This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  For the following seven years she contributed articles of crystalline clarity and occasional ferocity to the magazine. Her reviews show a particular sensitivity to the suitability of material to form; to the specific nature of radio, and to its capabilities and responsibilities. She admired Gielgud’s understanding that audio was capable of creating magical worlds with no analogue in the ‘real’: ‘a mysterious unreality in which he could make you participate’, as she put it. She was merciless when the BBC failed to live up to her standards. Shortly after the outbreak of war, in her column for 28 September 1939, she railed against the drama department’s production of a ‘hackneyed, trivial and second-rate piece’ – Dr Abernethy, a one-act play by Alicia Ramsey and Rudolph de Cordova that, according to Goldie, had been ‘a standby of repertory theatre and amateur dramatic societies since the dark ages’. She concluded her review, ‘It is to the BBC that we look for nourishment of the mind and spirit. Are we to look in vain? The times call for a bigness of idea and a sweep of the imagination beyond the ordinary … Well?’

  In 1936 she had got wind of the BBC’s experiments in television, the idea of which she found ‘fascinating and extreme’. She asked Lambert if she could cover them for the journal. She remembered his response: ‘Oh no, no, you don’t want to go and see television … look television is going to be of no importance in your lifetime or mine and I don’t want you to go up there wasting your time on it and you are certainly not going to write about it.’ Let me go just to have a look out of curiosity, she pleaded. Off she traipsed to Alexandra Palace, where she watched – comparing the live action to the broadcast version on a monitor – a revue called Here’s Looking at You (an obvious reference to the novelty of the medium) by variety producer Cecil Madden.

  The production, she recalled, ‘was terrible, the whole thing was terrible, the reception was awful and I was convinced this was going to become one of the most influential things that had ever been created’. She called Lambert from a phone box in Wood Green and demanded to be allowed to write about it. She was electrified; her wonderment (and perspicacity) shining through the article. ‘I admit that the whole of this television business goes slightly to my head. I cannot get used to being a “viewer”,’ she wrote. ‘I find it difficult to realise this miracle, this phenomenon, is actually here and part of our daily lives. But it is … it was perfectly clear from the programmes I saw that television has arrived, not as a freak and a curiosity, but as successful everyday entertainment.’ With characteristic clarity, she identified the essential qualities of the medium. It had ‘a vividness which we cannot get from sightless broadcasting and a combination of reality and intimacy which we cannot get from the films’, she wrote. Eventually she was to write weekly about television, grappling with the problems and possibilities of the nascent medium.

  In 1948, she was to expand such thinking into a chapter of a book, Made for Millions, about the new era of mass communication. Television was, she said, ‘a bomb about to burst’ (rather a bold metaphor to employ so shortly after real bombs had ceased to fall). ‘What is taking place, there, in front of us, on the lighted glass panel of our receiving sets, is not a photograph or a film. It is the real thing: a black-and-white, two-dimensional representation of reality produced electrically by the reflection of light from the real objects and the real people.’ She was writing, of course, when studio television was essentially a live experience. History, in a way, has looped back to join her, since in the age of fractured viewing it is television-as-event, television-in-the-moment (such as, say, the 2012 Olympics) that has a special power to bring a dispersed audience back round a television to enjoy the same event simultaneously. She added, ‘The “teleview” has what the newsreel has not – the dramatic quality of suspense. When we see a newsreel of the Derby, we know already what horse has won: but when we watch a teleview we do not know this, and, what is more, we know that no one knows it. A real event in television becomes, therefore, a shared experience; the people in the picture and the viewers watching them are bound together.’ She considered, too, the particular quality of ordinariness that television has: the rise of reality shows in the 1990s would not, one suspects, have surprised her. ‘The texture as well as the tempo of life is retained in television as it cannot be in the cinema,’ she wrote. ‘A thousand subjects of everyday routine which are too ordinary for the cinema become excellent television material.’

  After war broke out Frank, though in his forties, volunteered – becoming one of the generation of men who served in both the First and Second World Wars. Money was short and Grace, with no children to care for, took a civil-service job, organising the distribution of essential household goods to parts of the country suffering shortages. It was valuable work in which she took enormous pride: devising systems to get pots and pans to bombed-out mothers stretched intellectual muscles that she had never used as a writer and critic. There was a rigour to the civil-service discourse, she found: ‘If at a meeting you said something where you couldn’t validate your suggestions by produced facts … you very quickly learned by the withering scorn round the table never to open your mouth in these circumstances again.’

  Then, in 1944, a letter came from George Barnes, the head of wireless talks at the BBC, the section whose first director had been Matheson. The department was short of production staff: would she be willing to apply? (Guy Burgess had resigned from the unit in March to take up a post at the Foreign Office, from where he would embark on a parallel career as a Soviet spy.) Her interview took place on 2 June 1944, the Friday before D-Day. An internal memo sent by one of the ‘solemn-faced-looking BBC gentlemen’, as Goldie remembered the panel, read, rather dampeningly, ‘Yesterday’s appointments board was dis appointing. There were only three possibles … We recommend Mrs Wyndham Goldie as our first choice.’ The Board of Trade released her, reluctantly, and soon she moved into Burgess’s old office at Broadcasting House, where she was quickly pursued by a note from the librarian hoping that she would be better behaved than her predecessor in returning books. (There is a footnote to this tale: Burgess’s missing library books were hand-delivered back to the BBC by an unknown person on 15 September 1951. He and Donald Maclean had disappeared that May, and it would later transpire that they had defected to Moscow. The return of the books was duly discussed – in inimitable BBC fashion – through exchange of memo, with advice that the Foreign Office should be informed of this potential clue to the Cambridge spy’s whereabouts.)

  The war, according to Goldie’s reminiscences, had pushed the talks department somewhat to the periphery. Unlike the department of Matheson’s day, which had forged the beginnings of wireless journalism, talks now existed several removes from the news division, which was ‘something on a pedestal way way away’. Suggesting a journalist for a talk was tantamount to suggesting a pornographer, she recalled. Still, it was enjoyable work, and she was good at it – she produced, for example, a landmark series on atomic power with contributors including Bertrand Russell, Jacob Bronowksi, J. B. Priestley and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, the only British observer to have seen, from an American air force B-29, the bomb fall on Nagasaki.

  And so in 1947, when the young television service tried to lure her from her comfortable office overlooking Portland Place, she was reluctant. On 14 May 1948, evidently in response to a refusal based on her horror of the working conditions, Collins wrote, ‘I am just not going to accept no for an answer … I cannot help feeling that somehow or other we must have scared you off unnecessarily … the Alexandra Palace is very far from a dark satanic mill and … producers flourish quite heartily.’ The anxiety continued: another letter from Collins dated 28 June begins, ‘I gather that you are still worried because you fear that as soon as we have you at the Alexandra Palace we shall begin flogging you into an early grave.’ But by then the deal was done: she would join the television talks department headed by Mary Adams, a BBC intellectual trained in genetics who had earlier employed the exiled Ludwig Koch and would later
also hire the young David Attenborough.

  It is hard, now, to recapture just how marginal and eccentric television seemed from the purview of the established wireless operation in its elegant (though war-battered) headquarters in Portland Place. Begun in 1936 as the first regular television service in the world, it had been halted for the duration of the war. Even by the time of Goldie’s election-results programme in 1950, television transmitters covered only a fraction of the country. A 1951 article in the Manchester Guardian marked the austerity-slow march north of these magnificently alien objects by describing the freshly completed mast at Holme Moss in the High Peak: ‘The giant stays which hold it, tethered to their concrete bases, stride away between the banks of the black moss for all the world like one of Wells’s Martian machines arrested in mid-career.’ Sets were the preserve of the well-off. In 1947 Goldie could comfortably reach millions with her work in radio. With television, maybe 20,000 households, all within a 35-mile radius of Alexandra Palace. The view offered to Goldie by the BBC’s head of education Mary Somerville (another pioneering woman, who had unusually managed to keep her job in the BBC in the 1920s after having had a child), was typical: ‘Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.’ Only a few observers, such as Harold Nicolson, saw as early as 1939 that television ‘may alter the whole basis of democracy’. William Haley, the post-war director general – a ‘shy, awkward’ man, she remembered – was ‘hostile to communication by vision at all; rather like Sir John Reith he thought it in some peculiar way immoral’.

  The very geography of the operation was eloquent: Broadcasting House sat at the centre of establishment London, near Oxford Circus; television was on the margins of the city – a two-hour commute by bus, tube and bus again from Goldie’s Kensington home. ‘Sound was the father figure, established and responsible, television was the spendthrift and tiresome adolescent,’ she recalled in Facing the Nation. ‘I found that my office would be a tiny attic room reached by going into the open air in the rain and the wind, past the mouldering statues of Alexandra Palace; that it had no window, only a skylight; that it was warmed by a spluttering gas fire.’ She continued, ‘I often wondered whether I had been mad to change the civilised decorum of Broadcasting House for an existence which frequently seemed intolerable, which meant working late into the night in underground film-cutting rooms at the back of Alexandra Palace, returning along interminable dark corridors with an escort carrying an electric torch to keep off the rats and then, wearily, taking an infrequent bus down the hill to the underground station at Wood Green.’

  Alexandra Palace: ‘gaunt and enormous … derelict, mouldering, draughty’

  None the less Goldie had the qualities, in this new career embarked upon in mid-life, to forge the future of television in ways are still being played out today. She brought a fearsome rigour, armfuls of programme ideas and, crucially, the political shrewdness to allow her to navigate – and dominate – the BBC’s byzantine power structures. Most of all, she could see what the technology could do; she could see beyond the prevailing BBC view of television that, in her words, held that ‘pantomime horses and chorus girls were its natural ingredients; it was not suitable for news or current affairs’. Goldie’s overriding achievement was to prove that TV could tackle serious subjects and engage with the complexities of politics.

  BBC news was, in the immediate post-war years under Tahu Hole, conservative and resistant to innovation, with a safety-first attitude that its own correspondents often found deadening and frustrating. Furthermore, Hole had no real interest in developing television news as a visual form, resisting even putting newsreaders on screen until weeks before ITN launched in 1955. But that created an opportunity for Goldie, who began to forge a current-affairs unit within Adams’s talks department. An early example of her work was a programme called Foreign Correspondent, a series of films about post-war European cities. Unlike newsreel films, in which the pictures were paramount and a commentary was written over the top afterwards, the idea was to get the reporter, Chester Wilmot, and cameraman, Charles de Jaeger, to create a piece of reportage together in which words and pictures dynamically complemented each other. These were years of intense hard work. Adams wrote in her annual report dated 7 November 1949: ‘She brings a much needed breath of the outside world and her knowledge of public affairs and personalities is a great asset … Her work here is carried out under conditions of great strain and difficulty and only persons of exceptionally good physical and mental health can survive it.’ Everything was made up as they went along, all the skills of the current-affairs television professional invented from scratch: ‘There was nobody ready-made. There were no commentators, no anchormen, there were no people in journalism who were accustomed to writing film commentaries.’ Goldie found talent and trained people rigorously. In particular, she swept up a number of sharp, charismatic former MPs who had lost their seats in the 1950 and 1951 elections, among them Aidan Crawley, Christopher Mayhew and John Freeman.

  She summoned up Gormenghastian images when recalling these years. Fellow producers ‘looked like zombies … they were going about in a sort of coma of fatigue’. Alexandra Palace itself was ‘a gaunt and enormous building on the top of a hill … it was derelict, mouldering, draughty, away from the centre of London … [a] huge, vast, rat-ridden building’. Collins and McGivern, the heads of the television service, had offices ‘upstairs in a tower. Very much in the tower. There’s a tiny tower which stands on the top of this huge building, up which you could climb precariously.’ The gallery in Studio A, from which she would preside over programmes, ‘was a creaking wooden platform … There was an iron ladder which you had to climb which was extremely dangerous so that … I had a special handbag made for me which I would hang over my shoulders because I had to hang on to both sides of this ladder … and many a secretary fell down this ladder to the detriment of her ankles.’

  In 1953, Adams retired as the head of the talks department. Goldie made an application for the job, marked with a friendly handwritten note from her departing boss: ‘I am glad to forward this.’ Goldie’s pitch began, ‘The five years I have spent in television have been hard. They have been occupied, not only with building up new techniques of presentation in the talks field, but also with the training of personnel and the creation of a unit of production to deal with one section of talks output. That work is scarcely complete …’ She did not get the job; instead Leonard Miall, until then a foreign correspondent – with no experience of television but a great knowledge of international affairs – was appointed, Goldie becoming his deputy. ‘He was a nice chap and it worked roughly,’ she later said, somewhat evasively. His subsequent annual reports on her work are glowing, with the occasional telling detail. ‘She is quick to show her intolerance of what she regards as second rate. This keeps the department’s standards high, but it sometimes tends temporarily to undermine the self-confidence of producers,’ he wrote in 1956.

  In 1954, Goldie moved with the talks department away from Alexandra Palace to Lime Grove in west London, a warren of slummy offices and studios with a faintly renegade air that was to be the home of BBC current affairs until the 1990s. The arrival of ITN in 1955 seriously raised the game for television news, with its unstuffy, buccaneering approach. Alasdair Milne remembered in his memoir, ‘Every body thought BBC Television News, under Tahu Hole’s guidance, pathetic. ITN was winning the audience’s appreciation hands down by its fresh and open approach, fronted by new faces such as Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy, compared with BBC News Division’s stiff and solemn demeanour.’ That year Goldie was put in charge of the flagging Panorama, which had begun two years previously as a magazine programme with a kind of bouquet of contrasting items. Goldie decided it needed a complete reinvention as a serious forum for debating the matters of national importance. She relaunched it with her protégé Michael Peacock as editor, and Richard Dimbleby – who in 1953 had famously commentated on the coronation – as its anchor.

  Panorama was, she
remembered in Facing the Nation, ‘the voice of authority’. But now she went on to help invent what she called ‘the voice of the people’ – the current-affairs show Tonight. The programme, which ran five times a week from 1957 to 1965, a relatively short period that belies its influence and impact, was an invention to fill what was called the Toddlers’ Truce – a gap in the early-evening schedule in which parents were supposed to persuade their children to go to bed. This now eccentric-seeming convention was swept aside by ITV, for which the shutdown merely represented a lost opportunity for making money.

  Various ideas had been put forward by other producers to fill the gap, none of them up to snuff, as far as Goldie was concerned. She, meantime, was ‘in great cahoots’ with two mercurially talented young producers, Donald Baverstock and Milne. They had been discussing ideas for ‘a new sort of programme … Donald’s approach to his audience and to television was becoming very obvious, very individual and very clear. It was that Panorama was far too authoritative … He didn’t like people being told things. He wanted to look at life through the eyes of the individual who was on the receiving end.’ Goldie put forward the idea for Tonight – ‘a magazine programme that would go on nightly … and be much more individual and human’ than Panorama. McGivern was inexplicably angry and dismissive of the idea, initially – she realised later that his hostility was because of the acute shortage of television studios, for this was before the building of Television Centre. With Milne and Baverstock ‘cooking up ideas for this programme very busily’ she put her mind to solving the studio problem. Ever resourceful and willing to improvise, she remembered a place she had once visited to judge some BBC training-school exercises – a small space in Kensington that Marconi had established to train technical staff for the arrival of independent television. Goldie got her way. The programme was presented by Cliff Michelmore. The team included Jonathan Miller, who performed a weekly satirical sketch; Antony Jay, who went on to write Yes, Minister, and Alan Whicker. It ‘looked at those in power from the point of view of the powerless’, she wrote. ‘Tonight was … not rebellious, far less revolutionary, but it was sceptical.’ Jay remembered it like this: ‘We shared the feeling … that there was an out-of-touch group of people running Britain and covering their failures with a cloak of government statements and PR half-truths … abetted by docile and amenable Fleet Street proprietors who were worried about their advertising, and that we had a duty to show the other side …’