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.

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THERE IS NO SADDER sight on television than watching the speed at which the teenage shows develop visual hardening of the arteries.

In my day youth used to be identified with an erratic and unpredictable change of mood, interest, fad, foible, passion.

If one can judge by the most popular TV proprammes, the teenagers of the 1960’s have been stuck in a one-taste groove like a baby dinosaur growing up in the ooze.

Pop music, if we are to believe the programme planners, is the all-consuming cultural interest of modern youth – and practically nothing else!

For almost four years the only evening programmes aimed at adolescents have been little more than public relations adjuncts of the record business.

Rhythm

Juke Box Jury, Top of the Pops, Ready, Steady, Go! Thank Your Lucky Stars, Gadzooks, It’s All Happening and Stramash! have not only reflected the need of teenagers stimulated by rhythm but they have exaggerated the relevance of that need into a gigantic lie.

Sociological historians studying this decade from the pages of the Radio Times and TV Times would have to conclude that in their formative years the young of the ‘sixties had only a minimal or negligible interest in films, the theatre, sports, polities, books, conversation, science, debate, serious music, travel, poetry, art or even love. Their sole relaxation appeared to be to shake in a large hall – usually on their own, mute and devoid of contact with the opposite sex – displaying neither enjoyment, passion nor involvement

Even more depressing is the bovine manner in which they have accepted the same formula, the same setting, the same atmosphere, the same jargon, even the same personalities, of these pop shows.

For the past few weeks I have been watching Ready Steady, Go! and Thank Your Lucky Stars and find that they are practically indistinguishable in mood and manner from what they were a year ago.

Stale

Ready, Steady, Go! has suffered worst from imaginative paralysis with artists introduced in the same way to the same platform to the same accompaniment of massed bodies gawking or jiggling.

What was once fresh, immediate and zestful has been allowed to stale into tired familiarity and predictable routine. The fact that it has gone “live” has coincided with the fact that it is really dead.

Thank Your Lucky Stars, too, has gelled into formula stuff, with the designers being the only ones called upon to be inventive. And there is more than a sign of desperation about some to be of their efforts. I thought last week the motif was traffic signs for drunken drivers.

Adulatory

The over-all tone is adulatory and non-critical with the comperes of both programmes vying with each other in their use of copy-writers’ adjectives.

Cathy McGowan of Ready, Steady, Go! now has a serious rival in Jim Dale of Thank Your Lucky Stars in the use of the word “fantastic.”

Last week’s show, according to Mr. Dale, had items which were great, fabulous, the best, tremendous, in addition to being merely fantastic. He asked the audience to give each of them “a great big hand.” Must the vocabulary of these shows really be so poverty-stricken?

Welcome

Against such an uninspiring background it is a relief to welcome the B.B.C.’s A Whole Scene Going. Although it, too, over emphasises pop music, it at least makes an intelligible effort to examine the phenomena and provide more than a fan club’s view of the performers.

When Pete Townshend, of The Who, admitted that his group had no musical quality and that he was baffled by the tastes and personalities of the fellow-members of his group, I felt a rush of honest fresh air into this pop formula for the very first time.

“In pop business, you know, we’re lucky there are no standards,” he said, and when someone in the studio pressed him about their sexual appeal, he bluntly replied: “Look, our group’s one of the most unglamorous on the stage.” One may resent the grammar, but not the sentiment.

Relevant

The inclusion of a letters’ column with various teen-age and older experts answering questions such as when a provincial girl should leave home and come to London, should a new pop singer get himself a manager, and what do you do about a boy friend who is constantly being mistaken for a pop star provided lively and relevant discussion.

The film montages on fashion are zippy and gay, while the introduction of other interests like sport, cinema and clothes is a welcome rebuttal of the libel that we are rearing an adolescent herd, brainwashed by pop alone.

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POP records are not only big business but a social phenomenon. There is little doubt that they are making a discernible impact in the shaping of the new Britain.

From being the squarest nation in Europe we are fast becoming the coolest. Foreigners familiar with the Britain of Victor Silvester and hunt balls are staggered by the transformation they find in the dancing seen in jazz clubs and discotheques.

The grace, the rhythm, the abandon – not to mention the improvement in the looks of the girls – have that sophisticated natural quality that one used to associate only with the more exclusive haunts in Paris, Manhattan and St. Tropez.

Barriers

More important, that ease and lack of restraint has begun to manifest itself in certain social side-effects among the young.

Class and racial barriers erode much more quicker when peers’ daughters swing unselfconsciously with lorry drivers and Negro musicians.

The innate rivalry of the dance floor has created a heightened awareness of such status ornaments as hair styles, smart clothes and make-up.

The time-consuming demands of the pop craze has so canalised their energies that relatively few of them display much interest in politics, social problems or even hobbies.

The intimacy of their surroundings and the encouragement of physical abandon has also inevitably resulted in a freeing and liberalising of sexual inhibitions.

