Say hello to bold and brazen 1972.
Nudity? Great, bring it on.
Disgusting - that's what I think it is.
Pop got really scandalous...
We thought it might be naughty, but we weren't quite sure.
HE LAUGHS
..forks got really bent...
Oh! Oh, wow. That's fantastic.
..while a glossy new magazine got under our covers.
Every month, there was an article about orgasm.
One giant leap into space became one great yawn on Earth...
It's terrifying how quickly it became boring.
There is a state of apathy in the United States now.
I guess people don't care one way or another.
..sacred became scandalous on stage...
The only sound I could hear was the sound of the audience sobbing.
..and a royal reunion proved divisive.
I thought it was a sad and wonderful moment
for a sad man and a gracious queen.
So, hang on tight.
It's going to be a bumpy ride
back to 12 shocking months that had us all gasping.
I mean, it probably IS the greatest story ever told.
This is Mary Whitehouse.
I think she used to get outraged if her milk delivery was late.
COMMENTATOR: Quite a few wolf-whistles from the spectators.
Astonishing!
If you want outrage, shock and scandal, it's all here...
During the evening, I shall take my clothes off and bathe with them.
..because these are the jaw-dropping events in showbiz,
news and politics that were truly, deeply...
I mean, you could choose less controversial topics.
..controversially 1972.
1972, the Bri-Nylon year that Ziggy Stardust first fell to earth.
BOWIE: I just like startling people.
JOURNALIST: Startling? Yeah.
Something to do. HE CHUCKLES
Some called it the future of motorway travel.
Most just called it spaghetti.
And in a precursor to The X-Files,
secret organisations started to watch a controversial man
with contentious powers.
He divides opinions to this day...
..but in 1972, this self-proclaimed psychic
was at the heart of Cold War politics.
Uri Geller! Oh, my Lord. The old spoon-bender.
My memory of Uri Geller is just bending spoons, really.
MAN: Yes, it's happening. It's happening!
You'll go, "How do you do that?"
You will break it. CROWD EXCLAIM
Well, with his mind.
Is that solid silver, Lord Bath?
Yeah, made by Gerrards in London. LAUGHTER
Poor Lord Bath never ate soup again.
In today's cynical world,
Geller is considered an extraordinary entertainer...
URI: Begin to stroke it gently and wish it to bend.
It is beginning to bend.
..although easily mocked.
This is strictly the power of my mind, ladies and gentlemen.
Look, I don't do anything except use my mind...
LAUGHTER
But back in 1972, Uri Geller and his abilities
were being taken very seriously indeed.
It's the height of the Cold War.
It's a time when we're getting, you know, very nervous,
or the West is getting very nervous about the Soviet.
This was when science and the paranormal collided.
What once seemed ludicrous had become deadly serious.
There was this view
that there were psychic powers which could be developed
and that it really mattered
whether it was Russia or America who got their first
and harnessed this sort of power.
There were these reports at the time
that the Russians had got people who had psychic abilities...
Who seemed to have people who could be sit in Siberia
and see American military installations
and draw perfect plans of them.
The Americans wanted people who could do the same in reverse.
Into this febrile atmosphere of psychic paranoia...
..enter 25-year-old Israeli-born Uri Geller,
who travelled to America to seek his fortune with his unusual talents.
The CIA brought him in for a week of secret testing.
CIA AGENT: 'This is Uri Geller.'
He had to go through a series of image and word tests.
'Here, we show a series of experiments where previously,
'15 drawings were placed in double-sealed envelopes in a safe.'
They put a very complex drawing in a sealed envelope,
and they say, "Right, Uri," you know,
"What can you see in the red envelope?"
And he would describe it.
'This is Geller's representation
'of what he believed was sealed in the envelope.
'At no time during these experiments
'did he have any advance knowledge of the target material.'
He will do a drawing that he hasn't seen. He will reproduce it.
These tests weren't conducted by gullible amateurs,
but by scientists at the world-renowned
Stanford Research Institute under highly secure conditions.
Their more informal experiments with Uri were recorded on camera.
A lot of the scientists in the CIA took him quite seriously.
'Here, in the laboratory notebook, on the left-side of the page,
'you see the original targets.
'And on the right, Geller's responses.
'As you can see, he is quite elated about getting the right answer.'
Globally-respected scientists are one thing,
but could Geller truly convince the British public?
HE CHUCKLES
He was invited onto the Dimbleby show,
which was the big thing at the time.
Ladies and gentlemen, Uri Geller.
APPLAUSE
David Dimbleby was not well-disposed
towards having a so-called psychic on the show.
But before the show,
Uri bent his house key, which was in his pocket.
Uri, could you begin by just listing for us
the kinds of power that you have, the kinds of things that you can do?
And he thought, "Oh, this is curious."
I really don't know if it will happen if I try.
But it's... If our will will help, I think something will happen.
So, Uri let rip.
Open your hands.
Time itself was bent.
My God. Oh, look what happened.
The minute hand is bent at right angles to the...
LAUGHTER
Can you see that top hand there?
It's bent right across.
Minds were read...
This is what I get.
Got it.
Extraordinary.
APPLAUSE
..and science was left reeling.
What do you think of what you have seen?
Well, what I've seen here surprises me extremely.
To understand that, that really is a spot-on achievement.
Britain was swept away with Uri mania.
People were terribly intrigued by this.
Look, it's very... LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I think Geller really captured the public imagination.
But not everyone was so impressed. Some scientists were outraged.
We can all say, for God's sake, that's rubbish,
that's claptrap you're talking about there.
I've known it for... And many metallurgists,
it's a phenomenon which is known as high-strain fatigue.
I would be a little more convinced if Geller could deform
a piece of metal that could not be deformed manually.
Magicians weighed in, too.
As for Geller, his claims that he has been tested
under scientifically controlled conditions are so much codswallop.
But could Uri convince the cynical, world-weary Blue Peter presenters?
BLUE PETER THEME PLAYS
Earlier this morning, Lesley made a drawing.
Now, she's sitting over on the far side of the studio,
well remote from us.
What I do want you to do is start projecting me whatever you drew.
Just start drawing it into my mind.
I've got something here and, er... Uri...
Now let's see what Lesley has actually drawn. We have no idea.
JOHN NOAKES: Fantastic! Lesley...
Oh! I'm truly amazed.
And, you know, I didn't receive a nose.
Smiley faces became stunned faces,
became amazed faces as Uri got bending.
All I'm doing is I'm saying to myself,
"Fork, bend, bend."
And it will. Ah!
There it is. It's on the deck.
I don't know what to say. There is nothing to say.
He made even the most rational question their worldview.
Geller once bent a spoon for me.
Don't how he did it. To this day, I don't know how he did it.
About half an hour after Uri had left the studio,
we happened to glance at the fork.
I'm completely cynical about Uri Geller. I think he was a con artist.
And we saw that it had continued to bend and nobody had touched it.
But there still a part of me that thinks,
but if it was right and if there is something extra to the world,
and if there is another level that we can all get to,
that's still really interesting
and that's still something we are all intrigued and want to obtain.
I was gonna ask him to dinner, but I decided against it.
Very expensive.
So, for a while in the early '70s, most of the public
and some of the scientific community,
were baffled believers in mind-reading and metal manipulation.
But despite passing high-level CIA tests, as far as we know,
Uri never became a psychic secret serviceman.
They did not ultimately use psychics as a main method of warfare.
Obviously, they didn't find much,
because we don't have a department of seeing into the future, do we?
While Uri's contribution to the Cold War was negligible,
his gift to bending spoons is immeasurable.
By his own account, he discovered this trick when he was three
when he was drinking some soup and his spoon fell apart.
How many of us, in our mid-70s,
still have as our trademark
the exact same thing they were doing when they were three?
Coming up, 1972's pop charts tackle grown-up radical politics
and juvenile double entendre.
Why was it never banned?
This was the song that you sang at family parties.
That's right, it's a cute little song.
Turn up your Dansette and dig out your 45s,
we're delving into 1972's most outrageous pop moments.
Some of those cuts were so controversial,
they faced being banned.
And our first culprit -
lock up your poultry, it's this 24-year-old rock monster.
Alice Cooper came across as this alien.
Alice Cooper had, you know, dark eye make-up on.
He looked like some sort of deranged vampire.
He brought the horror to rock.
There was something about his energy
that was kind of almost a bit scary.
Before Ozzy Osbourne and his bat, there was Alice.
There was also accusations that he'd killed live animals on stage
and hammered kittens and all of this sort of stuff.
I mean, it was totally preposterous.
