SOURCE: "'Disgusted, Shepherd's Bush': Brimstone and Treacle at the BBC," in Essays and Studies, 1993: Literature and Censorship, Vol. 46, 1993, pp. 131-43.

Any discussion of censorship at the BBC will necessarily contain an element of speculation. All successful censorship makes its object invisible, but at the BBC the censorship itself is also invisible. The decision not to broadcast an item is entirely an internal matter, closed to public scrutiny and accountable to no outside body: there is no right of appeal, and there can be no informed public debate, since the BBC has no statutory obligation to explain its actions. This is one reason why the suppression in 1976 of Dennis Potter's television play Brimstone and Treacle did not become the cause célèbre that Potter evidently hoped. Other post-war censorship cases, such as the prosecutions of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960, Oz 28 in 1971, and Gay News in 1977, became notorious because the proceedings were conducted in open court, and people were therefore able to develop sophisticated opinions and write letters to The Times about them. In the case of Potter's play, however, there was only the impersonal and uninformative press announcement that, 'in the opinion of the BBC television service, Brimstone and Treacle ought not to be shown since it is likely to outrage viewers to a degree that its importance as a play does not support'.

The case has also lacked the feeling of deprivation which successful censorship tends to incite, for Potter went to great lengths to circumvent the BBC ban and bring his play before a public audience. The script was published in the May 1976 issue of The New Review, and a stage adaptation was produced at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield in the autumn of the following year; it was also performed in London early in 1979. Potter then collaborated with Kenith Trodd, who had been the BBC's in-house producer of the play, to make a film version, which was released in 1982. Finally even the BBC relented, and broadcast the original television production for the first time as part of a Potter retrospective in August 1987. In different forms, then, the play has been more widely available than many BBC drama productions which were not banned.

Brimstone and Treacle is a black parody of a popular genre best represented by the film It's a Wonderful Life (1946). It begins with suburban despair, and it ends with a miracle: in a climate of incipient marital break-up, Mr and Mrs Bates care for their daughter Pattie, reduced to a gibbering vegetable after a hit-and-run accident; and in the course of the action a charming and mysterious stranger, Martin, enters their lives, cures Pattie, and then disappears into the night. Familiar, perhaps, but with a twist: this time the household has not entertained an angel unawares. Where It's a Wonderful Life and its kind spooned out treacly sentimentality, Potter's play offers a touch of brimstone: the devil has all the best miracles.

The two unscripted epigraphs which punctuate the first scene are the best guide to this aspect of the play. First: 'There resides infinitely more good in the demonic man than in the trivial—Kierkegaard.' Then, with no variation of the voice-over speaker's tone: 'A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down—Andrews.' Angel in the house is a syrupy role which Martin plays to win the Bates's confidence and with it an invitation to stay and help with Pattie. Once installed, he rapes her, and the shock restores her to mental normality; like medicine, it is nasty, but curative. The demonic man has done good in spite of himself.

Broadly speaking, it is understandable that the BBC should believe that offence might be caused if the play were transmitted. Rape, religion, and mental illness are all sensitive topics, but Potter does not treat them sensitively: they are the incidentals of the plot rather than the objects of reverent analysis; it is not a play 'about' those subjects. It does not follow from this, however, that the ban was justified. It is notable that Potter's efforts to get his play seen brought it, with more or less the same manifest content, into an arena where it was subject to the Obscene Publications Acts 1959 and 1964, the Theaters Act 1968, the judgement of the local licensing authorities for cinemas, and, informally, that of the British Board of Film Censors. It was neither banned nor prosecuted, and this safe passage past the instruments of public censorship inevitably calls into question the BBC's private, institutional act of censorship in 1976.

