"ALL GONE TO GURNEYLAND"

(ATV, 22/10/1960 - 26/11/1960)

"I have hundreds of ladies running through my mind. They daren't walk."

'Thus, briefly, Newley was in time with the ephemera of pop culture rather than show business. Indeed, since his rivals were dismissed as agent-made brain-deads - such as Cliff Richard's Bongo Herbert character in Espresso Bongo - Newley came as near as the trade got to an "intellectual" before the music business developed its self-consciousness and self importance.'
(Nigel Fountain, 'Between Elvis and the Beatles', The Guardian, 16/04/1999, p.16)

 
The Strange World of Gurney Slade is a DVD release to treasure; ATV's utterly unconventional TV comedy is finally available to enjoy in all its bizarre glory, 51 years after its first broadcast.

The show started out with a large audience yet was moved to a post-11pm timeslot as its viewing figures declined; there were no contemporary reviews in The Guardian or The Times. Despite this critical indifference, it is effortlessly subversive, with a humour that is by turns dry and surreal. Tropes of British television that were already hoary by 1960 are mercilessly satirised, as Newley's agitated Slade walks out of the set of the sitcom he is in. The nascent consumer society of Macmillan's Britain is dexterously skewered throughout, with Newley dancing with a vacuum cleaner and multiple digs at the influence of advertising: 'who am I to ruin the advertising business?'

The series has a leisurely, reflective pacing, with Gurney given to philsophising about marriage, romance and the role of corn in the Napoleonic wars or conversing with cattle. Episode 3 evokes the languorous pastorialism of Powell and Pressburger or, as noted by Frank Collins, the rarefied film The Pleasure Garden (dir. James Broughton, 1953). It can also be considered a sedated, thoughtful development of the Goon Show's madcap anarchism. Newley himself figures as a hipper, yet oddball variant on Hancock's English everyman, as happy going to see French films as is in essaying his skiffle-folk classic 'Strawberry Fair'.

 As the series develops, there are pre-echoes of later 1960s exercises in the bizarre: The Prisoner and Dr Who: The Mind Robber; episode 5 takes place within Slade's own bonce: the curious 'Gurneyland', filled with devils, tinkers and children. Episode 6 evokes Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) in its deconstructionism: the previous characters of the series retuning to beseech Gurney, requesting life beyond the confines of the series.

For me, the absolute peak is episode 4, where Gurney - and by extension, the series itself - is put on trial for 'having no sense of humour'. The episode can be considered part of a lineage of absurdist trial scenes that includes Kafka and Welles's The Trial, The Prisoner: Fall Out and Dr Who: The Stones of Blood (and, unwittingly, the misbegotten Trial of a Time Lord). Slade is opposed by a motley array of characters including a hangman, a trade unionist, a prosecuting counsel (Douglas Wilmer) and a sullen, fairy tale princess. He is 'supported' by a George Robey-citing music-hall comedian Archie, his punchlines trailing - notable in the wake of John Osborne's Archie Rice. The Entertainer - first staged in 1957 - was adapted for film by Osborne and Nigel Kneale in the same year this series was broadcast.

The main evidence shown to the courtroom is footage of Slade on TV, delivering a rambling, deadpan routine about a countersunk screw. This is a minimalist comedy of mundanity, with Newley extemporising on the merits or otherwise of the said screw. It is just possible that writers Sid Green and Richard Hills may have been taking notes from Pinter's The Caretaker, which opened in London on 27th April; Slade's routine could be considered an altogether more light-hearted counterpoint to Aston's unsettling dramatic monologues.

Newley went on to considerable commercial success on stage with his collaborations with Leslie Bricusse, though less with his directorial film debut, the supposed grand-folly of Can Heironymous Merkin Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? : 'You may squirm but you will not want to walk out'. (John Russell Taylor, The Times, 26/06/1969). As said, The Times did not review TSWOGS, did but mention it glowingly alongside Newley's appearance in The Johnny Darling Show (TX: 12/11/1961), which itself sounds interesting: 'he regarded a world faced with catastrophe in a programme of uncomfortable but wittily expressed desperation'. (Our Special Correspondent, The Times, 18/11/1961, p.4)

The series is beautifully shot, on film; this is television unafraid to be influenced by innovative developments in radio and theatre, crafted by the future writers of Morecambe and Wise and the one-off talent that was Anthony Newley. The Strange World of Gurney Slade is an example of 'Television of the Absurd' to rank alongside Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Though, in truth, Gurneyland is a whole lot odder. For more thorough and erudite thoughts, read Frank Collins and John Williams, who was one of the people to recommend this wonderful series to me.

Uncle Jim, Uncle Lew, the Muppets and social democracy

I have written extensively elsewhere of the importance of ATV - the most problematic from a social democratic perspective, because wariest of the consensus of limited capitalism within which it had, unwillingly, to operate, of the ITV companies of the network's first quarter-century - in making the transition from the culture of the British Empire to the culture of the undeclared American one far smoother and easier to take for older British people at the time than it would have been otherwise.

The single most important show in this process in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Sunday Night at the London Palladium, simultaneously the last repository of the British music hall where the Crazy Gang made their final appearance together, and the platform through which Buddy Holly and the Beatles defined their impact, and where the Stones' attack on the certainties of the post-war state found its most perfect definition. But perhaps most fascinating in this context are the strong echoes of the music hall in the format of The Muppet Show - globally, probably Lew Grade's biggest success of all, even though it was made at a time when he had been forced to step down from day-to-day control of ATV by the IBA and when the social-democratic establishment was already closing in on the company, soon to force it to reform into a wholly Midlands-based company with quite different aims - and specifically the fact that, in the early weeks of 1978, the Muppets were in the Top 20 with their version of "Waiting at the Church".

