This programme contains very strong language and some scenes of a sexual nature.
In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, respectable Victorians
looked forward to living in a moral and upstanding nation.
But to their dismay, there would always be a different,
ruder country.
In Rude Britannia, life was celebrated in music halls,
with bawdy humour...
and lewd songs.
Outrageous! Stop it right now!
In Rude Britannia, new technologies created mass-produced offence.
The shock of the rude nude photograph.
The comic, whose boozy satirical star stuck
two fingers up to polite society.
No more of this filth!
And in Rude Britannia, you could enjoy
the cheeky carnival of the seaside,
a place of saucy peepshows...
..and smutty picture postcards.
Stick of rock, cock?
For over 100 years, a war waged.
On the one side, a naughty nation. On the other,
a country of Victorian values, now claimed in the Queen's name.
With battle lines drawn,
who would win?
Rude Britannia presents bawdy songs, lewd photos
and the most hand-wringing moral melodramas of Victorian values.
Already, by the first years of Victoria's reign, Britain was
experiencing extraordinary change created by industrial revolution.
Thousands were pouring into cities in search of work.
Manchester grows to 300,000 people, Liverpool up to 260,000 people.
This is a new civilisation which the world hadn't seen before.
In these cities, a new urban working class was born.
And wherever they could, they created their own rude culture
of pleasure, revelry...
and escape.
What you really get is so many people living in
and enclosed area and entertainment springing all around you.
So you got entertainment in the pub, you got entertainment in
the brothels, you got entertainment on the fair.
And it was everywhere, and anyone could do it.
Rough-and-ready places for drink and song, called penny gaffs,
exploded in numbers on the meanest of street corners.
# Oh, me name it is Sam Hall Chimney sweep, chimney sweep
# Oh, me name it is
# Sam Hall, chimney sweep. #
Enterprising people, not necessarily
with a theatrical background, would take any vacant space in which
a rough stage could be put up and they would charge people
a penny to come in and see it.
Into these places would be crowded all the street people from the
surrounding area, particularly the young, particularly young men.
There'd be drinking in these places, there'd be a lot of bawdy talk.
There would probably be sexual suggestiveness,
maybe some sexual activity.
In the penny gaffs, a rowdy crowd
drank, laughed at lewd banter and sang along to rude, bawdy songs.
# Oh, the parson he did come And he looked so fucking glum
# And he talked to kingdom come Damn his eyes, damn his eyes
# He can kiss my bleeding bum Damn his eyes. #
The working-class young
were wage-earning from a very early age, certainly by the early teens.
They had, if you like, a certain disposable income and they feature
largely in the audience, often up in the balcony or the gallery,
often noisy etc.
Rude, common people were a threat to another class
that also jostled for space and influence in the Victorian city.
The middle class
had a fierce belief in themselves as the guardians of public morality.
The middle classes were rational, they were intelligent.
They went to work on time and they looked after
their families and they were dignified.
And they were the backbone of the Victorian, mid-Victorian,
moral culture in Britain.
These were people who believed they were distinct
from the working class, who were drunken and dissolute and bestial.
They were clearly distinct from the upper class, who were interested in
fox-hunting and drinking and equally bestial pursuits.
When middle-class commentators steeled themselves to visit the
penny gaffs, they were appalled.
There can be no question that these places are
no better than so many nurseries for juvenile thieves, the little rascals.
The one cheers on the other in crime.
Plans for thieving and robbing houses and shops
are formed and promptly executed.
Despite such disapproval and censure, the new rude culture
of the cities went defiantly from strength to strength.
You couldn't licence it, you couldn't control it.
It was on the edge of anarchy.
And that was an anxiety, I think, that the middle classes had about
the working classes.
For much of the 19th century it was, "What can we do to control them?
"We don't want them going too far.
"We must keep them under control."
By the 1850s, the back-room bawdiness of the penny gaffs
had evolved into the more recognisable form of the music hall.
This world of song and dance was becoming the rude entertainment
that would dominate the Victorian city for the rest of the century.
The music hall comes from very humble origins.
Essentially, the music hall begins with rooms set aside in pubs
for people to have a bit of a sing-song round the piano.
But gradually those back rooms begin to, in a way, displace the pubs.