But is all this any different from the twenties, when teenagers were swaying to the Charleston and the Black Bottom? It is all a question of degree and I think that at the moment we are going through a particular virulent phase of the rhythm epidemic.

And chief among the influences to be credited or blamed for this phenomenon is undoubtedly television.

There are at present no fewer than five weekly peak hour shows devoted exclusively to the playing and plugging of pop music. This compares with two programmes about politics, three about current affairs and two off-peak shows fortnightly devoted to all the arts.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of these pop programmes – presumably devoted to the ever-changing tastes and fads of their fans – is how quickly they congeal into frozen formulas and into mindless repetitiveness of the same technical gimmicks.

Oldest

The three oldest in the business – Ready, Steady, Go!, Thank Your Lucky Stars, and Juke Box Jury – have remained practically unchanged, down to the compere’s cement smiles, for almost three years.

Now with stentorian fanfares two of them ushered in what they shouted was to be a fresh era in pop presentation.

“We’re all terribly excited,” said Cathy McGowan, introducing Ready, Steady Goes Live. “It’s the very first show of its kind where everybody sings live.” If memory serves me right I thought that was what TV used to do before most of Miss McGowan’s audience were actually born.

There was no doubt that something fresh had to be done to Ready, Steady, Go! which had deteriorated disastrously from its early days, when its free-and-easy mingling of artists and audiences had given the show a spontaneity and bounce that appealed triumphantly to the very young.

But of late is anarchic shooting had become an excuse for sloppy directing, its natural studio environment had become a refuge for lazy set designers and cheap budgets, and its gay, lively enthusiasts had diminished into a jumble of spotty faced, frozen gawkers.

Harried into going live by a growing suspicion among audiences that mime merely disguised the incompetence of its performers, Ready, Steady, Go! moved into a larger studio and recruited some prettier girls into the audience.

But apart from discovering two girls who could sing remarkably like Dionne Warwick, it cannot be said that a new millennium in pop programmes was opened up by the renovation.

The problem of singing live proved that only Tom Jones and Miss Warwick could perform as effectively without the help of recording engineers. The actual sound balance of the programme was atrocious, with rhythm beats blotting out melodies and the background noises blurring the singing.

There was chaos in the cueing, with performers caught with their instruments down and egg all over their guitars. “You’ve done it again,” cried Manfred Mann at a bad cue. “Ready, Steady Goes Live. Aspirin sales have doubled!”

A.B.C.’s Thank Your Lucky Stars did much better with its revised show. Getting rid of all the nonsense stunts – audience markings “O’ll give it foive,” extraneous disc jockeys – the acts took place in a well-marked off arena, divorced form the audiences, allowing the lighting effects to play their full part.

Screams

By cutting to the fist-chewing, hysterical screamers in the audience only when it was needed to match the effect of the performers, the viewers at home could get an uncluttered, clean-cut picture of groups like the Beatles, the Animals and the Drifters without interruptions from the stamping fett and waggling behinds of the studio fodder.

I am at a loss, however, to explain the continued tolerance of the B.B.C. for Juke Box Jury. The juxtaposition of close-ups of astigmatic children and square-faced Moms with the sound of the latest records has long since ceased to be of any conceivable visual interest.

The sight of middle-aged people like David Tomlinson, Joan Turner and Catherine Boyle trying to communicate their with-it-ness to a glum-faced, mummified audience is one of the continuing embarrassments on TV.

What conceivable use their judgments are escapes me when last week no fewer than seven out of nine records were solemnly nominated as hits. David Tomlinson, indeed, voted for nine out of nine as hits which, as a standard, would make the turnover in the Top Ten as active as an explosion of jumping beans.

Smashing

This programme, like Ready Steady Go! also tends to correlate pop music with inarticulateness. The vocabulary of Sue Lloyd on Juke Box Jury seemed to be confined chiefly to the words “I love it, I think it’s great.” Cathy McGowan, doing most of the talking in Ready, Steady, Go! announced a “smashing” competition, thanked Manfred Mann for a “smashing” arrangement, said a harmonica player was “smashing” and told us that the four dancing couples we were going to see were – guess what? “smashing.”

And, in addition to doing something about this potential deleterious effect on teenager speech, could the producers of these programmes not be so shamelessly ready to plug any new American star that happens to float into town?

Dionne Warwick, in spite of her undoubted talent, does not deserve a spot on the Eamonn Andrews Show, Ready, Steady, Go!, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Judy [sic] in just under ten days.

It would, indeed, be healthier all round if the entire pop world were farm more independent of the public relations men in the record business.

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HIT tunes. And The Beatles. They seem to go together like bacon and eggs. But we never seem to hear very much about HOW they write hit tunes.

Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney have been dubbed Britain’s answer to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Together, they have produced 52 successful numbers in four years. How do they do it? That’s what I asked when I interrupted their latest recording session at St. John’s Wood, London. And the answer: while tramping about Britain and the world in transit from one date to another.

