The Looking Glass War Strange Days: Cold War Britain

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: # How can I be sure

# In a world that's constantly changing?

# How can I be sure

# Where I stand with you? #

It's easy to forget that for almost 50 years,

Britain stood on the brink of Armageddon.

# Whenever I... Whenever I am away from you

# I want to die... #

There was a war that shaped our society.

# How do I know? #

Welcome to Cold War Britain.

The nuclear stand-off between East and West

took us all to the edge of destruction.

But the Cold War was also touched with a dark glamour.

It was fought on surprising new battlefronts

amidst a growing moral murkiness.

But there was much more to this great conflict

than secrets and spies.

It was a war between two different ways of life.

A war of ideas.

A war of shadows.

And a war of the imagination.

If there's one moment that captures the Cold War in our imagination,

it's the early 1960s.

On Berlin's frontline, its presence hung heavy.

Armed soldiers, barbed wire, military checkpoints.

But in Britain, the struggle between East and West

was moving onto a surprising new front.

And at the heart of this new battleground

was the suburban household.

Hello.

I think in this programme,

I'd better tackle a job that I've been putting off for a long time.

In 1962, this house in Ealing, West London,

had a glamorous TV makeover,

at the hands of DIY expert, Barry Bucknell.

Fairly new, this idea having the adhesive actually on the tile,

so there is no spreading of adhesive over the floor.

In the hands of Barry Bucknell,

this place became a temple to modernity.

At its peak, the show was watched by some seven million viewers -

the kind of aspirational young people

who dreamed of making the very best of their homes.

But as part of Britain's new army of DIY enthusiasts,

they'd also been recruited as foot soldiers

in the great ideological struggle between capitalism and communism.

MUSIC: "Dream, Dream, Dream" by the Everly Brothers

# Dream...

# Dream, dream, dream... #

Half a century before our love of property porn,

more and more ordinary families

were falling in love with home improvement

and getting a kick out of buying shiny, new mod-cons.

This was a genuine watershed in our modern story.

The moment when we began to define ourselves less as citizens

than as consumers - active members of the affluent society.

But the home furnishings boom

was also a sign of just how much more the capitalist West

could offer its people than the Communist East.

In 1959, most ordinary people

were more likely to live somewhere like this

than in one of the ideal homes in the brochure.

But if they worked hard and put money by,

then they could reasonably hope to live somewhere much, much better.

And that was one of the key things that divided them from their counterparts in the Eastern Bloc.

Since the late '40s,

the welfare state had given people support and security.

And in an age of full employment and soaring living standards,

Marxism appealed only to a tiny minority of idealistic intellectuals.

So, by the end of the 1950s,

it wasn't Communism that seemed likely to deliver a better future,

but for the first time, another C-word - consumerism.

You know, Karl Marx once said

that religion was the opium of the people.

But who needs religion when you've got white goods?

In just two years after 1957,

the number of British homes with a fridge

rose by a staggering 60 per cent.

And even at the highest diplomatic level,

the world's leaders recognised the importance of the domestic front.

In 1959, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev

took on American Vice President Richard Nixon,

at a Moscow trade fair.

KHRUSHCHEV SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

NEWSREEL: 'Mr Khrushchev is telling Mr Nixon

'that Russia will catch up to America and wave as she passes us by.'

'So he says in words and actions.'

HE CONTINUES TO SPEAK IN RUSSIAN

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

In the West, few people were convince by Khrushchev's bravado.

But while the capitalist powers

were confident of winning the contest

for consumer's hearts and minds,

they were increasingly worried that in other fields,

they were falling behind.

Over the pursuit of material satisfaction

loomed the dark shadow of the Cold War.

Each side was hunting for the technological breakthrough

that could mean global domination.

And at the beginning of the 1960s,

Russian scientists pulled off a feat so impressive, so historic,

than even the West couldn't help but applaud.

Suddenly, it was the Soviet Union

that looked glamorous and sophisticated -

the crucible of modernity.

CHEERING

In July 1961, Manchester came out to greet a very special visitor.

Major Yuri Gagarin.

MUSIC: "Destination Moon" by Dinah Washington

# Come and take a trip

# In my rocket ship... #

As the first man in space, Gagarin had shot to international fame

on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

# Destination, moon!

# We'll travel fast as light... #

A century earlier, Communism's founding fathers,

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,

had seen Manchester as the epitome of cutthroat capitalism.

