Just for fun…pop, politics and teenagers

Here's a historical curio for you. I'm writing an article (possibly a book) on creative writing by politicians. As background research, I'm reading Steven Fielding's survey of politics in popular culture, A State of Play, which is fascinating. 

It's led me to Just For Fun, a 1963 teen movie which mixes musical numbers with a story of fun-loving teens being crushed by the pop-hating Right Party and cynically used by the secretly-pop-hating Left Party. Various incredibly bland pop groups appear performing songs with utterly lame slightly political songs, shoe-horned in to a terrible plot. For added joy, celebrity paedophile Jimmy Savile appears, as does Alan 'Fluff' Freeman. It's one of the corniest things I've ever seen, and it's great fun. By the end, the Teen Party wins the election…and destroys the country.





Another teens-meet-politics novel, Angus McGill's Yea Yea Yea was very freely adapted for Press for Time, a truly awful Norman Wisdom vehicle. Can you last for the whole trailer? 'Get an eyeful of les girls: they're busting out all over!'



Sadly I can't find any footage of Swizzlewick, the cynical and 'lewd' local politics satire (the Guardian: 'a new low in tastelessness') and only episode is believed to exist, but you can have a speech from Dennis Potter's 1965 Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, which was yanked from the broadcast schedules hours before it was meant to go out so that its satire could be watered down to avoid offending the poor political classes. 



I've recently read Wilfred Fienburgh MP's No Love For Johnnie (an MP who is 'the most unmitigated, grasping and self-important bastard...' encountered in politics) which one review reproduced on the cover declares 'the most cynical book ever written on any subject'. I haven't yet watched the film, but note that what was an X certificate in 1961 is now merely a 12. Whereas the contemporary reviewers condemned its focus on 'sordid mattress capers', the BBFC now merely notes 'moderate sex references and languages'. 

There's no footage from the film online, but here's some of the music – it's by Malcolm Arnold and therefore is great. 

No Love for Johnnie

What images are conjured up by that sort of title? For me, it's 1950s kitchen-sink drama. I'm half right: Wilfred Fienburgh's novel was published in 1959, shortly after the left-wing Labour MP's death in a car crash, aged 38. They say 'write about what you know', and this tale of Johnnie Byrne, socialist firebrand MP alienated by his party's rightwing leadership must surely be a thinly-disguised biographical tale. Mind you, from this summary it's a shame more Labour MPs didn't read it in the dark days of New Labour. I'm currently reading Bob Marshall-Andrew's caustic, outspoken memoir of his 13 years as a despised civil liberties-defending MP, hated by Blair and the rest of the leadership. I wonder if he's read No Love For Johnnie?

I haven't started reading it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Who could resist a novel reviewed as 'the most utterly cynical book on any subject that has ever been written'?

Fienburgh was one of those almost extinct species: an MP who'd worked with his hands. He was a manual labourer whose (unspecified) war service gained him an MBE and an entrée to political life, first as a researcher and eventually as a London MP. Very much a figure of his time, he quickly developed a sideline in TV and newspaper appearances and apparently enjoyed what we'll euphemistically call a rounded social life. He was also a progressive socialist thinker and progressive author of political tracts and manifestos. Yet No Love For Johnnie (later filmed) seems to express the disillusionment felt by many on the serious left about parliamentary politics and the Labour Party in particular. 

The syndicalists always said that the workers' representatives will always lose sight of their interests once they get to London, don a fine suit and dine out with the opposition. Certainly the Labour Party as an institution has very rarely, if ever, come close to being a socialist party. 1945 was a high point, and the oft-slated 1983 Manifesto (once called the 'longest suicide note in history') looked pretty good, but it's always been too boxed-in by fear of the Mail, Tories and global business. Which is why we're in the state we are…