by Joe Moran
A common complaint from viewers was that the audience in the studio was overreacting and finding everything far too hilarious. The BBC and ITV companies had vast operations doling out free tickets to works outings, schools and pensioners’ clubs who came up in coachloads to watch shows being recorded, and creating studio laughter was a fine art. The comedian Ronnie Barker was convinced that fat people laughed more readily because their fleshy bottoms did not feel so uncomfortable on the hard seats. Ken Dodd believed in limbering up his studio audience with one-liners to ‘get the chuckle-muscles working’. Producers like David Croft, co-creator of Dad’s Army, were masters at creating the right ambience: hiding the tubular steel rostra seating with curtains so the audience were cosied up and the sound was warmer, balancing the microphones above the audience’s heads like an orchestra and winding up the fader at exactly the right moment to create a rush of reassuring laughter. Croft moved each recording along quickly, tolerating minor slip-ups by the actors so the audience would not get bored and would not have to feign laughter at endless retakes.20
Any autosuggestive living-room laughter that these techniques generated quickly rose and died behind the walls of millions of private houses, leaving little evidence that it ever existed. We do know that on one Monday evening in March 1975, a fifty-year-old bricklayer from King’s Lynn laughed so heartily at an episode of The Goodies about Lancashire’s answer to Kung Fu, the school of Ecky Thump, that he slumped on the settee and died of a heart attack. The journalist Brian Viner remembers his adoptive father laughing so hard at the first episode of Fawlty Towers in September 1975 that he fell off his Parker Knoll armchair. As with Monty Python, though, some needed to learn to find it funny. Michael Palin laughed a little at his friend John Cleese during that first episode, while his house guests remained silent. But the last episode in the series, in which Basil Fawlty offended some German hotel guests by repeatedly mentioning the war, had Palin ‘laughing as long and as loud as anything since Hancock and the Vikings’.21
This orthodoxy that viewers needed a studio audience to nudge them into laughing created a certain sort of comedy. Script editors would tick a script for the laughs and actors tended to clown, to go for the guffaw rather than a throwaway or wry effect. Like characters in Ben Jonson comedies, those in Dad’s Army had a distinctive humour, reverberating through their catchphrases: ‘We’re all doomed.’ ‘Don’t Panic!’ ‘Do you think that’s awfully wise, sir?’ ‘Stupid boy.’ Croft reinforced this reassuringly one-note quality with his distinctive end credit sequences, which had the words ‘you have been watching’ and the actors performing a curtain call, a little vignette of their characters over studio applause.
Few now remembered how contentious Dad’s Army had been before its first broadcast in 1968, when there was a disastrous showing of a pilot episode to an invited audience, the evidence for which Croft hid at the bottom of his in-tray, and several on the BBC’s viewer panel expressed unease at its mockery of the Home Guard. When it was broadcast, however, only one ex-Home Guard soldier wrote to express mild offence. After a few weeks, former Home Guard members were writing in with reminiscences and ideas for episodes, drawings of home-made weapons and offers of fatigues and buttonhole badges.22 The programme’s tone, a masterful juggling act of ridicule and tenderness, had quickly turned away wrath.
Croft’s other sitcom from this era, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, depicting the exploits of a Royal Artillery Concert Party based in Deolali, India, in the war, was more problematic. With the studio a mock-up of a parade ground with charpoys and mosquito nets, and a sand pit and conifer wood near King’s Lynn standing in for the North-West Frontier, it recreated the Raj just as Asian immigration was becoming a focus of attention. The tightening of controls in the 1971 Immigration Act had led to an increase in migration as wives and children, fearing further restrictions, came to reunite their families. Racial violence intensified, with paint and fire bombs thrown at immigrants’ houses.