But now the city turned out to applaud Communism's latest pin-up.

When Gagarin arrived on his goodwill tour,

despite the inevitable Mancunian rain,

he was hailed as a local hero.

# So away we'll steal In my space mobile... #

Gagarin was driven here - to Manchester Town Hall -

for a grand civic reception in his honour.

Outside, more than 6,000 people were waiting -

many of them wearing little pins with the hammer and sickle.

The Police said it was the biggest crowd here since VE day.

And as his car drew up,

they hoisted the red flag alongside the Union Jack,

and the band struck up the Soviet anthem.

Moscow could hardly have wished for better propaganda.

Man in space, official!

The people of Manchester weren't alone in falling for the Major.

You thought he was handsome? I certainly did.

He gave me a big heart throb.

I say, very best British good luck to the chap.

I liked his uniform, it's the best uniform I've ever seen,

and he's good looking and all that.

You've been listening to the girls, haven't you? Yeah.

For most people, the sheer thrill of conquering space

transcended the ideological divisions of the Cold War.

But not everyone was so enthused by the Kremlin's achievements.

I still feel that um the Western world is very much in advance

and that this thing

is just a matter of trying to get there first every time.

But I think it's going to make the people very nervous of what's going to happen next.

The Soviet Union's conquest of the skies

upped the ante in an intensely competitive arms race.

Following our American allies' lead,

Britain was investing in increasingly sleek

and sophisticated arms and aircraft.

And many people took pride and reassurance

from our independent arsenal of atomic hardware.

But some were becoming increasingly critical

of Britain's dangerous infatuation with high-tech tools of death.

In January 1958, a group of high-minded activists

made their way to the heart of the City of London.

Meeting in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral,

they committed themselves to a new mass campaign

against Britain's nuclear obsession.

As the playwright JB Priestly put it,

three glasses too many of vodka or of Bourbon on the rocks,

and the wrong button might be pressed,

so Britain, they thought, should lead the world.

"We must give up our nuclear weapons

"and persuade other countries to follow suit

"by the force of our moral example."

AIR-RAID SIREN

The idea that we might only be the push of a button away from Armageddon

would dominate the nightmares of a generation.

And this was the inspiration

behind the new campaign for nuclear disarmament.

That Easter, CND's idealists marched from Trafalgar Square

to the atomic weapons research establishment at Aldermaston.

CND was a classic movement

of the well-meaning, Guardian-reading middle classes.

And almost by accident, they came up with a unique British contribution to the iconography of the Cold War,

and one of the most successful pieces of branding of the 20th Century.

All thanks to the CND supporter and graphic designer, Gerry Holtom.

Now, there's different explanations of where he got the idea from.

One is that it's a version of the Christian cross.

Another is that it incorporates the semaphore symbols for N and D.

But Holtom himself said that his inspiration was rather more artistic.

Specifically, this painting - the Third of May 1808 -

by the Spanish artist, Francisco Goya.

"I was in despair," Holtom said, "Deep despair, so I drew myself -

"the representative of an individual in despair.

"Hands outstretched, palm outwards and downwards,

"in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad."

And when you formalise that in a drawing, you get this.

Gerry Holtom's even better at it than I am.

Now, if it had been me, I would have trademarked this

and moved to the Caribbean on the proceeds,

but Gerry Holtom was quite a nice guy, so he didn't,

and the result was one of the most iconic

and recognisable international symbols of the last half-century.

The arrival of CND triggered an urgent debate

about perhaps the biggest moral quandary Britain had ever known,

and provoked passionate disagreements

between hand-wringing idealists and hard-headed realists.

If we have an atomic war of this kind, it's the finish for Britain.

And I personally feel that it is time people of Britain realised it.

Do you think we should keep the H bomb?

Well, as long as the other countries do, I think we should, yes.

If we really are interested in the future of our children,

it is the smallest thing we can do to join this procession.

Russia's got it and she's producing it on mass production, really,

and what with what we've got, why should we stop it?

MUSIC: "Optimistic" by Skeeter Davis

# How long is the river...? #

The strange paradox of British life in the early 1960s

is that most people were both more secure and less secure than ever.

We were richer, more comfortable, better fed and better housed.

And yet, the world might end at the touch of a button.

Nothing captured the tension between prosperity and paranoia

better than the adventures of post-war Britain's most enduring and most dashing hero.

