THE COVERAGE of traumatic social events like the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy now takes an almost predictable course on TV.

Satellite communications enable us to be on the spot within a matter of hours no matter where in the world.

If the TV cameras are actually covering the occasion, and we are within their range, instant involvement with the shock, the panic, the hysteria can be communicated to millions.

Thus, when Martin Luther King was murdered, it wasn’t long before we were all immersed in the whodunit aspects ofl the affair.

The layout of the motel, the angle of trajectory, the lodging house across the way, the white Mustang car.

Similarly, the immediate details of Robert Kennedy’s assassination concerned the kitchen corridor, the swarthy assailant, the girl in the polka-dot dress.

Coupled with this were the close-up accounts of what happened immediately after the shooting – it’s odd how rarely the camera ever catches the actual moment itself.

The blurred, chaotic melee of frantic bodies; the shrieks, moans, cries of bystanders (will one ever forget tile sound of “No! No! No! Oh Christ, no!” as Kennedy lay crumped on the hotel floor); the harassed eye-witnesses trying to recollect their wits as they answer questions, have together become the archetypal visual pattern of assassination in the Telly Age.

Then the longer-range boys take over: the obituaries, the interviews about the causes, the significance, the consequences of the act occupy the energies of 24 Hours, This Week, Panorama, News At Ten for a couple of days.

The details of the funeral – beamed by satellite live at almost any hour — eventually conclude the drama so that the TV screen can get back to its more normal function of picturing life as wallowing in trivia rather than being pre-occupied with concern.

On the whole, British TV handles this sort of event efficiently and responsibly. There is a tendency to over dramatise, to rely too much on professional communicators for philosophical assessments, to hang attitudes on inappropriate visual material just because it happens to be available — but the need for instant comment makes these technical devices almost inevitable.

In the particular case of Senator Kennedy’s assassination, I found a readiness to talk in vague terms about America’s violent society without anyone attempting to assess what port, it any, TV itself contributed to that very violence.

There was a great deal of information about the passion of Americans for carrying guns and the ease with which they can obtain them; about the frontier philosophy that still permeates American thinking; about the pressure groups that demand the widespread sale of firearms — and one might have been forgiven for assuming that all one needed to cure America’s present sickness was stricter gun laws.

Spurred by this latest act of insane horror, President Johnson has set up a Commission to investigate violence in America and to suggest solutions.

If it does its job properly it must seriously and as scientifically as possible gather what facts are available as to what TV in the area of violence, is doing to Western society.

Anyone who watches the routine westerns and police or spy series that make up the vast bulk of American TV knows that such moral issues as they occasionally raise are always settled by some form of violence.

From the moment he can first perceive anything the American child is subjected to this scale of moral values. You don’t have to argue, to be persuasive, to be logical, to be compassionate, to be ethical to achieve your objects in this world. You have to be fitter, faster, stronger.

Having then, been conditioned to believe that it is right to attack evil with force, that it is, indeed, the most effective way of resisting evil, isn’t it, then a natural consequence that someone will shoot a black man, or his employer, or his rival — or a Kennedy — because in his distorted mind his victim is evil? And feel no guilt or remorse about it?

Astonishingly enough there is on the part of most people in authority a tendency to belittle or pooh-pooh this argument. Why is there this reluctance to believe that TV might be having this impact on our young?

I think the first reason is that most people who run society to-day were not as children subjected to the all-pervasive influence of TV. Having been brought up to believe that the written word was the most powerful formative influence on minds, they cannot accept the fact that this may have changed and that TV has insidiously replaced books and newspapers as our society’s most potent conditioner.

In America, too, TV is so innocuous, so silly, so uninvolved with real issues that legislators and teachers tend to dismiss it as having any conceivable social significance.

The same is true in this country where MPs and churchmen and editors and teachers refuse to take TV seriously except where it touches upon minimal aspects of our activities, such as political balance and shock over sex.

The TV channels themselves, as witness the analysis of the Kennedy killing, rarely involve themselves in any critical examination of their own power. Programmes like Talkback, useful as they are, tend to become defence mechanisms for BBC producers to reply to their more cranky critics.

There is also the belief that TV is not much different in character to books, the cinema and the theatre — which also depict violence.

