You will go away first.
An episode of Whicker's World from 1967 is more progressive than 90% of the press and media we're served now. Counter-revolutionaries run the show.
Previously: Savaged.
The media tributes to Paul O'Grady (and his alter-ego Lily Savage) strip him of his politics and smooth away the sharp edges that enhanced his greatness.
If you can’t stand or understand this flowering segment of the younger generation, there’s little point in getting cross or calling it names… and no point at all in just wishing it will go away. You will go away first.
— Alan Whicker, ‘The Love Generation’, Whicker’s World, September 9, 1967
Alan Whicker — who, as Captain A. Whicker, captured the traitorous Tory MP’s son, John Amery1, filmed footage of Mussolini hanging in a petrol station, and took the German surrender in Milan — had been presenting the documentary series Whicker’s World for 9 years when his film about the hippies of San Francisco was broadcast.
A public school boy, son of a soldier, born in Cairo and later voted “Britain’s most envied man” in a nationwide survey conducted by the advertising agency J Walter Thompson, Whicker — luxuriously moustached, with a drawling voice and a penchant for the finer things in life — was a creature of the establishment. Yet, dropped into the long-haired and loose environment of Haight-Ashbury at the height of the Summer of Love, he treated those he met with respect and gave them the space to speak.
‘The Love Generation’ is on iPlayer (and YouTube). Watch it and you’ll discover a piece of television that would be hard to make now. Not because Whicker uses archaic slurs or rolls his eyes at the young — he doesn’t — but because he was so open to discussing their views on the world and equally willing to challenge the assertions of the establishment figures he encountered, including the San Sherrif’s Department.
The even-handedness of Whicker’s presentation led David Attenborough, then controller of BBC 2, to write to him:
It is, without question, an excellent film, beautifully made. It was also magnificently topical. There were powerful arguments for transmitting it as it stands. And yet I am quite sure that to have done so would have been irresponsible. In the end and on balance, I was left with the impression that taking LSD is fun. While the commentary made it quite clear that drugs have their dangers, so indeed does smoking a cigarette or crossing a road.
If LSD is such a source of delight and gives you such a happy and irresponsible time as a result, why not experiment and try it? This indeed may be true, for all I know, but it is not the point.
The fact remains that to take LSD in this country is to break the law, as it stands at the moment; and it is also, in the eyes of many who know better than I, to run the risk of destroying yourself.
Whicker wrote:
The programme on Hippies contained nothing more than is now being written and considered elsewhere; it was hardly sensational — when drugs were touched upon they were roundly condemned… dammit the programme is already unbalanced and unfair; just what kind of sermon do you want me to deliver? Even that innocuous ‘nude’ party must go; next week, cover up all sexy piano legs. What’s happening at the BBC — how has this curious, craven attitude to current affairs crept in?
Attenborough won: Additional commentary on the ‘dangers’ of LSD was added before the programme was broadcast. But even after the changes, the episode that aired is arguably more progressive than what would be made now.
There is a sequence of a hippie couple tripping on LSD in the woods. It rolls without commentary from Whicker and the viewer witnesses them gently experiencing their changed perceptions. There is no scene showing them suffering or freaking out. When Whicker’s voiceover returns, he says…
Who knows what they see now in their kaleidoscopic trip to the dangers of inner space?
… before the soundtrack shifts to The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever and the visuals change to a collage of images from San Francisco. It is an electrifying piece of television and would be if it were newly captured in 2023.
Even at the time, Whicker’s willingness to stand back, to generally not talk over his subjects — though his voiceover contains plenty of sardonic asides — was unusual. Joan Didion, who is remembered as an iconic figure in a way the less t-shirt slogan-friendly Whicker will never be, was far more judgemental. Turning her gimlet eye to Haight-Ashbury in the essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she wrote:
We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing.
Years later, talking to her nephew Griffin Dunne in the film he directed about her life, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), she reflected on a passage where she claims to have witnessed a five-year-old high on LSD:
Griffin Dunne: What was it like to be a journalist in the room when you saw the little kid on acid?
Joan Didion: Well… it was… let me tell you, it was gold. That’s the long and the short of it. You live for moments like that if you’re doing a piece.
