Opportunity Doorways For Women (1976)

The Opportunity Doorway scheme for women was launched in 1976. Here's an excerpt from the council's literature:

"Scientific studies conducted by some of the finest minds in the Gentlemen's Science Club of Great Britain clearly show it’s not your fault that you were born female.

But that doesn’t mean you are entirely blameless for your irresponsible birth. Lazing around the house all day looking after infants and cleaning your husband's home is all well and good for a few years. But what happens after that, when you have become redundant?

Enter The Opportunity Doorway scheme, which has been designed specifically for you. It won't dig into your housekeeping allowance and you won’t have to worry about reading anything complicated; however, a head for heights is recommended."

See also: International Women's Day 1970, romance novels, birth, sexual reproduction in females and Bastard Lanes for single mothers.

1970s Pornography

Even an archive as respectable as Scarfolk's contains artefacts that some might deem offensive. In 1970s Britain, many aspects of life became increasingly sexualised, though sex was rarely one of them.

As you look at these pornographic magazines, which were aimed at lovers of Brutalism, please remember that the 1970s were a very different time with its own mores and values.

Click on the brown paper bag to access the magazines. You must be over the age of 18* (SFW).

 

 *with a City & Guilds qualification in town planning.

Romance Novels (1970s)

St. Valentine's Day is a fitting day to show you some of the novels that pandered to women's romantic fantasies during the 1970s.

Same Job Less Pay (1970) tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a co-worker. When she finds out that he earns twice as much as she does, she's so relieved she doesn't have to carry around all that heavy money that she bakes some pretty little cakes and falls pregnant.

Biological Necessity (1976) is about a woman who, having failed to meet a partner with an emotional IQ higher than a sandwich, takes an evening eugenics class in which she learns that romance is an overvalued social construct and that she is in fact most compatible with men who have a strong EPAS1 gene and an income of more than 100k per annum.

Carcinoma Equals Inheritance (1971). A woman encourages her husband to smoke in a bid to kill him for the substantial inheritance. When he dies, she suddenly remembers that she was the wealthy one all along. Shortly afterwards, a young, penniless con man falls in love with her and proposes marriage. On the honeymoon he encourages her to get drunk on vodka and take part in a series of dangerous sports.

Set in the year 1620, Tortured In The Name Of God's Unconditional Love (1974) is about a woman who falls in love with a pious town elder. She tries to tell him and other backward villagers about rudimentary first-world concepts such as interpersonal communication skills and oral hygiene. She is subsequently tortured and killed by a devout lynch mob, headed by her would-be lover, whose grasp of such things extends to believing that the demonic spirits of pigs can destroy crops by hiding in your nose.

"Violence On" (1970-1978)

This title screenshot is all that remains of 'Violence On', a children's TV programme that ran from 1970 to 1978. Each episode saw the programme's presenters encouraging children to push classmates out of windows, off high walls or from the saddles of seaside beach donkeys.

Another popular programme called 'Jail Fix It' gave children the opportunity to get their injuries treated in a psychiatric prison hospital by high-risk inmates who had to learn first aid as part of their integration back into society.
Each week, the children's decorated plaster casts (and, occasionally, unsolicited gang tattoos) were displayed in a gallery and a special prize was given to the child that had most amused the judges.

"Freedom of Speech" Public Information (1975)

While freedom of speech should, without exception, always be upheld and fought for, it was complicated in 1970s Scarfolk.

Take, for example, the case of the multinational New State Corporation, which converted decommissioned army personnel with psychological problems into soft toys that taught feral and left-wing children about Jesus. When two employees, Ed Manning and Julien Snowden exercised their freedom of speech to expose the company's illegal use of black magick (and candy floss) in the conversion process they soon found themselves in prison awaiting trial.

The problem was that there were so many (and sometimes contradictory) exceptions to freedom of speech that it was only practically possible to exercise it if you were a) very wealthy or b) the government had a vested political interest in what you were saying and were willing to endorse you, or c) you said what you had to say, then hid where no one could find you.

In addition to the help and guidelines offered in the 1975 leaflet above, the council also strongly recommended exercising one's freedom of speech in one's own head and not saying it out loud. A council spokesman said:
 "Everyone verbally exercising their freedom of speech at the same time not only contravenes a noise pollution bylaw, but also makes it difficult for our many council stenographers who are trying to illicitly record what everyone is saying".

