Television: Capturing Performance

The ‘Mick Jagger’ episode of the World in Action current affairs series offers an on-the-spot Establishment response to a pop culture cause célèbre: the 1967 drug trials involving various members of the Rolling Stones. As such, it is something of a trailblazer in British broadcasting history. That status alone makes it interesting. What makes the programme important, however, is the combination of its participants. This chapter considers ‘Mick Jagger’ in textual and contextual terms, and it seeks to answer the following questions: How is the televised World in Action debate useful as an historical document? What does it reveal about the nature of pop culture’s challenge to the British class/social hierarchy? Drawing on broad traditions of cultural historiography, the chapter builds to a close examination of the ‘Mick Jagger’ document itself. The young Jagger is powerfully performative; he is a counter-culture icon, the personification of 1960s freedom. Yet his appreciation of public responsibility is by no means shallow. This nuance points to a further tension: the social role of television versus the pop culture content of much of its programming. The chapter arrives at a set of conclusions via a constructionist analysis that deals in testimony and evidence, the latter triangulating examples of the former.