three weeks pass...
Yes... Robin to thread? :-)
Unbridled Wilsonia... the Open University and much of the more forward-looking television of the time...
One does have to realise that bar the OU few radical measures truly came from Wilson himself, who was a cautious, very skilled politician... a 'tactician, but not a strategist' was I think Hennessey's excellent description. Some bad economic mistakes from 1964-67, and possibly a too weak line on the TUs from 1974-76, but generally he was a good manager of the country, if not a leader. On the foreign policy front, the Rhodesia question dragged on and on; yet, keeping out of Vietnam was a major decision of conscience, considering the pressure on him to commit. It shows up some of the posturing of the centre-left/left in those days that he was castigated for not criticising the U.S. position... he had to agree not to to ensure vital aid from the U.S. remained with Britain.
It is overstressed that he had 'dodgy contacts' and the like; that didn't impact much on his tenure and it must be remembered he won 4 GE victories for Labour.
I always think of Hennessey's description of his stint as PM, that it was the last time pipe smoke was really allowed in the BBC or some such thing. ;-)
For one main thing, you need to look at the relative breakdown of the class system from 1964-76...
― Tom May (Tom May), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 01:57 (twenty-two years ago)
two months pass...
one month passes...
Ah ... just found this thread!
This is my first post to ILX in approximately 342 years and, of course, I know Gareth was deliberately using a Carmodyism (it isn't really a Gareth-ism).
Well, how about this sequence?
http://www.johnallsup.btinternet.co.uk/to-f.htm (obviously not Wilsonia; a very 1950s design although it's actually from 1961; the brief aesthetic state of the art from c.1961 can be seen at http://www.johnallsup.btinternet.co.uk/jgf-2-f.htm )
http://www.johnallsup.btinternet.co.uk/fitp-f.htm (the font is so 1965 it hurts; the book itself shows an idyll beginning to unfurl, and is arguably a deeply personal statement against the new techno-modernist tide in Britain, but it leaves me wondering what drained out of Tory ruralism in the intervening years that they could respond to Wilson with something of this texture whereas they can't respond to Blair with anything more subtle than foxhunting rallies - ultimately, as ever, it's down to Thatcherism and its anti-art, anti-culture worldview)
http://www.johnallsup.btinternet.co.uk/awib-f.htm (and now it's 1969 and the transition is complete; a perfect world finally crumbles, embodied in the streamlined typeface and the crime with which this book begins. Part of me wishes Monica Edwards had, like Antonia Forest, Malcolm Saville and Anthony Buckeridge, tried to translate her milieu further into a new era and gone on writing through the 70s or even beyond, with ever more fascinating incongruities and timeslips, but this is enough, and the Wilsonian side of the 60s - permissiveness, scientific farming, suburbanisation, motorway building etc etc analogised into the collapse of one writer's personal vision which she had been building up since 1947 - was never better encapsulated)
In pop music: "Mirror Mirror" by Pinkerton's Assorted Colours. "In The Middle Of Nowhere" and "Little By Little" by Dusty Springfield. "Tossing and Turning" by the Ivy League. "He's In Town" by the Rockin' Berries. "Ha Ha Said The Clown" by Manfred Mann (the best use of the flute in 60s Britpop). "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" by the Monkees, though only because of Davy Jones obviously. The Manchester school: "No Milk Today" by Herman's Hermits, "Pamela Pamela" by Wayne Fontana, and "I'm Alive", "Look Through Any Window" and "On A Carousel" by the Hollies, the last-named most important because it unwittingly anticipates the backlash (the reference to "changing horses", one of the Incredible String Band's lesser albums only three years later). "And Your Bird Can Sing" by the Beatles (more than any other Beatles song for me, but that's probably only because it was the Beatles song Simon Mayo chose to play as part of a sweep of records from 1966 on the morning of the England-Germany match in Euro 96 - it seems a lot longer than seven years ago, but that was the era of Wilson / Blair analogising). "When You Walk In The Room" by the Searchers. I make no apologies for mentioning "Everyone's Gone To The Moon" by Jonathan King (it was important that public schoolboys joined in the party, and the Old Carthusian's debut was significantly released just as the Tories bowed to the changing times and appointed the grammar schoolboy Heath as party leader). "Hold Tight" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and "With A Girl Like You" by the Troggs (ditto for the rural Tory areas) but above all else, "Lovers Of The World Unite" by David and Jonathan. Oddly, nothing by the Stones or the Who; they are big enough in all senses to transcend this sort of imagery.
The last pop record I would call Wilsonian is Traffic's "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" (the film was shot in Stevenage, which was Shirley Williams' constituency - I don't need to say anything else, do I?); by then "Ready, Steady, Go" had been gone for nearly a year, the pirates were sunk (ironically by the Wilson government itself), the singles chart had lost most of its focus and the whole thing splintered. "Yer Blues" and "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" and "Gimme Shelter" were far too nihilistic to fit into a progressive social democratic vision, "Waltz of the New Moon" and "Pentangling" and "Come All Ye" were collectivist (the one thing Wilson was and Blair isn't) but they don't count because they're not out-and-out modernist (if "A Wind Is Blowing" is an old Tory harshening up and effectively admitting that her time has gone forever, then "Liege and Lief" is a collective - that word again - of lapsed Wilsonians going the other way).
In television: Ready, Steady, Go should go without saying, as should the design, programming, startup music and everything else of its production company, Rediffusion London. The "Boy in a man's world" Meccano advert. The "Hey! Smarties! Chocolate! Smarties!" advert. Several other ads whose exact content I have regrettably forgotten. "Quick Before They Catch Us" with Pamela Franklin, if I'm not mistaken. Probably the first series or two of "Freewheelers" but, above all else, the monument to that era in TV has to be the Tyne Tees entry in the 1967 ITV yearbook.
In transport: the West Coast Main Line modernisation project (which, unlike the current one, was actually organised properly and ran to time). The entire British Rail image and design. The final removal of steam haulage on BR. The fact that the posters detailing the closure of the Somerset and Dorset railway actually had the BR double arrow on them, especially considering that they were still loading sheep into guards' vans on steam trains on the S&D in August 1965, even as TV Times were running British Rail adverts which are so Wilsonian they make Ready, Steady, Go look like something from Anthony Eden's time. Any shopping centres and precincts which aren't too tawdry, dirty and overcrowded (if they're aren't clean and very close to perfect, they're Heathiana). Any motorways or expanded A-roads, but with the same proviso.
As for Wilson's return in the mid-70s, it has absolutely no connection with any transient popular culture of the time. You can however draw vague parallels between the increasingly paranoid Wilson of 1975, already damaged by the first onset of Alzheimer's disease, and genuinely fearful of a right-wing paramilitary coup against him such as that planned at the time by the GB75 group (which would never have come to anything; I know an ultra-right-wing nutter who wants a "military coup" to destroy Blair, who he thinks is a Marxist Communist who is guilty of "ethnocide", but the difference is that Blair wouldn't waste his time worrying), and the nihilistic lyrics that run through so much of "The Who By Numbers" (compare to what both Wilson and the Who were 10 years earlier ...)
or you could read http://www.livingstonemusic.net/1966.htm
or you could read http://www.transdiffusion.org/pmc/yearbooks/itagallery/1967.htm
― robin carmody (robin carmody), Sunday, 13 July 2003 08:32 (twenty-two years ago)