Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  As usual, Ballard was more phlegmatic in life than on the page. Watching in his semi-detached house in Shepperton, he pronounced himself a fan of Big Brother while claiming only to have seen bits of it because his partner was addicted – and the fact that she voted ‘something like 30 times one evening’ led him to discount the huge voting figures on the grounds that people were just pressing the redial button. He was intrigued by its seemingly uncut actuality, although he would have preferred the people to be unaware they were being filmed, as in The Truman Show, while conceding that this was unethical. As Ballard told Spike magazine:

  Most television is low-grade pap, it’s so homogenised it’s like mental toothpaste. But Big Brother is a slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It is like Tracey Emin’s My Bed. If you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way, then you become obsessed by it. It’s like those Andy Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed obsessively enough becomes interesting in its own right.13

  Ever since the 1990 Broadcasting Act allowed Channel 4 to sell its own advertising, inclining it to broadcast what would sell it most effectively, it had aimed its programmes at young people. Although most Big Brother viewers were female, a large minority were the elusive young male viewers coveted by advertisers. Over fifty per cent of students watched it regularly. For all its apparent longueurs, watching Big Brother was an intense, involving experience. The series invited gossip and discussion, as viewers tried to decipher the housemates’ social performances. Both tabloid and heavyweight newspapers, with ever declining circulations, devoted pages of comment to Big Brother to draw in readers. It did seem that, in the summer of 2000, almost everyone was talking about the goings-on in that sealed compound in east London.

  Big Brother acquired a cultural symbolism that was much greater than its viewing figures, perhaps because it seemed to represent a ne plus ultra: television stripped to its barest essentials. The existential fear of wasting one’s time on this earth with trivialities had long been at the heart of anxieties about watching TV, and Big Brother tapped into these anxieties because it was all about watching the passing of time – especially on the live web feed, where bored or insomniac viewers could look at housemates sunbathing or snoring. In the middle of these moments of torpor might come a strange piece of non-action, such as a housemate walking across the kitchen to open the fridge door, or sitting in silence pensively eating a chocolate biscuit.

  Alongside this extreme mundanity came its opposite. For in the Big Brother house, life was lived at a higher emotional pitch than outside it. It compressed the normal arc of human relationships into several weeks and generated a great deal of shouting, moaning, bitching, hugging and crying. Crying is, as Charles Darwin wrote, one of the ‘special expressions of man’, something no other animal does (although he conceded that the jury was still out on the Indian elephant).14 And yet it is usually done in public sparingly, so in the most public forum of all, television, it has had a peculiar force. After Big Brother, though, tears on television no longer drew their power, like Gilbert Harding’s on Face to Face or Gazza’s in the 1990 World Cup, from the desperate attempt by their shedders to conceal them. Perhaps one of the most significant, intangible legacies of reality TV was this undermining of stoicism, this sense that an adult shedding tears in public was an unremarkable thing. But this aspect of Big Brother only seems to have heightened the sense of estrangement of the ninety per cent of the population who were not watching it. On the night that Nick Bateman’s eviction was broadcast, the show attracted a peak of 6 million viewers, around the same number as the current repeats of Fawlty Towers and Tarrant on TV.15

  Big Brother was not, perhaps, such a radical departure as it at first seemed. In a sense, it was simply transferring to the naked ape and the human zoo that interest in looking at other species that had defined television from the beginning. Some of the earliest television stars were zoo animals, and the career of the most admired personality of the television age, David Attenborough, had been fashioned around such zoological scopophilia. In the mid 1980s, Laurie Taylor and Bob Mullan interviewed hundreds of viewers and found that Attenborough was the only TV personality not to attract any criticism. ‘If there was one aspect of his appeal which stood out,’ they wrote, ‘it was the feeling that we – the viewers – had been privileged witnesses to the development of his interest: we had been drawn into this world by his genuine curiosity and then watched as he went about satisfying it.’16