The difference between Didion and Whicker — both gifted with an exceptional turn of phrase — is that the former had a larger “splinter of ice in [her] heart” of the sort that Graham Greene declared a writer needs. Whicker had a perceptive eye matched with a sharp wit, but his technique was the opposite of Didion’s detached coldness. He told The Guardian in 2002:
I never put people down. I was never abrasive. You can ask the rudest, most personal questions in the world if you smile. You can say anything!
It was this strategy that allowed him to eyeball the murderous Papa Doc and to secure sit-downs with the Sultan of Brunei and John Paul Getty, both occasions when he absolutely asked the rudest and most personal questions possible.
When Monty Python mocked Whicker’s near ubiquity and genially patrician air with a sketch called ‘Whicker Island’ — an isle populated entirely by multiple Alan Whickers interviewing each other — he took it as a compliment:
I was very flattered. I felt that they weren’t being acid about me, they were being kind. I was having the piss taken out of me by experts.
There’s a reason I’m talking about Whicker and that particular Whicker’s World episode at length in a normal edition of the newsletter rather than including it in a weekly recommendations round-up: Watching it made me think about how the journalism served up to us has — in general — gone backwards. Whicker, as you can see from his letter to Attenborough, trusted that his audience could handle complexity and presentation with polish rather than varnish.
In the case of ‘The Love Generation’, Whicker gave his interviewees space to talk about their worldview and about the place drugs played in it. While it was not his world and elements of his discomfort are present in the narration, he doesn’t try to shape the audience’s conclusions about the hippies; a year before the 1968 student protests, Whicker spoke with empathy and kindness about a generation whose concerns were being belittled and dismissed.
I finished watching that time capsule from 1967 and, after a brief moment of euphoria, was dunked into the cold water of 2023.
In 1987 — 20 years after Whicker was so open to understanding the young — Margaret Thatcher thundered in her Conservative Party Conference speech:
Children who need to be able to express themselves in clear English are being taught political slogans.
Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.
Yesterday — 3 March 2023 — Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, wrote in The Times, as part of the publicity round for a new report from the Michael Gove co-founded right-wing thinktank, Policy Exchange, that:
Gender identity beliefs are contested and based on unscientific notions, yet this report shows they are being taught in RSHE (relationships, sex and health education) classes as though they are facts…
… Schools seem unaware of their obligations to be politically impartial, when 25 per cent are teaching that some people or children “may be born in the wrong body”. Encouraging children to believe that their transient ideas about themselves are more determinative of their identity than their chromosomal DNA is not just misleading, but dangerous too.
Duffield joins a long history of Labour and nominally ‘left-wing’ MPs who have joined in with LGBT+ ‘panic’ stories. Take this story from the Evening Standard in April 1985, headlined Parents fear gay lesson:
A recent GLC [Greater London Council] homosexuality charter called for the curriculum to “reflect the richness and diversity of homosexual experience and not just negative images.”
… John Cartwright, Social Democratic MP for Woolwich, is asking ILEA [Inner London Education Authority] to outline precisely how the subject of gays and lesbians would be introduced into the classroom.
“This approval by Greenwich inevitably raises fears among parents that their children may be exposed to an encouraging view of homosexuality in schools.”
On June 5 1988, The Sunday Telegraph published a two-page feature under the headline Is There A Homosexual Conspiracy? It was bylined to Graham Turner, who carried on writing for the Telegraph titles until well into the 2000s. He wrote:
There is no doubt in the minds of men like Brandon Jackson [then the Provost of Bradford] that the changed intellectual climate has been created by a sustained propaganda campaign to portray homosexuality as thoroughly natural and normal. Some suspect that there is a “gay” lobby which operates in a more or less cohesive way, though they are disinclined to regard it as a conspiracy. Others point out that, since the liberal establishment holds much the same views, there is simply no need for one.
The advertising campaign to combat Aids is the one case which gives pause even to those reluctant to entertain conspiracy theories. “That campaign,” said one minister, “would indicate that the homosexuals are well established and have powerful influence behind the scenes, because it was deliberately distorted so as not to offend them, to pretend that Aids is a general problem, whereas the trust is that, in the Western world, it is essentially a homosexual disease.”
