Unbearable suffrage

Half a century of women’s suffrage was celebrated by Golden Gala (ATV), a blockbusting, ball-breaking variety show that left at least one male viewer clutching his groin with fright. They’re out to get us, chaps.

With the participation of more than a hundred female stars, what TV Times called ‘the all-woman super-show’ was staged at the London Palladium in the presence of Princess Margaret, a dedicated lady well accustomed to displaying a gracious smile of appreciation when people in the world of the arts line up to bore her. But by this event she must have had her patience taxed beyond endurance. Even if they do nothing but call out their name, rank and serial number, it takes a certain amount of time for more than a hundred female stars to file past a given point. If each of them is deputed to sing a song, read a speech or take part in a sketch, it follows inevitably that the procession will last all night.

In a uniformly dire compilation of acts, the sketches stood out by being even more dreadful than the songs. Actresses from The Rag Trade, with Miriam Karlin to the fore, did a turn wherein the position of women in politics was supposedly illuminated. ‘You can always trust a politician who smokes a pipe,’ somebody said — or it could have been, ‘You can never trust a politician who smokes a pipe,’ it doesn’t matter. The remark was greeted with a hurricane of laughter.

‘Mrs Thatcher doesn’t smoke a pipe,’ somebody else said. This remark was greeted with an uproar of enthusiasm and prolonged applause, as if Pericles had just concluded an address to the Athenians by performing the Hammerklavier Sonata. ‘She would if she thought it would get her a few more votes,’ said whoever had been entrusted with the punchline. This remark was overwhelmed by a mass paroxysm of hysterical delight which if it had been elicited by Hitler would have scared him off the podium.

The deeper significance of such material consisted in the satisfaction being taken from the fact that women were now free to be as cynical as men. The same line of thought kept surfacing throughout the show. Female liberty kept being defined in male terms. The paradox, if it is one, was especially apparent in the musical items, starting off with a production number of ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’. The song had been updated with some limply apposite lyrics, but it defiantly remained a male chauvinist pig’s snorting hymn to the intuitive, cute and tender unpredictability of the sow.

As a logical extension of the same idea, women dressed themselves up to look as sexy as possible and then presumed to despise men for lusting after them. A squad of angry black girls ran on stage in order to gyrate arousingly while pouring scorn on any male who might be foolish enough to classify them as sex objects. ‘You’d better stop your fantasizin’ they instructed us shrilly. For those of us who hadn’t been doin’ any fantasizin’, the advice was supererogatory at best.

Up at the other end of the market, where long gowns are worn, distinguished ladies introduced each other’s numbers with fulsome accolades. If the lady had no number of her own to perform, she made a performance out of introducing somebody else’s number. ‘We all serve in different ways,’ said Noele Gordon. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, here is someone very special.’ As Ms Gordon serenely tackled the job of getting herself and her gown off stage, the curtains opened to reveal Mary O’Hara, who once again favoured the world with that song in which two cuckoos discuss their respective life-styles (‘Will there be danger to us from the hawk?’) before embarking on a course of self-fulfilment. I like Mary, but she overdoes the dirndls.

Petula Clark, billed above everybody else, climaxed the evening with majestic inappropriateness by singing ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ from Jesus Christ, Superstar. As always with Petula, the technique was as perfect as the emotions were suspect. She pretended to have a little cry at the end. Some of us out in the audience were crying for real. Like many men of my generation I am grateful to the feminist movement for helping to release us from the burden of male supremacy: whatever the purported revolution in women’s consciousness might have led to, the change in men’s minds has surely been a blessing.

It is good to see women being independent, since it means that men are freed from some of the more tiresome obligations of being dominant. But it is not good to see our newly liberated sisters making idiots of themselves. Golden Gala was the bummer of the century. It put the feminist movement back fifty years at least. After this, they’ll have to start chaining themselves to railings again and committing suicide at Epsom.

16 July, 1978

[ The original unedited version of this piece can be found in our Observer TV column chapter ]