by Joe Moran
For the future Monty Python member Terry Jones, television began in the 1950s as ‘something that happened down the road at my friend John Campion’s house’. Terry and John would rush home from school to watch the cowboy series Hopalong Cassidy. Every Saturday morning they watched the same BBC demonstration film, with the same haunting bit of early film footage of a man attempting to fly from the Eiffel Tower and falling to his death, ‘into oblivion and history at the same time … This was the bit we ghouls all waited for with horror and fascination.’ When the Joneses finally kept up with the Campions and bought a set of their own, though, Terry soon tired of it and migrated to the bedroom to write poetry, tempted downstairs only to watch Michael Bentine’s It’s a Square World. ‘Television was never really my thing,’ he recalled. ‘In those days the image was only 425 lines [sic] and a rather murky purple colour.’59
This was normal behaviour among members of that newish tribe, the teenagers, who preferred shows aimed clearly and cultishly at them, such as 77 Sunset Strip, with its character Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes, unlicensed detective and adolescent role model. Constantly tending his ducktail haircut, he added jive talk to the British vocabulary, calling everybody ‘Dad’, an idea a ‘bulb’ and praiseworthy things ‘real nervous’. ABC Television published a glossary of Kookish (‘a pile of jive gone square’) to aid viewers. Teenagers also watched on the rare occasions that television offered glimpses of their musical heroes. When Buddy Holly appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium in March 1958, his ‘nationwide guitar-class’, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney in Liverpool, was watching intently. But, according to Holly’s biographer, Philip Norman, the lesson they had hoped for failed to materialise: ‘One could hardly see Buddy’s guitar, let alone what his fingers might be doing on its fretboard.’60
Six-Five Special, the BBC’s first attempt at a popular music show, kept about a quarter of teenagers at home on Saturday evening, although the historian Peter Hennessy notes that, because its opening titles showed an A4 Pacific steam locomotive pulling the Edinburgh–Aberdeen express over the Forth Bridge, it also appealed to the large number of boys, like himself, who were trainspotters.61 Although presented by Pete Murray doing an impression of youthspeak (‘Time to jive on the old six-five’), the show took pride in the wide age range it attracted, from children to pensioners. The BBC’s other pop show, Juke Box Jury, was another case study in generational compromise, as the older showbusiness stars on it would make snide comments about records, ventriloquising the views of parents. As television co-opted rock’n’roll into the light entertainment mainstream, teenagers migrated to their bedrooms and to Radio Luxembourg, which, after ITV had stolen its family audience, was now playing pop music late into the night, for those listening covertly under the bedclothes with their transistors.
The arrival of television in an area was marked by a new skyline, a critical mass of aerials, like Chinese ideograms, along thousands of miles of rooftops. The best blackbird and thrush song was now heard from aerials, and in coastal towns, herring gulls sat on them and caused them to sag, knocking them out of line with the transmitter. The collared dove was so renowned for using the aerial as an opportune perch that Germans renamed it the Fernsehtaube or ‘television dove’. The ornithologist Jeremy Mynott wonders if the rapid expansion of collared doves in northern Europe after the late 1950s was due to ‘the endless horizon of TV aerials they could see stretching over affluent Western Europe’.62
The abundance of aerials became part of a general fear that Britain was being uglified by ‘subtopia’, an all-purpose word coined by the critic Ian Nairn for postwar clutter from advertising hoardings to concrete streetlamps. A cinema newsreel, ‘Down with aerials!’, condemned the ‘hideous disfigurement’ of ‘the ugly crop of television aerials, like demented hatstands’ in Chesterfield. A letter to The Times lamented the blight of aerials spreading across the Cotswolds, where even thatchers had learned to leave a convenient gap in the straw for the aerial to stick out of, and ‘these Heath Robinson-like objects … utterly ruin the varied and picturesque roof-lines’. Television abstainers looked askance at the aerial. ‘We used to say that the people who dropped their aitches put them up above their houses,’ remembered the playwright Peter Nichols about the H-aerials which would soon be mentally edited out of view and vanish into the everyday landscape along with roof tiles and chimney pots.63
