By 10pm on the night of 9th June 1983 BBC Television center was humming. In Studio Two, amid a beige version of the set from Alien, David Dimbleby and Robin Day were about to start the election results show, though everybody already knew Thatcher was going to walk it.
I was in the studio next door, which had been transformed into a vast Green Room, tables stacked high with food and booze. Us trainees had been brought in to help organise the guests and manage the hospitality.
And that party was only getting started. As the night wore on and the politicians, academics and journalists came and went, but mostly came and stayed, the whole place, and the labyrinth of corridors, scenery docks and stage lifts surrounding it, began to resemble something between a University May Ball and the last days of Rome.
People were being sick in corridors, being discovered “in flagrante” in lifts or sneaking off into unlocked offices. Some, bearing an uncanny resemblance to their Spitting Image puppets, became far too slurry and unsteady on their feet to go before Dimbleby and co at the appointed time.
Back then, juniors like me were often sent to pick up politicians and other public figures, because if they were not physically guided they’d forget to turn up altogether or go to the wrong place. We’d arrive rather sheepishly outside clubs, parties and private homes — sometimes not the private homes that they were supposed to be living in. We’d gently lead them away from whatever drunken dinner they were at and take them to the studio where more free alcohol was always available. And everyone was smoking.
For politicians and journalists alike, it was an especially louche time. And secrets, by and large, were kept along an arc of tolerated misbehaviour that ran from Westminster through St James’ to Notting Hill and White City. Albertines Wine Bar and Julie’s restaurant both had booths you could dissolve into during lunches that slipped toward early evening, and the “cinq a sept” trade in the local hotels was always healthy.
There was a BBC chauffeur driving company run by a man called Niven, and a late night “Niven Car” was the ultimate perk when the White City and Lime Grove bars finally closed. I’m not the only BBC veteran who’ll remember when a certain public figure left an item of intimate female clothing on the back seat of her “Niven” after an over-enthusiastic snog on her way home. It was duly recovered, popped into a plastic bag and discreetly couriered back to its proper owner.
I’m making it sound more fun than it was. There was a lot of awful behaviour that went unremarked and unpunished, especially the leering, groping and grabbing that my female colleagues had to put up with endlessly, some of which would today rightly be called sexual assault. And, of course, this permissive culture was the ideal environment for celebratory predators, the Jimmy Savilles, Stuart Halls and Cyril Smiths (one of David Dimbleby’s guests that very election night). We all heard the gossip, but nobody made a challenge.
But if I could have any part of that world back it would be this: we didn’t expect, need or want our MPs, ministers or their shadows to be plaster saints.
Phil Craig, “I’m done with po faced politicians”, The Critic, 2022-05-18.
September 9, 2022
QotD: The BBC behind-the-scenes in 1983
August 27, 2022
Ex Dissed Him Publicly … Turned BRUTAL Insult Into An 80s Classic | Professor of Rock
Professor of Rock
Published 8 Apr 2022One of the most heart wrenching love songs of the 80s steeped in a happy go lucky feel. “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits is a bit of conundrum. Find out what this riddle of a song means from their 1980 classic album Making Movies and how Mark Knopfler took a breakup and made it an all-time standard next on Professor of Rock.
Hey music junkies and vinyl junkies Professor of Rock always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest 80s songs of all time for the music community and vinyl community with music history video essay’s including today’s Dire Straits story of “Romeo and Juliet” and Dire Straits reaction. If you’ve ever owned records, cassettes and CD’s at different times in your life or still do this is your place. Subscribe below right now to be a part of our daily celebration of the rock era with exclusive stories from straight from the artists and click on our Patreon link in the description to become an Honorary Producer.
The British rock band Dire Straits formed in London in 1977. Their original line-up consisted of Mark Knopfler on lead vocals and lead guitar, his brother David on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass and Pick Withers on drums. In 1978 they released their self-titled debut which included the singles “Water of Love” and “Sultans of Swing”.
In 1979, they released their follow-up Communique, putting out the singles “Lady Writer” and “Once Upon a Time in the West”. For their third album, Dire Straits traveled to New York, and set up shop at a studio called the Power Station. They got to work on June 20, 1980. The album, called Making Movies was co-produced by Mark Knopfler and Jimmy Iovine, who had been the engineer and mixer on Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Due to this connection, Iovine was able to secure E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan for the sessions.
