So You Think You Know It All: A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories

Grassroots campaigns are often heartfelt, but they have a habit of being strangled by weeds (and spotlight-craving politicians).

It’s 1967. Britain is swinging. And so is the economy – at the end of a rope. With inflation rocketing and foreign exports tanking, Harold Wilson’s government have had to devalue the pound by 14 per cent to be in with a hope of competing with European imports. It’s humiliating for Wilson as he pleads no alternative to boosting output.

But five secretaries from plumbing manufacturers Colt Ventilation and Heating Ltd, in Surbiton, have a cunning plan…

On 27 December ‘the girls of the typing pool’ composed a collective letter to their boss offering to work an extra half-hour a day, for free, to do their bit for the economy and British-made products. ‘We’re Backing Britain,’ they typed, in the process coining a pretty marvellous, media-friendly, rallying cry. The management didn’t need persuading to take an offer of free labour (what management would?) and the week between Christmas and New Year being traditionally slow in terms of news, the story was a belated gift to the tabloids. So enthusiastic were the columnists and features writers who picked it up from the newsdesk that by mid-January 1968, 3,000 companies had announced that their workers were pledging to skip tea breaks to improve productivity.

Initially the movement was spontaneous and homespun so, naturally, politicians wondered what they might get out of it. Ted Heath, the Tory (and opposition) leader, hopped on the bandwagon followed by Prime Minister Wilson. Business leaders weren’t far behind. Publisher Robert Maxwell launched a simultaneous Buy British campaign. He was passionate about all this, he said, failing to disclose that all the books he published were printed in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, the trade unions warned that the campaign was just a smokescreen for unpaid overtime. But that fell on deaf ears. And so, thankfully, did Bruce Forsyth’s excruciatingly naff – but very catchy – single ‘I’m Backing Britain’. It was rushed out to fanfare the movement and, in the spirit of things, everyone involved, including Bruce, made it for a reduced fee. It sold 7,300 copies and failed to chart.

Economically, experts said, the campaign was woefully naïve. It simply didn’t add up. But for a brief moment it did have a bit of Dunkirk spirit, a feeling that the nation was pulling together and enjoying a collective experience not felt since, well, Dunkirk.

Badges, stickers and T-shirts were everywhere and festooned everything for the first months of 1968. London wholesaler Scott Lester ordered thousands of white T-shirts screen-printed with the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ slogan. But, it turned out, the shirts had been made in Portugal. Lester said, ‘We can’t find a British T-shirt which will give us the same quality at a price which will compare.’ D’oh!

‘I’m Backing Britain’ disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. The slogan remains in parlance only as the punchline of a joke, most famously Spike Milligan’s quip: ‘I’m Backing Britain – over a cliff!’

UP IN SMOKE

Cigarette advertising was banned on British TV in 1965, but cigarette manufacturers W.D. & H.O. Wills probably wished it had been much earlier. In 1959, a period in British history where you were in a minority if you didn’t smoke, they launched a new brand, called Strand. The campaign centred on a costly TV advert that, to this day, still stands out for its artistry. It had a dishy protagonist, known in the script as The Lonely Man and in reality played by actor Terence Brook, a dead ringer for Sinatra. Wandering the empty streets of London at night, he stops to light a cigarette under a streetlamp. ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the tagline over a cool, downbeat theme jazz riff. It’s not clear why he’s mooching around in a trench coat in the early hours, but he looks good doing it. If you smoked Strand, the ad wanted you to know, you would reek of cool. The advert certainly struck a note with the public and brand recognition was extremely high. But something stank about Strand. Sales were a disaster. Most people who saw the ad translated its message into something akin to: ‘Smoke Strand and you too can be a depressed, friendless loser.’ The ad’s soundtrack, called ‘The Lonely Man Theme’, was recorded by the Cliff Adams Orchestra and reached number 38 in the hit parade.

THIS DEAL SUCKS

When a company synonymous with vacuum cleaners decided to branch out as a travel agent, the result was an unmitigated disaster. Britons were swept up in Hoover’s too-good-to-be-true special offer – and resorted both to hijacking and to Trojan horses to get their money back. Even the Queen was sufficiently miffed to whip back her Royal Seal of approval.

In 1992, the British division of Hoover had a surfeit of white goods, which they were desperate to shift. So they came up with the bright idea of offering two, free, round-trip airline tickets with every purchase of a Hoover product over £100. While the promotion was good only for trips inside Europe, canny customers realised they could make savings on flights.

Hoover didn’t have their eye on the ball, though, and leapt from misguided to moronic by extending the offer to US destinations. In 1992 a one-way ticket to the USA averaged £200, but Hoover were offering a pair of returns for £100. That made no business sense whatsoever. Their adverts acknowledged as much, running with a tagline that chuckled, ‘Two return seats: Unbelievable.’ Unusually for advertising, this boast turned out to be completely true – just not for the right reasons. More than 200,000 people bought Hoovers they didn’t really want.

