As if in harmony, the dystopian strain in English fiction returned. Anthony Burgess composed A Clockwork Orange, ‘being the adventures of a young man whose principal hobbies are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven’. Set in a not-too-distant future, it lays out a society at once authoritarian and feckless, in which the untrammelled young have adopted an argot called ‘nadsat’. The intent behind the devising of this patois, a kind of thieves’ cant of the future, was to render the book ageless. It incorporates English, Romany, and cockney rhyming slang, but above all, Russian. In a West that had heard Khrushchev’s grandiose threat ‘We will bury you!’, it was all too plausible that Russian should become the language of power.
The young man, Alex, has nothing to complain of. He is clearly of the middle class, and as clearly a sociopath. There is no reason behind his savage quest for unending self-gratification – indeed, it is his lack of obvious criminal motivation that makes him so unsettling, particularly to those who look for some ‘trauma’ to explain the existence of evil. He leads a gang of three ‘droogs’ on night-time escapades which reliably end in careless and sickening violence. When not with his pals, he is given to the casual rape of underage girls, and to Beethoven. When the gang turns against him, he finds himself in prison. There he is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, a kind of extreme aversion therapy which renders the patient incapable of violence or lust. When he is released into the world, his former victims, finding that he is helpless, beat, humiliate, abuse and incarcerate him. At last Alex is given the opportunity to reverse the treatment, an opportunity of which he happily avails himself. In the last chapter (omitted from the American version), a sedate and subdued Alex realizes that the lust for destruction has ebbed from him. Rather than remaining a ‘clockwork orange’, he may find the will to rejoin the human race.
Of the many people anxious to let wholesome light into this dark world, Mary Whitehouse, a Warwickshire housewife, was the most vociferous. Spurred on by what she considered the moral cowardice, even treachery, of the BBC, she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in the early Sixties. From the pens of the bespectacled, redoubtable Whitehouse and her followers poured a steadily swelling torrent of complaint. Once, asked whether she had actually seen a programme that had so offended her, she replied with mocking disdain: ‘I have too much respect for my mind!’ When it was insinuated, in an interview with Johnny Speight, that her views were fascist, Whitehouse successfully sued the BBC. It was one of several private prosecutions she mounted – few had the same success, though many proved influential.
Those who disagreed with her were apt to do so in satirical fashion. Soon after the Speight affair, Till Death Us Do Part, a television series written by Johnny Speight which depicted the comically hapless struggle of Alf Garnett against the forces of progress, had Garnett reading one of her works and cheering every line. Whitehouse had objected to the repeated use of the word ‘bloody’ on that programme; in that episode, the ‘bloody’s flowed without cease.
To her supporters, Whitehouse was a brave, decent Christian, attempting to reverse a contagion that had spread from the world of entertainment and into the English household. To her detractors she was a bigot intent on halting and even reversing any increase in freedom of expression and social progress. The truth is perhaps more subtle: she seemed convinced that to be a Christian entailed being a theocrat. Yet her influence proved greater than her supporters dared hope. Her campaign ‘The right of a child to be a child’ led many years later to the passing of the Protection of Children Act.
In her conviction that wild flowers are never more than weeds, she often aimed at the most seemingly innocuous TV programmes. Violence, as much as sex, disturbed her deeply, and when a show she wrongly understood to be for small children depicted a humanoid plant throttling one of the characters, she felt bound to lodge a protest. This was a pity since she and the protagonist of Doctor Who had much in common. Both were outsiders, rebels who saw themselves as healers, and both sought to interfere as much as they could in matters they felt to be of moral consequence.
A man finds himself trapped in an alien and primitive environment. His craft, which had once traversed many lands swiftly and fluently, now creaks and shudders. So far, the traditional motifs need no introduction. Here, however, a curious anomaly is introduced. The man’s ship alters its shape to suit its environment, but something has gone wrong, and the ship is stuck in the shape of a Sixties police box. His story begins in inconvenience, and what else is a story but a succession of inconveniences? Doctor Who had a difficult birth. First broadcast in 1963, it struggled to crawl from script to screen, but by the late Sixties it amounted to a national addiction, with production values best described as homely and a central figure who was old, eccentric and unglamorous. England’s answer to Superman looked, and thought, rather like Bertrand Russell.
It was part of a wider trend, discernible even in A Clockwork Orange, in which ‘white heat’ forged only monsters of metal. This is most apparent in the figures of the Daleks. With their pepperpot armour, spindly weapons, lavatory plunger eyes and, above all, their voice – like the bark of a cockney sergeant – the Daleks should have been comic. Instead they were terrifying, for under the metal exterior lurked the loathsome result of an experiment in eugenics. In this dreadful parody of humankind lay, it was hinted, our common fate if science were ever given the power to rule. Time and again, the Doctor must confront the prejudices of frightened races whose leaders have told them that the gods will punish them if they do not obey. Miracles are then revealed as scientific trickery, with gods shown to be mere computers. The Doctor thus acted as a kind of corrective to the missionaries of the Victorian period, urging the primacy of facts over faith.
His other great enemy was imperialism. The mass will to conquer and devour was outmanoeuvred again and again by the Doctor’s courage and wisdom, but never finally defeated. On the screen, as in the world, evil recuperates as if by reflex. But the Doctor was no superhero. Aside from his longevity, his only weapons were his intellect, his trench humour, his pluck and his sometimes quixotic compassion. The Doctor, in short, was a profoundly English creation, in manners, accent and wit. It is tempting to hear in his tones an echo of what one journalist referred to as ‘benevolent post-war paternalism’: Britain no longer ran the world, but it could perhaps heal it. This was an unarguable manifestation of the Sixties spirit.
The visual art of the Sixties was the result of schooling in the Fifties. Its roots had been planted in 1957, and from then on the plant grew as swiftly as willow. In the decade of the consumer, art had become public. As the critic Robert Hughes observed, in any clash between pop culture and art, art could not possibly win. Very well, then art would become pop; buildings, album covers, advertising logos and theatre sets all evinced the new spirit.
The world of colour, so long occluded, found its greatest exponent in David Hockney. A true child of the grey moorland, he caught the rising sun and like a sunflower bent towards it. Coming to prominence in 1963, he went on to dominate the Sixties with paintings of swimming pools, beautiful men, sun and sea. In his paintings, colour and light, exuberant splashes and clean, crisp lines are composed in a manner that lifts the most cynical heart. In many ways, modern art had begun as an act of retreat rather than of advance. With the fashionable efflorescence of photography, it was widely predicted that figurative art would wither and perish. Yet the remarkable flourishing of art in the Sixties is best known for being shamelessly figurative in character, largely in its subverting of images familiar from popular consciousness. The ‘Situation’ exhibition in 1960 established a paradox: the primacy of all things American and the distinctiveness of all things British. The contributing artists were keen to identify with all things American, from ‘action paintings’ to Dacron suits.