Just like electricity pylons and arterial roads before the war, the TV aerial suggested the spread of cultural sameness across the land, the dilution of local diversity and tradition. ‘As the bends on the roads are removed and the television signal spreads, doom is on hand for even these places; it’s all becoming Whicker’s World,’ wrote Malcolm Bradbury in his ‘poor man’s guide to the affluent society’, written after returning to Britain from a year studying in America in 1958–9. ‘The crudest of modern desires, desire for membership of the present, was displaying itself … The past I had come back to was already in hiding, confined to the places where the television signal had not yet reached.’64
Partly to allay these fears that the new mass media was destroying local identities, ITV had been divided into regional companies, their franchises stipulating that they produce some local material. One of the most enthusiastic advocates of this idea was Sidney Bernstein, the charismatic new chairman of Granada TV, who was described by the journalist Harold Evans as ‘a smooth silver-haired talker of creative vitality, who looked like a cross between a Roman emperor and a beaten-up boxer’, and who claimed he had been persuaded to bid for its northern franchise by looking at two maps, one showing the distribution of population in England, the other the pattern of rainfall. He repeated this claim over the years like a creation myth, by which time even he may have forgotten that his deputy, Denis Forman, had dreamt it up as a conceit. Bernstein was a brilliant propagandist for his company and its region. ‘The North is a closely knit, indigenous, industrial society,’ he told the London School of Economics in 1959, ‘a homogeneous cultural group with a good record for music, theatre, literature and newspapers … Compare this with London and its suburbs: full of displaced persons.’65
The vast Granada region, covering 13 million potential viewers from north Wales to Lincolnshire, could just about be correlated with that emotive but indefinable entity, ‘the north’. Northerners travelling south were surprised to see the name ‘Granada’ attached to TV rental shops, cinemas and motorway cafés, so habituated were they by the famous channel ident – ‘From the North: Granada Presents’, with an upward-moving arrow – to associating it with their region. Granada drew on a tradition of proud provincialism associated with the Manchester Guardian (which, ironically, was about to drop its adjective and relocate to London) as well as anticipating the northern new wave headed by writers and filmmakers like David Storey, Tony Richardson and Shelagh Delaney. Granada was at the vanguard of a new idea of the north that emerged in the early 1960s, after more than a decade of Tory rule, promising a new vigour and vitality in place of a stale, southern Establishment.
Granada’s serious programmes, like What the Papers Say, its groundbreaking, in-depth reporting of the 1958 Rochdale by-election and its 1959 ‘Marathon’, in which all the parliamentary candidates in the north delivered an election address, drew on the idea of the region as a citadel of autodidacticism and civic responsibility. When the 1962 Pilkington Report accused ITV tout court of vulgarity and commercialism, a wounded Bernstein proudly cited Granada’s nonstop coverage of the TUC and party conferences, ‘some of which have had the lowest ratings with the public ever known’.66
To describe this northern kingdom, united by its ability to receive his company’s programmes, Bernstein coined the inspired term ‘Granadaland’. Oddly, the name probably resonated more because it had no connection with its region, for Bernstein had chosen the name Granada for his cinemas in the 1930s to evoke the exoticism and romance of Spain. Many viewers at first pronounced it to rhyme with ‘Canada’. ‘Land’, meanwhile
, had originated as a suffix in America to describe the communities created out of wireless listening (‘you folks out there in radioland’). Bernstein declared the half-serious ambitions of marking Granadaland’s borders with customs posts on major roads and of moving a member of the royal family to Harrogate. With Denis Forman he devised ‘an up-to-date version of Cobbett’s concept of London as the Great Wen, a cesspool of sin, corruption and idleness’.67
