Last Hurrah? Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain

In the summer of 2012, millions of people, including me,

stood by the Thames in the teeming rain

to watch the Diamond Jubilee Pageant.

An unmistakeably British and rather odd event.

No-one witnessing the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh

standing for five and a half hours

in a howling gale, or watching the choir sing on as the mascara ran

and hypothermia followed, wouldn't ponder whether, for better or worse,

the stiff upper lip still plays some part in our national story.

Actually, I hadn't expected to be quite so struck by that afternoon.

The weather in Britain

does traditionally bring out a sort of stirring, sodden stoicism.

But is this famed national characteristic really just

fit for putting in historical pageants?

After all, since its Victorian heyday, over the last 100 years,

Britain has become more and more self-conscious,

and more and more self-critical about the value of its stiff upper lip.

When the battle-weary and damaged troops

returned from the World War One trenches, leaving nearly

a million British dead, it seemed the stiff upper lip was finished.

The imperial swagger gone for good.

But, since then, we've been nonchalant.

We've been steadfast.

And, in more recent times, we've let it all out.

And out even more.

There's no question that in our times, the stiff upper lip has taken one hell of a battering.

It's wobbled and it's crumbled. But is it now history?

Or does its history suggest that we may still find some use for it?

Believe it or not, there was a time

when the British Prime Minister didn't come from Eton and Oxford.

It was Harrow and Cambridge.

And in 1926, Stanley Baldwin faced a crisis.

But pipe as ever in hand, he appealed to the British

character to see us through a favourite theme of his.

'As a nation, we have a curious sense of humour,

'and the more difficult times are, the more cheerful we become.

'We have staying power, we are not rattled.'

Baldwin often spoke of the value of this sense of national sang-froid.

Only a few years earlier, he'd described it as "absence of worry",

an innate ability to remain "serene in difficulties".

So, in 1926, he took to the airwaves, urging Britons again

to display their characteristic resolve.

He said, "Let all good citizens

"bear with fortitude and patience

"the hardships with which they have been so suddenly confronted."

So what was this severe test of the national character?

'This is London calling the British Isles. Crisis!

'We regret to have to announce

'that a general strike will begin tomorrow at midnight.'

On 4th May 1926, more than two million

factory workers, train drivers and dockers downed tools

and the country was brought to a standstill.

They had walked out in solidarity

with Britain's one million coal miners,

whose wages were being cut while their hours were being extended.

But although the General Strike was,

and remains, the most widespread and most serious labour crisis

Britain has ever faced, it was also,

on all sides, a very British affair.

People responded to calls by people like Baldwin to...

hold tight, to hold firm.

The British people retained the sense that we have a parliamentary

democracy, that we comport ourselves

in a particular restrained way,

and that this is actually a real positive thing for Britons.

On one side were the middle and upper classes, many of whom

rolled up their sleeves

and pitched in to keep the country going.

I've got a page here of the special Strike Edition

of the society magazine Tatler.

And the headline reads, "Were we downhearted?

"The answer is in the negative."

And instead of the usual pictures of debutantes' dresses

and May Balls and court functions, it's quite different.

Here we have Captain Peebles Chaplin bringing out the coal,

and the Honourable Mrs Guy Westmacott, in pearls, serving tea

in the Scotland Yard canteen, from what looks like a giant silver urn.

The upper classes were knuckling down together,

doing their bit, and it was all "great fun".

But beneath this light-hearted veneer,

the establishment was also frightened.

What if those on the other side, the three million strikers,

didn't behave with British dignity and decency?

What if they became enthusiastic, hotheaded,

frenzied, like their European counterparts?

In recent years, continental Europe had witnessed a wave of

Communist revolution, flooding out from Russia,

into Germany and Hungary.

Then there was Fascism in Italy,

an independent Ireland.

Indeed, trouble just about everywhere.

And perhaps the General Strike

was signalling that all this

foreign radicalism

was now heading our way.

In preparation, the authorities stationed

80,000 troops around the country.

So was Britain on what Baldwin dubbed The Road to Anarchy?

Not entirely.

A story was told about a French journalist who was

sent across the Channel to cover the "English Revolution."

When he got here, he found himself reporting not on a popular insurrection,

but on a football match between strikers and the police.

"You English are not a serious people,"

he's said to have shouted in disgust, before heading straight back to France.

The tale of the disillusioned

French journalist may be apocryphal,

but the football match

did take place, in Plymouth.

