Long hair or LSD – the planners keep tackling young ideas

Syndicated to newspapers on 31 August 1967

YOUTH IS THE GREAT OBSESSION OF OUR TIME. We try to cling to it. We try to emulate it. We try to understand it. Whose fault?

I suspect the credit or blame can be equally divided between advertising and TV. Those petrol ad. virility symbols (fast cars and phallic pumps), slim-line girdles, bread, soft drinks (has love never been made by a fat, old man?), exotic chocolates (sucked by sexy females undressing upstairs) and hair glosseners, teeth brighteners, smell eliminators that seem to be the exclusive prerogative of the young.

Since the young have money that they spend more indiscriminately and more rashly than the middle-aged marrieds, it is natural that the copy writers should aim their tempting illusions at the soft centre of this vulnerable market

There always have been programmes like Ready, Steady, Go and Top of the Pops with Keep Out signs for adults. And the new TV drama has been preoccupied with the sexual travails of North Country lasses in Liverpool or Cockney lads in Battersea.

Hippies

But there has of late been an increasing tendency on the part of current affairs and documentary producers to isolate youth and examine it as if it were some special social group like homosexuals or child molesters.

The activities of the hippies, the flower people, the psychedelic ravers, are analysed and probed on programmes like 24 Hours and World In Action with the same sort of anxious concern that they give to comprehensive schools or race riots.

Unable to treat young people as naturally as the weather — which is what they are — producers tend to treat their behaviour patterns either with a shrug or a wagging finger.

The Mind Alchemists, in which Michael Tuchner for the BBC examined the cult and the gospel of LSD in America, would have been a much more satisfactory programme had it toned down the accusatory touch.

“Hippies seem to be playing at life; they are apathetic, non-productive and irresponsible,” wrote Mr. Tuchner in the Radio Times, “they stand for anarchy, nihilism and self-indulgence … their version of Utopia is naive and foolish and impossible.”

The programme itself was more objective than this synopsis of Mr. Tuchner’s views, with a particularly good interview with Timothy Leary, the Messianic leader of the LSD cult.

Handsome

Not only was he handsome and articulate, but he made some telling points about the futility of many of the values American youth has been encouraged to adopt.

There was, too, a fascinating cameo of an LSD session with tour disciples being “switched-on” in an atmosphere of Oriental reverence and protocol. The looks of serene ecstasy that suffused their faces belied most of the warnings that the earnest experts on the programme gave us about the terror and panic that can be experienced under LSD.

Attractive

And I was also impressed by the ex-hippie who, after 10 years, decided he no longer needed the drug, that it had shown him his potential and that he could now adjust his life more easily to his capabilities.

After such a convincing demonstration of the drug’s benign and beneficial longterm effects, the stern denunciations of doctors and psychiatrists about the deadly dangers of LSD would probably not have discouraged any young person from an experiment if he was that way inclined.

Indeed, I suspect that the mere fact that so many figures of authority were cautioning him about the perils of the drug would nave made it all the more attractive.

The one thing that the young learn early is that warnings add spice to an adventure and that prohibitions are an invitation to action. Preaching is something they react instinctively against.

Jill Craigie’s Keep Your Hair On, also on the BBC, did not make that mistake. This was an amusing assault on perhaps the silliest prejudice that the older generation has against our present young.

Miss Craigie showed us four young men with a variety of jobs and accents who were hard-working, responsible, masculine and efficient. And who wore long hair. And why not?

The inevitable psychiatrists again offered us explanations about both the desire for long hair and the antipathy it arouses in its middle-aged opponents.

It might be that a surplus of a million men over girls has created an instinctive peacock reaction in young boys. It might be that the older generation is jealous of the sexual freedom of the young and therefore resents the symbols of that freedom.

But these are doubtful premises and Miss Craigie’s nicely edited, sharply photo graphed documentary might have been just a bit faster and neater if the psychiatrists and sociologists had been eliminated. But this was a programme that eschewed preaching, made a small telling point and, because it was less pompous, was more effective than the Mind Alchemists.