TV Times magazine (1975)

Throughout the 1970s, ITV programmes were tailored to mollify the proletariat. Talent shows, low-IQ quiz shows and sitcoms about average working people were carefully constructed to mislead viewers into believing they were important.

But were they?

A 1973 survey showed that 87.5% of politicians deemed their working-class constituents to be less important than a second family car or having regular bowel movements. The concept of a functioning 'society', of which the working class believed they were a valuable part, when in fact they were little more than consenting serfs, had been invented by an eight-year-old hobby virologist who worked part-time for the government in the Department of Domestic Propaganda.

A fabricated sense of worthiness among the working class also benefited advertisers and therefore the economy. As one Scarfolk sociologist noted:
"When people think they are important they buy expensive continental wines and Custard Cream biscuits, and they won't even notice if they've misplaced one or two of their many children". Indeed, the aforementioned 1970s survey indicates that 78% of adults would have rather lost a child than a biscuit.

1970s "Inspirational posters"

In 1970s comic books and newspapers one could usually find advertisements offering posters, iron-on transfers, sew-on patches and T-shirts arranged by theme or subject matter: movie and TV stars, cartoon characters, pop stars, infant felons, etc.

Inspirational or motivational posters were also very popular, particularly among people who had few thoughts of their own and believed that pithy phrases containing as few syllables as possible somehow furnished them with something akin to a personality.

Scarfolk Council monitored the content of all posters to ensure that only quotes with moral integrity found their way onto the walls of citizens. To this end, the council turned to the tried-and-tested morality of spiritual and religious texts such as the Bible.

Here is a small selection of these posters from the council archive.

International Women's Day (1970)

Today is International Women's Day and the anniversary of the "Spread 'Em" campaign.

The freedoms of women and people like that were always very important in Scarfolk. As you will see from this poster and magazine ad issued by the council in early 1970, women had even more social and legal rights than domesticated foreigners.

Scarfolk was one of the first places to give women the right to ask a man if they are allowed to vote.

The council also fiercely lobbied to permit women's sports such as ironing, being pretty & sweet, and sobbing without cause in international competitions, including the Olympics. That the council was unsuccessful is testimony to the reactionary structures and attitudes that still hinder a woman's place in society. Poor dears.  

The "Little White Sam" Book Ban (1977)

"Little White Sam" had always been a very popular book among Scarfolk children, but in 1977 the Scarfolk Association of Teachers caused controversy by withdrawing it from the school curriculum.

This had been triggered by a slew of international complaints: Children from developing countries (many of which had been liberated from themselves by the benevolent British Empire) were terrified and offended by the book's pale-skinned, blonde protagonist. He reminded them of days under British and European rule and the suffering (or 'learning' as the government preferred) that they had endured.

Historically, white people had always been unfairly picked on for trying to help the world be more like them and Jesus, so this was another major blow.

A legal battle over the book ensued, and when it was finally reprinted stringent efforts were made to completely remove any contentious material regarding race, colour and even gender. In the updated 1979 edition Sam was reimagined as a completely transparent flatworm which changed gender at will. 

However, sales plummeted and, before long, environmentalists were reporting that crimes against flatworms had risen by as much as 23%.

"Audio Control for Baby" (Scarfolk Records & Tapes, 1970)

The cassette called "Audio Control for Baby" (Scarfolk Records & Tapes, 1970) has long been lost but we do have this recording of the music playing in the background at the Scarfolk Inconvenient Infant Playcenta. It was piped into every room around the clock at high volume and many child carers found it to be very effective: Enjoying drinks at the pub two doors down from the 'centa', the carers rarely heard any of the babies cry.

Many struggled with the pressures of the job. As one carer, Jocelyn Hurtt, noted at the time, "the kids really set your nerves on edge, especially if, like me, you don't have a natural affinity with children. You can be right in the middle of a good programme on the telly and one of them will start up: complaining about nightmares, appendicitis or wanting to be freed from their restraints. I really don't know what I'd do without my Martini & lemonades. You're not supposed to hit the little blighters, but if you've had a few drinks you're less tolerant and you don't know your own strength; it only stands to reason and is to be expected. After all, we're only human."

