When Gyles Brandreth honoured the splendid Leslie Caron for her Oldie of the Year Award at the Savoy, he remarked that the song Maurice Chevalier sang in the 1958 movie of Gigi might nowadays be cancelled. It begins, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/For little girls grow bigger every day…’
Actually, the song was banned – by Irish state radio, then called Radio Éireann. It was considered to be ‘suggestive’.
Radio Éireann (now RTE) also prohibited ‘I’d like to get you/On a slow boat to China’ (covered by many artistes) for being ‘suggestive’. ‘Oh dear/What can the matter be’, too, came in for some disapproval, since there was a bowdlerised version, where the lyrics continued ‘Two ladies/Locked in a lavatory’. Elvis Presley’s It’s Now or Never, as well, took some time to be approved for broadcast.
Ireland was considered – and was – prudish at the time, but prudishness and our contemporary ‘cancel culture’ are remarkably similar. Slow Boat to China is perhaps a bit rapey, when you come to think of it, and It’s Now or Never is quite evidently about pressurising a lady into sexual congress without asking consent.
As for Thank Heaven for Little Girls – well, it is rather suggestive of a distinctly Lolita-type tendency…
It is so sad to read about the way the Lebanon is falling apart, as a society and as a state: no streetlights; raw sewage on the beach; abject poverty; the economy collapsing. It was once a beacon of civilisation and even glamour.
My father, who was born in 1877 (yes, Pa was quite an oldie when he fathered me in 1944), was a student in Beirut towards the turn of the 20th century. He remembered it as the most delightful of places. Beirut was known as ‘the Paris of the Middle East’.
Everything worked properly. The food and the wine were wonderful, the culture sophisticated, and the people mingled together tolerantly – Christian, Muslim and Jew. The road to Damascus was, literally, a peaceful pathway of travelling and trading.
The Lebanese are an innovative and ancient people, descended from the Phoenicians: can they rebuild their country to what it once was?
One of my favourite shops is Poundland, which delivers pleasant service and bargain products for a quid or so. Since reading glasses are objects constantly lost os misplaced, I have a policy of keeping a pair in every room; as they are only a pound apiece at Poundland, this is no extravagance. These cheapo specs are just as good as any designer label supplied by the optician.
Marks & Spencer closed their popular store in Deal in Kent, much to the town’s chagrin, and left a visible gap in the High Street. But just in time for Christmas, the space will be taken over by Poundland: hooray for them, say I!
'We must teach our sons to respect women' was a comment often heard throughout an autumn of concern over violence towards women.
It is not that women and girls should be more careful in their everyday lives: men and boys should be taught to be less aggressive, selfish and savage.
Caroline Noakes, the Conservative MP (whom I’ve previously mentioned in dispatches) and Chair of Women and Equalities Committee, most particularly emphasises that there must be a ‘culture change’ in men’s attitudes to women. Harriet Harman, for the Labour opposition, has articulated this viewpoint many times.
We are all in favour, surely. And yet it’s not exactly the newest idea in the world. As the incisive American thinker Camille Paglia has pointed out, the civilising of the more brutish side of males has been a humanities project over many centuries.
The 15th-century Renaissance courtier Baldassare Castiglione established founding principles about treating ladies with respect and gentleness. Chivalry was invented because females didn’t have the physical strength to defend themselves, and it was a gentleman’s duty to observe chivalric courtesies towards ‘the fairer sex’.
The historian of European manners W E H Lecky describes how civilisation sought to soften the rough edges of the more loutish male. Although an Irish Protestant, Lecky claimed that the cult of the Blessed Virgin promoted deference and respect towards women.
Throughout the 19th century, as the Victorian historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has chronicled, respectability (and Sunday Schools) helped to refine all classes in society. When the Titanic sank in 1912, most men did observe the chivalrous code of ‘women and children first’.
And I think that the efforts to ‘gentilise’ men have been reasonably successful. There are always a few violent brutes – and the law should certainly rigorously penalise assaults and, of course, murder. But in my quite lengthy experience, most men are decent, kind and gentle – gentlemen, in fact.
Keep striving for high standards from chaps, Mesdames Noakes and Harman, but remember, these endeavours have been going on for quite a few centuries!
The Oldie December 2022
