I’ve Always Had Very Vivid Dreams

Monitor: Pop Goes The Easel (BBC-TV, 1962).

Although you probably wouldn’t know it from the stiffly formal marching string ensemble theme music and the accompanying supermarket own-brand Spirograph knock-off title graphics taken straight from the cover of a ‘exploring maths and science’ paperback aimed at overachieving pre-Beat Boom schoolchildren, the BBC’s flagship arts show Monitor, both by accident and design, routinely documented otherwise uncaptured glimpses of changing attitudes, perspectives and creative ambition in what was on the very verge of becoming a rapidly changing world. Launched in 1958 as essentially an attempt to replicate a broadsheet newspaper’s arts section on television with a brief to bring esoteric and challenging subjects to a wider audience, Monitor was created, presented and initially ‘edited’ by Huw Wheldon, with notable reporters including Humphrey Burton, W.G. Archer, Nancy Thomas, John Berger, John Schlesinger and a young trainee spotted working behind the scenes on the Third Programme named Melvyn Bragg. Huw Wheldon stepped down from Monitor late in 1964, feeling that he had run out of subjects he actually personally wanted to cover, and handed over – to some degree of controversy and resistance – to Jonathan Miller. Whether the audience were right to resent the emergent post-Beyond The Fringe polymath assuming control of their favourite arts show is another matter entirely, but the difficult truth of the matter is that Monitor would only continue to run through to the following June. Suggesting that maybe not that much had changed other than the presenter after all, the final edition included John Berger’s attempts to analyse the work of enigmatic sculptor Alberto Giacometti, George Melly presenting a profile of Rene Magritte, and a visit to Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’. Sadly this was not sufficient to secure Melvyn Bragg a namecheck in Walk On The Wild Side.

This was far from Monitor‘s only encounter with the contentious phenomenon known as ‘Pop Art’ – a term, incidentally, coined as far as anyone can tell by British artist Barbara Jones in 1951 – and on 25th March 1962, photographer and aspirant movie director Ken Russell’s profile of four young pre-eminent Pop Artists Pop Goes The Easel was slapped collage-style between the late evening news bulletin and A Quiet Mind – ‘a talk by The Rev. Dr. Maldwyn L. Edwards President of the Methodist Conference’ – for the possibly largely baffled enjoyment of late-night BBC-TV viewers. Opening with a pan across a collage of pin-ups, sports stars and movie and television icons arranged around his own not-quite-as-famous face, Huw Wheldon introduced the film with his own prescient thoughts on the artists’ preoccupation with “the world of popular imagination, the world of film stars, The Twist, science fiction, pop singers – a world which you can dismiss if you feel so inclined of course as being tawdry and second rate, but a world all the same in which everybody to some degree anyway lives whether they like it or not; film stars aren’t film stars for nothing, nor are they received as film stars for no reason at all”.

We then get a brief biographical overview of Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier over footage of them at work in their respective studios, although we properly ‘meet’ them as they lark around fly-on-the-wall style at a touring funfair. To the appropriately circus-themed strains of Goodbye Cruel World – an unlikely top thirty novelty hit late in 1961 for big screen heartthrob James Darren – the quartet giggle at hoardings and at each other’s prowess on the dodgems, share a handful of evidently deliciously taboo private jokes, try their collective hand at the coconut shy, the slot machines, and – intercut with footage of ‘real’ wild west sharp-shooters – the rifle range, and perch on the edge of the waltzers for a couple of hand-rolled smokes; only Peter Blake and Pauline, perhaps ’emboldened’ slightly, are game enough to give the alarmingly hurtling cars a try. Although we don’t get to hear anything that they are saying, we do get a sense of who they are as people and as artists, with spontaneous off-duty reactions to their surroundings tempered with eyes and minds buzzing with inspiration and creative possibility. Meanwhile, surprisingly for one of the most infamous egos in cinematic history – albeit one that powerfully harnessed this self-belief for some remarkable contributions to cinematic history – we get no sense of Ken Russell himself at all. He is there to translate the aesthetic visions of a handful of artists he finds fascinating into moving visuals suitable for a mainstream television audience, and in an impressively quiet and understated manner absolutely succeeds in doing so.

To the sound of Jorge Veiga’s eww-inducing march-samba tribute to Brigitte Bardot, we meet Peter Blake in his bedsit slash studio where, if the inserted film clips of her are anything to go by, he is enjoying some form of daydream about the star of Le Repos Du Guerrier that we are thankfully spared the details of. As well as multitudinous images of Initials B.B., there is also a significant quantity of recovered and repurposed Victorian military regalia on display, providing an early pointer towards a certain album cover he would have a hand in later in the decade, but here we get an entirely different example of his literal fusion of pop and art in action. After showing off his Frank Sinatra Door and Kim Novak Wall, he takes out a 45rpm copy of The Four Preps’ Got A Girl – framed as part of a collage of the teen pop singers the song wryly namechecks – and gives it a quick spin while ruminating on the diametrically opposed criticisms of his advertising hoarding sendup The Love Wall and simultaneously patriotic and thoroughly disrespectful assortment of images of The Royal Family within images of The Royal Family On The Balcony, before the camera closes in on his quietly epochal 1961 painting Self-Portrait With Badges.

A whole artistic world away from Peter Blake’s constantly refocused free-associative creative process, Peter Phillips arrives at his studio deep in thought and literally driven in a chauffeured Cadillac, with hip modern jazz shuffling away in the background as he very determinedly and methodically makes some strong and expensive-looking coffee in his collage-covered studio as his assistants read comics on the settee and give a full-size Gottleib Kewpie Doll pinball machine a thorough hammering. After flicking through the latest issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland, he then studies a copy of Mad and the tasteful ‘legitimate’ nude spreads in a society magazine and various elements of the various influences start to wordlessly find their way into one of his provocative juxtapositions of high living and low culture. It is difficult, incidentally, to shake the suspicion that his segment may well have had some bearing on the opening scene of The IPCRESS File.

Over in a basement flat, Derek Boshier is holding forth with a combination of fascination and concern over America’s cultural influence on the rest of the world, ruminating on how in the UK we now “start with America at the breakfast table”, courtesy of Yogi Bear-themed cereal promotions that reflect how “now we must sell cornflakes and comics together”. In a workspace that looks more like an ordered and professional office than a studio, he discusses the thoughts underpinning a striking example of his alarmingly prescient worldview – 1962’s I Wonder What My Heroes Think Of The Space Race, a juxtaposition of handsome and patriotic images of astronauts and cosmonauts with the haplessly smiling lost in time visages of Abraham Lincoln and Buddy Holly, composed in reaction to John F. Kennedy’s globally game-changing assertion that ‘we choose to go to the moon’. You cannot help but suspect that he may not have entirely shared the same degree of excitement as children across the world running around with cardboard boxes on their heads.

Then we meet Pauline Boty, setting out some of her artwork in a corridor in Television Centre when she is startled by some uniformed women barking orders in German, and flees into a looping nightmare of corridors, doors and inoperative lifts as a distorted alarm bell warps into disorientating musique concrete in the background. Just as it reaches a screechingly elastic cacophony, it snaps back into the sound of Pauline’s alarm clock as she wakes from her nightmare with the other three waiting outside the house for a tour of her studio, to the meteorologically appropriate accompaniment of Fred Astaire’s reading of A Foggy Day (In London Town). As they rummage around her artworks commenting on Natalie Wood, Ray Charles and – of course – coffee, Pauline notes whilst meticulously backcombing her hair that “I’ve always had very vivid dreams, and I can remember them very very vividly, and I use the kind of atmosphere of the dreams in my collages; I think there are two things about this, and one is that I often take the moment before something has actually happened – you don’t know if it’s going to be terrible, or it might be very funny; the other thing is something very extraordinary is actually happening, and everyone around isn’t taking any notice of it at all”. A browse through some of her frequently disturbing and sexually charged collages and some examination of her use of juxtaposition leads in to Pauline discussing her equal love of nightmarish imagery and Golden Age Hollywood musicals, noting that “I suppose I’ve just sort of absorbed all the shapes they use and the atmosphere, and it’s just come out in my paintings”, which is illustrated by a quick cut to her in top hat and gloves miming to Shirley Temple singing On The Good Ship Lollipop. What is particularly striking about Pauline’s contribution that rather than just using it as an opportunity to discuss and demonstrate her aesthetic, her approach is to treat the specific medium of television itself as an extension of her art, blurring the cross-disciplinary boundaries into something that is closer to a German Expressionist film than a tweedy discussion about technique between two academics on oddly uncomfortable-looking ‘comfy’ chairs. It does also leave you wondering whether Patrick McGoohan might have had one eye on the television that Sunday in between perusing Danger Man scripts.

