Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  The local aspect of community television made it watchable: there was novelty in seeing your own high street, the local school’s Christmas play, or neighbours talking about lacemaking or model trains. In Milton Keynes, organisers of protests about a nursery school closure and library cuts managed to reverse the decisions after making programmes about them. But most people wanted to watch television, not make it. The tiny number of volunteers were mainly techno-literate single men, with a seasonal rush of students and schoolchildren in the summer months. By contrast, the access programmes on the main channels – BBC2’s Open Door, HTV and Tyne Tees all offered studio facilities and airtime to members of the public to make their own programmes – were oversubscribed. But, the Annan committee found, viewers were rather less enthusiastic about watching local pressure groups campaigning against urban motorways or arguing for cuts in the rates.50

  Another crack in the image of the unified armchair nation was that regional television was flourishing. The Annan committee saw the ITV–BBC duopoly as a metropolitan élite imposing its tastes on the rest of the population and stifling the voices of the regions. From today’s perspective, this judgement seems harsh. The ITV regions had always been strange, makeshift entities, defined mainly by the reach of the transmitters, and fighting for viewers with the fickleness and ferocity of Balkan states. The regions were also at the mercy of the ITV franchise rounds: in the last big one of these in 1968, Granada-land had been cut to half its size, reduced to a rump west of the Pennines. The Granada chairman Sidney Bernstein’s half-serious threat to appeal to the United Nations fell on deaf ears.

  The arrival of colour TV in the late 1960s also created problems for the regions because more transmitters were required and, until a transmitter was built, no one knew for sure how far its signal – what engineers called its ‘fall-out’ – would reach. When Yorkshire TV built a colour transmitter at Bilsdale on the North Yorkshire Moors in 1969, Tyne Tees discovered to its dismay that the signal could reach as far as Newcastle, and the two companies were forced to merge under a holding company.51 A similar problem occurred when the signals from Anglia’s new colour transmitter at Belmont strayed into Yorkshire; Anglia ended up renting out the mast and many Norfolk viewers suddenly found themselves watching Yorkshire Television.

  And yet, just as with the ‘historic’ English counties which are really nothing more than pragmatic divisions of fairly recent vintage, ITV viewers became oddly attached to their regional companies. Each had their start-up themes for the beginning of the day’s television, jaunty marches like Border’s ‘Keltic Kavalcade’ or Southern Television’s ‘Southern Rhapsody’, composed by Richard Addinsell (better known for the Warsaw Concerto), accompanying a montage of regional scenes. Each had their short idents to introduce the programmes they had made, usually with bold brass and vibraphone fanfares similar to those used by Hollywood studios at the start of films. London Weekend Television’s ident was three coloured stripes forming to depict the course of the River Thames through the capital which, at least according to its designer Terry Griffiths, resembled the initials ‘L’ and ‘W’. Colloquially known as the ‘stripey toothpaste’, for London viewers it announced the arrival of the weekend. Thames TV’s London skyline mirrored in the river may have been associated more mundanely with the working week, but it was still the most famous ident on the network, an emblem of metropolitan self-assurance.

  Non-Anglia viewers mainly saw its revolving silver knight before the syndicated and hugely popular quiz show Sale of the Century, when the snatch of Handel’s Water Music, arranged by Sir Malcolm Sargent, ended with the perhaps anticlimactic affirmation, ‘And now, from Norwich, it’s the quiz of the week.’ (‘Thanks to this opening line, a lot of people thought I lived in Norwich,’ said the show’s host, Nicholas Parsons.)52 Granadaland, with its ‘G-arrow’ ident, now symbolised the north-west – stretching from Liverpool Bay to the mountains of Snowdonia and the Lake District, and from the Pennine ridge to the Black Country chimneys – just as eloquently as it once had the north, although Liverpudlians always resented the fact that its centre of gravity was unmistakably Mancunian. Westward TV’s galleon, a model of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, and Grampian’s eight notes from ‘Scotland the Brave’, were the defiant motifs of minnow stations wresting airtime from the big ITV companies.