A man who became synonymous with the superficial glamour of the Cold War.

On the 10th of October 1963, the Times announced

the latest development in the Cold War's nuclear game.

With the news that France's Mirage 4 atomic bombers had just come into commission.

But interestingly, it devoted rather more attention

to a very different kind of story.

The review of a new film -

a second outing for a secret agent

who, according to the Times's reviewer,

acts out our less reputable fantasies

without ever going too far.

And the extraordinary, record-breaking success of From Russia with Love

is a reminder that the Cold War wasn't just the stuff of nightmares,

but could also be the stuff of fantasy.

You're one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen.

Thank you but I think my mouth is too big.

No, it's the right size.

Ian Fleming's James Bond had little time for moral introspection.

Mind you, wrestling with your conscience isn't easy

when you're also fighting off a woman with daggers in her boots.

SHE GASPS AND CHOKES

Bond is an old-fashioned, square-jawed British hero,

updated for the modern world of the Cold War.

Horrible woman.

Yes.

She's had her kicks.

But the Bond phenomenon also reflected a society

that was more aspirational and more materialistic than ever.

Even before the first Bond film had been released,

the books were enormously popular,

selling more than 1.5 million copies.

But the real key to their success was this cheap paperback format

which made them immediately accessible.

As Fleming himself put it,

"The lower classes find them equally readable,

"although one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail

"are outside their experience and in part incomprehensible."

But this was a newly affluent Britain,

in which Fleming's cocktail of sex, snobbery and sadism

was a winning formula.

Hello. Hello. Agent Bind.

James? No, Charlie.

Number? Double-oh, "oh".

Bond rapidly became a fixture of British popular culture.

And an obvious candidate for the Carry On treatment.

I am Doctor Crow. You are surprised?

Yes, I am, I expected you to be a man.

Or a woman. I am both.

Britain's manufacturers were also quick to cash in

on Bond's famous gadgets.

The message being that in the technological field, Britain still held its own.

But not everybody bought into Bond.

It's the consumer goods ethic, really.

That everything around you, all the dull things of life,

are suddenly animated by this wonderful cachet of espionage.

The things on our desk that could explode.

Er, our ties, which could suddenly take photographs.

These give to a drab and materialistic existence a kind of magic.

The man who saw through Bond's glittering veneer

to the moral void beneath

was another spy novelist.

The former British intelligence officer, John Le Carre.

And he had no truck with Fleming's crude world view

and materialistic fantasies.

In 1961, the year the Communists built the Berlin Wall,

John Le Carre was stationed in Bonn,

and with one of his British embassy colleagues,

he travelled here to Berlin, to see the situation for himself.

Now, Le Carre knew better than anybody

the kind of ethical compromises required by the Cold War.

And he realised at once that the coming of the Berlin Wall

would only make the moral fog murkier than ever.

The atmosphere of Le Carre's most powerful novel,

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, hangs heavy with existential doubt.

It was published in 1963, at the height of Bond-mania,

but it could hardly be more different

from one of Ian Fleming's escapist thrillers.

Le Carre's book doesn't really have a hero.

It has an anti-hero - Alec Leamus -

a very different kind of character from the dashing James Bond.

Bond is tall and debonair.

Leamus is grey and shambling.

Bond lives in fashionable Chelsea, Leamus in rundown Bayswater.

Bond's flat is smart and modern, Leamus's is small and squalid.

Bond drives an Aston Martin, Leamus catches the bus.

The grubby reality of Cold War espionage

was underlined by the film adaptation.

Deliberately shot in black-and-white,

it starred a haggard Richard Burton,

his legendary good looks, now worn and weary.

What the hell do you think spies are?

Moral philosophers measuring everything they do

against the will of God or Karl Marx?

They're not, they're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me.

Little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands,

civil servants playing cowboys and Indians

to brighten their rotten little lives.

Do you think they sit like monks in a cell

balancing right against wrong?

The story ends at the Berlin wall.

His mission accomplished, Leamus has the chance

to return from the East and come in from the cold.

But by now our faith in his moral mission has been fatally eroded

because amid the twists and turns of le Carre's narrative,

Alec Leamus has left the ethical high ground far behind.

In 1966, Le Carre gave an interview to the the Listener magazine.

"We in the West," he said,

"Have always argued that in a non-Communist world,

"the one thing we have in common

"is our belief in the individual, rather than the idea."

