A few months ago, I went to Christine’s retirement lunch.
I didn’t really know Christine that well, she joined the company when we merged with another business a year or two before. She took care of facilities management (cleaning contractors, building maintenance, landlord management etc) on all the properties the company used. Prior to the new arrangements, she would most probably have been one of my team, but as it was, she reported up to someone else, and I never got to know her properly.
Until the day of the retirement lunch, when I sat next to her and a long talk.
Somehow, we got on to the subject of the sixties in general, and the TV show Top of the Pops.
If you have never heard of it, TOTP was a top-rating BBC show which played all the hit pop records every week, often featuring live appearances of the stars of the day – the Beatles and the Stones in the sixties; Oasis, Robbie Williams and so on in the nineties and two-thousands.
It chronicled over its four decades the whole history of pop music in the UK, and quite aside from the power it had to make or break individual pop acts, its wider cultural significance in the UK was simply immense.
I remember very well the huge impact the show made when it first started showing in the mid-sixties. Everyone at school would be talking about the acts featured the previous night. The timing was perfect: TOTP just caught the start of the “British Explosion” of pop talent which pretty much conquered the world in the mid-sixties. It was must-watch TV.
And, of course, the show regularly took a pounding from the platform at the Kingdom Hall. I remember this very clearly. Pop music generally, of course, was considered to be “worldly” and “Satan-inspired” but this show provided a sharp focus; it was, in fact, an absolute gift for that type of look-down-their-nose, no-part-of-the-world, Jehovah’s-wrath, judgemental brother who disapproved of everything.
“Brothers, have you seen that programme? Top of the Pops? How could anyone doubt that this system is nearly done? That long hair! That jungle-beat music! Boys who look like girls! And girls who look like I-don’t-know-what! And that dancing! Have you seen the way those people bump and grind into each other? Absolute filth, brothers! How glad we can be….[blah blah] ”
Younger members of the congregation knew enough to take this kind of tirade with a pinch of salt – after all, they were ALWAYS railing about something, right? But, in my congregation, at least, TOTP drew a particularly violent and righteous response.
I remember one sister in particular (the wife of this chap, actually) who, in an answer during the Watchtower study, made a comment about
“ the young people on Top of the Pops, the way they dance, the way they look, you just know that they’re not even listening to the music, they’re just thinking ‘how soon can I get this person into bed?’ It’s disgusting!”
[that comment, by the way, being so over the top, became a congregational catch-phrase among the younger ones for years after that]
I mention all this reaction to the show, because it just sets a scene. TOTP had been - for so much of my childhood - utterly reviled, held up as an example of the most wicked, death-deserving depravity the world had to display. I grew up being taught, in no uncertain terms, that those involved in it were in the same class as those beyond-all-hope vile sinners in Sodom and Gomorrah.
….and now here I am, eating lunch with Christine, we have been talking about her grandchildren, and how she’s thrilled to be able to spend more time with them. And then we get on to Top of the Pops.
“Oh, yes, well, I used to live in Manchester in those days. I was in the studio audience for that very first show in 1964, and then quite a few after that…
…A group of us girls used to go every week to see the latest bands,we would always try and dance at the very front to see if we could get ourselves on TV! Such happy days!”
I can’t help but laugh. You couldn’t find a more harmless-looking, sweet natured, white-haired old grandmother than Christine. But! she was one of those shameless Jezebels, pumping and grinding, dancing with all those sexy lewd movements, justly provoking Jehovah’s earth-shattering wrath with her flagrant wickedness back in the sixties.
One generation’s unspeakably wicked, death-deserving sinner is the next generation’s mild-mannered white-haired old grandmother.
And the word that comes to mind is: silly.
Weren’t we silly? The whole “Armageddon’s coming to wipe you sinners out!” thing - looking back on it now - was just so utterly silly. The lather we worked ourselves into over such trifling, transient events - weren’t we foolish? Weren’t we silly?
They’re no better today, of course. Religions like the Witnesses will always be populated with a good proportion of people absolutely outraged by the modern world, and predicting God’s imminent judgement upon it.
It’s the inherent silliness of their position which will do for them in the end.