Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Before the domestication of the video recorder, there was an industry of records and books based on television programmes, especially comedy – probably because, if shared humour does affirm membership of a group as Bergson claimed, that group may want something more concrete to hold on to than the fading memory of laughter. The first Monty Python film, And Now for Something Completely Different … (1971), was a compilation of re-shot television highlights, aimed at the American market, but it did better business in the UK because viewers wanted to see their favourite sketches again. On their first theatre tour in 1971, the team noted that audiences preferred what they knew to new material, and greeted sketches recycled from television with applause after their first few lines, like rock fans cheering the opening bars of a song. Comedy fans accumulated cultural capital among their peers by knowing routines off by heart, as did troubadours before the arrival of the printing press. Perhaps the Dead Parrot sketch would never have become seminal in a world populated by the domestic video recorder, because there would have been less playground or common room cachet in being able to recite a sketch that was purchasable and replayable.

  BBC Television’s fortieth anniversary in 1976 had prompted a round of introspection about the medium and the showing of many old programmes, in the first major attempt by television to explore its own history. That same year the BBC reached an agreement with the actors’ union Equity and the technicians’ unions which allowed them to present more of this kind of archive material. (The unions had feared that repeating shows indefinitely would cut down on new productions and put actors and technicians out of work.) When the BBC finally set up its Film and Videotape Library in 1978 in response to the Annan Report’s call for proper archiving, it coincided happily with the arrival of home video recorders which were starting to open up new markets for old programmes. Suddenly television performers had the possibility of an artistic afterlife. Videotape began stacking along miles of shelving in the BBC’s two vast warehouse hangars on Windmill Road in Brentford, close to the runway at Heathrow.

  Television now had its own version of the library at Alexandria, and in years to come, when the BBC and the British Film Institute both launched appeals for missing material, romantic tales would be told of fans coming across lost material that had miraculously survived the scorched earth policies of the past. In 1983, two episodes of Doctor Who materialised in a basement of the Church of Latter Day Saints in Wandsworth. In 2001, nineteen cans of film of the lost second series of Dad’s Army were discovered in a shed after being rescued years earlier from a skip outside Elstree studios. Two years later, an engineer was rummaging in a BBC tape archive at Kingswood Warren in Surrey when he came across a spool titled ‘Opening of BBC2’. He played it and saw a man at a desk in a V-neck jumper and tie reading from cards: it was Gerald Priestland, in the Alexandra Palace newsroom, explaining that a massive power cut in west London had disrupted programmes. ‘I ploughed on through every scrap of unedited Reuters tape they could feed me,’ Priestland wrote later. ‘After what seemed like an eternity of ad-libbing about Japanese fishery disputes and trains de-railed in Tunisia, I was taken off the air.’ The disastrous launch of BBC2, which the corporation would probably have preferred to forget, could now be re-lived. Rumours thrive that other lost programmes exist and change hands between collectors – more missing Doctor Who episodes, the Beatles on Juke Box Jury, the classic 1961 sci-fi series A for Andromeda – but they have never resurfaced.68

  While Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas shows went out, though, this fascination with the television archive was only just emerging. They must have hoped their names would live on, while perhaps also fearing that they would go the way of Mr Pastry or Jewel and Warriss, early television’s comedy stars who were now largely forgotten. ‘When I’m gone, I’m gone,’ Morecambe told his family after surviving a second heart attack in 1979. ‘No point worrying about me, you know. But you will still watch the shows, won’t you? If you don’t, then it’s all been for nothing.’