Croft’s co-author Jimmy Perry said later that they had written the series ‘to explain why we had so many Asians living in the UK and how we became a multiracial society; it was the effect of the aftermath of Empire. But when people started to dismiss the show as racist it filled me with despair … The strange thing is that British Asians loved it – and still do – they call it “our programme”.’ It does seem that, at a time when the National Front was growing in popularity and ‘paki bashing’ by gangs of skinhead youths was at its height, many Asians found It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum reassuring. Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, whose east African-Asian parents had emigrated from Tanzania during the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, recalled her family being ‘swept away by the rarity and simplicity of the portrayals, happy to see ourselves on television at all. At least the characters representing us in comedies appeared human and humorous, not barbaric, oppressed or rebellious.’23
Meera Syal, a teenager living in Essington near Wolverhampton, associated the programme with the fun-poking culture of the Punjab, from where her family had emigrated. She still felt uneasy about one character: the obsequious native bearer, Rangi Ram, played by a blacked-up English actor, Michael Bates. But Syal’s parents liked Bates because, having served as an officer in Burma, he spoke mainly in Urdu and Punjabi on the programme, only delivering punchlines in English, and it gave them a feeling of insider knowledge. According to a reporter for The Times who interviewed Asian families in South-all, sometimes known as ‘little Punjab’, in the summer of 1976, they often found little else on British TV that they liked. Southall had three cinemas, showing a diet of Indian films, and they were all thriving when, in the age of colour television, most others in the country seemed to be in terminal decline.24
The government’s General Household Survey, published in April 1976, showed the extent to which TV now dominated people’s waking lives. Ninety per cent of Britons watched television as their main leisure pursuit: women for an average of twenty hours a week, men for seventeen. In 1976 more than a million households switched to colour licences, which for the first time outnumbered monochrome ones. As colour TV crossed from luxury item to near-universal symbol of affluence in the middle of a recession, a press campaign about welfare ‘scroungers’, launched by the National Association for Freedom and supported by right-wing Tory MPs such as Iain Sproat, focused on how they were wasting their handouts on colour TVs. Urban myths flourished: immigrants were buying colour TVs with Social Security furniture vouchers because the sets had stands and doors that allowed them to be classed as furniture; those on supplementary benefit got grants for colour TVs as ‘essential’ household items.25
Since the start of the decade, a new phrase had entered the estate agents’ vocabulary of mod cons: ‘Col/TV rec’d’, announcing the arrival of the colour transmitter in an area. But on Britain’s extreme edges, its arrival was overdue and often technically difficult. The colour TV signal for the Channel Islands had to travel all the way from Stockland Hill in Devon to Alderney, and had more water to cross than any other signal in the British Isles, making it vulnerable to what engineers call ‘scattering’ from the surface of the water. The signal, when it arrived, was weak and liable to interference from French TV transmitters. But a new, manoeuvrable aerial christened SABRE (Steerable Adaptive Broadcast Reception Equipment) was able to amplify the signal from Stockland Hill and nullify interference from any French transmitters using the same channel. Channel Islanders had colour images by July 1976, just in time for the Montreal Olympics.
Four days later, colour TV reached the Outer Hebrides. A signal a foot wide, containing the colour programmes on all three main channels, left the Rosemarkie transmitter on the east coast and, in a giant game of virtual pinball, was deflected around mountain ranges by booster transmitters until it arrived at a new mast at Eitshal, towering over a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis. Colour came to Shetland when an unmanned transmitter opened on the bird sanctuary of Fair Isle late afternoon on Christmas Eve 1976, just in time for the Jim’ll Fix It Chri
stmas Special and a film called Million Dollar Duck. Apart from a few isolated pockets like the Isle of Barra, which could still only get BBC1 in grainy black and white, colour TV now covered the kingdom.