You can see this, actually, in some of the surviving
architectural examples.
The Wilton's Music Hall in the East End of London is this small building
that was the pub, with this giant hall appended to the back of it.
From the mid-Victorian era, music halls were being built
in every major city in Britain.
From the beginning, rude, chaotic places.
But unlike the penny gaffs,
the music hall became a place of rudeness for both rich and poor.
Here, aristocratic swells would slum it with the lower orders.
This alliance of toffs and proles in shared love of a racy night out
was a serious threat to Victorian values.
As you may suppose When you look at my clothes...
I think it would surprise us,
because it wasn't the serried ranks of fixed seating facing the front.
The crowd in the halls at this time were mixed, mobile and preoccupied
with their own presence.
They often sat at tables at right angles to the stage.
There was a lot that was going on in the auditorium.
There was drinking, eating, conversing, socialising, flirting.
In fact, it was a great hubbub.
And also there was the haze of tobacco smoke,
which meant that performers had to be bold and assertive. They had to
cut through this noise and the smoke even to make themselves heard.
So the early performers, their style was really a mix
of singing and shouting.
Crowds filled the early music hall
to hear saucy songs which celebrated the rude delights of bed and bottle.
And on stage, rude stars were created, none cheekier than
George Leybourne and his alter ego, Champagne Charlie.
# I've seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life
# With all my grand accomplishments I ne'er could get a wife... #
Charlie's whole act was a rude provocation.
Leybourne was noted for the majestic sweep of his hand play.
He postured and strutted.
It was almost homo erectus, almost a walking kind of phallus.
# From coffee and from supper rooms From Poplar to Pall Mall
# The gals, on seeing me, exclaim, "Oh, what a champagne swell!" #
He's a good-time chap.
He's got his eye open for the pretty girl.
It's a bit sexy, it's a bit naughty.
His songs were about the drink culture.
# From Dukes and Lords
# To cab men down, I make them drink champagne
# For Champagne Charlie is my name
# Champagne Charlie is my name... #
Champagne was the fashionable drink of the day.
It had come down in price.
Leybourne exemplified, embodied, this new relish for champagne.
He was provided with money from the champagne shippers
to live the life of the swell off stage as well as on stage.
Charlie's boozing was an affront to the aims
of the Victorian temperance movement
that saw the demon drink destroying the health and morals of the nation.
This darker side to life in the cities was also revealed in songs
that acknowledged a world of
prostitution, where the upper class took their pleasure with the poor.
# The thing I most excel in is the PRFG game... #
What did PRFG mean?
It took me years to find this out.
It meant Private Rooms For Gentlemen,
a reference to these premises that were available to men
who could take prostitutes there or other women for their assignations.
# Yes, Champagne Charlie is my name. #
Flirting with taboo areas
of Victorian life was one of the great attractions of music hall.
And it was this prodding of sensitivities
that allowed another rude performer to become a hit with audiences.
Lydia Thompson was a star of Victorian burlesque,
a style of popular theatre that used cross-dressing to
subvert conventional gender roles.
In Lydia's rude world, girls dressed up as boys.
Lydia Thompson is probably one of the foremost figures in the
history of burlesque itself.
Lydia Thompson very much
has earned her crown as one of the great queens of burlesque.
Lydia's early career, she was most famous at this point
for her sailor-boy dance where she danced a sailor's hornpipe.
Naturally, this meant that she was wearing trousers.
And this meant that everyone could have a good look at her legs.
Of course, it was celebrated as a terpsichorean delight.
But, you know, the audience knew better.
Lydia's performance was a satirical dance of mockery.
Every move and gesture poked fun at the Victorian male.
Outrageous!
Burlesque actually means "humiliation of the male
"form through the female form", so we use the female form in terms
of entertainment and nudity to humiliate the man.
It is very much suggestive, it is very much funny, and
it's almost, well, I suppose, what we call taking the piss out of.
It is that form of entertainment.
The way they would walk, would stand and pose,
perhaps a knowing look, a slow wink, maybe choosing an audience member
and giving them a long, hard stare.
These would be typically masculine, these would be
a strut, perhaps a cocky walk.
But of course, it was all about the shapely legs, the breeches,
the tights, the ankles.
