Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Women’s Lib followed the pattern of much post-1968 radical protest: it aimed to disrupt public spectacles and jolt the audience out of their roles as docile consumers. The Miss World contest, watched by half the country with a casual, unthinking sexism, was an obvious target. ‘The spectacle is vulnerable,’ reflected two of the instigators, Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jiminez, in Shrew, the London Women’s Liberation Workshop journal. ‘However intricately planned it is, a handful of people can disrupt it and cause chaos … The spectacle isn’t prepared for anything other than passive spectators.’4 This group of women realised, rather like the Pythons, that television naturalised the absurd, and they aimed to draw attention to this fact by rendering the event even odder than it already was.

  After a minute of pandemonium, however, the women were dragged away and Miss World carried on. As usual, the contestants all walked to the camera with one hand resting on their hips, shoulders swinging, maintaining their grinning rictuses throughout, and they all longed to travel on the QE2 or meet Prince Charles – an unflinching observation of the solemn, anaphrodisiac ritual later satirised by the Pythons in their ‘Summarise Proust Competition’. Miss World remained one of the highest rated TV shows for the next decade, although it is unlikely viewers took it as seriously as its organisers. ‘I think it’s very funny,’ said Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, which was published a month before Miss World 1970, ‘and certainly every time I’ve ever watched it, there’s been more malicious comment in the room, more fun made of the whole business, than people sitting open-mouthed at what they imagined was a real contest of female pulchritude.’5

  Popular memory likes to package decades into unified entities with a particular character. This kind of decadology sees the 1970s as an era of sequinned, tinselly entertainments, such as Miss World, and of political and economic crises: Britain as ‘Weimar without the sex’, in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, with kitsch television rather than decadent cabaret being the wilful distraction from the world outside the living room.6 But while Britain faced serious problems, such as rising unemployment, spiralling inflation and a falling pound, these were not experienced with the same intensity throughout the decade. Most 1970s television reflected the normal resilience and continuity of ordinary life rather than any desire to escape from harsh realities. Nor was Miss World especially typical of the rest of television; in the expanding schedules, there were just as many programmes with the cleverness and complexity of Monty Python.

  It is part of the mythology of Monty Python that it was unappreciated at the time, which makes it seem less of its own era than an avant-garde foretaste of the future. But perhaps this is also too simple. The BBC’s Annual Report for 1969 said that Monty Python had ‘got away to an encouraging start’ and that the pet shop skit about a dead parrot was a candidate for ‘best-new-sketch of the year’. A highlight of 1970, said the report for the following year, was Monty Python’s ‘Ministry of Funny Walks [sic]’.7

  One unassailable fact about this period in British cultural life is that lots of television was being watched. In October 1970 a commission on tourism in the Isle of Man reported that the favourite holiday pastime was watching TV, and recommended that the Manx government establish television theatres for holidaymakers from the mainland. Anthony Sampson noted that Britons had the most TV sets in Europe and spent the most time watching them (about eighteen hours a week, more than double that of Belgians, Swedes or Italians). ‘A broad picture unfolds,’ he wrote, ‘of the British living a withdrawn and inarticulate life, rather like Harold Pinter’s people, mowing lawns and painting walls, pampering pets, listening to music, knitting and watching television.’8

  Television’s ubiquity was striking because in other ways Britain lagged behind its European partners in indicators of affluence. In 1971, ten per cent of homes still had no indoor lavatory or bath, thirty-one per cent had no fridge and sixty-two per cent had no telephone; but only nine per cent had no TV. ‘One of the things that worries me, which you can’t very well say if you are a Director of Programmes,’ said David Attenborough in a television interview in December 1972, on resigning from this post at the BBC to return to programme making, ‘is that people watch television too much. The average man spends more time watching TV than any other activity except his work and sleeping.’9

  A familiar sight on screen at this time, however, was a caption apologising for the interruption in programmes. In an era that is sometimes unfairly remembered as one of perpetual strikes and stoppages, TV technicians were rightly notorious for their militancy. In the summer of 1970 there was a walkout at Granada, which left those in the north-west without ITV and the rest of Britain without Coronation Street. Granada’s strike music, excerpts from light classics like ‘Fingal’s Cave’ and ‘Claire de Lune’ played over its apology caption on a two-hour loop, became so popular that the company printed lists of the music to send to interested viewers.10 At the end of that year there was an ITV ‘colour strike’, with technicians demanding more money for working with the new colour equipment. The whole channel reverted to monochrome for three months. Another periodic event was the ‘work to rule’ at power stations, which meant either blackouts or voltage reductions, when lights became dimmer, electric fires duller and television pictures smaller – an eerie evocation, for those with long memories, of the earliest days of postwar television when viewers were huddled round a tiny screen in the cold and dark. For many families, their most vivid encounter with the escalating political and economic crisis was via the television set.

  In July 1971 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, had launched his ‘dash for growth’, a mini-budget that reduced purchase tax and relaxed hire purchase controls. This created a sudden surge in demand for colour TVs in the UK, with just over 2 million sets being produced in the peak year of 1973 – one of the bright spots in the monochrome economic gloom. This totemically modern object in the centre of the living room, the colour TV, looked curiously retrograde, for people paying £300 or a higher rental charge wanted a prestige piece of furniture in return. Unlike the short-lived astronaut-themed sets of 1970, with their rounded white bodies like space helmets, most colour sets concealed their electronics in a genteel granny look with splayed, tapered legs, sliding tambour screens, teak louvred speakers and satin-finished consoles.

  But Barber’s dash for growth simply accelerated the decline of the British television industry, for domestic firms were unable to meet the demand for new sets. In what became almost as classic a manifestation of national economic decline as British Leyland, cheap Japanese imports flooded the market and proved to be much more reliable than British colour sets, which frequently overheated and were known in the trade as ‘curtain burners’. Colour television deliveries reached their peak in autumn 1973, with demand stoked by the impending wedding between Princess Anne and Mark Phillips. In the lead-up to the event, though, Britain’s economy seemed on the verge of collapse, with a huge trade deficit and the Bank of England hiking its lending rates to prevent a run on the pound. With an acute energy shortage caused by the refusal of coal miners and electrical engineers to work overtime, the government proclaimed a state of emergency.

  Despite fears that it might be blacked out, the televising of the royal wedding went ahead. The journalist Auberon Waugh reflected that ‘the nation is as united as any nation can be – in a gigantic effort to be entertained … We are citizens of the world’s first satirical Ruritania.’ The writer and architectural historian James Lees-Milne meant not to watch at his club, Brooks’s, until he saw members gathering round the television set brought downstairs into the bar: ‘Curiosity impelled me to look … The beauty of the bridegroom’s uniform and the back of his well-shaped head with glossy chestnut hair riveted me for an hour.’11

  This was a brief respite. In December the OPEC oil crisis combined with the miners’ dispute to bring the national crisis to a head. On Thursday 13 December, after an episode of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, the prime mi
nister Edward Heath gave a special broadcast in which he warned that the country was facing ‘a very grave emergency’ and ‘a harder Christmas than we have known since the war’. He announced a three-day week to save energy, starting from January. One austerity measure, though, was to start the following Monday: television would end by 10.30 p.m.

  On the first night of the curfew, ITV dropped an unfortunately timed documentary about what miners did during their holidays, and BBC1 cancelled the Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer. ITV and BBC agreed to stagger the switch-off by a few minutes because the Electricity Board feared a catastrophic power surge as viewers boiled the nation’s kettles at closedown. As BBC1 played the national anthem and, a few minutes later, ITV’s News At Ten wound up its lighthearted ‘and finally’ item, the Electricity Board engineers in the national control room in London nervously watched the lights and dials on large, illuminated, overhead boards to monitor the load on the National Grid. To their relief they saw that instead of a ‘TV pickup’, the normal increase that came after the ending of popular TV programmes, there was a 1500 megawatt drop in demand.