The Chief Constable's wife kicked off, it was a close-fought game,

and the strikers eventually beat the police 2-1.

Despite the strikers' very real grievances, somehow,

the spirit of British fair play tempered disorder and militancy.

Nine days into the strike, King George V noted in his diary,

"Our old country can well be proud of itself.

"not a shot has been fired and no-one killed.

"It shows what a wonderful people we are."

Their point made, but their demands unmet,

most strikers soon returned to work.

But the miners, all one million of them, stayed out.

And among them were the men

of the Lewis Merthyr Colliery in South Wales.

Now three months into their strike, with food running short

and prospects bleak,

this whole community took to the streets together.

But it wasn't to demonstrate.

It was to stage a carnival.

Ivor England's father was one of the striking miners who joined the parade.

I'm amazed that the men, they had collars and ties on, they had their

flat caps on, they had a laughter in them, didn't they? A humour in them.

My father, my grandfather, told me people dressed up as all kinds of things.

There were gorillas, and there were tramps,

there were horses, with people boxing on the back of them.

Even the police seemed to enjoy it, you know!

My father dressed up as a child!

Ivor's father, Will,

is seen here on the right,

dressed up in his child's sailor suit.

Why did they think they could survive anything?

I think it was because of their character, that strength was there.

And I think that strength is endemic in places like this.

Regardless of their resilience and their grit,

the miners' efforts ultimately failed.

After six months, desperate for a wage,

they were forced to return to the pits.

There is still an argument about whether a more militant approach

would have served them better.

But whilst the stiff upper lip might have helped hold Britain

back from all-out revolution, it was no longer

an unquestioning expression of a set of shared values.

In the 1920s, the unifying national stoicism of the war years,

the all-in-it-together, had been split into conflicting class variants,

setting versions of endurance and doggedness

against each other, rather than working in a common cause.

Yet the huge problems of the coming decade would demand a more

coherent national persona.

The British stiff upper lip would have to be refashioned,

reintegrated, reaffirmed.

The 1930s saw the Great Depression spread across the globe.

The fervent rise of Nazism in Germany,

with Britain in a quandary how to respond.

And across the Empire, discontent growing at British rule.

But, in response,

instead of stiffening before the many challenges,

Britain arguably loosened up and tried to have a good time.

# Stiff upper lip, stout fellow

# Carry on, old bean

# Chin up, keep muddlin' through... #

The national character in the 1930s

did shift in subtle ways,

to become a bit more gentle, a bit more domesticated,

inward-looking, and also more humorous.

And that was when Gershwin wrote his song about the stiff upper lip,

and it became an international symbol of a slightly silly Englishman

who couldn't express his feelings, but wanted to rule an empire.

# ..Sober or blotto

# This is our motto

# Keep muddlin' through. #

It wasn't just foreigners like Gershwin

who saw the increasingly anachronistic side

to British national identity as something to laugh at.

This is Canterbury, home to the British Cartoon Archive.

In April 1934, a 25-year-old cartoonist, Graham Laidler,

who worked for Punch magazine under the pen name Pont,

began a series he called The British Character.

It was a huge success.

This is the first cartoon in a series of about 100 drawings.

It's called Adaptability to Foreign Conditions.

The joke being that they haven't adapted in the slightest.

There are four Brits abroad playing Bridge

in the middle of the African jungle.

The three gentlemen are in black tie, obviously,

dressed for dinner, and the lady is in hat and jewellery.

And the detail of the picture is absolutely fantastic.

If you look closely outside the tent,

there's a toothbrush in a little pot and there's a welcome mat

at the opening of the tent.

And they are maintaining this show.

And the most extraordinary thing is the look on the men's faces,

almost as though they hadn't noticed that they were abroad.

And it's just Bridge as usual.

Of course, by the mid-1930s, as Pont is deftly revealing here,

confidence in Britain's global standing had begun to wobble.

This spectacle was becoming less convincing,

the illusion of power is actually quite fragile,

and the characters are more fallible.

And, of course, that's why it's so funny.

Like Britain itself in the era of Appeasement,

Pont's British characters seem oblivious to events.

But is it admirable or wrong-headed

to carry on regardless when the ship may be sinking?

This was published in 1938.

"The British Character.

"Ability to be Ruthless."

And it shows two parents taking back a very sad

and worried-looking small boy to boarding school.

And they're keeping their distance away from him,

showing no emotion at all.

