White Heat, Paula Milne's 1960s-set drama has premiered on BBC2. But does it offer anything more than a stylised, nostalgic image of the decade? Six writers look back to their experiences of the era
Fay Weldon, writer, born 1931
We're so all anxious these days, we tend to forget the sheer exhilaration of the 60s: how exciting, how absurd, how upbeat those years were, how fast was the speed of change, and how we embraced it. The Age of Aquarius was under way, when peace would guide the planet and love would steer the stars. It all seemed so easy.
Abandon the old restrictive certainties and all would be well, we thought. No more short back and sides, hair must be long and if you didn't wash it – why, it would self-clean by virtue of the natural oils it contained. Forget the old tedious phonic route to literacy: just get the child to "absorb" the page and it could read; no more tables by rote, no more numbers, just strokes on the page and binary concepts and everyone could do sums. Cool, it seemed, in that dawn to be alive.
You worried because your children couldn't read or write, but your friends got government jobs to bring the new-style education about, and you applauded. You'd sit at the dinner table (avocado salad, Elizabeth David boeuf bourguignon and chocolate soufflé) while the old left rowed with the Trotskyists and Adrian Mitchell determined to bring out the artist in every man. When your children got expelled from school for radical sloganeering and your husband put in a cell overnight for joining a CND demo. When one set of neighbours asked you to help stuff buns with aniseed to divert the police dogs who were surrounding their squat. It didn't work. While the other neighbour was the minister for Northern Ireland, and the police had to run through your house to save him from a potential terrorist bomb. And you let them. Why not? Embrace the paradox! Flower power would take the place of violence: love your enemy and they'd love you.
At the beginning of the decade you looked down at your shoes and they were black, or very daringly brown. At its end they'd be bright Carnaby Street yellow with green satin bows. Drugs had infused design and the arts. At the beginning your best friend, unmarried, was pregnant, abortion was illegal, but her father had his shotgun out and a wedding was shortly anticipated. By the end contraception was the girl's responsibility, everyone seemed to be in bed with everyone else, and the shotgun husband was clamouring for an open marriage, to his wife's dismay. The expanding middle classes had central heating, fridges, front-load washing machines and dryers. Domesticity, once a time-consuming survival necessity, had become a bore. Feminism loomed.
The young people in Paula Milne's White Heat wander around looking soulful and serious, not over-excitable and full of naïve cosmic hope as we were back then. The cast's body language is of today, the men tentative, the girls aggressive. I don't think it's within their comprehension that once it could have been the other way round.
Yvonne Roberts, Observer columnist, b.1948
In 1965, I reluctantly began studying for A-levels with an ambition to do a bunk, leave school and become a hairdresser. Two years later, I was at university, one of a tiny percentage of women from a working-class background to become an undergraduate. Except, in those days, nobody bothered with percentages; women's lib was barely a whisper; girls who "went all the way" (often) were seen as the campus bicycle; and "free" sex was only for those who could afford to pay for an abortion, Germaine Greer or the very, very drunk.
As poet Michelene Wandor said of her experience of the 1960s, they were "full of people I didn't sleep with/joints I didn't smoke/plays I wasn't in". But that doesn't make for good telly. And something did happen and very quickly for many women, in the tail end of the decade: the three years to 1970 when the first Women's Liberation Conference was held.
The opening episode of Paula Milne's White Heat, set in 1965, takes those three years and vacuum packs them into one, music that never dates telling some of the story – the Who; the Yardbirds; the Hollies. Milne employs a cast of seven undergraduates who appear much more together (and a touch stereotypical) than the clumsy and confused counterfeits for adulthood that we all were.
Watching a fictionalised past, for those who were there at the time, is like peering at the world through a window smeared with Vaseline: it's only vaguely recognisable but some shapes are much sharper than the rest. Rich Jack, the landlord of the house in which the other six students live in north London, seems remarkably up on his Marxist dialectics for 1965 and he smokes a joint alone (definitely not done). Meanwhile the clunking scene in which the "politicised" male has his way then spouts his delight at finding "a girl who doesn't confuse sex with love" is a bit too much of a moralising 21st-century signpost that says, "Women, beware, when you get what you asked for…"
The joy, the fabulous clothes (out of bounds to anyone past 25), the anarchism (sleeping until 11am on a Monday!), the intoxicating freedom of escaping from a world "back home" that, as we saw it, had been commandeered by the older and grimmer, lying to themselves because "they know better" – little of this figures so far in this rather fraught and anxious Tufnell Park pad .
What Milne does capture well is the casual sexism; the invisible corset on female aspiration; the chasm that divided middle-class and working-class worlds; the desultory life of the drunk and affluent housewife with a semi-detached philandering spouse ("I used to blame your father for stealing my future, never myself, naturally") and the fragility and flashes of bravado of all the 19-year-olds in the house as they play at being grown-up – ironically, a universal and timeless element.
