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In Britain the obsession with sexual abnormality and make-believe violence had become so fashionable by the summer of 1965 that the `daring' new English drama, like the James Bond films, had played an important part in promoting London's image as `the most swinging city in the world'. In June, to avoid the vestiges of censorship imposed by the Lord Chamberlain, the Royal Court turned itself into a theatre club to stage John Osborne's play A Patriot for Me, the main set-piece of which was a lavish homosexual `drag' ball, before the protagonist, a homosexual spy in decadent Hapsburg Vienna, ends up committing suicide. Centrepiece of the summer season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, directed by Peter Hall of the Royal Shakespeare Company, featuring an apocalyptic orgy scene and, in what was described as a particularly `camp' gesture, the casting of four nude Soho strippers as the Four Virgins. At the Aldwych Harold Pinter's The Homecoming portrayed a man presenting his new American wife to his father and four brothers, whereupon they take it in turns to have sex with her and plan to set her up as a prostitute. Another vogue film of the summer was Roman Polsanki's Repulsion, depicting a young girl's sex and violence obsessed nightmares. In October a young writer who had won the first commission from Britain's new National Theatre (and also scripted the new Beatles film Help!) published a solemn article entitled `My boyhood life and work in the theatre and how I came to be obsessed with sex and violence', including such lines as `my plays are about filth, filthily. There is a place for filth in the theatre. I've seen it, and lovely cami-knick filth it was.'

In the autumn of 1965, just when this fashionable nervous frenzy was reaching a peak, as in the hysteria which exploded in the first week of November over the appearance of the first mini-skirts, two more new plays aroused the greatest sensations of all. The first, because it was on television, was the BBC's Up The Junction, an ostensibly cine-verite picture of life in working class south London, focusing on the seduction of a teenage girl on a bombsite, and her subsequent horrific back-street abortion. Even a critic normally keen for the BBC to show `daring' dramas commented:

`I suggest that at least part of the object ... was a wish, perhaps an unconscious one, to see just how far they could go in a television play with sex and cuss words.'

The other play, first performed on the same evening (November 3), was also ostensibly a picture of working-class life in south London; and again, to stage it, the Royal Court had to turn itself into a club. Edward Bond's Saved began with a young couple entering the home where the girl, Pam, a notoriously promiscuous 23-year old, lives with her parents. Len has just picked her up and rather clumsily fails to have sex with her. But we then see him having become her boyfriend and moved in as her parents' lodger.

We now meet, in a cafe, a gang of young men, one of whom, Pete, is about to attend the funeral of a boy who has been run over. After crude sex jokes, Pete boasts of how he had been responsible for the accident. Seeing the boy run out into the road, he deliberately accelerated his own vehicle to hit the boy, knocking him into the path of an oncoming truck. He did not admit this to the boy's parents or the coroner, We then see that, although Len is still living in her parents' home, Pam has now moved on to another boyfriend, Fred, having had a baby (father unknown, although she thinks it is probably Fred). The baby, throughout the scene, cries pitifully offstage while its mother takes no notice.

We then see Fred and Len fishing in a local park. Pam enters, wheeling a pram, and, after getting into an argument, walks off, followed by Len, abandoning her baby. This leads to the central episode of the play, when the gang of youths we have met earlier, including Pete, join Fred in the park, see the pram and