Brimstone and Treacle was made at a time of reaction and retrenchment at the BBC: Kenith Trodd later characterized the 1970s as 'the censorship decade' for television, after the liberties of the 1960s. Underlying the very different policies followed by the BBC in each of these decades was the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which expressly excludes BBC broadcasts from its scope. Under Hugh Greene, the liberal intellectual Director-General appointed in 1960, this was interpreted as a license to dare, and the result was the emergence of organized opposition in the form of the Clean-Up TV Campaign (later the 'National Viewers' and Listeners' Association'), a rightwing and extremist Christian pressure-group led by Mary Whitehouse. One of the central objectives of this group was a change in the law to make the BBC accountable to a Broadcasting Council.

Greene's confrontational approach, then, entailed the risk of a political backlash that might cost the BBC its autonomy. The Corporation's interests were better served by seeking an accommodation with the protesters, and Greene's successor, Charles Curran (appointed in 1969) accordingly made a point of paying greater attention to Whitehouse, without necessarily acceding to her demands outright. The crucial volte-face was the issue in 1973 of new guidelines on taste and standards in BBC programmes. The document recognized that, in the past, the BBC had made and broadcast outstanding programmes (The Wednesday Play, Culloden, and Till Death Us Do Part were named) which had 'come about through apparent defiance of accepted practice', and it did not repudiate their artistic success; but it was clear that, in future, the forestalling of public criticism was to have a higher priority. In other words, the BBC entered the mid-1970s determined to impose a narrower standard of acceptability, in the hope that it would be understood to be putting its own house in order without the need for legal or constitutional coercion.

Brimstone and Treacle was the first play that Dennis Potter submitted to the BBC after the issue of these guidelines. The script was delivered in December, 1974, and was approved for production by the Head of Plays, James Cellan-Jones. The finished version was seen and approved by Bryan Cowgill, the Controller of BBC-1, and it was scheduled for transmission as part of the Play for Today strand on 6 April 1976. At the last moment, less than three weeks before the play was due to go out, and after the Radio Times for that week had gone to press, it was announced that Brimstone and Treacle would not, after all, be broadcast. Alasdair Milne, BBC Television's Director of Programmes, had seen the play, and, repelled, decided to withdraw it from the schedules. He later wrote to Potter to explain his decision: 'I found the play brilliantly written and made, but nauseating. I believe that it is right in certain instances to outrage the viewers in order to get over a point of serious importance, but I am afraid that in this case real outrage would be widely felt and that no such point would get across.'

This was, to say the least, an extraordinary way for the BBC to conduct its affairs, even allowing for its increased proneness to impose censorship at this time. Potter himself said as much in a grumpy article published soon afterwards in the New Statesman: for the Director of Programmes to ban a play which had been discussed and scrutinized for fifteen months at every level from tea boy to channel controller, and finally pronounced acceptable for transmission, looked alarmingly like a personal whim—and, when that play had cost around £70,000 to make, quite a costly whim at that. The price tag signifies more, however: it may have been managerially inept to leave the decision so late, but even an inept executive does not knowingly waste so much money without a compelling reason. Milne was frustratingly vague and reticent about what this reason might be—the quotation in the last paragraph was the entirety of his argument—but with hindsight, his objection to the play becomes clearer.

Brimstone and Treacle deals with intrusion. The essence of the plot is that Martin, pretending to be someone he is not (Pattie's friend and would-be fiancé), and something he is not (the ideal house-trained man, 'mumsy's little helper'), enters the Bates household and, left alone, abuses his position. As such, the play addresses a very ancient human demarcation of space into inside and outside: 'outside' is the jungle, 'inside' a place of safety which is today called 'home'. At one level, then, the conflict is between the civilized values of 'home' and the feral savagery of the outside. Martin is a creature of the latter. Early on, he sneers at the traffic in the street: 'Sick, sick people in metal boxes. They do not know the taste of blood in their mouths. They do not know the glory of the hunt as I know it, as demons know it.' (p. 33) Later, he uses Pattie to satisfy humanity's most animal drive, sexual lust. He is dangerous because, unlike the beasts of the jungle, he is intelligent and articulate. 'I can smell the domesticity on your clothes, you sick grey blobs, you timid mortals' (p. 32), he says in a scripted line cut from the finished version. His rejection of domesticity, of the 'inside' he seeks to penetrate and disrupt, is conscious and considered: it is something he recognizes well enough to imitate.

Martin brilliantly mimics the petty gentility, the religiosity, the sentimentality, of the environment he enters. 'The plain truth is,' he lies, 'that I once dared to ask Patricia to be my bride' (p. 38), the last word playing up to the romantic fantasies of his suburban middle-class hostess with chilling precision. Accordingly, Mrs Bates—whose greatest pride seems to lie in not using tea-bags or instant coffee—is entirely taken in by this 'nice young man … who says his prayers and knows long poems off by heart' (p. 46). Her husband is harder to convince. His most revealing domestic trait is that he 'can't stand stains' (p. 37)—a finicky distaste for chaos in the home which reflects a larger fear of intrusion. On the widest scale, his political views are underpinned by the same concern: he has recently left the Conservative Party to join the National Front. Among his worries he lists 'Drugs. Violence. Indiscipline…. Strikes. Subversion. Pornography' (p. 49), but his bête noir is immigration: 'There'll always be an England. Ha! Not with half the cities full of coloured men, there won't!' (p. 49) He is the archetypal Englishman whose home, even in suburban Archenfield Avenue, is his castle. No wonder he is instinctively suspicious of Martin, even without recognizing him as a kind of immigrant from another metaphysical plane.

The different levels of Mr Bates's concern reflect the concentricity with which the play treats Martin's intrusiveness. The action is structured like a camera zoom as he enters the different degrees of private space. First he bumps into Bates in the street, then (having obtained his address by stealing his wallet) crosses the threshold of his home. The focus on an objective sharpens with the next stage: he is invited to spend the night in Pattie's old bedroom, preserved as she had left it, and he amuses himself by rifling through her underwear and squeezing blood out of a bra. Finally he invades the most private space of all when he rapes Pattie.

Martin is, then, a character who violates boundaries: he resists containment. This is true even of the containment which delimits every character in every play. He has an unnerving habit of looking at the camera—one of the cardinal sins for an actor in realist film and television. It is as if he is the only one who knows he is taking part in a television play, knows that there is an audience watching—us. The impression is confirmed when, just before the first of the two rape scenes, he turns to address the audience directly in sing-song 'Patience Strong' couplets:

     If-you-are-a-nervous-type-out-there,
     Switch-over-or-off-for-cleaner-air.
     But-you-have-to-be-very-smug-or-very-frail
     To-believe-that no man has-a-horn-or-tail. (p. 42)

The perpetrator of the outrage usurps the role of the neutral continuity announcer, warning us that what we are about to see is unsuitable for children or persons of a nervous disposition.

Now we are better placed to understand Alasdair Milne's objection to Brimstone and Treacle. Broadcasting has been called 'of its nature both a private and a public practice', and it is this dichotomy which is central to the debate on television censorship. One prevalent BBC philosophy holds that television offers its viewers a 'window on the world' (the phrase comes from the Richard Dimbleby era of Panorama), making available aspects of life which lie beyond their everyday experience. But since the days of Lord Reith, the Corporation has also been conscious that its broadcasts, though transmitted through the public airwaves, are received in a private place, the home, and that this imposes certain standards and conventions: the notorious dinner jackets that Reith's announcers wore behind the microphone were simply the appropriate dress for visiting. Shaun Sutton, who headed the BBC's Television Drama Group in 1976, is quotably succinct in his account of the reasoning as it applied in his field:

If a play offends it is an assault within the home and its outrage is the greater. Television invades man's privacy to an extent he would not tolerate from friend or neighbour. Drama, traditionally the host of the evening's entertainment, is now the guest in the house. As such, it should assume the graces and responsibilities of a guest.