A very resonant cartoon for those of us who went off to boarding school.

The question unwritten is, well, the boy doesn't want to

go back to school, but he must go, and it didn't do me any harm.

And I'm sure it's up in a number of therapists' waiting rooms.

Pont's work struck such a chord with his readers that he received

torrents of fan mail,

including lots of suggestions for future cartoons.

This is a letter from Margaret George.

And she said, "When this snapshot was developed, it was so like

"your British Character series of drawings that we felt we should

"send it to you. We call it The Tendency to Picnic in All Weathers."

And there's Margaret and her friend

resolutely having a good time.

Only a couple of months later, this cartoon appeared in Punch,

called The Picnickers.

And there they are in the driving rain, trying to enjoy themselves.

Is it life imitating art, art imitating life, or both?

A wartime air raid.

Panic, as civilians run for their lives.

'Go home! Go home! Get out of the square!

'Get out of the streets! Go home!

'Get out of the streets!'

Not much evidence of keeping calm in a crisis here.

But this is fiction.

This terrifying footage is taken from the 1936 film Things to Come,

written by HG Wells, adapted from one of his own novels.

An unnamed enemy is attacking an unnamed English city.

But everyone who saw the film knew perfectly well

that the city was London and the enemy were the Germans.

It wasn't just Wells who thought in the face of enemy attack,

Britons would go to pieces.

In April 1939, the government received

a report from a specially commissioned team of psychiatrists.

They warned that air attacks on the Home Front could create

three times as many mental casualties as physical ones,

thus swamping their institutions with millions of psychiatric cases.

One director of an Institute said he would be unable to deal with,

"more than a few teaspoonfuls of the casualties that would undoubtedly occur"

The truth was that no-one really knew what would happen

until the bombs began to fall for real.

The Imperial War Museum holds evidence of how the government

tried to prepare Britons for the worst.

As Baldwin had urged earlier, they were encouraged once again

to draw on that invaluable national resource, themselves.

At the very beginning of the war,

the Ministry of Information concluded

that the way to avoid civil chaos was to put up some posters.

And this is the first one, it says, "Your courage.

"Your cheerfulness. Your resolution will bring us victory."

Now, I can't imagine a lot of German propaganda posters of the time

emphasising cheerfulness.

This is the second poster that went out

and this one's rather more strident.

"Freedom is in peril.

"Defend it with all your might."

And the third in the series

is the best known of all.

"Keep calm and carry on."

We don't know who came up with this incredibly snappy, alliterative

distillation of hundreds of years of British sang-froid, but it was

so catchy and has become so popular that it's now everywhere.

What's less well known is that this poster was never used.

It was to be deployed only in the eventuality of a catastrophic

air strike, or the invasion of Britain itself.

On 7th September 1940, the Blitz began for real.

So how did Britons cope?

The nightly siege of London has begun.

Here they come.

Certainly, audiences both here and abroad were presented with

a portrait of a nation unflappable under fire.

'Never in history has an entire people

'borne so frightful an ordeal so bravely.

'Yes, England can take it!'

The propaganda machine was all about the Stiff Upper Lip.

There is a wonderful film called Fires Were Started where this woman

is on the telephone, and all of a sudden, a bomb drops

just behind her, and she dives under the table.

Then just a second later, you see her crawling out

and she carries on doing her business.

Oh, yes, I'm sorry for the interruption,

we have another message for you...

But, of course, these images of resilient Londoners

can't be taken entirely at face value.

This is a photograph from October 1940,

showing the morning after a German bombing raid.

It became one of the most iconic images of the entire war

and you can see why.

The message is absolutely clear.

Whatever the Luftwaffe can throw at Britain, it will pick itself up,

dust itself down, and carry on as normal.

And, in fact, better than normal.

There's a defiant jauntiness to the milkman in the picture,

the angle of the arm, the smile on his face

as he strides over the rubble.

But it isn't a milkman.

It's the photographer's assistant.

He's borrowed the coat and he's using the bottles as a prop.

Now, the firemen in the background are real,

they are putting out a fire, they are carrying on as normal.

But the photo itself, the image, is a curious mixture of fact

and fiction, of the truth and propaganda.

What was increasingly important was that these constructed images

of the cheery milkman, or the plucky telephonist, were inspiring.

They embodied a version of themselves

with which Britons were proud to identify.

And this encouraged them to live up to their own ideal.

This is Walworth, South London.

It's a neighbourhood which suffered heavy bombing.

