1 00:00:04,360 --> 00:00:07,840 Today we think we live in times of great rudeness. 2 00:00:07,840 --> 00:00:13,240 But travel back 250 years and witness a Britain openly, gloriously 3 00:00:13,240 --> 00:00:15,560 and often shockingly rude. 4 00:00:19,160 --> 00:00:21,960 Then we revelled in mocking and ridiculing 5 00:00:21,960 --> 00:00:24,040 the great and the not so good... 6 00:00:24,040 --> 00:00:28,160 rude about our politicians and royal family. 7 00:00:28,160 --> 00:00:32,200 He's just a pig. He's just a greedy, bastard pig and look at him. 8 00:00:32,200 --> 00:00:34,920 We loved to sing rude songs... 9 00:00:34,920 --> 00:00:36,440 the bawdier the better. 10 00:00:36,440 --> 00:00:41,520 # One for population. # 11 00:00:41,520 --> 00:00:46,120 We could be rude malicious and rude downright offensive... in rhyme. 12 00:00:46,120 --> 00:00:51,480 Perhaps you have no better luck in the knack of rhyming than of fucking. 13 00:00:51,480 --> 00:00:54,760 We took pleasure in a rude humour... 14 00:00:54,760 --> 00:00:56,560 of pee and poo. 15 00:00:56,560 --> 00:00:58,800 THEY LAUGH 16 00:00:59,840 --> 00:01:04,240 And some of us had a taste for a lewd rude that went all the way. 17 00:01:04,240 --> 00:01:07,480 You chuckle or sometimes actually could be quite shocked. 18 00:01:08,720 --> 00:01:11,880 During the hundred odd years of the Georgian Age, 19 00:01:11,880 --> 00:01:16,440 all manner of rudeness thrived in opposition to respectable society's 20 00:01:16,440 --> 00:01:18,640 demand for manners and morality. 21 00:01:21,200 --> 00:01:26,960 This 18th century rude culture of pictures, words, song and theatre 22 00:01:26,960 --> 00:01:31,080 crossed boundaries between high and low art. 23 00:01:31,080 --> 00:01:35,400 Then we had a fierce belief in our right to be rude. 24 00:01:35,400 --> 00:01:39,720 Then we were one nation under the Rude... 25 00:01:39,720 --> 00:01:42,880 Rude Britannia. 26 00:01:42,880 --> 00:01:44,600 Rude Britannia. 27 00:01:44,600 --> 00:01:50,360 A History most satirical, bawdy, lewd and offensive. 28 00:01:50,360 --> 00:01:56,120 # Rule Britannia Britannia rule the waves 29 00:01:56,120 --> 00:02:01,000 # Britons never, ever, ever will be slaves. # 30 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:05,600 In 1707, following an Act of Union with Scotland, 31 00:02:05,600 --> 00:02:08,440 a United Kingdom was created. 32 00:02:09,960 --> 00:02:14,080 The rude heart and lungs of the new nation was London. 33 00:02:14,080 --> 00:02:20,080 Dynamic, exciting, busy, chaotic, noisy and smelly - 34 00:02:20,080 --> 00:02:22,960 where rich and poor collided. 35 00:02:26,200 --> 00:02:28,840 Growing up in London, first in Smithfield, 36 00:02:28,840 --> 00:02:31,680 then working as a young artist in Covent Garden, 37 00:02:31,680 --> 00:02:34,320 was the first chronicler of Georgian Rude, 38 00:02:34,320 --> 00:02:36,560 William Hogarth. 39 00:02:38,200 --> 00:02:40,920 Hogarth definitely had a taste for the rude. 40 00:02:40,920 --> 00:02:45,000 He was a stroppy individual and he had a scar on his forehead 41 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:48,000 which he showed in his portraits as if to say, 42 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:50,280 I can keep up with the best of you. 43 00:02:50,280 --> 00:02:52,360 We know that he loved the taverns 44 00:02:52,360 --> 00:02:56,240 around Covent Garden and Leicester Fields, the Rose Tavern, 45 00:02:56,240 --> 00:03:00,120 and he chatted to the...he knew the girls, he knew the bawds, 46 00:03:00,120 --> 00:03:03,200 he knew the pimps, he knew the sort of hustlers. 47 00:03:03,200 --> 00:03:06,920 Hogarth was just such a bloody good artist. 48 00:03:06,920 --> 00:03:09,760 As an engraver, he could combine his skills 49 00:03:09,760 --> 00:03:12,680 that he had learned as an apprentice engraver 50 00:03:12,680 --> 00:03:15,800 with a kind of satirical piss-taking sensibility. 51 00:03:15,800 --> 00:03:17,240 So, using those skills, 52 00:03:17,240 --> 00:03:20,560 he could then actually observe the world around him. 53 00:03:20,560 --> 00:03:24,000 He used to walk down the street doing literal thumbnail sketches, 54 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:26,760 he used to draw on his thumbnail cos he'd see somebody 55 00:03:26,760 --> 00:03:29,480 he liked the look of and put them into these tableaux. 56 00:03:31,920 --> 00:03:34,320 Hogarth used the high art of painting 57 00:03:34,320 --> 00:03:39,320 to capture the rude energy to be found on the streets of London. 58 00:03:39,320 --> 00:03:43,920 In 1733 he painted the riotous carnival which took place in 59 00:03:43,920 --> 00:03:48,920 Borough, near St George's Church on the south bank of the Thames. 60 00:03:48,920 --> 00:03:51,720 This was Southwark Fair. 61 00:03:57,680 --> 00:04:01,480 The sheer celebration, really, of the diversity of types 62 00:04:01,480 --> 00:04:05,200 and of people and of incidents and noises and of action, 63 00:04:05,200 --> 00:04:07,880 you can almost hear the bubble of noise, 64 00:04:07,880 --> 00:04:11,960 the banging of drums, of course, at the centre of the picture. 65 00:04:16,480 --> 00:04:20,160 You've got stories being told, consequences being explained. 66 00:04:20,160 --> 00:04:23,880 Details here, there and everywhere. It's a feast. 67 00:04:23,880 --> 00:04:25,880 The wonderful thing about Hogarth 68 00:04:25,880 --> 00:04:29,080 is he works on a visual feast and they are there to be read. 69 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:37,040 If we look closer, we can see the rude illicit pleasures of the fair. 70 00:04:40,600 --> 00:04:44,960 There's a woman dicing on top of what looks like a crate or a table 71 00:04:44,960 --> 00:04:48,120 and you get the sense that there's this bumpkin 72 00:04:48,120 --> 00:04:52,440 who's just arrived from the sticks who's having a go on the dice 73 00:04:52,440 --> 00:04:55,720 whereas a smaller kid, it looks like, at his elbow, 74 00:04:55,720 --> 00:04:58,240 is tugging on his sleeve as if to say, 75 00:04:58,240 --> 00:05:00,760 "Don't, Dad. Don't start gambling". 76 00:05:10,800 --> 00:05:14,680 There's an extraordinary thing where people are looking in to, 77 00:05:14,680 --> 00:05:17,520 it looks like a dog kennel but it's a peep show. 78 00:05:17,520 --> 00:05:21,640 One does wonder, what exactly are they looking at? 79 00:05:28,080 --> 00:05:31,560 There is a great sense of excitement 80 00:05:31,560 --> 00:05:37,040 and carnival, but also something slightly dangerous. 81 00:05:37,040 --> 00:05:40,280 Everything is on the verge of collapse. 82 00:05:40,280 --> 00:05:43,160 The man is falling from the wire 83 00:05:43,160 --> 00:05:46,240 and there was a case of that very near the time. 84 00:05:46,240 --> 00:05:50,320 The stage on which the Fall of Bajazet is about to be presented 85 00:05:50,320 --> 00:05:52,840 is actually falling and the more you look, 86 00:05:52,840 --> 00:05:56,160 you realise it's falling on to a china shop underneath. 87 00:05:56,160 --> 00:05:57,920 BREAKING GLASS 88 00:06:00,760 --> 00:06:03,520 Southwark Fair was first a colour painting 89 00:06:03,520 --> 00:06:05,840 then became a black and white print. 90 00:06:05,840 --> 00:06:09,480 To make a living, Hogarth made engravings of his work. 91 00:06:09,480 --> 00:06:13,200 Print copies were then made from these engraved images. 92 00:06:13,200 --> 00:06:17,760 It was these mass produced pictures that were sold to the public. 93 00:06:17,760 --> 00:06:21,920 So Hogarth made Southwark Fair a portrait of the city 94 00:06:21,920 --> 00:06:24,920 that all Londoners could recognise and share... 95 00:06:24,920 --> 00:06:26,600 and want to own. 96 00:06:26,600 --> 00:06:30,840 Probably each person in it is a particular person. 97 00:06:30,840 --> 00:06:35,320 Is identifiable as a semi-celebrity of the day. 98 00:06:35,320 --> 00:06:37,480 The prize fighter sitting on his horse. 99 00:06:37,480 --> 00:06:41,320 The pantomime actor in his absurd regalia. 100 00:06:41,320 --> 00:06:43,840 These are particular people. 101 00:06:43,840 --> 00:06:46,120 It's the pleasure of identification 102 00:06:46,120 --> 00:06:49,960 which is very much part of what 18th century satire was about. 103 00:06:49,960 --> 00:06:54,320 The delight of seeing people you knew or knew of in them. 104 00:06:58,000 --> 00:07:02,680 Hogarth made sure his prints were rude bawdy and rude lewd, 105 00:07:02,680 --> 00:07:07,080 with a visual wit and attention to detail which heightened the humour. 106 00:07:09,200 --> 00:07:13,360 I think part of the pleasure of looking at Hogarth prints 107 00:07:13,360 --> 00:07:15,960 is finding the extra little story. 108 00:07:15,960 --> 00:07:19,040 These are often sexy little narratives 109 00:07:19,040 --> 00:07:22,360 so that you notice what is going on in the corner. 