And, of course, over time the breeches got shorter and the costumes
became increasingly exiguous.
Lydia's gender bending provoked a chorus of disapproval.
She is neither male nor female, an alien sex parodying both.
Music hall had roots in a tradition
of bawdy humour and song that went back centuries.
But in the first decades of the Victorian age, a revolutionary
medium arrived, a new technology to further undermine Victorian values.
At first, it seemed photography would be a reputable art to
capture those innocent moments of daily life.
But pretty soon, in studios all over Britain,
the clothes were coming off.
Respectable Britain was most certainly not amused
by all this nudity.
The moral campaigners of the mid-19th century were outraged.
Here was something completely new and very, very disturbing.
But in the upper reaches
of Victorian society, there was soon a taste for photographic rudeness.
Edward Linley Sambourne
was a cartoonist for Punch, house journal of the respectable classes.
In the pages of Punch, there was never the rude satirical cartooning
of the previous Georgian era.
Punch is a safe form of political criticism...
illustrated criticise politicians,
You can criticise politicians, but you mustn't undermine politics.
You can criticise the Queen, but you don't undermine the monarchy.
But when he wasn't creating safe,
comforting humour, Sambourne was being a very naughty boy.
Linley Sambourne had a hobby that rather dominated his life, really.
When his wife and two children were away, he would have models
in his studio, and he would photograph them in the nude.
You can gauge how he felt about what he was doing by the fact that
if you look at his diaries, he's always doing this when
his wife is away in Ramsgate.
Sambourne first had models
pose for him when he was looking for inspiration for his Punch cartoons.
It seems to be almost like a slow-motion striptease, where he
starts off posing models very much in line with the kind of pictures
he was going to produce, and then there's a clear divergence as the
photos he's taking bear no relation to pictures that he's producing.
Sambourne's rude pictures were circulated amongst
a small group of like-minded men.
His private vice was tolerated,
provided it stayed within a gentlemen's club of friends.
But for Victorians, more public displays of photographed nudity
were another matter entirely.
I think there was a degree of aversion to this kind of nudity.
One could have nudity when you are depicting historical moments, when
you are depicting the age of Rome and the age of Greece and these former
eras of decadence, and even then, it had to be done carefully.
To have modern nudity was an altogether more challenging idea.
In 1857, Dutch artist
Bosco Rejlander became involved in this debate when he used nude models
in his photographic tableau The Two Ways Of Life.
Oscar Rejlander's photograph
The Two Ways Of Life was exhibited at the Manchester
Art Treasures exhibition in 1857. It was actually quite a complex image.
It wasn't a single negative, a single image, it was actually
a composite of nearly 30 different images that he put together.
He wanted to create a high-art photograph.
High art or not, this picture posed problems for Victorian
guardians of taste and decency.
Because it included a number of unclothed female figures, a number
of critics felt this was actually an inappropriate subject matter,
therefore the image itself was vulgar.
Now, in an extraordinary twist, the Queen herself endorsed the picture.
Victoria was no prude.
Her marriage to Prince Albert was intensely sexual, so when she saw
The Two Ways Of Life, she bought it, the perfect present for her husband.
Danke, mein Lieben!
But photography could never be an exclusive medium
just for the upper-class elite.
It was much more democratic, and that made it a threat.
A single negative could create thousands of positive images.
These could be sold cheaply.
Rude photographs became affordable and available, and selling them was
a furtive but lucrative business.
There were certain places that you went.
There would be tip-offs, there would be people who would have
new stocks arriving from Paris,
and if you were part of one of those networks, you would know where to go.
The place to go for all this rudeness in London, a hundred years
before the heyday of Soho, was Holywell Street, near the Strand.
This was described in a letter to the Times in 1857 as "The most
"evil street in the civilised world."
You walked down Holywell Street, you would see bookshop after bookshop
after bookshop, all of which had prints, photographs...images
to buy that would have been kind of pornographical,
semi-pornographic.
Anybody could walk down this street,
be confronted, even if they hadn't asked for them specially, confronted
with these images up on display in the windows or inside the shop.
Nervousness became moral panic
when rude photography went from titillating
to hardcore.
In 1857, politicians decided to act.
