The Yippies had a slogan: "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!" What was the meatball? "The 'meatball' is whatever bugs you," Jerry Rubin explained. Amongst the most bugful was Sir David Paradine Frost - transatlantic journalist and at one point in the 1970s, Concorde's most frequent flyer; the only person to have interviewed all seven U.S. presidents in office between 1969 and 2009 (his encounter with Richard Nixon has been described as "the greatest television interview ever.") To his enemies, among them Peter Cook, he was a "bubonic plagiarist."

 

In 1970, he invited Yippie spokesman Rubin on to his widely-viewed talk show The Frost Programme to discuss his recently-published handbook DO IT! which, according to its back cover, was "a declaration of war between the generations calling on kids to leave their homes, burn down their schools and create a new society upon the ashes of the old." The TV presenter wasn't impressed either by Rubin (who described himself as an "ape") or his pals (who had travelled from Algeria where they'd been hanging out with Eldridge Cleaver), and attempted to humiliate them. In turn, they and their long-haired allies in the studio audience (including Social Deviants vocalist and White Panthers founder Mick Farren) denounced him as "plastic", someone who should be "stuffed and put into a people's museum", a relic of a dying planet. The sweary set-to, anticipating the Sex Pistols' run-in with Bill Grundy, made the front pages of national newspapers and was described by Frost as "the most powerful advertisement for law and order ever".

 

Complementing this screening is the little-known Where Have All The Flowers Gone? (1977) which tracks down members of the 'London Underground' ten years after the Summer of Love. Were the dreams of a new world order naive fantasies? Self-serving cant? Religious broadcaster Peter France was a serious inquirer (as a young man he decide he "would only stick around as long as I found life to be agreeable and stimulating", which led him to carry suicide pills with him wherever he went) and engaged deeply with Rubin, Timothy Leary, Mick Farren, Felix Anderson of Oz magazine, Lynn Darnton - founder of the Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, and, in a vanishingly rare exchange, Vashti Bunyan. All of them - unAmericans, psychedelic Bolsheviks, rug dealers - ponder the question: what comes after liberation?

 

Rise Up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball is a prelude to a season on Radical British Broadcasting in the 1970s and 1980s, programmed by Matthew Harle and Colm McAuliffe, that will be presented by Various/ Artists and the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture in October 2025.

 

SPECIAL THANKS | Matthew Harle & Colm McAuliffe.