It was the first time the band had ever fully worked a keyboardist into its lineup, but Knopfler’s arrangements were expanding musically and getting more complex. And Bittan was just the man for the job. Going into the studio, Mark had written a lineup of several great songs, “Tunnel of Love”, “Skateaway”, “Expresso Love”, “Romeo and Juliet” … And there was a sense within the group that this album was going to be something very special.
But for all the promise on the horizon, Dire Straits’ increasing success had exhausted one of its members. Dave Knopfler, more than anyone else in the band was struggling. And if the intense march to fame and fortune wasn’t hard enough, Dave also had the distinct challenge of living in shadow of his brother Mark … who was the undisputed leader of the band.
Through the first few weeks of recording Dave’s dissatisfaction felt like a dark cloud. And it followed him wherever he went. With eyes averted to the floor, he and Mark had all but stopped talking. And the resentment and gloom were dragging everyone down. It all came to a head one day when Dave showed up to the studio empty-handed. Responsible for a fairly simple guitar part on “Romeo & Juliet”, Dave just hadn’t bothered to practice it. So, Iovine told him to go away and learn it.
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August 19, 2022
The DeLorean Story
Big Car
Published 5 Jan 2020There’s much more to the DeLorean Motor Company than Doc’s 88mph time machine in Back to the Future. It’s a story of a playboy founder with a meteoric rise, a story of hope and regeneration in an area torn apart after a decade of fighting, and of a cocaine smuggling fall from grace. Yes, this story has it all!
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August 17, 2022
To understand Justin Trudeau, you need to look at his relationship with his mother
Janice Fiamengo on how a lot of Justin Trudeau’s personal quirks may be directly traced to his upbringing and particularly his relationship with Margaret Trudeau:
Malia and Sasha Obama talk with Prime Minister Trudeau and his mother Margaret Trudeau during a reception on the Truman Balcony, 10 March, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.
Cue the popularity of Justin Trudeau, who at first seemed all sincerity, even to the point of public spectacles of tearfulness and child-like ebullience. He was the first Canadian leader to march in the Gay Pride Parade as if it were his natural milieu, not merely a vote-seeking opportunity. His enthusiasm for Bollywood-style gyving, Hindu fancy dress, and participation in Islamic prayer, though heavily criticized, seemed genuine, at least in a high-school drama teacher way.
When he refused to give a real answer to the question of why it was necessary to appoint a gender-equal cabinet as one of his first actions upon assuming office in 2015, his insouciant quip “Because it’s 2015” suggested an unstudied feminist commitment. His comments after the Boston bombings emphasized that empathy rather than harshness was the appropriate response to murderous acts of terror.
But there has always been a harsher side to Trudeau, a fondness for dictators, an attraction to brute power, and an inability (or unwillingness) to hide his contempt for political opponents. Perhaps his empathy for the Boston bombers was respect or even admiration for their willingness to use violence. Many were shocked by his open admission that one of the countries he most admired was the “basic dictatorship” of China. When churches burned across Canada in the summer of 2021 in response to the alleged discovery of “mass” graves at a residential school (a discovery that has not yet yielded a single body), Trudeau condemned the arson but hastened to say it was “understandable”. About Canadians who chose not to take the Covid-19 vaccines, he could not control his impatience, unleashing a volley of stigmatizing, scapegoating rhetoric. For the truckers who camped out in Ottawa amid a sea of Canadian flags and bouncy castles demanding vaccine mandates be revoked, he had a brutal contempt.
Which is he: the soft feminist with the fancy socks, joy in Gay Pride, and empathy for the marginalized? Or the hard, contemptuous leader who could oversee without flinching a violent RCMP crackdown on the Convoy protest that saw an Indigenous woman trampled under the hoofs of a police horse?
The answer is: both. A clue to his doubleness may be found in his relationship with his mother.
I recently watched an old interview with Margaret Trudeau that offers some illuminating glimpses into the character of the woman who mothered Justin. The interview took place in 1979, after Margaret had left Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 until 1982. Pierre had primary custody of their three young children.