Parliament passed an Obscene Publications Act
to stop these dangerous images ever getting into the wrong hands.
The key element in understanding debates about obscenity
in the Victorian period is that they're really debates about
who looks at images, rather than the images themselves.
The two groups who are seen to be most vulnerable to these influences
are young working-class men, who might, by the 1860s,
have an income that would allow them to buy these kinds of images,
and, more particularly, women of all classes, who are simply believed
to be inappropriate as an audience for any kind of sexualised imagery.
But it wasn't only the rude threat of mass-produced photographs that
was causing concern.
Into the second half of the 19th century, a new urban and industrial
culture of work was in turn creating a popular culture of leisure.
Increasing incomes and levels of literacy meant new demand
for reading matter of all kinds.
New print technology created a mass media of cheap newspapers.
And to the dismay of moral reformers,
common people showed a liking for papers filled with sex and crime.
These people were absolutely outraged to find that what the working class
did with their education was to read things like the
Illustrated Police News and to read all sorts of material which was
anything but elevated.
Oh, my God!
The rude weeklies were a combination
of words and pictures that shocked and entertained in equal measure.
Looking at "Awful cruelty to an idiot boy."
There's no justification for
that story at all, however, showing a kid being thrown onto the fire by
ungracious parents!
Oh, Mama, why?
By the time you get to the Ripper murders,
they'd had no access to the photos, so they speculated on images.
They just made stuff up that provided probably the best images.
"We'll just make it up. Who knows? The police don't care. No-one cares.
"It's a big story."
One article in the upmarket Pall Mall Gazette of 1870 condemned
this most vulgar journalism.
Illustrated Police News is a hideous production.
They move the heart with murder,
inflame it with arson, tickle it with intrigue.
Another cheap publication with the same kind of appeal to working-class
readers was the comic.
And one of the first comics to
appear had rude cheeky chappy Ally Sloper as its cover star.
"Most Frequently Kicked Out Man In Europe."
Ally Sloper's Half Holiday
was first published in 1884 and was soon selling 350,000 copies a week.
He was a con man, he was a drunkard,
degenerate in many ways, and his name, of course, came from
his tendency to slope down the alley to avoid the rent collector.
He glorified in drink and sex.
He always had a bottle of gin protruding from his coat pocket.
Sometimes he went on the wagon, protested his horror of drink.
In that way, he echoed some of the
language of the reformers and also parodied them.
The guy's slightly dressed
anachronistically - his clothes and that weird stovepipe hat he wore.
He had a gin-blossom nose, so you knew he was a heavy drinker.
He's fascinating. Ally Sloper's...
hat is Dickensian.
It's almost like a kind of crumpled Regency hat.
He's goat-ish, and the most obvious demonstration
of this is this huge, ravaged nose, which is quite plainly phallic.
Phallic imagery and symbolism is everywhere in music-hall rude
and the rude of popular culture, but this is striking.
And it's mimicked in other features which you see in the cartoons,
like the erectile tissue of a horse's tail.
And his umbrella, to a degree, is phallic.
The big ears of...
a very, very old man, or someone who's
constantly listening in on other people's conversations.
It's really a...
face only a blind mother could love, frankly.
By the 1880s,
employers were giving their workers Saturday afternoons off,
the half holiday of the comic's title.
So Ally showed readers
the rude pleasures to be had in this liberation from the working week.
Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, the very name refers to the
Saturday half holiday for the working classes,
for the mass of the population. The idea of the weekend is coming up.
This is a periodical devoted to the weekend.
Ally's drunken gate-crashing of high society also gave his fans
the satisfaction of seeing one of their own larging it with the toffs.
And it's perhaps the first time in print there has been acceptance
of what the mass of the population actually does in its leisure time,
when it lets its hair down, when it drinks
and when it enjoys the weekend.
You can kind of see a root for
WC Fields in his image, as well.
It is quite an
antisocial expression on his face.
In the 1890s, Ally Sloper
had such celebrity that he was being played on music-hall stages.
But by now, it wasn't only swells and proles who were flocking to
what had become the most lucrative entertainment business in Britain.
Proprietors were trying to broaden the appeal of the music hall and
attract the middle class to bigger, ever more ornate pleasure domes.