Thus James Reston, the influential American journalist, analysing American violence writes: “The fantasy violence of American literature, television, and the movies, provides a contemporary gallery of dark and ghastly crime, which undoubtedly adds to the atmosphere in which weak and deranged minds flourish.”

But the impact of TV on “weak and deranged minds” is much more personal, more continuous, more unrelenting, more persuasive than anything ever accomplished by books or the cinema.

Books by their nature demand a concentration and a receptivity that only a minority of the population ever subjects itself to for long periods. The films, experienced in a strange environment, attended only periodically and subjected to home environmental influences between film-going, cannot be compared to continuous immersion in TV.

Any budding Capone would have his fantasies dampened after a walk home from the cinema and a cup of hot cocoa served him by his mother. But the TV experience offers no break, no change, no gap to millions of American viewers.

A recent survey of independent radio-TV stations in America showed that 25 pc of those asked — more than 1,500 stations — said that they had never broadcast any programme dealing with controversial issues of public importance. In other words, the western, the domestic comedy, the spy and police thriller made up almost their entire fare.

And a third reason for the reluctance of authorities to blame TV for violence is that they would not know what to do about it if it turned out to be true and accurate.

The fear of censorship runs deeper in politicians and editors in democratic societies than the consequences of violence.

But is censorship the necessary answer? Isn’t responsibility on the part of those who run TV — and a more intelligent method of choosing who should run it — also a way of handling the disease?

The post Is the real assassin television itself? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

MANY OF our politicians are so dedicated to the Parliamentary institutions in which they function and are so involved in their workings that they are oblivious to the waves of change and thought that are already eroding and undermining these institutions.

Anyone who watched Mr. Quintin Hogg on Panorama last week would have seen how fiercely and how pugnaciously a responsible politician reacts to any threats to conventional political attitudes.

Mr. Hogg lost his temper with Mr. Perry Anderson, a research fellow at Reading University and editor of the New Left Review.

★

Mr. Anderson, speaking in the low-keyed, rational tones of this kind of TV discussion (which was on the problems of Parliamentary democracy), was saying that talk of referenda or administrative devolution “is so much irrelevancy, it means nothing to the major part of the population in this country.”

A harmless enough comment. you might think. Not one to set pulses racing or fists pounding. But it sent Mr. Hogg into a lather of agitation which, by comparison, made most Frenchmen I had seen on telly seem like models of calm imperturbability.

“What right have you to speak for the major part of the population?” shouted Mr. Hogg. “You represent nobody. Nobody would v ote for you if you stood for Parliament. You ignorant man, why do you claim to speak for the major part of the population of this country?”

★

Now you will notice that what roused Mr. Hogg’s abuse was that Mr. Anderson, who is not an MP, should claim to speak for “the major part” of this country.

Presumably if he had been an MP, Mr. Hogg would have granted him this privilege. Or if he had been head of the TUC, like Mr. George Woodcock, he would have had the right to speak for a major or minor part of this country. Mr. Hogg clearly has no doubts that he has the right to speak for “the major part” of this country.

Now it seemed not to have occurred to Mr. Hogg that the reason he was in the Panorama studio discussing the possibility of bloodshed in Britain was because a young student named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who “represented nobody,” took a handful of students to the barricades to protest against educational and social conditions.

It is this conflict between those who believe that an ordered society can only function through elected representatives of the people and those who feel that the Parliamentary machine is too remote, too inflexible, too cumbersome, too self-infatuated, too indifferent to minority protests that is at the heart of the present malaise in all democratic societies.

The word that has dominated the speeches and the conversation of those involved in the current turmoil in France has been “participation.”

★

It was this frustration at not being allowed to actively participate in the direction of their own affairs, at being well-looked-after pawns in a benevolent autocracy, that united French students, workers and intellectuals. Economics, it should be noted, was only a secondary aspect of the revolt.

Now what guarantees are there that this feeling of non-participation, which can fortuitously be ignited into violent resentment, does not exist among the British people?

The truth is that our Parliamentary system has evolved to a point where we elect, for all practical purposes, an administrative dictatorship for a maximum of five years.

★

The Labour Party showed how it was possible to remain in power with a tiny majority of three. We have seen how little influence the protests of backbenchers, the Opposition or the House of Lords can have on a Government determined to push through any sort of legislation it desires.

