Peter Bradshaw writing in the Guardian after seeing the new Bruno film, compares the Britain of today with the Britain of the 1970s and the Mary Whitehouse inspired prosecution of Gay News for blasphemy.
Ah yes, I remember it well. All that fuss over a little poem I read and thought very little of.
But oh God, how awful the Gay News trial was: one of the meanest, nastiest, pettiest things ever to have occurred in British public life, and one of the unfunniest things about that remarkably unfunny decade. Francis Wheen wrote that if the 60s were a wild weekend, and the 80s were a hectic day in the office, then the 70s were a long Sunday afternoon and evening: filled with boredom and vague, nagging dread. The Gay News row epitomised the sheer loathesomeness of the time, a Life On Mars that was no Life at all.
Yes indeed – I remember it very well – a time in which we lived in limbo, neither legal or illegal, in a grey shadow world. I never want to go back.
