I watched "Made In Dagenham" the other night. This was a British movie made in the old fashioned British Drama Documentary Style and none the worse for it. There were shades of Cathy Come Home and Saturday Night Sunday Morning and even This Sporting Life. These kitchen sink dramas inspired me to raise the red flag and storm the barricades.
In the sixties and seventies the revolution was upon us. Working Class lads were becoming heroes, either singing their way out of the suburban housing estates of post war Britain, or clambering into powerful cultural positions in the BBC and other previously solidly middle class media arenas. The Eleven Plus examinations had launched its first wave of working class University Graduates and they were solidly for the welfare state and equal rights and opportunities for all. The cultural impact upon post-imperial Britain was profound.
"Made In Dagenham" outlined the story of how the first legislation for Equal Pay For Equal Work, was established. A group of women working in Ford Motors complained about their work being downgraded from Skilled to Unskilled, thus keeping their pay rates well below the men's. So they went on strike and brought a company that employed over fifty thousand people to a stand still. The Unions, a male bastion, were not happy with them, and the Ford Motor Company threatened to withdraw its company from the UK.
The principle was politically very attractive. Plenty of women were discovering that they were the breadwinners in the nuclear family and so the argument that men had families to support held little water. And women wanted to be independent and equal citizens, whether they were working class or middle class. So the strike was resolved by the promise of future legislation. The women were thus heroic fighters for their rights, and the rights of women for all time. Three cheers for the Women of Dagenham!
Watching the film, I remembered why I wanted to write. I wanted to further the cause, break down the hold over society that the aristocracy and private school educated elite of the UK had. I wanted to give suburban comprehensive school educated oiks like myself a fair crack of the whip. And my wife remembered why she had embarked upon a career path rather than a traditional housewife path. She wanted to inspire women to be more than just the servants of men.
As I cook her lunch, I remind myself of the iniquity of the old system where women knew their place was essentially to wear short skirts, giggle, fall on their back, pleasure me, and then iron my shirts. I have a slight twitch in my left eye as I do that and thank the revolution for rescuing me from such blatant something or other.
And the results of the revolution? Ford rid itself of thousands of jobs and Britain's traditional industrial base collapsed as companies went global and moved their operations to countries less concerned with health, social equality and fairness. Thus mass unemployment settled in. Crisis, as Jim Callaghan, then Prime Minister, said, what crisis?
At that time I found myself stuck on social security with no idea of how to climb out of the pit, apart from go shoot me some capitalists which in hindsight considering the present situation would probably have had better long term effects.
Instead, miraculously Margaret Thatcher came along, deregulated everything and made capital dirt cheap and so sucked me back into the game, putting money in my pocket for the first time ever in my life. Thus I became a born again capitalist and wondered what on earth I should write about now!
And so the last thing I had on British TV featured an Iranian Doctor giving a vitriolic tyrade against the stupidity, third ratedness, phony two faced left wing middle class, fat moronic working classes, conniving coke snorting bankers, arrogant selfish homosexual public school boys, sniffy racist illiterate everyones and ultimately a phony incompetent health service, public transport, half baked education at the hands of idiot teachers and so on and so on... echoing long before anyone had ever heard of them, the sort of all round tyrade the average mujahedin suicide bomber might utter.
It had people hurling coal bins at their colour tellies and phoning up in droves to complain about the language. I hasten to add that I used no swear words in this, but as incoherent rage against everything that pissed me off, I guess it managed to offend everyone largely because everyone in the UK pissed me off. For that matter, whenever I go there for any length of time I still find my blood pressure rising. No doubt the scars of those years of frustration during the crisis of the seventies has left its psychological scars. A noted writer of the period, Ted Whitehead, said that reading a script of mine was like sticking your hands into a drawer full of razor blades.
Anger fuelled my creative energies and nearly exploded my spleen. The only cure was to leave and live in the laid back laziness of Hong Kong. Or at least live in a city so hyper it made me feel normal. But of course, now that China's workers are beginning to notice how exploited they are, and how Asian women are beginning to seek equality, I'm beginning to feel the stirrings of the old revolutionary again. People had better start throwing money at me so I can write soft centred romantic comedies, a particular vice of mine, or at least make stupid movies with young women with large tits, another passion of mine, or else I will get back to my vitriolic roots, even if the tyrades will be in Cantonese.
My wife sighed on watching the movie and pointed out that only four of the staff in her University faculty were women and that there were hardly any women in Legco here in Hong Kong. She also mentioned how she was definitely more than the equal of many of the men and was still getting less than them. I suggested that she should chuck a molotov cocktail and that we should go hiking in Nepal and join the Maoist revolutionaries there. Then I poured her another glass of wine and thought, well, maybe not.