After Churchill died the British popular newspapers had themselves a sentimental orgy (“You can take tears today and catch them and call them the river that flows through London's heart. . . .”), but in spite of the treacle served up day after day the funeral was uncommonly moving. A nation seemed to be in mourning for itself. The honorary pallbearers were leading more than this hero to the grave. There was frail Attlee who had freed India and begun the job of dismantling an empire. Beside him stood Eden, who had fumbled Suez. Following after came Macmillan, shot down from office by a whore. The common fear, as V. S. Pritchett wrote in the New Statesman, was “. . . that we were seeing the end of our greatness with his; that meanness would now come in, that Churchill was the last and to the world outside we had become one more irrelevant folk culture.”

Today's England belongs to Oblomov. Indecision is the rule; sloth, the style; and no day is complete without a burlesque. One day Miss Mandy Rice-Davies writes in After Denning. . . The MANDY Report (Confidential Publications Ltd., London), “To me Jack Profumo did not look bright enough to be in the Government and subsequent events have, I suppose, borne out this impression.” Another day, C. P. Snow, now a Labour Minister and Lord Snow of Leicester, rises in the House of Lords to speak up boldly for a comprehensive school system; his own son, though, will not be mixing with the welfare state's nose-pickers: he's at Eton. “It is perfectly simple,” Lord Snow said. “It seems to me that if one is living in a fairly prosperous home it is a mistake to educate one's child differently from those he knows socially.”

Nothing, or almost nothing, works properly. It is notoriously easier, for instance, to get New York on the line than it is to make the right connection the first or even second time out on a local call in London. This year we've been lucky, but give us a winter of slightly more than average severity and electrical power fails, pipes burst, and railway points freeze. Meanwhile writers have become diagnosticians; bookshops, sickrooms. Look down the small table on which serious books are stacked and there lie the conflicting fever charts and readings of the weakening pulse of a nation.

While the British extremists, Left and Right, revile America, almost all innovation is latter-day American. On being chosen leader of the Labour party, Harold Wilson immediately modeled himself on President Kennedy. During the election he challenged Sir Alec Douglas-Home to a TV debate and promised a hundred days of action; his guide to campaign tactics was an assiduously studied copy of Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1960 (which book, incidentally, has led to yet another variant on a proven American formula—The Making of the Prime Minister by Anthony Howard and Richard West). Wilson has also opted for culture. He has had his old friend Rupert Davies, television's Inspector Maigret, to Chequers for the weekend, and he has given Ted Willis a peerage. Lord Willis is best known for the hundreds of TV serial plays he has written. It's rather as if Kennedy, having struck a Medal of Freedom, had presented it not to Edmund Wilson but instead to the writers of The Defenders.

Even the English cultural uprising of the 50's had an American base. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger owes a sizable debt to Tennessee Williams, while Room at the Top, by John Braine, is a carbon cousin of An American Tragedy. Arnold Wesker is Reader's Digest Odets. American-inspired enterprise is triumphant everywhere. Supermarkets are well on their way in and so is central heating, once considered too beastly for words. Cinemas where Ealing comedies used to play to S.R.O. audiences are being hastily converted into bowling alleys. Just three miles from where I live, in Surrey, a new motel is promised, incorporating a Wimpy Hamburger Bar and a Steak House. And in one of the truly competitive arenas in British life—journalism—all the aces are American. While it's true that Topic, a blatant copy of Time, folded a couple of years back, the magazine's young editor, Clive Irving, went on to adapt Time-style to the Sunday Times with such dash that his Insight pages are now widely copied in turn. Indeed today it is a wretched newspaper that is without its group-written Searchlight, Probe, Background, Depth, or Daylight page. And the Sunday Times pulled dangerously ahead of the Observer in a bitter circulation battle only after its canny proprietor, the Canadian Lord Thomson, unloaded yet another American fixture into Sunday journalism: the colored supplement.

More recently it was discovered that Playboy enjoys an enormous circulation here, and now we have had the first of several expected Playboy imitations. King is published, appropriately enough, by Paul Raymond, who also runs Raymond's Revue Bar, the first and still the most zingy of a spill of Soho clubs, with bunnies and all. Raymond introduced King with a publisher's letter: “. . . let me declare my philosophy right now: We like sex . . . our girls are laughing haystack-and-sunshine girls, not grimacing plastic mac-and-whiplash girls. . . .” The first issue includes a Malcolm Muggeridge conversation on espionage with Len Deighton, King's Calendar Girl, Christine Keeler, in some nude moods, a piece on “How to Keep the Tradesmen at Bay” by the Earl of Arran (“Boofy” to his friends), who has “more titles than you can find in a public library,” and an excerpt from Candy (“Sexual comedy is as old as mankind. . . . The marvelous thing about Terry Southern . . . is that he is a comic sex-writer of such literary excellence that he has forced public acknowledgement of the fact that masturbation, for example, properly regarded, doesn't seem to be a disgusting sin, but really rather a giggle”).