The most effective pressures on Government action do not come from within the Parliamentary system, but from outside it. From the Press, television and public demonstrations.

Now it is interesting that in de Gaulle’s France the most obvious repression was exercised over TV. “They (the opposition) have the Press,” said de Gaulle. “I have the RTF and I intend to keep it.”

★

But the mere act of using TV as an instrument of Government policy, of denying it the right to act as a channel for protest and opposition, is, in my opinion, one of the major causes of France’s present turmoil.

In highly industrialised societies like France and Britain, viewers are sensitive enough to realise when the total picture of their life, as shown on TV, is a lying or evasive one.

When Mr. Edward Short, as Postmaster-General, a few months back, said: “We do not want TV to degenerate into the state in which the British Press finds itself to-day,” was he not saying something similar to de Gaulle’s dictum: “They have the Press. I have the RTF, and I intend to keep it.”

★

No one suggests that Mr. Wilson’s Government is exercising a de Gaullist censorship over TV. Bid there are subtler and less obvious ways of making sure that TV does not function as vigorously or effectively as it should as a channel of protest and public participation.

The appointment of two politicians as heads of the BBC and ITV makes sure that Parliamentary sensitivities and sensibilities will always be recognised and appreciated in the highest quarters.

If minorities cannot acquire a reasonable access to the TV medium; if governments cannot encourage the use of TV as a safety-valve for dissipating and cooling the heated discontents of our time; then do not be surprised if frustrated Britons also take to the streets and the barricades.

The post A look at this business of a man’s right to speak on the box appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Syndicated to newspapers on 27 April 1968

MR. PAUL FOX was made Controller of Programmes of BBC-1 on June 18, 1967.

In his new post Mr. Fox has something like £15m. [£223m in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] to spend. He is responsible for putting out more TV programmes than any other organisation in the world, and he supervises the production of more hours of entertainment than Lew Grade, Sidney Bernstein, the Boulting Brothers, Darryl Zanurk, J. Arthur Rank and Sir Philip Warter all put together.

What qualifications has he for such a formidable task? He was editor of BBC’s Sportsview for six years, until 1961. He edited Panorama and was head of BBC Current Affairs. Thus, his background has largely been concentrated on sports and news.

When he was appointed, Mr. Fox modestly claimed that his personal influence on BBC-1’s programme schedules would not be much in evidence before sometime in 1968.

Philosophy

He has now had 10 months to assert himself, and I think it is fair to appraise the trends in programming he appears to have set in motion.

Such comments of Mr. Fox’s that I have seen reported would seem to show that the acquisition of viewers plays an exceedingly prominent part in his philosophy of broadcasting.

Soon after he took over he indicated that be would give the ITV a much tougher battle for viewers, and last December, be was concerned about the audience ratio of 60-40 which the commercial channel had in their favour on Sunday nights.

To correct this dire state of affairs, he offered the British public a peak-time fare which began with the Smothers Brothers followed by Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, and ended with a long, feature film.

Since the Smothers Brothers were a disastrous flop, it must be assumed that Mr. Fox’s much-hoped for switch of viewers did not take place.

There has been some more schedule juggling, and BBC-1 now offers us on Sunday night — to woo us away from Channel 9’s delectable treat of The Saint (a repeat), The Big Show (variety) and a feature film – The Andy Williams Show, The First Lady (a series about a female councillor) and a feature film.

The end result of this fierce competitiveness is that there are only a marginal difference in quality of programme between the two major channels and that any discriminating viewer will be driven to the nearest pub or book.

Not content with turning the week-end into a battlefield for ignorant insensitive and complacent scalps, Mr Fox has apparently turned his diligent drive tor viewers to the week-days as well.

It you eliminate the daily 24 Hours programme from BBC-1 (which has a rough equivalent on the commercial channel with the News at Ten), there is practically nothing to choose between BBC-1 and ITV as far as the aim, tone quality and spirit of their programmes is concerned.

Monday’s schedule offered us Z-Cars, The Dick Emery Show, Panorama, Professional Boxing, Dance Date. To-night you have The Virginian, Mum’s Boys, The Wednesday Play (a repeat) and the European Cup. On Friday it’s A Spoonful of Sugar, The Newcomers, Man from UNCLE, Comedy Playhouse, Miss England and Tennis.

