by Joe Moran
Soap operas now took up more of the viewing week. Several of the BFI’s television diarists worried that their favourite programme would be axed if Thames lost out in the franchise auction of 1992,36 but while Thames did lose the franchise, the new owner, Carlton, carried on commissioning The Bill and indeed switched it to three nights a week – not surprisingly, since it was so popular. By 1994, all three major British soaps, Coronation Street, Brookside and East-Enders, had also increased their number of episodes to three a week. Many people had feared that the auctioning off of ITV franchises, mostly to the highest bidder, would plunge the channel downmarket. But the most immediate effect seemed to be to increase the importance in the schedules of soap operas and popular dramas like Inspector Morse, Soldier, Soldier and London’s Burning – the kind of uncomplicated lower-middlebrow consumerism that Kingsley Amis longed for.
And yet television was changing in subtler ways. Ratings were now an ever more precious currency, the data gathered silently from a few thousand homes by an unheard telephone call from a mainframe computer at the dead of night, and processed in time to deliver the rough viewing figures, or ‘unconsolidated overnights’, to the office computers of channel controllers the next morning before being emailed to their underlings. The new BBC director general, John Birt, was an advocate of the ‘consumer-facing’ ethos that had been transforming the public sector since the Thatcher era. For years the BBC’s Broadcasting Research Department had been a separate fiefdom with little direct influence on programme making. Now the central planning and strategy units undertook audience research themselves and it began to shape commissioning and scheduling.
One type of research acquired its own demonology: the ‘focus group’, a cross-section of about eight people, invited to comment on existing or potential programmes in return for a small fee and some free pizza, perhaps with TV executives watching via a two-way mirror. The BBC’s use of focus groups was partly political: a seemingly neutral, democratic research tool also embraced by political parties, they reinforced the BBC’s sense of being answerable to its customers. But by the end of the millennium, the media had seized upon focus groups as a stick with which to beat both the New Labour government and the BBC. The focus group was now so associated with unimaginative conformity that the Rover 75 advertised itself with the slogan ‘rejected by focus groups’, although, as it turned out, it was also rejected by car buyers. When Michael Wearing resigned as the BBC’s head of drama serials in 1998, he said that focus groups were used ‘to placate a political loathing of anything in the arena of public service’ and ‘patronisingly reduce the audience to the role of passive consumer’. Terry Wogan described ‘focus group’ as ‘the two most devalued words in television and the sooner they get away from them the better’.37
The focus group became something of a bogeyman, when it was really just part of a general cultural shift at the BBC to more management-level decision making. It is hard to calibrate exactly what effect focus groups had on the programmes being shown, since the results were rarely made public. When she looked at focus groups while doing fieldwork at the BBC in the mid 1990s, the anthropologist Georgina Born found that ‘the quality of audience insights delivered was often achingly banal’.38 Anticipating what viewers wanted seemed to remain a hazardous and unpredictable business, because people do not always behave like the carefully deliberating consumers that focus groups assume them to be, perhaps especially when they are sitting in front of a television. Since it is difficult to talk about the experience of watching TV hypothetically, and viewers do not necessarily know what they will like until they have seen it, many market-tested programmes remained curious failures. Others were equally curious successes.
In August 1994, BBC1 scheduled Animal Hospital Week, a programme set in an RSPCA hospital in Holloway, over a whole week. Its unlikely choice of host was the artist and children’s entertainer Rolf Harris, who had been a familiar face on British television for more than forty years, but whose career appeared to be over after his cartoon show was dropped by ITV in 1993. On the Wednesday night, a young man brought in his father’s alsatian, Floss, who could only walk a few steps before his back legs collapsed. When he was told that the dog had to be put down, the man buried his head in Harris’s shoulder, and both of them cried. This seems to have had a dramatic impact on viewers, for the next day the show’s audience rose sharply to 9.5 million.39
The Oxford English don Peter Conrad, after watching a pet owner being told his cat’s cancer was inoperable, concluded that the programme was ‘as gut-wrenching as King Lear’. When the new series of Animal Hospital in January 1995 was pitted against The Bill on Thursday evenings, it got over 11 million viewers against this seemingly impregnable megalith of the schedules. Viewers found themselves caring about the fate of a chicken found wandering lost around Camden or a dog with a stick caught in its throat. Some BFI diarists insisted their pets enjoyed watching it as well.40
Animal Hospital ensured the success of a new type of programme: the docusoap. Competition for ratings and declining budgets meant that in-house and independent producers, vying for the same primetime slots, swooped eagerly on successful, repeatable formulae. An unexpected hit like Animal Hospital could produce a television scheduling version of chaos theory, creating a domino effect that transformed the whole of primetime. Here was a new form of documentary that was cheap, because new digital editing suites meant that long observational shooting could be easily stitched into a narrative, and which the BBC could even loosely define as educational. The commercialisation of broadcasting, rather than making television producers more responsive to the needs of viewer-consumers, had simply created a different set of mostly unintended market conditions.