“From Me To You” was born on a coach during a one-night stand tour; “This Boy” was originally scribbled down on an Airport Disposal Bag; “Can’t Buy Me Love” happened in Paris; in fact, the lads did most of the numbers from their first film “A Hard Day’s Night” while in Paris or touring America.

See The Beatles in:
Ready, Steady, Go! Friday
Lucky Stars Special, Saturday

Top left: Paul McCartney, bass guitarist. The Brainy Beatle. Speaks three languages.
Top right: George Harrison, lead guitarist. The Artistic Beatle. Teachers predicted he’d be a famous painter.
Bottom left: John Lennon, rhythm guitarist. Playing left-handed? “Well,” says John, “anything Paul can do…”
Bottom right: Ringo Starr, drummer. The Latest Beatle. Joined the group in 1962

No set routine. Sometimes John dreams up the tune and Paul writes the words; sometimes it’s the other way round. Paul wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love” on his own. John was the man behind their latest, “I Feel Fine.” But they always have a joint credit. Because they work together on the final “polishing up” technique, words and music.

They have a knack of knowing exactly what the other is thinking of musically. Call it pop rapport, if you like.

John whipped up “I Feel Fine” in an intense 90 minutes at the St. John’s Wood recording studios just over a month ago. It was waxed inside another hour — swift work by any standard.

Mention of Paris. Know how you say Rolling Stones in French? Thousands of beat-barmy Parisians know. When word spread that these five shaggy-maned laddies were appearing at the Paris Olympia, fans besieged the place.

All seats were sold within 24 hours’ notice that the Stones were to appear there. That’s the best business ever for the internationally-famous Olympia.

France digs the Rolling Stones. Spaniards love Susan Maughan. Slinky Sue spent three days in Spain a fortnight ago, fêted as the Best TV Artist in a nation-wide magazine poll.

When she returned to London, she notched up a motoring landmark, too. Her first parking ticket! Fined £2 [£40 today, allowing for inflation]. And they call her “Bobby’s Girl!”

Françoise Hardy, the 18-year-old French pop-ette who will be singing her latest “Pourquoi tu n’aime” on Saturday is motor-mad, too.

Crazy about cars. Drives a Mini-Cooper at high speed without batting an eyelash. Even in Paris’s traffic jungle. Until last month, when she was filmed driving around for an ITV company.

Françoise told me she was so busy trying to follow the instructions of the cameraman, she collided with SEVEN cars.

The Searchers are off to foreign parts soon. Or rather, a foreign part. Sweden. They’ve never been there before. Told me they were looking forward to smörbröd.

Smörbröd? Not a one-night stand town. It’s Scandinavian for bread and butter. And The Searchers just love freshly-baked foreign bread.

Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas are just back from America. Surprise for them in Hollywood. Had a visit from Chief Shooting Star, 73-year-old head of the Dakota nation and a descendant of Sitting Bull. He wanted to meet the lads who were using his tribe’s name to make heap big music.

Gave the lads beads and handsomely-finished Indian gear.

Also on American pop patrol: The Animals. Their 21-day jaunt had the girls in hysterics. Real, genuine hysterics.

In New York a lass had prolonged hysterics and was carted off to hospital in a strait-jacket! And in Utica, New York State, a theatre safety curtain had to be lowered five times in the same performance to save the Animals from rampaging fans.

While The Searchers are in Sweden, they will probably hear the name Lorne Lesley mentioned. She’s a big star there. But this dusky lass from Tiger Bay had language problems out there at first.

Take her first big show in Scandinavia. Didn’t know the Swedish for “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” So asked her pianist, who was also something of a wag. He told her… how to say:

“Good evening, ladies and drunken dogs.”

Lorne stepped up, was halfway through the greeting, then the audience was amazed when the pianist rushed across the stage and clapped his hand over the mike! Since then she carries an Anglo-Swedish dictionary.

No language problems for Long John Baldry. But he’s got sleeping problems. Especially in this colder weather.

Long John is a lofty 6ft. 7½in. [2.02m] tall. Longest bed he can find is only 6ft. 2in. [1.88m] So five chilly inches [13cm] of Baldry leg, plus the Baldry foot, stick out at the bottom. How does he manage to sleep at all? Easy. Wears football socks!

Finally, back to America. That’s where the Isley Brothers — Ronald, Rudolph and O’Kelly — live. Started early in show business. Brother Ronald was just three years old when he won a £25 War Bond in a song contest at Cincinnati Union Baptist Church!

Who are the Isley Brothers? Group who did the original recordings of “Twist and Shout” and “Shout,” both hot cover discs for The Beatles and Lulu respectively.

TAILPIECE: And don’t forget you can see pop stars Larry Parker and Jan Douglas in Tuesday’s Five O’Clock Club and The Trendsetters in Friday’s Five O’Clock Club.

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