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TV, of course, is supremely American. The early texts for the “serious” British dramas were the plays of Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, and Rod Serling, and the best of the British plays, written by Clive Exton and Alun Owen, were unfailingly directed by Canadians, who brought New York TV technique with them to London. Bonanza, Perry Mason, and The Dick Van Dyke Show are all extremely popular here, and many of the so-called indigenous shows are based on American hits. Only Highway Patrol has led to a vastly superior British product: Z-Cars. But on a straightforward money level, the richest gusher in British TV history was Robin Hood, a show that was American-made by Hannah Weinstein and written and directed, for the most part, by blacklisted Americans working under pseudonyms.

Where Americans (who require work permits) are lacking, Canadians, some of them very gifted, are usually found to fill this office in British entertainment. Sometimes they fill it to the point of parody. The most powerful drama producer in British TV is Sydney Newman, a Canadian. When Newman arrived in 1958, he told reporters, “I'm just a crude colonial,” and on the evidence offered they were more than prepared to believe him. Newman's rise has been swift and today he is responsible for all BBC TV drama, twelve hours weekly. He is worth speaking of if only because there are still innocents abroad who think BBC Third Programme standards apply to all of the BBC's output. The sour truth is that the BBC is as rating-conscious as the commercial networks here or in the U.S. Newman's own advice to “tired” writers is: “Cheer up, the world's an exciting place and changing overnight. Why not start out by finding a new and visually exciting place for a play to take place. . . . Don't worry about style. . . . Remember, a play is about people (the same as you and your audience) who demonstrate (it's visual, see?) their hopes, needs, ambitions (the play's driving force), but something (mother-in-law, a rival firm, the Russians, a character's ego) blocks their efforts (conflict) and they overcome it, or they don't. . . .”

American film expatriates also continue to have a considerable impact in England. The one with the most intellectual cachet is Joe Losey (The Servant, King and Country,) while Carl Foreman (Guns of Navarone), and C. Raker Endfield (Zulu) are both respected for their professional acumen. Years ago a blacklisted American producer who was stranded here said to me, “You've got an education, go to a library and find me something. Have you ever been in a library? It's a goddamn gold mine, if only you know which book to reach for. It's crazy.” Since then, craftier Americans have been busy mining the ore. Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman have been to the pithead and came back with the James Bond movies. When no British company would risk the capital necessary for Tom Jones, United Artists put up the stake. Even what the film critics here have called the first original indigenous British musical, A Hard Day's Night, was conceived by an American producer, Walter Shenson, and directed by a Canadian, Richard Lester.

Years ago most British radio comedy was written by men who huddled over short-wave sets with tape-recorders and picked up Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee, and other shows of the period. They then transposed and tarted-up the jokes and routines for British comedians. Radio no longer counts and most American TV shows reach England in their pristine form, but the tradition, far from dying, has now reached its finest flowering in Lionel Bart's musicals. Bart has borrowed heavily from Frank Loesser, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, and just about everybody else. His latest musical, Maggie May, springs out of the American 30's as reflected by West Side Story. The book, by Alun Owen, tells the story of a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold and an idealistic docker. Son of a union martyr, young Casey returns to Merseyside after years in the navy to lead the dockers in a strike action against loading “black cargo”—guns that will be used to suppress native nationalists in the colonies. A corrupt union leader offers the dockers double pay to load the guns. They desert Casey, who decides to destroy the cargo. He dies, falling electrocuted from a crane, in the effort.

Bart's musicals are related to another phenomenon of British show business in the 50's: the astonishing rise of so many Jewish producers, promoters, writers, and performers—many of them, like Bart himself, directly out of London's East End enclave—to a virtually pre-eminent position. Looking back, I would say that the breakthrough came with Wolf Mankowitz's first novel, Make Me An Offer, which dealt with sharp practices in the antique trade. It added schmaltz to the new material of “The Angry Young Men” and “the kitchen sink” that was heralded by the Royal Court's production of Look Back in Anger. Mankowitz's novel was filmed, as was his less fresh, more maudlin A Kid for Two Farthings. Yet another Jewish film was made out of Mankowitz's adaptation of The Bespoke Overcoat which he set in the East End. Meanwhile, Oscar Lowenstein, initially a partner of Mankowitz, was on his way to becoming the most important producer of serious theater in the West End. Bernard Levin, the Spectator's “Taper,” began to blow Parliament down with ridicule (and though we hardly suspected it at the time, the new satire industry was founded). Bernard Kops abandoned his wheelbarrow of secondhand books and wrote The Hamlet of Stepney Green. This play, a mixture of fun and sentimentality, was far more reminiscent of old-fashioned Yiddish theater, and maybe a dash of Harry Golden, than of anything being done by young Jewish writers in America. The same can be said of Kops's most recent play, Enter Solly Gold. Still, British critics, especially the liberals among them, were unprepared. Irving Wardle wrote of Enter Solly Gold in the Observer (Oct. 14, 1962): “It is one of the best Jewish jokes of our time that since anti-Semitism is taboo to Gentiles it has become the rich monopoly of Jewish writers. . . .”

