The great sextravaganza of the Sixties couldn’t happen now, says
In the Sixties and early Seventies, fornication was unashamedly everywhere but, says Roger Lewis, you couldn’t get away with it now
‘The essence of mankind lies in sexuality,’ said Georges Bataille. In France, perhaps, but not elsewhere. And certainly not now, when movie moguls are disgraced, the work of Oscar-winning actors cancelled or re-edited, and Cabinet ministers’ careers buried.
We have become as stiffly conservative again as the Victorians – and if, as Larkin famously said, sexual intercourse began in 1963, it didn’t last long. Ten years at the outside?
Should the Lady Chatterley trial happen again, I have no doubt that, in 2018, the novel would be banned and publicly burned. The viewpoint of the Crown – that here was a book that ‘sets upon a pedestal promiscuous and adulterous intercourse, commends sensuality almost as a virtue, and encourages and advocates vulgarity of thought and language’ – would be loudly applauded, and taken up by social media, rather than laughed at and scorned. As for Lolita, I am amazed it is still allowed in the shops.
But in the halcyon Sixties, everyone was at it, even Norman Wisdom. That was in a film called What’s Good for the Goose, co-starring Sally Geeson. In Rosie Dixon – Night Nurse, Arthur Askey whizzed around the ward in a wheelchair, goosing the girls. In another romp, Bob Todd, keeping his black socks on, squeezed Jill Gascoine’s knockers. Milo O’shea is in the stationery cupboard with Judy Geeson in Percy’s Progress, the one about the todger transplant. When Bernard Bresslaw, as a monk, rubbed suntan lotion on Sally Geeson, in Carry On Abroad, the ointment veritably ejaculated out of the tube.
The Geeson girls, Sally and Judy, along with Carol Hawkins, Susan George and Judi Bowker, were the quintessence of what in those days was deemed crumpet – ash-blonde, gazelle-slim, elfin minxes, endowed with what Peter Cook called perfectly defined, full and rounded ‘busty substances’.
Their skin had a faint golden glow, their waists were a stem, their personalities were melting and flowing, and they wore spike-heeled shoes, or thigh-length white boots, short skirts or denim hot pants. They went in for floppy, flowered hats, red feathers and white fur. Peter Sellers’s Britt Ekland was of this breed.
The colour supplements were full of bosomy disco babes, such as Paulene Stone, Patti Boyd, Celia Hammond and Madeline Smith, as was Casino Royale, a pop-art masterpiece. The Swinging Sixties were also transplanted to the past – Susannah York in Tom Jones, Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. When the Royal Film Performance in 1968 was Zeffirelli’s teenage Romeo and Juliet, with Olivia Hussey, the tabloids screamed, ‘Queen to see nude Juliet!’
One of the most popular television comedies was Up Pompeii!, where Lady Voluptua’s daughter was named Erotica: ‘So chaste – so easily caught!’
With the advent of the contraceptive pill, sex could be about pleasure rather than procreation. Until the Sixties, babies could be born in shame and given to adoption agencies, or else there’d be hasty, unhappy marriages. In Prudence and the Pill, a farce about pharmaceutical mix-ups, Judy Geeson is the randy daughter of David Niven and Deborah Kerr; in The Family Way, Hayley Mills is the crumpet.
But it is in the notorious Confessions films that liberation was meant to be on display. Robin Askwith and Tony Booth – as, variously, taxi drivers, window cleaners, plumbers, pop performers and holiday camp personnel – ogled girls on bicycles, in the shower or leaning on the bonnets of cars (‘Where to, darling?’).
The girls wear bikinis and take their clothes off and do look lovely, with their curves and energy. They are not surgically altered, subjected to the scalpel or silicone syringe, shaved, plucked or buffed, as if the products of a laboratory or operating theatre.
There is a large element of fantsasy, too, which is corny but not necessarily smutty, eg the Sir Galahad scene with the nympho virgins in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: ‘You must give us all a good spanking! A spanking! A spanking! And after the spanking, the oral sex.’ Would Michael Palin shoot such a scene today?
In the Sixties and Seventies, youngsters were stoned and trippy, and people could happily pass themselves off as something they were not, or at least not originally. There was social mobility and a fluidity of class and attitude; in fashion and photography; in the art
scene. Laurence Harvey, Dirk Bogarde, Derek Nimmo and Leslie Phillips, for example, were as real as the coal in coal-effect electric fires. Hence Billy Liar, with Julie Christie as a vision of bliss, or the Beatles (‘She was just seventeen. You know what I mean?’) in their Ruritanian Sgt Pepper costumes, as depicted by Peter Blake. Everyone was play-acting.
Yet when Butler, who is having frustrating woman trouble, in On the Buses, is told scoffingly, ‘I can see your trouble. Sticks out a mile,’ it is the case that, despite the alleged permissiveness of the era, most men were enduring humiliation and inadequacy, with sex a surreptitious clashing of elbows and knees. The way Kenneth Connor swallowed hard and said ‘Corr!’ was an expression of pain, shame and terror, never of pleasure.
Not everyone could be like Patrick Standish in Kingsley Amis’s Take A Girl Like You: ‘You’re a bastard’ – ‘Yes I am. Now get your coat.’
Even for Robin Askwith, intercourse with air hostesses, randy housewives and personal secretaries is interrupted either by fathers and husbands coming home early (‘Hello, dear. This is a surprise!’) or else he is thwarted by malfunctioning doorknobs, broken ballcocks, dropped buckets, collapsing ladders, wet paint and exploding drains.
‘The sun brought out the crumpet all right,’ Askwith says at one point – but it soon rains and there is mud underfoot. Women who once wore skimpy negligees end up married to the likes of Henry Mcgee, John Le Mesurier or Richard Wattis, cooking meals in woeful, steamed-up kitchens that are littered with damp nappies, brown furniture and pickle jars.
Olive and Arthur’s marriage in On the Buses is worthy of Strindberg – just as the terrible claustrophobia of Steptoe and Son is Beckett. Basil and Sybil Fawlty could be Beckett characters buried up to their necks in sand.
Underneath the animal appetites, the bloomers and bras, even in the Sixties, there was a traditional English fear of the flesh; a restlessness and self-contempt, such as you’d find in Jacobean drama, with its references to seizing and clutching and horror at sexual arousal.
As June Whitfield, often cast as a sourpuss, says in one of the Carry On films, when her husband wants to watch the beauty contest, it is an entertainment aimed at ‘the sexual gratification of a lot of drooling men!’ Well, yes.
We have certainly moved backwards now, with the enforcement of politically correct taboos, gender-neutral toilets, and the growing paranoid belief that the adult world cannot be trusted; that anything erotic is morbid and terrifying and a distortion.
The cockney gaiety and sauciness of the Sixties and Seventies has been replaced by grim, religious disapproval, yet too much virtue seems to me obtuse. Actresses and models now go to Africa to adopt babies or do charity work campaigning against female genital mutilation.
Moral guidelines are inimical to art, and to love, which in any real sense is ungovernable.
Charles Hawtrey was strangely prescient of the modern age, when he was asked, ‘Where’s all the crumpet, then?’
‘Oh,’ he replied, in his innocent way, ‘I don’t think they’ll be giving us any tea.’