The feeling that the home was being violated by the intrusion of undesirable broadcast material was the driving force of Mary Whitehouse's campaign, and, drawing in its horns in 1973, the BBC accepted that radio and television drama could not be judged by the same standards as the other media: 'drama to be seen or heard at home must accept restraints which do not necessarily apply to the theatre or the cinema'.

This is one reason why Brimstone and Treacle could be printed, staged in a public theatre, and projected onto a cinema screen, but also be considered unsuitable for broadcast television. The other is that much of its impact derives from its being a television play: to have it performed in a public place was an unsatisfactory compromise. To transmit the play, with its sensitive content, into the home could be seen as an enactment of the intrusion it represents in its action. To make matters worse, this intrusion is committed knowingly: when Martin acknowledges the audience, he becomes a presence in the room, looking through at us from the other side of the screen. If television is a window on the world, then Brimstone and Treacle seems to deny its viewers the benefit of net curtains.

It follows, that, in one respect, Milne's judgement was valid: the play would be likely to outrage some of its viewers if broadcast. The next stage of his deliberation, as his letter to Dennis Potter indicates, was to balance that outrage against an assessment of the importance or triviality of the play itself. In this respect he was following the procedure which has been used in obscenity trials since 1959, when the Obscene Publications Act provided for a defence of literary or artistic merit—though he, of course, considered the play in camera and without benefit of expert testimony.

The key issue is the play's objective—in Milne's terms, whether it seeks to make 'a point of serious importance'—and to some extent this is bound up with Martin's objective. Martin is the character through whom we see: we share in his knowledge and ignorance of key information, such as (respectively) the fact that he is not human and the full circumstances of Pattie's accident (known, until the end, only to Pattie and her father). This creates a disturbing impression of complicity, which is enhanced when he glances to camera: by drawing us in like this, he makes us voyeuristic intruders in the household too. Crucially, Martin is given no adequate motive for what he does. The play opens with him searching for bourgeois prey: 'Which one? Which one will it be?' (p. 31) Selection is difficult because it doesn't really matter whom he picks: disruption is an end in itself (he acts for the hell of it, so to speak), and the choice of victim will make only a minor difference in the quality of the aesthetic experience. Martin doesn't need a motive (after all, he's a demon), but Brimstone and Treacle does. If we identify his mischief (or anarchism) with the values of the play itself, we must conclude that it is brilliantly and gratuitously offensive (and therefore, in Milne's terms, should be banned).

That is the misjudgment on which, presumably, the decision to withdraw the play was based. It disturbs by showing the invasion of a home, and suggesting the invasion of our own. At a more sophisticated level it disturbs, too, by making us, in our homes, identify more with the feral Martin than with the domesticated Bates—with violator rather than victim. But these disturbances are the vehicle for the point of the play, not the point itself. That point is to question the mythology of 'home': crossing boundaries is the first step towards challenging their illusory absoluteness.

Before Martin arrives at Archenfield Avenue, during perhaps the first fifteen minutes of the action, there is a lot of verbal imagery of human beings inside enclosed spaces; this helps to establish the play's concern with inside and outside, home and foreign territory. Some of these spaces are protective, like the 'metal boxes' (p. 33) which the rush-hour commuters drive home. What is significant is that more are claustrophobic and threatening. The idea that Pattie might still be sentient somewhere inside her body is one that upsets Bates: 'to be cooped up, inside your own head and be unable to-to-' (p. 34) As for Mrs Bates, housebound for two years since Pattie cannot be left, she tells her husband, 'I feel as though I'm scraping my nails on the lid…. The lid of my coffin.' (p. 35) 'Home' has become confining as well as secure: the absolute dichotomy between the safety of inside and the danger of outside is already starting to break down.

