This programme contains strong language and some scenes of a sexual nature
In the 18th century, if you wanted something rude, you went to the print shop to see something racy.
Phwoar!
In Victorian times, for a bawdy night out, you would go to rude music hall.
# I'm here, by the gate, alone... #
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
But in the second half of the 20th century, enjoying rudeness became so much easier.
Rude was now in your front room.
Switch on the television any night of the week, and there it was.
Bloody blond ponce! Shut up!
Watching together, laughing together, we now lived in a mass democracy of rude.
# Staring at the rude boys... #
But, in a changing Britain, rude began to be seen as offensive in new ways.
Racist, sexist, you name it.
Before we went in, he used to say, here's that Paki with them two arseholes.
And, after centuries of mischief making, rude was now provoking outrage, and not just among prudes.
Sacked for what it called the "unacceptable and offensive messages left on his answerphone."
# Staring at the rude boys... #
Liberals, once cheerleaders for rudeness, began to believe
that all this had gone too far, even for them.
I'm the fucking... Now fuck the fuck off.
# Rule Britannia... # So, just how far should you go in the mass democracy of rude?
Rule Britannia!
You've never had it so rude.
# Britain never never never shall be saved. #
It was in 1963 that Modern Rude, like sex, began.
Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe drew Prime Minister Harold Macmillan starkers.
I drew Macmillan naked, and that was the thing I think
that shocked everybody at that time.
Because, up until then,
I have since read, no-one had been drawing politicians naked
since the 18th century.
I drew Macmillan's breasts sticking out and sort of vulgarly rude.
I made them as fleshy and round as possible as one can with a line drawing.
This image by Scarfe became a devastating piece of satire.
The inspiration?
Macmillan's Defence Minister, John Profumo, had a relationship with call girl Christine Keeler,
then covered the whole thing up.
Gave him a nice big bum too.
A provocative image of Keeler was taken by photographer Lewis Morley.
Gerald Scarfe took Morley's image and, in a rude twist, substituted the Prime Minister for Keeler.
LIPS SMACK TOGETHER IN A KISS
This cartoon appeared in a new satirical magazine called Private Eye.
Private Eye was fantastic, the amount of freedom they gave me.
They actually encouraged me to go for it,
and I found myself drawing nipples and pubic hair, and I found an almost schoolboy relish
in saying things or drawing things that I shouldn't really.
Yes, I definitely set out to be rude.
I set out to try and shock.
This was the beginning of the end for a deference that had protected politicians for years.
From now on, Scarfe and others could revel in a tradition of
rude cartooning come back to life, and attacking hypocrisy.
I think it is healthy in society to have somebody prick the bubble of
pomposity that can exist around politicians, and society in general.
It's just healthy to have someone to put the other point of view.
Caught by Lewis Morley in exactly the same
iconic pose as Christine Keeler, was '60s playwright Joe Orton.
His plays were now scandalising London's West End.
A woman once threw herself at me, I needn't tell you this is in confidence. She was stark naked.
She wished me to misbehave myself. And do you know?
All I was conscious of was that she had a malformed navel.
I think that, in terms of the theatre,
Orton is an exemplary figure,
a master of rudery.
Orton said he wanted to see plays with a lot more fucking.
Orton's short life was one of rude theatrical adventure and gay abandon.
Joe Orton was the spearhead of the idea that being gay is fun.
It's not a criminal thing, it's not a disease,
it's not a psychopathology.
It's just fun.
It's a lot of shagging, you know. Excellent.
Endless orgasms, that's the idea, the Joe Orton idea of homosexuality.
This was not the general view of the British public at the time!
The way Orton lived his life translated into the writing of bawdy, lewd and satirical plays.
Plays like Entertaining Mr Sloane, and Loot, with their assault on taboos of sex, class and death,
were a challenge to theatre audiences.
They pushed the boundaries of what could be said and shown on the British stage.
What did he do? He asked me to lie on that couch.
Did he at any time attempt to interfere with you?
You'll be disappointed, Sergeant, if you imagine that young man has lost his virginity.
I hope he'll be considerably more experienced before he loses that, sir.
It's the fact that it is smut on stilts that is so interesting.
It's that it's a kind of,
it's very cocky and
show-offy use of language, that
seems to somehow make it even more offensive, you know.
Because it's like jewels in shit, is really what it is.
Orton's last notorious piece of rude theatre was What The Butler Saw.
SHE CRIES OUT IN PAIN
Oh, my darling!
This is the way to sexual adjustment in marriage.
On its opening night, there were shouts of "filth"
and "rubbish" from the stalls.
SHE PANTS AND MOANS
And it's got rape. Let me cure your neurosis.
It's the only thing I want out of life.
There's cross-dressing, of course.
Are you Geraldine Bartley?
Yes.
It has Sir Winston's member.