I've heard rumours about myself that were pretty disgusting.
You know? And, er...
But, you know, rumours are rumours, and that's it.
If there's anybody that's seen our show,
they know that it's not in the least bit obscene.
HE SNIGGERS I don't think.
The very fact that he called himself Alice caused a stir then.
Tonight, I get to play Alice, you know.
For two hours on stage, I get to put the make-up on,
and, oh, boy, and I look forward to it.
It was, "How dare he!"
It was a bit like the arguments we have about pronouns now.
"How dare this man! He's a real man, look,
"yet he's calling himself Alice. It's disgusting."
Well, Alice Cooper is a role.
As much as when Bela Lugosi played Dracula,
I'm sure that he didn't go around off stage
biting people in the throat.
I mean, you know, people were easily upset back then.
Into this storm of outrage in July, 1972,
this shock rocker unleashed educational anarchy.
# School's out for summer... #
Alice Cooper doing School's Out on Top Of The Pops
absolutely galvanised the playground.
# For ever... #
We all loved it because it was so exciting.
# School's been blown to pieces...#
The song spoke to that sort of streak of anarchy
that you're looking forward to
when you just want to get the hell out of Dodge.
It was kind of telling kids, "Stuff it."
Naturally, the stuffy grown-ups didn't take kindly to such mayhem.
Of course, that was very troubling to parents, to teachers, educators.
It's, "Oh, no! Oh, my God," you know,
"Don't encourage young children to be really unruly."
You don't mind if I drink? INTERVIEWER: Go right ahead.
They said that it was sort of anti-school.
Well, every 14 year old is anti-school.
Back then, wherever there was controversy,
you'd find a certain moral guardian.
Last Thursday evening, we sat as a family,
and we saw a programme, and it was the dirtiest programme
that I have seen for a very long time.
The Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse spoke up,
as she did many times during the '70s.
'Is that Press Association news desk?'
Yes, hello, it's Mary Whitehouse here.
I think she used to get outraged if her milk delivery was late.
She thought Alice Cooper was absolutely outrageous
and that School's Out needed to be banned.
Of course, all the fuss just fanned the flames
of publicity around the song,
much to the delight of young Alice Cooper fans.
The fact that it had led to this great moral outrage
just added to our glee of singing it in the school the next day.
The result? Alice's anarchic anthem was number one for three weeks.
So, inevitably, you know, School's Out becomes a huge hit.
So it was a win-win for Alice in the end.
DOORBELL RINGS
Alice Cooper sent a bunch of flowers to Mary Whitehouse.
Thank you very much.
Which I thought was fantastic.
He said, "Thank you for all the publicity."
He made a massive career out of it
and had a number one record for three weeks as a result of it.
I'm sure Alice lapped it up.
OK, so Mary lost to Alice.
But by Christmas '72, she had another pop outrage to tackle.
And it wasn't even double entendre, just single all the way.
This happens to be an E flat.
My Ding-a-Ling...
And it's a very cute little number. As a matter-of-fact...
..it's a fourth-grade ditty.
I mean, where do you start?
HE GIGGLES
Oh, God. SHE CHUCKLES
And it also happens to be a sexy song.
Performing that song was a rock 'n' roll legend.
It's amazing to think that Chuck Berry,
one of the absolute foundation stones of rock 'n' roll,
would have his only British number one
with a record called My Ding-a-Ling.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with sex. No, not a thing wrong with sex.
Chuck Berry's My Ding-a-Ling is so funny.
Now, here we... HE STUMBLES
We have a groovy audience here tonight, don't we?
You know, looking back, we were all so innocent.
We thought it might be naughty, but we weren't quite sure.
That's right, it's a cute little song.
We loved it because it was being rude
without really being rude.
And everyone would just sing along.
# When I was a wee little boy
# My grandmother bought me A cute little toy
# Silver bells hanging on a string
# She told me it was My ding-a-ling-a-ling
# Oh, my... AUDIENCE: # Ding-a-ling
# My ding-a-ling
# I want you to play With my ding-a-ling. #
Beautiful, beautiful.
It was such an enormous hit.
It was a joke.
It was fun, and you knew it was fun because when you watched
the performances that he did on telly, the audience laughed.
Yes, sir, I heard one of the cameramen singing "my", too.
That's all right. LAUGHTER
But while most of the nation were enjoying Chuck's Ding-a-Ling,
someone wasn't amused. Have a guess who.
Mary Whitehouse had big issues with My Ding-a-Ling because obviously,
I think it's supposed to mean a gentleman's private part,
just between you and I.
And of course, all boys at school
were showing people their ding-a-lings.
And she actually wrote a letter of complaint
hearing from a teacher at a school where,
evidently, lots of seven-year-old boys
were exposing themselves, singing My Ding-a-Ling.
Mary Whitehouse was like a voice in the wilderness
protesting to everything.
And we just thought she was ridiculous.
But now she was probably right, and that was a ridiculous song.
So it was now outrage, two, Whitehouse, nil.
Chuck wasn't banned,
and his ding-a-ling hung at the top of the charts for four weeks
until Little Jimmy Osmond kept it off the Christmas number one spot.
I didn't like it much at all
because it just seemed like this old guy
singing about his thing, basically.
Why was it never banned?
This was the song that you sang at family parties.
Oh, so beautiful.
I mean, your uncle would be singing you this song.
I mean, it's every kind of wrong that you can imagine.
It's a loathsome record.
Even at the time, as a kid, I didn't like it.
I just thought, "This is daft."
Let me hear you holler, "Ole"!
A brand-new group had emerged in 1972
and managed to get their debut single banned.
That takes some doing.
Particularly when you realise it wasn't a school-destroying,
ding-a-ling-waving provocateur, but that nice Paul McCartney.
A couple of years earlier, the Beatles had split up.
They were all wondering what to do.
And Wings is Paul McCartney's new band.
And he's got to put out some new songs, take a new direction,
say something new.
Something new and something very controversial
as Paul penned a song
about the most contentious issue of the day called...
# Give Ireland back to the Irish
# Don't make them Have to take it away... #
Give Ireland Back To The Irish was a really political statement.
# Make Ireland Irish today
# Great Britain You are tremendous... #
I mean, you could choose less controversial topics, couldn't you?
I mean it's still quite, you know, fraught, that one.
Recent shocking events in Northern Ireland
were raw in McCartney's mind when he wrote it.
It was written the day after the Bloody Sunday massacre.
One of the worst incidents
in the whole of the 30 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
British paratroopers had killed 13 innocent civilians
in Derry, in Northern Ireland.
Paul McCartney's Irish on both sides, Irish heritage.
You can see why Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney,
who clearly both cared about civil rights,
would think, "Something is going horribly wrong here."
Further inspiration came from one of Paul's more radical old friends.
Paul McCartney falls out with John Lennon for a while.
But before Wings' first single,
they start to repair their relationship,
and Paul goes and visits John and Yoko in New York.
He is said to have noticed some of the protests that are going on,
the anti-Vietnam protests.
And John's there just writing loads and loads of protest songs.
And Paul has said, you know...
I was thinking, why is he getting into this politics stuff?
But I have a feeling that Paul, bless him, thinks,
"Well, maybe he's onto something.
"And, maybe, you know,
"some power pop with a little political edge will do it."
And he comes back and he writes Give Ireland Back To The Irish.
Paul wanted to show that he, too, could be political,
that it wasn't just going to be
silly love songs, as they came later.
When it came to controversy,
this debut effort from Paul would match anything of John's.
In those days, the idea of giving Ireland back to the Irish,
what that was really saying is the IRA is right,
the IRA should take Northern Ireland and reunite it by force.
Essentially, he was, like, supporting terrorism,
I suppose, is how it was portrayed.
It was quite shocking at the time.
My God, there was a backlash to it.
And some.
Citing the controversial and politically-biased content,
both the BBC and Radio Luxembourg banned the song.
People thought, "Oh, my God, he should be more patriotic.
"That's terrible."
But I thought, "Good on him." Because Bloody Sunday was awful.
Those controversies of '72 keep coming.
COMMENTATOR: Number three there is Sandra Graham.
Sheila Parker with her.
Female football, that'll never catch on (!)
'Why did you choose football? I'm sure most girls
'would jump at the chance of marriage.' What?!
LAUGHING: I can't watch this.
And The Body Beautiful, '70s style.
Disgusting. I'd stop them. I'd shoot the ruddy BLEEP.
We're plunging headlong back into the biggest controversies of 1972,
when in an eye-opening spirit of freedom,
all manner of things were being liberated.
Haven't got the right sort of backside.
