Privilege (1967) - the small moans of Paul Jones

The glam rock movement of the early-to-mid-seventies, which made household names of a clutch of pop groups who’d been peddling their wares since the sixties (but who only managed to sell records once they started dressing up in the most outrageous outfits imaginable, and wearing more make-up than a coachload of Lily Savages) and provided a defiantly feel-good soundtrack to a way of life played out against a depressing backdrop of strikes, IRA bombing campaigns, power cuts and parsimony necessitated by the Heath government’s three day week, produced only a handful of cinematic texts. This in itself is surprising, especially when you consider its all-encompassing popularity (which never quite managed to cross the Atlantic – although several of the groups toured the US incessantly, American audiences remained immune to this peculiarly British movement until the likes of Quiet Riot and the Runaways started covering Slade’s old songs) and the tendency in previous decades for profit-hungry producers to construct jerry-built big screen vehicles around the most unlikely of groups (see the Freddie and the Dreamers vehicle Cuckoo Patrol – or, rather, don’t).

Granted, the charismatic Marc Bolan managed to secure the services of none other than Ringo Starr to direct his big-screen offering Born to Boogie – fine as long as it stuck to the galvanizing concert footage, less impressive when it delved into whimsical fantasy sequences all too similar to those in the Beatles’ psychedelic misfire Magical Mystery Tour – but even Gary Glitter’s most ardent fans (of which there were several, right up until the unpleasant revelations of the late nineties which effectively scuppered his career on a permanent basis) must have felt rightfully short-changed by the Leader’s misbegotten 1974 effort Remember Me This Way, a startlingly self-indulgent combination of concert film, half-cocked action thriller and vanity project. As the TV Cream website noted, never has a film’s title acquired so much tragic irony in the light of subsequent events. Meanwhile, the adherents of such chart-topping glam icons as Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Alvin Stardust and Wizzard were denied the chance to see their idols in glorious larger-than-life widescreen at their local fleapit, and the millions of screaming fans of the Bay City Rollers, a tartan-bedecked Scottish bootleg of the Four Seasons, would have to wait until 1981 before a somewhat depleted line-up of the group (minus lead singer Les McKeown and lead guitarist Eric Faulkner) made their belated big screen debut in the deservedly obscure motor-racing action adventure Burning Rubber. Suffice to say, it really wasn’t worth the wait, despite the best efforts of the reliable journeyman director Norman Cohen behind the cameras.

The foundations for the key texts of British rock films in the seventies – which is to say, films that offered up dollops of escapist pop alongside large helpings of gritty realism – were laid in 1967’s astonishing Privilege, a vehicle for the former Manfred Mann frontman Paul Jones, with a screenplay based on an idea by Johnny Speight, the acclaimed comedy writer responsible for the hit BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965-75). Given that Jones’ time in the band saw him singing irresistible slices of goofy, throwaway pop like ‘5-4-3-2-1’, ‘Doo Wah Diddy Diddy’ and ‘Pretty Flamingo’, and Speight had created one of the decade’s landmark situation comedies (along with its standout character, a bigoted, racist, chauvinistic and unapologetically right-wing docker called Alf Garnett, played with devastating ease by Warren Mitchell), you’d be forgiven for thinking that Privilege was going to be another slice of swinging sixties nonsense cut from the same cloth as Michael Winner’s caper comedy You Must Be Joking! (1965) or a sharp slice of Carnaby Street-suited-and-booted satire like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967), which saw Peter Cook’s stylish Satan offering Dudley Moore’s lovelorn short-order burger chef seven wishes in exchange for his soul. Yet Privilege was a very different beast indeed, an uncompromisingly raw, angry and shocking polemic crafted with an unflinching attention to detail by Peter Watkins, the film-maker du jour who invented the docudrama genre virtually single-handed.