  Overall, though, the curfew is unlikely to have saved much energy. The government, after much chivvying, released figures that it saved only 600 tonnes of coal a day, less than 0.25 per cent of total production, and there was no way of knowing how much of this was simply displaced into other energy-consuming activities. Since TV sets take up little electricity, there was a case for encouraging families to huddle together in one room to watch television rather than disperse to separate rooms to do their individual electrically powered things. BBC and ITV both argued that they would save more electricity by coming off in the daytime, but Heath said he did not want to cancel schools programmes.

  Many Labour MPs saw it as an exercise in psychological warfare, an attempt to turn the middle classes against the miners. Some even saw it as revenge on the TV-watching classes by a man who, on arriving at number 10, had cancelled Harold Wilson’s television rental and installed a grand piano. ‘The 10.30 curfew on television is an impertinence, an intrusion, an absurdity, an ungracious act,’ wrote the columnist Keith Waterhouse. ‘Only one who spends his evenings playing the bloody organ, instead of watching a trashy old movie like any normal human being, would have thought of it.’12

  After a four-day Christmas reprieve the curfew resumed into the new year. Contrary to popular belief, a concern that it would lead to a rise in the birth rate nine months later was unfounded. TV commercials for free contraceptives, featuring a cartoon of a stork with the caption, ‘Make sure your baby is a wanted one’, appeared just before close-down. BBC Radio Leicester, which closed down in the early evening, came back on air from 10.30 to midnight with a show called ‘Tranny by Gaslight’. The fledgling form of the phone-in, the cheapest form of radio, now came into its own, with callers complaining bitterly about losing Sportsnight or the late film. On BBC Radio London, Robbie Vincent’s ‘crisis phone-in’ proved so popular that it long outlived the crisis.

  The phrase ‘Big Brother’ recurred regularly in letters to newspapers about the curfew, and most saw it simply as another annoyance to add to all the other privations. Peter Hughes of Epping wrote: ‘When for many of us it is a daily battle to get to and from our work; when for some the security of our jobs is threatened; when we are confronted by looming, disconcerting instabilities in our society; when those with cars are urged to stay at home for their recreation; when a bewildered public feels itself beleaguered between the panzers of union militancy and the Maginot line of government obduracy; when the lonely and the old especially feel battered by events, is it not just one more act of petty-minded victimisation to deprive so many of a major source of pleasure and relaxation? That makes this curfew spiteful.’13

  Others admitted that their anger was partly synthetic, and that they were quite enjoying the reassertion of human contact, from board games to pillow talk. On 7 February, Heath called a general election and lifted the curfew, not because the fuel crisis was over but because he felt that full coverage had to be given to the election. This, as the Nuffield study of that election pointed out, had the instantaneous psychological effect of diminishing the crisis atmosphere on which the prime minister was hoping to capitalise.14 The restoration of late-night television announced the return of normal life.

  Northern Ireland’s viewers, suffering the bombing campaigns and summary violence of the Troubles, particularly welcomed the sense of normality created by television. Belfast city centre had become a ghost town outside opening hours, as people retreated to their homes under unofficial curfew. Many bars, restaurants and cinemas went out of business and those theatres and entertainment venues that remained open could not attract stars from elsewhere. Primetime television took the place of these entertainments. The BBC, which had long treated the province as a ‘half region’, now expanded its Northern Ireland service, giving it the same status as BBC Scotland and Wales and funding more local programmes.15 Northern Irish viewers, the slowest in the nation to take up television when it arrived in the 1950s, now embraced it as a salve and balm for the region’s troubled public life.

  The most popular show in the province was Saturday Night, first broadcast on 14 October 1972 from the tiny Studio 8 in BBC Belfast, as an ‘opt-out’ after Match of the Day. (Viewers in the rest of Britain would probably have needed subtitles and explanatory notes to make sense of it.) That year was the most violent of the conflict, before or since – the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, the start of direct rule from London and the spreading of IRA violence to the ‘mainland’. Saturday Night starred the comedian James Young, known as Our Jimmie, whose recordings of his one-man theatre shows were the biggest-selling albums ever on both sides of the Irish border. But in May 1971, Belfast’s Group Theatre, the venue where he performed his shows, had closed as the Troubles led to a slump in business, leaving the way open for his long-overdue television stardom.

  Much of Saturday Night was filmed in one of the little terraced side streets off Belfast’s Dublin Road: the ‘wee street’ inhabited by comic characters like Derek the camp window cleaner (first heard in the radio soap The McCooeys), Orange Lil, a Protestant woman bedecked in Union Jack facepaint, and Ballymena Sarah, who refused to have Sunday papers in her house, all played by Young himself. It was a street in which Catholics and Protestants anachronistically inhabited the same row of terraced houses, for in this period there were huge population movements as families dispersed, often after intimidation, to live among people of their own religion. Young often put on a slight southern Irish accent when playing a Catholic, to avoid hitting too close to home.16

  He had a soft spot for mawkish monologues, one of which was called ‘Such a little time’ and ended, ‘For we’re here such a little time and there’s just no time to hate.’ Each show ended with him saying, to long applause: ‘It’s a great wee country. Do us a favour, will yis – stop yer fightin’.’ At the end of 1972, the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Belfast received hundreds of letters and Christmas cards, thanking them for cheering them up with Saturday Night. ‘When the story of that period is written,’ recalled Pat Loughrey when he was controller of BBC Northern Ireland in the 1990s, ‘I believe James Young will be seen as a major figure. I for one will never forget his weekly entreaty “Will you stop fighting”. He was a very shrewd judge of this place and of all our hidden prejudices.’ When Young died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 56, in July 1974, he was mourned across the divided community. The funeral procession ran all the way from his home in Ballyhalbert, a small village on the east coast of the Ards peninsula where he lived, through different parts of Belfast. On the Newtownards Road in Protestant east Belfast, housewives gathered in small groups, men stood outside pubs and workers downed tools. Along May Street in the Catholic Markets area, locals blessed themselves as the coffin went by, many of them weeping.17

  The belief that laughter could help to sew up the torn social fabric was not an attitude confined to Northern Ireland. The
primetime schedules were full of sitcoms and light entertainment aimed at the whole family, for in 1975 only six per cent of homes had more than one television set. All comedy was performed in front of a studio audience, a Greek chorus inside the television set intending to prod the viewers at home into laughter. All television comedy producers at this time were, consciously or not, disciples of Henri Bergson, who believed that ‘laughter appears to stand in need of an echo … laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry … How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!’ Philip Jones, head of light entertainment at Thames Television, had a theory that farces no longer worked on film because actors could not time laughs without an audience. Nineteen thirties screwball comedies had been shown to preview audiences and then sent back to the editing suite so the laughter-making moments could be spaced apart. They did not seem as funny as they once did, Jones felt, because ‘we are subconsciously missing the urf-urf-urf at the local Odeon’.18

  Jones, like James Young, also believed that laughter was inherently inclusive and conciliatory, and that difficult social issues might somehow by smoothed over by sitcom conventions. Love Thy Neighbour, the Thames TV comedy series about the conflict between a black and a white family living next door to each other, would, he told the Daily Express, ‘help take some of the heat out of race relations’. Tania Rose of the Race Relations Board disagreed, saying she hadn’t met a black person who wasn’t ‘offended to hell by it’. A primary headmaster in Fife reported that children in his school had made a black worker’s life a misery, ‘calling him names like “coon” and “sambo”, having picked them up from the programme Love Thy Neighbour’.19