Corporal punishment ruling

I think, I hope, you all know by now that there are in this country four national television networks, three of them are commercial and the fourth is called the Public Broadcasting System. It's radio as well as television and it's supported by a small grant from Congress but mainly by subscriptions sent in voluntarily by listeners and viewers and by grants from industrial corporations and philanthropic foundations. Together, they guarantee us all the blessing of watching first-rate television from dawn to midnight without having to see any commercials. This is not a small, struggling network. In fact, it has over 260 stations, attached stations, and is the second largest television network in America.

Now there's a weekly programme of drama. It runs throughout most of the year. This last year it had a 52-week series and we play in succession, say, the four parts of Henry James's 'The Golden Bowl', follow it with one of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective series and then Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure', then 'Country Matters' and so on. The programme has been running for six years and, during that time, I've had the pleasure, more than anything else, of MC-ing it and this involves, say, at the beginning of 'Jude the Obscure' doing a little talk, a sort of thumbnail biography of Thomas Hardy and then from week to week recounting the plot so far and saying, in effect, 'Now, read on! Watch on!' 

Most of the plays are imported from the BBC and they usually fill most of the hour and leave me two or three minutes to have my say at the beginning or the end or a shorter say at both ends. But from time to time we pick up something, a series, from the British commercial channel and thereby face a problem which is not without its transatlantic ironies. Each programme runs an hour and, as I've implied, there is little or no problem when the play was manufactured by the BBC's drama department but the irony sets in when we show a drama series that was designed for Britain's commercial television system. The episodes arrive over here and we have to cut out the commercials and this leaves the whole show usually six or seven minutes short. 

You can imagine that the more intriguing the drama, the less the audience is going to stand for Cooke waffling away to fill the time. What to do? The problem became acute and prolonged when we... we took up about a year after you'd seen it 'Upstairs, Downstairs'. Here were, by our count 55 hour-long dramas that by the time we were ready to show them ran about 53 minutes each. So to fill in the space left by the missing commercials, I devised from the start a series of visual essays placing the joys and griefs of the Bellamy family against the social background of the time they were living in. 

So what we have, either at the beginning or the end of each episode, is an essay illustrated with film or/and chosen stills on, let's say the factory system in England in Edwardian times or the rich Edwardians' mania for food or, in the First World War series, a running account of whatever was happening outside Eaton Place at the time, a miniature history of the Dardanelles campaign, for instance, or what women were doing during the war, or the history of the Zeppelin, or whatever. 

People who have watched the series here – and that means millions of Americans in the biggest and the smallest places across the continent – have been good enough to say that they've been given, down the past four years, a running social history of Britain from 1904 to 1930 which makes the fictional life of the Bellamys seem an actual part of English history and that, of course, was the idea at the start. But the impulse to do it at all was not an original desire to acquaint Americans with the life of Britain, it was a desperate expedient to fill in the time taken up in Britain with glamourising various commercial products. 

So the irony is that in Britain, which most Americans believe has only the BBC's non commercial system, 'Upstairs Downstairs' was presented with commercials and 'cold' so to speak, with no explanations or essays, whereas in America, which most Britons believe has nothing but a visible jungle of commercials, 'Upstairs Downstairs' has been seen for four years without any commercials at all. 

There's a further irony, because the avid American audience recognises 'Upstairs Downstairs' as obviously an English import and they are stubbornly planted in their belief that Britain has no commercial television, they assume, and I should guess 99 per cent of them, that 'Upstairs Downstairs' is a BBC product. The compliments come flooding in from coast to coast and, while we hasten on all public occasions to give credit where credit is due, the BBC suffers not too painfully from having to bear the weight of all this congratulation and flattery. Once a preconception takes hold of a nation, such as that all Italian food is liberally spiced with garlic, that Mexican food is as hot as a fiery furnace, people have to live in Italy or Mexico for a long spell before they can be made to realise that it just ain't so. 