We hope the extraneous sounds on the recording do not distract too much from the music.

"Charley says...[obey or die]" (1973)

Bad behaviour was rampant in 1970s Scarfolk and disciplining children was a major concern.

The so-called 'degenerate generation' of children, often from worthless-class backgrounds, was known to actively defy rules and social norms and frequently committed the following appalling offences:

- Stay awake after allotted bedtimes.
- Peel marzipan decorations from cakes.
- Laugh loudly while having fun.
- Read books more advanced than their official reading age.
- Question adults' belief in Father Christmas.
- Cry after having nightmares.
- Refuse to join in educational/life-skills games such as 'lie about a friend,' 'slap-the-immigrant',  'wet someone else's bed.'

In a desperate attempt to curb this destructive, nihilistic behaviour, Scarfolk Health Service launched a treatment regime employing the newly developed 'great flooding' psychological technique*, which exposes the subject to such long durations of relentless and exaggerated cruelty that any desire to be undisciplined is quashed.

*The technique largely comprised of repeated readings of a book called the bible which was written many hundreds of years ago by people who had never heard of knives and forks, washing machines, coat hangers, toilet seats, aluminium kitchen foil or shampoo.

"Seducing Students & Secretaries" (BBC 1, 1977)

In 1977 BBC Scarfolk broadcast a 'schools and colleges' series that prepared children for the world of work awaiting them. The programme was aimed at boys aged between eight and twelve (girls, of course, weren't allowed to watch such programmes because they interfered with weekly domestic servility exams).

"Seducing Students & Secretaries" focused on one of the more important aspects of employment; that of cornering and ensnaring female employees or students for personal gratification.
Based on his book "How To Get the Lady Beneath You Beneath You" (Pelican Books, 1974), Dr. Hugh Schaime (seen below) presented the programme and taught prospective bosses, in a classroom environment, how best to exploit their positions of power in the workplace.

His course covered subjects such as 'how to make women believe that an uninvited kiss is a compulsory dental exploration.' He also tutored obstinate female employees, teaching them how to submit with grace.

The programme was particularly memorable for its title sequence which featured a butcher preparing meat, something that Dr. Schaime felt was a perfect metaphor for the knowledge he imparted for over fifty years.

The programmes were accidentally erased by the BBC in 1979, but we do still have a selection of screenshots, as you can see below.

'Go Home' Racism & Living Toys (mid-1970s)

This allegedly innocuous British Rail poster, which could be seen all around Scarfolk in the mid-1970s, is pertinent because it touches on issues raised by the recent controversial anti-illegal immigrant campaign in the UK.

The campaign, which threatens illegal immigrants with its 'go home or face arrest' message, smacks of 1970s racist rhetoric, in fact it quotes it outright. The Home Office's claim that the campaign is not discriminatory is also reminiscent of 1970s racist attitudes which were subliminally woven into public life.

When racism was finally exposed as being detrimental to society, it was blamed on foreigners.

This post is the last in a short series which addresses dolls in society. Many Scarfolk children took part in after-school occult rituals to animate their toys but this practice was banned after schoolboy Peter Colons brought to life an immense Slinky which killed 237 people and destroyed public property.

"Mr. Nationalist"

Until 1978 foreigners were officially classified by the government as livestock and were subcategorised by odour.

Defining who was and wasn't English became complicated. By the end of the decade, right-wing nationalists had drawn up a list that demanded the deportation of everyone apart from 9 people, all of who claimed to be the only true English. They even insisted on the deportation of all foreign foods (which they later amended, granting visas to pizza, kebab and curry sauce).

Their spokesperson, Colin Head, said at a 1976 rally:  

"We reject foreign influences in England. That is our weltanschauung. Multiculturalism is our bête noire and we strongly believe that English culture is destined to become kaput if the current zeitgeist continues to be de rigueur. But it doesn't have to be a fait accompli and that's why we will continue to be the enfant terrible of modern politics. It's time to act: Carpe diem!"

"Put Down Old People At Birth" Conservative Party campaign leaflet, 1979

With the funeral of ex-prime minister and hobby taxidermist Margaret Thatcher underway, it is perhaps appropriate that this item from the archive is posted today.

