British Low Culture - From Safari Suits to Sexploitation - Leon Hunt

 BRITISH LOW CULTURE -

 FROM SAFARI SUITS TO SEXPLOITATION -

 LEON HUNT

If culture is not your friend, as ethnobotanist Terence McKenna once advised, does this mean that low culture is your mortal enemy? And what of British low culture specifically? Is it your nemesis? The metaphorical bullet with your name on? Enter into Leon Hunt's book British Low Culture and it needs to be done with trepidation because let's face it, the title is pretty loaded particularly with its added subtitle 'From Safari Suits to Sexploitation'. 

What exactly is 'low culture' and if such a thing can be defined is it cast as a good or a bad thing? Who's to judge? Who's the arbiter? In the blurb on the back of the book it mentions flares, lava lamps, safari suits, sexploitation films, skinhead novels, glam rock, and the mythology of wife-swapping suburbia. But hang on a minute. Is this implying that all these things are of no worth? As in low culture as opposed to high culture? Flares I'd agree with as they were always a waste of good cloth in the Seventies as well as the Madchester Nineties but everything else listed are some of my favourite things!

Leon Hunt's book was published in 1998 and there hasn't been a reprint since. The publisher is Routledge, who specialise in books of an academic nature which means Hunt is obviously an academic himself as well as a lecturer. Not that this is a bad thing, of course, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

'If you can remember the Seventies, you were there,' as comedian Jack Dee once said. The 1970s being always held up as an example of when culture turned naff. But isn't this by now a very boring yardstick? What exactly was better culturally about the Peter York/Robert Elms embellished 1980s than the BBC/ITV embellished 1970s? Between 'crumpet' and 'knockers' in the Seventies and 'birds' and 'tits' in the Eighties, there's not a lot of difference. There is, however, a difference between 'popular' and 'low' culture and that difference is often defined by 'authenticity', even if the term 'authenticity' itself is increasingly hard to define as the years pass.

Punk, of course, was the great leveller when it came to separating the authentic from the inauthentic but again as the years go by and our bullshit detectors in our garages become dulled, it's almost reached a point of where nobody really cares anymore because everything is simply product to consume without there being any real reasoning behind so-called choices. Essentially, for a lot of people 'I shop therefore I am' is all that really matters.

Leon Hunt's book is a dense affair, well-researched and packed with detail. Who would have thought that British TV comedy series from the Seventies were such cultural, political and sociological case studies? On The Buses, Are You Being Served?, Rising Damp, Man About The House - prime subjects for serious cultural studies all. As for Love Thy Neighbour, the fact that it was the most successful British sitcom from 1973 to 1975 tells us it was part of popular culture which alone begs a lot of questions, though the one to ask here is was it actually 'low culture'? Was it authentic?

This is where it starts to become problematic. The Sun newspaper was once part of popular culture too, but was The Sun 'low culture'? Was The Sun authentic? If so, then where did that leave The Guardian newspaper? It's at this point that a class analysis comes in handy, something that in a lot of academia is often missing. Thankfully there are times in Leon Hunt's book where he does indeed reveal a class consciousness and it's at these times that his book goes beyond navel-gazing and becomes genuinely illuminating, even if the reader needs to work on it due to these illuminations not being handed-over on a plate.

Hunt delves into the subjects of the Skinhead and Hell's Angels books from the New English Library stable, the wave of Confessions films starring the legendary Robin Askwith, the porn empire of David Sullivan and his Mary Millington films, and then finally the British horror film genre of the 1970s focusing specifically on the Hammer, Tyburn and Amicus films of that decade.

It's all good, interesting stuff written by somebody who clearly knows what he's talking about. And that's the beauty of it. British Low Culture is a serious book written by somebody who has thought seriously about the kind of subcultures that don't naturally invite examination. Importantly, Hunt doesn't set out to criticise but to understand. The icing on the cake of all this being the select filmography he supplies at the end that is an education in itself. Add to that all the films listed in the index then what you've got, essentially, is nothing less than a design for life.

John Serpico