The Transformation of the Labour Party Through Television: Harvey Moon and Adrian Mole
By Will Barber Taylor
The Labour Party is in many ways, a child of new media. It was born during the formation of the modern printed press; it was first elected when film was on the ascendance; its 40s landslide coincided with the slow return of television to Britain; it returned to power as the Beatles rocked Ed Sullivan; it achieved a “new dawn” as the internet was being born and seems to be currently imbedded in social media, for good or ill.
The Labour Party has, ironically enough, never been terribly fussed or overly keen with the changing media that has lived alongside it. At one time, Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell advocated the abolition of ITV because of its use of adverts; Harold Wilson would go on to embrace television but was reluctant to employ advertisers. The most media friendly leader was Tony Blair who would appear on all manner of political TV programmes, even going as far as to appear in The Simpsons. Yet, television is often one of the best ways to examine change — it captures the moment like no other.
Only through television can we see exactly what happened at Ted Bundy’s trial; only through television can we hear the panic at the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan; only through television are we allowed to feel Neil Armstrong’s footsteps on the Moon. Yet television’s power is not simply through its ability to entrap reality — it is its ability to use fiction as a means of expressing truths. This can be found in two excellent TV series — Shine on Harvey Moon and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. Both are entirely fictional though they do feature real people and represent two different eras of the Labour Party which perhaps tells us a great deal about how both Labour has changed but also how Britain has too.
In Shine on Harvey Moon, the titular character Harvey Moon (Kenneth Cranham) returns home from the Second World War to find his house destroyed and his wife, Rita (Maggie Steed) living in a prefab with their two children Stanley and Maggie. Harvey, after a failed attempt at reconciliation with Rita attempts to rebuild his life and through a variety of events becomes involved with the Labour Party, eventually becoming elected a councillor and a JP. It is this aspect of the series that I will focus on most heavily in this article, but every aspect of the series is excellent, and the cast, crew and creators Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran should receive the highest praise possible for the series.
In Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, Mole (Stephen Mangan) returns home to Ashby de la Zouch (“The town that cappuccino forgot”) on the eve of the 1997 general election to vote for his former childhood sweetheart Dr Pandora Braithwaite (Helen Baxendale). Mole, like Moon is in a transitionary point in his life; after he is sacked as an offal chef, he accrues minor fame as a TV chef with his own show, Offally Good. He also discovers that he has a teenage son from a relationship with Sharon Bott. As with Shine on Harvey Moon, this piece will focus on the political (specifically the Labour Party related) elements of the programme but as with Moon every aspect of the programme deserves praise.
As both pieces are, in effect, period pieces (though one more recent than the other) to compare them to the modern Labour Party or any representation of it — say for example in James Graham’s excellent Labour of Love — I’ll therefore only use direct comparisons between the two works.
The Labour Party we see in both programmes are radically different and both of its respective leaders appear in them. Attlee appears when Harvey attends the Labour Party Conference but not on the stage; on the train. Blair, contrastingly, is seen with Pandora in the famous picture of him with Labour’s newly elected female MPs. One could suggest that this demonstrates the distance that New Labour and its leader had from ordinary people, whereas Attlee was at one with them. It might be a nice suggestion for some but its probably down to the fact one was made decades after the latter’s death whereas Blair was still Prime Minister and beginning his second term when The Cappuccino Years was broadcast; one of the pitfalls of over examination is the failure to realize that everything that happened in fiction isn’t necessarily down to some greater motivation from an author.
What is clear is that the way that both Labour Party’s are organised and integrate into our characters’ lives is markedly different. Harvey becomes involved in the Labour Party through a dispute with his boss, resulting in Harvey unionising the workforce. Adrian’s involvement with Labour is peripheral at best — his main attraction is the fact Pandora is the candidate rather than New Labour agreeing with his belief system. This perhaps demonstrates something interesting about society in the post 45 world as compared to 1997; Harvey feels that by joining the Labour Party and by getting Stanley “up the grammar” he can not only better himself financially but also change society — he partly stands as a councillor because of his mother, Vi (Elizabeth Spring)’s “working class Toryism”. Adrian, contrastingly, feels that he cannot do anything to change his life — rather, he is trapped by his son William and his extended family — unable to satisfy his pretensions of being an “intellectual”. He doesn’t see Labour as a means of changing the world for him — he is perfectly happy acting as a spectator from the side-lines whilst Pandora ascends the greasy poll of political life.
