How times change. What once seemed harmless, devil-may-care – illicitly thrilling, perhaps, but no more – hindsight renders sinister, grisly,
even reprehensible. Ask any light entertainment star of the 1970s
and they’ll tell you that Graffiti was the craze that none
could afford to shun. The practice was introduced by the Italians during the reign
of Franco, as the country’s first hand-gesture-free form of protest. When it
became clear Franco was in charge of Spain, not Italy, this was claimed as an
early victory by the protestors.
The craze soon spread beyond its seditious roots and into
the soil of art. Brian Eno made an entire album by typing “found Graffiti” into
an ARP sequencesizer; Do Your Walls! was the most watched BBC-2 series
of 1974; and Dennis Healy was famously photographed daubing the perimeter of
Buckingham Palace with the popular phrase “Nelson Riddle is innocent”.
But decades of gleeful free expression left their mark, and
the 1980s saw Graffiti fall from favour. Home Secretary Lord Bravilor of Bonamat
campaigned long and wide against the criminalisation of walligraphy, but
the tide was well and truly in over his head, and his refusal to yield to
public opinion led to his faking his own botched double-suicide in 1983, in a
resignation that still gets heads wagging today.
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