The interview shows a very beautiful woman whose consciousness of her attractiveness is a paramount part of her identity. She is not, as has sometimes been claimed, stupid; many of her answers to the interviewer are clever in the manner of a wayward adolescent convinced she can get away with nearly anything so long as she charms. At times she flirts openly, smiling suggestively, tongue protruding through her lips, confident in her sexual power.
The overall impact of her answers is horrifying for a viewer who fails to be enchanted. This is a woman who takes herself seriously but evidently does not take seriously her position as a mother to three young sons (all of them under 10 years old at the time) — and certainly not her position as estranged wife to the leader of the country.
She boasts girlishly about smoking marijuana, listening to psychedelic music, and giving up guilt over failing to meet others’ expectations. Spouting feminist rhetoric about being true to herself, she makes clear that she is more interested in having lovers than in looking after her children. She dismisses her husband’s shock at her unfaithfulness as owing to “old-fashioned principles of fidelity”, and indicates that Canadian society would be better off if more people heeded their “feelings” rather than stodgy moral precepts.
I cringe to think of Justin Trudeau, even today, watching this interview. The woman who presented herself therein — self-preoccupied, proudly promiscuous — must also have been evident to the son who watched her flamboyantly “find herself”, feminist-style, as his parents’ marriage crumbled.
H/T to Brian Peckford for the URL.
August 12, 2022
The 1983 “Gimli Glider” Incident
TheHistoryGuy
Published 27 Apr 2022Captain Sully’s US Airways Flight 1549 lost its engines almost immediately after takeoff, after reaching an altitude of only 2,800 feet. In 1983, a very different flight lost power at a staggering 41,000 feet, and the pilots had no choice but to try to land the plane without engines.
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June 16, 2022
Paul Wells takes in a current movie … and likes it
I’ve never been much of a movie-goer, even before the neverending pandemic lockdown theatre landed on us in 2020, so the chances of me going to see something like Top Gun: Maverick were pretty low (especially as I never bothered to watch the original, back in the day). Paul Wells is in the middle of a European trip, so he did what every travelling North American would do somewhere on the continent of history and culture: he watched a current-release American movie:
The mystery of Maverick is why, by next weekend, it will pass Doctor Strange in the Convolution of Fan Service as the year’s biggest movie, why it is the biggest film of Tom Cruise’s charmed life — why it strikes such a chord in this moment, even though its premises, visual vocabulary and soundtrack are 36 years old. In terms of chronological distance from the original Top Gun, it’s as though the top-grossing movie of 1986 had been a sequel to 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun. (“And there has never been a star as sensational as Betty Hutton!” Annie‘s trailer proclaims. Switch Tom Cruise in for poor Betty and suddenly the claim may actually be true.)
The simplest hypothesis is that Maverick is just big and loud, so you can leave your brain at home and enjoy the spectacle. But lots of lousy movies nobody watched were big and loud, including Matrix: Resolutions and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, so there must be some fuller explanation.
This being a Substack newsletter, I suspect I’m contractually encouraged to argue that Maverick wins because it isn’t woke. I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I mean, the movie definitely makes only the barest acknowledgment of taking place in the 21st century. None of the hotshot young recruits pauses from the action to specify their pronouns. None decorates their flight helmets with empty square brackets to acknowledge their privilege. The film’s few concessions to cultural change since the MTV era have the effect, not of engaging today’s fights on provocatively old-fashioned terms, but of declining to engage. Joseph Kosinski, the journeyman special-effects technician brought in to direct this film in note-perfect homage to the style of the original Top Gun director Tony Scott, doesn’t even bother to make the film’s racial politics as minimally complex as Scott did in 1995’s Crimson Tide. Maverick‘s young recruits, diverse in gender and ethnicity, are awesomely interchangeable in every other way. One smirks, one has a moustache; the others have no identifying characteristics. (When half the recruits get cut from the big mission at the 90-minute mark, there is no dramatic payoff because it’s impossible to tell these people apart. “Sorry, Component A, I’ve decided to go with Component B.”) Nobody under 30 in this film has sex for either pleasure or procreation. Yearning for intimate touch is plainly something only old people do, like writing in cursive script or owning books.
