The Look of Love by Paul Willetts

Author:Paul Willetts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

30 MR STRIPTEASE V. LORD PORN

GROWING HOSTILITY TOWARDS the permissive society, especially from evangelical Christian groups, had coalesced into multiple campaigns that challenged the long-term viability of Raymond’s business. Newsagents displaying pornographic magazines on their top shelves faced protests; picket lines were organised around London cinemas screening softcore films; and the Society of Conservative Lawyers published a hostile report on the effects of pornography.

Of all the campaigns being waged during the opening months of 1971, the most famous was the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, previously Clean Up TV. It had been co-founded by the ageing Shropshire secondary school teacher Mary Whitehouse, horn-rim-spectacled scourge of permissiveness, who accused the BBC of peddling ‘the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt’. In a perverse twist of fate, Raymond inadvertently supplied her most prominent and vocal ally. The birthplace of this alliance was the Royalty Theatre.

Curious to find out whether Oh! Calcutta! merited such a vexed response, the sixty-five-year-old Labour peer Frank Pakenham, better known as Lord Longford, went with his son-in-law to see the show. Throughout its long tenure in the West End, Oh! Calcutta! can’t have attracted such an improbable customer as Longford, high-minded Catholic convert and liberal prison reformer. For one thing he would have been perfectly cast as a country vicar in an emollient Sunday night television drama, his bald head flanked by tufts of hair, his eyebrowless eyes blinking behind wire-rimmed glasses, his expression wavering between severity and benificence. Even his opinions, doctrinal rectitude blended with sequestered innocence, could have been mistaken for those of a vicar from some cosy rural parish. He believed that extramarital sex was sinful. He also admitted to being shocked by dirty jokes and avoiding House of Lords debates on obscenity lest they upset him.

The idealistic, self-publicising peer’s immediate reaction to Oh! Calcutta! was predictable. By the interval he’d seen enough to catapult him out of the theatre. But his stomping indignation didn’t end there. ‘I think until then I had averted my eyes and hoped to run my course without having to face this issue,’ he told a reporter several weeks later. ‘I thought I could shirk it. But we are on a very slippery course in this matter. It is like bullying at school, when you always assumed that the headmaster would do something about it. Then suddenly you realised that the headmaster had opted out, and was just sitting there with a genial smile on his face intending to do nothing. People in authority say that there is nothing they can do because public opinion is so much on the side of the permissiveness. But some moral order has got to be restored. Some firm ground must be placed under people’s feet again. It certainly will not be done by moral ranting or by old people demanding a return to the old standards. But those who are against pornography and want to stem this tide must put their heads together and work out a coherent policy of resistance.’

A brave, energetic

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.