Hoover’s European sales increased dramatically; their bottom line did not. Realising too late the calamity of the offer, Hoover refused to honour it. This incensed the public. In Cumbria, a Mr Dixon hijacked a Hoover branded van when a repairman from the company called to fix the dishwasher he had bought to fund a family holiday to the USA. Dixon refused to hand back the van until he got his tickets – and became a national hero overnight. BBC consumer rights show Watchdog became obsessed with the story and sent in undercover reporters to Hoover HQ. A grass-roots consumer group called the Hoover Holidays Pressure Group was formed and bought enough shares in Hoover’s parent company to attend shareholder meetings and pressure them to pay up.

When that failed, the group took the company to the courts, making headlines throughout Europe and the United States. The court cases went on for five more years, costing Hoover £50 million and such a devastating drop in reputation that their owners, Maytag, were forced to sell off the company to an Italian competitor, Candy.

AT THE PICTURES: THE STORIES BEHIND THE SCENES (#ulink_9714c2bf-7db0-54db-8374-d520ed35d624)

BISH! BASH! BOSCH!

Nestled in the Chiltern Hills, Turville is a tiny hamlet boasting the sort of chocolate box looks that have film location scouts swooning. To that end, its sixteenth-century stone cottages have been the backdrop to scores of TV dramas and feature films such as I Capture the Castle and The Vicar of Dibley (its church, Saint Barnabus, is actually Turville’s St Mary the Virgin). The hamlet is cinematic shorthand for idyllic, pastoral England; a place where nothing changes, where time appears to have slowed. An inspired choice, then, for the location of the most shocking British film of the Second World War, a film intended as a rude wake-up for the nation.

Went the Day Well? was a British box office hit, released late in 1942. By the standards of the time, it was an extraordinarily graphic depiction of what might happen following a Nazi invasion of Britain. Some scenes – including a housewife attacking a man with an axe – still pack a punch today. Ealing Films, more famous for their comedies, produced the film and shot it on location at Turville, renamed as Bramley End.

The film tells the story of how a platoon of Nazi paratroopers is sent to soften things up ahead of a full-scale invasion of the UK. In June 1940, Germany really had drawn up plans to invade Britain, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. Went the Day Well? was deliberately intended to warn the UK populace that an invasion remained a possibility and that they must stay forever vigilant. It managed to deliver its warning positively and without scaremongering.

In the film, the invasion advance guard arrive mob-handed at Bramley End, disguised as British soldiers. Stationing themselves in the village, they’re warmly greeted by the unwitting locals (mainly women and children). The soldiers are especially welcomed, and aided, by the local squire – a Nazi insider who knows their real identity. Soon, however, the women of the village begin to note that all is not as it seems about these Tommies. A blink or you’ll miss it clue is the way that some of the squaddies write their numbers – in the Continental way, with a cross through the stem of a 7. Later, one of the soldiers publicly manhandles one of the kids. But what actually betrays the platoon is, of all things, a bar of chocolate.

‘Schokolade? Funny sort of way to spell chocolate,’ says a village boy on inspecting the legend stamped into the unwrapped bar. ‘Yes,’ chuckles his mother, ‘that’s the German spelling of…’ The camera holds on her face as the penny slowly drops.

Die katze is now out of the bag, so the Nazis must now brutally suppress the villagers before anyone can escape and warn the real British army based some miles away. The women, children and pensioners of the village manage to mobilise and fight back, the action concluding at the manor house with a horrific shoot-out that could go either way.

Throughout the conflict, the Nazis remain in British khaki uniforms. Had the events depicted really have taken place, the soldiers would have been contravening both the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions. Both state that it’s legal for soldiers to be disguised in their enemy’s uniform, but add that it’s a war crime to go into combat without first removing that uniform and replacing it with their own.

Some in authority worried that the film would cause panic – especially as Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti drew on his background in documentary filmmaking to give parts of the film an almost fly-on-the-wall edge. Still, with average weekly cinema audiences of 19 million in 1939 – growing to more than 30 million by 1945 – that was a lot of civilians being alerted to the fact that any moment they might be called on to fight German soldiers, tooth and claw, outside Lyon’s Corner House on the High Street.

As it turned out, the message of Went the Day Well? – to practice vigilance at all times – fell by the wayside. The threat of Operation Sea Lion had significantly waned by the time the film was released. Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union – starting with Operation Barbarossa – took precedence and was proving to be a costly mistake.

The film, though, remains a fascinating document of the times, and still has the power to shock. It was to prove the catalyst for many British films and books that dealt with the question of what would happen if the Nazis had invaded.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks did it with songs in 1971 (see page 64), but the1976 blockbuster The Eagle Has Landed is, to all intents and purposes, a remake of Went the Day Well? with a bigger budget and a couple of plot differences. Filmed at the beautiful village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, it’s the story of German soldiers, led by Michael Caine, who are not an invasion force but simply ordinary squaddies (most definitely not Nazis) sent on a regular suicide mission to kidnap Churchill. They stick to the Geneva Conventions by removing their Polish uniforms when one of their number dies after saving a child caught in a waterwheel.

Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB took the invasion to London and is a far less plucky – and more historically accurate – vision. The south of Britain is now under the jackboot, the rest of the nation will surely follow – and the round-ups have started. The stark choice is: collaborate, or die.

McCARTHY’S CONTRIBUTION TO BRITISH CINEMA

In 1973 filmmaker Carl Foreman was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay Young Winston, the story of one of the great figures of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill. Given a CBE for services to the film industry, it symbolised his status as British cinema aristocracy. Not bad for a homesick American who had been exiled from Hollywood 20 years earlier, and had his American passport revoked.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, America was in the grip of an anti-communist witch-hunt lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Suspected communists faced the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), including leading names in Hollywood like Carl Foreman.

Foreman had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth but had left in 1941. Nonetheless the Committee ordered him to name other party members. He refused. That meant that he was blacklisted in Hollywood and his film career was over.

At the time he was working on High Noon, the powerful 1952 western about a town’s principled lawman forced to face a bloodthirsty gang, alone. The film would receive seven Oscar nominations (winning four, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper) and is generally regarded among critics and audiences alike as one of the greatest films ever made. Many can identify with the dilemma at the centre of the film on some level, but Foreman, who wrote it, also lived it. Says film critic Matthew Sweet:

High Noon is in a way a portrait of the turmoil in Carl Foreman’s life at that moment. Gary Cooper is the marshal of a town under threat from the imminent arrival of a gang of killers. He’s desperately trying to recruit deputies who’ll help him defend the town. He goes to the church and he discovers that the population gathered there, who he has protected in the last few years, don’t really want to help him. So this is a film about your friends not standing by you.

Some in Hollywood saw a message in High Noon they didn’t like. John Wayne called it the most ‘un-American thing’ he had ever seen. Matthew explains, ‘John Wayne looked at the last scene in the picture, where Gary Cooper throws down his marshal’s badge into the dust, and he saw that as a symbolic rejection of American values. It was an act too far for him.’

Facing the moral quandary of naming names in front of HUAC, Foreman left the USA in 1952. He headed for London to try and set up as a scriptwriter – but with a very heavy heart, says his son Jonathan Foreman.

He very much felt that he had been driven out. He knew, if he’d stayed, he wouldn’t be able to work at all. There he had been, in America, the sort of Quentin Tarrantino of his time, hugely successful, especially after High Noon, and then suddenly it was all taken away.

Even in Britain, the blacklisting meant he had to write under pseudonyms. When he co-wrote another cinematic classic, The Bridge On The River Kwai, his name was left off the credits. Foreman’s screenplay was based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï, which was written by French author Pierre Boulle. In spite of his amused admission that he couldn’t even speak English, Boulle took the screenwriting credit so that Carl could avoid the blacklist.

Foreman’s most ambitious film was the epic The Guns of Navarone about an Allied plot to blow up a German fortress. The film is packed with gung-ho action and adventure, and an outstanding turn by the English actor David Niven. But like High Noon, Foreman was writing on a number of levels, says Matthew Sweet:

Essentially it’s an antiwar picture. It has all the explosions, it has all those action sequences, but when the cast discovers that the munitions they are going to use to blow up the super-guns have been sabotaged they question the whole point of the mission and the film turns into a kind of play about the rights and wrongs of war.

Winston Churchill didn’t notice the subtle underlying message. He saw the film and loved it enough to request a meeting with Foreman. The main topic of conversation? How to turn Winston’s early life into an action movie. It would certainly be an exciting film but Foreman had a concern, says his son John.

He said to Churchill, ‘You know I’ve had these political problems back in America, which is why I came here?’ and Churchill sort of basically said, ‘Oh my dear boy, don’t worry about that, I don’t care what a man believed when he was a boy, all I care about is if can he do the job.’

Churchill expected to see the finished film in a matter of months, as Carl Foreman related in a 1970s BBC documentary:

So he said, ‘You’ll have it finished in two or three months, I suppose’ and I said, ‘No, sir, two or three years would be more like it.’ ‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘When we decided on opening a second front in Normandy it didn’t take us that long.’ I said, ‘Yes, you had more money.’

The film Young Winston didn’t come out until 1972 – six years after Churchill’s death – but Foreman was proud of it, calling it his love letter to England.

As the blacklist faded into insignificance, Foreman returned to work in America in 1975. Out with his kids he had a chance encounter with a former friend and fierce critic, remembers John. ‘My father took my sister and I, walked us over to his table and John Wayne stood up, he was an enormous man, and they shook hands. It was weird… but it was a sign that things really were over.’ Foreman was back where he felt he truly belonged. But, says Matthew Sweet, the British, especially the film business, benefitted hugely from his exile. ‘I think that we should be proud that he worked here because if he had stayed in America he would have been condemned to silence.’

Carl Foreman died in Hollywood in 1984 aged 69 – a unique American who made some remarkably British films.