Veracity doesn't always engage. White Heat isn't the 1960s (but no doubt it will play its small part in remodelling history). It's a fictionalised account. But Milne is masterful and I'll certainly keep watching.
Darcus Howe, broadcaster, b.1943
Collins published Tariq Ali's memoir of the 60s, The Street Fighting Years, in 1987. And he in turn presented me with this mighty tome and the following inscription: "For Darcus who was there. In comradeship, Tariq Ali."
I arrived at Southampton on 11 April 1962 after a two-week journey from Trinidad and Tobago, the country of my birth. On arrival at Waterloo station a friend who came to meet me warned that I must not under any circumstances walk alone at night because I would face arrest by the police and a beating from white racists. I contemplated returning home almost at once. During the first 18 months or so loneliness never left me alone even though I lived with five others in a rented flat atop a car showroom.
Within a year or two an election was on the agenda. A white candidate in the Smethwick constituency made his position clear: "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour." My world was turned upside down and within another four years Enoch Powell from the platform, again in the Midlands, threatened us with rivers of blood and painted the imagery of the Tiber foaming with our blood.
Meanwhile I fell in love with an Italian au pair, Amanda. I explained to her that whenever we went out she had to walk several paces in front of me. She was deeply hurt and walked away. I never saw her again.
I lost my way at several moments throughout White Heat, even though I shared flats with a whole range of political activists. Some of those who I encountered on my journey through the street fighting years appeared on the screen as characters from a different planet. The black student drifted around as though he was without a history and a name.
The street fighting years, as I recall them, chased huge political figures throughout Europe into oblivion.
Race was writ large as the issue of the day. Groups of young black men travelled around in cars attacking young whites (teddy boys) with amazing regularity. Time and time again I pleaded with my parents to send me a return ticket. They were sympathetic but pleaded with me to stick it out.
The newly arrived formed small organisations who proceeded sotto voce until Martin Luther King spoke at St Paul's Cathedral. It was inspiring but hardly convincing on the question of non-violence. I became active politically with the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. Sections of the organisation would not subscribe to non-violence, yet in this torture chamber that was England we danced and sang, courted women, got married and produced children.
Then of course the Oxford Union, led by Tariq Ali, invited Malcolm X to address the students. The press protested and parliamentarians howled. It is in this response I found a sense of purpose through Malcolm X.
Cushioned by the increasing numbers of activists of the time the white racism receded a bit. A new life had begun. I was becoming a West Indian in England. Before I arrived here I had never met a Jamaican, a Kittitian or an Antiguan. In that process we broadened our vision and perspective. I joined the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and attended its first conference in Red Lion Square. I spoke there and got a fine response.
Demonstrations, pickets outside the American Embassy were regular. I had joined in the street fighting years right up to the early 70s when I found myself in the dock at the Old Bailey with eight others to answer charges of riot and affray. We won that battle after 55 days.
Katharine Whitehorn, Observer columnist, b.1928
They say if you can remember the 60s you weren't there – "there" being the explosion of demos, drugs, weird clothing, love, happiness and all that, which is the background to White Heat. I wasn't "there", in that sense, by then being a blameless working mother, hoping to drag young women out of the clutches of compulsory domesticity; and of course White Heat doesn't cover all that was going on. It's a soap, not a documentary – equally, you don't expect Downton Abbey to cover every aspect of the years before the Great War. But it ticks all the expected boxes: drugs, the lifting of censorship (someone reading Lady Chatterley's Lover), young black men being friends with white men – and Enoch Powell denouncing them on TV; everyone smokes all the time, and the idea of chastity doesn't occur to anyone, not even to the kindly fat Irish girl who is one of the best characters. There is the rebellious well-born son, his predictably disapproving father; Mao's China is praised for its freedoms and an older person who remembers the war is blasted by one of the young for "dropping bombs on innocent Germans" – idealism with a mammoth helping of naivety.
But of course the decade was far more than that, particularly in its optimism. New universities, new estates; more freedom on the stage – the nudes were allowed to move; reformed divorce laws. A general loosening of restrictions – many of the reforms had been dreamt up in the 50s, but it was the 60s that passed them into law. And an entire fresh way of dressing, with miniskirts and well-cut hair (the soap gets the hair wrong, as period drama so often does: all the girls have long, straight hair as they do now; what about Vidal Sassoon's cuts? Maybe they couldn't ask the actresses to cut it off). Habitat, more girls having proper careers; much that made those over 25 think that when we ended "13 years of Tory misrule" everything was getting better. Perhaps the hippies weren't aware of what was going on outside their own circle – or of dodgy things that only came to light later, such as establishment links to the criminal Kray brothers, who helped the MP Tom Driberg to some of his more questionable enjoyments.