Kingsley Amis’s hated form of the documentary, which he associated with well-meaning liberalism that talked down to viewers, had been in long-term decline and most TV people thought it would be a victim of the new market. No documentary of any sort had made it into the top 100-rated television programmes of 1993.41 But now the documentary was reborn as a soap opera of the mundane. In each episode of Airport, a programme about Heathrow, different aspects of airport logistics were parsed into narrative strands: four Norwegian women lost their luggage and were refusing to fly on to Oslo until BA found it; the airport photographer waited in vain to take a picture of a supermodel; and a man dressed in a Womble costume found that he could not travel unidentified for security reasons.
While Airport made a celebrity of a camply officious Ground Services Manager for Aeroflot called Jeremy Spake, Driving School brought national renown to a Welsh cleaner, Maureen Rees, who had to write ‘L’ and ‘R’ on her hands because she could not tell left from right, and whose most memorable moment was running over her husband’s foot. The peaktime schedules, once full of quizzes and sitcoms, were colonised by a new genre, ‘reality TV’. Few had predicted its popularity, and it is unlikely any focus group had ever expressed a preference for it.
‘Personally I call her Delia, so totally has she taken on the nature of a family friend,’ wrote Joan Bakewell in 1980, ‘bright and neat, competent without being bossy, friendly without being familiar.’ The woman with the fairly uncommon forename and the most common English surname was perhaps fated to be known by the former. By 2001, ‘Delia’ had entered Collins dictionary as both a noun and verb, from ‘Delia dish’ to ‘doing a Delia’. Some of the hundreds of usages found in the Collins Bank of English included ‘the anti-Delia, anti-Aga backlash’ and a list of middle-class British institutions such as ‘the Dordogne, dishwashers, Delia Smith and dyslexia’.42 By then, Delia had earned her first-name fame for her magically galvanising effect on Britain’s amateur cooks.
Television cookery programmes had long provided vivid proof of the power of television to transform daily habits. This was partly a symptom of culinary ignorance: in a country with more cooking expertise passed down through families, like France or Italy, food programmes did not wield so great an influence. In the early postwar yea
rs, the TV chef Philip Harben, cooking on a basic enamelled four-ring stove, probably had a greater impact on culinary standards than Elizabeth David, who did not start to be published in Penguin paperback until 1955 and who, well into the 1960s, was mainly a north London middle-class taste. Raymond Postgate, who in 1949 had proposed a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food and in 1951 published the first Good Food Guide, praised Harben as ‘one of the major influences towards good living in this country, and there is no country which needs it more’.43
In 1953, Harben had shown a still austere Britain how to cook the tail of the Dublin Bay Prawn, which he named ‘scampi’. The next day fishmongers were swamped with orders they could not meet and soon many kinds of shellfish were being doused in batter and served as scampi in restaurants. Scottish fishing communities welcomed this example of television’s mass influence even before they had sight of a TV screen themselves. By the early 1960s, scampi, mostly bound for the Midlands and the south, accounted for a third of the total catch at the fishing port of Ayr on the Firth of Clyde. Then, in 1974, Scottish fishermen blamed Fanny Cradock for a precipitous decline in the demand for prawns after she showed how to make ersatz scampi using monkfish. Cradock had replaced Harben as the BBC’s main television chef in the mid 1950s, when he fell foul of the corporation by agreeing to sponsor a frying pan.44
When Peter Bazalgette began producing the programme Food and Drink in the early 1980s he noticed that large numbers of viewers were asking for the recipes. He realised that, because TV programmes moved along too quickly for the viewer to write things down, it created an inbuilt demand for information in more tangible form. And so he deployed the BBC’s teletext service, Ceefax. Ceefax (‘see facts’) had been conceived in a Brompton Road pub in 1969 when BBC engineers met to work out how text could be hidden in the spare lines of the analogue TV signal to provide subtitles for deaf people. But Ceefax’s founding editor, Colin McIntyre, saw that it could also be used to provide news and information, and accommodate ‘the viewer who doesn’t check his Pools till Tuesday, the man who wants waterways information, or the film fan who wants the details of a cast list’.
In the 1970s, Ceefax had few viewers, because the decoders needed to show it on television sets were expensive. But as Bazalgette took over on Food and Drink, Ceefax was just starting to be included as standard on newly bought televisions, and he used it to create another platform for the programme. In 1985, after Food and Drink demonstrated an apple corer and put the details on Ceefax, two factories had to be opened in the Far East for British orders. The next year, some of the ingredients for the programme’s Oxtail soup recipe had to be shipped from Holland to meet demand.45
Ceefax, which simply involved teams of people typing information on to a screen, looked primitive even in the 1980s. McIntyre described it as a ‘string and sealing wax operation’, ‘printed radio’ and a ‘bicycle in the technological age’, and it was known in-house as the ‘printed bicycle’.46 But Bazalgette’s use of it was a novel form of interaction with viewers, giving his programme a life beyond the broadcast itself. Food and Drink went on to pioneer the trend for television programmes to spawn commercial offshoots, such as BBC Good Food magazine, launched in 1989, and the BBC Good Food Show at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre, first held in 1991. The show’s centrepiece was the British Gas Celebrity Theatre, where television chefs such as Gary Rhodes and Michael Barry performed, before moving to the book stand to sign copies of their books. A chef might still have got into trouble with the BBC for sponsoring a frying pan. But there were more creative, roundabout ways of selling products and lifestyles to viewers than a straight pitch on the new shopping channels – especially on commercial and satellite television, where a general mood of celebratory consumerism led nicely into the ad breaks.