So owners felt a need to control
the rowdiness and rudeness that was always the essence of music hall.
The audiences are fed into these houses more expeditiously,
they are all now more disciplined, they all face the front...
There were controls upon artists in terms
of what they could or could not say.
These were house rules, forbid anything offensive - allusions to
royalty, to religion or any kind of vulgarisation, on pain of dismissal.
And the audiences also were patrolled by uniforms, officials
who cut down on any attempt to shouting, booing or hissing.
Shhh!
In this more cautious atmosphere, performers had to employ strategies
of nods and winks to give their audiences
what they still really wanted,
a good bawdy night out.
Someone with a genius for the rude innuendo now needed
was Victorian superstar Marie Lloyd.
Now come on, everybody, join in the chorus.
You know it, sir,
don't you? You've been here before.
# A regular farmer's daughter thought
# She'd like to come to town What did she know about railways? #
You couldn't be out and out terribly, terribly lewd,
but you could be suggestive.
And so I think what built up was a language of suggestiveness.
Now, Marie Lloyd is the one that everybody knows about, because
she wiggled her hips, she did her look over her shoulder, she winked,
and all of that sort of built up
this persona of the good-time girl, the naughty girl.
# She told them all she'd never had her ticket punched before... #
Marie Lloyd loved to play teasing, rude games.
One of her songs
was the sugary Victorian favourite Come Into The Garden, Maud.
# Come into the garden
# Maud
# Where the black, black night has flown... #
Marie, through her suggestive performance, gave the song
a completely new, lewd meaning.
# Come into the garden, Maud
# I'm here by the gate. Come out! #
Despite attempts to create a more respectable image
for their business, owners hypocritically turned a blind eye
to the rude reality that music halls were still places for prostitution.
Soliciting on the promenade,
a meeting place at the back of the music hall was commonplace.
In the music hall, managers claimed that they exercised a growing sense
of moral vigilance to exclude the Volunteers of Venus, women
of a so-called "light character".
But, in fact, they endorsed their presence.
Marie Lloyd cheekily confronted
owners and audiences about the illicit goings-on around them,
playing a lady of the night in a provocative piece of melodrama.
# Since Mother Eve in the garden long ago
# Started a fashion, Fashion's been a passion
# Eve wore a costume... #
Now, the presence of prostitutes in the audience, it also gave
extra point to many of the songs, an extra kind of sexual resonance, and
these were songs which mimicked the soliciting techniques of prostitutes.
"Do you like my dress just a little bit?
"It's the little bit the boys adore."
# When I take my morning promenade Quite a fashion card
# On the promenade I don't mind nice boys staring hard
# If it fascinates their desire Think my dress is a little bit?
# Just a little bit? Well, not that much of it
# It shows my shape just a little bit
# That's the little bit the boys admire. #
Victorian moral reformers argue that music halls, linked to prostitution,
were part of an exploitation of women, undermining the morals of
the nation.
By the 1890s, they had put pressure on local councils across Britain to
set up Watch Committees, to keep an eye on theatres and vet performers.
The leader of the campaign to clean up rude music hall
was Mrs Ormiston Chant, head of the National Vigilance Society.
She is a progressive figure.
We should not dismiss her as a Mrs Grundy.
She's the sort of woman who got women in this country the vote.
She's not a backward-looking person.
She's not somebody who just wants to spoil people's fun,
she's an activist.
In 1894, Ormiston Chant took on one of the biggest and most
profitable theatres in the country, speaking out against the Empire,
Leicester Square, London.
The place at night is the habitual
resort of prostitutes in pursuit of their traffic.
Portions of the entertainment are most objectionable, obnoxious and
against the best interests and moral wellbeing of the community at large.
This crusade to clean up the music hall prompted one eminent
and aristocratic young Victorian to do battle.
Winston Churchill, who was a cadet at Sandhurst during this period,
felt strongly enough about
the pleasures that he had had in the promenade to make what is effectively
his unofficial maiden speech... a speech against Mrs Ormiston Chant.
"Where does the Englishman in London always find a welcome? Where does
"he first go when, battle scarred and travel worn, he reaches home?
"Who is there to greet him with a smile and join him with a drink?
"Who is ever faithful, ever true?
"The ladies of the Empire promenade."