RASPBERRY IS BLOWN
SHOCKED GASP
One young theatre goer was present when the member of Britain's
war-time leader was used for dramatic effect.
I can remember and audible frisson of horror in the audience,
that Churchill's penis was being bandied about as
a comic device.
The great man can once again take up his place in the high street,
as the example to us of the spirit that won the Battle of Britain.
THEY GASP
It might just be permissible for rude to tread the boards.
But, to the dismay of Middle England, it was starting to enter the front rooms of Britain.
Now there was filth on the airwaves.
And radio was at its rudest in Round The Horne.
RADIO: Round The Horne! Turned to water when she sung that song.
They did. He's sensitive.
Touched. He gets touched, he gets easily touched.
And moved.
Touched and moved. Every time he goes to the theatre, he wilfully suspends his disbelief.
The straight man of Round The Horne was Kenneth Horne.
The camp energy and wit came from actor Kenneth Williams
who, with Hugh Paddick played Julian and Sandy.
I particularly was drawn to Julian and Sandy because, I simply don't know
how that really happened now.
Who is that lurking behind that potted palm?
Oh hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy.
A gay couple, absolutely nakedly, openly gay couple,
that this dear old Kenneth Horne, who was so proper.
He was like the man from the Prudential, always knocking on doors saying, "Hello there."
You never knew why he was going to see Julian and Sandy. He just did.
AS KENNETH WILLIAMS: Ooh, hello Mr Horne.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
What brings you trolling in here?
Well, I'd like to invest in your enterprise.
Ooh, ain't he bold!
Round The Horne was listened to by millions, Sunday lunchtime, on the BBC's Light Programme.
For the family of comedy producer-to-be John Lloyd, the show was a must-hear experience.
RADIO: ..transport it to another place. That's after you've been touched and moved?
LAUGHTER
You'd all be sitting down for Sunday lunch.
And my dad was a naval officer.
My mum would cook Sunday lunch.
And we'd have Round The Horne on, and everybody would laugh. It was filthy.
RADIO: Gratuitous sex. And gratuitous violence.
And filth. And swearing. And drinking.
And carrying on, and being arrested.
Because it was family listening, from the first series in 1965,
Round The Horne made BBC management nervous.
8th April 1965.
Assistant Director of Sound Broadcasting to HLES.
"Quite a few reasonable people inside the BBC,
"as well as outside, including myself on one or two occasions, have thought
"that there was a tendency for this otherwise excellent show to get a bit dirty.
"As it has always been intended for family listening, I think we should err on the side of strictness.
"Would you keep a personal eye on it, please?"
Round The Horne used the gay slang known as Polari to deliver
a humour of double entendre and lewd innuendo inherited from music hall.
Mrs Olga Cremo.
Lovely. But it never worked out, did it?
Neither did Captain Brassbound's conversion.
The use of Polari allowed Julian and Sandy to get away with being outrageously rude.
It waved, didn't it? Yes, it did.
One of the most extraordinary examples in Round The Horne,
there is a sketch where Julian and Sandy are talking about
how talented they are playing different musical instruments.
And one of them describes the other as being a "miracle of dexterity on the cottage upright"
which, of course, is a type of piano to most people listening.
Here, play him some of our numbers, Jules. Shall I?
Jules, is marvellous, he's a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright.
LAUGHTER
But, to gay men listening at the time and to there clued-up friends,
cottage upright means an erect penis in a public toilet where men met each other to have sex.
This is going out Sunday lunchtimes on the most popular radio network in the country.
It's unthinkable that if people had got the full extent of the joke, it could have been broadcast.
# ...yes.... #
APPLAUSE
To ward off attacks from offended listeners, a comedy
like Round The Horne had an ally at the highest level of the BBC.
The Director General of the time, Hugh Carleton Greene, defended rude programming.
He was keen that the corporation should move with changing, liberalising times.
Auntie should be ruder.
The Director General of the BBC at the time, Hugh Greene, was seen as
a figure that ahead of this liberalising, of this allowing of innuendo and filth and rudeness.
People like Mary Whitehouse and other moral campaigners at the time
were always targeting him as the person to blame.
And, in some respects, whatever their intentions, they were correct.
He was overseeing a period of loosening the shackles, of widening the remit of what
could be said on the BBC, of trying to make it slightly more contemporary and less stuffy.
Yes, tell him what it was.
Tell him, tell him what happened. Go on, tell him.
No. Go on. Get it out in the open.
No!
Unburden yourself. Look, look, as this is the last show, let's not have a "bona" contention.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Also benefiting from the new permissiveness
was a younger generation intent on creating a counter-culture.
House journal of this underground movement
was Oz, which first surfaced during the summer of love in 1967.
It was a hippy propaganda sheet.
It contained everything from hard-left politics, to sex and drugs and rock'n'roll.
Oz, with the rest of the underground press had its own rude,
that was hippy bawdy, and hippy lewd.