At the start of the Blitz, the crypt of St Peter's Church

had been turned into a public air raid shelter.

On October 29th 1940,

18-year-old George Parsons had decided to remain at home nearby.

It was a heavy night, heavy raid.

Then my elder brother came running through the house.

He said, "The church has been hit and Mum's down there."

And my father, who was already here, they allowed him to go to the crypt.

And he just came back to us and he said,

"I'm afraid Mother's been killed. She's died."

But my sister was all right, she survived.

And how did your father react?

Badly.

As we did ourselves, very bad.

We'd lost the kingpin of the family.

Yes. It was terrible.

But it was just a case of carrying on as normal.

And how did you manage to do that?

Well, we just have to get on with life.

And you've got to go to work, you've got to live.

So we just carried on night after night, and morning after morning.

And did everybody feel that this was somehow what the British did?

Yes, exactly.

-How you behaved.

-This was the British all over.

Yes, that is what we did think, that way.

67 people were killed that night at the church -

among 67,000 British civilians who lost their lives during the War.

But despite such heavy losses,

the psychiatrists' pre-war fears of mass hysteria never materialised.

Trying, however, to untangle the truth from the legends

surrounding the Blitz spirit remains a challenge.

Wartime propaganda portrayed Britons as fearless, unflinching,

and carrying on regardless.

Revisionists now want us to believe this was all a myth,

covering up much less heroic behaviour,

profiteering, looting - the kind of thing which DID go on.

I think it would have been astonishing

if everybody at the time had behaved

as if they were in a Noel Coward film or a Pathe newsreel.

The fact remains, and this is not just nostalgia,

that under extreme circumstances,

the majority of the blitzed population behaved admirably.

In the Second World War, huge numbers of people gained strength

from the idea of the stiff upper lip as a national characteristic

and it served them, and ultimately us, pretty well.

In the immediate post-war period -

a time of rebuilding, rationing and austerity -

the authorities still expected Britons to maintain a stoic front.

In this climate, grumbles, anxieties and fears

were all to be kept firmly inside.

But in the 1950s, as prosperity increased,

and a new consumer-driven culture started to develop,

tensions began to emerge.

And there were signs that the "battened down" approach of the past

might be out of step with the impulses of the modern age.

'Sorry, just a little interruption. Can we hold it for a minute, please?

'Hello there. How are you? We've got a special message for somebody,

'and it's for you, Anna Neagle, because This Is Your Life.'

This Is Your Life was a new television format,

imported from the United States,

and broadcast live into millions of British homes.

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you the story

of the First Lady of the British screen.

In February 1958, overwhelmed by the emotion of it all,

actress Anna Neagle was reduced to tears.

Surely, understandable behaviour?

Well, no, not in the 1950s.

Now, the moving story...

Today, a TV celebrity choking back the tears

is what every TV director seems to want.

But then, the British press was scathing.

The Daily Mail condemned "this revolting, maudlin mush!"

And the presenter, Eamonn Andrews, was singled out for criticism

for failing to rein in Anna Neagle's distress.

The Guardian's TV critic advised him,

when confronted with a distraught woman,

"The only thing is to hiss some taunt

"that will make her so cross that anger will dry her tears."

Goodnight, Vienna opposite Jack Buchanan.

In the ultimate insult, the Guardian remarked,

"It's all very American."

Now, I think we've been able to show some of the qualities

that have not only made up Anna Neagle the star,

but Anna Neagle the woman.

Critics may have cringed, but this kind of television was here to stay.

We're just... I hope you're feeling as happy as we are.

Old boundaries were being rejected,

as a new generation grew up in the '60s,

awash with the luxuries of peace and prosperity,

greater social mobility and sexual freedom.

No wonder that the relevance of the stiff-upper-lipped approach to life

began to be questioned.

Perhaps surprisingly,

it was a set of rather conservative-looking Oxbridge graduates

who were amongst the first to put the boot in -

Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller.

On the 10th May 1961, their controversial show

opened at the Fortune Theatre in London.

It was called Beyond The Fringe.

In times of times of trouble and sorrow and hopelessness

and despair,

amid the hurly-burly of modern life,

if ever you're tempted to say,

"Oh,

"stuff this for a lark...!"

LAUGHTER

The Beyond The Fringe team

made fun of clergymen, judges, politicians,

they even laughed at the Prime Minister.

Yet perhaps most daring of all,

they decided that Britain's "Finest Hour"

was a suitable subject for comedy.