That March saw the presses rolling on a new magazine
with new radical ideas how women should behave.
So, in 1972, suddenly, my mum brought home a magazine
that was shocking.
I remember when Cosmopolitan was launched,
and I thought, "Wow!"
It was fantastic.
Cos I used to get the train into London to work,
and I had a proper grown-up magazine meant for people like me.
It was absolutely, I thought, aimed at someone like me
who was, you know, young, independent woman with a career.
Oh, morning, Peter, it's Geri here.
Suddenly, there was a women's magazine
that actually mentioned the word "sex".
Not just once, but throughout it.
And it was unheard of.
Unheard of and unbelievable.
Because up until March, 1972,
women's mags had reinforced stereotypes dating back centuries.
Women's magazines were quite staid,
and it was magazines like Women's Realm,
with knitting patterns.
Magazines that had recipes,
and they were very much for, like, the mother at home.
All the items are timed and priced
so the reader can almost prop the magazine up on the cooker and say,
"Now, that is what I am going to do this evening."
This was the life lived by many women in the early '70s.
Staying at home with the kids, admiring flock wallpaper
and polyester sofas.
Girls were still expected to conform,
still expected to take a more submissive role in relationships.
Their job, more or less, is the housewife.
Looking after the kids and that.
That's good enough for them, do you think? Yeah.
Yep. Welcome to the '70s.
But Cosmo wasn't taking that attitude lying down.
It was this kind of passport
to a happy, independent, fun life.
It gave you the permission to go out and be who you wanted to be.
MAN: OK, we're gonna work.
It was a very empowering magazine.
It was really saying it didn't matter if you were single
and if you went through life single.
It had everything in it that I was interested in,
it had music, it had film stars, it had fashion.
And it was about how you got on the career ladder,
and it had tips about things like what you could do with your money.
Spend it on Cosmo, for instance,
as the magazine affectionately became known to us career girls.
It had actually been an altogether different publication
until one American editor shook things up.
Cosmopolitan was first published in...
gosh, in the late 19th century in America, just a family magazine,
you know, published these nice anodyne stories.
But in 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, who was the editor in chief,
completely relaunched it as kind of sex and the single girl.
There are magazines for the homebody who deal with the woman at home,
and her children and her problems and her husband
and how to take care of her house.
But we're not anything like that,
we never go near children in Cosmopolitan.
Helen Gurley Brown kind of created a magazine version
of how she lived and saw life, you know,
a woman who chose sex outside marriage,
she wasn't ashamed of it, who liked to dress well.
Being married was not the be-all and end-all
of a modern young woman's life any more.
That's what that magazine epitomised.
We're just into this particular area,
her job and her man, her love life and her sex life.
They were willing to go to places that hadn't been visited before.
My goodness, I'm sounding like Star Trek.
SHE CHUCKLES
And this was one of those places.
Who'd have thought it? Male nudity in the '70s.
I remember being particularly... gripped
by a naked picture of... or semi-naked... Was he naked?
It was Burt Reynolds, he had a moustache on,
I seem to remember that.
But isn't he, you know, completely naked,
but isn't he coyly sort of hiding any parts one shouldn't see?
This is the era of pin-ups of naked women on office walls,
on factory walls.
You know, it was a way to intimidate women and keep them in their place.
And Cosmopolitan was fun and liberating,
and it was focused on what women wanted to do.
Before then, magazines had given advice on cooking and sewing,
but Cosmo had other tips on the agenda.
It talked about sex!
And that was, like, taboo.
It just did seem like every month, there was an article about orgasm.
There was so much advice.
There was so much openness,
and I think it gave women a freedom...
to talk to each other about these things.
The sexual content, and sometimes imagery, in Cosmo divided opinions.
For some, it was liberating. For others, it went too far.
I think they overdo it a bit.
I think they think everyone under about 21...
Perhaps I'm getting a bit past it, but anyway...
Anyone under about 21 or so
is absolutely dying to read about sex.
I think it got a bit, er...
..it got a bit filthy.
More controversial than the sex tips
was the idea that women could have it all.
Because in the early '70s, this was clearly not the case.
Take sport...
Well, now, tomorrow, there's an international football match
at Greenock, which in its way is unique.
It's between England and Scotland - mind you, that's not new.
But when I tell you that one of the Scottish stars is Edna Neillis,
and the English captain is Sheila Parker,
then I think you'll get the message.
WHISTLE BLOWS
Today, women's football is a global concern.
Back then, it was just a concern, full stop.
In 1972, the questions raged.
And not just, "Can they play?" But even, "Should they play?"
What's so shocking about it
is that the FA clearly didn't want women footballers
to compete at the level of male FA footballers.
You're the centre forward? Yes.
You know what a centre forward does? Yes.
It was illegal, in a sense, the FA...
in England, wouldn't allow any women's football at all...
until 1970.
Well, I think it's a very good idea,
if they can spare time from their other duties.
So kind of you (!)
With the ban finally lifted,
the stage was set for the first-ever female international -
England versus Scotland.
The excitement was mounting.
LYNDA HALE: I got my call up letter
to say that I'd been picked for England.
To receive this letter to say that you're representing England,
was extraordinary.
Women were officially stepping into a hugely male preserve.
So how would men react?
The match between Scotland and England
was really ground-breaking.
LYNDA HALE: People say, "Oh, you were a trailblazer
"and you were the first ones."
COMMENTATOR: Lynda Hale, an accounting machine operator
who plays for Southampton.
It's the same as any other sport, I mean,
it's a hobby that you've got to be really keen to do.
It's not until years and years later that you think,
"Oh, I did that. That was me."
At first, it seemed the women might be getting
the same treatment as the men, with this TV report.
Tonight, we preview the first-ever international women's soccer match
between England and Scotland.
The English team were seen in training
during the five-a-side competition this week at Wembley.
COMMENTATOR: Here's Sheila Parker with the first attack.
But you only have to listen to the crowd on this rare footage
to realise female football still had a long way to go.
WOLF-WHISTLING
COMMENTATOR: Hearing quite a few wolf-whistles from the spectators.
SHE GASPS
Really?
Number three, there, Sandra Graham.
Sheila Parker with her.
WOLF-WHISTLING CONTINUES
That is just horrendous.
And 2-0, that's the second goal right on half time.
WHISTLE BLOWS
That's a marvellous performance so far, girls.
Wendy, let me ask you first, I'm sure most people
when they think of girls playing football
think of, perhaps, the same as men knitting,
do you ever feel like that at all?
SHE GASPS
When we tell the boys that we play football for England or whatever,
they seem very surprised and laugh. SHE SCOFFS
Sheila, you're captain of this side,
what does your husband think about you playing football?
He's thrilled to death with it.
What does he do when you're playing football?
Have his business and mind the baby.
He looks after the baby?
So you've got a real role reversal in your home, then?
Sylvia, are you married?
No, I'm not. No.
I did have a boyfriend for two years,
and at first, he liked me playing football,
but then after about two years, he said,
"It's either football or me."
So, er, I took my opportunity and carried on playing football.
Why did you choose football?
I sure most girls would jump at the chance of marriage. What?!
Well, actually... I can't watch this!
I thought, "This opportunity doesn't come very often",
so I took the opportunity of going abroad. Good girl!
Yeah, too right! I love that.
She's the MVP of that interview.
How seriously do you girls take this game?
Oh, I take it very serious.
You know, I can't get enough of football,
I live, eat and sleep football.
Wow! I mean, it's like watching a spoof.
COMMENTATOR: Can the Hoops get back into the match?
You're an athlete, you're trying to do what you do,
and you're being whistled at.
Astonishing! Honestly!
And then you come off pitch at the end of your match,
and some smarmy, posh guy
who clearly thinks that you should be in the kitchen, interviews you.
It really has become very serious,
do you think you're going to be able to keep up the pace of it?
You wouldn't interview a male footballer...
"Where's your wife?" You know?
Or... "What's she doing at home?"
Thank you very much, girls.
Off you go now for the second half, I'll have a word with your manager.
He calls them girls like they're sort of 12 years old.
It makes me wanna strangle him. How dare he!
COMMENTATOR: And the referee blows his whistle.
So some useful training for these girls.
At the time, you don't take any notice of it.
I can remember going to a football match one day
and them saying to us,
"We've only come to see you swap shirts."
It's not until later and you think, "He shouldn't have said that." Yeah.
He's got no reason to say that.
I thought those women handled those questions really well.
They gave reasonably diplomatic responses,
but I think their faces say it all.
Then came the main event and more opportunity for misogyny.