On Orkney, which had beaten its North Sea neighbour to colour by eight months, the poet George Mackay Brown recorded the excitement among his fellow islanders about the building of the colour TV transmitter on the high moors in the centre of the mainland. Over the last few years he had been chronicling the spread of television on Orkney with resentment merging into resignation. By the mid 1960s, BBC television had become fully part of island life and the giant communal bonfires that used to celebrate ancient festivals like Beltane and Lammas had mostly been replaced by the lacklustre flicker of thousands of cathode ray tubes. ‘TV personalities like Cliff Michel-more, Inspector Barlow and Fanny Cradock are spoken about more familiarly by islanders now than are the people who live in outlying farms,’ Brown complained. ‘The shadows on a screen have become more real than their flesh-and-blood neighbours.’26
Brown lived with his elderly mother, Mhairi, in a council house on the Stromness seafront. In the evenings she watched TV, and he had to try to blank out the noise from Dr Who, Top of the Pops and The Monkees with the sound turned up high. For Brown, who believed that the perfect poem was ‘a cold pure round of silence’, it was the booming sound of the television set he objected to more than the pictures – that and the tedious pub talk it spawned about last night’s programmes. ‘The story-teller is being pushed out by the frightful bore who will give you opinions about Vietnam and the colour problem and heart transplants,’ he wrote, ‘not really his own opinions at all but some prejudiced odds and ends that have stuck in his mind from a discussion witnessed on Panorama the night before.’27
For Brown, the obsession with new technology on the islands was a form of displaced religious idolatry. ‘Progress is a goddess who, up to now, has looked after her children well. The sky is scored with television aerials,’ he wrote in 1969 in An Orkney Tapestry. ‘The notion of progress is a cancer that makes an elemental community look better, and induces a false euphoria, while it drains the life out of it remorselessly.’ Brown dated this zeal for progress back to the arrival of newspapers on the islands in the 1820s, which turned language from ‘a sacred mystery’ into ‘the stilted elegances of a newspaper column’.28
In this long view, however, lay the seeds of an eventual accommodation with television. Mary Whitehouse, without Brown’s deep historical sense, thought television a new and explosively dangerous phenomenon. For Brown, antagonistic to modernity in general and regarding the Reformation and the industrial revolution as terrible wrong turnings, television carried no special weight. Slowly he found himself prepared to give ‘half a genuflection in the direction of the goddess Progress’ that his fellow Orcadians had so eagerly embraced. After his mother’s death in 1967, he moved a few hundred yards to another council flat where, despite still not possessing a fridge or a phone, he had installed a rented black-and-white television set. ‘How easy it is, in the evening after the day’s work,’ he conceded, ‘to sit back in the armchair and let the facile images flood through the mind.’29
In 1971 Brown began a weekly column for the Orcadian. Since writing for the Orkney Herald in the 1950s, his tone had softened, and he now regaled his readers with the trivia of his everyday life. He lamented the fact that he no longer walked up Brinkie’s Brae, the hill overlooking the town, as the lure of TV became too great, and that his television watching, and that of his fellow Stromnessians, had killed off the local cinema which had brought the townfolk together twice a week. In May 1973, the debut production of John McGrath’s touring radical theatre company, 7:84, came to Stromness. The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was a powerful piece of theatre about how the Highland Scots had been disinherited to make way for more profitable sheep, stags and North Sea oil. Brown, though, did not go to see it. Guiltily, he stayed in to watch Cider with Rosie on BBC1. But he did later catch the performance in Orkney’s main town, Kirkwall, after which he admonished his fellow Orcadians, more gently now than he used to do in the Herald, for their addictive TV watching and unconcern about the world beyond their living rooms.30
Brown felt that, despite the howl of rage from one end of the country to another, the TV curfew in the winter of 1973–4 had been one of the best things to come out of the economic crisis. Instead of being ‘lulled to sleep by the nightly anodyne – the benediction of that old one-eye in the corner of the living room’ with its ‘dance of irrelevant shadows’, it had been a relief to yank the plug out of the wall and write a letter, talk or ‘simply drink your ale and dream’. The return of television with the general election campaign had been a rude awakening. So important did politicians think themselves, he felt, that the fuel shortage was forgotten in favour of piped TV with ‘the three superstars, and their satraps, posturing and mouthing’. This, he thought, only added to the general feeling of apathy and disillusionment.31
But Brown’s broadsides against television were becoming fainthearted: a mark of respect, in part, to his dead mother, a lover of the lowbrow with a vast, non-judgemental capacity for enjoyment. His argument was with progress, not with the tastes of ordinary Orcadians, with which he had always tried to connect. He disliked what he saw as a tendency to obscurity and angst in modern art and literature and realised that television could sometimes offer what he wanted to produce: an accessible and ecumenical folk art. Now, once ‘that mysterious potent mast’ on Keelylang Hill was up and running, he reminded Orcadians in the spring of 1976, they would have three channels instead of just BBC1. He could watch the nature programmes on BBC2 and, on Grampian Television, that unfamiliar cultural form, the commercial, with its ‘melting rapture of voice and image’. And for the first time, it would all be in colour, although Brown himself clung mulishly to monochrome. ‘We old-fashioned ones are living in a drab workaday world – greyly we spend our evenings,’ he noted with a residue of proud asceticism.32
In its issue for 23 October 1976, the Radio Times revived its 1930s tradition of a fireside issue heralding the start of the autumn schedules. The artist Peter Brookes’s cover for this issue, ‘Home for the evening’, showed autumn leaves cascading down on to an armchair with a jug of Ovaltine and a copy of the Radio Times on a side table, its sub-heading suggesting that the turning back of the clocks meant ‘an extra hour’s darkness for viewing’. If you flicked through the pages of this issue, the first day of the TV listings was, as usual, a Saturday night. Thanks to the scheduling skills of its head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, and the controller of BBC1, Bryan Cowgill, the BBC was winning the ratings battle on this key night of the week (although slightly less key for ITV, because Sunday closing meant that advertisers were keener on the Friday and Sunday slots) and for the first time ever most people were watching in colour. The BBC1 schedule for that Saturday night, 23 October, has entered popular memory as a classic seven hours of popular, quality entertainment: the golden age condensed into a single evening’s television.
The BBC’s ascendancy began at 4.50 in the afternoon, when about a million viewers turned over from the ITV wrestling especially to watch the ‘full classified football results’ on Grandstand, ninety minutes of footballing melodrama turned into a simple, soothing litany of numbers and names delivered in alphabetical order. Len Martin’s reading of the results had the quality of a rite, bringing calm to the late afternoon, disturbed only by the scraping of pencils against pools coupons. His urbane BBC voice, carrying the merest trace of its antipodean origins, pre-announced the results through cadence and intonation, so viewers could tell whether the first-named team had won, lost or drawn without looking up from their coupons.
At 5.30 p.m., after the news and Tom and Jerry, came The Basil Brush Show, hosted by a glove puppet fox with a gap-toothed grin, taste in natty suits and plum-cake accent inspired by Terry-Thomas. Like much of that evening’s entertainment, the show addressed viewers through the dual
register of pantomime: Basil’s staccato laugh and self-admiring response to his own jokes (‘Boom boom!’) appealed to children, while his topical jokes and subversive comments about British Rail or ‘Mary Lighthouse’ kept adults interested. ‘Basil is a great creation and I recommend his raucous tomfoolery to the producers of Masterpiece Theatre,’ wrote the playwright Tom Stoppard in the Radio Times. For the poet and critic D. J. Enright he was ‘a cuddly innocent and a hard-boiled sophisticate: a fantasist who can suddenly turn coolly rational … Basil Brush belongs to that small band of anthropomorphised animals, headed by Toad of Toad Hall, who operate successfully in both worlds.’33
At 6 p.m., the whirling, electronic theme tune and time-tunnel graphics announced the arrival of Doctor Who. The BBC’s head of drama Sydney Newman had created this programme thirteen years earlier to stem the haemorrhaging of fathers from the TV screen on late Saturday afternoon in the hiatus between the end of Grandstand and the start of Juke Box Jury, and the need to attract adults as well as children had lain behind the decision to make the Doctor a mature man rather than a juvenile lead. The mid 1970s was Doctor Who’s most popular period, with a new producer, Philip Hinchcliffe, who moved the series into Gothic, grown-up areas, and a new doctor played by Tom Baker who, after a teething period in which viewers were unsure about his displacement of the well-loved Jon Pertwee, had settled into the role as a jelly-baby-eating, cerebral eccentric with a floppy hat and long stripey scarf.
Like The Basil Brush Show, Doctor Who’s audience was diverse. While more than half its viewers were over fifteen, Mary Whitehouse also blamed it for an epidemic of nightmares and bedwetting among under-sevens. One of the historical clichés about children’s reactions to this programme may have originated with Baker himself, who told a group of schoolchildren that Doctor Who frightened him so much he watched it from behind the sofa. Many young viewers, though, delighted in its scariness. After one 1976 episode, ‘The Seeds of Doom’, they wrote in. ‘I liked the episode very much. I think it was one of the most scariest ones of all,’ said one. Another commended the producers on their ingenious methods for killing off characters, such as ‘when Scorbie was pulled under the water when the plant came up and when Chase was killed in the compost machine’.34 That Saturday night saw the end of a chilling four-part story, The Hand of Fear, about a fossilised hand attempting to bring its previous owner back to life at a nuclear power station. It also saw the poignant departure of Sarah Jane, the most loved of the Doctor’s female companions. Distracted by a summons to Gallifrey from the Time Lords, the Doctor shooed her out of the TARDIS in what he confidently (but wrongly) told her was Hillview Road, south Croydon.