The article also contained a sustained attack on the Terence Higgins Trust:
[It] likes to portray itself as “the community response to a new illness. But senior officials at the DES [Department of Education and Science] believe that one of its central aims is to proselytise on behalf of homosexuality. “It is the homosexual lobby — and very cleverly done,” said a former civil servant.
The Aids leaflet, which was distributed to 23 million homes, simply included the Trust in a list of sources which could provide further information. As a result, as one of its members admitted, it came across as a social work agency.
Alarm bells first began to ring in Whitehall when a pamphlet produced by the Trust was brought to the attention of the Permanent Secretary at DES, Sir David Hancock, by a headmaster in whose school it had surfaced.
Entitled simply ‘Sex’ and showing a naked young man on the cover, it expatriates on (and illustrates) the virtues of “wanking — go for it! Share the pleasure with a friend”; watersports — “OK if piss doesn’t enter your body” and “sucking — risky if there are cuts or sores on your cock or gums”.
Sir Kenneth Stowe, then Permanent Secretary at the DHSS [Department of Health and Social Security], almost fell off his chair when he first saw the pamphlet, according to an Education Department source.
Sir Kenneth, the source added, was particularly concerned that DHSS money might have gone into producing it. “It was plain to us,” said the senior policy-maker to whom I spoke, “that its main purpose was to promote a homosexual life-style, but safer. And it is clearly promiscuous, there’s not a word in it about faithfulness, or single partners.”
In the following week’s letters page, Nick Partridge (who became the Trust’s chief executive in 1991) replied:
It is regrettable that in Graham Turner’s discussion of the Terence Higgins Trust safer sex campaign, he did not say that it has been successful in slowing down the spread of HIV in the UK. It is also regrettable that Turner did not mention the Trust’s work with people who have difficulties with drug use, with women who have Aids, and with prisoners. We were also the first organisation to provide information to the general public…
… The Terrence Higgins Trust is not a large organisation. What influence we have comes from the strength of our arguments and the quality of the services we provide. Our difficult and sometimes heartbreaking work is not helped by articles like the one you printed last week.
The next letter begins…
I am 61, vote Conservative and work for a Christian organisation.
… but does not take the direction you might expect from correspondence to the Sunday Telegraph in the late-80s:
Early in 1986, I joined the Terrence Higgins Trust as a volunteer when it became apparent that the tabloid press were adopting a Hitlerite attitude by treating people with Aids as less than human — to the everlasting shame and distress of their relatives…
… We had been expressly warned not to send [the safer sex leaflet] to those under 21 — ie children seeking information for school projects on Aids (!) but we felt head teachers and other responsible people would be able to exercise balanced judgement, not “fall off chairs” in the hysterical manner ascribed to Sir Kenneth Stowe.
We felt that to suppress information, however shocking, was not what we have volunteered for. Were we so wrong? We were not part of any “homosexual lobby” whatever.
Now I must say frankly that Graham Turner’s article shocked me, and the kindness thing I can add is to say that he seems afraid not of Aids, which he should fear, but of a kind of imprecise, nebulous “creeping homosexuality”. What does he think it will do to him?
Given that she was 61 when she wrote her letter, (Mrs) Patricia M. Netscher of Frome, Somerset may no longer be with us (she would be 98). Her family should be and no doubt is enormously proud of her.
Another letter, from Graham McKerrow, the editor and co-founder of Capital Gay whose offices had been firebombed the previous year, also made what we must now refer to as Gary Lineker-style references to the 1930s:
Graham Turner asked: “Is there a homosexual conspiracy?” In Germany 50 years ago respectable newspapers asked if there was a Jewish conspiracy. Please don’t promote but rather challenge this dangerous nonsense.
In 1988, the Thatcher government passed Section 28, which “banned the promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, including in schools. It wasn’t repealed in Scotland until 2000 and 2003 in England and Wales.
Two years later, in 1990 — when Andrew Neil was editor — The Sunday Times serialised a book that claimed Aids could not spread to heterosexuals. That publication was supported by a series of articles, comment pieces, and editorials from the paper that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS and called HIV “a politically correct virus” supported by a “conspiracy of silence”. There’s that word ‘conspiracy’ again. It suggested that AIDS was not spreading in Africa, that HIV tests weren’t valid, called the World Health Organization an “Empire-building AIDS [organisation]” and claimed that the HIV/AIDS treatment azidothymidine was actually harmful.