And he meant that. He meant that. He practised a speech on the way
that he didn't use. That is straight from the heart.
Ormiston Chant's campaign had only limited success.
The Empire was closed for two weeks before opening again
for business as usual.
A new century saw the battle between rude and prude continue.
Victoria may have died in 1901, but the Victorian values claimed in
her name lived on into a new, Edwardian age and beyond,
and the tensions between rude and its opponents would increasingly
take place in a mass culture of entertainment and leisure.
What you see in the city is really
the development of what we would recognise as a modern mass culture,
modern systems of transport which
bring people together - omnibuses, tubes, the trams -
modern leisure, football is going to be a booming public sport,
and with that, also, rising real incomes for the working class.
And the Factory Acts,
the Acts giving bank holidays, means that they now have leisure time.
And they have money to spend in the leisure time.
So they're going to spend that on holidays.
The most popular holiday destination became the seaside,
previously the preserve of the upper and middle classes.
Workers began to flock to resorts like Blackpool
for the one week of unpaid holiday now given to them.
At the start of the 19th century, a few thousand people go to Blackpool.
By the end of the 19th century, you've got two million,
three million, by the start of the First World War - four million.
It's quite an amazing proportion of people who would go to Blackpool.
It's because Blackpool is founded
because of the industrial holidays, so the Wakes Weeks...
When they had their week off, which they didn't get paid for, but they
got a week off, or two weeks off, the industrial calendar would allow each
town to have their Wakes Week, so each town would take their holiday,
go on the train to Blackpool.
At Blackpool, you could enjoy your very own rude carnival by the sea.
The seaside holiday is a place to be rude. You can forget
that you're doing this terrible job in a cotton factory in Lancashire.
You can go to Blackpool, you can get drunk every night, you haven't got
to dress quite so respectably.
There are still grades of good and bad behaviour at
the seaside, but in general there's much more space for bad behaviour.
At the seaside, you could find all manner of rude delights, some old,
some new.
By the Edwardian era, there was a new kind of peep show,
the Mutascope.
The Mutascope is really the form of What The Butler Saw.
They were instruments the viewer stood and peered into
and which in a way sort of closed off the outside world.
You press your head
to an eye piece, turn the handle and watch these images move.
Looking into these machines,
holidaymakers were in for a rude surprise.
When the pictures started to move, that was a real transformation
of people's relationship to images,
and it was a kind of fascination, it was an aesthetic response
to photographs that came to life and the repeatability, the fact that
you could press the button and see it again.
For a few pennies, anyone could look at voyeuristic little films like
Fun In The Bedroom or Stolen Stockings.
On one pier alone, there could be as many as 40 machines,
a very public experience for a very private moment.
There is something very intoxicating about the Mutascope, the idea that
inside this box there's something that is maybe not meant to be seen
but something that only you should be looking at.
But somehow, through this strange coincidence of light and chemicals
and paper, you can gaze upon a little moment captured in time,
and that might be a moment that you're quite glad is
just between you and the machine.
And of course, you've also got
to remember that Mutascopes were installed in very public places,
so if a bunch of lads out for an afternoon's fun were standing
in line at a Mutascope, they were all sort of laughing, joshing each other.
"What are you seeing? Oi! What are you up to?"
So it's a very social situation, except that each person is getting
their own private moment after they've put their coin in.
All this Mutascopic rudeness was available to anyone with
a few pennies.
So there was deep concern that the wrong sort could get
their hands on this kind of filth.
In a letter to the Times, MP Samuel Smith was outraged.
"A new source of evil has recently sprung up
"at our popular watering places.
"It is hardly possible to exaggerate
"the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under
"a strong light nude female figures represented as living and moving."
Well, there was a tremendous furore about these machines
corrupting the nation's morals.
If the people writing those letters didn't realise there were many other
things corrupting the nation's youth,
they must have been living on another planet.
The seaside was also inspiring an art form that would have its own
rude genius in Donald McGill.
McGill took a most proper part
of daily British life, the postcard, and turned it rude.
I went to a party last night,
Mr Smith, and I've just a dreadful hangover this morning.
Gentlemen's requisites? Yes, sir, go right through ladies' underwear.
From the early years of the 20th century, the postcard was
an everyday form of communication.