"And yet, in the Cold War, we are sacrificing the individual

"in the battle against the collective."

And this, of course, was the dilemma that Britain was facing.

The moral quandary at the heart of the Cold War.

During the 1960s, these ethical contortions

were brought home to the British public

by a wave of genuine and very seedy spy scandals.

And more than any other, it was the story of John Vassall

that felt like it might have come straight from one of John Le Carre's novels.

If there's one sex and spying scandal

that most people remember from the 1960s,

it is, of course, the Profumo scandal of 1963.

But I think it was the Vassall case a year earlier -

with its illicit homosexuality and its unambiguous treachery -

that did most damage.

Not just to Harold Macmillan's Conservative government,

but to the British establishment more generally.

It all began when a young clerk working at the British embassy in Moscow

visited a high-class hotel for a private dinner party.

After dinner, the British clerk began to feel a little bit woozy,

so his host suggested that he lie down on a convenient divan.

And then, the tone of the evening began to change.

"I can recollect," the clerk said later,

"Having my underpants in my hand.

"And holding them up in the air at the request of others.

"Then I was lying on the bed, naked.

"And as far as I can recollect, there were three other men on the bed with me.

"I cannot remember exactly what took place."

But the clerk's little memory lapse was neither here nor there,

because unfortunately for him,

the whole thing had been photographed by the KGB.

The Russians used the explicit images

to blackmail John Vassall into giving them top-secret documents,

first in Moscow, and later, back in London.

Years afterwards, he ruefully reflected on his plight.

Er, it's rather like a spider's web.

Er, once you are inside the web, there is no way of getting out.

The finesse and the way with which they do these things

is beyond the comprehension of most people.

In fact, I would say that the Russians

do it better than anybody in the world.

That was how Vassall signalled when he wanted to arrange an urgent meeting with his Russian contact,

it was alleged at Bow Street today.

A chalk circle on this plane tree here in Duchess of Bedford Walk,

just half a mile away from the Russian embassy.

To the British press, this was a new kind of front-page scandal.

Prurient voyeurism dressed up as pious concern for our national security.

And of course, Fleet Street loved it.

As one sensational headline followed another,

Britain's prime minister, Harold Macmillan,

seemed completely adrift, but he couldn't say that he hadn't been warned.

The story goes that in the spring of 1962,

Macmillan's cabinet secretary warned him that a clerk from the admiralty

was selling state secrets in the clubs around Victoria.

But Macmillan was having none of it.

"Nonsense," he said. "There are no clubs around Victoria."

Macmillan's rather off-hand remark would come back to haunt him

because when Vassall's treachery became public,

the prime minister's greatest strength -

his reassuringly tweedy, patrician persona -

became his greatest weakness.

At Vassall's trial,

it emerged that for years,

he had been living in a fashionable apartment

well beyond his civil service means -

all thanks to his Soviet paymasters.

And yet, nobody had smelt a rat.

Vassall went down for 18 years.

And although Harold Macmillan clung on to his job,

in many people's eyes, he was now on probation.

But in the autumn of 1962, Macmillan had other things on his mind.

MACMILLAN: Hello, can you hear me now? Over.

AMERICAN MALE VOICE: Yes, sir, I hear you very clearly

and I'll hand the phone to the President. Over.

For one week in October,

the Prime Minister was in almost daily conversation with the President of the United States

as the Cold War came terrifyingly close to turning hot.

I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate

this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace.

On the 22nd of October, the very day Vassall was sentenced,

John F Kennedy revealed that Soviet missiles had been discovered in Cuba.

Hello, er, Prime Minister. Hello, what's the news now? Over.

The Cuban crisis plunged East and West

into a deadly game of high stakes poker.

As the nation watched and waited,

Macmillan was desperate to ensure that Britain would have some say over the fate of the world.

Now, Macmillan was almost 70, whereas Kennedy was just 45,

but Macmillan was well aware that in this conflict,

it was the younger man, the American, who was really calling the shots

and that he himself was basically just a junior partner.

But Macmillan always liked to see himself as the wise old counsellor

offering all the benefits of his experience.

The Greek to Kennedy's Roman.

MUSIC: "A Mushroom Cloud" by Sammy Salvo

# I want to be happy... #

The world stood at the edge of darkness

and this wasn't one of Ian Fleming's escapist fantasies.

