In Hippie Hippie Shake, Richard Neville has me saying "Let's have a party, a party on live TV. The masses can see what our bloody culture is all about." It hardly rings true to my ear. I'm really not in the habit of talking about the "the masses", and this only leads me to feel his book is really a work of recollected and reconstructed fiction. But so, to some degree, is this book; I guess I shouldn't complain. On the same page, he has me in the LWT hospitality room surrounded by "a clutch of comely researchers". At least the fantasy has a cast of babes. After attempts at a cohesive and ideologically acceptable plan failed, the conversation degenerated to, as Boss put it

"who were going to be the lucky people going in the Austin Princess with Mr. Rubin to hospitality rooms A and B. So me and Micky went to hospitality room A and there was this very nice man with his tray and we sank the best part of two bottles of vodka in about 45 minutes. I can remember Rubin coming over and saying, "Hey listen, don't get too drunk. Stay sober, you guys" And Micky and me went, "What the fuck's he talking about? Leave it out, mate." So we went on paralytic basically."

These were the days before VCRs and I've never actually seen the edition in question of The David Frost Show in its entirety. Only bits and pieces, and some of the tape Hoppy shot. The other guest was Robert Ardrey, the behaviorist, who believed violence and aggression are eternally locked into human DNA. That Jerry Rubin should be sharing the bill with a miserable academic who, like B.F. Skinner before him, equated all human behavior with that of rats under stress, was a ploy we should have seen coming down Oxford Street. Obviously we hippies were there with Rubin to provide all the evidence Ardrey needed to support his theories, but we were too busy swilling vodka and chatting up comely researchers to notice. At showtime, we were all seated in a single, camera-accessible block of seats, and Rubin and Albert took the guest chairs on the stage with Frost. A modicum of chat was punctuated by interruptions from the audience, and an off-camera altercation as assistant floor managers tried to take away Hoppy's video camera, to which Hoppy objected "You've got your cameras, why shouldn't we have ours?"

Rubin lit a joint and handed it to Frost. This was the signal for the rest of us to swarm on the stage, only I found myself swarming slower than might have been expected and a tad more unsteadily. I do recall, however, noticing Richard, with Louis, keeping himself well off camera, which struck me as a little odd. I also clearly remember Felix squirting Frost with a water pistol.

Felix Dennis squirts Frost with a water pistol.

Unlike Richard, he had no qualms about being seen.

Time seemed to move so fast that, before we knew it, the show had gone to commercials. Commissionaires were hustling us out. Sometime around this point I was separated from Boss, but our recollections are pretty much the same. We might have arrived in a LWT limo, but now we were on our own, and as good as on the run. No planning had been made for escape or retreat -- a typical and fundamental Yippie! tactical oversight -- and, of course, the studios were in Wembley, a good six miles from the sanctuary of the Grove. "I was out on the car park and you could hear the police sirens in the distance. Then this very fast car suddenly drew up, with two people I'd never seen in my life before, and they said, "Hey, Boss, get in!" so I did. Then I remember sitting in the front seat of this very fast car and tearing out of the car park just as all the police cars raced in, and I looked back and there were all these smokebombs going off and flares and all these crazies. Incredible fun." Incredible fun indeed. Maybe more TV fun than we would see until The Sex Pistols mixed it up with Bill Grundy. All that dampened my enthusiasm was, as I attempted to make my getaway I also made a disconcerting discovery. Trying for a TV outlaw/hoodlum look, I had put on my old sleeveless Levi jacket with all the badges and honorary 1%er patch. I hadn't worn the thing in a couple of months, and as we hit the car park, I happened to feel in my pocket, and discovered to my dismay a tinfoil package that contained about thirty tabs of Took's pink acid I'd stashed and forgotten. Talk about a squirrel and it's nuts. Good acid, and I certainly didn't want to ditch it, but sirens were howling, and blue lights flashing all around, leaving no chance to conceal it. Alas, into a puddle it went and was gone. While Boss was whisked away in a sports car, I was picked up in a lumbering hippie van that I think already contained Steve Mann and Little Tony, and somehow the raiding party reconvened at Neville's flat. Rubin was jubilant, hopped up on the belief he'd made a greater impact than his partner and rival Abbie Hoffman had on The Merv Griffin Show when he'd worn a American flag shirt and been electronically blacked out. Seemingly our US cousins judged the success or failure of an "action" by the TV ratings and subsequent headlines. Neville, on the other hand, who had started out as Rubin's local second banana, now seemed subdued and unhappy. Later he would say he regretted pulling the number on Frost who'd always been decent to him.