  Those lobbying for better archiving argued that writers and performers were being made ‘cynical or lazy by the essentially ephemeral nature of television’ and would try harder if they knew their work had permanence. But the makers of the Morecambe and Wise Show were neither cynical nor lazy. John Ammonds and his successor, Ernest Maxin, rehearsed with Morecambe and Wise for at least five weeks before recording each show, and would carefully examine BBC audience reports in search of clues about how to improve things.69

  A Christmas show would take Braben five weeks to write, working sixteen hour days, including weekends, pushing himself close to breakdown. In the back bedroom of his house in West Derby, Liverpool, where he kept his typewriter, he would clock on at 7.30 a.m. and see people in the street catching the bus to work. ‘They weren’t looking very happy at going to the factory or the shipyard,’ he said, ‘and I thought, some of them are saying to themselves, “Oh great, it’s Morecambe and Wise tonight.” That’s what drove me on.’ Privately, though, he felt they had created an impossible burden of expectation and that ‘the Morecambe and Wise Show, for a lot of viewers, was Christmas. They were forgetting what Christmas was really all about.’70

  Braben watched the show each Christmas Day, his whole body clenched with nervous tension, unplacated by the studio audience laughter. Morecambe was so full of fear-induced adrenalin before the Christmas shows that he came out in sties, got indigestion and developed a nervous itch in his ear. When he watched them with his family on Christmas night, he would cough or kick a nearby ash can with his foot to distract his audience from any slight fluffs left in the edit. And yet, investing enormous energy into a single television programme with no guarantee it would be remembered, Morecambe and Wise’s gamble paid off. When Morecambe died of his third heart attack, in May 1984, thousands of people lined the streets of Harpenden for his funeral. An elderly woman in the crowd said, ‘he was like someone you had known and loved all your life – a member of the family … And that funny little song … How did it go? That thing about sunshine and laughter and love. That was ever so nice. We’ll never forget that …’71

  Television ended the 1970s as it began, with blank screens. For most Britons, the industrial unrest of the now notorious ‘winter of discontent’ was sporadic, dispersed and endured only vicariously on the news. The one disruption that everyone noticed, though, was to the TV schedules. There was a virtual shutdown of both BBC channels in mid-December 1978 when unions resisted a plan to start BBC2 at the earlier time of 5.30 p.m., with the BBC quickly settling because it could not face the bleak prospect of its Christmas programmes being cancelled. Another strike in the spring of 1979 halted BBC outside broadcasts and the filming of other programmes, the most distressing upshot of which was the indefinite delaying of the final episode of Fawlty Towers. ‘Should it matter one jot that Fawlty Towers fails to appear?’ wrote one dissenting Guardian reader. ‘Are the mass of people, after all, the helpless improvident “gammas” of Huxley’s Brave New World? What manner of homo sapiens is evolving when it betrays all the symptoms of addiction, and is distressed when the drug known as pap is temporarily withdrawn?’72

  There was now an unlikely addition to this mass of TV addicts: the previously hostile George Mackay Brown. He was finding it a source of distraction during his increasingly severe bouts of depression, a condition so linked with dark, isolated Orkney that islanders named it Morbus Orcadensis. In 1978, invited to appear in Who’s Who, he put ‘watching TV’ in his list of recreations alongside reading and ale tasting. That autumn he noted with delight that old winter favourites like Mastermind, The Good Life and All Creatures Great and Small had returned and his mind was being ‘fed full with shadows’. And he recounted his relief at getting hold of the Radio Times Christmas double issue from a Kirkwall friend after the Stromness paper shop had sold out and he had faced ‘a bleak prospect of groping blindly about in a fog of programmes for a fortnight’.73

  Now in his late fifties, Brown lived a frugal, mon
kish existence in his sparse council flat and left Orkney even more rarely. Television drew him out of this sometimes claustrophobic existence and offered a brief respite from his expansive imagination, steeped in the island’s Viking past, introducing him to a less parochial, more contemporary reality. On Monday evenings he watched the BBC2 science programme Horizon so he could discuss immunology or extraterrestrial intelligence with his niece’s scientist husband, Fraser Dixon, and his geologist nephew, John Flett Brown. He now conceded privately that he had over-egged his Luddite tirades against technology which were ‘just a sort of stance’, a rhetorical device used for contrast and effect. When Isobel Murray, an English lecturer at Aberdeen University, visited his flat and expressed surprise that he had a television at all, he replied weakly that ‘the only concession I’ve made is that it is black and white, you see. I keep one step behind. I’m not in the vanguard of culture.’ He certainly had no religious objection to television. For Brown, an attraction of Roman Catholicism, to which he had converted in 1961, was that, unlike the native Calvinism of what he called this ‘Knox-ruined nation’, it saw visual culture and music as augmenting the faith.74