This was a genuine doomsday scenario

that might mean the end of civilisation itself.

# It haunts my future and threatens my schemes... #

Some people could only think of their nearest and dearest.

Among all the stories about British reactions to the Cuban crisis,

this one strikes me as particularly moving.

A father of six kept his three eldest children from school yesterday

so that the whole family could be together during the Cuban crisis.

Mr Peter Gardner, a 44-year-old company director

from Shoreham, Sussex, explained,

"I could not protect my children in a bomb raid -

"nor could anyone else -

"but I feel we should all be together at this dangerous time."

# We pray, we party, we laugh and we pray... #

With the Third World War apparently only moments away,

this was as close as Britain ever came to nuclear annihilation.

# I cling to my baby

# And she clings to me... #

And then, the Kremlin blinked.

The Soviet Union agreed to dismantle the missiles.

The crisis was over.

# There's a mushroom cloud That hangs in the way... #

The people could breathe a great sigh of relief.

# Peace, peace, peace Where did you go?

# Where did you go? #

And so could Harold Macmillan.

But the reality was much, much more frightening

than either Macmillan or the British people had ever guessed.

Because if the missile crisis had escalated,

we would have been the launch pad for the Americans' attack on the Communist Bloc.

All thanks

to a deal struck in the 1950s.

The arrangement was called project Emily.

It sounds innocuous enough,

but under the terms of the deal,

the Americans installed 60 Thor ballistic missiles

on RAF sites up a United Kingdom.

By hosting the Thors,

the Government had effectively drawn a target on Britain

and invited the Kremlin to take aim.

And what neither what the public,

nor - more shockingly - Macmillan himself,

knew during those long days and nights in October

was just how close to that attack Britain almost came.

When Kennedy talked to Macmillan on the phone, he took care to sound inclusive and considerate.

"I will talk to you," he promised on the 26th October,

"Before we do anything of a drastic nature."

But a month later, in a secret meeting with his intelligence chiefs,

Macmillan found out that he had been kept in the dark.

According to Sir Kenneth Strong,

the director of the joint intelligence bureau,

the Americans had been prepared to go it alone -

either irrespective of what their allies thought,

or without consulting their allies at all.

According to Strong, the Americans had seriously considered a pre-emptive strike,

sending their bombers east to hit the key Soviet missile sites.

And if, as Strong feared, the attack failed,

then the Russians would have hit back,

unleashing nuclear Armageddon.

The Cuban crisis was a chilling reminder of Britain's vulnerability.

It left many people convinced that a devastating nuclear war

was now not a possibility, but a terrifying probability.

The Government's rather rose-tinted hope was that if the worst happened,

the British people would rediscover the stoical spirit of the Blitz,

helped by a small army of civil defence wardens

and a flimsy pamphlet

telling you how to turn your house into a fallout shelter.

But the wardens were advised to expect something of a challenge.

Good morning, Mrs Bells. Right, what is it?

I'm your civil defence warden.

Is there any help or advice I could give you?

Wouldn't know, I'm sure.

Read the Householders' Handbook, haven't you?

No. My husband says there's not going to be a war.

All this panic's going to blow over.

Anyway, I got plenty to do without sitting around all day reading books, thank you very much.

The instructions in the Householders' Handbook

are extraordinarily detailed.

There's the different kinds of sirens,

how to prepare your fallout room,

how to protect yourself against radiation.

Even what you'll need in your shelter.

Kettle, towels, rubber gloves.

Even, poignantly, toys for the children.

And yet the tone of this pamphlet

is surprisingly brisk, even a little bit upbeat.

With all the nice pictures, it feels like a DIY manual.

And that, I suppose, was the point -

that with the proper preparation,

you could get through World War Three almost unscathed.

That was very far from the truth.

But in Cold War Britain, the authorities thought it better

to maintain public confidence than to be absolutely honest.

But a BBC director called Peter Watkins

had no time for the Government's half-truths,

and he set out to show the public the awful reality.

'Time - 9.13am.

AIR RAID SIREN

His film was called the War Game.

Move! Come on, come on. Quick.

'This family couldn't afford to build themselves a refuge.

'This could be the way the last two minutes of peace in Britain would look.'

Gather the children!

Peter? Tony? Tony!

One of Britain's first docu-dramas,

it showed what might happen if a nuclear bomb landed on Kent.

