Britain in the 70s: The Brexit That Never Was (Part 2)

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Please allow me to introduce myself. I am the owner of 40 Towers. And may I welcome your war, you war, you all, you all, and hope that your stay will be a happy one. Now, would you like to eat first, or would you like a drink before the war? Ah, close persons will be tied up with piano wire. Sorry, sorry. May I say how pleased we are to have some Europeans here now that we are on the continent. Didn't vote for it myself, quite honestly. But now that we're in, I'm determined to make it work. So I'd like to welcome you all to Britain. We're all friends now, all in the market together, all differences forgotten, and no need at all to mention the war.

**Tom Holland** (1:01)
So that was Torquay Hotelia Basel Faulty, as played by John Cleese in Faulty Towers. And the episode that we were citing there was The Germans, which was first broadcast on the 24th of October, 1975 And I'm actually so exhausted from doing that, that I just need to catch my breath.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (1:24)
Tom, have a rest.

**Tom Holland** (1:25)
I'm going to have a breath. But just to say, I mean, Faulty Towers consistently voted the greatest British sitcom of all time. But it's also a brilliant window under the state of the nation in the mid 1970s. Coming out just as Harold Wilson is starting his second stint as Prime Minister between 1974 and 1976 And in that episode and in all the other episodes, it captures the mood of the times, doesn't it, Dominic? So the hotel is kind of very shabby. The management style of Basel is less than suboptimal. He's obsessed with class. He's always kind of fawning around his betters and kind of kicking, well, actually kind of clipping around the ear hole. Those who are employed by him, most notably his ludicrously inept Spanish waiter, Manuel, he's got this loveless marriage with the very tyrannical Sibyl. And there is a retired major who is always making racist jokes, complaining about strikes and loves a test match. And I guess that probably that passage where he meets a load of Germans, he's knocked himself on the head, hasn't he? So he's gone a kind of little bit mad.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:44)
With a moose.

**Tom Holland** (2:45)
Yes, that's right. And so all the kind of buried thoughts of the average strangulated middle class Englishman, it just kind of pours out of him, unmediated, and it all revolves around the war.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:58)
Yeah. So at one point, they say to him, will you stop talking about the war? And he says, you started it?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:04)
We did not start it.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:05)
Yes, you did. You invaded Poland. And so on and so forth. And Basil is absolutely, I mean, one of the glorious things about Basil is that comic creation. He is a textbook kind of frustrated middle class conservative, isn't he? There's no doubt whatsoever that he's always placed his vote in the Tory column. And so when a fire extinguisher goes off in his face in this episode, The Germans, he knows whom to blame. He says, it sits there for months and when you actually have a fire, it blows your head off. I mean, what is happening to this country? It's bloody Wilson. And this is the story of today's episode. It's about Basil and the Germans or rather, it's about the first Brexit referendum in June 1975 when Britain took the fateful decision not to leave what became the EU. And it's about Basil's betnoir, bloody Wilson, and how Harold Wilson struggled to stop Britain plunging into hyperinflation and complete economic meltdown in the course of 1975
So last time we talked about some of the background to all this. So to remind people, a very demoralised and sort of hangdog Britain is reeling after the 1973 oil shock. The Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath has tried to impose his wage controls. The coal miners rebelled. They blew his economic policy apart. He called an election in February 74 The result was stalemate. Back came Basil's nemesis, Harold Wilson, the leader of the Labour Party as Prime Minister for the second time. He paid off the miners, paid off the other unions. He called another election in October and he won a three seat majority.

**Tom Holland** (4:44)
And just to remind people that that three seat majority means that Wilson's position is very, very weak because he has to pay attention to every MP behind him because they now exercise incredible power.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:57)
Exactly right. So we did a series in 2024 about the year 1974 and we talked a lot about Wilson in that. But I know we've got a lot of new listeners since then. So we should remind ourselves a bit about Wilson. Wilson wants such a pivotal figure in British politics. Kind of forgotten today, but he won four elections out of five in the 1960s and 1970s, a record that seems very unlikely to be equaled anytime soon. So Wilson was born in West Yorkshire in 1916 He went to Oxford and he was an absolutely brilliant student, supposedly got the best mark in economics that anyone had ever got. He became an economics don and then a government statistician, became a Labour MP, then Labour leader, then a modernising Prime Minister between 1964 and 1970 Wilson, I think we said this before, he's a very likable character, I think. He's a very kind man, he's generous. As a politician, he's resilient, he's pragmatic, he's very cunning, his wiliness, his legendary. He has moved over the course of his career, it's a very common trajectory. He started out kind of on the left and he's moved steadily more and more towards the centre. As a man, his tastes are modest and unpretentious. He loves Agatha Christie, he loves golf, he loves Gilbert and Sullivan.