On 6 December 1990, in an edition of Delia Smith’s Christmas, Smith showed viewers a recipe for chocolate truffle torte and pointed out that its key ingredient, liquid glucose, was available from chemists. Within days, Boots’ West Country warehouse was emptied of its stock and two weeks later there was no liquid glucose to be had throughout Europe. According to an Aberdeen pharmacy, Charles Michie and Sons, Scottish chemists were caught ‘with their breeks down’.47 By the mid 1990s, Smith’s ability to empty shelves simply by mentioning types of pie-topping lattice cutter or lemon squeezer was well known, but this still left the country ill-prepared for the great cranberry shortage of 1995. A previously minor berry known mainly for its medicinal qualities (until 1991, cranberry juice was available on NHS prescription to cure cystitis), its status was transformed by Smith’s copious use of it in her series Delia’s Winter Collection, which unhappily coincided with a poor cranberry harvest in America. ‘It is murder,’ said one beleaguered importer. ‘We must have cranberries.’48
Television’s effect on its viewers is endlessly conjectured but, since it takes place in millions of individual living rooms, remains essentially invisible and immeasurable. The Delia effect, by contrast, seemed to show this effect vividly, giving the workings of mass consumer society a narrative simplicity, a clear sense of cause and effect. Four or five million viewers watched a programme on BBC2 and the next day supermarket shelves emptied. In his 1999 book Living on Thin Air, the former New Labour adviser Charles Leadbeater argued that Delia Smith ‘symbolises a vital aspect of the New Economy: the power of knowledge’. Leadbeater saw the boom in cookery books and TV chefs as ‘a worldwide upgrade of the software which runs our kitchens’, introducing us to food from around the world in a way that proved that ‘globalisation is good for our palates’. And while a chocolate cake could only be eaten once, he pointed out, the same chocolate cake recipe could be endlessly replicated without anyone being worse off – rather like the new weightless economy which would be driven by the exchange of ideas and information. Leadbeater called it ‘the thin-air business’.49
But there was nothing very ethereal or weightless about the Delia effect. With the relaxation of planning laws in the 1980s, supermarkets had grown in number and power, and the big stores learned to react quickly to trends through just-in-time distribution networks, tracking purchases through loyalty cards and till receipts and even Met Office data, which told them when to stock up on ice cream and salad, or hot water bottles and de-icer. Delia’s Winter Collection tied in with a book of the same name which included a list of Sainsbury’s stores at the back, and Smith’s office warned supermarkets in advance to stock up on key ingredients. The publication of this book coincided with the withdrawal of major publishers from the 95-year-old Net Book Agreement, the arrangement by which all books were sold at full price, which had somehow managed to survive into the post-Thatcher era because publishers argued that mark-ups on bestsellers allowed them to subsidise loss makers. The collapse of the agreement allowed the big book chains and supermarkets to offer selected titles at huge discounts, and a new publishing phenomenon was born, the hardback bestseller, usually with a television tie-in. Between 1960 and 1995, Elizabeth David’s most successful book, French Provincial Cooking, sold just under 250,000 copies; by the end of 1995, Delia’s Winter Collection had sold a million.50
Why Smith had such a devastating impact on supermarket shelves compared to other TV chefs is less clear. When she returned to television in 1990 after a decade-long career break writing Catholic devotional books, she retained a certain didacticism, a residue of the old cookery demos that used to be on television and which sat somewhat oddly with the style of the newer, hyperactive TV cooks like Keith Floyd and Gary Rhodes. Unlike them, Smith never ate her own food on camera: even when showing viewers how to eat spaghetti, by curling a single strand round a fork, she refused to lift it to her mouth. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, a Cambridge English don, Eric Griffiths, related her style to Hegel’s theory of the aesthetic, in which ‘smell, taste, and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art’. In place of sensuous immediacy, Delia had ‘regal self-control’, a ‘dowdy reticence’ and an ‘over-archi
ng and point-instant grip of time’. ‘Hegel would, on the whole, have approved of Delia Smith,’ concluded Griffiths, ‘and settled back after a day of wrestling with the Absolute to watch eagerly what she might think to do next with a cranberry.’51
One of the constants of postwar British cultural history is that each age persuades itself that it is becoming more informal and less elitist than the last. In the late 1990s the sociologist Alan Warde, drawing on the experiences of a thousand diners in London, Bristol and Preston, found that most of them rejected the highly structured, traditional model of the dinner party but quietly improvised on it, so there were still clear but silent rules at work, such as having no more than about eight people, or using cutlery and crockery reserved for such occasions.52 When informality has its own tacit conventions like this, it is easy to imagine Smith playing an anxiety-alleviating role. Her recipes were clear, easy to follow, on-trend but not intimidatingly so and, with her naming of ‘star’ ingredients, she steered the average cook through the daunting superfluity of consumer choices.