COMMENTATOR: After Scotland won the toss,
England kicked off on a rock-hard pitch
and were quickly on the attack.
The Scots, in the early stages, fell back in face of,
dare one say it, a heavier English team.
Proof, if needed,
that back then, female football was both controversial and patronised.
The woman's place was in the home, wasn't it? Yep.
That's what it was. That's how it was perceived.
Thank goodness things have moved on.
In 1972, female footballers had a long fight ahead
against entrenched attitudes and lazy prejudice.
And that November, old and new values
were also in collision
in the form of a controversial new sporting competition
with a difference...
Tomorrow, for the first time ever,
the International Naturists Federation
is to hold its annual swimming gala in Britain,
at Spenborough, in Yorkshire.
..where one man saw it as his civic duty
to take the plunge himself.
The mayor, who's called Geoff Dobson, opens the event.
52-year-old Geoff Dobson decided that the only way
to greet his visitors was to disrobe and appear in his birthday suit.
So when the world nudists arrive at the new swimming baths,
the Mayor will take the plunge without his symbols of office.
INTERVIEWER: Now, tell me, Mr Mayor,
why are you opening a big civic occasion in the nude?
Well, I don't see any difference in doing this,
opening this in the nude, than going out to civic functions.
Of course, mayors don't normally open functions
in the nude, though, do they?
No, but these people are coming from all over the world,
and I feel that I shall be slighting them
if I didn't entertain them in their way.
This man, desperate.
Suddenly, 72, he gets his wish.
During the evening, I shall take my clothes off and bathe with them.
And I think it's both very sensitive of him,
very empathetic to be able to be in the nude
with other people being in the nude in a public space,
which he's probably thought about quite a while afterwards.
But this was the early '70s, remember?
And unfortunately, not everyone was as relaxed
about getting their kit off as the have-a-go mayor.
Growing up, naturists, I mean, the way they were presented,
they were like this enemy of the state.
Disgusting. I'd stop them. I'd shoot the ruddy BLEEP.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
Because it's disgusting, that's what I think it is.
What is there about nudists which you think would...?
I'm telling you, it'll attract the wrong class of person.
The hooliganism.
It will give extra work to the police,
drinking and everything else.
You'll get all the scoundrels out of hell coming.
Satan has come to town, hasn't he?
Just because people have taken their clothes off.
I think it's objectionable.
You had these terrible things happening in the world,
but you had someone who used to go and play tennis in the nude,
and it was a bit like, "Oh, my God! They're a threat.
"This is the worst thing ever."
There's all this sex and every wretched thing,
more and more of it.
And of course, you don't get anything bad happening,
it's just that people want to let it all hang out.
Did I just say that?
They want to let it all, you know... be free.
Actually, it's just a normal way of life,
and there's quite normal people from every walk of life,
every shape and size.
I mean, that's how it is.
In 1972, this kind of exhibitionism divided the nation.
Some were predictably horrified.
I don't think I'd like to meet a party of nudists.
Others, generally people without clothes on, saw no problem.
INTERVIEWER: Wouldn't you feel safer with clothes on?
Safer?
For your own protection in a game like this.
No. No?
No, not at all.
Then there was the rest of the population,
raised on a diet of Carry On and Benny Hill,
who just found any nudity really funny.
The North Sea would hardly seem the kind of water to attract sunseekers.
Well, the British Naturalist Council searched Britain
from Wick to the Isle of Wight
to find a place where they could caress their bodies
on a public beach.
Naturism isn't illegal. It is hilariously totally legal.
What's so funny is '70s people being naked as well
cos they all have glasses on and '70s hair.
There was this feeling of, "Oh, this is gonna be a bit saucy."
But the people that were naturists would be the last people
you'd want to see in the nude.
And so you do look, and you think, "Ooh, put them back on."
I think naturism is the funniest thing that's ever happened.
SHE LAUGHS
You know, long may it continue for those that want to do that.
More controversies incoming
as the royal family face both heartbreak and crisis.
I thought it was a sad and wonderful moment
for a sad man and a gracious queen.
We're looking back at chaotic, crazy, controversial 1972...
CHANTING: Tories out! Tories out!
..when society's divisions grew ever deeper...
..and the monarchy faced not one but two major crises.
The first came in the form of a play
which redefined how the public viewed their royals.
And remember, this is years before The Crown
would explain Tampongate in all too vivid detail.
God, I wish I could just...
live inside your trousers or something.
It would be so much easier. MAN HUFFS
VOICE OF CAMILLA: 'What you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?'
CHUCKLING 'Or God forbid a Tampax.
'That would be just my luck.' LAUGHTER
And well before the Windsors played fast and loose with the facts.
Dad?
OK, which one of you's the robot?
And even before the '80s,
when Spitting Image first impersonated our beloved Queen.
Philip! HE SIGHS
You've embarrassed me again with your insulting remarks.
Oh, don't you start, you silly old trout.
In '72, causing a right royal commotion on stage was...
Crown Matrimonial.
You are under great strain.
If he deserts his post, you would...
..have to take over.
HE STUTTERS
He would never dream of doing a thing like that.
OK, so Tampongate it isn't,
but in 1972, this was scandalous stuff.
It's hilarious when you look back at it,
but Crown Matrimonial was a huge issue when it came out.
I would be very grateful...
if someone would explain the situation.
It dealt with the abdication crisis of Edward VIII.
His Majesty.
Mama.
And it was notorious
because it featured an actual living member of the royal family.
And that's the real controversy.
Never before had a current member of the royal family
been played by a common actor on stage.
In your play, you portray a real person, the Duchess of York,
now Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
How do you think she'll react? Ooh, I've no idea.
The play depicted Elizabeth the Queen Mother's concern
that her husband, George,
whose stutter made public speaking difficult,
might unexpectedly become king.
They said I had a reasonable likeness.
I'm exactly the same height, five foot two.
The only thing they had to do, cos I never had big boobs,
they had to make me a special little vest to be bigger there.
How do you know what went on?
Well, I don't know what went on.
There's a certain amount of evidence as to what went on,
but naturally, I've invented the dialogue.
I don't know actually what they said to each other.
No, what d-distresses me in this is that... I am his heir.
This was quite ground-breaking
in that can you really be putting the Queen Mother in a play?
Britain at the time was still very deferential.
This is King Edward VIII.
I think I'm the only one that the King crowned.
It was sacrosanct. You didn't mess with the royal family.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
You have a legion of older people
who have been brought up on the royal family.
My grandmother would have boiled herself alive
if she ever said anything bad about the royal family.
She still had a front room ready just in case the Queen popped by.
You know, fainted on some sort of royal walk or something
and you had to take them in.
For some Brits, there hadn't been treason like this
since Guy Fawkes messed about with some matches.
People were up in arms.
My grandmother would not have watched,
because she wouldn't have liked our royal family
being dissed in such a way.
I have been inhabiting cloud-cuckoo-land
where there are no answers to any questions except another question.
Spoiler, the play ran for just over a year
and didn't bring down the royal family.
What I going to do, Elizabeth?
But all further dramas featuring living royals had this one to thank.
I've not been trained to be...
..k-king.
This was quite an important moment.
I think it was a barrier crossed that needed to be crossed.
The events of Crown Matrimonial came as a result
of this scandalous abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936,
leaving his brother to take the throne.
By 1972, Edward was in exile in France on his deathbed
and asking to see his niece, the Queen.
Elizabeth faced a controversial no-win situation.
Should she stay, or should she go?
You've got to remember,
when she was a little girl, she absolutely idolised him.
You know, he was this amazingly colourful, handsome...
wonderful uncle.
In his youth, he'd been like a Hollywood royal.
Edward, as a young man, was a film star.
He was amazing.
During the First World War,
with a cigarette jauntily stuck between his lips,
he'd go and visit the troops.
He was incredibly popular.
Everybody I knew and all my friends just adored him.
He was a very much beloved prince.
But that all changed when Edward abdicated
to marry American divorcee Mrs Wallis Simpson.
EDWARD VIII: I have found it impossible
to carry the heavy burden of responsibility...
..and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do...
..without the help and support of the woman I love.
In the years that followed,
the former monarch became almost a nonperson,
banished from every official occasion,
in effect, a royal pariah.
Do you have any regrets at all about not having gone on being king?
No, I would like to have,
but I was going to do it under my own conditions,
so I do not have any regrets.
He was a close relative. She must have felt something.
When we got to the stage
that it was going to be over, and he was going to die,
then I think that is the moment
when an awful lot of people reconcile.
So on the 18th of May, to the shock of many,
Queen Elizabeth went to say goodbye to her uncle.