The producer of Enter Solly Gold was Arnold Wesker, who chose it to launch Centre 42, an experiment in developing working-class solidarity through refurbishing its folk culture. Given this aim, the choice of Wesker's play was particularly quixotic: a thoroughly Jewish comedy to introduce the bicycle workers of Nottingham and the sailors of Bristol to the power of “committed” theater. Meanwhile the (Jewish) culture that the masses don't walk out on is personified, unfortunately, by David Kossoff, a throwback to the ingratiating stage-Jew, who now has his own TV series, A Little Big Business.

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Nothing in the new wave of Anglo-Jewish pop culture, however, compares in interest to the real-life story of John Bloom. Bloom is a hero.

Born in Stepney, in 1931, the son of a Polish immigrant tailor, John Bloom sold chewing gum, comics, and fireworks to the other lads at school. “I was like the discount store,” he told Margaret Laing of the Sunday Times, and to this his father added, “He'd do anything for a halfpenny.” Bloom did poorly at school and left when he was sixteen years old, drifting from job to job. Then came military service in the RAF, where Bloom ran a cheap bus service for his mates. He was prosecuted at one point, but his case was dismissed by a judge who ruled, “It's no sin to make a profit.” There followed other aimless jobs and outré projects such as a spray-on shoe polish that was supposed to last a week but split the shoe leather instead. In 1958 Bloom began selling washing machines door-to-door. He discovered a twin-tub machine in Holland, talked himself into the agency, and on September 24, 1958, risked 428 pounds on a back-page advertisement in the Daily Mirror. Bloom received some seven-thousand inquiries from housewives and immediately embarked on a massive directsell, price-cutting campaign that revolutionized a typically stuffy, inefficient British industry, outraged the City, and left the more solidly entrenched businessmen in ardent anticipation of his fall.

In 1960 Bloom acquired respectability of a sort by taking over Sir Charles Colston's Rolls Razor Co., and two years later he was a self-declared millionaire. “I shouldn't like to be poor again,” he told Miss Laing, “and I have taken precautions to see that I shan't be.” Still in his twenties, Bloom was photographed in restaurants wearing cufflinks shaped like washing-machines, and according to the gossip columns, he took round a different car each time he called for a girl friend. Recently, he recalled one of these cars as “the orange monster—a horrible flashy American bit of rubbish. I don't need special features any more.”

By 1962 Bloom had a flat in Park Lane, owned a Rolls Royce “the color of a black tulip” and a 376-ton yacht, Ariane, that was usually docked at Monte Carlo. A year later Bloom was employing four-hundred salesmen, who worked entirely on commission, and spending two-million pounds on advertising (he was the largest single advertiser in the Daily Mirror). A portrait of him, done by Stephen Ward, hung in his office: a pale, young man, his little beard pathetically elegant. Over the bar in his flat was an illuminated mural of can-can dancers with glittering garters. There was also, in 1962, a scandal; the “Blue Gardenia” trial. “My wife knew all about the girl from the start,” Bloom was to say afterward. Anne Bloom is twenty-five. “I like musicals and Doris Day,” she told one reporter. “We keep a clean home and don't have milk after meat for hygienic reasons.”

Last year Bloom tried to diversify. His offer to take over a football club was turned down disdainfully, as was his bid for the British-Lion Film Corporation. He did go into trading stamps, thereby becoming—as columnists snidely observed—the first person other than the Queen to have his face on a British stamp. Then the roof caved in. While Bloom was sailing his yacht in Bulgarian waters, arranging a tour deal (free trips with washingmachine purchases), his creditors pounced. Underfinanced, over-extended, trapped with a single product that was no longer selling nearly as well as his advertising required, the Bloom empire collapsed. Financial backing was withdrawn, receivers moved in, and more reputable voices in the City and industry and in the Anglo-Jewish community mourned his fall with thinly concealed glee. Weteyed widows and pensioners, interviewed on TV, told how they had lost everything by buying shares in Bloom's companies. The New Statesman, in a front-page sermon, said Bloom was the price of a Tory society (like Balzac, perhaps.) Bloom had to put the Ariane up for sale and to cancel his order for an executive airplane. He is said to have kept his private fortune intact (possibly eight-million pounds). He continues to hang onto the periphery of the show biz world, where his friends include Adam Faith and the Beatles. “I like the Beatles,” he once said, “because I think I am on top of one sphere and they are on top of another. There are a lot of similarities.”

