West End Girls

[Lucia Lanigan]

A good little curate's egg on the iPlayer at the moment: a documentary/docu-drama from 1961 about the sex industry in London's West End. Very risque TV for its time (and indeed banned), it focuses at first on the changes made by the 1959 Street Offences Act, but warns that the problem is still rife, often by showing you women getting a fair amount of their kit off.

10,000 prostitutes in London at the time (most of who looked like Duffy), apparently. None of the blame seems to go to pimps or kerb-crawlers (most of who looked like Boycie from Only Fools And Horses) but it does expose the workings of the industry well. Its main aim is obviously to put off potential "mugs". Sample dialogue:

[Model]: "You, er, won't need the camera."

[Voiceover man]: "Of course he wouldn't. He's only entitled to a five-minute session of peering at a girl who could do with a good wash."

They've really laid it on with the narrative:

"The once-fashionable streets where statesmen, diplomats and great families lived were heady with their cheap perfume, noisy with their magpie chatter, endlessly repeated invitations, and hollow promises."

And, as is often the case with Old Telly, the accents are a treat: the voiceover man could be an American trying to do English RP, an Englishman trying to "sex up" his voice with a hint of Hollywood, or an Irishman trying to do both. Perplexingly, anyone who rents out women to upper class men seems to be a German jew.

"The idea was to scrub clean the over-painted harridan's face of the West End."

The intro sequence is a straight out of Police Squad.

[diggedy derek]

West End Girls

.... anyway, favourite bit of dialogue, which I remember verbatim:

"the weak-willed glamour hungry bumpkin has become a skillful, heartless gold digger"

Endlessly quotable.Why do you think it was banned, and who might have produced it? I mean, it's hardline anti-prostitution. I wonder if it was a government information film which unwittingly made it all look stupendously sexy, or just titillation masquerading as social commentary.

Everyone needs to see this. I made the precaution, actually, of downloading it, so I can watch it in the privacy of my sordid, lonely bedsit. So if you need cheap thrills, you know where to come.

I'm not sure how much one learns about the era from it. I'll have to rewatch it more closely to figure that out.

"All they have to do is whisper the magic formula.... drinks, GIRLS girls g i r l s...."

[Lucia Lanigan]

West End Girls

"the weak-willed glamour hungry bumpkin has become a skillful, heartless gold digger"

Jesus, it's as if the telly's looking back into my life.

The reasons for things being banned are usually pretty hard to read, aren't they. It could have been that there was an inch too much flesh showing in one shot, or that the cinematic style made it feel too groovy, or anything else that made the BBC man's trilby rise a little to release a jet of confused steam.

I'm sure it'll be on display again before long in the iPlayer's dirty window of deceit. "Come get it while you can," they goad, but they'll be back, plying their jezebel wares.

[Guest]

West End Girls

It wasn't the BBC who banned this, because it wasn't made for TV. It was the BBFC.

I can only presume that it was banned simply for describing what was happening - despite the heavily moralistic, finger-wagging tone of its condemnation, the censors of the time just wanted to hush up any account of what was still going on, whatever its tone. You get a sense of just how much was bubbling up in the early 60s, still hidden from view.

The narrator is David Gell, who was a radio DJ (at times presenting Radio Luxembourg's Top 20 show, supposedly reaching 12 million listeners) and game show host, and had that smarmy mid-Atlantic tone favoured in the pre-pirate era - when Caroline came the style stayed mid-Atlantic but got faster and slangier. I think he may have been Canadian - a lot of them were, and that would explain the "neither British nor American" tone.

[Amor de Cosmos]

West End Girls

FYI Robin, The Top 20 show David Gell did was with the BBC, it was a sort of pop music Any Questions. They'd traipse around the country asking locals what they thought of the latest batch of new releases. His Radio Luxembourg stint was for Philips, (almost all the Luxy programs were sponsored by record companies as I'm sure you're aware.) At the time I thought he was OK, authentically Canadian and far better than faux-Americans like Hughie Green or Kent Walton (who went to Charterhouse fer chrissake.)

[Guest]

West End Girls

Not the only faux-American to have gone there, then (yawn, Carmody alludes to Peter Gabriel & Genesis again, but their crap period this time).

I know Gell worked for the BBC and that Barry Alldis was the regular presenter of the Radio Luxembourg chart show, but I'm sure I've heard one where Gell sat in for Alldis. There were definitely a lot of Canadians working in the UK then, probably more than now because the old ties of empire were still much stronger, and they'd obviously have seemed ideal DJs because they had the accent people were looking for and, unlike actual Americans, they were actually over here. I think that particular style became very dated very quickly, though.

Hughie Green grew up here but toured Canada as a teenager, spent time in Hollywood and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was obviously where he got the accent. Again it was what ITV (and Luxy before that) were looking for, but he got everything wrong - no actual American game show hosts were quite that creepy and scary, and it would have seemed quite unthinkable for an entire channel there to seemingly be built on "Stand Up and Be Counted".

[Amor de Cosmos]

West End Girls

There were definitely a lot of Canadians working in the UK then, probably more than now because the old ties of empire were still much stronger, and they'd obviously have seemed ideal DJs because they had the accent people were looking for.

No question. Both in front and behind the microphone/camera. Mordecai Richler in one of his autobiographical novels — Cocksure, or St Urbain's Horseman I think — writes about how easy it was for a Canadian writer to get a job at the BBC or ITV pretty much on the strength of his accent, it was pretty unrealistic to check references after all.

[Mumpo]

West End Girls

The most scandalous thing about this documentary is that it doesn't seem to be on the BBC iPlayer link any more.

Anyone got a link?