The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [492]
All this was reflected in the post-war years by the British cinema, happily projecting a particular view of Britain as it had emerged from its heroic wartime ordeal, keenly aware of class differences but still a society bound together by shared traditional values. It was the heyday of Ealing comedies, such as Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob; of films like The Blue Lamp, with Jack Warner creating the idealised fatherly policeman later to become the hero of a 1950s television series Dixon of Dock Green; of the classic film versions of Dickens's nineteenth-century novels, such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. The events of the war itself did not much feature on the screen until, in the early 1950s, a flood of films appeared recreating heroic British wartime episodes, from the Battle of Britain, the Dambusters raid and the sinking of the Graf Spee to prison-camp escape stories.
In the theatre it was the heyday of West End `drawing room comedy, Terence Rattigan, T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party: thoughtful, undisturbing plays for respectable middle-class audiences, about the lives of socially `above the line' people like themselves. Evelyn Waugh, the provocative young novelist of the 1920s, had embarked on his earnest trilogy about the war, Sword of Honour, partly inspired by his conversion to Roman Catholicism; while his longest novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945) was like a serious revisiting of the plot of his first, Decline and Fall (1928), replacing its sardonic satire of the amoral 1920s with a haunting portrait of an old upper-class Catholic family in its decadence, clinging on to a sentimentalised version of its Catholic faith as the rising tide of modern barbarism consigned it to the past. Even Waugh's contemporary, Graham Greene, although he specialised in portraying the social and moral twilight world dubbed `Greeneland, clung on to his own sentimental version of Catholicism, as offering the hope that there was light flickering somewhere in the darkness.8
However much some were still holding to the imagery and symbolism of the past in their search for meaning, the world in that first post-war decade was changing rapidly. It was symbolically apt that the crowning of a new Queen in the mediaeval setting of Westminster Abbey should have been the occasion which more than anything else introduced the people of Britain to the new medium of television. On all sides the pace of technological innovation was now transforming human life more rapidly than ever before: the first jet airliners; transistors; new wonder-drugs like penicillin, which promised a revolution in man's ability to combat disease; new pesticides like DDT, which promised a worldwide revolution in food production; nuclear fission producing electric power; the first rockets reaching into space.
By the mid1950s there was a growing sense that humanity was standing at the dawn of a wholly new era, with a power to command the forces of nature which would dwarf anything which had gone before. Nowhere was this more obvious than in America, now, under the presidency of the elderly and conservative wartime general Eisenhower, indisputably the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced nation in the world. But along with this vision of a shining future had come the uncomfortable awareness that it cast a long shadow. The advance of nuclear physics had already produced the hydrogen bomb. Those advances in rocket science were creating missiles capable of carrying such weapons halfway across the globe. The dreams of mankind were now becoming haunted by a barely imaginable new nightmare.
At least on the surface such fears could be turned into popular entertainment. Both in America and Britain, the early 1950s saw a rash of science fiction horror stories showing humanity facing some final catastrophe: either through its own technological ingenuity