Here was an attitude to sex and the body that hadn't been seen since the libertines of the 18th century.
Oz was a process of exploration, and an experiment to discover
how much fun you could have without either dying or being arrested.
In 1970, co-editors Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis
invited a group of teenagers to guest edit Oz.
Amongst those selected to produce a Schoolkidz edition was 18-year-old
Charles Shaar Murray, introduced as a Jewish Pantheist.
Ended up with a bunch of other people aged between 15 and 18, in this
very exotic, to me, basement, which smelled of pot, incense, vegetarian cookery,
and slightly stale laundry.
which, to me, is always the iconic smell of Notting Hill Gate.
The editor of underground magazine International Times was a witness to
what emerged from hippy Notting Hill Gate.
It was a completely worked-out experiment to give a bunch of
young teen school kids
free run of a magazine.
This wasn't the product of degenerate 25 to 30-year-olds.
It was a bunch of kids let loose, paste up and do their own magazine.
And that's what they came up with. And...
Then all hell broke loose.
Inside Skoolkidz Oz was a comic strip featuring the head of the much loved children's character Rupert
Bear superimposed on an X-rated cartoon by American Robert Crumb.
Words and pictures were a rude provocation.
"Rupert finds Gipsy Granny.
"It looks just like a ball to me.
"Open it and see."
The idea of suggesting that Rupert Bear,
offstage if you like, when he wasn't doing his gig for the Daily Express,
actually had
a libido, a sense of mischief and some
possibly unsavoury internal urges
was, I thought, hilarious.
"Oh, good, that door is open wide, pants Rupert as he runs inside.
"And then he slips, and down he slides to where dark water glints and glides."
WOMAN SCREAMS
The rest of Britain found these Schoolkidz antics a lot less hilarious.
And for some, all this hippy mischief-making was deeply shocking.
A lot of people reacted painfully to it.
My own parents' generation, for instance.
They were just sort of shocked and sort of hurt.
Was this why people died in the Second World War?
So these young ruffians could come and be rude about things that we value.
In fact, not just that we value but that we feel sustain us.
There was agitation that something must be done about Oz.
And it was. The editors were charged with obscenity and put on trial at the Old Bailey, in June 1971.
Outside court, white pantheist Charles Shaar Murray supported the Oz three,
whilst inside the legal niceties got naughty.
The hallowed halls of the Old Bailey resounding to
a conversation between a lawyer
and a witness about what would be the appropriate size for the penis of a young bear cub.
Admittedly a young bear cub who wore a scarf and sweater.
The whole episode was completely ludicrous.
To the fury of their supporters the defendants were found guilty and sent down with harsh sentences.
In prison, the Oz editors had their hippy locks cut whilst waiting for what would be a successful appeal.
We weren't actually tied to the chair but if we hadn't had our hair cut
we would have been on bread and water for three days.
As bad as prison food is, the prospect of bread and water for three days was not delightful.
People were genuinely frightened by Oz. It did all sorts of things,
which were beyond the pale, which suggested they were out of control.
Which is why, in fact, the whole kind of machinery
of repression came down on them so savagely in that trial.
On their release, the Oz editors affectionately devoted their next issue to the boys in blue.
The hippy rude of the Underground Press, rude cartoons,
a rude theatre and rude radio -
they had all contributed to an emerging, modern kind of rudeness.
Scene 36, take one. But it was television that finally introduced a mass democracy of rude.
You, you bloody Scouse ponce!
LAUGHTER
By the early '70s, almost every household in Britain owned a set.
Here was a rudeness that was easily available in your front room
at the click of a switch.
Telly rude we could all comfortably enjoy together, at exactly the same time,
no matter who you were.
..bolshie bastards like him!
In all the other art forms, you made a decision, you bought a ticket,
you made a journey in most cases.
Or you went and bought a book and brought it into your house
But this stuff, television could take you unawares.
I'll never play this bloody game with you again!
And that's why it's been both dangerous and brave things have been able to be done.
That's the trouble with the bloody telly.
Too many people getting too well bloody informed, if you ask me.
Too much of that going on, that's what. Bloody BBC.
It's also why there's been so much caution, because of that awareness
that people are not necessarily choosing what they're viewing.
It was comedy like Till Death Us Do Part
that brought rude to peak-time television.
Writer Johnny Speight benefited from the more open minded BBC.
He could make the Garnetts gloriously rude about politicians.
In one episode, Alf's daughter has a rant about Tory premier Edward Heath and the 1972 miners' strike.
Everyone wants to pay the miners but old fatso won't.
No. Oh, he makes me sick every time I see him on there with his great porky face wobbling with the fat.
Now, this is the most popular sitcom in Britain, and to have somebody talking about
the sitting prime minister with such venom, such aggression, I mean you wouldn't see it in My Family now.
Zoe Wannamaker's not going to suddenly start banging on about how
Gordon Brown is disgusting and he makes her sick.
