountability to the mainstream media.
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