The plot thickens. In the TV Times of 27 January-2 February 1979 - the same issue with Flambards on the cover - the then Prime Minister, in an interview seemingly conducted towards the end of the previous year so utterly inimical to the events of that moment, and weirdly predictive of the distortion of the political process which would do so much damage to another Labour Prime Minister who should have called an autumn election when he had the chance, expresses his appreciation and enjoyment of The Muppet Show. Infamously, he had heralded his fatal postponement of the general election at the TUC conference the previous September by singing the very same song, in a gesture which seems - history has given it this status, however little he could have imagined it - both to end one era (dignified statesmanlike politics, a cross-party agreement on the limiting of capitalism so as to maintain social cohesion and stability) and fire the starting gun on another (the reduction of politics to symbols, gestures, songs). Could it be, perhaps, that it was the Muppets' rendition that had placed the song back in his mind, and convinced him that it might, somehow, be a good idea?

The idea that there might have been some kind of connection between such an omnipresently successful - despite rather than because of the system under which it was created - product of British television as global/mid-Atlantic powerhouse rather than internal public service, and the political decision which opened the floodgates for the lifting of those restrictions on global capitalism which had dogged Lew Grade for so long, is one of the many powerful ironies of those years (if, that is, there is a connection; there may not be, I just like to imagine so). The cultural shame and embarrassment - obviously embedded with a nasty, latent anti-Semitism when held in some Tory circles, but rooted in a basically admirable, however incompatible with the pop-cultural creativity that exploded in Britain in the 1960s & 70s, belief in public-spiritedness and universal obligation when held by Labour supporters - which had been felt across the board about the presence of a company like ATV, trying desperately to juggle the international role it aspired towards with the regional role it had to fit within, in retrospect began to die the moment the nation heard that there would be no general election at this time.

The political legacy of what happened next is defined by the fact that it happened in the first, pre-Falklands years of the Thatcher government, when the ideologues were still struggling to stamp their absolute authority and the less fanatical "wets" still had a stake in the Cabinet. The collapse of the Grade empire due to the attentions of the IBA on one side of the business and the disaster of Raise the Titanic on the other (ITC having moved into films in the later '70s hoping for greater success in a less regulated area, only to be destroyed by the same rules of the market that have undermined so many latterday Tory heroes, not least Bruce Gyngell of Thatcher's own ideal ITV company) was one of two downfalls of buccaneering capitalists in the very early 1980s (the other being the collapse of Laker Airways, at least in part due to the machinations of the still-nationalised British Airways, in the early weeks of 1982) which convinced the forces of Thatcherism that they needed to take absolute control of the party and push out those who still took "conservative" comparatively literally. There is, in fact, a sense in which ATV and ITC died so that Murdoch and Sky could live.

There is no doubt that the Grades fitted perfectly one of the two main anti-Semitic stereotypes, and the Bernsteins the other; obviously, all those who adhered to such stereotypes, however subconsciously and unthinkingly, epitomised the lies and delusions on which Britain was living at the pre-ITV, pre-Suez, pre-Elvis moment, and Britain in 1955/6 undoubtedly needed a bit of what the Grades had to offer, "vulgar", "rootless" capitalism. It just needed the tendencies demonised by old-school Tories as "Jewish Bolshevism" more. In terms of being Conservative without being "Tory" in the then still commonly identifiable cultural sense, with its echoes of backwoodsmen and Victorian diehards, and also calling for an Establishment separated from the old Foreign Office Arabism, the Grade dynasty played a crucial role in the long-term creation of Thatcherism (this is the sense in which Death of a Princess was, perversely, less of a break from the earlier incarnation of ATV than it seemed at the time).

The fact that Central were, only twelve years after coming into being, absorbed by Carlton - capitalism at its absolute crudest, with no hint of the genuine love and enjoyment and care that defined even ATV and ITC's more mediocre efforts - sums up precisely how this story ended. In the brief island between, Central - while still continuing the tradition of IBA-baiting with The Price is Right - also defined their own territory in terms of drama (helped massively, in terms of opening up new ground in the portrayal and stimulation of young people, by Lewis Rudd and Geoff Husson, of whom more soon), and brought a genuine flavour of the Midlands to British television in a way nobody before or since has really shown the desire or inclination to do. The story of ITV in the Midlands begins and ends with out-and-out capitalism, by the end devoid of any of its fresher, more exciting qualities by having become a fat, rotten establishment culture. What interests me most, though, is what happened because it had to happen under a mixed economy, and which would probably not have happened under the neoliberal misinterpretation of freedom. For a powerful depiction of a class lost and isolated amid Thatcherism - the children of the old respectable working class, seeing their parents' routes to suburban respectability closed off and reduced to sheer nihilism, with even the land where the values of "your philosopher Keynes" were surviving only an unattainable mirage in the end - check this for a start. And remember how and why it was able to happen, and how and why it couldn't happen now.

Excuse me if I don't think The Persuaders or The Champions stand any kind of comparison. Out-and-out capitalism was exciting once. But here, now, it can never be again. The Grades, undoubtedly, did much of value in British mass culture in a particular place and time. But their myth is the same myth as that cherished by the offshore radio fanboys, the Jim Slater euologisers, the Jagger cultists (who Peter Hitchens would almost be right about if only he admitted that their crime is neoliberalism rather than socialism), and in the age when a cruder, much less well-made and well-constructed version of what they represented represents the cultural model for Old Etonian Tories rather than anything to be wary of, it has to be opposed. If only Jim Callaghan could have seen that, back in the first week of September 1978.