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television in the bar. That was an absolute disaster. If you’ve ever been into a pub in the early days of television you’d know what I mean. The bar would be full of people all
watching. And apart from the noise of whatever programme was on, it would be as silent as the tomb. You’d go in and ask for your drink in a whisper. And if you didn’t want to watch the
thing, which we didn’t, you’d start a sotto voce conversation. Then the heads would flash round and shh you like snakes. Oh, it made a real jolly evening out. It didn’t
take long for publicans to realize that installing television was no answer to this falling trade, because the people watching television spent very little money and the people that didn’t
want to watch were so bored that they gave up coming into the pubs. And that I think was the beginning because people lost the habit. This doesn’t apply in the City and the West End of
London. There, pubs are lovely places to go to, particularly at dinnertime. You get food, drink, and conversation. No, it’s the provinces that seem to have given up trying.
    Some people blame the decline of pubs on the influence of women. I don’t agree of course. To my mind the presence of women has done away with a lot of drunkenness. Whereas men on their own
didn’t care how they got – the kind of disgusting condition men can get into left on their own, over-indulging in foul jokes and things like that – when they’ve got a woman
with them or near them they’ve got to not only moderate their language, they’ve got to moderate their drinking too. Because the money’s got to do for two people instead of one.
No, I think women add a great deal to pubs. Surely a pub is a place for social intercourse. Well, if it’s only going to be exclusively for men, they’ve got very little conversation,
because men are inherently lazy about using their brains. They’re not interested in talking about anything but their work, dirty stories, what girl they’ve been out with or what girl
they hope to go out with, and what they’re going to do to her when they get her out. Women have changed this. So I think they’ve done a lot for pubs.
    In any case with the equality of the sexes rearing its ugly head, as men put it, why shouldn’t women share in the social life? When you marry a man you don’t expect that your domain
is going to be just the home, do you? An example of what it used to be like is this. About eight o’clock at night the man says, ‘Well, I’m off to have a drink. Cheerio. I
shan’t be late. Have my supper ready for me when they close.’ What the devil did he think you were? He could’ve waited till the cows came home for his supper as far as I was
concerned. And when he came back he’d have found I was out too. That’s what so many working-class wives had to put up with. They were nothing but unpaid housekeepers. I wasn’t and
I never intended to be.
    What I think has changed pubs, and what may eventually almost destroy them, is ‘nationalization’. Because that is what is happening. They’re being ‘nationalized’ by
financiers.
    Instead of having any number of local breweries, family concerns, owning a few pubs in a small area – we’ve now got four or five industrial giants run by accountants and computers
from boot-box blocks of offices dictating what the public will drink. The pubs are managed for them by the faceless civil servants they now choose as landlords, tenants, or managers.
    In the days of the small brewers they knew about local tastes and interests. They studied their customers. If it was thought that something was wrong with the beer the brewer would come round
and find out what. I’m willing to bet that half the people who brew the stuff now have never tasted it in their lives.
    And the way they decorate and furnish places! They look clinical, like something out of the Ideal Home Exhibition. But pubs aren’t homes or they shouldn’t be. You come out