The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish the Nationwide Festival of Light, making religious inspired protests against the so-called permissive society, she also wrote an autobiography, Who Does She Think She Is?, published by New English Library. Thus her thoughts regarding the impending moral collapse of the nation were brought to the public by the same outfit responsible for a comprehensive range of sinew-stiffening pulp fiction delights such as The Degenerates by Sandra Shulman, Bikers at War by Jan Hudson and Gang Girls by Maisie Mosco.
All of these and many more are featured in this heavily illustrated collection of essays, edited by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette, who also wrote a significant proportion of the contents. The contributors, variously based in Australia, America, and the UK, examine the explosion of postwar cheaply produced paperbacks in those three countries, in fields such as juvenile delinquency, popular music, drug culture, biker gangs and the hippies’, mods’ andTeddy Boys’ youth cults.
Today, battered copies of Richard Allen’s million-selling exploitation titles Dragon Skins, Boot Boys, Knuckle Girls or Terrace Terrors, which survived being passed from hand to hand among schoolchildren in the early 1970s, are offered by respectable book dealers for considerable sums, and their contents analysed in learned institutions.
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