  The most memorable scene from Attenborough’s series, Life on Earth, came in the penultimate episode, when he explained the closeness of homo sapiens to other apes by lying on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes in Rwanda while a pack of the human race’s non-TV-watching cousins, mountain gorillas, checked his scalp for fleas. Attenborough’s hushed voice, much imitated by TV impressionists, exemplified the care he took not to alarm the animals, the assumption being that their privacy could be disturbed as long as they were not distressed. Soon cameras the size of a lipstick could be put inside a badger’s warren, strapped on a bird’s back or hidden in artificial stones named ‘bouldercams’; low light cameras illuminated nocturnal animals; fibre-optic endoscopes filmed insects underground; and helicopter cameras steadied by gyroscopes could film an animal from half a mile away. Animals were seen mating, killing and being killed – things that viewers rarely saw other humans do on television, even on Big Brother.

  ‘The whole proceeding seems to contain an unpleasant voyeuristic streak, verging on the pornographic,’ wrote Ferdinand Mount about Attenborough’s programmes. ‘Isn’t there something faintly repellent about a posse of cameramen training their sights on a python slowly swallowing an antelope or on a coot killing her surplus young – and then countless millions of us crowding round to watch the footage?’17 But such dissenting voices were not only rare; they were the opposite of what most people felt. These nature spectaculars, particularly when fronted by Attenborough, were some of the most admired programmes on television. Homo sapiens is the only species curious about other species, and such curiosity is, mostly, a benign and touching quality – even if, as when it is aimed at the contestants on reality TV programmes, it merges with schadenfreude.

  Attenborough might at one point have taken a different route, into the televised ethnography of which Big Brother was a coarsened version. In the early 1960s the BBC seconded him to study at the LSE under the ethnologist Raymond Firth and, as part of this arrangement, he came up with a number of programme ideas to examine human territoriality. He planned to take a wrecked car, park it in Mayfair and secretly film the reactions of residents; or to hide a camera in a hotel room to see how a guest marked his territory, by putting his pyjamas on the bed and so on. But Attenborough soon realised that for the experiment to be valid, people would need to be filmed unawares. ‘Programmes could not be made in such a way,’ he concluded. ‘Human beings are not, after all, the same as other animals and television should not treat them as though they were.’ Life on Earth did not end with the then voguish sermon about what a human-created mess the world was in, for Attenborough maintained that to pretend we were no different from other species was ‘to carry modesty too far’.18

  Attenborough’s friend, Desmond Morris, did make the move from wildlife expert to anthropologist. A curator at London Zoo, he had begun hosting Granada’s Zoo Time in 1958, but as his and the public’s views about zoos changed, he resigned both posts and moved on to the zoological study of humans, notably in his bestselling 1967 book The Naked Ape. One of Morris’s key theories was that modern urban life resembled being an inmate in a zoo; like caged animals, humans were protected from the dangers and discomforts of the natural world and were thus more likely to become neurotic and inward-looking. His 1977 TV programme, Manwatching, helped to popularise the study of body language and the tiny, involuntary displays of self he called ‘social leakage’. One of Manwatching’s fans was a Dutch television producer, John de Mol, w
ho in 1993, invited Morris to cooperate on the idea that became Big Brother.19

  Morris declined, but the Big Brother house, particularly as reinvented for British audiences by Peter Bazalgette, certainly seemed Morris-inspired. While at London Zoo, Morris had inaugurated a special house for small nocturnal mammals. By using bright lighting at night and dimmer lighting during the day, he convinced the animals that day was night, so they were awake during the zoo’s opening hours and visitors could see them at their most active. The Big Brother house was a similarly simulated environment with bright lighting on constantly in order to blur the division between night and day.

