Just started reading Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat – as with the previous volume (a third is planned on the 1970s, hurrah), the anecdotes and local colour are easily as interesting as the analysis.
– Mary Whitehouse: ‘she especially criticised Doctor Who for its reliance on “strangulation – by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter”‘
– The 1964 election campaign: “The greatest debacle, however, was Home’s final set-piece speech of the campaign at the Bull Ring in Birmingham, where the Prime Minister was systematically shouted down by hundreds of hecklers shouting “Tories out! We want Wilson!”…To make matters worse, he was also confronted by an alarming apparition in the front row of the crowd: a Homosaurus, a cardboard monster with ‘the body of a prehistoric reptile and the face of Sir Alec’. It was hardly surprising that, with the Homosaurus staring back at him, he should have found it so difficult to quell the hecklers.”
He also has a very good nose for the slightly clunky feel that a lot of 1960s public language has – caught halfway between Pathe News RP and a newer, more informal type of discourse. (Rejected 1964 election slogan: Tories Dodgy – Labour Swinging).