As a cultural argument, Maverick is so close to being tabula rasa that there’s no real point interrogating it. But on another front, it succeeds resoundingly in popular art’s primary function of tantalizing simplification. It started to make sense when I realized that Cruise’s character, despite the denial inherent in his call sign, is a career civil servant.
This is a movie about the action of a large modern state. It’s a film about public policy. Its central claim is a cathartic feat of Avengers-level denial. Just as the superhero movies offer us a made-up universe in which we have any hope of telling the good characters and the evil characters apart, Maverick posits a world in which modern governments can get anything done at all.
I may be influenced in this reading by the fact that I work in contemporary Ottawa. I’ve been writing variations on a simple question — Can Justin Trudeau get big things built? — since 2017. I’m hardly alone. And it’s hardly just a question about Trudeau, Ottawa or Canada. It’s been fun reading about chaos at Toronto’s Pearson airport, but last week the Financial Times ran a “big read” feature story about global airport chaos that didn’t even mention Pearson, Toronto or Canada. Joe Biden promised to Build Back Better. It’s not going great. Here in France, Emmanuel Macron is the first president to be re-elected in 20 years, a genuine feat, but it’s not going great. Brexit? Don’t ask.
A generic term for the ability of governments to do stuff is “state capacity”, and there’s a vague sense in the quasi-academic literature that it’s in decline, although, the real world being the real world, every element of this claim — that state capacity is declining, that it can be measured, that it even exists in any measurable form — is open to dispute. Still, it feels true, don’t it? The world was never great. In important ways it was worse than today. But it used to feel like it was possible to improve the thing, and now it just feels like everyone’s just firing blind and hoping for the best. COVID is a dynamite demonstration of this. Three successive Canadian federal health ministers were told, by a prime minister who prides himself on his ability to read the room, to get cracking on plain-paper packaging for tobacco products. And then the biggest public-health disaster of our lifetimes opened up its jumbo can of whup-ass, and it wasn’t even in the mandate letters. And it’s hard to blame anyone involved. All the chaos that has ensued had its roots in the original chaos. Real life doesn’t have a plot. As Homer Simpson said, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.
June 2, 2022
“Like many problems in American history, recycling began as a moral panic”
Jon Miltimore recounts the seminal event that kicked off the recycling pseudo-religion in North America:
The frenzy began in the spring of 1987 when a massive barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage — the Mobro 4000 — was turned away from a North Carolina port because rumor had it the barge was carrying toxic waste. (It wasn’t.)
“Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history,” Vice News reported in a feature published a quarter-century later, “a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.”
The Mobro was simply seeking a landfill to dump the garbage, but everywhere the barge went it was turned away. After North Carolina, the captain tried Louisiana. Nope. Then the Mobro tried Belize, then Mexico, then the Bahamas. No dice.
“The Mobro ended up spending six months at sea trying to find a place that would take its trash,” Kite & Key Media notes.
America became obsessed with the story. In 1987 there was no Netflix, smartphones, or Twitter, so apparently everyone just decided to watch this barge carrying tons of trash for entertainment. The Mobro became, in the words of Vice, “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.”
The Mobro also became perhaps the most consequential load of garbage in history.
“The Mobro had two big and related effects,” Kite & Key Media explains. “First, the media reporting around it convinced Americans that we were running out of landfill space to dispose of our trash. Second, it convinced them the solution was recycling.”
Neither claim, however, was true.
The idea that the US was running out of landfill space is a myth. The urban legend likely stems from the consolidation of landfills in the 1980s, which saw many waste depots retired because they were small and inefficient, not because of a national shortage. In fact, researchers estimate that if you take just the land the US uses for grazing in the Great Plains region, and use one-tenth of one percent of it, you’d have enough space for America’s garbage for the next thousand years. (This is not to say that regional problems do not exist, Slate points out.
The widespread imposition of recycling mandates across North America was probably an inevitable reaction to the voyage of the Mobro. For many people, this was the end of the story, as things that were previously just buried in landfill sites would now be safely and efficiently put back into the economy as re-used, re-purposed, or actual recycled products. Win-win, right?