Bland

There are 28 hours of peak-time viewing on BBC-1 every weeks (ie, 6-30 pm to 10-30 pm) and, excluding the news and 24 Hours, the proportion of time devoted to what I might loosely call “non-entertainment” programmes (ie, drama, ballet, opera, documentaries, discussions, music, art, social and political comment) is about four hours per week.

In other words, for its mass viewing audiences BBC-1 now feels that 80 pc of its prime time should be devoted to bland, innocuous, unconcerned, uninvolved, soporific, uninformative, desensitising programmes.

Its tendency to move serious programmes to off-peak hours — which has always been the policy of the commercial channel — shows that there will soon be no difference at all between BBC-1 and ITV.

Since Mr. Fox has taken over we have seen the disappearance of the satire snows, the end of controversial comedies like Till Death Us Do Part, more a conventional plays into The Wednesday Play slot and an annual schedule which boasts of 1,000 hours of sport, or almost 25 per cent of its total output.

What seems to be happening is that BBC-1, like commercial TV, is opting out of a responsible position in shaping the taste, values and aspirations of the British public and is contenting itself with playing the role of a national yo-yo.

Deterioration

Its hierarchy can probably rationalise this position by claiming that BBC-2 can offer the more discriminating and more sensitive viewer all the serious, cultural, non-entertainment programmes programmes they want.

One can even envisage that when BBC-2 becomes more popular — when it shares a larger proportion of the audience — it, too, will deem it necessary to cater for bigger and bigger audiences, like its rivals, and eventually succumb to the temptation to become just floss and froth on the fabric of our national life.

This deterioration in the impact and power of TV is just what those with vested interests in the status quo would like.

Politicians, establishment figures, groups opposed to change and reform, have watched with a baleful eye the increasing intrusion of TV in their domains of influence and power.

Nothing would please them better than the cutting back of this involvement of TV in the central issues of our time. And the best way to do it is, of course, to turn the medium into visual chewing gum; innocuous waffle; soporific pap unworthy of the attention of those seriously concerned with our affairs. This has almost been achieved in America.

But TV is, for good or ill, a medium more powerful than any that exists in society to-day. It becomes the duty of those who run it to refuse to have it converted into a national bubble-bath. They must claw, fight, scream and shout for the right to be responsible and involved.

Serious

The BBC — because it is a national institution financed by the people’s money — must always be at least as serious as a popular newspaper. There is not a popular newspaper in the land that does not devote at least 40 per cent its non-commercial space to a discussion of the serious, demanding and involved aspects of the day. And in prominent places like its front page!

If TV is used by governments and those in authority as a new opium for the masses; if it portrays a bland, reassuring, comforting picture of life; if it is not used properly as an outlet for all the doubts, arguments, controversies and fears that rage through our lives, then watch for the explosion when disillusion sets in.

Some of the violence and anger of Negro rioters in America has been attributed to the contrast between the miserable reality of their existence and the chummy, benevolent, affluent, fictitious picture of American life seen on the small screed.

Similarly, the German students have been rioting because they claim that not only the Springer Press, but TV as well has provided the people with a false illusion of what is going on about them.

Mr. Paul Fox and Lord Hill, who joined the BBC as its chairman, have responsibilities towards the British public which, at the moment, they show few signs of either understanding or grasping.

The post A sad, sad look at the sad, sad decline of BBC-1 appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

NOW THAT JULY IS HERE the TV critic thinks inevitably of folding his tent and quietly stealing away. The chances are that the next six weeks will offer him only dross and desert.

Traditionally summer is the time of mindless effort on the part of both the BBC and ITV with old films, repeats and seaside pier standards filling the small screen.

It may have been a recognition of this pattern of entertainment that prompted the BBC into turning over an entire three weeks of its peak-time schedule to World Cup football.

On any other ground, it was the most arrogant and indefensible decision ever taken by a public corporation claiming to cater for the wishes and tastes of its viewers.

Having striven valiantly and expensively to attract viewers away from the commercial channel — and finally having achieved some success in this goal — this wanton disregard of audience preferences and this reckless rebuke to their loyalty will, I am sure, be very costly to the BBC in the long run.