I think what that shows is that in the '70s there was this kind of
political frankness and this kind of political aggressiveness.
And this kind of naked partisanship.
And through the bigotry of Alf Garnett, the issue of race could be raised.
He'd put the coons down the pits.
Colour, as it was called, was something that was pre-occupying a changing, more multi-racial Britain.
Humour was a way of dealing with it.
That's why they wear all that war paint, innit?
To see each other in the dark, see.
I suppose, if he did put the coons down the pits...
..he could always whitewash their faces first!
Here, rude could be agent provocateur, forcing into the open fears and prejudices.
Every time you see rudeness of this kind, you feel
either it's battering a door which won't open, or, in other cases,
it's breaking through a door.
Fair enough. Thanks very much. Do you want a cup of tea, Sambo...John?
Rudery always tests your response.
It's always a kind of litmus paper of where you are and where society is at any given moment.
That's what makes it so interesting in my view.
Oh, if you want me again, just beat the drums, eh?
Race was critical to another tradition of rude humour
that also entered primetime television in the 1970s.
This was performed in northern working men's clubs by stand-up comedians like Bernard Manning.
This Paki used to knock about with these two Irish fellows.
The Paki got knocked down.
And the copper said, "What was his name?" They said, "We never knew his name, sir.
"The only thing we knew about him, he had two arseholes." He said, "How do you mean?"
He says, "Every pub we went in they used to say here's that Paki with them two arseholes."
These were comedians who luxuriated in being blunt, in being direct.
And in a way part of their appeal was we say it direct, we say it to you in an unvarnished way, we say it
to you because those people in London won't give you this kind of comedy.
CHEERING
Bernard Manning was a king of northern comedy.
Thank you very much.
Manning made his part of '70s Britain laugh.
We've got a wonderful show for you tonight.
When's the best time to sell an Irishman a plot of land? Do you know?
When the tide's out.
Nothing wrong with that. That was lovely.
What would there be left to laugh about if you didn't have nig-nogs and disabled people and fat women?
There would be nothing left to be funny about.
And we all merrily did Pakistani accents and thought that was terribly funny,
and jokes about Chinese people eating Pakis, and Irish jokes and so forth.
They were very funny and nobody batted an eyelid.
In 1971, Producer Johnny Hamp at Granada TV decided to put the humour
of northern comics such as Manning on television.
Hamp thought these comedians would put a smile on the face of a nation gripped by a mood of decline.
Everybody was a bit in the doldrums and we thought how about a belly laugh.
And so I
picked out 30 of the comics that I thought...
I don't know what I was going to do with them, to be honest.
But I brought them into the studio at Granada.
Over three nights, ten a night, and just put them all on tape.
Then edited up what became the first show of The Comedians.
Irishman up in court, for maintenance.
The judge said, "We decided to allow your wife seven pound a week."
He says, "Thanks very much, and I'll try and send her a few shilling meself."
The Comedians made national stars of regional comics.
But in this transfer to television the bawdy blue humour of the clubs was left out.
This would have been all too much for '70s television.
I always pride myself that I don't think we ever did a blue joke.
When I say blue, I mean a rude, very rude, sexually rude gag.
What was left after the blue had been washed out was comedy that would soon be seen as unacceptable,
rudeness that was crude and offensive.
I know a fellow spent 30 years in darkest Africa looking for the lost Mazazuki tribe.
He found them eventually, living over a chip shop in Bradford.
Corporation toilets in Birmingham are losing a fortune. All these Jamaicans keep doing the limbo under the door.
There's nothing ironic about The Comedians.
There is something ironic about Till Death Us Do Part.
Johnny Speight wrote that show to show up Alf Garnett.
To make fun of him and to make fun of his attitudes.
That was the whole point of the show.
It didn't quite work, because a lot of people empathised with him.
But that was the design behind it. Now Comedians isn't doing that at all.
The Comedians is basically saying we all think Pakis are funny, let's all have a laugh at them.
That's the subtext behind the show.
There's no irony, no attempt to debunk, it's wallowing in
those kind of prejudices rather than interrogating them or questioning them.
What's this? You, a Jew, you don't serve Jews...
The Comedians ran on ITV for 11 seasons.
At its peak in the mid-'70s, audiences were reaching ten million.
But into the '80s, the programme lost its mass appeal.
# Babylon's burning... #
Now the mood in Britain was angry and fractious.
This was a time of conflict abroad and the enemy within at home.
Rude satire now held up a mirror to a nation on edge.
And satirists focussed on the one person whose aggressive conviction politics were dominating Britain.
It's complete gloom when Thatcher came to power.
I remember vividly May 4th 1979.
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
I can remember just the sheer frustration of the Thatcher years.
It went on for bloody 11 years of it.
And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
For a new generation of cartoonists, Margaret Thatcher was THE target.
