Flesh, bang, wallop
Fifty years ago ‘women’s libbers’ flour-bombed the Miss World Contest while TV viewers watched in disbelief. As a film about the furore opens, Sheena Hastings
meets screenplay writer Gaby Chiappe. Main picture by Simon Hulme.
For decades it was part of the fabric of family entertainment, and garnered an audience of around 100 million worldwide to watch beautiful women being inspected by judges who checked out both front and rear view. Since its inception by Eric Morley in 1951, the Miss World Contest had become one of the world’s biggest TV phenomena. Morley stipulated that contestants should be aged 17-23 and have “good teeth, plenty of hair and great legs”. Years later, Morley’s wife and business partner Julia rebranded the contest as “beauty with a purpose”, emphasising charitable work performed by the title holder rather than parties and shopping.
For its first 20 years, no one voiced aloud any reservations about women being paraded and judged like livestock. All that changed on November 20, 1970.
In that year The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer’s bestselling polemic against the sexual repression of women was published.
The 1960s had seen the bloody, but successful, civil rights campaign in the US and anti-Vietnam War protests spreading from college campuses to Capitol Hill.
Second-wave feminism gave birth in the US to the women’s liberation movement – with braburning a metaphor for throwing off male sexual domination.
One signal of similar stirrings (without the bra-burning) came in 1968, when women sewing machinists brought Ford’s Dagenham car plant to a halt for weeks in a strike over equal pay. Their courage and sacrifice paved the way for the 1970 Equal Pay Act.
Groups of women had begun to gather and question their place in society – one where few females entered Parliament, or reached the top in business and professions. Married women had to have their husband’s permission to get a loan from a bank or seek contraception. Single women were usually denied a mortgage.
Seeking a higher profile for their cause, a group of 50 so-called “women’s libbers” dressed up and infiltrated the glamorous audience at the Royal Albert Hall for the 29th Miss World Contest.
If ever there was an event that did not sit comfortably alongside the growing climate of protest, this was it.
American comedian and host Bob Hope was in the middle of a sexist shtick when Sally Alexander, a young single mother with academic aspirations, started off the protest with a football rattle.
The brave protesters bombarded stage and host with flour bombs, stink bombs and water pistols loaded with ink, before they were dragged away by police, still shouting their slogans.
In the space of a few chaotic minutes, women’s liberation hit screens and made headlines around the planet – and nothing would ever be the same. The contest was dropped by the BBC in 1988, although it’s still held annually.
Gaby Chiappe, co-writer of Misbehaviour, a new film about the Miss World Contest disruption of 1970 and events around it, remembers how, as a little girl, she and her family would watch the broadcast.
She ruefully recalls her primary school self saying “Oh no, she can’t win – her bottom’s too big”. She says the show was presented through what’s now called “the male gaze” – or masculine view of the world – which was not questioned.
This was hardly surprising, since TV at the time was overwhelmingly made and mostly presented by men.
A major part of writing the script – which took 18 months of Chiappe’s life in her office in north Leeds – involved setting aside 21st century feminist/human rights issues such as #MeToo and immersing herself only in the climate, experiences and prejudices of the 1970s.
“There was the objectification of the women, but also the post-colonial thing of BBC presenter Michael Aspel laughing at contestants who didn’t speak good English. It was astoundingly patronising – yet at the same time hugely celebratory of female beauty,” says Chiappe.
It was vital to the mostly female production team led by director Philippa Lowthorpe that the film did not deal in easy “goodies” and “baddies”.
“This was an earlier phase of feminism than the one I first experienced as a student in the 80s,” says Chiappe. “We’re talking about a time when women were not considered fit to run their own lives.”
After two decades of writing for top TV series from Family Affairs to EastEnders, Casualty, Vera and Shetland, she broke into film in 2016 with
Their Finest, an adaptation of Lissa Evans’s