And in this scenario,

there was no dashing secret agent to come and save the world.

SCREAMING AND COUGHING

'At this distance, the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball,

'third degree burning of the skin, and ignition of furniture.'

SCREAMING

'12 seconds later, the shock front arrives.'

THUNDEROUS RUMBLING

One of the first things that Peter Watkins did

was to put together this extraordinary list of 112 questions

for all sorts of scientists and experts and organisations -

not just here in Britain, but all over the world.

Some of them are genuinely chilling.

"Does radio-active dust taste?

"Is it gritty in the mouth? Can one ever see it?"

Or this. "What are the effects of mental depression likely to be?

"An increased wish for suicide? For, perhaps, killing off one's family?"

Scary stuff.

You see, Watkins was determined, absolutely determined,

that nobody was going to discredit his film

on the grounds of inaccuracy.

'When the carbon monoxide content of inhaled air exceeds 1.28 per cent,

'it will be followed by death within three minutes.

'This is nuclear war.'

But the War Game's vision of a Britain

where the unlucky ones survived

was so horrific that the BBC refused to show it.

Because the subject was so contentious,

Whitehall officials had been shown a preview.

They let it be known that while it wasn't their decision to make,

they'd prefer the War Game not to be broadcast.

And so, the BBC was placed in a tricky situation.

The BBC executives had a lot of respect, a lot of admiration,

for the power and integrity of Watkins's film.

And they also felt they had an obligation as an independent broadcaster

not to be cowed by the Government.

But they were facing what they saw as a genuine moral dilemma.

Their greatest duty was to the national interest.

And in this case,

they thought that would be served by not showing a film

that might undermine the nuclear deterrent,

that might undermine support for something

they believed was keeping us safe from the threat of Communism.

Ranging ahead! Tank, on!

On!

Loaded! Fire!

MUSIC: "Downtown" by Petula Clark, in German

# Bist du allein von allen Freunden verlassen?

# Dann geh' in die Stadt

# Downtown. #

While people at home

were debating the moral complexities of the Cold War,

there was one group of British citizens for whom the conflict

was still very much a matter of us and them.

# Und hor die Grossstadtmelodie bis in den fruhen Morgen

# Sei wieder froh Da ist alles fur dich da... #

Stationed in West Germany were some 55,000 British troops.

# Come on, downtown... #

This was the British Army of the Rhine.

# Downtown, soviele Lichter, oh!

# Downtown... #

They were joined by their families.

Thousands of woman and children,

for whom bases like this one at Rheindahlen were now home.

The strange world of the British Army of the Rhine

captured in microcosm the two fronts of the Cold War.

A tense military stand-off, and a battle for material satisfaction.

For the families stationed here at Rheindahlen,

the facilities were second to none.

This postcard rather captures the sheer modernity of it all.

There were schools, churches, swimming pools, even cinemas.

Indeed, in many ways,

the families here actually had a much better deal

than a lot of their friends and relatives back home in Britain.

And if you were Mrs Grey from Swansea getting this postcard,

you might actually be a little bit envious.

Well, social life - we have the messes to go to.

We go on a Wednesday night when they show a film,

and on Saturday, when they have some social on.

And if we lived in Civvy Street,

probably the nights we were at the mess, we would watch TV.

The soldiers knew that at any moment,

they might be called into action.

But in a sense, their family's roles were just as important.

While the men on exercise were out shooting,

their wives were out shopping.

For although they were living in West Germany,

they were still playing their part in Britain's consumer revolution.

Maintaining the British presence in Germany came with a hefty price tag.

In the late 1960s,

the cost of keeping the British Army of the Rhine for just 12 months

was a cool ?180 million.

And this was only a fraction of Britain's total defence bill,

which in 1970, came to a whopping 2.8 billion -

well over a tenth of our entire national budget.

And beneath all the facts and figures of the balance sheet,

there was a deeper, more long-term cost.

You see, while Britain was spending so much money on arms and armaments,

we were being overtaken economically by our old rivals,

West Germany and Japan.

Both of which, ironically, were effectively prohibited

from spending so much money on defence.

Now, when you think about the international pressures of the day,

you can understand why successive British governments felt they had to spend their money as they did.

Even so, it is tempting to wonder what Britain would be like

if they had chosen differently.

And that's something to think about

next time you're left waiting an hour for your train.