Steve Bell was a fan of the political cartooning of Gerald Scarfe
and had been influenced by the subversive ideology of the counterculture.
Must never forget the neck.
One of the points about Margaret, the brass Margaret, is her brass neck.
Continuing her monstrous cheek.
Anger made Bell's pen drip with vitriol.
I attacked her as a psychopath. That was my take on her. I thought she was mad from the word go.
I thought there was something really weird about this woman.
Not only did she stand for everything I hated, but she was deranged with it.
And there was a kind of arrogance about Thatcher.
Utter self belief.
I have only one thing to say.
You turn if you want to.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Steve Bell in his comic strips chronicled a period
when the lady was not for turning, no matter what the consequences.
The lady's not for turning.
I just wanted to be as rude as I possibly could, I just wanted to get at her, I wanted to attack.
I wanted to destroy her.
# Babylon's burning
# Babylon's burning. #
Television also satirised Margaret Thatcher
in a comedy show that first appeared on ITV in 1984,
Spitting Image.
We considered it fair game to be as rude about Mrs Thatcher as...
Well, ruder than we could possibly imagine. We tried to be.
Ah, Heseltine.
What are you covering up this week?
The idea of Mrs Thatcher going for a pee with the lads
seemed to be perfectly normal and I think a lot of people thought that's probably what she does do.
It felt right. And obviously she wears Y-fronts - of course she does.
She's well hung, massive swinging dick under there.
That seemed right.
Spitting Image benefitted from collaboration between illustrators
and sculptors Peter Fluck and Roger Law and producers like John Lloyd.
# Grimly fiendish
# Plays the game that never ends... #
I think that Spitting Image was a sort of hybrid
between the tradition that Scarfe comes out of, that we came out of,
English comic art, English satirical art, and John Lloyd, of course, is out of Footlights.
So it is that hybrid between Oxbridge Footlights and a traditional form of visual art, and Punch and Judy.
Spitting Image revived centuries old traditions of puppetry
and caricature to mock and ridicule the powerful, rich and famous.
When Spitting Image emerged, with Fluck and Law,
who create these grotesque puppets, it seemed to be
a direct link back to 18th century political cartooning.
Millions began to watch Spitting Image.
In the front rooms of Britain, there seemed to be an appetite for this kind of comedy.
The mass democracy of rude was voting for its peak time marriage of puppets and political satire.
If the unemployed are hungry, why don't they eat their own bodies?
All that good meat going to waste. It makes me mad.
'Mrs Thatcher. Will you, yourself...
One of the sketches in the very first six shows was Norman Tebbit,
who had liquidised - he put a hand,
puppet hands were made out of pink latex, into a liquidiser and made a kind of pink soup,
and then drank this sort of cannibal soup.
The idea was that if the unemployed are so hungry, why don't they eat themselves?
It is very nutritious, human flesh.
This sketch made those who regulated independent television uneasy.
I went to the IBA and they said, "John, you see, is this funny?
"I mean, cannibalism, do you really think that is amusing?"
But a little learned chat about 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift
between producer and regulator persuaded them otherwise.
And I said, "Well, no, obviously I do not think it is amusing, sir, but it is really Swift's A Modest Proposal.
"As you will recall, the Irish potato famine and so on." "Oh!
"Satire. Oh, well that is fine.
"I'm sorry, I did not realise it was satire, I thought it was filth. Jolly good, move on!"
But Spitting Image didn't just attack politicians.
The programme also went for the British Establishment by making fun of the Royal Family.
..will be mine tonight.
I want you now.
Rude mockery of all the senior Royals.
Something like this hadn't been attempted for centuries.
Yes, dear. Did you remember to set the bugler?
Yes, dear, seven o'clock. The Queen was a secret communist.
I don't think you have met my sister Margaret, dear, have you?
Margaret was a dipso.
Charles was really earnest and rather out of touch with everything.
One talked to the workers and one cracked a rather amusing joke about an outside loo.
Randy, you have got to help me.
The Duke of Edinburgh shot everything in sight. Come on now...
That's right, boy. Good shot!
The Royals were another target that modern rude could take on and get away with.
Now the Windsors were part of Rude Britannia, just like anybody else.
Producer John Lloyd had a rude awakening to the impact
Spitting Image was making after one late recording.
I came back and I fell asleep on the train back from Birmingham.
I woke up to the sound of these two old ducks with a bucket cleaning the train.
One said, "Oh, did you see that Spitting Image last night on the telly?"
The other one says, "Yeah, I saw it.
"I love that show because I hate the fucking Queen."
And you think, "What have I done here?"
The writers, producers and artists who worked on Spitting Image
were part of a generation intent on creating a new kind of comedy.
Here they arrive on the scene, the Ben Eltons, Harry Enfields,
Jo Brands, and they wanted to create something new.
Dubbed alternative comedians, they tended to be younger, more middle class and university educated.
And they consciously rejected a rude humour of easy laughs against Pakistanis or the Irish.