You could say it was all this optimism that paved the way for the dismal 70s, when the money ran out and trade unions stopped being seen as good for the underdog, just interminably making life difficult with strikes. Maybe Wilson was completely deceived about the white heat of technology; things got worse not better. But we saw the 60s as a time for more freedom and justice and plenty – not just a ticking time bomb of social problems, drugs and hangovers. Naive, maybe; but it was great at the time.
Roger McGough, poet, b.1937
We never wore kaftans or put flowers in our hair Never made the hippy trail to San Francisco Our love-ins were a blushing tame affair Friday evenings at the local church hall disco
These lines from a poem of mine, "Decade", came into my head as I watched White Heat. Ask any young person now about the 60s and they always tell you it was all about flower power and free love and revolution. But as anyone who lived through it knows, that is a myth. For me, the 60s were something that happened elsewhere, at parties I wasn't invited to.
Most young people I knew in Liverpool in the early 60s after graduating from university were getting jobs and renting flats. They weren't plotting to overthrow the establishment, they were aiming to be doctors or lawyers or teachers, or just to get an office job, and they were grateful if they found one. Like today, there were very few jobs. National Service had only just ended. And if you had had a strict upbringing like mine, working in the arts or the media did not seem like a possibility.
So the swinging 60s seemed to be happening somewhere else. Nevertheless, there was this sense in the air that things were about to change, which is something the series captures very well, this feeling of being on the cusp between postwar gloom and something newer and more exciting where a lot more was going to be possible.
In 1965, when the first episode is set, I had just hung up my corduroy jacket and quit teaching. I had been to the Edinburgh festival and had started writing political, satirical sketches that I was performing with an embryonic Scaffold in the basement of the Everyman Theatre. I was starting to feel like I could do what I wanted to do with my life and not what my parents expected. But it was small steps.
It is interesting how the character in White Heat who is going to overturn the ruling classes, Jack, the politician's son, is the one who was born into privilege. He can afford to be anti-establishment because he comes from the establishment. He can be against social injustice because he has never known any himself. That rings very true for me. A lot of the 60s rebels were public school- and university-educated. Less realistic, though, is the dinner-table conversation. We all know that when students sit around talking they talk about fashion or toast or the weather, not usually social revolution.
Emma Soames, journalist, b.1949
With sweaters that promise to become as seminal as Sarah Lund's Faroe, a chronologically correct soundtrack (the Kinks, "King of the Road"), the opening episode of White Heat was giddily precise with its period detail. On the fuzzy TV, feminists discuss contraception, while the news bulletins carry sonorous updates in received English on the fading life and then death of Sir Winston Churchill.
As seven characters in their early 20s come together in a London terraced house with high ceilings and tatty wallpaper the first thing established by flash forward is that it didn't end well. But back in 1965 it looked ambitious and very exciting. Picking his flatmates as his personal social experiment, Jack the lad and landlord is an upper-class rebel – the sort whose room was covered with posters of Che – made all the more meaningful because his father is an MP. Jack doesn't want any house rules or sexual convention in his anarchic student patch (not so utopian as to not require rent). The chosen six roomies run the gamut from the quiet Jamaican on a law scholarship to a clever geek from Newcastle, with girls from Ireland, the Midlands and the suburban middle class. So determined is White Heat to tick diverse ethnic and class backgrounds that all the characters are so weighted down with differences that it's amazing they find anything to talk about. It may have been a turbulent time of both opportunity and anguish for boys who had to face racism and homophobia (of which we will surely see much more), but in the first episode it's the girls who first get grief as two are pressured by their parents to return home from their racy houseshare.
Sadly, in January 1965 I wasn't in London sharing a house with boys, but that was exactly where I wanted to be. My dream was to get away from home and go to London, to meet people who hadn't all been to the same school and to explore the possibilities I just knew were out there. How I recognised Charlotte leaving home in a tweed suit, changing in a taxi and arriving in N19 in a mini red plastic mac. How I blushed with relived embarrassment when she realised a boy had overheard an intimate conversation. The curious combination of naivety and ambition we all endured is very well drawn. We didn't realise, when we first smoked a joint or went on the pill, just how much we were changing the world – how the personal was truly generational. But what I was aware of, and what White Heat shows clearly, is the unbridgeable generation gap between parents and their children. We felt (in most cases rightly) our parents had no idea what was happening in our world and how very reluctant we were to share our expectations and ideals that would lead some of us to the barricades. In this episode it's clear just how much the ground was shifting. The death of Churchill, like much else in the series was symbolic of much, much more.