  Morris had also devised tests for chimpanzees to stop them from becoming bored, and to provide entertainment for viewers of Zoo Time. If they passed, the chimps would receive tokens which they could use to buy raisins at a ‘chimpomat’ slot machine. To test whether apes had the precise aim of early hunting humans, Morris enlisted the help of Bruce Lacey (a performance artist responsible for inventing the weird props used for the comedian Michael Bentine’s surreal television shows) to make a chimp coconut-shy with grapes. When the ball hit the grape, it rolled down a sloping panel, the chimp being able to collect it if he learned to push a rod through various holes.20 Like Morris’s chimps, the Big Brother housemates were set tasks, such as learning semaphore or how to ride a unicycle which, if completed, could win them a luxury shopping budget and other ‘rewards’. Academic psychologists were on hand to interpret the housemates’ body language, from flirting to passive aggression. With public opinion shifting against zoos, the pleasure of observing animals in captivity could now only be satisfied by watching consenting adults.

  Morris had declined to participate in Big Brother but was a keen viewer. ‘For a professional people-watcher like myself, Big Brother provides a feast of body language and social interaction,’ he wrote. ‘There is a never-ending supply of courtship rituals, confrontation displays and appeasement gestures as the housemates struggle to adjust to one another and to their isolation.’ After a few series, though, he became disillusioned by the exploitative gimmickry of the show and the public hostility to the participants. Attenborough was also intrigued by Big Brother and its clones. ‘Reality TV programmes are quite fascinating, a real social phenomenon,’ he reflected. ‘These programmes might seem like a big shift, but really they are about human nature and about registering your identity.’21 He did not, however, think them a proper experiment, because the participants, unlike the animals on nature programmes, were aware of what was going on. Everyone, from watchers to watched, knew it was television.

  A new type of scabrous, surreal TV criticism, pioneered by Jim Shelley in the Guardian and Victor Lewis-Smith in the Evening Standard, had by now emerged to satirise the trashily attention-seeking programmes of the multichannel era. In 1999, TVGoHome, a website of mock TV schedules which parodied the television listings style of the Radio Times, acquired a cult audience. The site’s founder, Charlie Brooker, also began a TV column for the Guardian in 2000, with a much imitated, scatological style in which he dwelled mainly on the factory-produced television he called ‘untertainment’. For Brooker, malignantly trite shows such as Elimidate, So You Think You Want Bigger Boobs?, Celebrity Wife Swap and My Breasts Are Too Big were a simple by-product of market conditions. ‘Hundreds of channels, filling hundreds of hours,’ he wrote. ‘No wonder the majority of programmes are churned out like sausage meat: unloved swathes of videotape whose sole purpose is to bung up the schedule … Most modern TV is uniformly nondescript, the equivalent of oxygen-flavoured gum.’22

  In this new environment, good television carried on being made but seemed to be smarter, edgier and less needy in its search for the audience’s approval. The first episode of the BBC sitcom, The Office, went out with no great fanfare on 9 July 2001, on a midsummer Monday evening after a rain-delayed Wimbledon final. Partly because it mimicked the then ubiquitous formula of the docusoap and had no laughter track, many viewers did not realise it was a comedy. The BBC chairman Gavyn Davies was an immediate fan, but his wife, Sue Nye, who ran the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, mistook it for a documentary. It got fewer than 1.5 million viewers; only one other new addition to BBC2’s schedule that year scored lower in the BBC’s audience appreciation index, and that was women’s bowls. Not until the autumn of 2002, when the DVD came out and the second series was heavily promoted, did The Office come to be seen as a modern classic. Even then, while the first episode of the new run got 5.2 million viewers, 400,000 viewers had turned off by the end, and only 3.6 million came back for the next episode.23

  Nowadays the understated performing style and atmosphere of The Office is the industry standard and the ‘fourth wall’ sitcom, performed in front of a live audience like a play on a proscenium stage, seems old-fashioned. But in 2001, The Office, while not the first comedy to dispense with background laughter, took some getting used to because it seemed almost to forget that its viewers were there. Where a comedy producer might once have ticked the script for studio audience laughs, The Office instead had long shots of an office worker yawning or feeding paper into a shredder. It also broke the sitcom convention that viewers would laugh at characters on the assumption that nothing too awful would happen to them. David Brent’s decline and fall in the second series was a betrayal of this compact with viewers, who gradually realised they were laughing at something rather tragic. ‘We are living in a new golden age, but this time it is the golden age of a much colder, cynical and more cliqueish kind of entertainment,’ wrote Graham McCann, the biographer of Morecambe and Wise. ‘For every viewer who savours each awkwardly tender exchange between Tim and Dawn, and laughs aloud at the sheer awfulness of David Brent, there are several more who shake their heads and protest: “I don’t get it.”’24

  Critics of the new digital era tended to focus on the threat to ‘quality television’, a peculiarly British term which has its origins in our tradition of public service broadcasting and the idea that it needs protecting from an unfettered market. There was even a ‘Campaign for Quality Television’, born in opposition to the selling off of ITV franchises to the highest bidder that was proposed in the late 1980s. Mobilising TV stars like Rowan Atkinson, Esther Rantzen and Michael Palin, it campaigned successfully for a ‘quality threshold’ which every applicant for an ITV franchise had to pass. In 1999, the Campaign for Quality Television published a paper whose title summed up its fear about the fate of what it was campaigning for: A Shrinking Iceberg Slowly Travelling South.

  But despite quite a lot of evidence of untertainment on the ever-expanding number of digital channels, shows like The Office proved that ‘quality television’ was also thriving. Quality TV actually benefited from the multiplication of channels, for it could now have several lives, appearing on a main terrestrial channel, its sister digital channels and on a DVD box set with extras. In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, the American critic Steven Johnson argued that this kind of quality television had to be complex to stand up to such repetition. Following a pattern set by Hill Street Blues as early as 1981, American drama series, such as The Sopranos and 24, now built up multi-stranded narratives and demanded more intellectual and emotional work from viewers. To gorge on a box set of The West Wing, watching several episodes in ‘a single glorious wodge’ that stretched deep into the night, was, wrote Clive James, ‘like Bayreuth with snappier music’.25

  The octogenarian Richard Hoggart, who had co-authored the Pilkington Report on Broadcasting forty years earlier, and whose ideas about creating a common culture through television had influenced Dennis Potter when he was beginning his career, now joined this argument about quality. Hoggart worried not so much that good programmes would stop being made, but that television was losing the sense of an empathetic common ground. After fifty years of consumer populism, he feared a new tyranny of cultural relativism, in which everything had its place and value judgements were seen as elitist and patronising. Reserving the right to cr
iticise bad television, Hoggart evoked the example of Anton Chekhov, who once spoke with ‘love and anger’ to his own people: ‘You live badly, my friends; it is shameful to live like that …’26

  In 2002 Hoggart complained, in language highly reminiscent of the Pilkington Report, about ‘cheap and nasty offerings aimed at people who are assumed to be both insufficiently educated and ill-informed’. The quiz show The Weakest Link, whose presenter’s putdowns had earned her the sobriquet ‘The Queen of Mean’, revealed a ‘mindless, cruel competitiveness and a disguised or perhaps unconscious contempt in the makers for those at whom they are directed’. Meanwhile the new highbrow digital channel BBC4, whose most popular shows drew about 50,000 viewers, offered ‘a little caviar for the snobs’, allowing arts programmes to be ghettoised ‘so that – like the celebrated daft pianist in a brothel – they may not know and so may cease to complain about what goes on elsewhere in the building’.27

  This feared fragmentation of audiences did not, however, quite materialise. In his book The Shock of the Old, the historian David Edgerton argues that our understanding of historical progress is ‘innovation-centric’. We think that technological change happens inexorably and in linear fashion. So we focus on exciting new inventions and underestimate how much they will have to struggle against the forces of habit and inertia in our daily lives, and how resilient older, still serviceable technologies often turn out to be. The American theorist of technology, John Seely Brown, gave the name ‘endism’ to this historical fallacy that new technologies like the internet would simply do away with older ones, like television.28