Sadly, the economic case for recycling many items is weak to non-existant. The demand for recycled materials was lower than predicted and often only maintained through subsidies and hidden incentives that couldn’t last forever. Once the incentives went away, so did much of the created demand. Worse, the way a lot of the stream of recyclable materials was handled was by shipping it off to China or certain developing nations — in effect, paying them to take the problem off the hands of western governments. This resulted in even more problems:
Americans who’ve spent the last few decades recycling might think their hands are clean. Alas, they are not. As the Sierra Club noted in 2019, for decades Americans’ recycling bins have held “a dirty secret”.
“Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” journalist Edward Humes wrote. “There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution.”
It’s almost too hard to believe. We paid China to take our recycled trash. China used some and dumped the rest. All that washing, rinsing, and packaging of recyclables Americans were doing for decades — and much of it was simply being thrown into the water instead of into the ground.
The gig was up in 2017 when China announced they were done taking the world’s garbage through its oddly-named program, Operation National Sword. This made recycling much more expensive, which is why hundreds of cities began to scrap and scale back operations.
May 30, 2022
QotD: The end of Nicolae Ceaușescu
“You should have fired on them, and had they fallen, you should have taken them and shoved them into a cellar,” she said. “Weren’t you told that?”
Long one of the world’s most vicious dictators, Ceaușescu’s most recent plan for winning over the heartland was forcing half the country’s villagers to destroy their own homes — with pick-axes and hammers, if they couldn’t afford a bulldozer — and packing them into project apartments in new “agro-industrial towns”, for a “better future”. Despite this, and his long history of murder, terror, and spying, Ceaușescu to the end did not grasp that his unpopularity had an organic character. He was convinced ethnically Hungarian “terrorists” were behind the latest trouble.
After reaching the balcony of Bucharest’s Central Committee building to give a speech that December day, he’s genuinely surprised when the crowd turns on him. When he tells them to be quiet, he’s befuddled by their refusal, saying, “What, you can’t hear?” Elena jumps in and yells, “Silence!”, to which Ceaușescu, hilariously, replies, “Shut up!” The crowd listens to neither of them.
Paul Kenyon’s Children of the Night describes the morbid black comedy that ensued. The Ceaușescus and a motley gang of undead apparatchiks that included the “morbidly obese Prime Minister, Emil Bobu” later tried to load into a single helicopter — Bobu “waddled, walrus-like, to the rear” Kenyon writes — but there were too many of them, and the copter barely got off the ground. “Where to?” asked the pilot, and nobody knew, because there was no plan, since none of them had ever considered the possibility of this happening.
The sky was full of stuff, including other helicopters, which were dropping leaflets on the crowd giving what Kenyon described as a Marie Antoinette-like order to ignore “imperialist conspiracies” and return home “to a Christmas feast”. Four days later, a firing squad put the Ceaușescus against a wall and gave them their final, solid lead Christmas presents.
Ceaușescu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination. The neoliberal political establishment in most of the Western world, the subject of repeat populist revolts of rising intensity in recent years, seems to suffer from the same disability.
Matt Taibbi, “Justin Trudeau’s Ceausescu Moment”, TK News by Matt Taibi, 2022-02-10.
May 17, 2022
Mary Whitehouse, “The avenging angel of Middle England”
At First Things, Jonathon Van Maren considers the legacy of Mary Whitehouse, the often mocked champion of public decency and crusader against pornography and blasphemy in the media from the mid-60s onwards:
I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)
We have reached the point where our post-Christian elites, having safely enshrined the sexual revolution in law, can afford the luxury of occasionally admitting that their opponents were right. Exhibit A is the new BBC documentary Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, which details the life of Great Britain’s most infamous morality campaigner. Beginning with a crusade to keep smut and blasphemy off TV in 1964, Whitehouse rallied hundreds of thousands of women (and ordinary Britons) to her campaigns against “the permissive society”, culminating in her war against the porn industry. Alas, she lost most of her battles — but her warnings proved prophetic.
