Television
Hippy shakes
Martyn Harris
One of the funniest cartoons in the last 20 years of Punch was a poke at the old-style TV God slot. It showed Mr and Mrs Average blankly watching the opening titles of Stars on Sunday, with a conjuror in a dinner jacket — juggling Bibles.
The wedding of piety and showbiz made some ludicrous television, and the genre has been replaced now by the 'hymn-vids' of Sweet Inspiration (BBC 1, Sunday, 6.25 p.m.) and programmes like Heart of the Matter (BBC 1, Sunday, 10.30 p.m.) which have a vague 'moral ishoos' brief. This is usually some social concern that falls out- side party politics — in recent weeks it has been the ordination of women, the Nation- al Front in Lewisham and the hippy trav- ellers. The God slot legacy lingers on in the wholesome perspn of Joan Bakewell, a name no novelist would dare invent, and in the seesaw style of argument, which always culminates in the baffled stalemate which the BBC mistakes for balance.
This is not the fault of Bakewell, who looks like the wife of a progressive vicar but is a good, nosy journalist, unafraid to ask obvious questions: 'What right do you have to stop a traveller using the highway?' she asked the Assistant Chief Constable of Warwickshire, who had thrown an exclu- sion zone around a hippy camp near Strat- ford. He was so surprised that he told her: 'We have the right to stop anyone where there is a liability to cause a breach of the peace'. The last 12 words, one felt, were rather redundant.
The hippies, for all their calculatedly horrible appearance, are gentle and hos- pitable, if rather boring in their uniformity of dress and attitude. Almost all the ones I have met are vegetarian, pacifist and cred- ulous — whether of flying saucers and crop circles or shamanism and Krishna Con- sciousness. 'Any reasonable policeman', said one of Bakewell's hippy interviewees, `will tell you there is less trouble at one of our festivals than in the average pub on a Saturday night.' This is my experience too.
In the 1970s there were acres of derelict council housing in London given over to squatting: in North Kensington, Maida Vale and Finsbury Park. The squatters were ex-students prolonging for a while the camaraderie of college life, or working- class rebels postponing the encroachment of jobs and children. The Government has made squatting difficult, but the hippy trav- ellers are much the same people (there are few over 30) and they travel for much the same reasons. It's cheap, it's friendly, there is plenty of sex, Special Brew and marijua- na — and there isn't much else to do.
It is daft, when there are three million unemployed, to describe them as 'spongers' and 'locusts' as Social Services Secretary Peter Lilley has done. If they were forced into fixed accommodation they would only be drawing housing benefit on top of their dole. The claim from the Country Land- owners Association that the hippies occupy food-producing land is pretty hilarious in the age of EEC surplus and set-aside.
The only real question is how much of a nuisance they are to country people. A farmer told Bakewell he had lost 11 ewes to hippies' dogs, though it might as easily have been a neighbour's dog. The hippies sometimes leave a mess, but this is usually when they are suddenly forced off a site by police. Most of the other stories — of hip- pies carrying Aids or shotguns, or peeing in supermarket deep-freezes, are obvious fab- rications. I wouldn't want the hippies in my back yard but it should not be beyond the wit of man to allocate them a few miser- able patches of common land, out of every- one's way.
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