When the scientific journal, Nature, which had been monitoring The Sunday Times’ dangerous pseudoscience, published letters rebutting the paper’s claims, it hit back. Under the headline AIDS — why we won’t be silenced the paper accused Nature of having “sinister intent” and demanding censorship.
In his biography Full Disclosure (1996), which covers his time at the paper, Neil claimed the denialism “deserved publication to encourage debate”. He also wrote an article for The Sunday Times in that same year under the headline The great Aids myth is finally laid to rest which read in part:
The Sunday Times was one of a handful of newspapers, perhaps the most prominent, which argued that heterosexual Aids was a myth. The figures are now in and this newspaper stands totally vindicated…
The history of AIDS is one of the great scandals of our time. I do not blame doctors and the AIDS lobby for warning that everybody might be at risk in the early days, when ignorance was rife and reliable evidence scant.
Neil went on to attack what he called “the Aids establishment” and claimed, “Aids had become an industry, a job-creation scheme for the caring classes.”
Channel 4, which gained so many plaudits for It’s A Sin — a drama about the LGBT+ community at the height of the Aids crisis, now employs Andrew Neil on a big money contract to goon around with George Osborne and Ed Ball on Sunday nights. Neil has never apologised and never will.
The Sun, which splashed on Paul O’Grady’s death this week, spent the 80s under Kelvin MacKenzie’s demonic rule and prosecuting a campaign of virulent anti-gay stories, Aids denialism, and persecuting gay celebrities. In Stick It Up Your Punter!: The Uncut Story of The Sun, Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale recount MacKenzie describing The Sun reader of his imagination:
He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news).
In 1987, MacKenzie splashed on a story that falsely claimed Elton John had been with underage rentboys. He swiftly followed it up with fantastical claims that the singer had sent his guard dogs to have their voiceboxes surgically removed to stop their barking from disturbing his sleep. MacKenzie quickly found out the story was bollocks when a reporter was sent to Elton John’s house and… the guard dogs barked at him. Elton John’s bark and bite were pretty powerful too; he sued The Sun and was awarded £1,000,000 in damages.
Asked about the case by Press Gazette in 2006, MacKenzie was on brand — arrogant and unrepentant:
I think The Sun should have its million quid back. It hasn't damaged him at all, has it? Libel can only have a value if there has been some kind of damage, right? Where is the damage? Where? There's nothing wrong with him. So no, I don't feel bad about him, not at all.
The homophobic campaign continued: An attack on gay vicars was headlined Pulpit Poofs and quickly got a sequel, penned by The Sun’s showbiz editor, a grasping non-entity called Piers Morgan, under the headline The Poofs of Pop. When Eastenders featured a gay kiss, the paper called it Eastbenders and pushed the usual “won’t somebody think of the children?” line:
[It was]… a homosexual love scene between yuppie poofs… when millions of children were watching.
Like The Sunday Times, the paper combined its homophobic hate with lies and scare stories about Aids. In 1989, it published a story that declared Straight Sex Cannot Give You AIDS — Official. The editorial said:
At last, the truth can be told… the risk of catching AIDS if you are heterosexual is ‘statistically invisible.’ In other words — impossible. So now we know — everything else is homosexual propaganda.
It later ran an apology… on page 28.
In his book, The Universal Journalist, David Randall writes that The Sun’s hounding of the LGBT+ community under MacKenzie is “one of the worst examples in recent memory” of “reporting which stretches and strains the facts to fit a particular thesis”. He goes on:
On several occasions, government statistics were wilfully manhandled… [this] was reporting that deceived readers and possibly endangered them.
Preconceived theories have no place in journalism. Newspapers should be at war with closed minds, not employing them.
If British newspapers cut all the columnists with closed minds, they’d publish the printing equivalent of 4’33”.