Millions were written and sent each year.
Postcards were used
very much in the way that we use e-mails or text messages today.
There were up to nine deliveries a day, and people would send cards in
the morning to say, "I'll meet you for tea in the afternoon,"
which is just unimaginable for us.
Can I show you anything further, sir?
McGill seemed an unlikely purveyor of seaside smut.
McGill regarded himself as very respectable.
He worked in a suit,
but he has within him these subversive elements.
I'm sorry to see so few young mothers here after all my efforts.
McGill drew his first card in 1905.
Over 50 years, he produced over 12,000 cards.
His father-in-law ran a music hall, and its bawdy traditions lay behind
McGill's rude alchemy of words and pictures.
Just as the music hall may have within it
innuendo and suggestiveness that are a kind of acceptance
from the stage of the lives of the ordinary people in the audience,
then McGill with his cartoons is producing an acceptance of the
bawdy that's in the lives of all the people who take seaside holidays.
I want to back the favourite, please.
My sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways.
McGill drew on a cast of well-loved characters to deliver a blue humour
that was smutty yet also warm, without malice -
big, fat ladies,
busty brunettes and, of course, the dirty vicar.
There's two women walking past a window, and there's a vicar in a
window with a plant, and one woman says, "Oh, there's a
"vicar sponging his aspidistra," and the other woman's saying...
"..Horrid old man!
"He ought to do it in the bathroom."
Aspidistra's quite a stretch, actually, but "sponging it"
actually makes it really dirty.
And he's a vicar, as well. Of course, he has to be, doesn't he?
He has to be a vicar.
They are situations involving, often, figures of sexual potency,
which are generally women.
A lot of the men in the McGill cards are kind of frightened by sexuality.
What's obscene is often what's taking place in
the mind of the viewer and the mind of the character within the card.
"Take this jelly away, waiter. There are two things on this
"earth that I like firm, and one of them's jelly."
By the late 1930s, 16 million saucy postcards were
being sold every summer at seaside resorts all over Britain.
Chuckling over this rudeness
was a shared laughter that could cross barriers of age and class.
My mum loved receiving them.
A different type of laugh she would come out with when she
got one of those from an aunt.
And thinking back on them, they were about flashing knickers.
"Here's my card, Miss. If you want a witness, I saw everything."
They're fun. I think that's the key thing, that there is a lot of fun in
his drawings.
And it's amazing, you read the postcards of the time, and it will
say, "Dear Ethel...", you know, it'll be something very saucy on
the other side, saying, "Dear Ethel, having a lovely time..."
And you can tell from their style of writing this person's very
proper and so on, and they seem to have chosen this rather saucy card
to send to someone, and they didn't mind at all.
Rude seaside carnival reached a peak in the 1950s,
when over 17 million people a year were visiting Blackpool.
And this most vulgar of resorts now had its own rude star,
Frank Randle.
Frank Randle was a comedian from Wigan.
He was the most
raucous, irrepressible, terrifying figure, actually, as a man.
He was a monster.
Crates of beer would be delivered to his dressing room. He would then
proceed to smash all the mirrors in his dressing room, either with
his empties or with a gun from his collection of Luger pistols.
Randle pushed the coarse humour of the music hall to new levels
of anarchic comedic invention.
Frank onstage was wild.
It's said that he had nine different
sets of false teeth for different occasions and he kept them in jars
in the dressing room, and he had papier mache ones which, when he went
onstage, as soon as he got heckled he'd fling them at the audience.
Randle created characters to play on taboos, like the still-sensitive
subject of drink.
One of his most rude creations was the hiker, bottle of beer in hand,
belching and farting.
All the time, he's drinking from a great big bottle
marked Allslopp's Ales, and he would belch gigantic belches.
Allslopp's!
And his famous catchphrase was
"By gum, I supped some stuff last neet.
"I sent some of this to be hanalysed, and I got a telegram back saying,
"'Your horse has diabetes.'"
The hiker also confronted audiences with anxieties of sex and age.
This dirty old man had a strange, phallic stick, a libidinous prop,
all the better to chase young girls.
But he'd go over the edge, because he'd be surrounded by girls from
the chorus line who were dressed a hikers. "By gum, she's a hot 'un."