This leaflet was distributed throughout Scarfolk during the 1979 Conservative Party campaign. With such clear policies and faultless logic, it's little wonder that the Tories won the election. The Labour Party had pushed Britain into a deep recession following numerous strikes by miners, postal workers and the royal family who, throughout 1976, refused to politely wave on Tuesdays, weekends and bank holidays.

However, under the Tory government, Scarfolk lost several of its community covens, and the council's plans to convert Scarfolk Towers, the site of a series of occult killings, into a children's nighttime playground were thwarted. Additionally, Scarfolk residents were vexed that mystical phenomena became taxable, which led to an increase in back-street astral projections.

"Let's Learn About...Torture" 1976

This textbook was taught in Scarfolk schools in 1976. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

"Experts agree that information and its communication will be very important in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Information will become a commodity, sold only to the highest bidders, so it is crucial that students learn how to acquire information as quickly as possible if they want to survive.

Some information can be found in library books, but oftentimes, the most valuable information is buried inside another person's mind. It is up to pupils to mine that information, much like a prospector searches for coal. Sometimes he will use dynamite, other times a powerful drill is more appropriate. There are many ways that a person's mind may be mined.

Here are just a few techniques that you can try on your classmates:

--Scream at them in a high-pitched, helium-inhaled voice without pause for 47 hours.

--Beat the soles of their feet with an effigy of Jesus made out of frozen, compacted ladybirds.

--Pass a pair of stockings dipped in marmalade through their entire body from anus to mouth and then refuse to let them win a game of Monopoly.

--Bake them at gas mark 4 (350 degrees F) for 45 minutes or until the top becomes a rich, golden brown.

--Staple or glue them to a panicking, claustrophobic ostrich..."

"Space Minstrel" by Beige. Prog rock, 1978

Back in the early 1970s, people were listening to progressive rock concept albums by bands such as Genesis, Yes, Jethro Tull, & The Carpenters, but by the late 70s the genre was faltering under its own weight and social attitudes were changing, as is apparent from the anachronistic double gatefold album 'Space Minstrel' released by Scarfolk's very own prog group, Beige.

Beige's guitar, lute and harpoon player, Geoff Djeff: "I'd been struggling for hours to come up with a fresh concept. In a flash of inspiration I got the idea of combining a cosmic apocalypse with my favourite TV programme, 'The Black & White Minstrel Show.'* I knew right away I'd got something really classy..." 

Here's the story of 'Space Minstrel' from the LP's inner sleeve notes:

"The earth has been completely smashed up by a disappointing nuclear war. The only survivor, a minstrel, clings to a big lump of rock that was once part of the Queen's garden. As the minstrel hurtles through the spacious universe, he sings show tunes and music hall favourites to the planets as he passes them. But without a real audience he's soon depressed and considers flinging himself off his rock into a nearby black hole... 

...However, his love of song is too strong. He endures and his voice echoes through the heavens, bouncing off stars, nebulas and other cosmic rubble. 400 billion years and 3 days later, his vocal vibrations are picked up by an alien race called The Capri-Cortina. They discover a bit of thumb in the minstrel's white glove, rebuild him, and create millions of copies. The minstrels are given their own planet called Zipadeedoodah31-TX where they happily sing for what is left of eternity..."

'Space Minstrel' was, perhaps not surprisingly, Beige's second and last album. They disbanded in 1979 and Geoff Djeff formed a short-lived minstrel punk band called 'The Dainty Boys.'

'Space Minstrel' (Scarfolk Records & Tapes. 1977)

Tracklist:
1. The Apocalypso of Creation's Demise
i. Earth Dearth
ii. Part I
iii. Celestial Dixie Suicide (in Top Hat & Tails)

2. The Majestic Cosmos of the Infinity-sized Steamboat Vortex
i. Mammy with the Four Green Arms in 4/4
ii. [Instrumental: Mellotron & banjo duet]
iii. New Horizons of the Intergalactic Space Minstrels in Space

*It's hard to believe now that The Black & White Minstrel Show was so popular and ran for 20 years until 1978. For those who have suppressed the memory, here it is.