110 00:07:22,360 --> 00:07:26,040 You chuckle or sometimes you could actually be quite shocked. 111 00:07:26,040 --> 00:07:28,920 BELCHING AND GIGGLING 112 00:07:28,920 --> 00:07:31,160 BABY CRIES 113 00:07:31,160 --> 00:07:33,480 GASPS 114 00:07:41,400 --> 00:07:45,120 Yet Hogarth knew he had to be careful with all this rudeness. 115 00:07:45,120 --> 00:07:48,440 In the 1730's he produced a series of prints - 116 00:07:48,440 --> 00:07:51,560 The Harlot's Progress, then the Rakes Progress. 117 00:07:51,560 --> 00:07:55,840 Racy stories with moral conclusions, they revealed in Hogarth 118 00:07:55,840 --> 00:07:59,600 and his public a tension between the Rude and the Prude. 119 00:07:59,600 --> 00:08:03,800 He lives in a world where the Church is still powerful, 120 00:08:03,800 --> 00:08:08,640 where the dominant voices are elite aristocratic gentry. 121 00:08:08,640 --> 00:08:11,800 Where the big City merchants are on the up and up 122 00:08:11,800 --> 00:08:15,320 and have their own forms of puritan respectability. 123 00:08:15,320 --> 00:08:17,520 He's got to sell to these people. 124 00:08:22,760 --> 00:08:27,600 In order to, as it were, launch them properly on the public 125 00:08:27,600 --> 00:08:29,600 he had to say these are moral tales. 126 00:08:29,600 --> 00:08:32,000 But what people really enjoyed, of course, 127 00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:35,680 was actually all the wickedness and the bad things and the rudeness 128 00:08:35,680 --> 00:08:38,160 that happened before they become punished. 129 00:08:54,480 --> 00:08:57,960 In the Rake's Progress, 130 00:08:57,960 --> 00:09:03,720 the orgy in the tavern in Drury Lane where the Rake is having it away 131 00:09:03,720 --> 00:09:08,680 really in a really quite brilliant composition of tavern mayhem 132 00:09:08,680 --> 00:09:14,640 with dancing girls, prostitutes with bare breasts spitting at each other. 133 00:09:14,640 --> 00:09:18,840 These kinds of things are titillating and, in that sense, 134 00:09:18,840 --> 00:09:23,040 he's playing to one's prurient curiosity about low life. 135 00:09:24,600 --> 00:09:27,400 It's slightly News Of The World-y, you know? 136 00:09:27,400 --> 00:09:30,040 It's like, "Let us expose the shocking horrors 137 00:09:30,040 --> 00:09:33,080 "that are going on in the smart brothels of the West End." 138 00:09:33,080 --> 00:09:36,600 "Oh, they're going to get punished"! So there is an ambivalence. 139 00:09:38,120 --> 00:09:42,360 These guys who may be depicted initially as having a jolly time 140 00:09:42,360 --> 00:09:43,800 come to a sticky end. 141 00:09:43,800 --> 00:09:45,880 They have to come to a sticky end. 142 00:09:45,880 --> 00:09:48,320 The harlot dies of syphilis. 143 00:09:48,320 --> 00:09:51,200 The Rake dies of madness. 144 00:09:51,200 --> 00:09:53,600 SCREAMING 145 00:10:18,880 --> 00:10:22,040 In the art of Hogarth you not only see Rude London, 146 00:10:22,040 --> 00:10:24,400 you can almost hear the city as well. 147 00:10:24,400 --> 00:10:27,240 SINGING 148 00:10:29,280 --> 00:10:33,520 Look at his prints, and ballad singers turn up again and again. 149 00:10:33,520 --> 00:10:37,880 Their lewd and bawdy songs the soundtrack of his urban landscape. 150 00:10:37,880 --> 00:10:40,080 # Thy beauty doth so please my eye... # 151 00:10:40,080 --> 00:10:43,680 You could see ballad singers on every major corner battling it out, 152 00:10:43,680 --> 00:10:48,480 one against the other, in part to be more rude than the next. 153 00:10:48,480 --> 00:10:52,160 Every alehouse would have ballad singers coming through, 154 00:10:52,160 --> 00:10:54,960 singing ballads in exchange for a few pence. 155 00:10:54,960 --> 00:10:56,880 # With you to lie 156 00:10:56,880 --> 00:10:59,320 # So if you lie with me one night... # 157 00:10:59,320 --> 00:11:01,280 Visitors who'd come from abroad say, 158 00:11:01,280 --> 00:11:03,880 "You can't go to any corner without finding one." 159 00:11:03,880 --> 00:11:08,320 Any populous place where the ballad singer is likely 160 00:11:08,320 --> 00:11:13,440 to find a market for their products, there are famous places. 161 00:11:13,440 --> 00:11:17,560 Blackfriars, Covent Garden, the Strand. 162 00:11:17,560 --> 00:11:20,320 There are places that they congregated. 163 00:11:20,320 --> 00:11:24,120 Obviously you'd try to find a pitch, usually with your back to a wall 164 00:11:24,120 --> 00:11:28,200 so there was an audio effect, reflection of the sound. 165 00:11:28,200 --> 00:11:31,760 Not too noisy but the early modern city was a noisy place anyway. 166 00:11:31,760 --> 00:11:34,280 BABY CRIES 167 00:11:34,280 --> 00:11:36,360 MUSIC PLAYS 168 00:11:55,400 --> 00:11:58,800 Some of the ballads sung on the streets of London are so rude 169 00:11:58,800 --> 00:12:01,040 that I'm, frankly, embarrassed by them. 170 00:12:01,040 --> 00:12:03,280 They are absolutely explicit. 171 00:12:03,280 --> 00:12:05,040 In all ways. 172 00:12:05,040 --> 00:12:09,880 One rude song sung on street corners and in taverns was Put In All. 173 00:12:09,880 --> 00:12:14,080 # I hope my neck and breast Put in all, put in all 174 00:12:14,080 --> 00:12:17,840 # Lie open to your chest Put in all 175 00:12:17,840 --> 00:12:22,680 # The young man was in heat The maid did soundly sweat 176 00:12:22,680 --> 00:12:24,600 # A little further get! 177 00:12:24,600 --> 00:12:26,960 # Put in all, put in all. # 178 00:12:26,960 --> 00:12:28,640 They would not just explicit 179 00:12:28,640 --> 00:12:31,240 in terms of the words that were being expressed. 180 00:12:31,240 --> 00:12:34,560 They were explicit in terms of the actions that went with them. 181 00:12:34,560 --> 00:12:39,440 As female ballad singers lifted their skirts as illustrations 182 00:12:39,440 --> 00:12:42,560 for the kinds of content that many of the ballads contained. 183 00:12:42,560 --> 00:12:47,440 # According to her will Put in all, put in all 184 00:12:47,440 --> 00:12:52,280 # The young man tried his skill Put in all... # 185 00:12:52,280 --> 00:12:57,400 Put In All cheekily teases men about their sexual anxieties. 186 00:12:57,400 --> 00:13:05,360 # For an inch, they'll take an L Put in at all, put in all. # 187 00:13:05,360 --> 00:13:08,760 It's that moment when you find out you're in the secret majority 188 00:13:08,760 --> 00:13:10,240 and you can relax and think, 189 00:13:10,240 --> 00:13:12,560 "Everybody else is worrying about this too. 190 00:13:12,560 --> 00:13:15,520 "We can all relax together and sing our ditty, Put In All," 191 00:13:15,520 --> 00:13:18,200 you know. Because lots of fellas worry about this. 192 00:13:18,200 --> 00:13:21,120 They worried about it then and they worry about it now. 193 00:13:21,120 --> 00:13:23,160 # You had your freedom... # 194 00:13:23,160 --> 00:13:25,080 To help them make a living, 195 00:13:25,080 --> 00:13:29,160 ballad singers sold printed versions of their songs. 196 00:13:29,160 --> 00:13:34,560 But even here again there was little attempt to disguise their rudeness. 197 00:13:34,560 --> 00:13:40,520 Use of the common four-letter words for body parts were, sometimes 198 00:13:40,520 --> 00:13:43,680 interestingly in the printed version, somewhat avoided. 199 00:13:43,680 --> 00:13:48,360 C - - T would be a nod towards being polite, 200 00:13:48,360 --> 00:13:51,120 but really, I mean, when it rhymes with blunt 201 00:13:51,120 --> 00:13:53,000 you know what they're on about. 202 00:13:53,000 --> 00:13:55,960 All this immorality from ballad singers was 203 00:13:55,960 --> 00:14:01,600 a cause of much dismay and concern to moral guardians and law makers. 204 00:14:01,600 --> 00:14:04,840 You even get books of instructions to servants, where they say, 205 00:14:04,840 --> 00:14:08,240 "When you go on an errand for your mistress, you go straight there, 206 00:14:08,240 --> 00:14:11,240 "straight, you don't go and listen to a ballad singer. 207 00:14:11,240 --> 00:14:14,640 "Not only will that waste your time, it will corrupt your morals." 208 00:14:14,640 --> 00:14:15,720 That sort of thing. 209 00:14:15,720 --> 00:14:17,880 BELL CHIMES 210 00:14:19,640 --> 00:14:23,560 We know from prosecutions for nuisance, for example, 211 00:14:23,560 --> 00:14:28,000 that in 1775 there were five ballad singing women every night 212 00:14:28,000 --> 00:14:31,520 in St Paul's churchyard who committed a nuisance 213 00:14:31,520 --> 00:14:35,800 because they enticed the shop girls and the girls of the town 214 00:14:35,800 --> 00:14:40,200 to come and listen to them and to laugh at their sheer rudeness 215 00:14:40,200 --> 00:14:43,200 and sexual explicitness of their songs. 216 00:14:50,400 --> 00:14:53,920 Rude culture not only thrived on the streets of London. 217 00:14:53,920 --> 00:14:57,480 You could also find it, alive and kicking, by buying 218 00:14:57,480 --> 00:15:02,120 a ticket and stepping inside any of the capital's theatres. 219 00:15:02,120 --> 00:15:06,320 Rude places that Hogarth also knew and drew. 220 00:15:06,320 --> 00:15:08,440 APPLAUSE 221 00:15:11,240 --> 00:15:14,560 Theatre is one of the only art forms which brings together 222 00:15:14,560 --> 00:15:16,480 everyone in 18th century London. 223 00:15:16,480 --> 00:15:19,440 From apprentices sitting at the top in the gallery, 224 00:15:19,440 --> 00:15:22,080 very squashed in, very dirty, very smelly ... 225 00:15:22,080 --> 00:15:24,720 to the aristocrats sitting in the boxes. 226 00:15:26,560 --> 00:15:29,280 People were allowed to enter in the middle of plays. 227 00:15:29,280 --> 00:15:32,000 In fact, they had an incentive to do so, 228 00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:36,040 because it cost them less if they came in just for the last act. 229 00:15:36,040 --> 00:15:40,160 People would talk and heckle and discuss things 230 00:15:40,160 --> 00:15:42,680 and walk around during the plays. 231 00:15:42,680 --> 00:15:45,520 AUDIENCE BOO 232 00:15:45,520 --> 00:15:49,080 In the early 18th century audiences were used to barracking 233 00:15:49,080 --> 00:15:53,520 exotic characters on stage, like those found in Italian operas. 234 00:15:55,040 --> 00:15:59,200 Then a play appeared that was a true piece of British theatre. 235 00:16:05,040 --> 00:16:08,400 This was The Beggar's Opera by John Gay. 236 00:16:13,200 --> 00:16:16,440 As the curtain went up on Gay's satirical masterpiece, 237 00:16:16,440 --> 00:16:18,440 audiences were in for a surprise. 238 00:16:18,440 --> 00:16:20,880 Here on stage were rude common people, 239 00:16:20,880 --> 00:16:23,480 just like those found in a Hogarth print. 240 00:16:23,480 --> 00:16:27,120 Well, the first character you see is a beggar. 241 00:16:27,120 --> 00:16:29,760 Because this has been advertised as an opera, 242 00:16:29,760 --> 00:16:33,240 it must've been an extraordinary surprise to the audience 243 00:16:33,240 --> 00:16:36,440 to be sitting in the theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields, 244 00:16:36,440 --> 00:16:39,000 and to look up and to see a beggar on stage. 245 00:16:39,000 --> 00:16:41,600 This was an event that no-one had seen before. 246 00:16:41,600 --> 00:16:43,600 It was something quite new. 247 00:16:43,600 --> 00:16:47,400 The Beggar's Opera is rude because it's set in a prison, 248 00:16:47,400 --> 00:16:50,040 it's heroes aren't kings and queens, 249 00:16:50,040 --> 00:16:54,400 it's heroes are kind of thieves, highwaymen and pickpockets. 250 00:16:54,400 --> 00:16:56,880 The Beggar's Opera became a smash hit 251 00:16:56,880 --> 00:16:59,480 precisely because it was Rude Theatre. 252 00:16:59,480 --> 00:17:02,800 Rude, because in a space used to high art, 253 00:17:02,800 --> 00:17:06,840 audiences now saw low common characters on stage. 254 00:17:06,840 --> 00:17:11,880 And rude, because they were singing songs that were biting satires 255 00:17:11,880 --> 00:17:13,600 on 18th century life. 256 00:17:13,600 --> 00:17:18,040 # When you sense you're the age Be cautious and say it 257 00:17:18,040 --> 00:17:22,520 # Lest the courtiers offended might be 258 00:17:22,520 --> 00:17:26,640 # If you mention vice or bribe 259 00:17:26,640 --> 00:17:30,120 # 'Tis so pat to all the tribe 260 00:17:30,120 --> 00:17:35,320 # Each cries That was levelled at me! # 261 00:17:35,320 --> 00:17:37,120 Gay had this brilliant idea 262 00:17:37,120 --> 00:17:41,240 which has been duplicated often since and is still duplicated. 263 00:17:41,240 --> 00:17:43,680 Which is to put in to his play 264 00:17:43,680 --> 00:17:47,360 lots of the most popular songs of the day. 265 00:17:47,360 --> 00:17:51,760 I mean, they do it in Shrek, he discovered this art first. 266 00:17:51,760 --> 00:17:55,840 So, I think, literally audiences sang along or hummed along 267 00:17:55,840 --> 00:17:59,440 because often he put rather new words to these tunes. 268 00:18:02,920 --> 00:18:06,880 These new lyrics attacked the double standards of Georgian life 269 00:18:06,880 --> 00:18:12,280 where Gay saw one law for the rich, another for the poor. 270 00:18:14,280 --> 00:18:18,000 # Since laws were made for ev'ry Degree 271 00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:22,080 # To curb Vice in others as well as me 272 00:18:22,080 --> 00:18:28,960 # I wonder we han't better Company Upon Tyburn Tree 273 00:18:28,960 --> 00:18:33,160 # But gold from lock and take out the sting 274 00:18:33,160 --> 00:18:37,520 # And if rich men like us were to swing 275 00:18:37,520 --> 00:18:42,440 # T'would thin the land such numbers to string 276 00:18:42,440 --> 00:18:48,200 # Upon Tyburn Tree. # 277 00:18:50,960 --> 00:18:52,760 This reference to Tyburn Tree 278 00:18:52,760 --> 00:18:55,960 would send a chill down the necks of Gay's audience. 279 00:18:55,960 --> 00:18:58,200 Tyburn, near modern day Marble Arch, 280 00:18:58,200 --> 00:19:01,680 was the notorious place for public hangings in London. 281 00:19:03,200 --> 00:19:06,160 But the Beggars Opera was much more than rude satire 282 00:19:06,160 --> 00:19:08,760 on the wider injustices of Georgian Britain. 283 00:19:08,760 --> 00:19:12,160 Audiences knew that the play was also an attack on specific 284 00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:15,960 politicians, their corruption and many scandals. 285 00:19:17,480 --> 00:19:20,160 It was generally recognised 286 00:19:20,160 --> 00:19:23,200 that the play lampooned the politicians of the day, 287 00:19:23,200 --> 00:19:26,680 that although it was an opera about thieves and highwaymen, 288 00:19:26,680 --> 00:19:29,280 these were really the thieves and highwaymen 289 00:19:29,280 --> 00:19:30,920 who were running the country 290 00:19:30,920 --> 00:19:34,000 and who were often actually sitting in the audience, 291 00:19:34,000 --> 00:19:38,240 Robert Walpole went to one of the first performances of the play. 292 00:19:38,240 --> 00:19:42,880 Walpole, the Prime Minister, was seen in all the key characters - 293 00:19:42,880 --> 00:19:49,800 Peachum the thief taker, Lockit the jailer and Macheath the Highwayman. 294 00:19:49,800 --> 00:19:53,600 What Gay does so brilliantly is to suggest to us 295 00:19:53,600 --> 00:19:57,000 that the world of politics is a world which, 296 00:19:57,000 --> 00:20:00,280 under the appearance of respectability, 297 00:20:00,280 --> 00:20:04,040 is in fact no more than pervasive corruption. 298 00:20:09,560 --> 00:20:13,680 Also in the 1730's, from a theatre on the Haymarket, 299 00:20:13,680 --> 00:20:17,640 came further provocations to the Prime Minister and his cronies. 300 00:20:17,640 --> 00:20:22,080 Plays such as the Historical Register For The Year 1736 301 00:20:22,080 --> 00:20:24,760 were written by Henry Fielding. 302 00:20:24,760 --> 00:20:26,520 His attacks on political sleaze 303 00:20:26,520 --> 00:20:29,920 were even more direct than those of Gay in The Beggar's Opera. 304 00:20:29,920 --> 00:20:35,520 So, faced with this, Walpole ordered that Rude Theatre now be dealt with. 305 00:20:37,560 --> 00:20:41,240 The government essentially decided to to restrict the freedom 306 00:20:41,240 --> 00:20:44,320 that Fielding was enjoying and introduce licensing, 307 00:20:44,320 --> 00:20:48,600 so that you had to submit your plays to a government censor 308 00:20:48,600 --> 00:20:50,800 before they were performed. 309 00:20:53,400 --> 00:20:58,720 Places such as the Haymarket no longer had a licence to perform. 310 00:20:58,720 --> 00:21:02,720 Importantly, it put Rude playwrights out of business, 311 00:21:02,720 --> 00:21:06,280 so it's a tremendously important moment in the history of theatre. 312 00:21:06,280 --> 00:21:11,200 It's a very successful shutting down of the Rude in London. 313 00:21:18,280 --> 00:21:21,120 But just as Rude Theatre was killed off, 314 00:21:21,120 --> 00:21:25,480 so another part of London's cultural life continued in rude health. 315 00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:29,680 East of Theatre land was Grub Street, 316 00:21:29,680 --> 00:21:33,720 a meeting place for writers, of taverns and coffee houses 317 00:21:33,720 --> 00:21:37,080 that became a byword for bookish rudeness. 318 00:21:39,520 --> 00:21:42,520 Literary London was really rude, it was a vicious place. 319 00:21:42,520 --> 00:21:45,120 People beat each other up, poisoned each other, 320 00:21:45,120 --> 00:21:48,120 slandered each other in poems, slagged each other off, 321 00:21:48,120 --> 00:21:50,800 bitched about each other, maligned each other. 322 00:21:50,800 --> 00:21:52,760 It was extraordinarily vicious. 323 00:21:54,320 --> 00:21:58,280 As long as writers avoided treasonous high politics and didn't 324 00:21:58,280 --> 00:22:02,920 doubt the Lord, the law allowed literary bitching to flourish. 