Does this lack of participation by Adrian, this feeling of helplessness demonstrate that by 1997 society had already divided itself between the “political class” and the “voters” unable to switch between one another? Harvey though partly needed to be convinced to stand does so because he dislikes his mother’s idea that there is some separation between him and the elite — that he cannot be a councillor simply because he is working class. Mole, though from a similar background — albeit one that benefits from advances that Moon would not have grown up with — feels he cannot achieve his dreams because he is being held back. It could be suggested that, though by 1997 Britain’s economy was much better than in the late 1940s, its society more equal in terms of rights but that part of the civic belief in service had gone. Britain, unlike John F Kennedy’s America, never experienced a mid-century “call to serve” — the slip towards apathy continued with no redress.
Yet is this entirely true? Adrian’s mother Pauline (Alison Steadman) certainly doesn’t feel apathetic — she joins in campaigning for Pandora’s election and is optimistic about the future. Yet the optimism she displays is not one of self-faith or faith in a project over which she has any control — it is, in some regards, a blind faith. After the election she comments that everything seems better “under Tony”; she tells her husband George that he’ll get a job now that Labour is in power. Of course, this is part of Sue Townsend’s satirical characterisation of Pauline — she has the same pie in the sky self-belief as Adrian but none of his father’s latent depression. Yet, unlike Harvey, Pauline is again removed from the drama of politics; she doesn’t participate and idly believes that New Labour will solve all her problems. She also, given her attraction to Pandora’s father Ivan, sees it as a means of “escaping” her working-class roots.
This element demonstrates a change in the Labour Party and society between 45 and 97. Harvey, though surrounded by more middle-class socialists such as Dick Elliot and Stanley’s headmistress Harriet Wright never feels uneasy about his roots. He wants to improve his standard of living and those of his constituents, but he doesn’t wish to distance himself from his background. Contrastingly, almost every character in The Cappuccino Years that is involved with Labour either attempts to escape their roots or try to keep them in the background. Adrian and his mother are desperate to escape any association with being working class — Adrian through his pretensions of being a Soho “intellectual” and his mother through hooking up with Ivan. The Braithwaites, Bennites converted to New Labour, attempt to hide their Middle-Class sensibilities but bring them to the forefront when they feel in the least bit snobbish about the Moles.
Yet, it could be argued that The Cappuccino Years shouldn’t be viewed as any form of entirely accurate commentary on the state of the Labour Party; Townsend’s work is pure satire and all of the characters featured in her Mole books are broad caricatures. Yet it does suggest something about the way in which society and politics have changed over the last century; from something that felt almost like a civic duty and that, whilst not always as open to working class people as it could have been, was still powered by them to one in which social mobility meant destroying your roots rather than remembering them.
Television, is of course, not a portal into the past. It only shows us what has been captured at a specific moment in time. It is like a fly in amber — it doesn’t allow us to bring back the dinosaurs, but it does let us envisage what it was like when they roamed the Earth. Similarly, TV drama isn’t the same as a text book; its aim isn’t to necessarily inform but to entertain. Sometimes, it can do both. Yet TV drama allows us to re-examine moments in history through new eyes and to consider how writers have formed their opinions and what prompts them to tell the stories that they tell. Often, they can tell us more about ourselves than any charter or headstone can. They offer us a glimmer into not only how we have changed but how we think we’ve changed. And personal insight is the greatest tool for change that there is — for both people and institutions such as the Labour Party; insight into how we were and how we can be allows us to change and hopefully change for the better.