Pop Goes The Easel signs off with more footage of the pop artists variously at work and scouring a market for old comics and postcards, intercut with a happening-looking party where they all attempt The Twist with varying degrees of success. With that, and with one of the strongest impressions yet that whatever was happening in the arts and culture and at that point still more or less out of their view was about to accelerate beyond their control, the audience were shoved straight back out into the reality of a Sunday night in a working week, with only Peter Yorke with his Orchestra featuring Michael Desmond and the Sidney Bright Trio introduced by Roy Williams on the Light Programme’s Serenade In The Night to realign their frazzled perceptory faculties. If you want a convenient but nonetheless telling context for this, Love Me Do had not yet even been released. Even when it was, it would see out 1962 hovering around the lower reaches of the chart, still yet to break through to that wider audience who probably couldn’t quite figure out why Derek Boshier was attaching American flags to clockwork robots.

Especially considering Monitor’s to say the least patchy representation in the archives, it’s remarkable enough that Pop Goes The Easel still exists, but it’s also fairly remarkable that it was even made in the first place. As prominent as all four artists may have been in 1962, they were nonetheless still just artists making a noise to the consternation of flannel-faced men spluttering that they ‘feel sorry for anyone who finds pleasure in this’ and disdain of bores at parties cornering you with their incessant clever observations that all modern artists were ‘con-men’ – yes, men – and there was no way of knowing that Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips would very soon be awarded prestigious academic and cultural positions, or that Peter Blake would go on to create arguably the most influential sleeve art in pop history, or more soberingly what would become of Pauline Boty. Every inch a social and political firebrand as much as an artistic one, Pauline was feted by the arts media for her increasingly challenging and provocative work at the same time as being courted by the entertainment media for her looks; dubbed the ‘Wimbledon Bardot’, she could often be seen amongst the dancers on Ready Steady Go! and heard as a regular contributor to the Light Programme’s The Public Ear, delivering humorously impassioned and pointed thoughts on culture and society and the role and prospects of women in both that were decades ahead of their time. She also drew considerable attention as an actor, most famously sighted in Alfie but also more prominently featured in a handful of avant-garde television dramas and murky crime serials, many of which are sadly all too predictably long lost. Then in 1966, she fell critically ill while pregnant and that was pretty much that. A fleeting name at a time when the majority of sensations in popular culture were even more fleeting still, Pauline faded from public memory and her artworks were put into storage awaiting rediscovery in more retrospectively enlightened times. Very little evidence exists of her mercurial talent and personality beyond the paintings and indeed beyond the painting – and even then one of her most celebrated works, the Profumo Affair-inspired Scandal ‘63, still cannot be located -which is why this glimpse of an excursion into multimedia art with occasional flashes of the artist behind it is all the more valuable and significant.

Whether Patrick McGoohan or Sidney J. Furie actually were looking in on BBC-TV that night is open to conjecture, but Pop Goes The Easel did actually find itself repeated on a number of occasions; once in response to public demand in 1963, before being chosen to represent 1961 as part of BBC2’s Festival 77, and again as part of The Late Show‘s coverage of The Royal Academy’s Pop Art retrospective in 1991. It was partly as a consequence of this exhibition and exposure that Pauline Boty’s work began to be reassessed and rehabilitated, giving rise to a steady stream of retrospectives and renewed critical assessment as well as Marc Kristal’s phenomenal biography slash collection Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister, a vivid, compassionate and crucially not uncritical look at a career lost to the dustier corners of the very first stirrings of home entertainment. Coinciding with its publication late in 2023, an accompanying exhibition at London’s Gazelli Art House met with considerable acclaim but also attracted sniffy and high-handed reviews, casting doubt on her significance and questioning whether her work ‘deserved’ to be considered alongside that of Peter Blake. The simple answer to that is that he himself seemed to think so at the time, and so did a director not exactly known for his quiet opinion and placatory position on artistic matters. Above all, however, it deserves to be considered entirely in its own right, on its own terms and in its own context. Especially when that context is being chased around Television Centre by some escaped henchwomen from a Cold War-era symbolist thriller.

Buy A Book!

You can find much more about Pauline Boty and other long-lost leading lights of early sixties art and popular culture in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. I’m not saying it has to be as meticulously made as it would be at Peter Phillips’ ‘pad’, but it’d help.

Further Listening

We never did get to find out Monitor‘s take on ‘Dalekmania’, but I had plenty to say about the subject in I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek here.