The alternative comedy of the '80s came into being as
a very self-conscious reaction to older types of comedy.
Let's do away with the old-fashioned comedy of The Comedians,
of those club comics, of those older working-class comics.
I am not a virgin! I am not a virgin!
The anarchic punky humour of The Young Ones relied in part on traditional slapstick.
Oi. If I am a virgin,
how come I know what a girl's bottom looks like?
From looking in the mirror.
It is often rudeness that does go back to a kind of clowning, bodily parts.
The Young Ones has lots of violence as rudeness, abuse of the body, which is a different kind of rudeness.
UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE THEME PLAYS
Watching The Young Ones go and be on University Challenge
and Vivian lose his head by sticking it out of a train, which,
by the way, is an excellent safety message, it has made me always not stick my head out of a train window.
Do not lean out of the window. I wonder why?
TRAIN HORN BLARES
AARGHHHH!
Yes, it was incredibly juvenile and in a way that does fit into the alternative remit.
So much of alternative comedy was young middle-class men behaving like children. It cannot be got past.
You took your time, you bastard!
This was knockabout stuff,
but also in a tradition of using rude humour to challenge taboos.
There is a party episode when Rik Mayall goes into a girl's handbag and goes, "What is in here?"
And he gets out a white cardboard tube and goes, "What's this?"
And she blushes and covers her eyes.
It's a telescope!
A telescope with a mouse in it!
I remember thinking at the time, I was only 18 or 20, thinking,
"Wow, I have never seen a tampon on television before."
Menstruation is just not referred to at all in public,
and he gets out this tampon, and there's this huge laugh on
the edginess of it and that rudeness of it but actually it is liberating.
He is saying, yes, women menstruate, yes, let's not be so embarrassed
and not make women feel so bad about it, which is what it is really about.
Have you? Honestly...
The Young Ones were getting laughs out of new sensitivities.
Pay attention. Mary, who is that tall girl doing Geoggers...
Oh! You mean
the one with the enormous tits!
They're minute... Vivian, will you stop being so sexist!
They are called breasts and everybody has them.
But comedians of all ages and persuasions would increasingly
have to pay attention to a new code of do's and don't's
in the manufacture of their laughter.
This was dictated by the emergence of political correctness.
It's all about not offending the very groups who had been
the traditional butts of so much comedy. Women, ethnic minorities,
people who were in any way different, people who are weaker than you are.
Those people who had all been targets for kind of comic bullying.
Political correctness says, oh no, you can't do that.
Take that off the table.
See if we get any niggers in here, you know?
What political correctness demanded
was that comedians like Bernard Manning should have no place in television's mass democracy of rude.
This nigger walked in this pub with a BEEP big parrot on his shoulder.
And the barman said, "Where have you got that from?"
And the parrot said, Africa, there's BEEP millions of them.
As a journalist rather than as a punter,
I went a number of times to Bernard Manning's club
in Manchester and when they kicked him off TV,
when the on the whole liberals who ran TV decided that this stuff
was no longer acceptable, he just went and did the same jokes
and even worse jokes in the clubs.
I said you'll get a BEEP the way you are going on.
You slant-eyed, yellow face bastard.
Banished from television, Manning became the new alternative comedy that went underground.
I think it is absolutely true to say that Manning becomes the counter-culture.
And not just Manning.
What is left of the survivors of the working men's clubs
have retreated underground. They have become the alternative.
INDISTINCT
Those working-class comics slink back into their bunkers
and become something that has to be sought out, like with native guides.
At the same time that club comedy went back to its roots, scornful of newly PC times,
another rude phenomenon emerged from the north
that also refused to bow down to the concerns of political correctness.
This was Viz, from Newcastle.
Our take on everything was to take the piss.
That was what we enjoyed doing.
We very much enjoyed
not being guided by the whole PC...
brigade bullshit.
Stop this show.
Equal rights for ugly women.
The whole politically correct aspect of it was worthless, as far as I am concerned.
You see, comedy can't be righteous.
Comedy doesn't bear analysis.
Whatever makes you laugh makes you laugh, and you can't be judgmental about it.
The manifesto of Viz proposed that you had a right to be rude about anything and anyone.
In their comic strips, Viz could satirise the everyday delusions of men like Sid the Sexist.
This porn mag, mine?
I thought you meant the newspaper.
Porn, me?
Well, I'll believe you, mind.
I don't suppose anybody would admit to buying Big Jugs Monthly.
Big Jugs? Oh, it was Mammoth Melons I wanted.
I've picked up the wrong one.
Sid the Sexist, for instance, I just wanted to create a character,
kind of inspired by a friend of ours, but the point was he was supposed to be this sort of Geordie
character who was useless around women but felt that he had to do
all of the bravado and all the macho stuff that peer pressure told him he had to.
Sid isn't complete without his comedy catchphrase.