But while the British economy was beginning to stutter,

we could console ourselves

that we now led the world in popular culture.

And that was to prove just as potent a weapon in the war on Communism

as any tank or missile.

In the mid 1960s,

four young, British men infiltrated the enemy lines...

NEWSREEL, IN RUSSIAN:

The Beatles were the most famous example

of the most dynamic and successful British export of the 1960s...

# It's been a hard day's night... #

Pop music.

In the capitalist West, pop was teenage entertainment.

But in the East, pop was political dynamite.

With its unbridled celebration of sex, choice and freedom,

it seemed a shocking challenge to Communist values.

Now, the Beatles never played East of the Iron Curtain,

but here in Moscow, they were seen by many people

as the supreme champions of Western values.

Soviet music served the interests of the state.

It promoted Russian patriotism and ideological conformity.

But the Beatles were different.

Theirs was the music of individual self-expression.

# Do what you want to do... #

Of course, most ordinary Russians didn't understand the lyrics,

but what they loved was the sound, the style -

the sheer youthful exuberance

that seemed to represent an altogether different way of life.

To the Kremlin, it appeared that the Beatles

had opened up a dangerous new front in the Cold War.

So, the Soviets censors decided to keep them out.

Despite all the state surveillance,

some Beatles records did get through.

What happened was that underground studios

would cut illicit bootleg flexi discs

out of old medical X-rays,

earning them the nickname rock 'n' roll on bones.

# Baby you can drive my car... #

But as the black market in Beatles records boomed,

the Soviet authorities upped the stakes,

commissioning a film that dismissed the Fab Four

as degenerate western puppets.

IN RUSSIAN:

When this failed, The Kremlin tried to co-opt the Beatles...

..with the help of the state record label - Melodiya.

MUSIC: "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da" - cover version

RUSSIAN ACCENT: # Desmond had a barrow in a marketplace

# Molly is a singer in a band

# Desmond says to Molly, "Girl I like your face"

# And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand

# Ob-la-di, ob-la-da... #

You might recognise this one.

It's Melodiya's cover version of the Beatles' Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.

And personally, I rather prefer it to the original.

But Melodiya didn't just bring out cover versions,

they also issued some originals.

In the late 1960s, they brought out this compilation album

which had a catchy title, the 8th March International Women's Day.

And side one, track five, we find Girl -

credited, here, to the "Beatles Quartet"

and described, oddly, as "traditional folk music".

A case, I suppose, of lost in translation.

None of this washed with Soviet Beatles fans.

They wanted the real thing.

MUSIC: Back In The USSR, by the Beatles

But while Russian fans were daydreaming of life in the West,

the Beatles wrote a song infused with nostalgia for the East.

# Man, I had a dreadful flight

# I'm back in the USSR. #

Well, sort of.

# You don't know how lucky you are, boy. #

In August 1968, here at Abbey Road,

they recorded Back In The USSR.

Paul McCartney said later that he imagined the lyrics

were the thoughts of a Soviet spy stationed for years in America

and now on his way home to mother Russia.

And there is something refreshingly unexpected, even a little bit irreverent,

about taking a quintessentially American sound

and wrapping it around the details of life behind the iron curtain.

"Oh show me round your snow-peaked mountains way down south,

"Take me to your daddy's farm.

"Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out

"Come and keep your comrade warm."

# Back in the USSR

# Oh, let me tell you, honey... #

MUSIC: A Day In The Life, by the Beatles

# I read the news today, oh boy... #

The Beatles appealed to Soviet youngsters

because they seemed to embody the very best of the West.

And yet at home, their appeal was now bound up

with their increasing scepticism about the western way of life.

In Britain, they were challenging convention

and becoming outspoken critics of bourgeois capitalism.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objects, objectives.

Half the people watching this are going to be saying,

"Ah, what's he saying? What's he saying?"

You know, you are being run by people who are insane

and you don't know.

In 1969, John Lennon even returned his MBE

in protest at Britain's support for the American war in Vietnam.

An extraordinary gesture coming for the former darling of British pop.

But his frustration with western capitalist values

was typical of a new angry and alienated generation,

bred in affluence and now questioning their own values.

I'm telling you! Don't make me provoke you! Get onto the pavement!

# Come on baby, light my fire... #

The moral compromises of the Cold War

had turned many young men and women against the West.

And they focused their anger on the supposed failings of liberal democracy.