But I find I am losing my temper when the object of the column, when I sat down to write, was to spread sweet compliments all round.

Many times

Having said many times in the past that British TV was the best in the world, I realise that I have not provided many illustrations to justify the claim.

But before the summer doldrums take over, I intend to place on record the kind of programmes — routine, unheralded, unpretentious — that could be found on your box over the past fortnight which could not be matched in terms of imagination and style by a fortnight’s output of any TV service anyhere else in the world.

NOT ONLY… BUT ALSO, which brings Dudley Moore and Peter Cook to BBC-1, manages to be as hilarious on second viewing as it when I first saw them on BBC-2.

Such gems as the parody of the Supercar puppet films, the delirious takeoff of that account of Laughton’s I Claudius, their visit to Heaven and Dudley’s grimace at the of ambrosia (“Not that creamed rice!”) blend with rare mastery the elements of wit and irreverence.

Occasionally they miscalculate. The item on the most boring man in the world was a failure because being bored is rarely funny, only dull.

If the BBC want to enter some of those annual festivals with a chance of winning, they should — if the rules permit — assemble the best items in Not Only… But Also, eliminate the interruptions by singing females (these musical moments no longer make any sense when there is no need for interludes in which costumes and sets can be changed), and startle the world with the quality of our best British humour.

The vulgarity of TILL DEATH US DO PART is as refreshing and startling in its comic concept as Steptoe and Son.

Johnny Speight’s scripts have taken over the formula of the crude, noisy, uninhibited working-class farce and injected into them an ironic, social comment that is almost breathtaking in this context.

Taboo words

I cannot recall ever hearing so many taboo words on one programme as I did in the episode dealing with Intolerance with Warren Mitchell and Anthony Booth shrieking ‘Mick! … Coon! … Yid!” at each other with unrepentant gusto.

Yet, in spite of this, the programme was not normally anger and wounding sentiments that would only hilarious, but managed to say something worthwhile about the stupidity and futility of racial prejudice.

For those wanting a unique and satisfying intellectual treat there was Jonathan Miller’s recreation of THE DEATH OF SOCRATES as told by Plato.

The modern setting — a sort of limbo in Edwardian England — came off beautifully although I would have thought that a further liberty might have been taken with the characters’ names. Somehow characters like Simmias and Xanthippe struck a jarring note when dressed to look like something out of Fanny By Gaslight.

Persuasive

But Leo McKern brought a massive dignity and overpowering persuasiveness to the arguments of Socrates while his resignation and the mundane preparations for his execution gave the event a wistful and autumnal climax.

And even that cornucopia in a single fortnight does not exhaust all the other good things I managed to catch. There was Whlcker’s fascinating account of life in Kuwait, Tony Hancock bringing a fresh, destructive quality to the role of a compere in such a commonplace programme as THE BLACKPOOL SHOW, and a first-class episode of SOFTLY, SOFTLY dealing with the possible bribery of a juryman.

If one adds to this list such regular stalwarts as TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, PANORAMA, THIS WEEK, LATE NIGHT LINE-UP and, of course, full coverage of Wimbledon and the Test match, can any intelligent viewer claim that he is being neglected by TV.

In his handling of the incomes policy, Vietnam and Rhodesia, Mr. Harold Wilson has recently shown that he has plenty of courage. Surely he can summon up the extra courage needed to increase the licence fee to £6 so that Britain can continue to lead the world in this one field of endeavour.

Will the new Postmaster-General, Edward Short, have the persuasive power that Mr. Benn so obviously lacked?

– Milton Shulman

The post This is television nowhere else in the world can match appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WITHOUT current affairs programmes or documentaries, television would be hard put to it to justify any claim to being a serious medium of communication.

It is programmes like Panorama, This Week, World in Action and Gallery that provide the solid bulwark of respectability behind which television channels can cower while peppering us with Compacts, Coronation Streets, Beat the Clocks and Take Your Picks.

They achieve a remarkable standard of consistent, pungent, informed comment and their continued existence and well-being is as essential to TV as the Kremlin is to Communism.

But there are signs that longevity has brought its inevitable toll of orthodoxy, smugness and hardened thinking. This is particularly true of Panorama, where methods of presentation have remained as static and predictable as a pagan ritual.