Watkins had caused a sensation with his 1964 BBC historical drama Culloden, which had cleverly presented Scotland’s Jacobite rebellion of 1746 as if the events had been covered by a modern documentary crew, but nothing could have prepared the Corporation for Watkins’ next offering. 1965’s the War Game, created for the anthology series the Wednesday Play, presented a fictional Soviet nuclear attack on England in the manner of a current events programme – complete with vox pops interviews, a dispassionate off-screen narrator, fly-on-the-wall footage, news reportage, the plentiful use of captions and ‘talking head’ segments including the testimonies of doctors, psychiatrists, Anglican Bishops and nuclear strategists – and was far too hot for the BBC to handle. Not even the familiar, soothing tones of Michael Aspel on narration duties could dilute its sledgehammer impact, and after much deliberation and consultation with senior government figures, the official line given by the Corporation was that the War Game was ‘too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’ (though it has since been revealed that the film’s suppression was far more of a governmental concern than anyone was willing to admit at the time) and Watkins’ film was shelved for the next twenty years, finally being granted its television debut a full year after Mick Jackson’s similarly bleak and disturbing Threads (1984) had traumatized an entire generation with its no-punches-pulled depiction of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. The War Game wasn’t banned completely – Watkins fought for the film to be shown abroad (which resulted in a prestigious Academy Award for Best Documentary – despite it being fiction – in 1966) and on the burgeoning arthouse cinema / college film society / CND protest meeting circuit in England – but the damage had been done, and Watkins quit the BBC in protest. Little wonder that his first big-screen outing would prove similarly contentious.

Privilege takes place in ‘Britain in the near future’ where the Labour party and the Conservative party are perceived as virtually identical, leading to the formation of a coalition government whose prime concern is the enforcement of blanket conformity on the populace. To that end, the state has assumed control of the career of an apparently infinitely malleable young pop singer named Steve Shorter (Jones) who is currently enjoying a wave of popularity that makes the levels of fame previously scaled by Cliff Richard and the Beatles look positively paltry – his return to his home city of Birmingham warrants a welcoming tickertape parade, the streets lined with adoring crowds, the film’s narrator describing him as ‘the most desperately loved entertainer in the world’. His name and image are used to sell everything from apples to dog food and to promote everything from discotheques to boutiques. Without the government behind him, he’d be indistinguishable from the rest of the pop-star crowd, hawking his latest single on Top of the Pops. With their backing, however, he’s practically the new Messiah.

The stage act that led to Shorter’s current celebrity status is a combination of the Theatre of the Absurd and rabble-rousing rock theatricality (no doubt inspired by the Who’s early adherence to ‘auto-destructive art’ – in other words, destroying their instruments and amplifiers as a combined audio-visual spectacle and a deliberate statement on ‘throwaway culture’ and passive consumerism – but several years before similarly performance art-reliant rock acts like Alice Cooper and Kiss became household names, or the Kinks became cult heroes in the US by touring a series of increasingly whimsical concept albums accompanied by cut-price Vaudevillian stage shows) which sees him arrested, slung into a cell, clubbed by thuggish actors dressed as prison guards and pleading for his freedom with a series of overwrought mid-tempo rock numbers that make Tom Jones sound positively restrained by comparison.

Shorter’s performances provide a necessary cathartic release for his audiences ‘from the nervous tension caused by the state of the world outside’ – in other words, in the eyes of the government, it’s better to have the kids screaming over this pantomime ritual than clogging up the streets with their futile banners and marches, protesting about matters that hardly concern them anyway. Yet Shorter’s martyr routine is already beginning to wear thin, and a new image is being planned for him behind closed doors – one which will see him renouncing his bad-boy ways (it’s inferred that Shorter was arrested at one point) and embracing a new, clean-living image, adherent to God and country, a cynical move designed to prompt a mass public embrace of unquestioning ‘fruitful conformity’. Fears of a military right-wing takeover would resurface throughout the seventies, as expressed in both pessimistic and optimistic terms by such memorable characters as Harold Steptoe in a 1974 Steptoe and Son episode, and by Reggie’s brother-in-law Jimmy in the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Jimmy, as embodied by Geoffrey Palmer, was planning to form his own private military unit to take on the ‘forces of anarchy’ when ‘the balloon goes up’. His extensive blacklist included punk rock, keg bitter, rapists and Clive Jenkins. The character proved so successful, he was eventually given his own series, Fairly Secret Army, which ran on Channel Four from 1984.

Meanwhile, the golden boy at the centre of their manipulative endeavours is beginning to fray at the edges. Shorter has found out the hard way that he’s sold his soul for success and lost his individuality in the process, and he spends most of the film moping his way through a series of increasingly absurd press calls, photo calls, receptions and film shoots with a face like a wet weekend in Newport Pagnell. The path to his eventual self-destructive rejection of his entirely fabricated persona and subsequent persona non gratia status in the media is smoothed by the introduction of Vanessa Ritchie, an artist who has been commissioned to paint his portrait.