Perkins.

-Sorry to drag you away from the fun, old boy.

-That's all right, sir.

War's not going very well, you know.

Oh, my God!

We are two down, and the ball's in the enemy court.

War is a psychological thing, Perkins,

rather like a game of football.

You know how in a game of football,

-ten men often play better than eleven?

-Yes, sir.

-Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man.

-Sir.

Perkins, I want you to lay down your life.

Yes, sir.

We need a futile gesture at this stage...

LAUGHTER

As a small boy, I listened to the record that my parents had bought

of this show, and thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

And as I see the Aftermyth of War sketch as I get older,

I find it not only funny, but curiously moving.

'Goodbye, Perkins.'

God, I wish I was going, too.

Goodbye, sir. Or is it "au revoir"?

No, Perkins.

LAUGHTER

I asked the sketch's co-author, Alan Bennett,

about taking a pot-shot at one of the nation's most sacred cows.

How did the audience react to that sketch about the war?

Well, badly.

In the sense that occasionally, I would be hissed,

which, because I was so pleased with myself,

I was rather gratified by

and felt that this was true satire and that I'd actually hit home.

I had a pretty quiet war, really.

I was one of the few. We were stationed down at Biggin Hill.

One Sunday, we got word Jerry was coming in...

'We were used to people walking out

'because when we were on tour,'

the tour finished at Brighton

and Brighton couldn't stand it at all -

the seats were going up

like pistol shots throughout

and...and people were outraged.

England lay like a green carpet below me.

The War seemed worlds away.

'It was ripe for it, in the sense that

'it had been the stuff of private comedy'

before it went public.

Until that time, nobody had thought

that you could do it on the stage

and, as it were, make money out of it, really.

I remember that last weekend I'd spent there

with Celia, that summer of '39.

LAUGHTER

The Queen came here to see...?

Yes, she did. Yeah, she came and she sat in about the fourth row.

But in those days, a royal party

in a theatre was an absolute frost.

It absolutely killed the audience stone dead,

there wasn't a laugh

from start to finish.

She was not amused at all?

I don't know... Nobody else was.

If she was, I don't know.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

Suddenly, Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of cloud.

I let him have it, and I think I must have got him in the wing

because he spiralled past me out of control.

As he did so - I'll always remember this -

I caught a glimpse of his face.

You know...he smiled.

Funny thing, war.

LAUGHTER

This kind of satire wasn't Pont's gentle send-up

of "the British character" of the 1930s.

It felt more like a final curtain call

for something whose time had definitely passed.

So, goodbye, stiff upper lip,

or is it "au revoir"?

It was all very well for young Oxbridge satirists

to smash the cut-glass understatement of their parents' generation.

But traditional reserve and endurance

still informed the way many ordinary people dealt with tragedy.

What was changing, however,

was that the line between the personal and the public

was being eroded.

Now we were all watching.

And even 50 years on,

relating for this film what happened in this community in South Wales

in October 1966 is unsettling.

It still feels uncomfortable, intrusive.

REPORTER: Just after nine o'clock this morning,

this mountain of coal slag, half a mile high

and soaked with two days' rain,

began to slide towards the little town of Aberfan.

240 children were in the school.

Within seconds, they were engulfed.

One of those children

was Brian Williams.

I think it was about 9:15.

All that I remember hearing was...

an aeroplane coming in to land,

and the noise getting louder and louder and louder.

And we actually watched the classroom wall

split from bottom to top.

And then, for about 30 seconds,

complete silence,

and then, um, a lot of crying,

a lot of screaming.

REPORTER: Everybody now is calling for quiet.

And we'll see if anything can be heard.

Local people, many of them parents, mounted a rescue operation.

Their calm, as the tragedy unfolded, seemed extraordinary.

Every moment was captured by camera crews.

Well, I know where my son is at the moment -

he's buried in that end classroom up there.

And what about your other child?

Well, she's all right, she is. My little girl is all right.

Have you got anybody in the school?

Yes, a little boy.

-How old is he?

-Ten.

Do you know what's happened to him?

No, I'm afraid he's underneath the...the rubble.

There were 144 people killed that day -

116 of them were children.

The compilers of such grim statistics

record that it was not the highest number of children's deaths

in a single British disaster.

In 1883, for instance,

over 180 children were crushed to death in a theatre stairwell

in the Victoria Hall in Sunderland, after watching a magic show.