As well as mocking Sid, Viz would, with equal enthusiasm,
ridicule the PC absurdities of Millie Tant and the Modern Parents.
Have you ever been fox-hunting?
Have you ever worn fur?
Have you ever had misogynist fantasies whilst masturbating?
Viz could celebrate the lewd, bawdy lifestyle of the Fat Slags.
Eh, Tracey, I forgot me knickers.
Well, you wouldn't be keeping them on long anyway.
These two women with, "Oh, I've forgotten to put the purple blotches on my legs!"
And ending up shagging someone outside the kebab shop.
You sort of laughed because you recognised the stereotypes, appalling though they were.
I wouldn't stand up and defend that to the Hackney Women's Committee, but I did used to chuckle at it.
You could eat at our place.
We want a pizza. You'll get a shag later, don't fret.
And after all the clever satire, Viz could just revel
in the centuries old, rude delights of farting.
There is nothing like a vigorous fart for...
overturning pomposity.
Viz was a welcome breath of stale air...you might say.
Then in the late '90s, it seemed that Britain might just become a little less rude,
when Tony Blair came amongst us to heal and unite after the wounds and divisions of the Thatcher years.
Because Tony was no rude boy, was he?
I think there was a sense that he brought in a culture,
if not necessarily of niceness,
then of decency and inoffensiveness.
That notorious quote which has haunted him down the years of "I am a pretty straight kind of guy."
That is what he ran on.
But despite the touchy feeliness of the New Labour project, Britain remained defiantly, stubbornly rude.
Cartoonist Martin Rowson for one found a lot to be rude about in the person and politics of Blair.
From the first moment I became aware of him, there was something about him
which really, really irritated me.
He was like a Christian school prefect, bursting into the Common Room when everybody else is
sitting around reading copies of Mayfair or having a crafty fag, saying, "Hey, guys, come on, get up,
"let's go and do something, let's all be enthusiastic."
And you go, "Oh, fuck off!"
I think we might have a slightly anxious Tony thinking about God,
wondering what God is going to say to him when he meets him.
Probably say hi, I should think.
Hi, Tony. Hi, God.
# This charming man... #
So many different things you could do with his face
because you could reduce him to just an eye and teeth and ears.
He would always hold his hands in a certain way.
As if poised ready to spring into
prayer, or as if he was clutching an enormous ball.
Tony Blair is responsible for the deaths of more people
he has never met than any prime minister since Winston Churchill.
And if that doesn't make people angry I don't know what does.
It makes me incredibly angry that he has got away with it.
And we should get angry about things, because there are terrible, horrible,
appalling things happening in the world all the time.
And one of the ways that we cope with it, rather than topping ourselves and going mad, is by laughing.
Staring, demonic eye.
And not forgetting, blood on his hands.
I get an enormous amount of almost spiritual satisfaction
about being beastly about Tony Blair.
I think that's enough blood.
Just as rude cartooning continued into a new millennium,
so the rude traditions of northern clubland also lived on.
Here the reigning king is now Roy Chubby Brown.
AUDIENCE CHANTS: You fat bastard, you fat bastard....
Fat bastard to his adoring fans, Chubby Brown
gives his working class audience just the kind of humour they want.
Roy Chubby Brown is possibly the idiot bastard son
of the club comics.
He is a raw offspring.
There is no innuendo in a Roy Chubby Brown act.
It is a full tilt, non-stop juggernaut of filth.
Roy Brown, born with a black eye.
My father fancied one more fuck on the way to the maternity hospital.
He is so over the top that you are drained of
any chance of being shocked. If you can last the distance.
Bloke swapped his wife for an outside toilet.
Said the hole was smaller and it smelt a lot fucking better.
And on and on and on, and the permutations of the things
he is going to do and the things that are being done to him.
I'm going to singe the minge.
I'm going to bury the helmet.
I'm going to break the wife's back, I'm gonna fucking snap the bitch in two.
He is rude, the boy is rude.
Roy Chubby Brown has been able to distribute his material through changing technologies
and he has a network of live venues to perform in.
So, unlike earlier club comedians, Roy Chubby Brown has no need for the patronage of radio and television.
His real success and infamy grew
when he started selling audio cassettes of his stand-up act.
These were passed around almost like banned documents in the Eastern bloc.
And then the VHS cassette and the DVDs, that kind of rude comedy
has now achieved mass impact without using the broadcast media.
If you take somebody like Roy Chubby Brown, his story
is one of white working-class clubland humour going full circle.
It starts off in the clubs, it comes onto television in the 1970s,
and then disappears back underground and is almost forgotten again.
Somebody like Roy Chubby Brown, in his own way, like it or loathe it,
he is keeping alive a tradition of working class blue humour.
Yet quite staggering rudeness can still be found in the front rooms of Britain.
One comedy series proves that television's mass democracy of rude can still exist today.