In his memoir, Still Standing: The Savage Years, O’Grady wrote about The Sun’s campaign against Elton John and the wider LGBT+ community, as well as a less well-known example of tabloid homophobia:
The Daily Star’s editor Ray Mills was expelled from the National Union of Journalists for his persistent racist and homophobic abuse, not that the expulsion bothered him as he still carried on referring to the gay employees of Camden Council as ‘bent’ and talking about the “poofter persuasion”, while up in south Staffordshire, Bill Brownhill, the leader of the Tory council, announced that his cure for Aids would be to ‘put ninety per cent of queers in the ruddy gas chambers’. A lesbian protestor spat at a police officer during a small demonstration against ‘the gas man’s’ comments, the police officer later demanding a blood test in case he’d contracted the Aids virus from her.
To explain this hysterical behaviour away a spokesperson for the Police Association blamed the media, claiming that police officers picked up their information about Aids from the press and that it wasn’t surprising that they were getting the wrong idea.
There’s zero chance that O’Grady — a woolyback (he was from Birkenhead) and honorary scouser — would have wanted The Sun front page, particularly as the paper has turned the tactics it used against gay people in the 80s onto the trans community in the 2020s.
This week, Harry Cole — who identifies as a bumptious home counties colonel 30 years older than he actually is — was bylined on The Sun’s press release for the aforementioned Policy Exchange report. He wrote:
NEW rules forcing teachers to tell parents if their kids want to change gender will be published within weeks. PM Rishi Sunak yesterday hit out over a report revealing safeguarding principles around trans issues are routinely disregarded in secondary schools.
Cole — in common with most of the stories about Policy Exchange’s deceptive ‘report’ — repeats the lie that “safeguarding principles around trans issue are routinely disregarded”. In fact, the Department for Education’s guidance says:
The fact that a child or a young person may be LGBT is not in itself an inherent risk factor for harm. However, children who are LGBT can be targeted by other children. In some cases, a child who is perceived by other children to be LGBT (whether they are or not) can be just as vulnerable as children who identify as LGBT.
Risks can be compounded where children who are LGBT lack a trusted adult with whom they can be open. It is therefore vital that staff endeavour to reduce the additional barriers faced and provide a safe space for them to speak out or share their concerns with members of staff.
It also makes it clear that revealing a student is trans to their parent without their consent would be a breach of the guidance:
Where there is a safeguarding concern, governing bodies, proprietors and school or college leaders should ensure the child’s wishes and feelings are taken into account when determining what action to take and what services to provide.
The government is going to endanger young people to please opaquely funded think tanks and the newspapers. Trans people are being used in the same way gay people were in the 80s: As an “enemy within” to fear and a distraction from the real causes of dissatisfaction and despondency.
The real story in the Policy Exchange report is that according to its figures — in lines that laud the actions — a significant number of schools are violating safeguarding guidance and are in breach of the Equality Act 2010.
Policy Exchange howls:
Only 28 per cent of secondary schools are reliably informing parents as soon as a child discloses feelings of gender distress…
… Four in ten secondary schools operate policies of gender self-indentification.
In The Daily Mail, Bel Mooney contributed a screed headlined Our whole society's been dozing while a disturbing trans-rights dogma has infiltrated our schools - and now we ALL need to fight back. It begins:
Back in 1990, just three months after the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed and killed in Romania, I was on assignment in that poor country, meeting people and finding out what it had been like to live under the iron heel of communism.
Yesterday, reading the shocking new report about schools excluding parents from information about their own children who want to change gender, I was reminded of what I learnt about chilling, authoritarian control over children’s minds.
We live with an unhinged media. The Daily Mail is a tyrant: Unelected, capricious, emperor for your life and your children’s lives and the lives of your parents, and their parents, and their parents. Mooney comparing some schools respecting children’s rights and the idea of consent to Ceausescu’s regime is a grim disrespect to his victims and a disgusting way to write about children and teachers who care about them.
Later in the piece, Mooney writes:
The detailed report is enough to make any concerned parent (or grandparent, in my case) contact local schools and demand to know exactly what is being taught under the banner of Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE). But good luck with that — because the prevalent culture of secrecy essentially tells parents to mind their own business.
She and her editors know exactly what they’re doing here: They want protests and headteachers harassed. They want to further heighten the paranoia about “conspiracy”, to reassure that it is the children who are wrong and that, despite the evidence of their eyes and ears, it is “the evil left” running the show.