Then, too, there were shocked reports in the newspapers.

There were letters from Britons all round the country

offering condolences.

There was a memorial fund set up.

There was a heartfelt tribute from the Queen, Queen Victoria.

But there was no television.

There were no victims addressing YOU directly,

there were no reporters asking those victims to tell YOU how they felt.

REPORTER: Standing with me here,

we have one of the luckiest little girls in the village,

because she was one of four children

who escaped from her class.

How do you feel now? Are you a bit better?

Yes, thank you.

Are you feeling all right now?

What about your friends?

Many members of the public felt reporters had gone too far...

..and there were angry letters to The Times.

One woman wrote complaining that reporters were parading

the community's grief,

even they were seeking crude entertainment.

Huw Wheldon, who was Controller of Programmes at the BBC,

wrote back defending the Corporation's coverage.

"The nation wanted to know,

"and had the right to know what was happening.

"It wanted, even in some measure,

"to share the storm of grief that was descending on the valley,

"or, if there was to be any hope, to share that hope."

Events here in Aberfan were starting a still-unfinished debate

about media intrusion

and about how appropriate it is for the British public

not to stand back, but to join in someone else's grief.

Meanwhile, for the survivors, there was little professional help

and little clarity about whether sharing their emotions

or keeping them in was the best way to cope.

Brian Williams was trying to come to terms

with the death of his elder sister, June.

I do recall a gentleman

coming to our house

and my mother saying to me,

"Brian, do you want to speak to this gentleman about..." Blah, blah, blah.

"..about what happened?"

And I... Basically, what I said to him was,

"Well, can you fetch my sister back?"

And he said, "No."

I said, "There's nothing really

"I can talk to you about, then."

So I found myself, and a lot of my friends found as well,

is that we dealt with it between each other

and we looked after each other, and that's how we got through it.

# O Cyrmu, O Cyrmu... #

In 1968, encouraged by their wives,

who'd set up their own support group,

grieving fathers formed the Ynysowen Male Voice Choir.

Brian Williams, like his father before him,

is a dedicated member.

The choir was everything then to my dad,

so going twice a week to practice and going away

with the boys, you know, it was everything.

It's done so much for so many people, I think,

kept them going, perhaps where a lot would have given up.

Keeps the spirit alive.

# ..O Cyrmu, O Cyrmu... #

The choir is clearly an extraordinary vehicle

for both emotional control and emotional release.

It's also a testament to the fact that genuine self-help

and a traditional strength of character

have enabled this community to survive.

MUSIC: "Love To Love You, Baby" by Donna Summer

Across the world, in California,

they were putting a whole new spin on feelings.

And we were watching with interest.

Because by the early '70s, repression was on the way out

and self-expression coming in.

Opening up, letting out, sharing!

At retreats like this, California's Esalan Institute,

psychotherapists were instructing thousands of eager visitors

that the way to live a more happy and contented life

was to be honest about your emotions.

As this British documentary revealed,

we were mesmerised by this new panacea, a good hug.

'At Esalan, they believe that one day, this sort of thing will be

'a regular feature of our daily life.'

That wasn't, yet, the case back in Britain.

But it wouldn't be long.

And one of the best ways to spot this seismic shift in values

is to look back at what women were reading.

This is the February 1972 edition of Good Housekeeping

and it's largely devoted to good housekeeping,

being the perfect wife and mother in a beautiful home.

And there's a typical feature here.

"Don't dash away with the smoothing iron because it gives you back and knuckle ache."

And then a very helpful family meal.

Here we are, kidney flambe.

"It's simple when you know how."

But hidden away amidst this traditional fare is an advertisement

for a very different sort of magazine.

"Cosmopolitan, a sensational new magazine for women."

But "What sort of Woman?" Cilla Black, yes.

Mary Whitehouse, no.

Barbra Streisand, yes.

Mrs Thatcher, no.

Tell me, where did you get the idea to come here for your holidays?

'Cosmopolitan, a sensational new magazine for women

'who are interested in men, love, fashion,

'travel, films, beauty, and themselves.'

Like hugging your way to happiness, Cosmopolitan was an American import.

When the first UK edition for March 1972 was released,

it sold out in under 24 hours.

The Times reported,

"A mighty orgasmic roar could be heard throughout the land."

This is the very first edition of Cosmopolitan

and it contains many of the features you'd expect to see now.

There's diet, there's fashion, there's sex.