That dichotomy is the basis of the opposition between Bates and Martin which is the axis of the drama. As a denizen of that dangerous outer world, Martin has bestial tendencies which he does his best to keep hidden in company. Besides his unpleasant sexual propensities, he is also a sadist, and becomes injudiciously excited during a discussion with Bates of the consequences of National Front policy, consequences which lead from deportation to concentration camps to genocide: 'Think of all the hate they'll feel! Think of all the violence! Think of the pain and the degradation and in the end the riots and the shooting and the-' (p. 50) All this makes Bates first uncomfortable, then repelled, and finally he decides to cancel his National Front subscription—another case of the demonic man doing good in spite of himself. But, again, an absolute dichotomy is impossible to sustain. In an isolated but very striking moment early on, Bates pronounces against the driver who hit Pattie and caused her condition: 'He should be hung up. On a steel rope…. All I hope is that whoever did it dies full of cancer, screaming his head off.' (p. 38) Even allowing for the understandable vindictiveness of the bereaved, the steel rope is the product of a sick imagination. It shows that Bates contains the same nasty streak of sadism that we later see in Martin: it is not so wide, nor so powerful, but the point is that it is there.

Bates is more overtly concerned with matters of sexual decency. In the past he has disapproved of Pattie's friends, his wife tells Martin, and in particular of Susan, whom he calls 'a slut … one of those girls who'll—'. (pp. 47—8) Now, he refuses to go out with his wife for fear that Pattie will expose herself to the babysitter, and he is concerned that Martin's help should not extend to washing or changing her: 'Her brain may be damaged. But her body is that of an attractive young woman.' (p. 46) Martin puts his finger on it brilliantly when he summarizes, as if offended: 'He means that it would be indecent for me to see her poor, helpless body, obscene for me to help make her more comfortable, and lewd and disgusting to-to-'. (p. 46) Mrs Bates is not far from the truth when, responding to this prompt, she rounds on her husband and accuses him of filthy thoughts—even though she is wrong to go on to say that such thoughts would never enter Martin's head. For if in Martin sexuality is rampant, in Bates it is not absent but merely repressed.

Bates is exposed as a corollary of Pattie's recovery, and this gives us the hindsight to see that his despair of that recovery, expressed throughout the play in marked contrast with his wife's optimism, was in part a form of repressed hope. Martin is the unwitting agent of this exposure in raping Pattie into articulate consciousness. This is not just a somewhat unorthodox form of shock therapy: it is a brutal reminder of the circumstances which led up to the accident in the first place—which is why both rape scenes induce flashbacks to that event. It becomes clear in the final moments of the play that Pattie ran out into the road after finding her father in bed with her friend Susan. Her mental incapacity has been the invisible keystone of the Bates household, ensuring her silence about the home-wrecking adultery she has witnessed.

In short, the difference between Martin and Bates is one of degree, not antithesis, and this has implications for Bates's isolationist philosophy as a whole. Not only is it politically undesirable at its widest dilation, it is also based on a fallacy: the things that he tries to keep outside, the wild, savage traits that give Martin his true identity, are already inside, at the centre of the home he wishes to protect. At the deepest level of enclosed space, within his own psyche, the binary distinctions of inside and outside, civilization and savagery, man and beast, collapse into one another.

The development of the play, then, is away from the disconcerting surprise which, at first, we are induced to feel as we are made to see things through Martin rather than through Bates. That initial discomfort arises partly from our preconceptions about the moral nature of Martin's actions, but also from our awareness that Bates belongs to the same home environment in which we sit watching the play: he is the one we feel we should identify with, and are not allowed to. But by the end of the play, such feelings have become irrelevant.

So far I have argued that this irrelevance follows from the play's skepticism about the privileged status of home space compared with outside, and its resistance of binary oppositions between the two. But not all viewers are so responsive, or so sympathetic: some may find the entire play irrelevant, either through lack of interest or (more importantly here) through hostility. In revealing the similarity that underlies the seeming antithesis between Martin and Bates, Brimstone and Treacle asks a disturbing question about our own pretensions to civilization. This is the crucial point in the censorship process. Viewers who cannot face that question will operate a personal censor mechanism which enables them to discard the play: to them it becomes trivial, or nauseating, or outrageous, a programme unfit for broadcasting. It only takes a position of power for an individual to turn his personal, psychological act of censorship into an institutional ban.