  In the spring of 1979, Brown found himself entranced by a series which, though presented by an atheist, resembled a theology in its celebration of life and the search for knowledge about it: David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, which told the story of our evolution from primeval slime to late twentieth-century television-watching human. As controller of BBC2 in the late 1960s, Attenborough had inaugurated a new type of blockbuster colour documentary series, when he had commissioned Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. These had thirteen episodes which neatly filled three months, at a time when the schedules were always planned in quarters. ‘Happily, when I sat down to survey geological time,’ Attenborough reflected, ‘the schedules of creation seemed also to be conveniently divided into thirteen parts.’75 He insisted on presenting the series chronologically, beginning with the most basic organisms, although several BBC executives feared that all the interesting animals would come in the last few episodes, by which time viewers would have switched off. The fear proved unfounded. Life on Earth was both a sensual and educational experience, with haunting incidental music and groundbreaking footage of rarely seen creatures such as sea slugs, legless amphibians and coelacanths.

  On 10 April, Brown watched the last episode in the lounge of Stromness’s Braes hotel, specifically so he could view it in colour. The weather was wintry that night and Orkney’s new BBC2 reception was poor, so a series conceived partly to show off high-fidelity colour kept disintegrating into kaleidoscopic patterns. Brown was also distracted by local women playing a darts match. But he still sat enthralled, sipping his beer, while Attenborough talked about a species of grasslands ape he called ‘the compulsive communicators’ who, having come down from the trees, had learned how to talk, paint and write. Brown’s natural curiosity had won out over his acquired misanthropy, and he seemed finally willing to concede the lyrical, life-affirming potential of television. When the programme ended, he walked the few hundred yards home through the cold and rain, wondering ‘what group of “homo sapiens” in a skin and wattle boat first had the courage to set foot on the bleak, black Orkneys, on such a night as this?’76

  Brown does not seem to have been part of one of the most unlikely mass audiences of British television history, when at 10.20 p.m. on Tuesday 7 August 1979, about 16 million people watched Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party. It was a remarkable figure for the school holidays, and for a Play for Today which had been shown twice before, did not finish until just before midnight, and whose mise-en-scène seemed so unpromising: a dreadful suburban drinks party, dominated by the blowsy Beverley, smoking king-sized cigarettes and doling out cheese and pineapple nibbles.

  The play mimicked the look of the 1970s domestic sitcom – the wallpaper of brown and orange swirls, the sunburst clock above the fake coal-effect fire, the padded leather suite – with background music provided by Beverley’s favourite singer, Demis Roussos, a bearded, high vibrato Greek singer, dressed in a kaftan, who appeared often in light entertainment television specials. One man presumably not watching was Dennis Potter, who had reviewed the first TV showing in November 1977 as a play ‘based on nothing more edifying than rancid disdain, for it was a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes’.77 Whether or not Abigail’s Party was sneering at its viewers, as Potter suggested, it certainly dispensed with the easy, communal laughter of the 1970s sitcom and suspended its audience halfway between mortification and amusement.