325 00:22:04,440 --> 00:22:08,400 Suddenly, by accident as a matter of fact, 326 00:22:08,400 --> 00:22:11,520 the licensing of print disappears. 327 00:22:11,520 --> 00:22:14,240 So, no longer do you have to get the permission 328 00:22:14,240 --> 00:22:17,200 of a government operative in order to print anything. 329 00:22:17,200 --> 00:22:20,560 There is an extraordinary freedom to print whatever you want. 330 00:22:20,560 --> 00:22:22,720 To read, therefore, whatever you want. 331 00:22:22,720 --> 00:22:27,120 The laws governing print are mostly to do with sedition 332 00:22:27,120 --> 00:22:30,120 to matters of politics and religion, 333 00:22:30,120 --> 00:22:34,480 but if you want to be extremely rude about a particular person, 334 00:22:34,480 --> 00:22:37,400 legally there's very little to stop you. 335 00:22:40,280 --> 00:22:43,840 Exploiting this freedom was a master of rude words 336 00:22:43,840 --> 00:22:47,920 who lived in some splendour by the Thames at Twickenham, 337 00:22:47,920 --> 00:22:51,440 far from the noise and confusion of London town. 338 00:22:51,440 --> 00:22:56,800 Poet Alexander Pope deployed rudeness as his weapon of choice 339 00:22:56,800 --> 00:23:00,560 to give the high art of his verse a sharper edge. 340 00:23:03,000 --> 00:23:05,960 His invective, and there is plenty of it, 341 00:23:05,960 --> 00:23:09,160 he does dish it out, is so poised and elegant. 342 00:23:09,160 --> 00:23:13,240 A sense of him being a kind of wind-up merchant. 343 00:23:13,240 --> 00:23:15,560 INSECT BUZZES 344 00:23:15,560 --> 00:23:20,120 Pope was deliciously vicious when he used metaphor to shrink 345 00:23:20,120 --> 00:23:25,040 his enemy, Lord John Hervey, down to insect-like size. 346 00:23:26,560 --> 00:23:30,160 "Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings 347 00:23:30,160 --> 00:23:34,480 "This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings 348 00:23:34,480 --> 00:23:37,480 "Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys 349 00:23:37,480 --> 00:23:40,880 "Yet wit ne'er tastes and beauty ne'er enjoys 350 00:23:40,880 --> 00:23:43,880 "So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight 351 00:23:43,880 --> 00:23:47,080 "In mumbling of the game they dare not bite." 352 00:23:52,600 --> 00:23:56,360 Pope's rude masterpiece was The Dunciad. 353 00:23:56,360 --> 00:23:58,080 From the very first lines, 354 00:23:58,080 --> 00:24:02,200 Pope takes aim at the first two King Georges of the Georgian age, 355 00:24:02,200 --> 00:24:06,080 two of the many Dunces to be savaged in this huge mock epic. 356 00:24:08,360 --> 00:24:13,120 "You by whose care in vain decried and cursed 357 00:24:13,120 --> 00:24:18,760 "still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first." 358 00:24:23,440 --> 00:24:27,560 But the rudeness in The Dunciad has a more earthy quality, 359 00:24:27,560 --> 00:24:30,280 a humour revealed in prints of the time 360 00:24:30,280 --> 00:24:34,640 that delighted in the barefaced evacuations of daily life. 361 00:24:40,640 --> 00:24:43,320 With filth and worse filling the streets 362 00:24:43,320 --> 00:24:45,480 and a lack of any real sanitation, 363 00:24:45,480 --> 00:24:49,960 it was natural that rude scatology should be part of the poetic urge. 364 00:24:52,720 --> 00:24:54,760 In Book two of The Dunciad, 365 00:24:54,760 --> 00:24:59,120 two characters get all blokey in a peeing competition. 366 00:25:00,840 --> 00:25:04,600 "First Osborne leant against his lettered post 367 00:25:04,600 --> 00:25:08,680 "It rose and laboured to a curve at most 368 00:25:08,680 --> 00:25:12,240 "So Jove's bright bow displays its watery round 369 00:25:12,240 --> 00:25:15,680 "Sure sign that no spectator shall be drowned 370 00:25:15,680 --> 00:25:19,480 "A second effort brought but new disgrace 371 00:25:19,480 --> 00:25:22,880 "The wild meander washed the artist's face 372 00:25:22,880 --> 00:25:27,000 "Thus the small jett which hasty hands unlock 373 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:31,480 "Spurts in the gardener's eyes who turns the cock." 374 00:25:37,240 --> 00:25:43,440 Sex and unpleasant smells were at the heart of a celebrated rude feud 375 00:25:43,440 --> 00:25:46,560 in the high society of the 1730's. 376 00:25:46,560 --> 00:25:51,840 In one corner was the Dean of St Pauls, the satirist Jonathan Swift. 377 00:25:51,840 --> 00:25:55,120 In the other was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 378 00:25:55,120 --> 00:25:59,480 a celebrated wit and beauty with a sharp tongue of her own. 379 00:25:59,480 --> 00:26:03,640 Swift began a bad tempered exchange of words with a poem 380 00:26:03,640 --> 00:26:07,160 in which the character Strephon spies on Celia 381 00:26:07,160 --> 00:26:10,120 and the contents of her dressing room. 382 00:26:10,120 --> 00:26:14,720 He finds there all the equipment she uses to make herself beautiful. 383 00:26:14,720 --> 00:26:20,600 The vials of puppy piss that she uses and make-up and false bits 384 00:26:20,600 --> 00:26:24,040 and he's horrified at what he finds. 385 00:26:25,560 --> 00:26:28,000 "Hard by a filthy Bason stands 386 00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:31,240 "Fowl'd with the Scouring of her Hands 387 00:26:31,240 --> 00:26:36,880 "The Bason takes whatever comes The scrapings of her Teeth and Gums 388 00:26:36,880 --> 00:26:40,000 "A nasty compound of all Hues 389 00:26:40,000 --> 00:26:44,160 "For here she spits and here she spues." 390 00:26:44,160 --> 00:26:46,920 What Swift's doing in this poem is guiding us 391 00:26:46,920 --> 00:26:49,400 on a very intimate tour of Celia's body, 392 00:26:49,400 --> 00:26:53,480 the way in which it presses into her make-up, her clothes, 393 00:26:53,480 --> 00:26:57,040 the armpits of her dress which are covered in muck, 394 00:26:57,040 --> 00:27:01,720 her stockings which are stinking of her and are stained by her feet. 395 00:27:01,720 --> 00:27:04,680 It's looking at all the traces her body leaves on these 396 00:27:04,680 --> 00:27:07,960 objects in the dressing room. In a way, almost voyeuristic. 397 00:27:07,960 --> 00:27:12,080 We are getting very close to her body without ever seeing her body, 398 00:27:12,080 --> 00:27:15,600 so there is almost a voyeuristic relish in these descriptions. 399 00:27:17,120 --> 00:27:20,320 "But, oh! it turn'd poor Strephon's Bowels 400 00:27:20,320 --> 00:27:23,200 "When he beheld and smelt the Towels 401 00:27:23,200 --> 00:27:25,960 "Begumm'd, bematt'd and beslim'd 402 00:27:25,960 --> 00:27:29,080 "With dirt and sweat and ear-wax grim'd 403 00:27:29,080 --> 00:27:34,720 "No object Strephon's eye escapes Here petticoats in frowzy Heaps 404 00:27:34,720 --> 00:27:37,160 "Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot 405 00:27:37,160 --> 00:27:40,000 "All varnished o'er with snuff and snot 406 00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:45,080 "Thus finishing his grand survey disgusted Strephon stole away 407 00:27:45,080 --> 00:27:51,040 "Repeating in his amorous fits 'Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits.'" 408 00:27:53,280 --> 00:27:58,080 Now was Dean Swift here dishing out a rude that was offensive to women, 409 00:27:58,080 --> 00:28:02,120 or was his verse a satire on female beauty and vanity? 410 00:28:02,120 --> 00:28:03,480 Whatever the truth, 411 00:28:03,480 --> 00:28:07,400 when Lady Montagu read his poem she was not best pleased. 412 00:28:07,400 --> 00:28:10,840 She penned her own rude response locating the source of Swift's 413 00:28:10,840 --> 00:28:15,320 disgust to failures of his own in ladies' dressing rooms. 414 00:28:15,320 --> 00:28:18,080 "What if your verses have not sold? 415 00:28:18,080 --> 00:28:21,120 "Must I therefore return your gold? 416 00:28:21,120 --> 00:28:26,920 "Perhaps you have no better lacking The knack of rhyming than of fucking. 417 00:28:26,920 --> 00:28:33,240 "I won't give back one single crown to wash your band or turn your gown. 418 00:28:33,240 --> 00:28:38,560 "I'll be revenged, you saucy Queen, replies the discontented Dean. 419 00:28:38,560 --> 00:28:41,240 "I'll so describe your dressing room. 420 00:28:41,240 --> 00:28:43,360 "She answered short 421 00:28:43,360 --> 00:28:45,320 "I'm glad you'll write 422 00:28:45,320 --> 00:28:48,240 "You'll furnish paper when I shite." 423 00:28:52,560 --> 00:28:56,720 Rude was not only important to 18th century poetry, 424 00:28:56,720 --> 00:29:00,880 it was also to be found in the novel, the newest literary form 425 00:29:00,880 --> 00:29:03,880 to entertain the Georgian reading public. 426 00:29:03,880 --> 00:29:08,520 Bawdy humour was at the heart of the success of Tristram Shandy. 427 00:29:08,520 --> 00:29:13,480 First published in 1760 and written by Lawrence Sterne, 428 00:29:13,480 --> 00:29:17,680 hitherto an obscure parson from Yorkshire. 