Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  People who rented sets just for the coronation usually held on to them, and the normal summer slump in television sales failed to materialise. By autumn, manufacturers were able to lower production costs and reduce prices. The TV screens at the Earls Court radio show in August had increased in average size from twelve to seventeen inches: no longer would anyone complain about the picture being too small. When the Christmas trade in 1953 broke all records for furniture and electrical goods, retailers speculated that this was due to ‘the stay-at-home propensities induced by television’ and ‘the television party … fostering a new pride in the home’.61

  The post-coronation television boom coincided happily with the end of rationing. The easing of restrictions on hire purchase in July 1954 was probably more important than the coronation in turning television into a mass medium, for people could now walk into a shop and buy a £60 TV for £6 down, or sometimes no deposit at all, with the repayments spread over as long as the shopkeeper would allow. For those who could still not afford a set on the ‘never never’, pubs now had televisions. A glossy new publication, TV Mirror, featured a 200-year-old inn in south London which advertised ‘Good Beer and Television Nightly’ and photographed a woman wearing field glasses so she could see the screen more clearly.62

  The rural writer and conservationist John Moore, living on the rustic borders of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, noted that three out of five cottages in his nearest village, Bredon, now had an aerial on the roof. He had overheard farmers and labourers talking about Margot Fonteyn and Shakespeare, after switching on for the boxing and variety shows and finding these programmes by accident. ‘Whereas the countryman always regarded sound radio with a faint awe, he accepts television as a commonplace,’ reflected Moore after watching the coronation in his local, the Fox and Hound. ‘Standing there in the bar – and yet standing, it seemed, within a few feet of the altar in Westminster Abbey – we accepted that sheer magic of the business without turning a hair.’ Watching the majestic occasion in this ordinary setting, though, Moore felt ‘doubtful and afraid … it took a lot of foam-flecked horses, and a lot of bonfires, too, to bring to us the first tidings of Waterloo … The countryman is a countryman no longer. The TV camera has given him one of the dubious gifts which the Devil gave to Faust: the privilege of “looking in” at whatever he wanted to see. It didn’t do much good to poor Faust.’63

  The televising of the coronation heightened the sense of injustice in those towns and villages that still did not have television. Unlucky places like Southampton, Aberdeen and Plymouth had missed out because of the awkward shape of the island, and its fractal coastline, which the TV signal strained to reach. Brighton had managed to acquire a signal, just in time, from a temporary mast mounted in an old wartime trailer, hastily resprayed BBC green to conceal the military camouflage, high up on the South Downs at Truleigh Hill on the site of an old radar station. There was much muttering among its coastal cousins about how exactly the well-connected ‘London by the Sea’ had managed to acquire pictures while they remained televisionless.

  Another area of contention was Cornwall, which generated the first major opposition to the building of a television mast. The BBC insisted that Hessary Tor, a 1,650-foot summit overlooking Prince-town and Dartmoor Prison in the middle of Dartmoor National Park, was the only available site from which television could be transmitted over the peaks and troughs of Devon’s moorland to Cornwall. At the public inquiry, the inventor of radar, Robert Watson-Watt, said that the shape of Dartmoor made it ‘a holidaymaker’s paradise but a television engineer’s purgatory’. The Dartmoor Preservation Association contended that the mast’s alien presence would be ‘a perpetual reminder of that modern “civilisation” which most people come to a national park to forget’ and that it would not even guarantee a reception for the peninsula’s western extremities, so towns like Truro, St Ives and Penzance would be ‘bereft of this latest benefit to humanity’. Although the Hessary Tor mast was not completed until 1955, Mrs Sylvia Sayer, the DPA’s chairman, complained that the BBC was cashing in on ‘Coronation TV hysteria’, a clamour raised ‘by those who would quite willingly sacrifice Her Majesty’s personal feelings to make a TV holiday’.64

  Questions in parliament from MPs about the absence of television in their constituencies became more insistent. A rumour spread among Welsh television owners that Wenvoe was not transmitting on full power, but had been in the days before the coronation to trick the Welsh into buying sets. ‘We cannot ask any friends or children in to view because of poor reception,’ complained Mrs Aimee Havard from Abergwili, ‘and we have felt so mean over Christmas, but I could not risk disappointing the children.’65 Viewers in the long, narrow south Wales valleys found the hills disagreeable to viewing. In mining communities, terraced rows were often built along the valley sides in a hand-and-fingers pattern, and the TV signal found these houses especially hard to reach.

  On the Isle of Man, whose uncertain status as a crown dependency nurtured a strong patriotism among its citizens, the council was unwilling to pay for a booster mast for the coronation and also forbade council tenants from putting aerials on their roofs, even evicting one tenant, Norman Clarke, who erected one in his garden. After an enterprising radio dealer had built an unofficial transmitter on Douglas Head, just in time for the island’s loyal subjects to watch on 2 June, the Home Office demanded that this unauthorised mast be shut down after the coronation, while in return moving the island to the top of the waiting list. But siting a transmitter on this island of hills bisected by a central valley was difficult. After several failed attempts, the BBC engineers rented a room in a farmhouse on Carnane, the hill overlooking Douglas, and poked a mast out of it. Television officially arrived on the island in time for Television’s Christmas Party, with Norman Wisdom, Max Bygraves and the Beverley Sisters. Reception was terrible, particularly in the south of the island, where the new mast was worse than the pirate mast. ‘Perhaps, again, we should be patient and give the BBC engineers a chance,’ the Isle of Man Examiner said, ‘but their apology to the dealers and potential viewers in the South is poor compensation to both when sums up to a hundred guineas have changed hands for a useless piece of machinery.’66 Six years earlier, television had been barely missed when it was cancelled for weeks. Now those who could not receive it felt cheated of citizenship.

  In other ways, though, little had changed. Viewers may have outnumbered listeners for the coronation, but British radio was enjoying a golden period. The number of sound only licences remained double that of TV licences, and the Radio Times still printed the TV schedules, as an addendum, at the back. The most popular radio shows, like The Archers and Mrs Dale’s Diary, inspired intense loyalty and the anarchic creativity of The Goon Show, which relied on painting surreal pictures in the listener’s mind, had no televisual rival.

  In Scotland and Northern Ireland, where incomes were lower than average and the coverage of the transmitter erratic, television would not eclipse radio until well into the 1960s. While television was mostly relayed from London, the Home Service still had a strong regional component. The Scottish Home Service had already moved its popular programmes into the early evening as part of its ‘high tea’ strategy, devised after the war to fend off the new Light Programme. The routine in most working-class Scottish homes was to have a main meal at lunchtime and a light evening meal called high tea at around 6.30 p.m., with the radio on in the background broadcasting Scottish dance music, comedy or the hugely popular soap opera about a working-class Glaswegian family, The McFlannels. By 7 p.m. the family was settled in front of the fire for the rest of the evening, and many quite highbrow programmes, broadcast later on, got huge listenerships.67 This strategy had worked against the Light Programme and now, since evening television did not start until around 7.30 p.m., it had great success against TV.

  The McCooeys, a radio soap about a Belfast working-class family that ran until 1957, was the most popular programme ever broadcast in Northern Ireland
, in any medium, its catchphrases – ‘You’re a comeejan’, ‘shloup with vegabittles’ – repeated throughout the province. Here there might be one television set per street or neighbourhood. After they won the League in 1954, Wolverhampton Wanderers played a series of televised friendlies with sides like Moscow Spartak and Moscow Dynamo. At his home in Belfast, eight-year-old George Best would boot a ball repeatedly against the wall outside the house of a neighbour, Mr Harrison, about ten minutes before kick-off to persuade him to let him in to watch his TV set, the only one in the vicinity. Wolves’ ground, Molineux, was the first to install the floodlighting that made it possible to televise night games, and, Best wrote later, ‘it was the floodlights which made them magical for me, made football into theatre’.68 For the rest of the decade, television in Northern Ireland tended to be watched communally and remained an occasional indulgence reserved for special occasions like football matches.

  Ten-year-old Philip Norman, living in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, also inhabited this world where radio and older entertainments still prevailed, although later, in his memoir Babycham Night, he probably overestimated television’s primitiveness. At the time of the coronation, he claimed, ‘only a few thousand people in the whole country owned television sets’ and ‘unless you lived within a couple of miles of the BBC’s London transmitter, reception tended to be poor’. Soon after the coronation, Philip’s parents acquired a television and he would lie on the Chesterfield sofa with the curtains drawn and watch ‘all of what little was on – Test cricket, Russian ballet … I knew every note of the long drawn-out overture played as a sound track to the test card before transmission began.’ Beside him in the gloom sat Mrs Kennie, the Scottish home help deputed to keep him company, clicking her knitting needles and judging every programme ‘verra gude’. But on the Isle of Wight, at least until the Rowridge transmitter opened in November 1954, ‘the picture would collapse sideways into horizontal black and grey stripes, or flick downward in individual squares like frames of film’.69

  One place in Ryde, jutting half a mile out to sea and back towards England, got better reception. Philip’s father, who ran the Seagull Ballroom on the pier, domesticated their room there with two easy chairs, a one-bar electric fire and a Cossor television, and here they watched the American comedy shows the BBC had begun showing, like Amos’n’Andy and The Burns and Allen Show. Even here, though, the dit-das of Morse code messages from passing ships kept breaking up the picture.70 In the hard-to-reach inlets of the British coast, those struggling to get a reception must have felt they were being offered a tantalisingly patchy glimpse of the future.

  If it did not have as radical an effect on the nation’s viewing habits as is often supposed, the coronation does seem to have had a profound impact on the monarchy’s attitudes to television. The Queen, newly returned from a tour of the Commonwealth on 15 May 1954, even delayed appearing on the Buckingham Palace balcony until she had finished watching Gracie Fields in the BBC’s Welcome Home Ball. When ITV arrived in London in September 1955, she and Prince Philip made sure the Buckingham Palace sets were converted ready for when they returned from Balmoral. All the Queen’s residences were exempt from TV licensing laws; by 1960 there were fifty sets in Buckingham Palace alone.71 By the late 1960s the Queen was reported to be a fan of Dad’s Army, Morecambe and Wise and the wrestling on World of Sport – as was Prince Philip, who especially admired Johnny Kwango’s signature move, the flying headbutt. In Richard Cawston’s film The Royal Family, shown by the BBC and ITV on two separate nights in one of the televisual events of 1969, viewers saw the Queen washing up, feeding carrots to her Trooping the Colour horse, announcing ‘the salad is ready’ at a Balmoral barbecue, with Princess Anne on the sausages and Prince Philip on the steaks, and watching television with her family. The royals had inadvertently invented a new genre: the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary.

  A week after The Royal Family, all three channels showed the investiture of the Prince of Wales. The coronation had been an event filmed by television, with much agonising over what could be shown; the investiture was a televised event, conceived so that everything could be seen from all angles by TV cameras without the cameras being visible. Lord Snowdon’s stage set at Caernarfon Castle – carefully antiquated coats of arms made of expanded polystyrene, and a central dais designed like an Agincourt tent with a see-through canopy, ‘just like Henry V would have done it, if he’d had Perspex’72–was mock medievalism made for colour TV. Caernarfon residents had been given free paint to do up their house fronts in architect-approved colours – pink, green and cream – to look good on television.

  Unlike the coronation, the investiture was watched by most viewers in their own homes, although the few who owned colour sets did invite neighbours in to watch on BBC2. The estimate that Caernarfon would have its population swollen to 250,000 proved to be wildly optimistic. Police outnumbered spectators on the processional route and the misnamed crowd control barriers restrained only scattered groups of people. Like a party host trying to convince guests that everything was going well, the BBC commentator, Richard Baker, pointed out that ‘everyone is inside, watching television, where they can get a more comprehensive view of what is going on’. The events of 2 June 1953 may not have turned the nation instantly into a community of viewers, but within half a generation most people were sitting indoors in front of the TV.

  4

  THE PALE FLICKER OF THE LIME GROVE LIGHT

  I peer into my magic mirror like a fourteen-stone cigar-smoking Lady of Shalott … I have already passed uncounted hours half-hypnotised by the jiggling and noisy images … [Television] does not seem to bring the outside world closer to me but pushes it further away … I feel I am taking a series of peeps, perhaps from the darkened smoke room of a giant spaceship, at another planet, with whose noisy affairs I am not involved at all.

  J. B. Priestley1

  In July 1951, Gilbert Harding began chairing a new TV quiz show, What’s My Line?, in which panellists had to guess what members of the public did for a living. It did not go well. He mistook a male nurse for a panel beater and kept interrupting him to say his answers were wrong. When the nurse revealed his mistake, Harding told viewers, ‘This is the last time I ever appear on television.’ But he reappeared as a panellist on the show a few weeks later and seemed no happier, telling one equivocal contestant, ‘I’m tired of looking at you.’ A viewer complained: ‘I felt like walking out of my own drawing room.’2 There was talk of scrapping the programme, not because Harding was rude but because it was as dreary as he had feared it might be.

  Gradually, though, viewers were drawn into the panel’s attempts to identify jelly baby varnishers and pepper pot perforators. By the end of the year it was the most popular show on television. What’s My Line?, the Glasgow Herald assured its readers before the opening of Kirk O’Shotts, ‘is good fun, and when the challenger happens to be a saggar maker’s bottom knocker, can be hilarious’. One panellist, Lady Isobel Barnett, was sent paintings and needlework portraits of her face, modelled from the TV screen by viewers. Newspapers ran on their front pages the story that another panellist, Barbara Kelly, had dropped an earring under her chair. But Harding was the main attraction and he inspired that odd mixture of veneration, resentment and illusory intimacy that we now associate with celebrity, a phenomenon wrongly thought modern. ‘Right, I’ve seen Gilbert Harding now,’ said one man loudly as he passed him in the street. ‘You can take him out and shoot him.’3

  Often he appeared drunk, for which occasions the BBC coined the phrase, ‘Mr Harding was overcome by the heat from the studio lights.’ But he really was troubled by the hot arc lights, and would often remove his jacket on screen. In December 1952, he appeared in the middle of the Great Smog, the worst of London’s pea soupers. Showing the panache for penitence that endeared him to viewers, he telephoned the Press Association later that evening stating that his behaviour was caused by ‘asthma aided by fog – I may have over-fortified myself against it �
�� viewers were not wrong in thinking I was a bit tiddly’.4 Well-wishers sent in cough mixtures and bronchial cures. But a few weeks later, with no London smog to exonerate him, he upset people again by being rude to the ventriloquist’s dummy, Archie Andrews.

  Many watched the programme hoping Harding would be rude. A friend told him he imagined What’s My Line? as a bullfight, with Harding as the bull, the challengers as the picadors and the host Eamonn Andrews, awarding points against him, as the matador. While demurring, Harding conceded that he did detect ‘the elemental odours of the bull ring – and of the bear pit – in what is supposed to be a mild Sunday evening’s amusement’.5 Hilde Himmelweit, a social psychologist and director of a four-year Nuffield Foundation research project on children and television, argued that TV offered ‘the appeal of infringed conventions’ in a way that was safely enjoyable because it was vicarious and contained elements of roleplay and pretence. She found that children, perhaps unfamiliar with this wish-fulfilling aspect of the medium, were left uneasy and anxious by Harding. Joan, herself ‘a rather aggressive child’, said, ‘He’s just horrible. I don’t like him. Everybody claps when he comes on, but I think he’s absolutely disgusting. He’s absolutely born to disgust me. I hate him.’6