White Heat is the latest original drama from the BBC, following a group of friends who meet in the 1960s.
I am young enough to remember that we studied the 60s in our history class at school. It was, we were told, a period of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The 60s are often blamed for the death of cultural Christianity in Britain, and it’s easy to see why. The rules were changing as young people attempted to take control of the world. Radically disrespectful of their parents, they set about defying the expectations of the older generations, determined to smoke, drink and dance their way into the future. Sexism, racism and homophobia were still rife, but there was a new sense that political and social freedom was to be sought, at any cost. It was the era of the Beatles, the miniskirt and the pill.
All-important question
In the midst of this white heat, surprising friendships were forged. The BBC show takes this fact and poses the all-important question: what would happen if a group of young people tried to ignore every social tradition and taboo that had gone before and searched for a new way of living?
Young landlord Jack, a charismatic rebel, gathers together a collection of young people from a range of social, ethnic and professional backgrounds. His aim is to ‘live according to morals’. He persuades them that they must set out to find a new way of living, in which love — of both an emotional and a sexual nature — is shared freely between them without the need for commitment. With this ‘godless set up’ operational, the characters set out to live their dreams in a world where the personal is most definitely political. The programme rapidly summarises the tumultuous years of British life, as the friends join the frenzied riots, energetically paint like Francis Bacon, take LSD and read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, aware that all of it has implications that reach beyond the tin-foil-lined walls of their house.
Around them the nuclear family crumbles, but its demise can easily be drowned out by a vinyl refrain from The Who:
People try to put us d-down
Just because we g-g-get around
[...] I’m not trying to cause a big sensation
I’m just talkin’ ’bout my generation.
Hindsight makes it all seems rather overstated, with the characters verbalising the important issues rather noisily. Yet it does paint a vivid picture of a decade which shaped modern Britain with its brutal passion and burning optimism.
Welcome to the 21st century
The plot is told in a series of flashbacks, and thus anchored in the modern day. One of the characters has died — we are not initially told who — and the other friends begin to reunite to sort through the possessions left in his house, which is the same house that at they once shared. The 21st century in which they now live has inherited much of its morality from the 60s, but the characters, the house, and the country are almost unrecognisable.
Cutting back the stripes of yellow police tape the characters offer brittle and awkward exchanges, laden with muted grief. The bleak atmosphere is reinforced by the fact that the body of the deceased individual was not discovered for over two weeks: welcome to hi-tech, multicultural, busy, capitalist, city living in 2012.
Pain in the process
In many ways the animated, mind-whirling drama of the 60s seems preferable to the lonely and clinical reality of the 21st century. But the problem, of course, is that the 60s were the route whereby the characters reached where they are now.
They have reached adulthood and each live heavy with regret for what they did, and what they did not do, to each other. What used to hold them together was mutual disappointment at the stable world that their parents offered them. What they share now is disappointment that their revolution didn’t win them total freedom. It bought them some measure of progress, but there was pain in the process: as we follow the characters on their journey to the present, their heady hedonism is confronted by union strikes and IRA bombings, divorce and abortions, and finally, death.
A zealously followed ‘godless set up’ seems not to have been the revolutionary route to happiness that everyone had hoped for. For, as one of the characters astutely remarks, ‘man cannot live by rage alone’.
White Heat’s six episodes were broadcast weekly from March 8 - April 12 2012 on BBC2.
Rachel Thorpe works as an events planner and freelance writer in Cambridge. More of her articles are available at http://www.rachelthorpe.com