429 00:29:17,680 --> 00:29:20,680 Tristram Shandy was probably the most successful book 430 00:29:20,680 --> 00:29:22,720 published in the whole of the century. 431 00:29:22,720 --> 00:29:26,160 Dan Brown has nothing on Laurence Sterne 432 00:29:26,160 --> 00:29:30,000 in terms of literary impact. 433 00:29:30,000 --> 00:29:31,960 It was a revelation to everyone. 434 00:29:31,960 --> 00:29:34,920 It was a new form of writing, a new form of satire 435 00:29:34,920 --> 00:29:38,360 that took elements of rudeness, elements of rude culture, 436 00:29:38,360 --> 00:29:40,200 and reinvented them. 437 00:29:42,080 --> 00:29:46,000 Tristram Shandy attracted the attention of William Hogarth 438 00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:49,160 who drew illustrations for its first editions. 439 00:29:49,160 --> 00:29:53,880 Two hundred and fifty years later, cartoonist Martin Rowson 440 00:29:53,880 --> 00:29:59,040 has produced his own graphic-novel take on this rude classic. 441 00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:02,040 I think Tristram Shandy is a wonderful novel, 442 00:30:02,040 --> 00:30:04,440 mostly because it's not a novel. 443 00:30:04,440 --> 00:30:07,080 It's an anti-novel, it's digressive, funny, 444 00:30:07,080 --> 00:30:09,200 a shaggy-dog story and it's filthy. 445 00:30:09,200 --> 00:30:12,240 It is like listening to a stand-up comedian 446 00:30:12,240 --> 00:30:15,560 for page after page after page after page. 447 00:30:15,560 --> 00:30:21,440 Rowson includes all the best rude bits in Tristram Shandy. 448 00:30:21,440 --> 00:30:25,160 Tristram's accidental circumcision with a faulty window. 449 00:30:28,400 --> 00:30:31,320 The nasty incident of the hot chestnut down the breeches. 450 00:30:33,400 --> 00:30:36,880 Uncle Toby's wound in the groin at the Battle of Namur. 451 00:30:40,040 --> 00:30:44,960 And the climax - or perhaps, in true Shandean style, anti-climax - 452 00:30:44,960 --> 00:30:48,880 the wooing by the Widow Wadman of Uncle Toby. 453 00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:52,440 Visually, the thing about the widow 454 00:30:52,440 --> 00:30:54,880 is that we don't know what she looks like 455 00:30:54,880 --> 00:30:58,080 from Sterne's description because the readers are invited 456 00:30:58,080 --> 00:31:00,680 to draw their image of beauty on a blank page. 457 00:31:03,240 --> 00:31:07,120 Toby is this sort of sweet, 458 00:31:07,120 --> 00:31:09,320 benign, ingenue. 459 00:31:09,320 --> 00:31:11,200 He's a bit like Bambi, actually. 460 00:31:15,200 --> 00:31:18,040 One of the great scenes in the novel 461 00:31:18,040 --> 00:31:22,000 is where he offers to show Widow Wadman his wound. 462 00:31:22,000 --> 00:31:25,240 He's been wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur. 463 00:31:25,240 --> 00:31:30,800 Of course, she wants to know if he is still capable of the business 464 00:31:30,800 --> 00:31:35,280 that a husband is expected to perform if she's going to marry him. 465 00:31:35,280 --> 00:31:37,800 How bad is this wound? 466 00:31:39,920 --> 00:31:43,520 "You shall see the very place, madam," said my Uncle Toby. 467 00:31:43,520 --> 00:31:48,680 Mrs Wadman blushed and looked towards the door, turned pale, 468 00:31:48,680 --> 00:31:53,440 blushed slightly again, recovered her natural colour, blushed worse 469 00:31:53,440 --> 00:31:58,640 than ever, which for the sake of the un-learned reader, I translate thus: 470 00:31:58,640 --> 00:32:00,840 "Lord, I cannot look at it. 471 00:32:00,840 --> 00:32:03,240 "What would the world say if I looked at it? 472 00:32:03,240 --> 00:32:05,760 "I should drop down if I looked at it. 473 00:32:05,760 --> 00:32:07,760 "I wish I COULD look at it. 474 00:32:07,760 --> 00:32:10,480 "There can be no sin in looking at it. 475 00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:12,000 "I WILL look at it." 476 00:32:26,240 --> 00:32:30,160 By the time Tristram Shandy became a Georgian best-seller, 477 00:32:30,160 --> 00:32:33,120 another part of rude culture was staking its claim 478 00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:37,120 to be the most vibrant part of later 18th-century life. 479 00:32:38,120 --> 00:32:42,960 This was the colourful world of satirical and humorous prints 480 00:32:42,960 --> 00:32:46,760 that could be enjoyed at print shops in London's West End, 481 00:32:46,760 --> 00:32:49,800 on Piccadilly, Oxford Street and The Strand. 482 00:32:49,800 --> 00:32:55,000 These were places of shared laughter for Londoners of all classes. 483 00:32:56,000 --> 00:33:01,040 The print shop window was probably the most colourful, changing, 484 00:33:01,040 --> 00:33:05,840 theatrical space in urban London. 485 00:33:05,840 --> 00:33:08,000 So, you would go past it every day. 486 00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:09,640 You would look for new prints. 487 00:33:09,640 --> 00:33:12,480 You would constantly expect to see something new. 488 00:33:12,480 --> 00:33:14,520 And it was incredibly democratic. 489 00:33:14,520 --> 00:33:18,520 The beggar boy and the sweep, the porter and the lord 490 00:33:18,520 --> 00:33:20,960 all walked past the print shop. 491 00:33:24,960 --> 00:33:29,880 You mustn't forget that this is a culture which is image-starved 492 00:33:29,880 --> 00:33:32,040 in a way that ours is not now. 493 00:33:32,040 --> 00:33:34,800 They're hungry for images of their own lives. 494 00:33:34,800 --> 00:33:38,440 Of course there are great paintings, but they're hidden away 495 00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:43,040 in the private houses and mansions of the great. 496 00:33:43,040 --> 00:33:46,240 If you want an image of how you live, 497 00:33:46,240 --> 00:33:51,320 or how your governors live, it's to the print shops that you have to go. 498 00:33:55,320 --> 00:33:58,320 Living above the shop of his publisher, Mrs Humphrey, 499 00:33:58,320 --> 00:34:00,920 on St James Street, Piccadilly, 500 00:34:00,920 --> 00:34:05,720 was the dark master of rude print culture, James Gillray. 501 00:34:07,440 --> 00:34:11,760 # I like my town 502 00:34:11,760 --> 00:34:16,080 # With a little drop of poison 503 00:34:17,080 --> 00:34:20,200 # Nobody knows 504 00:34:20,200 --> 00:34:24,800 # They're lining up to go and sin 505 00:34:24,800 --> 00:34:27,480 # I'm all alone... # 506 00:34:29,120 --> 00:34:33,120 I think what you get from Gillray is a kind of sour, 507 00:34:33,120 --> 00:34:37,560 disaffected, even-handed... 508 00:34:37,560 --> 00:34:42,040 misanthropy, dislike of nearly everything... 509 00:34:43,560 --> 00:34:47,280 ...outside the pleasures of art itself. 510 00:34:47,280 --> 00:34:49,600 There's no love in Gillray. 511 00:34:49,600 --> 00:34:52,320 There's no warmth, there's no generosity, 512 00:34:52,320 --> 00:34:54,680 there's no joy, particularly. 513 00:34:54,680 --> 00:34:57,040 # ..And a rat 514 00:34:57,040 --> 00:35:02,760 # Always knows when he's in with weasels 515 00:35:04,480 --> 00:35:08,800 # Here you lose a little every day... # 516 00:35:12,080 --> 00:35:17,520 He also had that essential attribute of a visual satirist, 517 00:35:17,520 --> 00:35:21,440 or of any kind of satirist, which is basically a kind of fuck-you-ism. 518 00:35:21,440 --> 00:35:23,760 He attacked everybody. 519 00:35:27,160 --> 00:35:30,240 Gillray in the 1790s created his greatest works 520 00:35:30,240 --> 00:35:35,320 of malice and ridicule in fertile but dangerous times. 521 00:35:35,320 --> 00:35:39,640 This was a decade of revolution in France that created tension, 522 00:35:39,640 --> 00:35:41,880 unrest and violence in Britain. 523 00:35:43,400 --> 00:35:46,080 With fear of invasion by the French, 524 00:35:46,080 --> 00:35:51,360 Gillray used the popular medium of the print to do his patriotic duty. 525 00:35:51,360 --> 00:35:55,800 Gillray gets the third Georgian King, George III, 526 00:35:55,800 --> 00:35:58,800 to fart his contempt towards the French 527 00:35:58,800 --> 00:36:01,440 and blow their fleet back to France. 528 00:36:05,680 --> 00:36:08,840 And Gillray will visually go way over the top 529 00:36:08,840 --> 00:36:11,320 to demonise this enemy to Britain. 530 00:36:11,320 --> 00:36:14,600 "Un petit souper a la Parisienne. 531 00:36:14,600 --> 00:36:16,840 "A family of sans culottes 532 00:36:16,840 --> 00:36:19,600 "refreshing after the fatigues of the day." 533 00:36:19,600 --> 00:36:21,960 The title is wonderful. 534 00:36:21,960 --> 00:36:25,720 The image is utterly, utterly vile, utterly shocking. 535 00:36:25,720 --> 00:36:27,800 It's totally grotesque. 536 00:36:27,800 --> 00:36:29,960 It's ugly, hideous, horrible, 537 00:36:29,960 --> 00:36:33,960 but by God, it sticks in your mind, and I suppose that says 538 00:36:33,960 --> 00:36:36,160 something for his power. 