Enemy Within by Roger Cottrell
In my last blog I mentioned the significance of the kitchen sink tradition and its relationship to the underworld crime thriller in contemporary street history. In particular, I argued that revisiting the high point of post war British literature, TV and film (the 1970s) enabled us to reconnect with themes like alienation that were relentlessly purged from British popular culture from the 1980s.
There were very definite reasons for this. In the 1980s, reference to alienation (along with other kitchen sink themes) was closed down on TV and in film. This was partly due to Thatcherism, to censorship and the threat of privatisation levelled at the BBC after it was shamefully accused (by Thatcher) of treason furing the Faliklands War. By raising questions in the House of Commons about Bleasedale’s THE MONOCLED MUTINEER, Thatcher paved the way for our present (Thatcherite) government transforming the Hutton Inquiry into a witch hunt against the BBC. Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of a 10% share in ITV also harks back to the days the monopolies commission waved his purchase of the Times (in exchange for his supporting Thatcher) and bodes ill for the future of British drama.
But Thatcherism alone didn’t undermine the relationship between kitchen sink and the underworld crime thriller that put the Great in British fiction. As with rock music, all that was best about British TV, literature and film was about alienation and this kind of theme was purged as much by Stalinist cultural criticism as anything else. By this I refer to the wholly negative influence of the journal, SCREEN, to Althussarian interpretations of Marxism, to post-structuralism and post-modernism. Not only is this kind of cultural criticism offensive rubbish, it has been significantly propagated by the very people who used to write for MARXISM TODAY, who then became the DEMOS think tank and contributed directly to the rise of NEW LABOUR. From renouncing the class struggle in the 1980s in order to build the broadest of possible fronts against Thatcher, they went on (following the collapse of the USSR) to take Thatcherism to the heart of the Labour Party enabling the New Labour clique to hijack the party in violation of its constitution. This is a direct consequence of the Stalinist method of the Popular Front.
It has consquences for drama and literature. Writing in SIGHT AND SOUND in 1988 Julian Petlet remarked that much of what was significant in British TV drama in the 1980s was about the central institutions of the British State. This was signifcant at a time when a new state form (the Coercive State) was being founded on the basis of the political defeat of the working class. This conspicuously applied to the best thing that ever appeared on British TV in the 1980s namely EDGE OF DARKNESS by Troy Kennedy-Martin. But something characterised even the best of drama about state repression in the 1980s. In 1972, when THE GUARDIANS appeared on British TV it very openly connected repressive tendencies in the state to a crisis of capitalism and to the class struggle. So too did the canon of John Gould such as THE DONATI CONSPIRACY and STATE OF EMERGENCY. Dramas like DEFENCE OF THE REALM and IN THE SECRET STATE (however admirable and remarkable) did not. As with the whole business of alienation, this amounts to a purging of class themes from British literature, television and film that it is the duty of street history to refound and reestablish – as part of its counter hegemonic mission.