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From Socialist Worker, No. 98, 23 November 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
‘EVENING ALL.’
You all know it. The cheery opening to BBC’s marathon-running, oft-revived epic Dixon of Dock Green.
That sums it up really. The cheery, paternalistic little Hallo, Friends that starts the ball rolling on another orgy of homespun advice to the law-abiding masses.
The most noxious thing about cops on the box is, of course, this nauseating ‘we policemen are only human too’ attitude; the lad next door image (which is presumably why cheroot-smoking, non-lad-next door Alexis Kanner was sacked from Softly, Softly.)
Dixon’s the worst; I’ve seen programmes on the Danger of Drugs for the Young and the classic Help the Police to Help You (a recurrent theme, so watch for helpful citizens, carefully disguised as Special Branch men, pointing out ‘troublemakers’ at demonstrations for the cops to pick off).
Dixon is distinctive for what he leaves out. No mention of Students, Immigrants, the Special Branch or other nasty sidelines. Just straight from the shoulder GBH from nasty young (note) thugs. And George Dixon’s homely advice.
Softly, Softly is more realistic. There was a story in which John Watt thought that a job he was on to (through his paid informers) was an illegal immigrant racket. But, lo and behold, it turned out to be a nice comfortable little robbery after all. Well, there were women involved.
But Softly, Softly does occasionally do more than just gloss over those aspects of police activity that are a bit suspect. On Thursday October 17 it broadcast a story called Red Herring.
This story involved a nightshift worker at a defence installation (or a cover-factory for a defence installation). Holes had been appearing in the wire fence.
First suggestions included student rag. Special Branch can’t deal with it; ‘they’re up to their eyes in student agitators and Welsh nationalists’. Students twice in the first five minutes.
But don’t forget the timing of this programme. OK, so October 27 was a week away. But the AEF strike was due to start on the following Monday.
So what does the night watchman turn out to be?
After Inspector Watt pokes round a bit among this bloke’s belongings, guess what he finds?
Marxist Literature.
This is duly reported back to the boss. ‘He’s a Red’, those in
the know assure the superintendent, ‘but he’s not been a Communist for years. A Trotskyite to some, a Mao-tse Tung man to others, even an anarchist’.
So the super, full of moral indignation, exclaims: ‘An alleged anarchist guarding a secret establishment! It’s too much. You’ll have to get rid of him. If you can’t get him straight out, make some plausible excuses.’
And this is from a copper who has, on several occasions, been seen helping children and old ladies. A man we’ve come to trust. Do we lap it up as God’s truth? Well, of course we do.
But they’ve been very careful. The two men involved on this case are Watt and the large, lovable Box.
Now, they haven’t put in Barlow, about whom we’ve occasionally had doubts. The lads on this case are honest, down-to-earth Watt and honest, down-to-earth Box
So when Watt says, ‘You don’t tell people in industry to do something or they go on strike’, we believe him. And when the same Watt admits ‘I must be prejudiced’ (against communists), we say ‘how reasonable, how honest, down-to- earth, no nonsense of him’ and go out and beat up a black man.
And, of course, the night watchman (who, it transpires with sickening predictability, is a Trot), cut the holes in the wire himself. Watt provokes the little man (who has a big chip on his shoulder about his failing eyesight, a sort of revolutionary Richard III) into shouting at him, and charges him with ‘threatening behaviour’.
Watt suggests reasonably that this little man is ‘probably supporting Albania or some crummy African country about to be taken over by the Chinks’. Good old Watt.
The little man, with the chip on his shoulder now as big as Das Kapital, shrieks ‘I want to be arrested!’ Watt pours scorn. ‘You only want’, he says, ‘to be paraded past your workmates like a martyr.’
And, pay-off time, they let him off.
The poor little bloke gets the sack, of course, but they don’t charge him. How jolly nice of them.
It’s this sort of patronising crap that is far more insidious than Wallacism, Powellism and other general Reds-under-the-Bed-isms.
It just pours scorn and contempt, quietly, from a great height.
And it’s all done by the honest, straight, lovable characters we know so well, the ones who station closed-circuit cameras in Grosvenor Square, who beat up the demonstrators, who plant the pot and who victimise the blacks.
This review first appeared in Guerilla, magazine of Manchester University Socialist Society. David Edgar will be writing regularly on television for Socialist Worker.
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