Little Britain is a place where every tradition
of British rudeness is drawn upon to provoke our shared laughter.
INAUDIBLE
You little slut. You fat bitch.
Get your hands off me.
Matt Lucas and David Walliams seem to have cast off the shackles
that political correctness tried to put on rude comedy.
Little Britain came along after years of programmes that would never
have dared go into the places where Little Britain went.
It is just because of the time lapse that it suddenly had comic value,
that detonating these bombs in the middle of their sketch show
was suddenly far more powerful because the time was ready for us
to go, "OK, I will laugh at that again," but it still had shock value.
Little Britain is shocking,
confronting taboo after taboo to reveal just how far we have
travelled since modern rude began in the early '60s.
That's got it.
Yet Little Britain also divides us as a nation,
because today's responses to rude are so conditioned by sensitivities about race, class and sexuality.
LAUGHTER
'The idea of a Prime Minister having an outrageous, sissy PA'
is a send-up of the Prime Minister, but is also a parody and a send-up of sissy gay men.
Be gentle with me, Prime Minister.
I very much approve of what I think probably would be the Little Britain charter of comedy, which is that
anything can be laughed at. And I really mean anything.
And I certainly as a gay man or whatever, short stocky bearded man,
whatever I am, any part of that can be sent up.
But some find Little Britain simply offensive.
What I find so troubling about Little Britain is their women are repulsive
and they're not just repulsive characters,
which all their characters are.
They are physically, specifically unpleasant.
So they constantly defecate, urinate, lactate, vomit.
< Sorry.
Oh, is there a good one near here?
All these women are producing fluid from some orifice at some time all the time.
And it is impossible to watch it without thinking,
"I get it already, you don't like people who look like me.
"That is just fine. Really that's just fine, can we stop now?
"This is just so nasty."
What Little Britain confirms
is that the opponent Rude Britannia now faces has changed.
'In the '60s, with Till Death Us Do Part and others,'
it was essentially the right who were saying
this is filthy, this is sweary.
Very little actually, except a few members of the left, saying this is racist.
When we get to the early 21st century, you have the criticism coming almost entirely
from the liberal left, saying this is misogynistic,
this is homophobic, this is racist.
You can't have these men blacking up and cross-dressing and making jokes about breast-feeding.
And so the entire line of attack across those 50 years has changed.
An explosion of television channels and radio stations has given
greater opportunities for rudery but also for offence.
In October 2008, Jonathan Ross went on the Russell Brand radio show.
The two tried to contact actor Andrew Sachs, then left offensive messages on his answer phone.
The BBC has apologised to the actor Andrew Sachs for what it called the unacceptable...
Sachsgate was a rude own goal for just about everybody.
..by the broadcasters Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.
I have still never met,
even in private, a comedian or anyone at all who will defend what they did.
The BBC has so far received 1,500 complaints about the programme.
Like many people I think that what Brand and Ross did
was unforgivably pathetic, and rude and not very nice.
The furore led to a tightening of BBC rules
governing material considered to be offensive.
Now the C word used is compliance.
This is the internal procedure for monitoring contentious material.
Rude is still in the schedules. But with stricter compliance,
there is less of it, and what rudeness there is,
has a cordon sanitaire placed around it.
What has happened is that there are certain
very small areas of the schedule which are licensed to offend.
And around that half hour or hour, there are lots of people with red
flags jumping up and down and saying this is quite incredibly offensive, please don't be offended.
This programme contains very strong language from the outset.
You get her into the sack, you bang her fucking brains out.
This is really crossing the line.
Don't start with moral objections,
you fucking Blue Peter badge-wearing ponce.
Go and make a contribution to fucking Amnesty International, go and buy
a goat the whole village can fuck. But you are doing this for me.
The rest of the schedules, people are frightened and cautious
and nervous and taking out words which were routine in programmes even four or five years ago.
And so you have a few licensed bad boy or bad girl programmes,
but the rest of it are on Sunday best all the time.
This reining in of rude has led to accusations that compliance is just another word for censorship.
There is a kind of climate now that suddenly you're not allowed to say that.
And anybody who has ever been at the cutting edge of comedy trying to stop us all getting stultified
by doing the same joke that we have been doing for 100 years, trying
to move it on a bit, is going to get a good deal of opprobrium and anger
and there is going to be this
sort of cultural police come along and say that is not funny.
Cheer up, John!
Our modest history of Rude Britannia suggests that we may not have to be so pessimistic.
There has always been a war between Rude and Prude.
The cartoonists of the 18th century continually had the skill and wit
to take on their rich and powerful foes.
The music hall stars of the 19th Century thrived on battles with the moralists of Victorian Britain.
And modern rude has got up the noses of just about everybody.
So it is more likely that the centuries-old battle between
rude mischief makers and their enemies will just never end.
Perhaps it wouldn't be much fun if it ever did.
# Reasons to be cheerful One, two, three... #
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk