Peter Wildeblood (Martin Hutson) is a diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Mail newspaper. He is a closet homosexual and like most gay men in the 1950s, lives in secret because homosexuality is against the law. In 1950s England about 1,000 gay men were being jailed each year for engaging in sexual activity. One evening Wildeblood meets Edward McNally (Sam Heughan), who is on leave from the air force and the pair embark on an affair together. However, a weekend visit to the estate of Lord Edward Montagu (Orlando Wells), a 28-year-old aristocratic socialite, eventually leads to a scandal which rocked Britain and led to a reconsideration of, and the eventual decriminilization of homosexuality.
In January 1954, Lord Montagu and his friend Peter Wildeblood were arrested after a concerted effort by the police to ensnare them for homosexual offences. The subsequent case scandalised high society, electrified the nation, and changed the course of British history. Appalled by the severity of the sentence, and the fact that two men were pressured into turning Queen's evidence, it became clear that the law was out of step with public opinion. Something had to give and that something was the law itself. The trial, the most overtly homosexual one since that of Oscar Wilde, set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in the campaign for sexual equality.
Mixing drama with documentary testimony, this moving film re-lives the extraordinary events of the trial and paints a vivid picture of what it was like to be gay in 1950s Britain. With contributions from people including Lord Montagu and veteran gay rights campaigners Allan Horsfall and Michael Brown, they vividly recall what it was like to live through an era in which homosexuals were in constant fear of assault, entrapment, blackmail, and a lengthy term of imprisonment. Horsfall and Brown describe the reality of gay life in Britain, telling of "chain prosecutions" and police harassment, vibrant underground social scenes and medical attempts to "cure" their "disease". And they discuss the implications of the trial and its role as a pivotal turning point in gay history.
A public backlash prompted the government to look into matters relating to Consenting Adults in the form of the Wolfenden Committee, one that Wildeblood himself would later stand before and quote the title of his ground-breaking book "Against the Law". The film dramatizes the meetings of the Wolfenden Committee whose landmark recommendations led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967 with The Sexual Offences Act.
The docu-drama is a little clunky in places, yet the mix of real-life testimony with dramatized moments shows how this marked the change of social attitudes in Britain. Lord Montagu always denied the charges for which he was convicted, and describes Wildeblood as a rather amusing person, someone he greatly admired in having spoken the truth. Yet in being out and proud in a court of law at this time, Wildeblood by admitting he was a homosexual, did so in the certain knowledge that he would be convicted. There is no denying the quality of this production, or the commitment to it by writer and director Patrick Reams, but you cannot help but feel that Peter Wildeblood deserved a sexier sex scandal than that presented in this made-for-TV docu-drama. No acts of "gross indecency" are to be found in this very reserved depiction of sex in the 1950s produced by Blast! Films for Channel 4 TV Corporation.
