by Joe Moran
The rising levels of rudeness were a familiar postwar anxiety. Since the late 1940s, commentators had been noting the increasing incivility of the working classes, particularly ex-servicemen who seemed reluctant to return to pre-war standards of deference. The writer J. L. Hodson called it ‘a mild revolt against society’. As Ross McKibbin has argued of this period, the middle classes valued apolitical qualities such as niceness, humour and ‘not making a scene’, which they used implicitly to contrast themselves with the bolshy working classes.7 Although he had the look of a reactionary old colonel, it was clear which side Harding was on: he disliked genteel obfuscation and had a column in the People campaigning forcefully on behalf of victims of rapacious landlords, bad service or poor food.
‘My favourite TV star is Gilbert Harding,’ wrote Mrs R. B. Dring from Spalding, Lincolnshire in a letter to TV Mirror. ‘Why? Because he is all the things I am not. I am a mouse. I eat badly cooked food in an hotel without a word of complaint … Oh! To demand good food for my good money! To tear off a strip to someone who annoys me. To say “shut up” to people whose idle chatter bores me. To refuse a cracked cup and to be grumpy when I feel grumpy.’ Harding’s rudeness spoke to a vague impatience that postwar life had not lived up to the wartime promise of a better, fairer society to come. The Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor, himself a combative performer soon to be nicknamed the ‘sulky Don’ after an appearance on the TV discussion programme In the News, defended Harding in a Daily Herald column titled ‘Let’s be rude!’ ‘I have no sympathy with those amateur schoolmarms who sit over their television sets, waiting for something that offends them,’ he wrote. Harding was ‘a symbol of protest against the soft good-taste that surrounds us at every turn’, and what people called rudeness was really ‘pulling down the curtains of pretence that keep out the noises of the world’.8
But Harding’s ill temper had another source closer to home: his discomfort with television as a medium. A Cambridge graduate with abortive careers as a teacher, barrister and Times journalist behind him, he was frustrated, among other things, by what he felt to be the waste of his talents in his new career as a ‘tele-phoney’. In his People column, he pronounced himself mortified at being pointed out on a Tube train while T. S. Eliot was ignored, no doubt happily so, in the same carriage. ‘Do you think that I planned and plotted, or lost a wink of sleep, scheming to spend a considerable part of my life trying to identify hog-slappers, cheese-winders’ clerks, or theatre fireman’s night companions?’ he asked. He had better things to be doing, and so, he implied, did his viewers. This attitude was quite common. After becoming famous for appearing on What’s My Line?, the actor Robert Morley fretted that it was ‘all too easy, the values are all wrong’. The writer and journalist Marghanita Laski also suffered guilt pangs when, after being on the panel, she was sent butter and apples through the post and offered nylons under the counter, all ‘for a parlour game I wouldn’t even have played at home’.9 Both relented, Laski returning to the screen as Panorama’s book reviewer and Morley going on briefly to host Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
Harding’s solution to the trivial inconsequence of What’s My Line? was more eccentric: he over-invested it with seriousness and meaning. He disliked the way that women preened themselves before coming on the show, so they all looked alike and he could not tell the black pudding stringers from the knitting needle knobbers; and he resented the diploma that challengers were given to say they had beaten the panel, because he thought it encouraged oblique and evasive replies to his questions. The public fascination with What’s My Line? bemused him and he hoped one day he ‘might be able to watch the programme, and try to find out for myself what it is that makes it so popular’.10 He could not, of course, watch himself, because almost all television at the time was broadcast live, a fact which perhaps displeased him as much as its phoniness. He reserved his greatest praise for those whose achievements had a more enduring memorial than the fast and fleeting fame of the new media age. His Christmas radio broadcast in 1953, in which he quoted Macaulay’s description of the Puritans (‘Their palaces were houses not made with hands: their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away’) moved many listeners to tears. He seemed uniquely unsuited to an evanescent medium which simply died on the evening air.
‘Why, at this stage of progress,’ asked Harding in January 1954, ‘should we need to have these seemingly interminable intervals of 8–10 minutes, watching the tide coming in, or two palm trees waving to us from the beach?’11 These were the BBC interludes, a stock of ambient films put into service when there was an underrun or one of the still recurrent technical breakdowns. Their purpose was to rationalise and anonymise the stop-start interruptions that had bedevilled the viewing experience since the war. At first, announcers would bustle into camera position and announce an emergency musical interval accompanied by a caption reading ‘Please do not adjust your set’. Then there was a gramophone record of whichever announcer was on duty (‘We apologise for the fault …’) with the needle always poised at the right point so it could be deployed as needed. The interludes, introduced in February 1952 with a film of vespers music at St Benedict’s School, Ealing, automated this process still further. Apart from the Jamaican beach mentioned by Harding, and a few films of Scottish lochs and rivers, they were mostly versions of southern English pastoral. A team of horse-drawn ploughs gradually worked their way across a field in Tillingham, Essex. A windmill’s sails slowly turned over some harvested wheat in Pakenham, Suffolk. A boat made a leisurely trip down the Thames near Maidenhead.
The interlude most notorious for its hypnoidal qualities was the potter’s wheel, in which a potter’s hands worked away perpetually at a ball of clay that seemed at times to be tantalisingly metamorphosing into a bowl, or a high-sided pot, but was never, ever finished. The interludes were meant to be storyless and circular like this, because they could be pulled at any time and the viewers returned to the programme. Their accompaniment was the kind of light music, with its origins in seaside and palm court orchestras – short divertimenti, with swooshing harps, trilling flutes and cascading violins – that was the BBC’s background noise well into the rock’n’roll era. As much as the potter’s wheel itself, this music, by composers like Charles Williams, Haydn Wood and Leslie Bridgewater, evokes television’s ambience in the Edwardian summer before ITV. ‘The BBC had things all its own way and in the early years of the fifties it reflected life in Britain accurately enough: well mannered, class-ridden, deferential and exceedingly dull,’ writes the broadcaster John Humphrys in his autobiography, précising this established view. ‘Heaven help us, but we really did sit for what seemed like hours between programmes watching a pair of hands moulding a chunk of wet clay.’12
Harding’s writings as television critic for Picture Post offer some corroboration of this retrospective judgement on his own era. He especially disliked the raft of shows, spawned by the success of What’s My Line?, in which dinner-jacketed men and evening-gowned women played parlour games with challengers, guessing which famous relatives they had or why they had been in the news. ‘Static, sedate, sedentary and verbose,’ Harding judged them. ‘The people we are expected to sit and listen and look at would hardly be called attractive, even by their mothers.’ At a public Brains Trust held in Liverpool, Harding heard several in the audience say they had either returned or sold their TV sets because there was nothing on them worth watching. One elderly lady, no longer able to walk, had banished her set from her room except for What’s My Line?.13
But Harding was torn about television. He could find it suffocatingly formal, as for instance while watching the imperious Douglas Craig presenting Opera for Everybody, when he felt as though he ought to raise his hand and ask to leave the room. But he could also find it overly familiar, complaining of the ugly, cloying habit of using Christian names, which he thought ‘almost as bad as the “Good evenings” in What’s My Line?’. At a time when many work colleagues still addressed each oth
er as Mr and Mrs, this was a frequent complaint. A newspaper leader criticised ‘this quite unnecessary air of intimacy on the part of people who may have never set eyes on each other before’. Evelyn Waugh refused all requests for television interviews because of ‘the bandying about of Christian names and so forth, of the kind which deeply shocks me in some of the performances I have sometimes begun to hear’.14 These people worried not about the boring interludes, but, as people have always done, about television propelling its viewers too quickly into an unfamiliar future.
Television, in this supposedly soporific era before the arrival of ITV, was probably not as dull as it is remembered. The BBC was, for instance, beginning to create fresh forms of television comedy suitable for both northerners and southerners, who had such different tastes in the pre-television era that variety producers ran separate shows for different ends of the country. ‘Before television,’ the comedian Reg Varney recalled, ‘if you went up north and they suspected you were a cockney they did not want to know.’ The comedian most successfully bridging this divide was Southampton’s Benny Hill. In 1951, after being slow handclapped at the Sunderland Empire – which had a daunting reputation among southern comedians, because the audience, many of whom were from the shipyards, would throw washers at acts they didn’t like – he came off stage and was sick in the dressing-room sink. A few weeks later, Hill had a triumphant debut on television. His habit of underplaying, which was swallowed up on the big stages, was ideal for the small screen. In 1953 he rented his first TV and watched it constantly at home in Kilburn, absorbing every detail.15 He began to fashion a definitively televisual comedy, doing impressions of Philip Harben and a famous take-off of What’s My Line? in which he impersonated all the panellists, including Harding, using rapid camera cutaways.
The Charlie Chester Show brought the American-style ‘giveaway’ quiz to British television before ITV did, although the modest prizes – such as nylon tights, a razor blade or a packet of crisps – reflected a residual asceticism. Another well-loved programme was Ask Pickles, in which Wilfred Pickles and his wife Mabel made viewers’ dreams come true by, for instance, allowing them to meet a tame kangaroo or play a Stradivarius. Ask Pickles viewers were clearly fascinated by television, for the most common request was to be able to see how a programme was made. George Aubertin of Compton Potters’ Arts Guild, a William Morris-inspired artists’ collective in Surrey, appeared on the show as the owner of the hands in the potter’s wheel interlude. Aubertin explained anticlimactically that he wasn’t making anything in particular, just doodling away as he had been asked to do.16
Children especially loved Ask Pickles, although according to the Nuffield television inquiry, these ‘comprised mainly duller children from secondary modern schools’, and ‘being duller they were also the most gullible and the most cliché-ridden’. The universal favourite with all children, irrespective of their dullness, was Fabian of the Yard, based on the real-life exploits of Detective Inspector Robert Fabian, played by Bruce Seton, who would scream round the London streets in a Humber Hawk squad car solving grisly murders, a year before PC Dixon began plodding round Dock Green. Even Gilbert Harding praised the inventiveness of children’s television. ‘I miss Mr Turnip so much,’ he confessed to Picture Post readers after the bad-tempered string puppet from the Saturday afternoon show Whirligig was retired. ‘Some of the B.B.C.’s programmes for children are absolutely enchanting,’ Lord Hailsham told parliament. ‘Andy Pandy, for instance, at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ At Manchester University, its official historians note, women students could be found knitting while watching Andy Pandy in their union lounge.17
Just as they secretly liked watching Harding explode, viewers seemed to welcome a mild subversiveness elsewhere. The most popular character in The Grove Family, an otherwise pedestrian soap opera about a north London builder and his family interspersed with Archers-style homilies about how to buy a television licence or secure your windows against burglars, was the cantankerous ninety-year-old northerner Grandma Grove, a grown-up child whose catch-phrases were ‘I’m faint from lack of nourishment’ and ‘I want me tea’. The Daily Mail’s Peter Black saw the actress who played her, Nancy Roberts, waiting on a bench at London Airport for a plane, ‘surrounded by curious and reverent fans’.18
On Thursday nights, a snatch of a Bach violin sonata and a box spinning on an electric Lazy Susan announced the start of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? A panel of archaeologists, or sometimes art historians or anthropologists, tried to identify objects donated by a museum, with the chairman, Glyn Daniel of St John’s College, Oxford, awarding points to either the panel or the museum. It had started in 1952 but only became a national craze, watched by over 5 million viewers, towards the end of 1953, when, according to Picture Post, the 89-year-old Egyptologist Dr Margaret Murray ‘brought the house down when she successfully identified a nineteenth-century mid-European wicker bed-bug trap’. Remembered now for its Reithian earnestness, the programme actually had a fine sense of showmanship. A young production assistant, David Attenborough, visited the museums and developed a knack for selecting objects with narrative potential: a moustache-lifter made by the Hairy Ainu of Japan, a horse’s knucklebones used as Roman dice, a crocheted mid-Victorian fly settle. The rakish archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was the star. He would twiddle his moustache, pretend to be baffled and then identify the object with a flourish, often claiming he was there when it was dug up. ‘It is no good picking up something and saying “this is a Samoan cake mould” – viewers want to see how you arrived at your decision,’ he said.19
Buried Treasure, in which Wheeler and Daniel explored ancient sites like Pompeii and Orkney’s Skara Brae, got even higher viewing figures than Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? with a similarly winning mix of didacticism and diversion. Its first episode, in June 1954, ‘The Peat Bog Murder Mystery’, about the discovery of the strangled Tollund Man by Danish peat cutters, ensured its immediate popularity. The programme began with Tollund Man’s head revolving on a turntable to reveal a remarkably preserved, serene face. Back in the Lime Grove studios, the announcer Noëlle Middleton served Wheeler and Daniel a reconstruction, based on Tollund Man’s stomach contents, of his last meal: a greyish, oily porridge made mainly of barley and linseed. After Wheeler concluded that Tollund Man ‘probably committed suicide to escape his wife’s cooking’, an offended Dane wrote in insisting his ancestors would never have tolerated such food. This was probably Wheeler playing to the gallery again because, according to the producer Paul Johnstone, ‘the actual taste, though unexciting, was quite reasonable … The mash that many farm-horses are fed on is not very different.’20
Librarians reported that shelves on which archaeology books had sat neglected for years were suddenly empty, and museums noted an upsurge of interest in their collections. ‘Especially for those of us who were in our fifth and sixth forms at the time, this was really the Golden Age of archaeology on television,’ wrote the television producer Paul Jordan in 1981. ‘It is not too much to say that these programmes created the classes of ’59, ’60 and ’61 that have gone on to include some of our leading academic archaeologists and excavators.’ Glyn Daniel was less certain of the value of television, being ‘on the whole disappointed with its educative impact on the general public’ and worried that it might have given an impetus to ‘bullshit archaeology’, the ‘ley-hunters and the pyramidiots’ who emerged with the 1960s counterculture and who found ‘the signs of the zodiac in the quiet hedgerows of the English countryside’.21
David Attenborough went on, at the end of 1954, to present Zoo Quest, a programme with a similarly shrewd eye for what would entertain viewers. The mission to capture animals in west Africa for London zoo provided a strong narrative line, while studio scenes showed the captured animal in the kind of close-ups they were unable to get on location with the film and lenses then available. To persuade people to keep watching, Attenborough gave the series an objective, a rare animal to pursue: picarthates gymnoc
ephalus, the bald-headed rock crow. He doubted this creature would be alluring enough, but when his cameraman Charles Lagus was driving him down Regent Street in an open-top sports car and a bus driver leaned out of his cab and asked him, in a neat piece of tmesis, if he was ever going to catch ‘that Picafartees gymno-bloody-cephalus’, he knew it had lodged itself in the public mind. The most memorable episode of Zoo Quest came at the end of the third series, in 1956, when Attenborough managed to trap a Komodo dragon, an antediluvian ten-foot lizard that many viewers had thought was mythical. ‘We regard Attenborough as the finest type of young Englishman – unpretentious, humorous, resourceful and humane with his animals,’ said a fitter and turner on the BBC’s viewer panel. ‘A grand boy! How well he tells his story too.’22
Another quasi-educative programme popular with viewers was Television Dancing Club, which began each week with Victor Silvester’s ballroom orchestra playing the signature tune, ‘You’re dancing on my heart’. On this show, amateur dancers competed with each other, their efforts judged by postal vote, with about 8,000 viewers sending in postcards each week to Lime Grove, London W12. ‘Don’t just pick the best lookers,’ Silvester cautioned viewers, ‘– the prettiest girl and the best looking man, but give your vote to the couple that you think show the best style, footwork, rhythm and movement.’
Over the fixed smiles of the dancers came the voice of the announcer Patti Morgan: ‘Now, Doris’s dress has gathered lace in the underskirt, and shot ribbon round the neck … Doris’s father is a taxi-driver, and you would never guess that he spent the last week of his holidays helping her to sew on the sequins …’ Since the late 1920s, Silvester had championed the modern English Style, with its strict tempo and firm policing of steps. This dance band culture was now under threat from an Americanised culture of star vocalists, dance crazes and hit records marketed through jukeboxes and radio disc jockeys. Still unsure about pop music, though, BBC television helped to prolong the era of the dance bands, giving airtime to band leaders like Geraldo, Ted Heath and Billy Cotton long after the rise of rock’n’roll. ‘TV Dancing Club has helped to bring back grace, elegance, beauty and style to dancing in this country,’ wrote Douglas Brent in May 1954. It was the answer to ‘a new horror that is seeping into the ballrooms of Britain, an ugly, dreary, lifeless way of dancing known as The Creep … Teenagers in exaggerated Edwardian clothes (The Teddie Boys and Girls) gyrate stiffly in monotonous procession.’23