Mary Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1910. She first started organizing in the 1960s because she — and millions of other mothers — did not like what her children were seeing on TV. A committed traditional Christian, she watched with dismay as the country she loved began to change around her. The metropolitan elites she faced off with thought she was “a provincial Birmingham housewife”. They didn’t underestimate her for long. She hosted her first mass meeting in 1964, and her organizing skills soon highlighted the subterranean power of Britain’s women. Whitehouse tapped into the gardening associations, the mothers’ unions, and other grassroots community organizations filled with folks who cared deeply about their children and the moral fabric of their nation. She brought them together, and when she spoke, it was with the voices of legions of little people. Her nickname summed it up: “The avenging angel of Middle England”.
Whitehouse’s first major campaign was to “Clean Up TV”, and her parliamentary petition to that end garnered around 500,000 signatures. In 1971, Whitehouse began organizing against sex ed in schools, triggered by an “educational” video she saw that was filled with pornographic scenes. Whitehouse was accused of hysteria — but Banned! features a pornographer admitting that, by using sex ed, “we gradually pushed back the barriers”, much as Whitehouse warned they would. Now that they’ve won, they can admit they were lying.
Whitehouse and others appalled by attempts to corrupt their children were accused of being “horrified by sex”. In reality, they were horrified by the version of sex presented by sex educators — in much the same way an art lover would be appalled to see vandals approaching a great masterpiece with cans of spray-paint and lewd laughter. Progressives never understood this, and consequently Whitehouse has been almost entirely defined by what she fought against rather than what she fought for.
Whitehouse’s lobbying resulted in several pieces of legislation, including the 1981 Indecent Displays Act, which sought to restrain sex shops and the display of porn, as well as the 1984 Video Recordings Act, intended to limit the sale of extreme video content. Unfortunately, these acts were rendered moot by the internet. But her greatest achievement was the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalized child pornography. It seems remarkable that such a law did not already exist, but in the ’70s the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was operating openly in Britain; it was supported by some British elites who believed that sex with children was the natural next step in sexual liberation.
April 16, 2022
How to Make a Royal Marines Officer: Part 2 (1989)
Royal Marines
Published 13 Sep 2012First transmitted in 1989, this is the second part of a programme that follows the progress of 29 men who want to be Royal Marine officers. The remainder of those hoping to be Royal Marine officers face their toughest test.
From the comments:
Nick B
5 years ago (edited)
Richard Van der Horst (honour sword winner) rose to become a Lt Col and commanding officer of the SBS. He was widely expected to be fast tracked to General and command of all UK special forces. Tragically he died in a diving training accident in Norway in 2005.
April 12, 2022
How to Make a Royal Marines Officer: Part 1 (1989)
Royal Marines
Published 13 Sep 2012First transmitted in 1989, this is the first part of a programme that follows the progress of 29 men who want to be Royal Marine officers. After arriving at Commando Training Centre, Devon, they find that their fortitude is tested to the very limits as they undertake the All Arms Commando Course to earn their green berets.
April 4, 2022
Reconsidering the legacy of conservative activist Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse was a figure of mockery and abuse for much of her time on the public stage, a one-woman British equivalent to the American “Moral Majority” in the 1980s, without the performative religious connections. Even those who agreed with her concerns were careful to distance themselves from her, yet Alexander Larman wonders if she wasn’t more right than wrong after all:
I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)
“The Queen of Clean”. “The Archangel of Anti-Smut”. Whatever you thought of the campaigner and activist Mary Whitehouse, she was hard to ignore. From her heyday in the 60s until her gradual decline in both relevance and physical faculties in the late 80s, she became the physical embodiment of social conservatism, loudly demanding that “family values” be placed at the heart of the national conversation, and that national evils (including pornography, abortion, swearing, homosexuality and the BBC in general) should be either tamed or dispensed with altogether.
Whitehouse died in 2001, and the obituaries trod a fine line between acknowledging her impact — even, at times, her importance — and denigrating her as someone who was almost driven insane by her campaign to clean up Britain’s screens. The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that one might have assumed was a natural ally, sighed “[she was] seemingly as concerned to eliminate the occasional ‘damn’ or ‘bloody’ as to prevent the worst excesses of pornography or violence” and the Guardian, a long-standing and probably inevitable bête noire, marked her passing by calling her “a self-appointed and much-derided guardian of public morals”, sneered at her “simplistic and nannyish” views and approvingly cited Ned Sherrin’s comment that “If she had been ignored for the last 30 years the world would have been a better place”.