The Queen escaped from the hectic round of public engagements
to pay a private visit to her favourite uncle,
the Duke of Windsor,
at his home in the outskirts of Paris.
So, when the Queen went to Paris, you know,
this was against the better judgement of, say, the Queen Mother,
who really thought it was the wrong thing to do.
REPORTER: And for the Duchess of Windsor, too,
it's a significant occasion -
the first time that she's played hostess to the Queen.
She knew he was dying.
I think she saw him sort of ten days before he died.
He was very unwell, very frail.
And he bowed, she was the monarch,
and I thought it was a sad and wonderful moment
for a sad man and a gracious queen.
REPORTER: On this day, of all days,
it's not a time for recrimination or for sentimentality.
It's a day, rather, on which we can find it
in our hearts to be grateful for the devoted service
this man gave to his country and its Commonwealth
as Prince of Wales and as King for 25 years.
The Queen was a very forgiving person,
and I know she wanted to sort of say goodbye to him.
I'm not sure that the Queen Mother would ever have gone.
Family politics is one thing...
..but national politics is quite another.
And in 1972, one of the UK's largest workforces
stirred up a countrywide controversy.
For many, many generations,
the miners were the top of the tree of the industrial worker.
They were very well-paid, with reason!
800 of our men
die from accidents and dust disease every year.
Tough job, dangerous job.
Anybody in here knows my husband.
He's got bronchitis and an enlarged heart,
and he's 58 year old in April.
But by 1972, the danger of mining
was no longer offset by its pay.
REPORTER: The first national stoppage in the coal industry
since the general strike of...
How much have got there? £15.10.
£15.10?
What is your job, please? Cleaning up on the washing.
Their wages had fallen some way behind inflation,
and the Government weren't prepared to pay them more.
Negotiations stagnated.
Neither side would compromise, and in 1972, the situation escalated.
Bear this witness, strike and strike to the end.
REPORTER: The miners had not struck nationally for 46 years.
Now they were to take the Government head-on.
Now, we're prepared to fight and right t'bitter end.
I've got four kids. It's gonna be hard for me.
This was the start of the conflict that would rumble on
through the '70s and into the '80s.
The victory will be ours, let there be no doubt.
CHEERING
Whatever side you were on, you felt the bite.
It had a huge effect, cos of course,
the country's main energy supply was coal.
And suddenly, you had a sort of a turmoil, a tremendous movement,
if you like, of industrial unrest.
REPORTER: The crisis was more critical
than the public or industry had been led to expect.
So energy became rationed,
as the Government ordered scheduled power cuts for nine hours at a time.
Just imagine - no heating
when the temperature in January was dropping to -15.
I can just remember being cold, cos you couldn't have your heating on.
REPORTER: The cold weather that's now arrived
may make the situation even worse.
Schools have already started to close,
including 20 in the Rhondda Valley alone,
and the Coal Board forecasts
that they'll soon be followed by many more.
It got pretty tough. I mean, there was a state of emergency.
Out came these oil lamps from another age,
and everything got a bit Gothic and a bit sort of mysterious.
My dear mother had torches everywhere.
Huddling with blankets on, trying to stay warm,
TV coming off really early.
No heat, no light, and for many, no income.
It was a desperate time.
It was a different feel in the country, you know.
This was a very serious situation.
REPORTER: A number of men were arrested,
and some strikers complained to me that police had taken away men
who had been behaving in a perfectly orderly manner.
There were tensions between miners and police,
but also within divided and embattled communities.
With sides chosen, the violent situation escalated.
Came through and hit this and then under the new fridge.
REPORTER: The Moore family were grocers who sold coal in the strike.
What do think about him selling coal in the strike?
I think it's a disgrace.
Do you think he deserved to have a brick thrown through his window?
I don't think he deserved a brick through his window,
but I don't think it's right he should sell coal.
In the middle of a mining estate, selling coal!
Increasingly, picket lines became vicious battle lines.
REPORTER: Earlier, there had been clear struggles
between the police and pickets,
as the strikers tried to stop lorries entering and leaving.
Lorry drivers have switched on their lights
and driven straight through the picket lines, scattering them,
and this is obviously terribly dangerous
and could lead to people being injured.
Then that grim prophecy was tragically realised.
In February that year, Freddie Matthews, a miner,
was killed by a truck that mounted the pavement.
With blood spilled, the Government finally capitulated
into setting up an inquiry into miners' pay.
In a very short space of time, it was settled...
with 27%.
That's a huge increase.
The percentage voting yes was no less than 96.5.
And that's what stopped it.
The piece-rate workers
and the men on personal rates will all receive the full increase.
CHEERING
APPLAUSE
It was the beginning, it was the first salvo
in an on-off war with the government and the miners
that lasted the whole of the rest of the decade.
Coming up...
We're heading back into the outrage orbit of 1972,
as space becomes our next controversial frontier.
The Americans plan to get a man on Mars
some time between 1985 and 1990, and I'm sure they'll do it.
We are lifting off and heading back to controversial 1972.
Planet Earth was blue, and space looked like it held the answers.
So NASA sent out a high-tech naked greetings card,
in the hope of attracting some alien interest.
REPORTER: That's the first picture of man
that's going outside our solar system,
and quite nice to see the man's hand is raised in a friendly greeting.
Maybe it's no surprise no-one's been to visit.
1972 was also the year that saw the contentious final chapter
in a space saga which had once gripped the planet.
At 9.53pm local time on December 6, 1972,
Apollo 17 lifted off for the moon,
and for many people all over the world, a dream ended.
The first moon landing three years previously
was supposed to herald a golden age of space exploration,
wasn't it?
The late '60s, early '70s Apollo and the moon was everything.
It was the most exciting thing going on in the world.
Well, this is, in fact, you know,
a design that might well be used on the moon or for exploring planets,
you never know what the terrain's gonna be like.
The astronauts, when they first land on the moon,
they're gonna be there for about 18 hours,
and they will be taking measurements and photographing things
and also take about 60lb of moon samples.
What I remember most was the fact
that it did seem to unite the whole planet.
Everyone seemed to care.
The Russians really cared.
They'd been leading the space race for years.
In 1957, Laika became the first dog in space,
while April 1961 saw their first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin.
The moon was the real prize, though,
and in May 1961, JFK set out a challenging, controversial,
and some thought impossible, time frame
to get America there first.
I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal before this decade is out
of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
And in summer 1969...
Four, three, two, one...
..JFK's challenge was met.
Lift off! We have lift off!
An impossible dream became incredible reality.
We actually managed to land people on the moon,
which was extraordinary.
NEIL ARMSTRONG: Houston, Tranquillity Base here.
The Eagle has landed.
I remember the moon landing, absolutely.
I'm going to step off the LM now.
And it was fantastic.
That's one small step for man... one giant leap for mankind.
It was this extraordinary scientific accomplishment,
and these astronauts were supermen.
They were unlike anything we've ever seen before,
they were amazing creatures.
It was a wonderful thing. Everything is now possible.
Everybody said, "Man on Mars within five years?"
The Americans plan to get a man on Mars
some time between 1985 and 1990, and I'm sure they'll do it.
If you can put somebody on the moon... we can do anything.
But after the Eagle had landed and the dust had settled,
everyone asked, "What do we do now?"
We got there, and it was a great piece of human ingenuity
and human endurance, yes, all of that is true, but, erm...
well, the moon?
NEIL ARMSTRONG: I think we found what we came for.
They did a bit of geological research.
They found what they called the Genesis Rock.
ASTRONAUT: Look at the size of that rock!
And they could tell from that that the moon actually comes
from the same place as the Earth, so that was valuable information.
ASTRONAUT: If we could see to the bottom,
we can say for sure if this big black rock
is right out of the bottom.
Keep going!
And then it was like, "Well, OK, we've been to the moon,
"we found this interesting rock, we've been to different bits,
"we got ourselves a little car to drive around on the moon."
ASTRONAUT: He's got about two wheels on the ground.
He's a big rooster tail out of all four wheels,
and as he turns, he skids.
The back end breaks loose, just like on snow.
Then somebody hit a golf ball, that was fun.
ASTRONAUT: Miles and miles and miles.
As astronauts tried to find new ways
to keep viewers back on Earth interested,
those viewers started to wonder if there was a point to it all.
I think the general public was sold a bit of a lie, really.
What we were told at the time was
that this was about expanding humankind's frontiers.
And in the future, we're all gonna live on moon bases
and then Mars bases and then, like, I don't know, Jupiter bases.
Going to the moon was never about going to the moon.
It just seemed to be an American folly.