There's even Michael Parkinson talking about his vasectomy.

But there was more to Cosmo than this.

The raunchiness was a big part of it,

but Cosmo wouldn't have happened without some serious feminism.

And the fashion and sex tips were coupled with heavyweight advice

from leading psychiatrists for a newly liberated generation.

This article, from July 1973,

was urging Cosmo's readers to tell the truth.

"No man or woman can ever hope to find self-contentment

"until that person is content to be truly and simply himself or herself,

"without artifice and without deception."

And that kind of thinking influenced a whole "Me" generation.

Cosmopolitan.

All of a sudden, we turn ourselves from a society

which is about civic contribution

to...the notion of individuality is where it's at.

Now, with individuality, how do you express your individuality?

Part of the way you express your individuality

isn't only through clothes and occupation,

it is through genuine forms of emotional expression.

In the 1970s, even some men started talking from the heart

about themselves.

Opening up about your childhood,

your relationships,

your self-esteem,

and your sex life

would free you up and was bound to produce a happier, healthier you.

I think the most powerful arguments against the stiff upper lip

were really medical ones. It was bad for you.

This was the rise of a sort of therapy culture,

but, both physically and mentally,

having a stiff upper lip, being repressed, was bad for you.

This was a Freudian view, it becomes the absolutely standard view.

The stiff upper lip had been based on the premise that

suffering in silence was a service to society.

But from the 1970s onwards,

popular culture has been championing the idea

that an individual's first duty is to listen to themselves.

Critics of this cultural shift

claimed that all this self-examination

would only make us dissatisfied with ourselves and less happy

and, in the process, we would lose our traditional backbone,

our national ability to keep going, to not throw in the towel.

Theirs, however, was not the general view.

The overwhelming historical momentum

was towards greater public emotional openness,

towards more display of shared, communal feeling.

One personality, more than any other,

seemed to represent this change.

She was the incarnation of a new emotionally literate nation.

Diana wasn't cold or stuffy, she seemed warm and inclusive.

And people felt they knew her. She seemed to behave like one of them.

And in that sense, she was a very unroyal Royal.

She didn't comply with their established,

very formal code of conduct,

and she refused increasingly to play the traditional role

of dutiful wife, mother and princess.

Instead of tolerating her unhappiness,

she was candid about it. She went on television

and forced back the tears whilst talking about her failed marriage

and her intimate private life.

And people loved her, or not, for exactly that.

'This is BBC Radio in London.

'A French government minister has said within the past few minutes

'that Diana, Princess of Wales, has died.

'He said she was killed in a car crash in central Paris.

'I'll repeat that. Diana, Princess of Wales, has been killed in a car crash

'in the centre of Paris...'

I was driving back in the early hours of the morning,

turned on the radio and I heard the announcement that Diana was dead.

Ballet dancer Daniel Jones was a personal friend of Diana's.

We thought, we have to do something, what can we do?

And we stopped off at a garage and bought some really pathetic flowers,

the only ones that they had in there,

and we came to Kensington Palace

and we literally popped these flowers in the gate.

Little did Daniel know what he had started.

More than a million bouquets, cards and messages

from people she didn't know piled up outside the palace,

alongside that first floral tribute from Daniel.

Indeed, in death, Diana seemed even more influential

than she'd been in life.

Did you get the feeling they'd come from everywhere,

as though Britain had converged?

Yes, it was all walks.

It was the very, very wealthy, it was the very, very poor.

I mean, the cultural diversity, the age range, everybody was touched.

But they really did feel that they knew her.

It was the life that they were all reading in the papers and magazines,

and the impact that she'd had was incredible.

And to try and understand it, it was virtually impossible,

it just sent you into this kind of trance about - who am I,

what am I, why am I here?

And what did you make of the people who weren't feeling as sad as you?

I suppose I felt a bit sorry for them. Ha-ha!

'In truth, I was one of those

'that Daniel would have

'felt sorry for. At the time,'

it was almost sacrilegious to admit

that Diana's death didn't affect us all in the same way.

And in my entire time as Editor,

there's never been an edition of Private Eye

that's caused as much controversy.

This is the cover that we published on 5th September, 1997.

The headline was, "Media To Blame,"

which had fast become the general consensus.

We chose to run it with a picture of the crowd outside

Buckingham Palace, with bubbles coming from the crowd.

One saying, "The papers are a disgrace!"

"Yeah, I couldn't get one anywhere."

