Camp and coded performance in British broadcasting

Camp and coded performance in British broadcasting describes a period, running from the 1950s to the 1980s, in which camp performers reached very large radio and television audiences while homosexuality was either criminal or newly and only partly decriminalised, and while none of the performers concerned was able to be publicly gay.

What camp was for changed as the law changed. Before 1967 it was a means of speaking to those who understood while remaining deniable to everyone else. After 1967 it became mainstream light entertainment. From the mid 1970s it was attacked by the gay liberation movement as a caricature, and from the 1990s reassessed again.

Polari

Polari was a cant assembled from Italian, Romani, Yiddish, backslang and rhyming slang, in use from at least the eighteenth century among travelling people, fairground and circus workers, London market traders, the theatre and the merchant navy. Gay men working in those trades developed its vocabulary further, and by the mid twentieth century it served as a means of speaking safely in public at a time when conviction meant imprisonment.

Words that passed from Polari into general English include camp, mince, naff, drag and bona.

Julian and Sandy

The characters Julian and Sandy first appeared in the fourth edition of the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne on 28 March 1965, two years before the Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men in England and Wales. They were played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, both of whom were gay and both familiar with Polari, and written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman, who named them after the composers Sandy Wilson and Julian Slade.

Round the Horne ran for four series until 1968, broadcast on Sunday lunchtimes to a family audience which grew to some fifteen million listeners, and won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain award for best comedy script in 1967. Julian and Sandy became its most popular element, appearing in almost every edition.

The sketches followed a fixed form. Kenneth Horne would call at a business in Chelsea whose name began with "Bona" – Bona Law, Bona Tours and others – and be greeted with the catchphrase "Hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy". The dialogue was conducted substantially in Polari: "How bona to vada your dolly old eek" translates as "how good to see your nice old face".

Two things distinguished the sketches from most contemporary depictions. The pair were not the butt of the joke – Horne's presumed innocence was – and they were neither ashamed nor tragic, which was almost unheard of at a time when homosexual characters in mainstream entertainment were absent, villainous or doomed.

The scale of the audience had an unintended consequence. Once several million listeners knew what bona and vada meant, Polari's usefulness as a private language was largely destroyed, and it fell out of common use after 1967.

Kenneth Williams's diaries, published after his death, record a private unhappiness quite at odds with the public performance; he wrote in 1965 of longing for the warmth of unquestioning love.

After 1967

Camp performance became a staple of mainstream television in the decade after partial decriminalisation. John Inman played Mr Humphries in the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? from 1972 to 1985, ten series in which the character's catchphrase "I'm free!" entered general use and the programme reached audiences of twenty-two million at its peak in 1979. Larry Grayson presented The Generation Game from 1978. Neither man was publicly out; Inman and the writer David Croft both maintained that Mr Humphries was simply a mother's boy and that his sexuality was never stated.

Who the joke was on

Camp characters of the period did not all stand in the same relation to the humour, and the difference matters.

In Round the Horne the target was Kenneth Horne's presumed innocence: Julian and Sandy were in command of the exchange and were neither ashamed nor punished. In Are You Being Served? the position was contested, Inman maintaining that the character was not the butt of the joke and his critics maintaining that he was.

In the BBC sitcom It Ain't Half Hot Mum, written by David Croft with Jimmy Perry and broadcast from 1974 to 1981 to audiences of up to seventeen million, the arrangement was explicit. Gunner, later Bombardier, "Gloria" Beaumont, an effeminate drag performer in a Royal Artillery concert party, was played by Melvyn Hayes; Croft had originally wanted John Inman for the part. The Sergeant-Major's weekly catchphrase demanded of the concert party, "No man who puts on make-up and ponces about on a stage is normal – what are you?", to which the required answer was that they were a load of poofs. Perry later acknowledged that the language was homophobic, defending it as an accurate record of how soldiers spoke, and citing his own sergeant-major during wartime service in India.

As with Mr Humphries, the writer denied that the character was homosexual. Croft told an interviewer that Beaumont never expressed any interest in other males and was a transvestite rather than a homosexual – a distinction drawn in terms that read oddly now, and one which places the character ambiguously in relation to both gay and trans history. A storyline in which Beaumont became engaged to a nurse was introduced and not returned to.

The BBC has not repeated the series, principally because of the casting of a white actor in brownface as an Indian character, but also on grounds of homophobia and its sympathetic treatment of empire.

Gay liberation objects

In 1977 members of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality picketed Inman's summer season in Brighton, distributing leaflets which argued that he depicted homosexuals as sexually obsessed, extravagant in manner and too eager to appear in drag, and that most gay men did not behave like Mr Humphries. Inman replied that people far more camp than the character could be found across the country, and that I feel I might be doing some good.

CHE's Lewisham branch picketed Larry Grayson at a concert hall in the borough. Paul Patrick, later a founder of Schools OUT, recalled in 2011 that the protest was not directed at Grayson personally but at how he appeared in the media, distorting the reality of our lives. Grayson invited the picketers backstage after the performance. They asked him to confirm that he was gay, which he did, and he asked in return what more he could reasonably do, being a household entertainer who could not be openly out without serious consequences. One figure who moved in the opposite direction from mainstream broadcasting to radical gay liberation theatre was Bette Bourne. Working under his birth name Peter Bourne, he appeared in 1960s television series including Dixon of Dock Green, The Avengers and The Prisoner — precisely the coded, respectable world the liberation movement was reacting against. Disillusioned with show business, he joined the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s, adopted women's clothing as a political act, and in 1977 co-founded Bloolips, a radical drag theatre company that took the protest in an entirely different direction: not picketing camp comedians, but creating a new kind of openly gay performance that needed no code at all.

Reassessment

Opinion has shifted since. Peter Tatchell has said that he used to utterly despise Grayson and Inman for what he regarded as a negative and stereotyped representation, adding that there is nothing wrong with camp but that in a period when it was the only representation available it alienated men who did not identify with effeminacy.

George Broadhead of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, who had described Inman as a bête noire of the gay community, said on his death in 2007 that the community had since come to appreciate its trailblazers, and that reruns could now be enjoyed rather than cringed at. Writing in The Times in the same week, Matthew Parris headed his tribute "I'm free – and it's all because of men like John Inman".

Inman lived with his partner Ron Lynch for more than thirty years and entered a civil partnership with him shortly before his death.

See also

• Bette Bourne
• Bloolips
• Polari
• Kenneth Williams
• Hugh Paddick
• John Inman
• Larry Grayson
• Melvyn Hayes