Politics of decency
Michael Vestey
The film industry, like the media generally, tends to attract people on the left of centre, some anxious to peddle their beliefs, others merely and instinctively slanting it their way on the assumption that everybody thinks like them except for some rednecks out there in the strange world of Middle England, with which they are unfamiliar. So it was no surprise to hear a chorus of lefties in Movies with a Message on Radio Four this week (Sunday, repeated Wednesday) praising Labour’s 1944 propaganda film about the wonders of the coming welfare state. Encouraged by the COI, the Central Office of Information as it then was, the socialist Humphrey Jennings and fellow socialist novelist E.M. Forster made Diary For Timothy, a schmaltzy but remarkably effective plug for post-war welfare.
In the first of a three-part series, the film-maker David Puttnam, now a Labour peer, pointed out that, after the first world war, the ‘Homes Fit For Heroes’ for returning soldiers and their families failed to materialise as Britain faced the Depression. By the second world war, expectations of better housing, education and healthcare were higher, and there’s no doubt the Jennings film caught the mood of the time. It was made in the form of a diary to a baby called Timothy and was full of clever emotional stuff about how there should be a better future for the child Blairite way before its time — and this was how it should be done. Listening to the clips played in this programme, it comes across as extraordinary and shameless political propaganda and even Puttnam thought it had crossed the ‘fine line’ between information and propaganda.
Lord (Richard) Attenborough thought Jennings was ‘uniquely gifted’; he had watched him edit film and had been inspired by him. The social historian Professor Peter Hennessy recalled that it was Aneurin Bevan who told Barbara Castle at the time to ‘look into the perambulators’; that was what the welfare state was for, the children of the future: ‘The politics of decency,’ explained Hennessy. ‘Everybody has the right to a decent home, a decent education, decent respect and treatment, and that word decency was the key word of the 1940s.’ You certainly find it used a lot in George Orwell’s essays and journalism. Simon Heffer offered a more sober view that Diary For Timothy was a script written by the new governing class. ‘They made this film to a definite socialist agenda, which very much caught the spirit of the time.’ Not since 1832 — the Reform Bill, I guess he meant — had there been an example of idealism suffocating reality. There’s no doubt that the Jennings film was hugely influential in post-war cinema, leading to the kitchen-sink plays and films of the late 1950s in which working-class characters weren’t patronised and made to look ‘lowly, comic figures’, as the film historian Sir Christopher Frayling put it.
Of course we’ve gone from the welfare state to the Labour government’s client state, and by the late 1950s a certain disillusionment with the wonderful workers was beginning to set in, as Puttnam examines in this Sunday’s programme about the Boulting brothers’ film I’m All Right Jack, with Peter Sellers as the Stalinist union activist Fred Kite, who was actually based on a shop steward at Denham studios. Roy and John Boulting were well placed to know about union intransigence as the unions were largely responsible for wrecking the British film industry. Attenborough wasn’t convinced that the film was just an anti-union attack, though. As he recalled, the Boulting brothers were anti-authority and that included union leaders as well as the establishment. It seems astonishing now but, according to Frayling, among the taboo subjects of the time — sex and the monarchy — was also labour relations, and the British Board of Film Censors wouldn’t allow any films that touched raw nerves, so I’m All Right Jack was quite a breakthrough.
Heffer thought the film captured the anxieties about Britain’s economic underperformance and increasing industrial conflict, and although it was funny it was also depressing, a monument to cynicism, as he put it; the workers were portrayed as feckless, lazy and dishonest, the management as corrupt, self-serving and lazy. The message that came across was one of hopelessness. As it happens, the situation was indeed pretty hopeless, and it took more than 20 years of union strife for the Thatcher government finally to deal with it. The last programme looks at Ken Loach’s pro-IRA film Hidden Agenda, a truly spectacular example of the crazed self-delusion of a film director.
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