James Wentworth Day - Television Career

Television Career

Wentworth Day briefly achieved minor fame through television in 1957 and 1958, when he appeared as the resident reactionary "rent-a-quote" (to use a term coined more recently) in Daniel Farson's Associated-Rediffusion series, most famously Out of Step and People in Trouble. Farson made it clear that he did not agree with the sentiments, which were often perceived as racist and xenophobic even in the 1950s (in the People in Trouble programme on mixed marriages Wentworth Day referred to "coffee-coloured little imps" and claimed that black people must be "inferior" because "a couple of generations ago they were eating each other"), but he usually chuckled along with them and ended them with a remark along the lines of "I completely disagree with you, but at least you say what you really feel".

However, Wentworth Day was soon dropped from Farson's programmes after he claimed, while contributing to a programme on transvestism, that all homosexuals should be hanged. Farson, himself a homosexual, was afraid Wentworth Day would land him in prison and insisted that the programme on transvestism should be scrapped, theoretically because the Independent Television Authority would ban it anyway.

Despite his increasingly outmoded views on racial matters, Wentworth Day continued to write until shortly before his death, which came very soon after two Daniel Farson programmes in which he expressed his opinions had been repeated on the fledgling Channel 4 (clips of Wentworth Day's comments were later shown in Victor Lewis-Smith's Buygones strand in Club X and TV Offal). Wentworth Day also held a set of views in support of traditional farming methods and in opposition to pesticides; these were expressed in his 1957 book Poison On The Land.