With the Vietnam War raging on and race riots across the US,
by 1972, the lunar mission suddenly became very divisive.
Sure, like, it's fun to find out what's going on up there,
but it's really not that important to survival, not right now.
I think people did actually say, "All this money that we're spending
"to watch these blokes play golf on the moon,
"do you think maybe we could be spending that money
"a bit better on Earth?"
People are starving here,
and that money could be put to very good use in improving life here.
Then we earthlings reacted in the most damning way -
by losing interest.
There is a state of apathy in the United States now, I guess.
People just don't care one way or another.
Apollo 11, you know, the entire world is watching the TV.
Apollo 12, most of the world.
Got to 13, it was already getting boring,
and there was that famous incident on 13
where the astronauts did a science lesson for kids,
and nobody had the heart to tell them
that none of the networks were screening it,
so they were doing it completely in private.
So interest has absolutely, you know, dived.
ASTRONAUT: Charlie, something happened here.
Something happened. I don't know.
And then they stopped.
CONTROL: Shut down. Roger, shut down.
Yes, "shut down" is the phrase.
In December '72, Ronald Evans, Eugene Cernan
and Harrison Schmitt completed the last Apollo mission.
EUGENE CERNAN: As I step off at the surface at Taurus-Littrow,
I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17
to all those who made it possible.
To be truthful, I can't even remember 17.
It's terrifying how quickly it became boring cos, you know,
even now, you look up at the moon and think,
"Did people really walk on that?"
SCHMITT: # I was strolling On the moon one day
# In the merry, merry month Of December... #
CERNAN: No, May. # May. #
The moon was an uninhabited rock once more.
We are stopping in our exploration of the moon...
..basically because the United States public
is tired now of the moon missions.
That 1972 decision means that, for now at least,
humanity's time on the moon is ancient history.
Come out here and give me a salute.
It's quite extraordinary now that most adults alive
have no memories of their own.
So it's now more than 50 years
since any human being was on the moon, which is...
It's almost a lifetime.
The Apollo missions had promised us an optimistic vision of the future.
But a 1972 movie also gave us
a dystopian version of things to come,
and it terrified us.
In fact, the fallout from Stanley Kubrick's
hugely controversial A Clockwork Orange
was so great it was kept off British cinema screens
for nearly 30 years.
Right up until the early 2000s,
you couldn't see A Clockwork Orange in Britain,
and I remember being one of those people
who went to Paris, where it was running every day.
People would literally make the journey to Paris
to go and see it.
Based on Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel,
the shocking story is told through the inner monologue
of young thug Alex speaking in Nadsat,
a futuristic language innovatively created by Burgess.
'There was me, that is, Alex,
'and my three droogs, that is, Pete, Georgie and Dim.
'And we sat in the Korova Milkbar
'trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.'
This is set in a dystopian future,
where a young man played by Malcolm McDowell
is a hooligan who rapes and murders with his friends,
egged on by each other.
Disturbingly,
Kubrick choreographed the scenes of nihilistic violence
with all the elegance of ballet.
Is it a film that revels in violence? No.
It's actually a film about redemption,
about personal choice, about free will.
It's a very complex tale.
'And then what do you know?
'Soon, our dear old friend, the red, red vino on tap...'
In one of the most iconic and notorious scenes,
Alex is forced to watch violent acts until he's sickened by them.
'When it came to the sixth or seventh malchick
'leering and smecking and then going into it,
'I began to feel really sick.
'But I could not shut my glazzies.'
In a 1973 interview,
Malcolm McDowell defended the film's brutality.
I don't think it is pessimistic.
I think that Burgess -
who wrote the novel, let's not forget the writer -
wrote a novel about the freedom of man to choose.
He made it difficult for the audience
because he made the main character, the anti-hero,
a violent, evil force.
It's a masterpiece.
It's an absolutely magnificent bit of film-making.
I mean, it's brilliantly directed. The acting in it is wonderful.
Watch that.
Do watch that, O Dim,
if to continue to be on live thou dost wish.
It was amazing. It really blew you away.
The idea that it could be kind of glorified and led
by a rather attractive young man,
that really was new, and it really was shocking.
'What we were after now was the old surprise visit.
'That was a real kick,
'and good for laughs and lashings of the old ultraviolent.'
The tabloids had a field day,
fearful that the movie's "old ultraviolent"
might spill off the screen and into real life.
Can you spare some cutter, me brothers?
LAUGHTER Whoa!
HE MOANS
Go on. Do me in, you bastard cowards.
I don't want to live anyway.
It was quite easy
to see how a film like that could encourage copycat behaviour.
JEERING, SCREAMING
Then the dire predictions tragically came true,
when homeless David McManus was killed.
There was a murder, which was described as a copycat murder,
by a 16 year old.
INTERVIEWER: After a boy had been found guilty of murdering a tramp,
and it had been said in court it was because of the Clockwork Orange.
Is there evidence for this, do you think?
The violence? I don't think there's any doubt.
You don't get learned counsel making the remarks
at the trial of this boy that he did
without him feeling that this is a justifiable conclusion to draw,
that these boys went out and committed a crime
that was so closely patterned upon what had been shown
that you were taking coincidence too far.
How much had 16-year-old Richard Palmer
been influenced by the movie?
The jury, as they say, is still out.
He certainly hadn't seen the film.
It was an 18,
it was an X, as they were called back in those days,
certainly some of them were.
And it's a really deeply moral book,
with a language which draws on Russian and Polish,
that he invented, called Nadsat.
I really doubt that it's the sort of thing
that actually provokes the average teenager
to go out and commit a heinous crime.
You've got to put it much more into the context
of kind of general hooliganism in England at that period of time.
REPORTER: The gang cult of Clockwork Orange
is held by some older people
to represent all that's worst in the young.
Tonight, Panorama exposes the new crime wave.
Since 1952, the number of indictable offences
known to the police has nearly quadrupled.
Our number of arrests has gone up considerably.
Unfortunately, the more we catch, there never seems any shortage
of young people coming up from the bottom to take their place.
Many came out in defence of A Clockwork Orange.
What it really comes down to
is how the guy is being brought up...
..which boils down to it's his parents fault, really,
not the film, because if a guy...
I mean, I've seen it, and I come out laughing.
Hundreds of thousands of people have seen that film
and not gone out and hit people.
But the damage was done.
For some, it wasn't about the present crime wave
but what they believed was to come.
Films that focus on this are not focusing life as it is.
They are influencing the trend of life as it shall be.
Malcolm McDowell saw more personal motives at work.
Every time a magistrate
wants to get his name in the papers, you know, he'll say,
"This crime is a direct result of Clockwork Orange".
The debate over the movie's influence on violence
wouldn't go away,
and A Clockwork Orange was withdrawn from cinemas.
Although the ban didn't come from censors or lawmakers,
controversially and surprisingly, it was suggested by Kubrick himself.
His response was extraordinary.
Kubrick withdrew the film
because of some of the responses to it.
There were death threats made to him and his family
about the showing of the film.
And so he said, "Well, you know,
"if that's gonna be the response of people in the United Kingdom,
"they can't see it."
The ban remained in place for the rest of Kubrick's life.
Only after his death in 1999 was A Clockwork Orange
finally allowed back in British cinemas,
its power undiminished by time.
The controversy keeps coming, and 1972 doesn't pull any punches...
My mother said, "I won't have that show on in my house."
..as religion, race and violence
are all served up for our entertainment.
This would have made Christ vomit.
We're leaping back
into the biggest controversies that shaped 1972.
In entertainment, you were never far from a taboo-busting production,
and in the West End, a new superstar was born.
Or should I say and old superstar was reborn?
# Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ
# Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
# Jesus Christ... #
Jesus Christ Superstar!
# Do you control What they say you are? #
I remember going to see it with my mum...
# Oh, Jesus... #
..and thought it was brilliant.
I was blown away by it. I thought it was fantastic.
# Oh, Jesus... #
Jesus Christ Superstar is about the ten days
leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross.
The risky and potentially blasphemous concept
was the brainchild of creative double act
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Jesus Christ Superstar is a musical retelling
of the story of Jesus Christ, the story of the New Testament.
But importantly, it's one that doesn't really entertain
the idea of Christ's divinity.
It's about Christ as a man. It's about the idea...
I think Tim Rice said it was a portrait of Jesus as a man
in the right place at the right time.
And it probably is the greatest story ever told.
I mean, everybody in the West knows that story, don't they?
Yes, they do.
But would they accept it told in a brand-new way for the West End?
Until that point, we'd never really had a rock opera.
We didn't really have the concept of a rock opera.
