“no compromise with doubtful material”
Isn’t this a fine photo? It depicts George Orwell and T.S.Eliot, both of whom bent the craft of writing into new shapes, together at the BBC in 1942. They adopt a working pose with other BBC Eastern Service broadcasters. I thought the link between the text and image in this post was tenuous, but I’m seeing more and more in it.
The BBC’s “Green Book”, a style guide for the final triumphant years of radio , is a neat introduction to popular prejudice down the years. It maps the edge where sanctimoniousness drops into an abyss of fanaticism. The edition for the 1940s and ’50s is online, here.
My mother, who used words like “common” and “guttersnipe”, would have appreciated the stern but fair stewardship of the nation’s standards articulated in this fragment -
Vulgarity
Programmes must at all cost be kept free of crudities, coarseness and innuendo. Humor must be clean and untainted directly or by association with vulgarity and suggestiveness. Music hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen standards, are not suitable to broadcasting. Producers, artists and writers must recognise this fact and the strictest watch must be kept. There can be no compromise with doubtful material. It must be cut.
A. General. Well known vulgar jokes (e.g. the Brass Monkey) ‘cleaned up’, are not normally admissible since the humour in such cases is almost invariably evident only if the vulgar version is known.
There is an absolute ban upon the following:-
Jokes about -
Lavatories
Effeminacy in men
Immorality of any kind
Suggestive references to -
Honeymoon couples
Chambermaids
Fig leaves
Prostitution
Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on
Animal habits, e.g. rabbits
Lodgers
Commercial travellers
Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to or jokes about -
Pre-natal influences (e.g. ‘His mother was frightened by a donkey’)
Marital infidelity
Good taste and decency are the obvious governing considerations. The vulgar use of such words as ‘basket’ must also be avoided.
B. Sophisticated Revue and Cabaret. A great deal of the material performed elsewhere in these types of entertainment is just not suitable to be broadcast. There can perhaps be a little more latitude in the editing of ’sophisticated’ programmes which are billed and generally identified as such but not sufficiently for them to reflect all the accepted characteristics of this kind of show. The fact is that radio revue and cabaret must be tailored to the microphone in much the same way as other programmes and deny itself may items technically suitable which do not conform to established BBC standards.
During this period, Benny Hill was already working in radio, and he started in television in 1949 – for the BBC, which also gave him his breakout The Benny Hill Show in 1955. While his trademark sauciness developed later, the BBC mandarin’s po-faced objection to “music hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen standards”, was already the last frenetic dance of a dead era.
While this outrage makes for easy laughter today, the underlying social anxiety is always present. Perhaps we are safer when social control focuses on bad jokes from popular culture, and taboos about vulgarity. I guess that paranoia helps to fuel the liminal horrors about drugtaking, migrants and perceived social parasites.
Via Linkmachinego.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Full Metal Runt indeed.
very sweet, that avoidance of references to pre-natal influences. No wonder Monty Python made such a splash 25 years later.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:29 am
make that 15 – you have ’40s AND ’50s there, don’t you.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Strange that when we consider how standards of language have changed, we don’t include the notion that “Boer War” was offensive and that “South African War” should be used instead! I’ll be more careful in future.
June 10th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
What is the vulgar allusion to ‘basket’ about? I must be too refined to understand it.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Odd it was included since a favourite description of Hitler during the war years was as that ‘Wicker Basket’ – Wicked bastard.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Along with “common” and “guttersnipe” your mother surely would have had at her disposal (abeit sotto voce perhaps) the fine word “slattern”.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
In the 60s my employer the Australian Broadcasting Commission TV news section would not allow the word “balls” in scripts, “spheres” was prescribed for all but sports reports. Also naked female breasts were only acceptable as long as the women “natives” were in their “native settings” a la “National Geographic”
No shocks for the family in the lounge room in those days I’m pleased to say!
The Controller (!) of News was a Deputy Commonwealth Film Censor — in the interest of speeding foreign material through — and everything deleted at his command was locked away, only to be seen annually by a select few trustworthy (irony intended) journos.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Its hard to believe Benny would have been able to restrain himself. Indeed a ’straight’ Benny Hill is unimaginable.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Laura, ‘basket’ was just a euphemism for ‘bastard’ (in its abusive not its denotative sense, of course). My mum used to say it all the time.
What I find most pleasing and astonishing about that (indeed very fine) photo is the number of women in it.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:45 am
It does leave me to wonder what happen to them. The women are Asian, presumably employed because this is the Far Eastern Service (hem, hem) who may well have gone back to their home countries, perhaps to Indian and Pakistani broadcasters, or to Hong Kong or Singapore.
Difficult to imagine them working in the BBC ten years later.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Laura, picture a basket in Pride & Prejudice. Then picture Sid James: “Wickham, you’re a right basket!”
June 12th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Suggestive references to -
Honeymoon couples
Chambermaids
Fig leaves
Prostitution
Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on
Animal habits, e.g. rabbits
Lodgers
Commercial travellers
I’m snorting already. I’m trying to run a scene through using every one of ‘em.
Hell even Graham Parker as hip as he was did a song about a Hotel Chambermaid.
I’m too Post Modern – just saying Lodger gets me going, Ladies underwear gives me the titters and don’t get me banging on about honeymooners…. or perhaps I watched too many Carry On movies.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
How did the goons ever get through?!?
Didn’t the Beeb know what a thunderbox was?
June 25th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Greta moment in BBC history.
In 1944, King Haakon – leader of the exiled Norwegian government in London during the Nazi occupation of Norway – delivered a rousing wartime address to his beleagured people on the BBC World Service. As His Royal Highness was running forty seconds short, producers requested a fanfare from the studio library to round things off…
As Haakon made his final solemn remarks and laid down his script, the air came alive with carnival sounds and cockneys shouting, “Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen! Try your luck with the hoops, etc, etc…”
The library had mistakenly sent up not a fanfare but the sounds of a funfair.
Haakon’s response was, with a heavy Nordic sigh I’m guessing, the observation that “these things happen”.
“How did the goons ever get through?!?”
Spike was saving up all the naughty stuff for his war memoirs. Actually listening to the Goons now, they were surprisingly innuendo-free, especially compared to stuff like ITMA that came a generation before them.
Not that they needed innuendo spelt out when they had Minnie Bannister quavering “Oh, you naughty naughty man” followed by the sound of a sock full of custard hitting Major Bloodnok right in the gorillas.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 am
[...] Tiley puts the Henson affair in historical perspective with a meander through the BBC’s “Green Book” of broadcast standards in the 1940s [...]