There inevitably sits the Buddha-like figure of the Great God Dimbleby aura-ting (if the verb doesn’t exist it ought to) resplendent waves of common sense and reliability.

With the slight frown of a benevolent teacher asking a series of hypothetical questions to which he alone knows the answers, he takes us gently by the minds into the confusing maelstrom of such issues as Vietnam, the trade gap or the Congo.

On Monday, with a condescending smile, he showed us the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, defending his latest fiscal statement against the combined scepticism of a BBC reporter, a financial journalist, Edward Heath and ICI’s Paul Chambers.

Then he whisked us off to Rome and a short profile by John Morgan on the new British Cardinal, Dr. John Heenan. And finally Derek Hart summarised for us the argument for and against travelling to Spain during the present crisis over Gibraltar.

Everything was impeccably well-mannered and balanced. Mr. Callaghan answered questions from the reporters without being remotely drawn on anything concerning the Budget or anything he had not said in the House.

Mr. Heath and Mr. Chambers made their statements to which Mr. Callaghan listened with firmly closed lips since it appeared obvious that they had agreed not to talk to each other but at each other. The new Cardinal’s profile was friendly – almost obituary-like in tone with John Morgan failing to take up the one issue which non-Catholics might have been curious. The Cardinal said it was the Church’s view about contraception he was supporting and not his own. own. [sic] He was merely concerned with the truth.

He agreed, however, that he would find no difficulty at all in accepting the changed attitude to contraception if the Church decided a different line was valid.

If, then, to-day’s truth can become to-morrow’s lie, how is Cardinal Heenan so convinced that what he supports to-day is the real truth? John Morgan did not ask the question.

Derek Hart’s contribution on Gibraltar, with its efforts to brighten up to discussion with some long-ish sequences of flamenco dancers was, by journalistic terms, a very dated story that should have been scrapped since it had nothing really new to offer.

A typical Panorama week. A dehydrated discussion, a scrappy profile and a tired news story. The programme has been better but, of late, traditional reporting and respectability seems to be clogging its arteries.

This Week, under Jeremy Issacs, has streamlined its format by eliminating the resident compere and being more flexible in the time it gives to any one subject. Lately, indeed, it has tended to devote a whole half-hour to subjects that hardly warrant it.

With James Cameron in the chair, it managed to inject a note of urgency into an analysis of the recent financial dilemma facing the United Nations.

By stopping the story for pressing transatlantic telephone calls to Desmond Wilcox in New York one was given the feeling that Albania’s intransigence was about to smash the United Nations and that we were in an international crisis not far removed from Vietnam.

The programme’s chief weakness is using the same trite techniques – silhouetted, shadowed, masked figures – for probing into taboo sociological problems like homosexuality.

The sight of the crunched face of Magee or Wilcox displaying concern in film reverses (shots taken after the actual interviews) has now become one of the cliches of TV.

World in Action, once Granada’s challenge to This Week, has deteriorated recently in both the artificiality of its anger and the strident, hysterical note of its commentary.

It programme on bronchitis was marred by a sensational lingering on sputum and coughing sufferers as well as a faked-up procession of coffins that jarred, and to some extent nullified, the reality of the problem.

The programme last week on Vietnam was practically all old newsreel clips with a minimal amount of film shot specifically for the programme.

Its best item, seen before – was an evangelical sequence of President Johnson, before he became President, in an unbelievably home-spun and corny frame of mind.

But no one should be allowed to get away with a script that contains lines of such bathos as “This is a civil war… brother set against brother”, or: “This is a battle for the hearts and minds of Vietnam… (the Americans) failed to win friends and influence people.”

Alex Valentine, the producer, should immediately get himself a new scriptwriter or this series will drown itself in its own muck sweat.

All these programmes, exciting and provocative as they sometimes can be, are suffering from an inability to get out of a format rut.

There is no evidence of experimenting with fresh techniques of presentation nor any signs of new thinking about the way in which an old problem can be given a fresh impact.

They all tend, in addition, to see only the ponderous, significant and urgent side of life. It is a long time since any of them gave me a laugh.

Since they profess to be mirroring life surely they must sometimes be tempted to show us what life looks like in a distorting mirror and with its trousers down.

The post Just for a change why doesn’t Panorama etc get out of the rut? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.