And he'd get excited and priapic, and his stick'd start shaking.
No harm, eh? Well, I'd better be goin'.
And Randle got laughs from the biggest taboo of all, death.
"I were at a funeral t'other day. A little lad come up to me.
"He says, 'How old are thee?'
And the character would get more and more obstreperous.
"It were very cold that morning.
"T'limousine couldn't leave t'crematorium, so he had to use the
"ashes to get the wheels going." Et cetera!
Frank Randle's rude because he refused to behave.
He took that tradition of working-class innuendo,
of the celebration of drunkenness and bad behaviour, and
pushed it to an extreme that nobody else at that time really matched.
People often compare him to George Formby.
# Every year when summer comes round Off to the sea I go... #
George Formby was a comparatively respectable working-class lad who
had cheeky little songs and cheeky little jokes.
Randle wasn't cheeky, Randle was filthy.
Randle's flair for filth made him the target of a moral crusade
conducted by those eager to put a stop to the loose morals
they thought had flourished during the Second World War.
Frank, I think, was perceived as a threat by the
Rotary Club of Blackpool, certainly by the Watch Committee in Blackpool.
At Blackpool Magistrates' in 1953
Randle was charged with contravening the 1843 Theatres Act.
He had been performing material on the Central Pier
before it had been formally vetted.
A Mr Nugent, prosecuting on
behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions, told the court...
"People go to these performances to be entertained and not
"to be disgusted."
But Randle continued to defy all attempts to censor him.
In Cinderella, when he was supposed
to deliver his line, he walked to the apron of the stage and he said to the
audience, "At this point in t'show, I am supposed to say to Cinderella,
"I've come to cut your twatter off, but t'buggers won't let me."
So they arrested him and dragged him off. Fined 30 quid for that one.
There's a myth - it's a wonderful story, but, sadly, it's a myth,
it didn't happen at Blackpool - that Randle was so fed up
of being arrested and the court cases and the hassles, that he hired
an aeroplane and flew over Blackpool and bombarded it with toilet rolls.
It's a true story, but he bombarded Accrington, not Blackpool.
At the same time comedian Frank Randle was being pursued through
the courts, artist Donald McGill was being
scrutinised by Watch Committees from Southend to Scarborough.
"Censor or no censor, I've got to hold my hat on!
No fun, my babe, no fun...
During a nationwide back-to-basics campaign by the government of
Winston Churchill, McGill was investigated for obscenity.
The young defender of rude was now the elderly slayer of smut.
"She's a nice girl.
"Doesn't drink or smoke and only swears when it slips out."
It was ordered destroyed in Grimsby,
in Brighton, in Folkestone, in Margate, in...
McGill could be a little cute in defending his right to be rude.
One can say he was slightly disingenuous.
For example, there's a famous one of a stick-of-rock cock,
where this man is holding this enormous stick of rock in front of
him, and he actually says it's balanced on his knees and so on,
so any phallic suggestions were obviously not anything
he intended, and he never saw it before it was pointed out to him.
In 1954, McGill, after numerous local bannings, was charged in
Lincoln under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
After a night in the cells, the 79-year-old artist pleaded guilty
to obscenity and was fined £50.
Thousands of his cards were then ordered to be destroyed.
It's no surprise, given the reach of these laws,
that Donald McGill is prosecuted under a Victorian law, under the
1857 Obscene Publications Act.
These kind of ideas, the kind of public morals and public morality
about rudeness, about lewdness, still dictate much of the official culture
and the laws on the statute book.
Yet, within a decade of McGill's prosecution, Gerald Scarfe
could draw a picture showing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan nude
in the infamous pose of call girl Christine Keeler,
and Scarfe could get away with it.
A rude revolution was under way.
I could draw pubic hair, I could draw nipples, I could draw nostrils,
I could draw bottoms, you know?
They let me do what I wanted to do.
I want to be rude!
Welcome to the mass democracy of rude,
next time on Rude Britannia.
# Girl, you really got me now You got me so I can't sleep at night
# Yeah, you really got me now
# You got me so I don't know what I'm doing now
# Oh, yeah, you really got me now
# You got me so I can't sleep at night
# You really got me
# You really got me. #
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