What we have got to do is find out how,

within the educational sphere, we can smash this.

They were not, however,

drawn to the straight-laced socialist realism of the Kremlin.

Instead, they flirted with the more glamorous exotic elements of the far left.

Communism as cool.

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Min.

And they rejected the manifold crimes of western governments.

Militarism.

Exploitation.

And the encouragement of mindless consumerism.

Violence is used constantly by the Americans against the Vietnamese.

Violence is used by the cops.

Violence is inscribed on the face of society.

It's the capitalist society that's got blood under its fingernails the whole time.

CHANTING: The international army...

The police are after me. You what?

It's not funny. I hit one of them.

You hit a policeman?

By the 1970s, this new student left had become so vocal and so visible

that they were irresistible targets for prime-time teasing.

Yeah, I don't think Lenin would have left it like that.

Listen, I was the only one who stood up to the police dog.

Oh! I wasn't frightened.

I patted it. I got a cheer.

Oh, yeah...

Hey, hey, they're here!

THEY GASP

LAUGHTER

But not all TV producers saw comedy in Communism.

Like Britain's youngsters themselves,

the BBC had moved with the times.

Having sided with the establishment over the War Game,

Britain's public broadcaster now found plenty of room

for those more interested in the certainties of the class war

than the complexities of the Cold War.

MUSIC: "Join Together", by the Who

# When you hear the sound a-coming... #

To be a good Communist is not easy.

Your first loyalty is to the party to its politics and its leadership.

# And we don't make no collections

# I want you to join together with the band... #

If there was one programme

that was forever exposing the rotten underbelly of bourgeois capitalism

or celebrating the revolutionary potential of the oppressed proletariat,

then it was Play for Today.

No script was too worthy, no subject too depressing.

MUSIC: "In The Light" by Led Zeppelin

# In the light... #

A classic example was "Leeds United".

A tale of Northern factory workers taking on their exploitative bosses.

Based on a true story,

it was one of the most expensive single TV dramas ever produced.

The real enemy's still up there - the bloody masters -

the most ruthless, arrogant and vindictive bosses in contemporary industrial Britain.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# We shall not, we shall not be moved

# We shall not, we shall not be moved. #

Now, not every Play for Today was a hand-wringing denunciation of the evils of capitalism,

but to be honest, quite a lot of them were.

And given the Cold War tensions of the day,

some observers were genuinely worried

that more suggestible viewers might be brainwashed

by all this far-left propaganda.

MUSIC: "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd

The strident voice of the new left

was now a potent force in British culture.

And some of its critics took great delight

in puncturing the posturing narcissism of the worst offenders.

Just at the moment of maximum entropy,

when late capitalist structures are beginning to fall in on themselves,

those of us in the vanguard of the struggle

have suddenly been afflicted with an unaccountable paralysis.

As a famous radical at the university, Howard has a senior lectureship there.

He is still active in the town radical causes

and in the radical journals, where he writes often.

He edits a sociology series for a paperback publisher

and has published a second book - The Death of the Bourgeoisie.

For many people, the new trendy lefties of the 1970s were ripe for satire.

And nobody did it better than Malcolm Bradbury

in his book, The History Man.

So, you want to do Sociology?

It's the only genuinely relevant subject in the curriculum,

and it's entirely comprehensive - it takes in everything...

..decimal currency, Rhodesia, abortion,

Coronation Street, you name it.

You'll finally begin to learn something about life.

It's a question of opening your minds.

The bastards!

For the likes of Howard, history was on their side.

Capitalism was doomed, Marxism was the future.

But of course, most ordinary people didn't think that way.

They were too busy shopping for a new carpet or buying a new colour TV to worry about world revolution.

And when they did think about the Cold War,

they looked back on 15 years

in which from the marches of CND to the novels of John Le Carre,

black and white had given way to infinite shadows of grey.

But things were changing.

A new political generation was poised to take power,

spearheaded by a retired Hollywood film star

and a grocer's daughter from Grantham.

And under their leadership, the Cold War

would once again become a battle ground of good against evil.

MUSIC: "Atomic", by Blondie

Next time, as a new political generation takes power...

..Britain revels in rampant consumerism.

# Atomic! #

And the gloves come off in the Cold War.

# Your hair is beautiful

# Oh, tonight

# Atomic

# Oh, Atomic

# Oh-oh

# Oh-oh, Atomic. #