539 00:36:37,800 --> 00:36:42,880 Here you have the sans culottes eating the severed head. 540 00:36:42,880 --> 00:36:45,720 That would be fine, sort of, 541 00:36:45,720 --> 00:36:49,760 but Gillray will add the gouged-out eye, 542 00:36:49,760 --> 00:36:53,000 or he will add, as he does here, the supine form 543 00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:57,520 beneath the table with the table leg rammed up in his crotch, 544 00:36:57,520 --> 00:36:59,480 but with one foot off 545 00:36:59,480 --> 00:37:02,200 and the blood spurting out. 546 00:37:02,200 --> 00:37:03,960 It's more than a nightmare. 547 00:37:03,960 --> 00:37:08,200 It's about eight nightmares in one print. 548 00:37:09,760 --> 00:37:13,000 But Gillray was just as unforgiving and ruthless 549 00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:16,600 when he turned his withering gaze on British politics. 550 00:37:18,480 --> 00:37:20,720 His work is completely about politics. 551 00:37:20,720 --> 00:37:24,160 He's utterly obsessed with politics, he's involved in it, 552 00:37:24,160 --> 00:37:26,040 he's observing it closely. 553 00:37:26,040 --> 00:37:29,360 He's one of the only people who went into Parliament and drew them. 554 00:37:29,360 --> 00:37:32,200 He had little cards he used to draw their faces on. 555 00:37:32,200 --> 00:37:35,400 That's why his images of Pitt are so accurate. 556 00:37:35,400 --> 00:37:39,960 Gillray used the simplest of images to satirise Pitt, 557 00:37:39,960 --> 00:37:42,520 Prime Minister at the time. 558 00:37:42,520 --> 00:37:47,320 It's just a simple image of a fungus in the form of Pitt' head 559 00:37:47,320 --> 00:37:51,280 coming out of a crown which is, again, rooted in a dung hill. 560 00:37:51,280 --> 00:37:55,000 And the simplicity is breathtaking. 561 00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:58,000 Pitt isn't a mushroom. Why should he be a mushroom? 562 00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:01,960 But you can actually reduce a recognisable human being, 563 00:38:01,960 --> 00:38:06,240 in this case the Prime Minister, down to something which he isn't. 564 00:38:06,240 --> 00:38:09,960 That is something that cartoonists are constantly trying to do. 565 00:38:09,960 --> 00:38:12,400 It's a kind of shape-shifting shamanism 566 00:38:12,400 --> 00:38:14,800 to turn them into something else. 567 00:38:14,800 --> 00:38:18,560 And Gillray didn't hesitate to mock the biggest target of all, 568 00:38:18,560 --> 00:38:23,080 royalty, in the portly shape of the eldest son of George III. 569 00:38:23,080 --> 00:38:24,720 George, Prince of Wales, 570 00:38:24,720 --> 00:38:28,920 was a picture of nobility when painted in official portraits. 571 00:38:28,920 --> 00:38:32,800 Gillray's caricature was something quite different. 572 00:38:34,360 --> 00:38:38,680 # ..To purge us of the seven deadly sins... # 573 00:38:38,680 --> 00:38:41,440 He skewered the heir to the throne 574 00:38:41,440 --> 00:38:44,480 with an accumulation of compromising detail. 575 00:38:44,480 --> 00:38:47,280 There is dice on the floor, he's gambling, 576 00:38:47,280 --> 00:38:50,200 there's his gambling debts written down in books. 577 00:38:51,720 --> 00:38:53,600 There's a chamber pot behind him 578 00:38:53,600 --> 00:38:56,040 over-brimming with either piss or vomit. 579 00:38:56,040 --> 00:38:58,840 There's a sort of pyramid of bottles of pills 580 00:38:58,840 --> 00:39:01,320 which he's taking to cure him of the pox. 581 00:39:03,040 --> 00:39:05,760 The table he's leaning up against 582 00:39:05,760 --> 00:39:11,400 has got these bones on the plate and a half-eaten, huge joint of meat. 583 00:39:11,400 --> 00:39:15,600 But the bones are very "ossireal", to use a nice word I've just made up, 584 00:39:15,600 --> 00:39:20,400 they're very bony. This isn't a nice feast, this isn't a nice meal. 585 00:39:20,400 --> 00:39:25,400 This is actually almost like a cannibal feast. 586 00:39:25,400 --> 00:39:28,640 It's just hammering home the point. 587 00:39:28,640 --> 00:39:31,600 Visual satire is done with a pen or an engraving tool, 588 00:39:31,600 --> 00:39:34,440 but it's actually thought up with a sledgehammer. 589 00:39:34,440 --> 00:39:38,040 Even underneath the Prince of Wales' feathers in the back, 590 00:39:38,040 --> 00:39:41,800 his coat of arms, is a knife and fork crossed over because he's just a pig. 591 00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:44,680 "He's just a greedy bastard pig and look at him!" 592 00:39:44,680 --> 00:39:47,760 BURP! 593 00:39:53,360 --> 00:39:57,720 Living close to Gillray in the West End of London, but a world apart 594 00:39:57,720 --> 00:40:02,120 in the ambition of HIS rude art, was Thomas Rowlandson. 595 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:14,880 You wouldn't want to be on a desert island with Gillray, 596 00:40:14,880 --> 00:40:16,400 but you might want to be 597 00:40:16,400 --> 00:40:20,720 with Rowlandson, because he's a man who's deeply life-affirming 598 00:40:20,720 --> 00:40:22,880 and amused by the world. 599 00:40:22,880 --> 00:40:25,840 He never takes himself seriously. 600 00:40:25,840 --> 00:40:28,720 He has warmth, he has humour. 601 00:40:28,720 --> 00:40:32,920 He's the first humorous artist, I think, that we encounter 602 00:40:32,920 --> 00:40:35,880 in the big scheme of things in English art. 603 00:40:40,360 --> 00:40:44,680 In his prints, Rowlandson captured the confusion and chaos 604 00:40:44,680 --> 00:40:49,360 on the streets of London, just as Hogarth had done 60 years earlier. 605 00:40:49,360 --> 00:40:51,200 He's not a political animal. 606 00:40:51,200 --> 00:40:55,240 He comments on manners. He comments on the manners, increasingly, 607 00:40:55,240 --> 00:40:57,720 of ordinary people in the street. 608 00:40:57,720 --> 00:41:02,360 There's a lightness about him and a brilliant capacity to draw. 609 00:41:04,120 --> 00:41:09,600 But Rowlandson, unlike Hogarth, had no desire or need to moralise. 610 00:41:09,600 --> 00:41:14,040 He just wanted to celebrate the rude delights to be had from life. 611 00:41:18,520 --> 00:41:21,400 Rowlandson liked a drink, 612 00:41:21,400 --> 00:41:26,440 so he depicts a scene of drunken debauchery in all its rowdy excess. 613 00:41:29,320 --> 00:41:31,360 Rowlandson was a gambler, 614 00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:35,760 so he vividly captures the drama and excitement of the table. 615 00:41:38,040 --> 00:41:41,960 And Rowlandson celebrates the pleasures of the flesh, 616 00:41:41,960 --> 00:41:44,840 so in "Rural Felicity, Or Love In A Chaise", 617 00:41:44,840 --> 00:41:47,680 he brings to life the joy of al-fresco sex, 618 00:41:47,680 --> 00:41:49,640 and attached a rude ditty. 619 00:41:50,640 --> 00:41:53,680 "The kneeling youth his vigour tries 620 00:41:53,680 --> 00:41:56,120 "While o'er his back she lifts her thighs 621 00:41:56,120 --> 00:41:58,720 "The trotting horse the bliss increases 622 00:41:58,720 --> 00:42:01,320 "And all is shoving love and kisses..." 623 00:42:02,480 --> 00:42:06,680 It's not guilty, it's completely open about sex and sensuality, 624 00:42:06,680 --> 00:42:08,400 that's what I like about it. 625 00:42:08,400 --> 00:42:11,960 And they're having a good time, and the horse is having a good time too! 626 00:42:13,920 --> 00:42:17,040 I love the way the horse is kind of echoing the sensuality 627 00:42:17,040 --> 00:42:19,800 of her thighs and his arse and the rest of it. 628 00:42:19,800 --> 00:42:24,160 It's a splendid blending, I love that kind of visual punning. 629 00:42:24,160 --> 00:42:26,520 "..What couple would not take the air 630 00:42:26,520 --> 00:42:29,080 "To taste such joys beyond compare?" 631 00:42:32,000 --> 00:42:36,480 She really does look quite in control, brandishing her whip, 632 00:42:36,480 --> 00:42:39,360 and it's such a smart little chaise with its red wheels, 633 00:42:39,360 --> 00:42:41,880 that, actually, it's quite an enjoyable picture. 634 00:42:41,880 --> 00:42:44,680 Look at her feet. She just crossed her legs, 635 00:42:44,680 --> 00:42:48,560 it's what she does every day with her wonderful little shoes. 636 00:42:48,560 --> 00:42:50,760 I'm sorry, I expect I should be shocked 637 00:42:50,760 --> 00:42:52,440 but I do think it's quite fun. 638 00:42:55,760 --> 00:43:00,040 In 1811, following the final madness of George III... 639 00:43:01,840 --> 00:43:06,560 ..the much-ridiculed Prince of Wales became Prince Regent. 640 00:43:06,560 --> 00:43:10,000 Now the mood of Rude Britannia darkened. 641 00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:15,320 For a decade, the dandy Regent presided over a country in crisis 642 00:43:15,320 --> 00:43:18,360 after victory in the Napoleonic Wars. 643 00:43:18,360 --> 00:43:20,040 The Regency period 644 00:43:20,040 --> 00:43:23,200 is a moment of terrific turbulence. 645 00:43:23,200 --> 00:43:25,720 There's enormous unemployment. 