Ricky Gervais’s hosting of the Golden Globes, in which he cheerily lambasted some of Hollywood’s most prominent figures, turned it into must-see, viral television. And it is secretly every producer’s dream that their ceremony or occasion should feature such a moment, however publicly or pompously they might denounce it at the time. Celebrities battling one another, after all, is the definition of water-cooler viewing, as the Rock-Smith affair has proved.

Half a century ago, British television viewers were treated to a similarly outrageous moment that is still remembered today. The controversial director Ken Russell had made the historical drama The Devils – a scandal then, and still unavailable to view in uncensored form today – and was booked to appear on a BBC chat show to discuss the film. Opposite him was the Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker, who was not only a staunch moralist but a long-standing detractor of Russell’s, who had dismissed The Devils as “the masturbatory fantasies of a Roman Catholic schoolboy”. 

When Russell and Walker appeared on air, the conversation between the two of them became more and more heated. Russell defended both his film and his right to make it, but Walker refused to deviate from his conviction that it was both indecent and tawdry, calling it “monstrously indecent”. 

Eventually, the director, in a moment of apparently spontaneous theatre, seized a copy of the Evening Standard containing the review and hit Walker over the head with it, while swearing at him. Russell remained unrepentant about his action for the rest of his life – to some, he remained better known for it than his films – and, when asked once whether he had any regrets about it, replied: “Yes, I wish I had hit him with an iron bar rather than a rolled-up newspaper.”