Doughty Mrs Joan Bakewell suddenly launched her tirade at a surprised care assistant who had just brought her breakfast tray, saying that everything “started going wrong in the sixties, when all those drug-crazed hippies started calling for free love, with their long hair and what have you.” She added that she was “seventy-seven!” before adding, “Seventy-seven!”
Warming to her theme, Mrs Bakewell harangued her dozing fellow-residents of the Sunset Home For Retired Broadcasters with a devastating critique of the pill, the legalisation of abortion, bra-burning lesbian suffragettes and the horrors of the Woodstock Festival.
“Them and their sexual revolution!” she raged, drowning out the familiar drone of Breakfast Television X in the residents’ lounge. “They even said sex was pleasurable and wholesome, when we all know perfectly well that it’s dirty and wicked and only to be tolerated when the husband instructs his lady wife that he’s very much afraid to say the time has come to create an heir to carry on the family name.”
“Now it’s sex, sex, sex everywhere you look,” she thundered, spilling tea everywhere. “We tried to tell them that women are pretty little fools who couldn’t make a sensible decision if our lives depended on it, but would they listen? Oh no! So now we’re in a pretty pass where single mums, without the reassuring authority of a man in the household, dress their poor little bastards – and I’m sorry, but that’s the only proper word - dress their little bastards in push-up bras and crotchless nappies before cheerfully delivering them into the clutches of perverts in raincoats outside the school gates!”
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” she fumed. “Every week in Smith’s I have to fumble through yards of the vilest pornography imaginable to find a copy of the People’s Friend. Where will it all end?”
Eventually Mrs Bakewell’s shrieks woke veteran newshorse Richard Baker from his daydreams, causing him to mumble that back in the sixties the most prominent campaigner for sexual liberation was, in fact, her.
With barely a pause for breath, Mrs Bakewell described Mr Baker’s recollections as the senile ramblings of a silly old twit, maintaining stoutly that “that Mrs Whitehouse had the right idea” and adding that she was seventy-seven before the duty manager finally managed to convince her to take her tablets.
No comments:
Post a Comment