646 00:43:25,720 --> 00:43:28,320 Prices are very high. 647 00:43:28,320 --> 00:43:32,600 There's unrest in many provincial cities. 648 00:43:32,600 --> 00:43:38,720 There's a sense that the war has been won, but that peace is being lost. 649 00:43:43,280 --> 00:43:48,280 In London, away from the West End, further east in the city, 650 00:43:48,280 --> 00:43:53,760 radical publishers were turning rude culture into a protest movement. 651 00:43:53,760 --> 00:43:58,560 They commissioned prints that pushed a defiant agenda of political reform 652 00:43:58,560 --> 00:44:03,280 and social justice that challenged the Regent and his Ministers. 653 00:44:03,280 --> 00:44:08,920 The biggest talent these publishers worked with was George Cruikshank. 654 00:44:09,920 --> 00:44:13,960 He came from a caricaturing family, a family of printmakers. 655 00:44:13,960 --> 00:44:17,800 From a very young man, he was quite clearly in that tradition 656 00:44:17,800 --> 00:44:23,200 of extreme political rudeness, of taking no prisoners, 657 00:44:23,200 --> 00:44:26,240 of racking it up, and racking it up again. 658 00:44:28,080 --> 00:44:32,040 Despite his increased power as Regent, Cruikshank continued 659 00:44:32,040 --> 00:44:35,760 the vilification of George begun by Gillray. 660 00:44:35,760 --> 00:44:39,760 Study the detail of a Cruikshank print from 1812, 661 00:44:39,760 --> 00:44:42,760 "Merry-Making On The Regent's Birthday", 662 00:44:42,760 --> 00:44:46,360 and appreciate its satirical bite, its anger. 663 00:44:50,400 --> 00:44:55,800 On the left is Lord Hertford with two devils with French horns 664 00:44:55,800 --> 00:45:00,440 pointing above his skull, indicating his being cuckolded by his wife, 665 00:45:00,440 --> 00:45:04,480 Lady Hertford, who's dancing - with her bulbous breasts - 666 00:45:04,480 --> 00:45:08,280 with the Prince Regent in the centre of the picture. 667 00:45:11,160 --> 00:45:14,880 Lord Hertford, you notice, is reading a long scroll. 668 00:45:14,880 --> 00:45:19,720 "Two men hanged at Newgate," it says. 669 00:45:19,720 --> 00:45:23,760 The point of the joke is that here these two men are being hanged - 670 00:45:23,760 --> 00:45:27,120 and of course you can see them on the right hand of the picture - 671 00:45:27,120 --> 00:45:32,040 thanks to the Prince's indifference to their fate. 672 00:45:32,040 --> 00:45:35,920 Their fate, however, is something he is fully aware of, 673 00:45:35,920 --> 00:45:40,560 because his dancing foot rests on the petition that's for mercy, 674 00:45:40,560 --> 00:45:43,120 that has come from the wife and children, 675 00:45:43,120 --> 00:45:45,280 the two starving children, 676 00:45:45,280 --> 00:45:48,200 who you can see weeping at the foot of the scaffold 677 00:45:48,200 --> 00:45:49,840 on the right-hand side. 678 00:45:51,840 --> 00:45:54,480 So, there's a lot going on here. There's adultery. 679 00:45:54,480 --> 00:45:57,400 The man's adultery is being registered. 680 00:45:57,400 --> 00:46:00,520 The man's indifference to the plight of the poor. 681 00:46:00,520 --> 00:46:05,400 The absurdity of an aristocracy 682 00:46:05,400 --> 00:46:08,440 that can deal with adultery of this kind, 683 00:46:08,440 --> 00:46:11,600 and their own cuckolding, 684 00:46:11,600 --> 00:46:17,080 and the state of the nation, a nation in which hunger is sweeping 685 00:46:17,080 --> 00:46:21,240 the people and in which, none the less, the law has no mercy. 686 00:46:28,160 --> 00:46:32,840 The last year of the Regency, 1819, was momentous. 687 00:46:34,360 --> 00:46:37,040 Cruikshank drew instant images of outrage 688 00:46:37,040 --> 00:46:40,040 following the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. 689 00:46:40,040 --> 00:46:43,160 Here, cavalry had charged into protesters 690 00:46:43,160 --> 00:46:48,960 agitating for parliamentary reform, killing 15 and injuring hundreds. 691 00:46:57,080 --> 00:47:01,800 1819 also saw protest from an aristocrat - a radical, too - 692 00:47:01,800 --> 00:47:04,640 who supported political change, 693 00:47:04,640 --> 00:47:09,240 spoke for the oppressed, a poet with the rudest reputation 694 00:47:09,240 --> 00:47:13,640 in Regency Britain - the devilish Lord Byron. 695 00:47:14,640 --> 00:47:18,200 He's famous for his multiple affairs 696 00:47:18,200 --> 00:47:21,200 with men, women, choirboys, sisters... 697 00:47:21,200 --> 00:47:24,320 you name it, he's done it with them. 698 00:47:24,320 --> 00:47:28,920 You know, he was notorious as a libertine in his time. 699 00:47:30,440 --> 00:47:35,840 From exile in Italy, Byron had been writing a long poem, Don Juan, 700 00:47:35,840 --> 00:47:40,360 to rudely, with plain speaking, expose what he saw 701 00:47:40,360 --> 00:47:43,520 as the many lies and hypocrisies of his age. 702 00:47:43,520 --> 00:47:45,960 It's a poem written right at the end 703 00:47:45,960 --> 00:47:52,160 of Byron's career, where this former darling of the London literati 704 00:47:52,160 --> 00:47:54,200 and of London high society, 705 00:47:54,200 --> 00:48:00,600 who's had to leave London because of scandals in his own private life, 706 00:48:00,600 --> 00:48:06,800 looks back at the place he comes from and addresses its moral hypocrisy, 707 00:48:06,800 --> 00:48:08,840 its double standards, 708 00:48:08,840 --> 00:48:15,400 its prudishness, and above all - this word he used a great deal - its cant. 709 00:48:16,400 --> 00:48:18,880 His targets are poets, 710 00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:23,720 politicians, warmongers, women, 711 00:48:23,720 --> 00:48:27,040 the Church, especially the evangelical Church... 712 00:48:27,040 --> 00:48:29,320 The list is almost endless. 713 00:48:29,320 --> 00:48:32,600 It's a poem which is designed to offend almost everyone. 714 00:48:34,160 --> 00:48:37,760 Byron's use of the character Don Juan was deliberate. 715 00:48:37,760 --> 00:48:40,480 The fictional Don, like his creator, 716 00:48:40,480 --> 00:48:43,560 was a legendary rogue and philanderer. 717 00:48:43,560 --> 00:48:46,840 So to have the Don as the protagonist of his satire, 718 00:48:46,840 --> 00:48:50,080 the rude lord was provoking the moralists 719 00:48:50,080 --> 00:48:52,920 from the very first lines of the poem. 720 00:48:52,920 --> 00:48:55,840 "I want a hero: an uncommon want 721 00:48:55,840 --> 00:49:00,000 "When every year and month sends forth a new one 722 00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:03,560 "Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant 723 00:49:03,560 --> 00:49:07,680 "The age discovers he is not the true one... " 724 00:49:08,840 --> 00:49:12,040 In Don Juan, Byron does name names. 725 00:49:12,040 --> 00:49:14,880 He lambasts Wellington, the bloody militarist, 726 00:49:14,880 --> 00:49:17,720 Southey, the turncoat Tory poet laureate. 727 00:49:17,720 --> 00:49:20,960 And he doesn't flinch from the libellous and the blasphemous. 728 00:49:20,960 --> 00:49:24,840 But the tone Bryon adopted for his satire was playful. 729 00:49:24,840 --> 00:49:27,960 He knows that when people look at his writing, they're going 730 00:49:27,960 --> 00:49:31,600 to be looking for rude bits, because of his reputation as a libertine. 731 00:49:31,600 --> 00:49:35,000 In fact, what's so wonderful about the poem is the elegant, 732 00:49:35,000 --> 00:49:38,560 skilful way in which he bypasses ever being explicit. 733 00:49:38,560 --> 00:49:42,280 That he's subtle, that he's... a tease, 734 00:49:42,280 --> 00:49:45,760 and that he forces the reader to come up with the goods themselves. 735 00:49:45,760 --> 00:49:48,080 He doesn't give it to us on a plate. 736 00:49:48,080 --> 00:49:51,000 "But now I'm going to be immoral 737 00:49:51,000 --> 00:49:54,840 "Now I mean to show things really as they are 738 00:49:54,840 --> 00:49:57,360 "Not as they ought to be 739 00:49:57,360 --> 00:50:01,240 "For I avow that till we see what's what in fact 740 00:50:01,240 --> 00:50:05,280 "We're far from much improvement with that virtuous plough 741 00:50:05,280 --> 00:50:08,480 "Which skims the surface, leaving scarce a scar 742 00:50:08,480 --> 00:50:12,400 "Upon the black loam long manured by vice 743 00:50:12,400 --> 00:50:16,120 "Only to keep its corn at the old price." 744 00:50:18,200 --> 00:50:22,040 Publication of Don Juan in the fractious year of Peterloo 745 00:50:22,040 --> 00:50:24,080 was a rude bombshell. 746 00:50:24,080 --> 00:50:28,280 You have to remember that Don Juan when it was published, it was more than a book. 747 00:50:28,280 --> 00:50:30,000 It wasn't a book, it was an event. 748 00:50:30,000 --> 00:50:34,680 It was this kind of force of nature and it had everybody up in arms. 749 00:50:34,680 --> 00:50:38,160 Not to put too fine a point on it, it created a shit-storm, 750 00:50:38,160 --> 00:50:40,080 it really did, in 1819. 