It also, with some reluctance, admitted that “it was possible for many middle-of-the-roaders to think she was just possibly right”. The debate continues as to whether Whitehouse was an oddly prurient figure, whose apparently endless campaigning was dictated by some sort of strange mental imbalance (she boasted about her “direct line to God”, as if the Almighty were responsible for guiding her attempts to rail against the likes of Dennis Potter) or an ahead-of-her-time master of both media relations and social understanding. And now, for some reason, Whitehouse has once again returned to our screens and airwaves, two decades after her death.
The journalist Samira Ahmed recently presented a Radio 4 documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, that attempted to ask whether Whitehouse had somehow anticipated the rise of the internet, social media and society’s concomitant, and doomed, attempts to preserve the nation’s innocence amidst the ready availability of virtually every human depravity imaginable at the jab of an eager finger. This was followed by another two-part documentary on television, Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, in which various luminaries debated whether Whitehouse was simply a bigot who should best be forgotten about, or if she had a salient point that has, if anything, become more relevant since her death.
On the one hand, there is little doubt that Whitehouse was a proudly ignorant and even destructive figure when it came to arts and culture. She refused to watch most of the programmes that she organised campaigns against, announcing, “I have too much respect for my mind,” and declined to consider such things as artistic merit, creative intentions or context. For her, nudity, violence and sex were things that had no place in British public life, and she was happy to roll up her sleeves and lead well-organised campaigns against things that she disapproved of. It was partly because of her that Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from exhibition in Britain for two decades, and her private prosecutions of Gay News and the director Michael Bogdanov for, respectively, blasphemous libel and staging a homosexual rape scene in The Romans in Britain, were vindictive and viciously closed-minded. The first was successful, the second was not, and its failure in 1983 saw the beginning of her decline from public relevance.
March 24, 2022
What a bunch of hosers! Take off, eh?
In The Line (which is operating on skeleton staff due to March break), Laura Mitchell considers the existential question of Canadian nationhood: what if we’re just a bunch of hosers?
Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s “Great White North” on SCTV.
Screencapture from YouTube.
Remember Bob and Doug MacKenzie? I’m old enough to have owned a bag featuring this pair, Canada’s quintessential Hosers. But for those of you who might not remember, Bob and Doug were a pair of TV characters played by Canadian comedians Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, who played up Canada’s silly, self-deprecating sense of humour on SCTV.
[…]
Now, The Canadian Encyclopedia has a definition and an entry to define this particular personality subtype, and it’s not terribly flattering:
Hoser: is a slang word for a Canadian of limited intelligence and little education.
I profoundly disagree. Hoser is all of us and we are all hosers.
Hidden in the silliness of baby bottle beer chugging and yodelling, there is subtle genius to the premise behind these characters (beyond the genius of the entire concept, of course — Bob and Doug sketches were cheekily and overtly mocking “CanCon” rules by providing government regulators content that was wildly over the top in its stereotypical portrayal of an average Canadian). In this particular sketch, we see just two normal dudes concerned about local matters and asking basic questions. They don’t try to be anything more than they are and they don’t apologize.
In the entry above in the Canadian Encyclopedia, there is much hand wringing over the idea that a hoser has to be white. This obviously stems from the fact Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas are white and the skits are set in rural Ontario in the early ’80s, when Canada was noticeably less diverse. But focusing on race misses the point of the whole thing. Hoserdom isn’t racial, it is a state of mind. To be a Hoser is to accept your place in the world and to be at peace with it.
[…]
The Canada of the 21st century is suffering from an identity crisis — somewhere along the line we stopped feeling inferior and began to fancy ourselves superior. Whether it be our health-care system, immigration policies, perceived influence on global affairs or success of some of our celebrities (looking at you, Celine Dion), we took on a feeling of grandiose majesty we simply don’t deserve. Our current prime minister is the personification of this collective delusion — pretty on the outside but hollow and fake beneath. Canada is alarmingly little more than a two-bit Instagram influencer with a closet full of free designer clothes but no ability to pay the gas bill.