  The large audience for Abigail’s Party had, however, been artificially inflated. At the beginning of August, commercial TV screens started to go blank, region by region. On 10 August a total walkout of technicians turned the whole of ITV into an apology caption. The shutdown lasted for eleven weeks, the longest in the history of British television. While Alan Sapper, hardline leader of the TV technicians’ union, became briefly infamous for spoiling the nation’s viewing, the landlady of the Maxwell Hotel, Orpington, said the strike had boosted her bar takings by £800 a week.78

  For the first time, the Radio Times acknowledged the existence of ITV viewers on its letters page, as they complained about being ‘forced’ to watch BBC, suggesting that, more than twenty years after the arrival of commercial competition, some families still identified themselves as ‘ITV’ or ‘BBC’ households. Often unfairly, the BBC was seen as stuffy and middle-class, ITV as vulgar, brash and ‘a bit council house’. ‘We have been without ITV for a few days now, and believe me, what a boring time it has been,’ wrote Mrs E. Jackson from Formby. ‘You have two stations, I hope you never have any more.’ D. J. Thompson from Blackpool said he had switched off the BBC and been ‘thoroughly entertained by reading what might have been in TV Times’. Mrs Alys Quirk was among thousands who wrote directly to ITV to describe her withdrawal symptoms and complain about the stuffy BBC presenters and their ‘forced smiles’: ‘I for one will never want to see BBC again.’79

  ITV’s ratings system measured a ‘discernible number’ of viewers (press leaks suggested over a million) tuning into the apology card played out each day from the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s temporary national control centre at St Hilary near Cardiff. West Yorkshire Police, in an effort to make use of this captive audience, persuaded the IBA to vary the caption to read, ‘We are sorry that ITV is still off the air. Here is a police message. If you think you could help to catch the Ripper please telephone …’ The BBC, meanwhile, insisted that ninety-five per cent of ITV viewers were switching over to them, producing huge audiences, including 26 million for yet another repeat of the film The Great Escape.80

  The large audiences would remain in the coming years but, subtly, the tone and ambience of primetime television was changing. Abigail’s Party, with its lack of a laughter track, foreshadowed a less variety-oriented television comedy which did not demand that we all laughed at the same things. On The Kenny Everett Video Show, which had replaced Opportunity Knocks on Monday nights, the star, when not in character, wore a shirt and jeans and performed without a studio audience, with only a few gruff cameramen reacting to his jokes. For the comedian Stewart Lee, then aged ten and watching on a television in Solihull, ‘the tinkling of genuine human laughs, however few, was a beautiful sound’.81

  The light entertainment now remembered as the quintessence of 1970s TV had the ulterior motive of advertising the benefits of colour sets. The BBC in particular wanted people to buy the more expensive colour licences to offset the increased cost of making colour programmes. The hard selling of colour was led by the Miss World and Eurovision Song Contest spectaculars, and the star-with-guests specials hosted by stars like Lulu, Cliff Richard and Val Doonican, with their garish cerise backdrops and troupes of writhing dancers in sequins and tulle. By the end of the 1970s, though, colour television was the norm, and primetime programmes did not need to sell colour so energet
ically. A note of dry humour crept into primetime programmes, especially if they were hosted by the Irish presenter Terry Wogan, whose commentary on the Eurovision Song Contest genially subverted the whole charade, and who made much of the fact that the prizes on his quiz show, Blankety Blank, were rubbish: a mug tree, a plastic bicycle, a weekend in Reykjavik.

  Perhaps there is even a relationship between improved heat insulation and changing styles of television around this time. Many families now had more than one TV set and the whole house was warmer: more than half Britain’s 19 million homes had central heating, compared to a quarter at the start of the decade. Double glazing, only in ten per cent of homes by 1979, was about to experience a boom, thanks in part to a series of commercials featuring the Derbyshire farmer-turned-TV personality Ted Moult (‘fit the best, fit Everest’), and by 1982 Britain was second only to West Germany in the amount of double glazing being installed.82 TV programmes still attracted vast audiences. But they could not intuitively assume that they were speaking to a single family, crowding round the same set for social and actual warmth.

  7

  A BARRIER AGAINST THE SILENCES

  And it was only a few days before Bert Tilsley died [on TV] that our dog had got knocked over. My husband was sitting on the settee watching Coronation Street. Tears streaming down his face. I said, “What’s the matter with you?” He said, “I’m thinking of the dog with Bert Tilsley dying.” Fancy comparing the two. You’ve never seen anything like it. Tears rolling down his face.