That there is such a connection between censorship and repression is evinced by the difficulty of establishing in specific terms what it is in a work's content that will cause it to be banned, or prosecuted. Advocates and practitioners of censorship tend to prefer imprecise pejorative terms like 'filth', which save them from having to engage with the nature of the material they seek to suppress. Even the keystone of English legal censorship, the concept of 'obscenity', has been defined since 1868 as a 'tendency … to deprave and corrupt', without any apparent need to establish what depravity and corruption might be. Subjective terms 'define' one another in a meaningless hall of mirrors: juries who convict in censorship cases may not know much about obscenity, but they know what they don't like. Or rather, they know it when they see it, for censorship, whether personal, institutional, or public, is very much an ad hoc practice. Because there are no precise rules, only a body of case law, it is not always possible to foresee trouble with the censor, as the BBC Drama Group found out in 1976.

This is, of course, a very one-sided account: one might put it differently by saying that censorship is a reactive rather than a proactive phenomenon, incited by a work's transgression of boundaries, albeit sometimes ill-defined ones. The process is itself part of the effort of definition: material is suppressed when (with whatever degree of intelligence or articulacy) it reminds us of the relativity of principles which we should prefer to think of as absolute. Usually this serves to afford a degree of legal or institutional protection to culturally sensitive ideas; in modern Britain, the censor is called upon to defend from question and challenge beliefs about such things as sex, religion, and the innocence of childhood. The paradox is that, to its supporters, censorship may itself be an absolute to be protected by these means, and in a sense this was the root of Brimstone and Treacle's troubles at the BBC.

This is not to say that the play deals directly with censorship—patently it does not, and in practice to ban such a play would anyway have been too embarrassing to contemplate—but in Bates it presents a prime example of the censorship mentality. His concern to keep his household undefiled, to make it a privileged space by means which the play identifies as psychological repression, is a physical correlative for the censorship process in general, and an exact analogy with the ideas used to defend television censorship in particular. As Potter had recognized, the suburban setting of Archenfield Avenue is typical 'National Viewers' and Listeners' Association' territory. 'Potter … loves the idea of Mrs Whitehouse,' wrote a Guardian interviewer in 1973. 'He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on their walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority.' The ducks on the wall are an especially telling detail. No doubt it would be in such households, so like that of Mr and Mrs Bates, that the transmission of Brimstone and Treacle would have provoked the greatest outrage: in challenging the sanctity of the home, the play calls into question the fundamental principles of the advocates of television censorship; to them, more than anyone else, Brimstone and Treacle would have seemed eminently censorable.

The play glances briefly at its own exclusion from the airwaves when Bates remarks that he has bought his wife a colour television. Martin promptly starts a conversation about Songs of Praise—the epitome of 'wholesome' television to the advocates of programming suitable for viewing at home (meaning a suburban, middle-class, ducks-on-wall home). What concerned Potter about the BBC's mid-1970s trend towards a tighter control of broadcast content was that its output might become restricted to such programmes. Not long after Brimstone and Treacle was accepted for production, he wrote in The Observer:

The [late nineteenth-century] theatre was waiting for something like moving pictures to go down into the nightmares of dislocation and unease which both scar and ennoble modern man. The television play has this freedom, and it is seriously threatened at the moment precisely because its stumbling innovations and infant awkwardness are seen by the programme planners as disturbances, which mix ill with the treacle of TV entertainment or the 'balanced' editing of TV journalism.

In the play, the irony is that Bates has bought the television set to enable his housebound wife to get out vicariously. In practice, however, all the 'window on the world' lets into their home is more of its own stuffy atmosphere, in the form of Songs of Praise and its ilk: the sort of 'treacle' which. Potter argued, gums up a medium which could be used for serious, challenging plays. In acting to protect Britain's ducks-on-wall homes from such a play, Alasdair Milne simply proved the thesis.