This was mostly PR. Granada still filmed many of its shows from the Chelsea Palace on London’s King’s Road, from where it broadcast a networked variety show with the incongruous opening announcement, ‘From the north, Granada presents: Chelsea at Nine’, made even more incongruous when it sometimes went out at 8.30 p.m. Much of Granada’s quota of local programmes was filled with cheap outside broadcasts filmed by its distinctive pale blue Travelling Eye cameras: sand-yacht races at Southport, traffic on the Barton Bridge, dairy farmers making Cheshire cheese, a visit to a glass factory, Manchester after midnight. ‘Today these OBs would seem grotesquely primitive,’ conceded Denis Forman later, ‘and even then they were exceedingly boring, but … the experience of showing the North to the North in a workaday manner was something new and astonishing.’ On his return to Bolton in 1960, after conducting a Mass Observation survey of the town in the late 1930s, Tom Harris-son noted that the town was fortunate to be in this ITV region, for ‘Granada is deeply interested, in a conscious and intelligent way, in the Manchester area complex, in which Bolton somewhat unwillingly lies’. Harrisson noted approvingly that, when he had offered him ‘a privately conducted tour of the inner workings of Bolton’, Bernstein had jumped at the chance.68
Coronation Street, which began in December 1960, was partly commissioned to increase Granada’s northern content. But Bernstein worried that it sent out an outdated image of the region. ‘When I get driven in from the airport I can see many houses that are much nicer than those on your street,’ he told the producer, Harry Elton. ‘Is this the image of Granadaland that we want to project to the rest of the country?’ But northern viewers recognised immediately its authentic core. Richard Whiteley, now a sixth-form boarder at Giggleswick School in north Yorkshire, was doing his evening prep in the study when his young English teacher, Russell Harty, came in. He had one of the early portable television sets – the fourteen-inch Murphy, with its distinctive purple handle – in his rooms. ‘I’ve just seen this wonderful thing on TV,’ Harty said. ‘It’s about a street in Manchester and there’s a woman with a hairnet in it.’69
The debut broadcast of Scottish Television, on 31 August 1957, a variety show called This is Scotland, evoked a nation only marginally less invented than Granadaland. After the Jacobite song ‘The Hundred Pipers’ and Kenneth McKellar singing ‘Scotland the Brave’, a kilt-wearing James Robertson Justice, a Scottish Nationalist who claimed improbably to have been born under a distillery on the Isle of Skye, laid it on thick in an accent rather more Celtic than the one he used for the Doctor films: ‘Good evening, this is Scotland, the land of sunshine and clouds, the land proud and ancient as history itself, yet young, strong and vital as the flowers that bejewel our northern summer …’ ‘The whole thing culminated as might have been prophesied with a pipe band marching down the plywood hills,’ reported the Glasgow Herald. ‘For what it was, a glorious inevitability, it was well enough done.’ STV’s Highland mythology reached about 190,000 lowland televisions, the reception outside Glasgow and Edinburgh being mostly dreadful. This was not, as some engineers claimed, because of the pine-forested hills of Argyllshire (although conifers, in leaf all year round, do affect reception), but because the new ITV mast on Black Hill, near Kirk O’Shotts, had a duff aerial design. St Andrews received faint pictures; Ayr had blank screens; Perth got sound only.
Wales was even less fortunate, for it had to share its regional company, Television Wales and West, with the West Country. Like the Wenvoe transmitter, the ITV mast at St Hilary was near the Severn Estuary and you couldn’t send a signal north of there without also sending it south. In any case, TWW needed the advertising revenue that its flank of English viewers would bring to make a profit. For fear of alienating people in the West Country and in industrialised, Anglophone south Wales, its Welsh language programmes were shown late at night. Many Welsh nationalists thus saw ITV as a further incursion of Anglo-American culture into the homeland.