In The Times — following a similar piece for The Sun — Matthew Goodwin, who ate his own book and poisoned his brain with the ink, rails again about “the new elite” he has invented to satisfy and salve the actual elite:
This is now having real and profound effects on our society. Over the past decade, the graduate class has swung sharply leftwards, doubling down on its social liberalism or radically “woke” views in response to the Brexit and Trump revolts, what some US researchers call the “Great Awokening”. And now, as a result, they are starting to take the institutions with them, pushing our media, political and cultural debate further away from the average voter. Staring at a national debate that neither seems to represent nor respect their values, many people watch the advertisements, television programmes, BBC debates or latest Netflix drama, scan the book releases and listen to the national conversation with a sense that the only values represented are those of the strongly liberal minority — which, according to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, represent just 20 per cent of the country…
… Pointing to the hypocrisy of the new elite, the Cambridge academic Rob Henderson refers to them as the “luxury belief class” — people who routinely preach beliefs that bring them social status and incur few costs but which negatively affect other groups in society. Examples include calling for mass immigration while ignoring its impact on domestic workers, demanding a more relaxed approach to illegal migration while living in elite enclaves, or calling for a more relaxed approach to the breakdown of families while being the most likely to get married, stay married and have children within marriage…
… one thing is clear: unless we begin to close these divides now, the revolts of the past decade will soon grow into a much more serious and far-reaching rebellion, like the ones still erupting around us in the US, France, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Sweden and many other western democracies.
The death penalty in the UK would never have been abolished if politicians had merely focused on public opinion. In 2015, support for the death penalty in Britain dropped below 50 per cent (down to 48 per cent) for the first time since 1983. A YouGov survey in March 2022 suggested that 40 per cent of people back the death penalty, rising to 58% if it were restricted to cases involving multiple murders.
The first age of consent in England — 12 — was set in 1275 in the Statute of Westminster. It was raised to 13 in 1875 and then, ten years later to 16. Gay sex was illegal and lesbian sex was never legislated against (but not because no one wanted to tell Queen Victoria about it).
Gay sex didn’t stop being totally criminalised until 1967 as a result of the Wolfenden Report but only for men over 21. Scotland only legalised gay sex in 1980. The age of consent for gay sex in England and Wales was lowered to 18 in 1994 and was finally equalised with the age for straight sex (16) in 2000.
None of those changes would have occurred if a majority vote of the population was required.
Goodwin writes with a palpable disgust for the idea that anyone is left-wing; as if being right-wing is just the natural state. He clearly loves saying “the Great Awokening” because it echoes a far-right conspiracy theory — ‘the Great Replacement’ — without him having to say it with his whole chest.
Is it true that there is a stratum of clueless self-aggrandising, self-satisfied and hypocritical liberals? Of course, Marx called them the petite bourgeoisie. But Goodwin is only pretending they bother him most. His real aim is a counter-revolutionary action against the young, the left, and the intersection of the two.
His conclusion, where he pantomimes gathering his skirts and worrying about the frightening prospect of revolt, actually has the opposite intention. He wants a right-wing revolt, an uprising, a rageful destruction of the people who mock him on Twitter.
Matthew Goodwin is 41. Alan Whicker was 46 in 1967. We have gone backwards. The counter-revolutionary bastards are winning for now. But Whicker was right: They will go first.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this edition, please share it. It’s really helpful and makes it easier for me to keep writing and researching…
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In his memoir, Whicker’s War, Whicker wrote empathetically that the death sentence served upon Amery was “not a verdict of which the British judiciary could be proud” and went on: “Amery, scoundrel of a famous political family, had from childhood lacked any sense of right and wrong, but instead showed a certain style and considerable courage. At the foot of the scaffold, he greeted his famous hangman Albert Pierrepoint: ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you’, he said, ‘though not, of course, under these circumstances…’
Flooded with happy memories of programmes like that sending my father apoplectic. Thank you so much🌟🌌💜xxx
Excellent piece. Whicker’s matchless presentation, urbane, informed, kindly, courteous, gave him instant authority. The rebuttal of Attenborough is a thing of beauty.
Still wondering if in its entire miserable existence the Murdoch press (Sunday Times, or at least Daniel Pogrund, excepted) has got any issue of the day right – anyhow, anywhere, ever.