Primitive London Page #7

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"Seor Coffee's real good."

MAC:
Watch "is".

MAN:
Take 59. Action.

"Seor Coffee is real good!"

- What about it, Roger?

- Fantastic.

Simply great, simply great.

A terrific interpretation.

Nothing harsh, a nice soft sell.

There's just one thing...

NARRATOR:
Throughout history,

man has created idols.

Someone or something they can see as

projections of themselves, but writ large.

(ALL CHEERING)

Billy J. Kramer is one

of the current idols.

A personal appearance by him

anywhere in Britain

is certain to draw

screaming crowds of teenagers

and create headaches for the police.

The teenagers will scramble and fight

to get close to or touch

the object of their idolatry.

(GIRLS SCREAMING)

# If you're alone and blue

in the hush of the night

# Call me, then I can let you know

just how much I care

# I can make you happy

just by being there with you

# I can show you all the things

a love like this can do

# When things are bad

and you lie awake each night

# Call me, say that you need a friend

And you'll find me there #

(SCREAMING)

NARRATOR:
The young man

pushing through the crowd

is Terry Dene, one of the first pop idols,

the object of as much,

if not more, adulation.

Today he sings better than he ever did.

But he's not known to this generation

of pop worshipers, and is unrecognized.

They're wholly concerned

with their present idol.

When Terry Dene was king,

this audience was five or six years old.

Terry Dene is now 24 years old.

Certainly, their adulation is intense.

But their rejection is absolute.

Ten-pin bowling had a slow start

in Great Britain during the 1950s.

But it's the boom sport of the 60s.

Its fascination? Subtle, submerged,

canalized aggression.

The launching of this heavy,

destructive missile,

the strike, a symmetrical pattern

violently broken.

But then, hypnotically,

the machine remakes the pattern.

Symmetry is restored.

Ten-pin bowling caters for

the aggressive spirit,

a harmless release of the stress

of modern urban living.

The operating theater is ready.

The patient, trusting to the

surgeon's skill, awaits the knife.

The theater sister is tense.

The instruments are prepared.

All the surgeon's training,

skill and knowledge are brought to bear

as he prepares for

a delicate and critical operation

on a goldfish.

The fish is kept alive by water

passed into the gills.

This saves him in an alien atmosphere.

A needle is injecting a mild anesthetic to

cover the pain of the forthcoming operation.

The surgeon needs a magnifying lens

to inspect his diminutive patient

and locate the source of the trouble,

a fungoid growth on the tail.

There goes the fungoid growth.

Left to himself in the wild,

the patient would die.

Weakened by disease, he would probably

fall prey to some predatory marauder.

Here in civilized captivity,

he's fed a solution of whisky

to act as a heart stimulant.

All the benefits of modern science

in exchange for life imprisonment.

Civilization loves all its animals.

It waxes sentimental

over its fawning dependents,

except when it eats them.

Civilized man refuses to acknowledge

that he is a predator.

The housewife doing her shopping

is prepared to believe that

chickens are born plastic-wrapped

and oven-ready.

Any other thought

is likely to spoil the appetite.

These are battery-raised chickens

arriving at a processing plant.

They're taken from the only homes

they've ever known

and hung by their feet

from this moving belt.

They've lived little more

than seven or eight weeks.

Now, they're stunned by electric shock.

Thirty volts jolts them

into unconsciousness.

An unconsciousness

from which they will never rouse.

(MACHINE HUMMING)

The belt rolls on towards the knife.

They're now part of a machine,

a product for processing.

Blood sacrifice to the hunger of animals

that no longer hunt for themselves.

With most of their blood drained,

the birds are next prepared for plucking.

The machine takes them forward

into a channel of high-pressured jets

of boiling water, scalding,

to loosen the feathers that were

chick fluff seven weeks before.

This machine rips out the larger feathers

and starts the process of

depersonalizing these birds,

making them into that

anonymous thing, food.

The smaller feathers are removed

by this threshing machine.

Now, finally, the neck

feathers are ripped out.

The denuded birds are passed once more

to human hands.

From hatched egg to fattened death

in seven weeks.

A short span during which

these birds never scratched earth,

caught a worm or saw daylight.

Now, they take off,

rising for their first and only time,

Looking more like a flight of

prehistoric pterodactyls than chickens.

The machine is inexorable. But not for all.

This bird has found himself free.

But he doesn't know freedom.

He will be returned to the machine,

and eventually arrive here, where the

last remnants of feathers are removed

by women whose eyes find

every last wisp of down.

Not all is immaculate, however.

Even the machine is not perfect.

The birds now have their legs

neatly folded into place.

Symmetry makes for sales appeal.

It is these methods

and their undoubted efficiency

which has brought chicken for dinner

out of the luxury class

and onto the ordinary table.

The price of chicken has been halved while

the price of most other foods has doubled.

Now, the last stage, packaging for market.

The whole process,

from the arrival of the live chickens

to their removal in cardboard boxes

has taken 15 minutes.

The chickens will rendezvous at

the supermarket with the housewife,

who prefers not to be thought of

as a predatory animal.

Now, the product of

another processing plant.

Let's follow one of the graduates

of the strip school we saw earlier.

STRIPPER:
Can't afford to be late.

They stop your money.

I do about six to eight shows a day,

all in different clubs.

And if I'm, say, just two minutes late,

they stop me ten bob.

Ooh, me gloves. They're important.

(ENCHANTING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

STRIPPER:
Clothes are a big expense

in this business.

Most of the girls start between 16 and 18.

How long they stay depends on their luck.

Most of us drop out in our mid-twenties.

I reckon we earn our money

just rushing about.

We do about 40 shows a week,

and very few of us get more than 20 quid.

I worked it out once.

I dress and undress about 100 times

in six days. They're closed on Sundays.

Lots of girls come into the business

because they think it's going to be easy.

They soon find out different.

Some of the girls get married

and still go round the clubs.

Most of us are glad to get out.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Weather's another thing.

Oh, rain can ruin your mascara.

Makes it a drag, having

to keep redoing your makeup.

And these dressing rooms.

Well, they're dirty, but some of them

are downright filthy.

Well, it's obvious, really.

You get ten girls all using the same room.

Who's going to stop behind and clean up?

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