Well, a year or two ago, we took from the BBC the rollicking dramatic series called 'Tom Brown's Schooldays'. It was such a success that a small town in Ohio, I believe, that bears the name of Thomas Hughes's birthplace made itself over into a sort of transatlantic show place for 'Tom Brown's Schooldays'. We had the usual piles of gratifying mail but there came one week when the mail was heavier than usual and most of it was very un-gratifying indeed. 

The audience had just seen an episode in which Tom Brown was paddled, caned or birched – according to the idiom you're most used to – and a storm of protest flared up like a prairie fire. Indignation ran most high among women viewers who were appalled to see the visible evidence of a school system in which small boys were physically punished for their misbehaviour. This episode also stirred another American protest which was against the whole idea of boarding schools for little boys of nine or ten. I read through whole bags of mail which implied that not only had I sat there unruffled by the abominable canings but, such is the abominable magic of television, that I had practically invented the system myself. 

One lady came to the heart of the American protest when she wrote, 'Don't you believe that this system of sending small boys away from home at an early age is the main reason why Englishmen grow up so neurotic?' This was fascinating news to me and I used my next stint before the camera to say that in my lifetime I had known, about equally, men who had gone away to a prep school at nine or so and as many who had never gone to a boarding school at all, and that all things considered I was unable to attach neuroses to one group more than another. Well, this may have drawn the sting from the neurotic accusation but for several weeks, and especially when the detestable Flashman started some of his ingenious bullying, it didn't stop the waves of shock in mothers who thought the caning or other physical punishment of children was barbaric, if not downright criminal and certainly un-American. 

My own close friends came to me and asked me, with the guilty curiosity of someone enquiring how you were treated in a prisoner of war camp, asked me if I had ever in my life been caned. I said, 'Of course!' And they went into shock. None of them, whatever their origin, whatever sort of school they'd been to – kindergarten, elementary, local high school or boarding school – none of them had ever felt a flick of that rod which, spared, is supposed to spoil the child. And I hasten to say that my American contemporaries didn't seem to be more or less spoiled than the rest of us. 

I don't know when caning went out in the American system but it must have been at least 50 years ago. But there's no question that it was, for centuries, a staple of the American system. It may well be that it fell into disuse once John Dewey and his disciples of permissive, or progressive, education took hold and spread their gospel of treating a child as a small grown up who must be persuaded, argued with, reasoned with and led tenderly into the paths of righteousness. 

Well, maybe the pendulum is about to swing back, for this week we had a shocker. In a ruling handed down by the United States Supreme Court in what is sure to be the landmark case of Ingraham versus Wright. Ingraham is the plaintiff, the punished boy, and Wright, I presume, is the offending teacher. I should say Ingraham 'was' the boy because the offence he complained about and eventually brought to court happened in 1971. Since the mills of American justice grind exceeding slow, it has only now come up after several appeals were upheld and reversed before the Supreme Court. 

Ingraham took the legal burden on behalf of himself and another boy named Andrews. Their complaint was that they had both been paddled, one, twenty times and subsequently developed a haematoma, a blood mass, which took several days to go down and the other was paddled several times and claims he didn't have the full use of an arm for a week. The case came to the Supreme Court as any case must that goes there on a constitutional issue – nothing ever goes to the Supreme Court that does not claim the violation of the rights of the individual. And they claimed that the spanking of a child by a teacher violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution which says simply, 'Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted'. 

Now, although New Jersey and Massachusetts have laws specifically forbidding physical punishment of any kind, 23 states authorise moderate spanking but the Supreme Court can override state laws and, from now on, the court says that the teacher has, and I'm quoting, 'a common law privilege to inflict reasonable corporal punishment'. It did not find the spanking of Ingraham and Andrews was cruel and unusual. It is, in fact, unusual but cruel it was not. 

So watch out for a whole new round of spanked bottoms. Prepare yourselves, folks, for a new generation of American neurotics.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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