David Frost attempts to maintain order as chaos ensues.

All this started me idly wondering into exactly what we'd been maneuvered, and who might have been in cahoots with whom. Rubin was hunting headlines and looking to sell his book. Frost was trolling for ratings. Richard Neville had presumably assisted with this publicity stunt because he was tight with Ed Victor, Rubin's editor. And the rest of us? Party in public and bug the squares? I wouldn't deny a major element of the uniquely twentieth century weakness to be on TV at all costs, the one that causes humans to detour both logic and common sense and submit like slaves to the camera; canon fodder in a conflicted media episode. That Frost had a second backup studio already hot to continue his live broadcast -- hardly a normal TV procedure -- clearly indicated he and his producers were anticipating, even hoping maybe, that the show would be disrupted. They expected to need a second studio so Ardrey the Behaviorist could liken whatever disruption might have a occurred to the perverse and destructive performances of overcrowded rodents. The next day, the print media got in on the act. A writer called Peter Black in the Daily Mail typified the press response. "They're mad, bad and dangerous, these horrible hippies. "The Frost Show, which has been rather drowsy this session, woke up with a vengeance with this weekend's edition. It was impossible not to become involved in the loathing of the horrible hippies; such was the atmosphere of lawlessness they introduced you longed to see the courageous Frost punch one on the nose. I found it a hair-rising illustration of how mob action becomes mob rule. On his own Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Seven, might have given the coherent explanation Frost asked him for of what thought and policies, if any, energized his anarchist movement. His simple-minded clowns having dispensed with thought they saw to it that it was not allowed; and it wasn't. The mob was controlling the boss. Even after the mindless bullies had been cleared away, their remaining supporters, although reasonably polite argued so pitiably as to make you abashed for them." The Mail piece was not only typical, but also an early symptom of something that would grow progressively stronger in the seventies as the nation ground down to inevitable Thatcherism. Note the buzz words like "anarchy" and "mob rule". Through the seventies these and other emotive terms became increasingly common in the right wing press. (And, indeed, where was the left wing press?) The punks finally and deviously turned the whole thing around by making the same buzzwords their battle cry, but before their counter-measures, the increasingly shrill message of high conservatism was to warn of impending and dangerous chaos; and couple the warning with the injunction to obey the rules without question lest civilization crumble and the murderous and ravening rabble run amok in the streets. More, I suspect, by osmosis of mindset than actual conspiracy, the needed fear was being generated to make the idea of a "nanny society" all too horribly attractive. Admittedly I can be a trifle paranoid, but I had the distinct feeling that, at the extremes, many were secretly hoping for an anarchic outbreak; the excuse for the elimination of dissent and non-conformity in a one great political Armageddon. Now I was hearing the Dalek cry way over on the right of me. "Exterminate! Exterminate!" Some of my more polite brethren may also have heard the Daleks, but assumed they were us. One such was Alan Marcuson, the editor of Friends, "I found the Frost Show so embarrassing; the most absurd thing to do and a complete misuse of the opportunity." I'm not sure exactly what Alan thought we should have done with opportunity, but others insisted we should somehow have staged a impromptu revelation that would have converted thousands to our cause. Many accused those of us who went on the show of playing into the hands of Frost, Rubin, Ardrey, and all the worst prejudices of the powers that be. We were roundly condemned for reinforcing all the negative stereotypes, but, frankly my dears, I didn't give a damn. We'd just spent some long years trying to reform the world by example, and all we had for our pains was Ted Heath in Downing Street, an Industrial Relations Bill to curb the unions, an Immigration Bill that was nothing short of racist, and legislation giving wider powers to the police to wage the War on Drugs, all being pushed through Parliament simultaneously. My primary motive for going on the Frost Show was not to expand the consciousness of the viewing public, but simply to pull off a prank that might at least bring a smile to those who were still trying to hold on to some tatters of revolt. Thus far into the new decade, they'd had precious little to laugh at. The Frost Show was show business for Chrissakes. We weren't blowing up Parliament, dragging aristos to the guillotine, or hanging merchant bankers from lampposts. All we did was change the format of the bloody David Frost Show for a few minutes, just as Jimi Hendrix had bucked the rules on The Lulu Show when he insisted on playing "Sunshine Of Your Love" instead of the mandated "Hey Joe", and was also cut off for his temerity. Even back in the seventies, TV was already being sufficiently confused with actual reality that many, both hip and square, equated a disturbance in a TV studio with some real fissure in society itself. Society wasn't without its fissures, but the perception that television doesn't just reflect society, but actually is society, is the dangerous misconception that has been compounded and exploited over and over, decade after decade, to the point where politics are conducted by sound bite and war can be packaged on CNN as a bloodless video game. For me, the most interesting aspect of the Frost incident didn't reveal itself until years later when I went to US Embassy to get my resident visa. When I was summoned to explain myself to the John Dean character I introduced in the prologue to this book (Give the Anarchist a Cigarette pp. 1-4), I discovered the US State Department not only had a file on me -- presumably with data supplied by the CIA -- but some of John Dean's questions revealed this file contained a fairly detailed report the whole Rubin/Frost incident, including the meeting at Neville's. For a while I wondered who was collecting this kind of data. Who among us was the pet mole, our direct line to Langley? In the end, though, I deemed it an unhealthy speculation, and abandoned it in favor of more immediate worries. The meeting with Tony Benn, late in the afternoon that followed the Jerry Rubin adventure was of far lower key, much more polite, and passed without public notice. I'd mentioned to Hoppy that I was going to have tea with Benn, and he'd expressed an interest in meeting him too. I saw no reason why Hop shouldn't come along, he was, after all, one of the founding figures who'd precipitated us into this mess in the first place. I think Hoppy collected Ingrid and me, and drove us in his Mini to Benn's modestly splendid town house in Holland Park Avenue. If my memory isn't being totally colored by mood, the day with Rubin was grey and wet, while tea with Tony Benn was blessed by a chill late autumn sun. Benn himself was tall, charming, and sufficiently charismatic -- understated, upper class -- to have prospered as an actor, playing courageously off-hand and affable naval officers in black and white, stiff upper lip, J. Arthur Rank war movies. In fact, he was about everything one might except from a socialist earl who'd given up his title and, as a commoner, condensed his name from Anthony Wedgewood-Benn to simple Tony Benn. Again, if my memory doesn't play tricks, I think Benn served us tea and small genteel sandwiches, in a tastefully cluttered and book lined study clearly designed to compound the image of Tony Benn as destiny's gentleman. The encounter was high on good manners, but lamentably low on communication. He seemed prepped to deliver a lecture. He had a geo-economic world map that demonstrated the stark division between the haves in the northern hemisphere and have-nots in the south. Not only was this far from new, but weirdly simplistic. I was already becoming objectively nervous as to how the global environment would survive if emergent Asia, Africa, and Micronesia all insisted on going through a polluting, fuel-burning, smokestack industry phase of the development -- probably with attendant wars and military industrial complexes, and nuclear weapons. Benn, on the other hand, seemed totally wedded to disturbingly smokestack socialism, and a rather Victorian view of the working class. He seemed to feel I was unduly pessimistic, but, of course, neither of us knew then, within twenty years, Central Africa and parts of Asia would be in the process of being depopulated by AIDS. (At least, I profoundly hope neither of us knew.) Hoppy then got started on a fairly abstruse theory about plurality and attempted to outline a form of math that could provide a organizational base for a plural society. He lost me, and Benn visibly glazed, retreating behind the politician's bland and reasonable mask. He came back onto safer ground when the discussion moved to the current Tory assaults on labor and race relations, and I suggested what Britain might really need is a US-style constitution to specifically limit the power of government. Benn seemed to agree that a constitution was one idea, but he was far from sure that the nation was ready for any measure that would drive a coach and four through parliamentary tradition. (I've noticed few politicians who are over-eager to tamper with the basics of the system that has placed them in power.) Obviously the underlying agenda in all this was to discover if any common ground could exist between what remained of the counter culture and the Labour left. Going in, I was far from optimistic. I wasn't even sure common ground was possible with career politicians of any persuasion. Beyond all ideology, the ramparts of hypocrisy and compromise seemed just too high and slippery to scale while still hauling my self respect with me. Just to prove I definitely had no talent or aspirations to conventional politics, I came right out and defined what I saw as one of the primary impediments to any conceivable relationship. "A rapport can hardly be established with any government that continues to use the drug laws as a means of social control, and we continue to be the targets." Again the politician's mask came down. Benn uttered some vagueness, but I knew he was never going add the decriminalization of marijuana to his list of priorities. Maybe more tea parties might have followed, although I personally doubted it. The first one had proved itself one more exercise in futility. Then Benn discovered we were the Frost Show culprits and any possible future invitations were scrubbed. I guess Hoppy, Ingrid, and I were just too "mad, bad, and dangerous". But, then again, they'd also said that about Lord Byron, and look where politics got him; slap in the middle of a Greek uprising against the Turks.