"Borrow mine, it's got a picture of the car."

Now, inside, we spent a lot of time attacking the hypocrisy

of the papers who, only days before Diana's death, were presenting her

as some sort of wastrel and strumpet,

hanging around in the Mediterranean with playboys,

and then, as soon as she died, were saying she was a saint

and she was the Queen of Hearts.

But it wasn't having a go at the press that got us into trouble,

it was this suggestion that the general public,

some of our readers, might perhaps, in some way,

be complicit in that hysterical hypocrisy.

And essentially, what we'd done was to hurt their feelings.

We received an avalanche of letters and I printed two pages of them

in the next issue of the magazine, split into anti and pro.

This is the tone of the antis.

"Shitbag. The tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales,

"has brought home to me what a truly shitty magazine you've become.

"You're what creeps out covered in green slime from beneath large flat stones.

"By God, I wish you ill!"

"The laugh's on you, this time, arsehole!"

And one of our readers offering his own satirical comment.

"Your wholly inappropriate and pathetic attempt

"at ridiculing the nation's very real

"and deeply-felt grief plumbs new depths of tastelessness.

"You leave me with no alternative

"but to renew my subscription with immediate effect."

In this atmosphere of heightened emotion,

the Monarch's behaviour also split opinion.

"Where is Our Queen?" screamed The Sun,

because she chose to stay in Balmoral

with her grieving grandsons who'd lost their mother,

rather than rushing back to London

to offer succour to her distraught subjects.

But blaming the Queen for coldness irritated others.

I certainly wasn't in any way sympathetic to the people demanding

that she should "Go mourn-about,"

I think I said, and that she should

meet the crowds and dab her eyes

and show obvious signs of grief.

But I am sure that's temperamental to other people, you know,

make a lot of what my father would call 'splother'.

But I was brought up to avoid 'splother',

and I hope I do, really.

# Goodbye, England's rose

# May you ever grow in our hearts

# You were the grace that placed itself... #

However they expressed it, when it came to the funeral,

many people found the day very moving,

and for all sorts of reasons.

# ..And you whispered to those in pain

# Now you belong to heaven

# And the stars spell out your name... #

A public event is given life because it allows the individual

to tap into something that's real for them,

either in relation to that figure,

or in relation to a sort of ensemble of emotions

that are represented by that.

We make a conversation that has to relate to our own questions,

griefs, early deaths, sorrows, guilts, and so on.

Events around Diana's death have been credited with proving

the final demise of the stiff upper lip.

But whilst the headlines focused on

the most demonstrative public mourners,

paradoxically, at the heart of it all,

was an example of old-fashioned restraint.

I felt out of kilter with the public mood.

And then I watched the funeral and I was moved.

But ironically, I was most moved not by Elton John's song,

or by Earl Spencer's eulogy, but by the sight of those two young boys

in suits solemnly walking behind their mother's coffin.

Their composure, their attempts to hold it all together

in the midst of the public spectacle, I found deeply affecting.

Today, we've become so accustomed to people showing their emotion

in public that we tend to forget how recently things were very different.

You've given me something that I can't cope with.

But such is the power of television

and so accepted is the contemporary wisdom

about the unhealthiness of any emotional repression

that it sometimes seems that today's unfettered displays of feeling

have entirely replaced the old expectation to try and control them.

Oh, darling! Look, if ever a room deserved to be cried over...

But I think that in moments of real crisis or adversity,

some residual impulse of the stiff upper lip

does still quietly kick in.

You saw that in London,

as it dealt with and recovered from the 7/7 bombings.

There was just this explosion in the carriage next door

and then there was all this smoke and you couldn't breathe.

You saw it again in the response in the capital

to the summer riots of 2011.

I felt like helping out, it's pretty much as simple as that.

I don't think it's entirely coincidental

that THE catchphrase of our day, resurrected from 70-plus years ago,

is - Keep Calm and Carry On.

Yes, it's funny, and it's easy to parody,

and it's become an ubiquitous post-modern joke.

But I think there's a hint of admiration in the laughter,

a hint of envy in the nostalgia,

because, despite its faults

and its failings, British reserve, stoical sang froid,

grinning and baring it, might still have something to recommend it.

But perhaps I'm wrong.

Perhaps the stiff upper lip is finished, it's over,

rightly consigned to the history books.

And if that's the case, no point in making a fuss about it,

no point in crying, we'll have to deal with it,

sort ourselves out, and get on with it!

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