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HIDDEN ARCHIVE: Panorama: The Mescaline Experiment
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| First published February 2005 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Panorama: The Mescaline Experiment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"To fathom hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic" - Dr Humphry Osmond, 1956
Steve Coogan addresses a camera with his best old-school BBC announcer voice and declares that he's indulging in a fashionable exercise which most young people are trying these days. "I'm being 'fellated,' he says, by a young girl known as a 'groupie'. It's an interesting feeling, and certainly quite relaxing." As Coogan relishes the moment, the scene fades out.
A passage of time denoted, Coogan addresses the TV audience again, informing us that his initial feelings of euphoria have been replaced by those of "indequacy and gloom. It's not an experience I can see catching on. But neither is it one which I regret." This memorable scene, part of the remarkable 'Attitudes Night' sketch in the first episode of The Day Today (BBC2, 19/01/94) is funny in itself as a pastiche of archive TV, but much funnier when you know that it references an actual, albeit untransmitted, incident from 1955 in which an equally plummy BBC presenter indulged in an equally counter-cultural television experiment. Quite possibly one of the most famous 'unbroadcast' television shows of all time, the event - intended as a Panorama special - features the endearingly staid and proper-sounding Christopher Paget Mayhew MP demonstrating the effects of the mind-altering drug mescaline hydrochloride. With all the predictably comical incongruities which accompany this.
An articulate and personable figure, Mayhew was also pretty well-known as a TV personality by this time. As well as being the chosen face for Labour party political broadcasts, he'd also presented a well-received series of half-hour documentaries on the subject of religion entitled Men Seeking God, which had also yielded a spin-off book of the same title (London George Allen & Unwin, 1955). So what led such an upstanding pillar of the political scene to take part in such an eyebrow-raising experiment? The answer, as is so often the case, is that he was led astray by a rebellious mate from school.
A key historical figure, often overlooked, it was Dr Osmond who, the following year, embraced science-fiction writer Aldous Huxley with the fruits of his research, introducing him to the world of mescaline and who, during the ensuing correspondence, first coined the word "psychedelic". As a direct result of his experiences at the receiving end of Osmond's spoon, Huxley wrote his infamous guinea-pig dissertation The Doors Of Perception (first published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1954), a book which would later become a veritable bible amongst the 60s acid subculture. Osmond was thrilled by the results. Huxley, despite modest claims that he was 'a poor visualiser', was an expressive and illustrative writer and skillfully translated his experiences to the printed page, drawing on an eager interest and knowledge of historical art and culture to help take the reader on an easily-digestible 77-page psychedelic trip.
All well and good, but surely this was only the beginning. Osmond sought to spread the word further and, to that end, he contacted his old friend Christopher Mayhew to see if it was possible to arrange a BBC radio documentary on the subject. Mayhew later told his side of events in an address which was included in a book called Hallucinogenic Drugs and Their Psychotherapeutic Use:
And so, on the 2nd of September, 1955, a small BBC crew descended on Christopher Mayhew's nice middle-class house in Surrey to film a load of footage which, sadly, was destined never to be edited into a full programme. It's entirely possible that, had it ever been broadcast, the show would have been remembered for decades afterwards as a unique event in television history and Mayhew would have been remembered as an underground hero for the mild-altering set (rather than 'that posh BBC bloke who took acid on black and white telly - ha ha, what were they thinking' which is more often than not the only response these days). His afternoon's experience of starving his brain of glucose certainly rivals that of Huxley's. However his spoken thoughts under the view of the camera are somewhat less than expressive. As Huxley himself observed, "The mescaline taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can't be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about."
What follows is a complete transcript of the rushes filmed on that day. Cosmic.
and as sane as... I ever am" The first shot appears to be 'wild', that is to say an out-of-context bit of filming captured for editing into the finished programme, perhaps as an opening title sequence. Unlike other wild shots which occur later in the session this features audio and we hear Mayhew and Osmond's candid conversation (although probably not as candid as all that since they start speaking immediately after the director cues them in with his clapperboard).
A recording break, the picture changes to more of a mid-shot. Mayhew is now addressing the camera.
The "Tubby" Mayhew refers to was Adolf Arthur 'Tubby' Englander, a well-respected film cameraman who'd joined the BBC Film Department three years previously and who would later contribute his talents to such BBC classics as Maigret, Quatermass and the Pit and Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. He died on January 29 2004.
Exactly how long the filming break took isn't clear as nobody gave the actual time during the first sequence. However, the mescaline has certainly started to take effect in that time.
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