751 00:50:40,080 --> 00:50:42,960 The publisher of Don Juan, John Murray, 752 00:50:42,960 --> 00:50:46,720 was fearful of the scandal the poem would create. 753 00:50:46,720 --> 00:50:51,200 So not only his name, but Byron's, were missing from first editions, 754 00:50:51,200 --> 00:50:53,800 and they cost over 30 shillings, 755 00:50:53,800 --> 00:50:57,280 a month's wages for most working people. 756 00:50:57,280 --> 00:51:00,920 The point being that nobody could accuse them of trying to corrupt 757 00:51:00,920 --> 00:51:03,200 the morals of the lower classes. 758 00:51:03,200 --> 00:51:06,400 So it comes out, it hasn't really got a publisher's name on it, 759 00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:10,600 all of that's been fudged, so of course it gets pirated straightaway 760 00:51:10,600 --> 00:51:15,080 and everybody gets to have a peep at it, so it just grows and grows. 761 00:51:23,240 --> 00:51:27,640 The many pirated editions with their rude illustrations made Don Juan 762 00:51:27,640 --> 00:51:32,000 affordable and available to less well-heeled readers, 763 00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:34,920 eager to devour this notorious book. 764 00:51:34,920 --> 00:51:38,520 Much to the dismay of Byron's enemies, the poem now had 765 00:51:38,520 --> 00:51:42,960 an unheard-of readership, thought to be over 500,000. 766 00:52:00,960 --> 00:52:04,960 In 1820, the Prince Regent finally became king. 767 00:52:04,960 --> 00:52:07,480 His coronation in Westminster Abbey 768 00:52:07,480 --> 00:52:10,280 was the most lavish ever seen in London. 769 00:52:10,280 --> 00:52:13,880 Thousands of diamonds adorned his crown. 770 00:52:13,880 --> 00:52:17,560 Faced with this continued excess and the contempt it showed 771 00:52:17,560 --> 00:52:23,160 for the people, Cruikshank just carried on mocking his old enemy. 772 00:52:23,160 --> 00:52:28,200 He depicted the new George IV in drag, receiving his subjects 773 00:52:28,200 --> 00:52:32,800 whilst his latest mistress, the amply-proportioned Lady Coningham, 774 00:52:32,800 --> 00:52:35,960 wisely protected the nation's cash. 775 00:52:38,080 --> 00:52:40,440 Confronted by this ridicule, 776 00:52:40,440 --> 00:52:44,160 George decided to buy off his biggest critic. 777 00:52:46,320 --> 00:52:51,840 Cruikshank, and his brother, both get £100 in June 1820, 778 00:52:51,840 --> 00:52:56,200 and the agreement still survives, and the wording 779 00:52:56,200 --> 00:53:03,800 is not to portray His Majesty in any immoral situation whatsoever. 780 00:53:03,800 --> 00:53:08,000 Which meant that there was to be no more jokes 781 00:53:08,000 --> 00:53:14,000 at the expense of his mistresses, his flirtations, his indulgences. 782 00:53:14,000 --> 00:53:17,720 And that pretty well silenced George Cruikshank. 783 00:53:17,720 --> 00:53:21,920 Which, of course, makes one wonder about just how radical he was, 784 00:53:21,920 --> 00:53:25,080 really, that he could be so easily bought off. 785 00:53:25,080 --> 00:53:27,600 CASH REGISTER RINGS 786 00:53:28,640 --> 00:53:31,160 Meanwhile, between 1820 and 1823, 787 00:53:31,160 --> 00:53:35,160 Byron had been completing further books of Don Juan. 788 00:53:35,160 --> 00:53:37,640 But continued hostile reception to the poem 789 00:53:37,640 --> 00:53:39,640 convinced him that the game was up. 790 00:53:39,640 --> 00:53:42,400 Prudes were gaining the upper hand. 791 00:53:42,400 --> 00:53:44,360 He wrote to a friend. 792 00:53:44,360 --> 00:53:47,960 "I have written about 100 stanzas of a third canto, 793 00:53:47,960 --> 00:53:49,800 "but it is damned modest. 794 00:53:49,800 --> 00:53:51,800 "The outcry has frightened me. 795 00:53:51,800 --> 00:53:53,920 "I had such projects for the Don 796 00:53:53,920 --> 00:53:57,800 "but the cant is so much stronger than the cunt nowadays 797 00:53:57,800 --> 00:54:01,640 "that the benefit of experience in a man who had weighed the worth 798 00:54:01,640 --> 00:54:05,680 "of both syllables must be lost to despairing posterity." 799 00:54:08,040 --> 00:54:13,120 Then, in 1824, Byron died in Greece. 800 00:54:14,640 --> 00:54:18,800 His body was brought back up the Thames for a lying-in-state 801 00:54:18,800 --> 00:54:22,560 at 20 Great George Street, Westminster. 802 00:54:22,560 --> 00:54:25,760 Byron was refused burial in the Abbey across the road, 803 00:54:25,760 --> 00:54:28,840 despite this being the tradition for great writers. 804 00:54:32,400 --> 00:54:37,400 Crowds lined Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road to show respect 805 00:54:37,400 --> 00:54:43,200 for the people's poet as his funeral cortege made its way out of London. 806 00:54:51,720 --> 00:54:57,200 When Byron died he was a great hero for common people, ordinary people. 807 00:54:57,200 --> 00:55:00,200 But he was still reviled by his own, if you like, 808 00:55:00,200 --> 00:55:02,560 the aristocracy from which he came. 809 00:55:02,560 --> 00:55:06,000 So his funeral cortege passed through the streets of London, 810 00:55:06,000 --> 00:55:10,680 and London was packed with ordinary, common people who had gone to mourn 811 00:55:10,680 --> 00:55:13,000 the loss of their hero, Lord Byron. 812 00:55:15,120 --> 00:55:20,640 People at the time saw it as the end of their 1960s, or something. 813 00:55:20,640 --> 00:55:22,800 That was what it was like. 814 00:55:22,800 --> 00:55:29,040 He was a celebrity as well as a great writer, and it was almost as if 815 00:55:29,040 --> 00:55:36,080 that funeral represented to people, almost immediately, some sense that 816 00:55:36,080 --> 00:55:39,440 he was the product of a bygone age. 817 00:55:44,720 --> 00:55:47,640 By the time Byron was dead and buried, 818 00:55:47,640 --> 00:55:51,840 it was clear that Rude Britannia was now under threat. 819 00:55:54,760 --> 00:55:59,360 One satirical print from 1829, "The March Of Morality", 820 00:55:59,360 --> 00:56:01,560 reflected a taming of the rude 821 00:56:01,560 --> 00:56:04,760 that came with greater political stability 822 00:56:04,760 --> 00:56:08,360 and the influence of evangelical Christianity. 823 00:56:08,360 --> 00:56:13,400 Here, bare-breasted and red-faced do-gooders try to prevent passers-by 824 00:56:13,400 --> 00:56:16,600 enjoying the delights of the print shop window. 825 00:56:18,120 --> 00:56:22,240 Across the street is the Religious Tract Society. 826 00:56:22,240 --> 00:56:26,160 And look, that C word again - cant. 827 00:56:30,640 --> 00:56:34,960 Now, with the end of the Georgian age, the very map of London 828 00:56:34,960 --> 00:56:37,400 was changing to physically reflect 829 00:56:37,400 --> 00:56:40,600 the attempt to clean up and sanitise Rude Britannia. 830 00:56:42,120 --> 00:56:46,760 Regent Street has been put up from Piccadilly Circus to Regent's Park 831 00:56:46,760 --> 00:56:49,040 to separate the plebeian culture 832 00:56:49,040 --> 00:56:51,960 from the West End, which was aristocratic and gentry. 833 00:56:51,960 --> 00:56:55,800 It's ordered, more street order has been achieved. 834 00:56:55,800 --> 00:56:59,240 Bridges are being built, streets are being widened and so forth. 835 00:56:59,240 --> 00:57:02,040 So that by the 1830s, London has 836 00:57:02,040 --> 00:57:05,920 what is called a feeling of circulation about it. 837 00:57:05,920 --> 00:57:08,480 It's got the postures and the architectures 838 00:57:08,480 --> 00:57:11,000 and the big streets of the fine city. 839 00:57:18,760 --> 00:57:22,680 The modernised city was a bricks-and-mortar threat 840 00:57:22,680 --> 00:57:25,360 to the old rude culture. 841 00:57:25,360 --> 00:57:28,040 You get a general rebuilding of London 842 00:57:28,040 --> 00:57:31,960 into a great imperial city, certainly, but one without 843 00:57:31,960 --> 00:57:35,200 the spaces for the ballad singers, for the bawdry, 844 00:57:35,200 --> 00:57:39,000 for the print shops, for the chaos of the previous century. 845 00:57:51,720 --> 00:57:57,600 In 1837, Victoria became Queen and the Georgian era ended. 846 00:57:58,600 --> 00:58:02,880 Victorians looked back at the recent past with horror and distaste. 847 00:58:02,880 --> 00:58:04,840 Disgusting! 848 00:58:04,840 --> 00:58:09,080 They were not amused by the satirical and bawdy humour 849 00:58:09,080 --> 00:58:11,600 of their rude forebears. 850 00:58:11,600 --> 00:58:14,040 So, next time on Rude Britannia, 851 00:58:14,040 --> 00:58:16,880 could a naughty nation survive Victorian values? 852 00:58:16,880 --> 00:58:19,880 # Come into the garden... 853 00:58:19,880 --> 00:58:22,800 Oh, most certainly it could! 854 00:58:22,800 --> 00:58:28,320 # ..I'm here by the gate alone... # 855 00:58:28,320 --> 00:58:30,360 APPLAUSE AND CHEERS 856 00:58:40,800 --> 00:58:43,920 Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd. 857 00:58:43,920 --> 00:58:47,040 E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk