Survivor stories from Britain’s gay witch hunts

The names at the centre of a trial that precipitated the decriminalisation of homosexual activities in Britain, 50 years ago, already sound as though they were plucked from the pages of a drama. At its centre was Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, the third baron Montagu of Beaulieu – Lord Montagu for short. During the hysterically anti-gay years of home secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, Lord Montagu was convicted for homosexual activities alongside his friends Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood.

If that last name, with its romantically tragic ring, is not familiar today, it probably says a lot about how far a nation can come in half a century, and how quickly the liberated can forget the plight of the shackled.

Wildeblood, a journalist, was sent to HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs for a number of grimy, pruriently named charges which today would be termed having a boyfriend. When released, he testified before the Wolfenden committee, which recommended decriminalisation in 1957, and it is his book from which director Fergus O'Brien's commemorative documentary drama takes its name, Against the Law (BBC Two, Wed, 9pm).

Even on the stand, Wildeblood is asked to consider the tragedy of his part namesake, the Victorian martyr of gross indecency: "You are familiar with what happened to Oscar Wilde?" Yet, there is a sense in the programme, written by Brian Fillis, that Wildeblood's drama is not quite enough.

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Interrupted, sequence by sequence, with the talking-head recollections of older British gay men, who describe the politics and codes of the 1950s, the programme brings together dramatic recreation and something like survivors’ testimony. It seems guided by one, almost disbelieving question: what was it like back then?

Initially, this chorus of real voices feels like an unnecessary intrusion to the story of Wildeblood, played as a gentle naïf by Daniel Mays. But where Fillis's writing becomes pat and polished, with the chime of repeated, meaningful phrases, the unvarnished testimony of the men, aged between their late 60s and mid 90s, brings more fascinating details and personal dramas.

Of illegality, one man energetically admits, “it made things even more exciting”, while recognising that it made relationships nearly impossible. First-hand reports of “aversion therapy” from those who underwent it, and those who administered it, are more harrowing that anything the drama can depict. And the light laugh of one interviewee is more delightful and implausible than anything the dramatisation can dream up. The reason he was so well informed about the Wolfenden committee was because he was sleeping with the son of its chairman.

At its conclusion, in the interview studio, the men are asked to repeat gay epithets as though to reclaim the words – “Poofta”, “shirt lifter” – until a 93-year-old frowns at the word “flamer”. “That’s one I’ve never heard,” he says. “Well,” says the younger director, “I hadn’t heard ‘brown hatch’.” In the fond laugh of the older man you can see how far we’ve come.