In the long tide of history, the world-famous reticence of the British is a very recent development. Less than a hundred years old in fact. The rakish ways of the regency, the roistering Restoration and the downright rowdyism of the Tudor era are older and more firmly rooted traditions among these tough island people that Victorian middle-class morality or latter day neo-Freudianism. It needed only a gadget – a mechanical marvel – to make the British dispense with polite fol-de-rol and come right out with the view that sex does exist. Once having admitted this, the English Government, always fiercely partisan in their gloriously muddle-headed fashion, refused to permit anybody to be without sex. Anyone could have told them this would make trouble. For if the British have a proud (if somewhat obscure) history of joyous licentiousness, they have an equally proud history of stubborn refusal to permit any invasion of their private lives. Thus the struggle began. Although not titanic in proportions (it is, after all, a quite smal island) its results were hilarious and its effects far-reaching, indeed, world-wide - and that too was part of a proud British tradition.