February 2, 2022
Neil Young revives the PMRC
Jim Treacher invites you on a trip down memory lane to a time when musicians like Neil Young were [gasp!] against censorship:
If you’re Generation X or older, you might be getting flashbacks over this whole “Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan & Spotify” contretemps. On one side, we’ve got a popular public figure who’s expressing his thoughts and opinions, just as America’s Founding Fathers told us we get to do. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of miserable old fuddy-duddies who want to shut down free speech because they believe it hurts people.
In other words, Neil Young just revived the PMRC.
If you don’t know what the PMRC was and you’re too lazy to google it, here’s the short version:
Back in the ’80s, a senator’s wife named Tipper Gore got sick of her kids listening to music she didn’t like, so she started an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC compiled a list of songs they found unacceptable, including “Darling Nikki” by Prince, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper. Then Tipper used her political connections to convince the Senate to hold hearings about this supposedly dangerous music.
A lot of Americans decided they liked what popular entertainers were saying, and a handful of busybodies tried to put a stop to it. “If we don’t want to listen to it, nobody should get to listen to it. We need to protect the helpless unwashed masses from themselves!”
Sound familiar?
But then this happened:
If you’ve got a half-hour to spare, you can watch Dee Snider’s entire Senate testimony here. By the time he was done, the PMRC had been exposed for the meddling, hypocritical clowns they were. Their brief moment of relevance was over, at the hands of a guy who looked like Bette Midler transitioning into a Wookie.
The PMRC did get a consolation prize, though: the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker you can find on a lot of cassettes and CDs from the era. Y’know, the sticker that made kids want to listen to what was inside because their parents wouldn’t like it.
Over the next couple of decades, the PMRC ended up helping a lot of artists sell a lot of records. Like this one:
I remember seeing that CD cover for the first time and thinking, “Damn … this must be awesome.” And it was! If not for Tipper Gore, NWA might not have become superstars and Dr. Dre probably wouldn’t be a near-billionaire now.
January 30, 2022
Engineer’s Delight: Stemple 76/45 Becomes the Stemple Takedown Gun
Forgotten Weapons
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The saga of how the original Stemple 76/45 became the Stemple Takedown Gun is a fantastic story of engineering design choices.
Essentially, John Stemple began by building a rather crude copy of the Swedish K in .45 ACP in the mid 1980s, called the Stemple 76/45. He produced and registered 2,000 transferrable receivers for the gun (pre-1986), but only built them slowly, a few at a time. In the late 1980s he faced criminal charges from ATF, and transferred the receivers to a friend while he (successfully) fought the charges. When he went to get the receivers back, his friend refused, and the two entered into a nearly decade-long legal battle over them.
By the time Stemple eventually won the case, he recovered about 900 transferrable tubes. By this time (circa 2000) these tube receivers were much more valuable than when he first made them, as the machine gun registry was closed in 1986 and new ones can no longer be made. At this point, Stemple reached out to Brian Poling (BRP Corp) to act as a subcontractor to make the parts for the Stemple 76/45. But Poling had a better idea …
Poling’s thought was to instead design a new gun that would be much more desirable as a recreational gun than the 76/45. He envisioned something controllable, low recoil, and using large drum magazines. Such a gun would be a lot more fun at the range than the MACs and Uzis that tended to dominate the submachine gun market at the time. In addition, Poling’s gun would be designed specifically to protect the irreplaceable registered receiver tubes from wear or damage. The result was the STG-76 — the Stemple Takedown Gun.
In order to remain legal, the STG-76 had to leave the original 76/45 receiver tube cutouts unmodified, so as not to change the configuration of the receiver itself. Poling designed a replaceable internal trunnion and slip-over magazine well, allowing multiple different calibers and magazine configurations. The internals were closely based on the Finnish kp31 Suomi, for which parts kits became readily available in the early 2000s. This also facilitated the use of Suomi 71-round drum magazines. The original STF-76 design also included a bipod for easy shooting, and a grip and stock from an HK91 or CETME Model C for comfortable handling (instead of the terrible metal strut stocks common to most budget SMGs).
Several other interesting configurations would follow (stay tuned for those videos), and the guns remain available brand new to this day. The original supply of receivers is sufficient for production until about 2023 …
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