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Bloom's closer counterpart, though, is Brian Epstein, manager of Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, The Fourmost, Cilia Black, Tommy Quickly, and, of course, The Beatles.

A Liverpudlian, Epstein was born in 1934, which makes him three years younger than Bloom. The son of a middle-class family, he was expelled from Liverpool College, a minor public school, at the age of ten for being below standard. He writes in his recently published autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise¹ that he was a late developer. “If Keats had waited as long as I did to get going he wouldn't have written more than a couple of poems before his death.”

After Liverpool College, there followed a few more public schools, including Wrekin, which Epstein left at the age of sixteen in the hope of becoming a dress designer. Instead, his father put him in the family business, a furniture store. Then came military service (“Failing to be selected as an officer did not . . . prevent me from impersonating officers and one night this involved me in trouble”), and then the furniture store again. At night Epstein sought “escape in the cool and cultivated dusk of the front stalls of the Liverpool Playhouse.” This led to enrollment in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but soon he “was yet again, face to face with failure.” Epstein returned to the expanded family store, now set up in the Liverpool city center, and took over the record department, which he stocked with at least one copy of every available disc. Then one day in 1961 a boy named Jones stepped into the store and spoke the magic words. “Have you got a disc by the Beatles?” The Beatles? Seeking them out, Epstein went to the now legendary Cavern, birthplace of the Mersey sound, and before the year was out he was their manager. Two years later “. . . The Beatles were the greatest entertainers in the world. They had met the Queen Mother and the Duke of Edinburgh and their pictures were on the walls of all the noble bedrooms of the young aristocracy. Prince Charles had all their records and San Francisco had the ticker tape ready. Ringo Starr was asked to be president of London University and John Lennon was the world's best-selling writer.”

Though the Beatles are now ubiquitous, it was their American triumph that saved them from sliding—and, in fact, propelled them to still more dizzying heights. Earlier, Billy J. Kramer and Cliff Richards had both failed the test. “The American charts,” Epstein writes, “were unobtainable. Only Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, the very great in their field ever made any imprint. . . . Always America seemed too big, too vast, too remote, and too American. . . . We knew that America would make us or break us as world stars. In fact, she made us.”

Is there anything left to say about the Beatles themselves? Possibly not. No daily newspaper is complete without its weather or Beatles report. Lennon and McCartney have formed a public company, Northern Songs, in association with Epstein and Dick James (the son of a kosher butcher, who used to sing the Robin Hood theme song). “McCartney and Lennon,” James told reporters, “are going to be the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the future.” Of course what distinguishes them from The Pretty Things, The Animals, The Kinks, The China Plates, The Headlines, The Rebel Rousers, and The Peddlers, is that they are talented. But are they that talented? Certainly not.

There are, of course, other considerations. For years on this island most pop entertainment has tended to be pseudo-American. After Marilyn Monroe there came, if only briefly, Diana Dors. Before Brando's The Wild One there were no ton-up (motorcycle) boys here. The Group Theater plus camp added up to frenetic Joan Littlewood's overrated company. Mad made for Private Eye. Ian Fleming was a special case. He was not so much public school Spillane as the obsolescent butler gone to work in Las Vegas.

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In recent years, then, there have only been two original entertainment phenomena in England: the satirists and the Beatles. The satirists are preponderantly middle-class Oxbridge. At their height there was Beyond the Fringe and Michael Frayne's column in the Guardian, but today the satire is so thin and widely spread, so institutionalized and commercial, that in sum it is a bore. The Beatles, though, took on and beat the Americans at their own pop game. This is important. For many a British triumph in America (theater) or over Americans (boxing) is trivial or false. This country, for instance, should be able to send out the best Shakespearean actors. Boxing is something else. Almost monthly, American boxing bums are brought over here to feed the egos and ring ratings of such unlikely British hopefuls as Billy (Greek God) Walker and Henry Cooper. Most recently, Cooper, the British heavyweight champion, took on and beat a sleepy Jewish snowplow driver from Buffalo, named Wipperman, and Walker managed to knock out a Charlie Powell, who is a sparring partner in the U.S. But the Beatles, sir, took on the Cashbox “Top Ten” and won. Smashing.

If the Beatles, like Elvis Presley, had come from America, there would have been no British joy in their music or their nerve. The group would have been deplored as yet another example of bad taste Americana, etc., etc. But the Beatles came from gritty Liverpool and made it in New York. Golf, remember, comes from Scotland but the British Open is an American preserve. The first TV set was British-made. The jet engine was invented here, but BOAC flies American and so, very soon, will the RAF. This island can do with something socko. Anything socko.

¹ Doubleday, 120 p, $2.95.