It wasn't really something anyone had tried to do.
This was a sung-through, modern musical
with no dialogue, just all sung as an opera.
A risky proposition, but on the 9th of August 1972,
this musical featuring torture, betrayal and death opened.
My Fair Lady it wasn't, and some people weren't happy.
There were protests that happened outside theatres.
We had a lot of people out front, protesting,
without seeing it, of course.
It can be attacked on questions of taste, artistic taste, I think.
You know, it's cheap and vulgar.
People were really against it. It was picketed. It was boycotted.
A Christian community leader issued a statement about it
which said, "This would have made Christ vomit."
It's that sort of language. "It would have made old Jesus sick."
Not just one but two religious groups were up in arms.
It was lobbied against by both Christian and Jewish groups.
The narrative that the Jews killed Jesus was also in there.
There was a prominent New York rabbi called Marc Tanenbaum
who said it was
"a witches' brew of antisemitic and anti-Black venom".
I don't think he liked it,
although the show did win some unexpected fans.
There were quite a lot of people, bishops and so on, who were like,
"You know what? Actually, we really like this."
Some suggested it was recruiting
more young people to the church than staid Sunday services.
There is, undoubtedly, in my view, a movement of the spirit
because the institutional church
is so cluttered up with structures and institutions,
and people are feeling for the reality of the person of Christ.
I don't think Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice
were deliberately looking for trouble.
I think their intentions were probably more noble.
The question that I want to ask,
is it religious, or is it just pure entertainment?
It just tells a very old story
which has been told thousands of times before
and in, you know, endless different ways.
It just tells it in a new way,
and it happens to have got several very catchy tunes,
which is why it's done so well.
Even TV's most unforgiving character
found himself moved by the show's finale.
In the 1972 Till Death Us Do Part Christmas special,
Alf Garnett met the Messiah... kind of.
Jim Sharman, the director, staged the crucifixion brilliantly.
I was taken below stage, and I was attached to this frame,
and I was kind of resting on a kind of a bicycle seat,
but you couldn't see that.
And it looked as if I was hanging in mid-air,
and the only sound I could hear...
was the sound of the audience sobbing.
Father, forgive them.
They don't know what they're doing.
And indeed, the first time I did that...
..I began to cry.
And I think the thing about that show was that it was done
with such sincerity by Tim and Andrew,
and it means so much to people in the audience, that...
..that it's loved.
Here, look.
What? That's him - Jesus.
And then, of course, I lit a fag and went to the pub.
HE LAUGHS
Does it hurt up there on the cross?
Well, I'm glad when I can get down. Yeah, cor blimey.
That's the best bit in the show, that is.
You like that bit, do you? Oh, yeah, marvellous, that is.
It was about time they done a show about him, innit?
After its stormy start in '72,
Jesus Christ Superstar is now big box office across the planet.
The objections to it have more or less faded.
It does get picketed. It does get boycotted.
But those reactions feel much more marginal,
I think, than they did in the '70s.
What's interesting with that show
is as it's travelled down the decades,
what started off as being something that Christians were like,
"We're not going to see that show. We're protesting,"
now it will be a church day out.
"Ooh, we're gonna go and see Jesus Christ Superstar
"at the theatre!"
1972 was a year when entertainment and controversy went hand in hand.
While religion was being tackled on the stage,
in April 1972, a new and still-divisive TV sitcom
dared to tackle racism head-on.
I think what happens in the mid-'70s
is that kind of race becomes subject matter
for makers of comedy and sitcoms in a way that it hadn't been before.
Back then, casual racism was widespread
and widely accepted in a way that now seems shocking.
Here's Alf Garnett again, always ready with a rant.
£100 million in one year, costs your health service.
£100 million increase on it, innit? So?
So that's all your bloody foreigners, innit?
But then came an ironically-titled series
that took things up a level.
# Love thy neighbour... #
Love Thy Neighbour was the one, I suppose,
that will be for ever more the benchmark for racist comedy.
At the time, it was popular -
17 million people were sitting down to watch it on a weekly basis.
As with Alf Garnett,
Love Thy Neighbour had an openly racist character
front and centre.
Eddie Booth, played by Jack Smethurst,
a brilliant comedy actor,
played the smoker, beer-swilling racist character.
A coloured family have come to live next door,
and it's up to us to come to terms with it.
We'll move.
This simple set-up played out as racial conflict week after week.
Next door, a Black couple
played by Nina Baden-Semper and Rudolph Walker...
We ought to call next door
and introduce ourselves to our neighbours.
Oh, come on, let's get settled in first.
I can't help feeling that we are going to come as a surprise to them.
If you ask me, I'd say we'll be more of a shock.
Today, a sitcom playing bigotry for laughs
simply wouldn't get made,
but back then, it reflected a reality
for many viewers of different ethnicities.
It was written by Harry Driver and Vince Powell,
and in the early 1970s, Vince Powell told me this story,
that if a Black family moved into your neighbourhood,
the neighbourhood would be less desirable
than it would have been if they weren't there.
They're a lovely couple,
two of the nicest people who you'd wish to meet.
In fact, I will go as far as to say
they're the best neighbours we've ever had.
Nevertheless, their presence has reduced
the asking price of your house by at least £3,000.
£3,000!
That's the way it was, I'm afraid.
That's why they wrote it.
They wrote it because that's the way it was.
It's a mark of the era that this series
was then actually seen as progressive.
That tells you a lot about 1972.
Nina Baden-Semper is an intelligent, caring woman.
Would you like a cup of tea, Joan?
Oh, that'd be very nice, Barbie.
Well, why don't I show you the kitchen
while these two get acquainted.
Rudolph Walker, playing Bill,
is a fit, muscular, attractive, funny,
charismatic character.
For the very first time,
there's a Black guy and a white guy on par.
They were equal.
There were Black faces on television.
Not a cabaret singer in blackface doing Swanee River,
but a good-looking, clever, successful couple.
A leading role in a situation comedy in Britain in 1972.
That was a major breakthrough.
And Rudolph Walker's Bill gave as good as he got.
You hit me, I hit you.
You call me a name, I answer you back.
So there was no "Yes, Master. No, Master. I'm sorry, sir".
I think in a certain way,
you can probably watch Love Thy Neighbour now
and see it in the sophisticated vein
in which it might well have been conceived.
The Black guy is actually sort of more conservative,
and the white guy is left-wing,
and they're sort of trading insults at each other.
You tar-brushed Tory!
You left-wing layabout!
But however much the series intended to expose racism and bigotry,
for many, it only succeeded in making a bad situation worse.
Your kids are listening to it.
We're all listening to this for half an hour.
And, yes, oh, he gets a little payoff at the end,
but we've had to suffer half an hour of racism.
My mother heard the theme tune one night,
when I used to watch, you know,
whatever was on after the show I was allowed to watch.
And she came running into the living room, and she said,
"I won't have that show on in my house. Turn it off."
Because the language of it was horrific.
People don't realise how much you can be affected
by what you see on TV.
And that can go on to a bigger level
outside of the television into the streets,
you know, and it can create more conflict.
They start calling names, and these kids think,
"Oh, it's nothing," and they do it,
but they don't know how offensive it is.
I still have this visceral anxiety in my stomach
when I remember how my mother hated that show.
It's impossible to take those shows out of the way audiences took them.
In the end, it's always about the harm that's caused.
No-one can get around that.
In 1972, rather than race, the writers of one comedy show
decided to mine extreme violence for laughs.
They'd been breaking barriers since the late '60s.
Now they were going to burn them down.
Monty Python's Flying Circus was already a British institution.
Right, you two hermits, stop that sketch.
I think it's silly.
Sketches like the dead parrot...
Hello, Polly!
..and the Ministry of Silly Walks...
..were ground-breaking instant classics.
But where to go next?
Autumn 1972 saw the Pythons back with a new series.
They'd done two series already, and now they were really exploring
in their third series how they could go right out
because they had an audience that was so devoted and loved them
and knew what to expect.
But nobody expected either the Spanish Inquisition
or what was coming in series three, episode seven.
A shocking sketch with a title that told those in the know
what was in store - Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days.
They take a very British, very twee summertime,
I mean, it's called Salad Days, the musical.
Oh, look, Jane, people coming.
Some context -
since the '50s, the musical Salad Days
had epitomised quintessential Englishness,
as seen in this documentary about a local village production.
Very jolly, kind of, you know,
a very British kind of picnic that you could possibly go
and have the best time, and everyone is OK,
they've all got lots of money,
and they're all very posh and very happy.
Oh, for me?
Hello there. Hello there. How are you? You know?
