WHAT ROY'S CHILDREN READ
a new health warning: licence can damage your brain
THIS year sees the 25th birthday of Mary Whitehouse's Clean Up TV Campaign, now known as the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. Keeping such a movement going in the face of the sneers of most of the media has been a remarkable achievement on Mrs Whitehouse's part, and I salute her courage and stamina. She has had her victories too, notably the recent creation of the Broadcasting Stan- dards Council, which her group asked for at their first public meeting in 1964. Moreover, it is likely that, without the Whitehouse campaign, the broadcasting duopoly, in its lust for ratings and profits, would have descended even lower than EastEnders. All the same, it is painfully true that, despite the efforts of Mrs White- house and others, and a decade of Thatch- er government, the permissive society still B. ourishes. As the Sunday Telegraph noted in a leader this week, it is Roy Jenkins's Britain as much as Margaret Thatcher's. I agree it is quite unfair to blame poor Roy, an ultra-fastidious and civilised man, for the excesses of the cultural climate he helped to introduce in the 1960s: he is merely the most convenient symbol of it. But the sheer ugliness of the flora and fauna that climate has encouraged to grow sometimes sickens the spirit. I am thinking, for instance of the polytechnic students educated and supported by the taxpayer who recently howled down Norman Tebbit and gloated over the horrific injuries his wife suffered in the Brighton IRA bomb- ing. Indeed the whole notion of using Public money to promote higher education and popular culture has been undermined by permissive extremism. Take the case of the Liverpool Playhouse, which gets £615,000 a year from the Arts Council and further large sums from local councils. Why should taxpayers and ratepayers en- able this organisation to stage political Propaganda plays such as its current Fears and Miseries of the Third Term which, as reported in the Sunday Times, compares Mrs Thatcher with Hitler?
What characterised the cultural progeny of the Permissive Society was its sheer exorbitance, its passion for excess. Clearly, useful political debate becomes impossible
when a democratically elected prime minis- ter is dismissed as a Hitler. Such a compari- son itself suggests a violent approach to public affairs. Violence is now an omnipre- sent feature of much of our cultural output, especially what is directed at the young, which rests on an unholy tripod of brutal- ity, crude sex and radicalism. In a series on `The New Morality' in the Sunday Times, a clergyman is quoted: 'Young people are far more sensitive to cruelty, both to animals and people. They are less racist, more environmental, more philanthropic. They are more aware of what goes on in the world — and more generous.' I wonder if this cleric has talked recently to an 80-year- old lady who has been beaten up and robbed of her pitiful pence by a couple of teenagers, or for that matter has troubled to read the literature now fashionable among young people up to their mid- twenties?
There is, for instance, Brain Damage (price 85p) which describes itself as 'The Comic for Grown-ups' and features strips called 'Acid Head Arnie', 'Ronnie Sperm' and 'Andy the Anarchist'. One, 'Wild- trouser Hall, a Chronicle of Superior Folk', has an upper-class family shooting tortoises, engaging in sodomy and flogging anti-hunt protestors. Another, 'Home Front', shows a teenager's mother murder- ing a harmless old lady with a crossbow. 'The Scraggs' features a restaurant where rats are eaten. The Watchdogs' shows Mrs Whitehouse watching sex-videos. There are drawings of Mrs Thatcher jumping on sick people and going to the lavatory — there is a good deal of cloacal humour, plus crude porn (`Tony the Tosspot', `Arseover Tit'). And there is the political message. A full-page photo of a youth is captioned: 'This is Tim ... he started on a scheme just 'cos his friends said it was cool. Nothing big to start with, just two months in a rubber factory. But now he's on a two-year computer programming course and he can't get off it. Don't end up like Tim. Just say no. Government training schemes real- ly screw you up. Dole's Your Goal.'
The new kind of adult comic is not just
on the margin. Brain Damage was laun- ched to cash in on a growing market, encouraged by the success of an earlier venture, Viz (90p), which is reputed to sell 200,000 copies an issue. This has photo- strips, such as 'Happy Ever After', a retelling of the Cinderella story which ends with Prince Charming telling her: 'Mar- ried? In love? What do you think this is — a frigging fairy-tale? Listen baby, I've had me fun. Now slag off, y'cheap tart!' Its drawn strips include 'Mrs Brady', about a cruel and greedy old woman, 'Buster Gonad and His Unfeasably Large Testi- cles', `Biffa Bacon', concerning a cretinous teenager whose parents delight in beating him up, 'Johnny Fart Pants', 'Jack Black and His Dog Silver', in which old folk suffering from hypothermia are sent to prison, and 'Postman Plod', who lies, cheats, steals and uses brutality to amass money. Violence, four-letter words and crude sex abound. There are both phony advertisements (tat school? No job? No money? Then fuck off — GnatWest') and real ones. Indeed there is no shortage of adverts, which adapt themselves willingly to the paper's tone of voice. Thus: 'Bike the World's Horniest Motorcycle Maga- zine. No ferkin' shit'. And: 'Rock Trips: if you had trouble getting to your last concert — Tough Shit. Because you didn't book with us'. Or: 'Bra. Smeggy. Pump. Bum. Poo. Dandruff. Right, that's the dirty words out of the way. Now listen: Super- Bike is a ----ing excellent motorcycle maga- zine.'
Not only firms anxious to make fast bucks out of young people support Viz. The current issue has a full-page ad which reads: 'Guts. Corpses. Entrails. Shouldn't school biology rather be the study of life? ... the manner of such study often results in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of creatures for dissection. The National Anti-Vivisection Society supports students who are repelled or angered by this.' It asks students to apply for a 'Violence-Free Science Information Pack' and concludes: 'After all, there is no reason why morals and A-levels should be incompatible.' No reason at all. But it is not clear how a campaign against violence to animals — or morals for that matter — is compatible with the kind of material published in Viz or Brain Damage. These papers, and others, reflect the extraordinary confusions of modern youth culture, in which political radicalism, 'compassion' and 'caring' issues jostle frantically with aimless violence, de-sacralised and vandalised sex, consumer greed, the cult of sleaze, drugs, noise, speed and mindless music. A generation which enjoys, or at any rate buys, this kind of thing suggests that the Cassandras were right when they predicted in the 1960s that scrapping the rules would not end in enhanced liberty but in moral chaos. And where do we go from here, Mr — sorry, Lord — Jenkins, Chancellor of Oxford University?
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