  The nation mainly got to know Southern Television’s star-like ident (‘the station that serves the south’) through Jack Hargreaves’s Out of Town, which by the 1970s was being shown throughout the country. It now aimed at being as evocative as it was informative, giving urban viewers what the former Southern Television controller Roy Rich called ‘a dream of the green fields beyond’. Beyond the Southern region they saw Out of Town episodes out of synch and long after they were made, happily watching fish being caught in the middle of winter or lambing in August. Noting that Hampshire, where he lived, emptied in the morning as people travelled to London for work, Hargreaves realised that many of his viewers no longer had any real contact with rural life. ‘I’ve got to hook every sort of viewer, particularly the ones who have never held a fishing rod,’ he said. ‘You can’t do that just by showing them a lot of floats and telling them how to breed champion maggots.’53

  Most of Hargreaves’s viewers were unaware that he was a Southern Television executive and former magazine editor who felt just as at home in the Savile Club as on the River Test. The Clydeside trade union leader, Jimmy Reid, watching in Glasgow, thought Out of Town ‘a gem of a programme’ and ‘the answer to those TV moguls who plead poverty as an excuse for diminishing standards’. Another fan, George Harrison, now living in semi-rural seclusion near Henley-on-Thames, had the idea, while watching one episode on restoring old leather books, of publishing his autobiography/lyric book, I Me Mine, as a hand-bound limited edition.54

  Farming programmes were a familiar feature of the regional schedules for Sunday lunchtime, often with little concession to what was called the ‘over the shoulder’ lay audience. Despite this, viewing figures for Tyne Tees’ Farming Outlook suggested that at least two-thirds of its viewers were non-farmers, unfazed by in-depth items about crop rotation and tied cottages. The show was mini-networked to Yorkshire TV, Border, STV and Grampian, and the presenter Peter Williams found himself being hailed by lorry drivers as far north as Aberdeen. At a time when 15,000 men were leaving farming each year for the factories and docks where, even during a recession, they could earn in a week what a farm paid in a month, these programmes also alerted urban viewers to the realities of agrarian capitalism. ‘These agricultural programmes do yeoman service,’ said the Annan Report, ‘explain[ing] the importance of agriculture and forestry to our largely urban community who consume agricultural products without understanding much about the toil and hazards of production.’55

  Regional opt-outs were common. The Tyne Tees show, What Fettle? (Geordie for ‘How’re you doing?’), was one of the north-east’s most popular programmes, with entire villages being bussed into the studio to watch folk music, ballads and comedy themed around the region’s great interests, such as coal, fishing or football. When the impressionist Mike Yarwood began mimicking Russell Harty on his BBC show, the studio audience laughed; but those in the landmass between London and the Scottish Highlands must have been baffled, for Harty’s LWT chat show was transmitted in the London area only, and then, for obscure reasons, by Grampian. At a reception in the Town Hall of his hometown in 1975, the Mayor said to Harty, ‘You may be a big cheese in London, but you’re bugger-all in Blackburn.’56

  The campaign for a Welsh language television channel, spear-headed by the small but vocal Welsh Language Society, was also reaching a climax. At the national Eisteddfodau, speakers often pointed out television’s baleful influence in not only presenting an almost unbroken diet of English but also in cutting down the amount of talking, which could have been in Welsh. Welsh language protestors, many of them students or lecturers at Welsh universities, began climbing up television transmitt
ers and trying to disrupt programmes. At 9.05 p.m. on 4 March 1977, protestors invaded the buildings at the Winter Hill transmitter on the West Pennine Moors and managed briefly to switch off the ITV series Raffles across the Granada region. ‘I tried to explain that radio and TV signals are no respecters of geographical or political boundaries,’ wrote the duty officer, ‘and I tried to point out to them that inhabitants of N. Wales did not have to tune their sets to the Granada channel if they did not wish to receive it. But all this fell on deaf ears.’57

  Advocates of a separate Welsh channel professed concern for the non-Welsh-speaking majority who had to put up with Welsh programmes like the BBC’s Carmarthenshire-set soap opera, Pobol y Cwm. This had long been a complaint of Wales’s non-Welsh speaking majority. In 1964, more than 5,000 viewers in Aberystwyth signed a petition protesting about the launch of a new BBC television service for Wales, fearing they might lose their favourite programmes, like Z Cars and Steptoe and Son, for Welsh language ones. According to a Radnorshire parish council in a 1973 submission to the Committee on Broadcasting Coverage, these Welsh programmes made most Welshmen ‘aliens at their own firesides’. Wales had become ‘a television electrician’s paradise’, with non-Welsh speakers paying to have their aerials retuned and turned towards English transmitters.58

  The writer Gwyn Thomas, the unofficial poet laureate of the English-speaking southern valleys and an eloquent regular on chat shows like Parkinson, dismissed Welsh as ‘elitist gobbledygook’. Even some Welsh language loyalists did not want a separate channel. Jac L. Williams, Professor of Education at Aberystwyth, wrote many letters to newspapers from 1973 until his death in 1977, arguing that it would exile Welsh speakers to a broadcasting ghetto on an obscure wavelength. By the end of the 1970s, a ‘Ban Welsh Telly’ group had acquired 30,000 members in monoglot Avon and Somerset. The movement was strongest in Weston-super-Mare, where ‘Ban Welsh Telly’ stickers adorned the rear window of every other car. Even today, the town’s residents attribute antipathy to the Welsh to the days when they had to watch Welsh-language television. When, in September 1978, HTV, the Welsh ITV station, dubbed the western film Shane into Welsh, the ‘Ban Welsh Telly’ group complained to the newly formed Commission for Racial Equality. Both Welsh and non-Welsh speakers seemed equally disapproving of Wyoming cowboys conversing in Cymraeg, and it was sufficiently imprinted in the nation’s memory that, twenty-three years later, the MP for Ceridigion, Simon Thomas, told parliament: ‘That experiment has gone down in Welsh history and will never be tried again.’59

  On the evening of 25 December 1977, 28.5 million people arranged themselves in front of a television, between 8.55 p.m. and 10.05 p.m., to watch The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show. This moment has entered British folklore as the culmination of television’s potential to bring the extended national family together. For the historian Ben Pimlott, updating his late father’s social history, The Englishman’s Christmas, in 1978, this viewing figure suggested that Morecambe and Wise had taken over from the Queen’s Christmas broadcast as the essential element of the secular festival, especially ‘for those who digest their mid-day Christmas dinner in an armchair’ – and this despite the fact that it was the least festive show in the schedules, with barely a slither of tinsel or a Santa hat in sight. In Jonathan Coe’s 1970s-set novel The Rotters’ Club, the sixteen-year-old protagonist watches the show with his parents and experiences an epiphanic moment, ‘a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter’.60 The moment of unanimity ended with a certain narrative neatness when, in January 1978, Morecambe and Wise defected shockingly to ITV, after which their careers, by common consent, went into sharp decline.

  Morecambe and Wise were certainly loved, but not uncritically or universally so. It was in fact a recurring motif among TV critics throughout the 1970s that Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas show was not as funny as last year’s. ‘Ernie and I have always prided ourselves on seeing the red light before anyone else,’ Morecambe said in 1973, predicting that the show would not survive much longer. ‘We think there is a saturation point at which people can take so much of a good thing.’61 In 1974, after their new series slipped down the ratings, they took a break and were off screen for over a year.

  Television’s weakness as a medium is that it relies a lot on repetition, prolonging a successful formula long after its potential is exhausted. And Morecambe and Wise, who had learned their trade in the variety halls where resuscitating old gags was the norm, believed in letting the audience eternally in on the joke. They depended so much on the reassuring reiteration of stock phrases and comic business that it is hard to pin down the invisible moment when this may have tipped over into staleness. The Radio 1 DJ John Peel found them ‘extravagantly unfunny’ and thought ‘their best work in several years was the current television commercial for Texaco’. Watched today, the 1977 show does not seem like a classic. It started with a lame skit on ‘Starkers and Krutch’ and finished not with the triumphant ‘There is nothing like a dame’ number from South Pacific that everyone remembers, but with Elton John playing piano in an empty studio while Eric and Ernie, dressed in drag as cleaners, looked on. ‘I thought the ending didn’t quite come off,’ the comedian Les Dawson said. Many felt Morecambe had been funnier ad libbing with Dickie Davies on ITV’s World of Sport on Christmas Eve.62

  ITV’s Christmas programmes in 1977 were so unappetising that when the schedules were announced a few weeks earlier, several advertising agencies officially complained. On Christmas Day, ITV showed Sale of the Century, Stars on Christmas Day and, at 9 p.m. when Morecambe and Wise were on, a re-run of the film Young Winston. To have detained half the nation for an hour and ten minutes with this on the other side was no great achievement. In any case, ratings at this time were disputed, the difference between BBC and ITV claims often being huge. The famous figure of 28.5 million viewers came from the BBC’s own audience research, based on telephone interviews and viewing diaries. ITV’s figures, which sampled homes using electronic measuring devices attached to TV sets, suggest that the 1977 Christmas special was only the eleventh most-watched programme of the decade with 21.3 million viewers, behind less fondly remembered shows like a 1977 episode of This is Your Life and a 1971 edition of The Benny Hill Show. According to ITV, even the 1977 Mike Yarwood Christmas Special, which preceded Morecambe and Wise on BBC1, got more viewers (21.4 million), so that, far from uniting the nation in laughter, Morecambe and Wise made 100,000 people switch over or turn off the TV.63

  But the national affection for Morecambe and Wise was real enough. They may never have been as good as they used to be, but they were always popular and, albeit fitfully, funny. After moving to the BBC in 1968 and acquiring a new writer, Eddie Braben, they had become distinct characters: an idiot disguised as an intellectual (Ernie) and a subversive disguised as an idiot (Eric). It was Braben’s idea to have them sitting up together in a double bed, Ernie working on ‘the play what I wrote’ while Eric read The Dandy and smoked a pipe. The television playwright John Mortimer called it ‘an English marriage, missing out the sex as many English marriages do’.64

  They evolved a unique way of engaging with viewers, melding theatricality with intimacy. Clinging to their variety background, they worked on a raised platform that looked like a proscenium stage with tabs and wings, and at some point in each show they clowned in front of a plush red curtain. While this staginess gave the show a sense of occasion, their producer John Ammonds also got them to look at specific cameras, with Morecambe watching carefully for the camera light to come on so that he could treat its lens as a mirror, adjusting his tie, flashing his smile and wiggling his spectacles at viewers. John McGrath, a former Z Cars writer who had given up TV to try to create a genuinely proletarian theatre, and whose touring show George Mackay Brown had seen on Orkney, respected Morecambe and Wise as creators of a real folk art with the same direct engagement with its audience and the same democratic variety – of songs, playlet
s, sketches and stand-up comedy – as the Welsh noson lawen and the Scottish ceilidh.65

  While Morecambe and Wise were performing their Christmas shows for the BBC, television had yet to acquire a reliable collective memory. Archiving was erratic. Even when shows began to be video-recorded in the late 1950s, the tapes were as expensive as a small car and so engineers routinely wiped and reused them. Peter Cook pleaded in vain for his 1960s comedy series, Not Only … But Also, to be preserved, even offering to pay for the tapes and the storage costs. Despite this, the BBC taped over the series, an act criticised by Cook’s co-star Dudley Moore when he appeared on Parkinson. The 1970s, too, saw much wiping of old black-and-white shows because it was thought viewers who had recently paid for a colour TV licence would never want to see them again. The ITV channels took even less care of their old programmes, being unwilling to pay to store or insure them. The critic T. C. Worsley rightly called television ‘the ephemeral art’.66

  Those who took television seriously as an art form fretted often about its impermanence. Dennis Potter still felt a sense of paralysing anticlimax as the end credits rolled on each of his television plays, even though he knew more people had watched them than would have seen Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in its entire West End run. ‘The pictures flow on easy as tapwater,’ he wrote. ‘A play which has taken months to write, characters who have leapt up gibbering in your mind when you are trying to sleep, ideas which have simmered feverishly in your blood like a virus – all used up, all at once, all gone.’ In his often dyspeptic television reviews in the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, Potter returned to the same theme: the TV was becoming nothing more than a domestic appliance for passing the time, ‘a box that can be plugged into the same socket as a hairdryer or a coffee perculator’.67 In an age before archiving, he worried about the fragile connection between writer and viewer, desperately wanting television to be a more enduring medium to justify the effort he put into his work.