OK, so that's twee, uncontroversial Salad Days,
which the Pythons were about to reimagine
in the style of a notorious US film-maker.
Sam Peckinpah was an American director
who'd made two particular movies.
One called The Wild Bunch, about American cowboys,
and one called Straw Dogs, about Satanic cults.
And he'd become famous for ladling on the gore.
Does it worry you that in the public mind your work is...
synonymous with excessive and very explicit violence?
That you are in fact known as "Bloody Sam".
GUNFIRE
You know, when somebody got shot,
I mean, it literally spurted blood out.
Can you see where this is heading?
The dressing on Python's salad would be controversial.
While I'm on the subject of westerns,
I want to take a closer look at one of my favourite film directors.
Only the Pythons would think of mixing Salad Days...
In his latest film, Peckinpah has moved into the calmer
and more lyrical waters of Julian Slade's Salad Days.
..with Sam Peckinpah.
Hello, everybody. ALL: Hello, Lionel!
I say, what a simply super day!
ALL: Gosh, yes! It's so, you know, sunny!
Yes, isn't it?
It is the best combination.
Anyone for tennis?
Oh, super! What fun!
It's so unexpected when all of a sudden it starts,
that you're, like, "What am I watching?"
I say, Lionel, catch!
Suddenly, this sort of horror comes in.
Argh!
He throws the tennis racket aside and it cuts the woman in half.
Crikey!
The blunt end goes in and...
THEY LAUGH
..there's blood spurting everywhere.
He shut the thing on the piano on Cleese's arms,
and that was all done for real. This isn't CGI, this is literally...
tomato ketchup coming out.
Everyone is drenched in this hideous blood.
We'd watched it on a black and white telly,
and it was years later that I saw it in colour.
The excessive nature of it was just pure Sam Peckinpah.
Pretty strong ME there from...
HE SNIFFS ..Sam Peckinpah.
They were taking the piss out of the film critic
more than the film director.
Cos there is that sniffy film critic who introduces it, Eric Idle,
and then at the end, he gets machine-gunned.
The sketch caused an offence bloodbath in the BBC mailroom.
There was an absolute outcry about "This should not be on television."
The Wild Bunch movie was X-rated
and that was bad enough, and this was worse.
And even some that did get the Python joke
thought they'd gone too far this time.
But the Pythons knew what they were doing
and the reaction it would cause.
They knew what was gonna happen,
so they do this parody apology about the BBC, and you know,
BBC Two is going through a difficult time.
Salad Days is such a fabulous thing,
and it was one I watched with my parents, and they were just...
the race to get up and turn it off was... was fabulous.
Coming up, Marlon Brando in his most controversial movie role,
with one scene buttering us all up for a big dose of outrage.
It's very uncomfortable, horrible sex.
We're revisiting the controversies
that had us all in a spin in 1972.
It was a year when the sexual revolution of the 1960s
seemed to fast forward into '70s supercharge.
First published in 1972,
The Joy Of Sex, penned by British scientist Alex Comfort,
was an illustrated sex manual that became an immediate bestseller.
And in the half a century since has shifted over 12 million copies.
The Joy Of Sex, at the time, was revelatory
because it put two words together that hadn't been joined
except in the privacy of possibly your bedroom.
"Joy" and "sex" together.
Up until the '70s, nobody talked about sex.
You certainly didn't talk about how to please your partner.
These were all things that were a bit swept under,
they were behind closed doors.
Up until the '70s, it was all a bit austere and straitlaced,
and a bit, you know... considered dirty.
A bit Victorian, shall we say?
And then The Joy Of Sex came along, and sort of,
it was like a modern day Kama Sutra, and it just opened out
the whole conversation, which I think was really important.
I had a Saturday job in Smith's,
and I used to pick up a copy of it and look at it from time to time,
and, erm, frankly, beards will never be the same.
They will just never be the same.
Honestly, maybe I will buy a copy for my children
when they come of age and get boyfriends and girlfriends,
because I'd rather that they looked at The Joy Of Sex
than looked at, you know, Pornhub.
I bet it's one of those books that everybody's parents
had a copy of that you'd probably find in their middle drawer.
I'm speaking on behalf of a friend.
1972 was also the year that an arthouse movie release
from acclaimed director Bernardo Bertolucci packed cinemas
and sparked outrage.
Last Tango In Paris is good box office.
One London cinema took £600,000 during its year-long run.
It's a great example of how what 1972 found controversial
is quite different from what makes it shocking to us today.
Last Tango In Paris is about a kind of liaison,
a kind of union between an incredibly depressed man,
played by Marlon Brando...
..and this actress, who sort of wanders into this flat,
played by Maria Scheider.
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
It is about a man who decides to have an affair with a woman
without knowing anything about her.
I don't know what to call you. I don't have a name.
You want to know my name? No, no! I don't...
I don't wanna know your name.
The focus of it was just graphic sex
involving a quite unattractive older man, at that point,
with a really young woman.
I mean, she's barely out of her teens.
SHE GASPS AND MOANS
They have this intense and brutal
and not entirely consensual sexual relationship.
This is not a pretty film.
No, it is not.
I give you exhibit A -
a sexual act in which Brando charmingly suggests...
I'm gonna get a pig... and I'm gonna...
I'm gonna have the pig...
That's quite enough of that, thank you.
It was... like, impenetrable arthouse movie
which I never would have wanted to watch...
Are you gonna do all of that for me? Yes, and more than that.
And worse.
..but watched because of the sex.
I remember us watching and being bored
and just waiting for the sex,
and then, to our horror, it's not sexy sex,
it's very uncomfortable, horrible sex.
But as we all know, sex sells, and audiences came flocking,
queueing around the block to see for themselves
what all the fuss was about.
The film grossed over $36 million worldwide.
REPORTER: Last Tango In Paris still plays to full houses
in the West End.
It's rated as one of the top ten money-spinners of the year.
Part of that was due to a perceived air of respectability.
It was received very well by the film critics.
For the first time, ladies and gentlemen,
before your very eyes, a man and woman actually at it.
Or at least for the first time with meaning and sincerity
and tragic significance, but this is art.
This is the ultimate truth.
It seemed very European, and it seemed a bit arty.
In the early '70s, there is something about seeing sex
performed on camera as somehow being sophisticated.
There was a sense of freedom about life
and that there was a change happening.
And that we had got to be a bit cooler about the human form and...
nudity, and, like, great, bring it on!
You know, at 14, 15, yeah, more nudity, please.
But remember, this was 1972,
so not everyone welcomed arty free love.
The controversy at the time
was just how much graphic sex there was.
So was it a blue movie, an art movie or just a bad movie?
Anti-porn campaigner Lord Longford wanted to find out for himself,
for professional reasons.
Longford, can you tell us why you came to see this film?
Yes, because if you criticise this kind of thing,
you've got to see it.
Well, you've seen it, what do you think of it? Not much.
Was it as bad as you thought it was gonna be? Just about, yes.
There were tabloid stories that said
"This film is gonna make the market
"in backstreet pornography irrelevant, it's so obscene."
Now, a lot of people are going to find a lot of this film offensive.
TRANSLATION: I don't think I need justify myself for anything.
Because I believe that the life we all lead
is much more cruel and much more crude
than anything that we see in my film.
Sex on screen is no longer controversial,
but 50 years on,
one moment in this film remains especially shocking.
There is a scene involving butter.
Go get the butter.
I have to hurry, I have a cab downstair, waiting.
Go get the butter.
The on-screen action is disturbing enough,
but when you know what happened off-screen,
it becomes even more problematic.
Increasingly, as the years have worn on,
I think people are more concerned with what was actually going on
in terms of consent on the set.
She was not told about what was going to happen,
she was not told about the use of butter, which is gross
and probably quite frightening for her.
Afterwards, in subsequent interviews,
the director has confessed that they never told her what happened.
Saying, "I wanted her to react as a young girl,
"not as an actress who knew what was coming."
We didn't tell her.
And that, er...
There was that detail of...
..er, the butter used as a lubricant.
Erm... And I still feel very guilty for that.
Do you regret the fact that you have shot a scene like you did?
No. But I feel guilty.
I didn't want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage,
I wanted Maria to feel not right, the rage and the humiliation.
But Maria suffered genuine humiliation, leading to depression,
a suicide attempt and drug addiction.
This wasn't method acting.
It appeared to affect her dramatically
for the rest of her life, while her co-star and her director
went on to bigger things and more money.
Yes, it might have been technically an arthouse film,
but actually, it was abuse, and I think that tells you something
about what was masquerading as arthouse entertainment
in that period.