The private, domesticated act of watching television also seemed to threaten indigenous Welsh traditions of live, communal entertainment, like the Eisteddfodau, the evenings of music and poetry known as nosweithiau llawen (‘happy nights’) and the noson lawen, informal gatherings in people’s homes similar to the Scottish ceilidh. In 1961, Blodau’r Ffair, the journal of the Welsh League of Youth, published ‘This enlightened age’, a poem by the Carmarthenshire poet David Henry Culpitt: ‘The Devil’s forks can now be seen / On the corner of the chimneys of Hendre Fawr … And pretty girls with naked legs / Fill the space where the wise Psalmist used to be.’ The same issue had a cartoon showing a doctor diagnosing a patient: ‘Lack of sleep, I’m afraid – watching too many Welsh programmes.’70
The smaller ITV regional stations relied on still more makeshift identities. Tyne Tees Television, starting in January 1959, covered an area with a strong sense of its own apartness but little unity. The ‘northeast’ was a recent and nebulous term, first used widely in the interwar years in connection with the Jarrow march and efforts to revive the region’s economy. But Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside all had different newspapers, with no equivalent of, say, the Yorkshire Post or the Western Mail to unite the region. The new channel had provisionally been called ‘North East Television’ but its owner, George Black, was worried that its acronym could be extrapolated to ‘Nettie’, Geordie slang for toilet. For similar reasons, the name Tyne, Wear and Tees Television was also vetoed.71 The new company soothed the wounded feelings of Wearsiders by commissioning a start-up theme called the ‘Three Rivers Fantasy’.
Anglia Television, broadcasting across the flatlands from the Wash to the Thames Estuary, had an agricultural feel. Dick Joice, a tenant farmer dressed in cavalry twills and brogues, who did not own a television until he started appearing on it, was the face of the channel. As well as presenting Farming Diary, a programme interspersed with commercials for fertiliser and new types of sugar beet, he was the anchorman for About Anglia, the first regional news programme with its own weather forecast, keenly watched by the region’s many farmers and fishermen. In one memorable edition in January 1963, in the middle of the coldest winter of the century, Joice presented the programme from Wroxham Broad in Norfolk, sitting at a desk perched on the frozen water while reporters skated round him under the arc lights.72
Southern Television’s catchment area ran along the south coast from the New Forest to the agricultural prairies of Kent. Its chalk streams were some of the best fishing waters in the country, and the programme controller, Roy Rich, wanted a series about the region’s speciality, fly fishing, then a rich man’s sport and thus attractive to advertisers. So began, in 1959, Jack Hargreaves’s Gone Fishing, which mutated the following year into a much-cherished series about the countryside, Out of Town. Its format barely changed in twenty-one years. Viewers discovered Hargreaves in a set made to look like a shed, dressed in tweeds, gumboots and a fly-festooned cap. Sitting at a trestle bench and smoking a briar pipe, he would simply start talking, without introduction, about an old country skill like cider making or onion stringing, before leading into a film about fishing for roach or cutting the Winchester water meadows.
Hargreaves avoided that glassy, eyeball-swivelling, autocue stare at the viewer, for he had intuited, like Kenneth Clark, that the most successful television presenting is really a form of soliloquy. He had no script, believing that stumbling over words and repeating himself was more natural, and he did not always look at the camera because he felt that people in conversation often looked away from each other. ‘I’m not talking to two million people 20 miles away,�
� he mused. ‘I’m talking to three people exactly 14 feet distant. That’s the average size of any TV audience, and the distance they sit from their set.’73 His sentences had a comforting, epigrammatic quality. The countryside would fall apart without baler twine. There’s nothing more dopey than a dopey cod. Freezers have taken the fun out of beans. In the Southern region, Out of Town regularly beat Coronation Street in the ratings.
Another local programme, In Kite’s Country, presented by a former army major called Oliver Kite, was also regularly in Southern Television’s Top Ten. Like Hargreaves, Kite was a ‘spieler’, simply adlibbing in his slow rich voice over film of him catching grayling while blindfold or with a paper bag over his head. He received about 350 letters a week from viewers, a huge number for a programme never shown outside the region. One man, who wrote to say how sorry he was that he would no longer be able to watch In Kite’s Country now that he was leaving the area, was found to be awaiting release from Parkhurst.74
The most artificial ITV region was Border Television, broadcasting from September 1961 to a population of about half a million, outnumbered four to one by sheep, and awkwardly straddling two countries, from Walter Scott’s fairy-haunted lowlands to the Cumbrian lakes. Its most popular programme was Cock of the Border, a weekly knockout competition in which rival quizzers, piano players and darts throwers from places like Workington, Stranraer or Kelso competed against each other – a canny way of bringing together a region made up of small, dispersed towns.