Cognisant of the gulf between the ‘real’ Steve and his public persona, Ritchie (played by Jean Shrimpton, arguably the first ever ‘supermodel’, who – it must be said – acts about as convincingly as a cardboard cut-out, but her distant, mannered performance works fairly well in a film that’s all about the importance of style over content) responds to the commission by producing an unsettling likeness that’s part-death mask and part-blank-eyed void, inadvertently revealing the terrible truth – Steve is just an empty canvas onto which the public can project its own fantasies – that is, after the government have finished bending him to fit their latest whims. In this regard, Jones (who gives a very good account of himself nonetheless) was an inspired casting choice – a more charismatic and distinctive performer such as Mick Jagger would have tilted the film too far into ‘star vehicle’ territory, whilst Jones, with his bland, slightly acne-scarred good looks, modish yet neat haircut and pleasant, tuneful voice fits the bill perfectly.

After unveiling his new Christian image (complete with supporting acts in ecclesiastical garb performing rocked-up versions of ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and some disturbing Nazi overtones) at an open air concert that doubles as a mass rally, Shorter finally snaps, using an industry back-slapping ceremony to vent his spleen at the public, his management and the puppet masters who’ve been controlling him all this time. His fall from grace is swift and merciless – Shorter’s music is banned from the airwaves, and he is expressly forbidden from speaking or performing in public again. In a postscript, the narrator confides that there is very little left to remind the public of Shorter’s astonishing career, save for a few old records and a scrap of black and white archive footage with the sound missing. With the country’s equilibrium back on an even keel, and no shortage of faceless pop idols willing to take Shorter’s place, the narrator muses that ‘it is going to be a happy time in England, this year in the near future’.

Perhaps inevitably for one of the most pessimistic depictions of the music industry and the nature of stardom ever committed to celluloid, Privilege opened almost unanimously negative reviews. Whilst some of this could have been merely belated examples of petty point-scoring and score-settling left over from the controversy that surrounded the War Game (during which, it must be noted, none of Watkins’ peers or contemporaries – which included such luminaries as Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson – spoke out in his defence, instead falling back on non-committal musings on how Watkins had bitten the hand that was feeding him and thrown away his sizeable chance of mainstream acceptance, whilst contemporary critics pondered on Watkins’ sanity and integrity), it’s sobering to realise that several contemporary reviewers seemed predisposed toward dismissing the film out of hand without even bothering themselves to watch it in the first place. John Russell Taylor of the Times described the film as ‘juvenile’ (which it most assuredly is not) and ‘a comment on the swinging pop scene’, which simply made him sound like the squarest parent on the block, whilst the Financial Times’ critic, not content with erroneously describing Privilege as Watkins’ debut, found it ‘alternatively arresting and ridiculous’, maintaining that ‘teenage taste still has an odd way of favouring professionalism, artistry and certain qualities of warmth and vitality and humour’ – whilst completely missing the point that Privilege was deliberately designed as a ‘cold’ film, combining the stylings of the documentary and reportage genres with the unidentified narrator acting as a further distancing mechanism, and any film that follows the gradual mental disintegration of a pop singer ruthlessly milked and exploited until he’s a husk of his former self was never going to be a barrel of laughs anyway. (Furthermore, the ‘warmth, vitality and humour’ displayed by the Beatles – inarguably the biggest group of the decade, and the act the Financial Times’ critic undoubtedly had in mind – artfully concealed the fact that they were one of the most neurotic acts in the business.)

Only Penelope Gilliat in the Observer sounded a positive note, describing ‘Peter Watkins’s vision of his country’ as possessing ‘the unforgiving rancour of the genuinely prophetic’, but one cheer doesn’t make an ovation, and Privilege looked doomed to wither on the vine. In the event, the Rank Organization, which handled its British distribution on behalf of Universal Pictures (who had bankrolled the film to the tune of a cool £700,000) performed a mercy killing. Taking its courage from Alexander Walker’s London Evening Standard review, which described the film as ‘immoral and un-Christian’ and denounced the way in which it ‘defied authority and encouraged youth in lewd practices’, the Rank Organization withdrew the film from general circuit bookings, and that was that. Aside from a single television screening in May 1975 (ironically on the BBC), Privilege was swept into the dustbin of history as gracelessly and apparently irrevocably as its doomed protagonist, not even granted a second life on home video. In fact, it wasn’t until 2010 that the film finally received a home media release, thanks to the BFI’s excellent Flipside imprint. That said, though, it seems that enough people saw Privilege first time around, because its influence on later films such as Ken Russell’s Tommy (of which more later) and Alan Parker’s remorselessly downbeat screen treatment of Pink Floyd – the Wall (1982) seems remarkably obvious. It goes without saying that Privilege was a hugely prescient picture, and retains its satirical impact even today – think about the fate of poor Steve Shorter next time you start wondering whatever happened to any of the numerous winners of the X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent.