Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Words like ‘digital’ and ‘new media’ seem to belong inevitably to the future; ‘analogue’ and ‘cathode ray’ seem rooted in the past. And yet well into the new century, most Britons seemed unpersuaded by the choice offered by over 200 digital channels and carried on buying analogue televisions even when told they would soon be obsolete; and at the end of its first decade, forty years after the arrival of colour TV, 28,000 people still had a black-and-white TV licence. Notable among their number was the Labour MP Chris Mullin, who revealed he had been questioned by the Daily Telegraph, which uncovered the scandal of MP’s expenses in 2009, about his claim for a £47 monochrome licence. He had owned his set for over thirty years, being averse to throwing away things that still worked. ‘The Telegraph reports that I claimed for a black-and-white TV licence,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘which has been the subject of much amusement among colleagues, many of whom dwell in the world of plasma screens.’29

  New Labour had come to power in 1997 extolling the consumer freedoms opened up by digital television and the internet. This commitment now began to conflict with a new anxiety germinating in the rioting of Asian youths in the summer of 2001 on the streets of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, crystallising in an atmosphere of post-9/11 suspicion and coming to a head with the London tube bombings of July 2005. While tabloid newspapers adopted a strident language directed against newly arrived immigrants and asylum seekers, politicians talked less flammably about the promotion of ‘community cohesion’ and ‘Britishness’. The home secretary, David Blunkett, set up citizenship and language tests for those applying for British passports, and exhorted Asian parents to speak English to their children at home.

  One of the issues underlying these anxieties was the fragmenting of the television audience, for the most fertile markets for cable and satellite television had been Britain’s 2.5 million British Asians. After late night programming aimed at minorities disappeared on mainstream channels in the 1990s as they went in search of the largest (or youngest) audiences, satellite channels like Zee TV, Alpha Bangla and Star TV, carrying the Indian subcontinent’s most popular soaps, game shows and Bollywood movies, filled the gap. Young British Asians could now choose from dozens of channels speaking Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi or Bengali.

  But the habit of communal viewing turned out to be more resilient than people had hoped or feared at the start of the digital era. Programmes like Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, the celebrity ballroom dancing competition Strictly Come Dancing and the revived Doctor Who still brought millions of families together in front of the set on weekend nights. A 2006 government White Paper on the BBC recognised this shift and began to tweak the orthodoxy that the era of communal television watching was over. It now argued that the BBC should form part of the ‘national glue’, bringing people together in ‘water-cooler moments’, reflecting and reshaping national identity.30

  The White Paper also rewarded the BBC for helping to rescue the government’s digital policy after the calamitous failure of ITV Digital, a digital package known to terrestrial viewers through a series of commercials presented by the comedian Johnny Vegas and a knitted woollen monkey. While the ad was popular, and the replica monkeys given away free with a subscription were fetching hundreds of pounds on eBay, ITV Digital was not. Its reception problems were legendary; even opening a fridge door could knock out the signal. In 2002, its abandoned licences were relaunched as Freeview, a free service led by the BBC with only about thirty channels. It became the fastest new consumer technology to reach a million homes, ahead of the DVD player and PlayStation. Only eighteen months after its launch, around 3.5 million homes had it, with a bias towards the middle-aged and older. With viewers at last signing up to digital, the government could now begin to switch off the analogue signal, first launched at Alexandra Palace in 1936, so that the digital signal could be broadcast at full power across the country. Switching off analogue would also allow the government to sell off these frequencies to mobile phone and broadband companies. The BBC would play a vital role, said the White Paper, in ‘building Digital Britain’ just as it had first introduced Britons to black-and-white and colour TV.31

  Labour MPs, however, feared that voters might punish them if the digital switchover did not work and left people without their favourite programmes in the run up to a general election. Worried about what they called the ‘Coronation Street bug’, the government tested the waters at Ferryside and Llansteffan, two villages on opposite sides of the estuary of the River Tywi in Carmarthen Bay, served by the same tiny transmitter. On 30 March 2005, for around 500 homes and a few scattered beach chalets and static caravans, the analogue signal was switched off for the first time in Britain. Apart from a few unhappy residents hidden behind the Cliff, a wooded outcrop above Ferryside which the new signal couldn’t get over, the villagers settled down to watch Wales lose to Austria at football on digital TV.

  A little Cumbrian coastal outcrop, bounded by the Lake District on one side and the Irish Sea on the other, was the perfect place for the next and much bigger controlled experiment. Whitehaven had long been a televisual backwater. It had missed the coronation because it could not get television until the Isle of Man built a transmitter at the end of 1953. It did not have ITV until 1968, picked up Channel 4 six years late and still could not get Channel 5. One of the biggest firms in White-haven in the 1970s and 1980s had been the cable company British Relay, because analogue reception was so poor and homes on the new housing estate had no chimneys, which made fitting aerials difficult anyway.

  A billboard in Whitehaven harbour with a countdown ticker, a giant blinking LED display, reminded people of the switchover’s zero hour. The town’s oldest resident, Florence Parnaby, aged 100, opened the official Digital Help Scheme shop, which, with an eye to an older demographic, was giving away a pile of cassette tapes with an audio step-by-step guide, alongside a bowl of mint humbugs.32 There was much local grumbling, particularly from the proprietors of Whitehaven’s many guesthouses, who complained that they would have to convert multiple sets. But on the day of the switchover, hordes of people were seen emerging from the town’s electrical shops with set-top boxes. In the early hours of 14 November 2007, the analogue signal disappeared, painlessly, while most of Whitehaven was sleeping. At 3.27 a.m., all the digital channels arrived, just in time for a repeat of The Jeremy Kyle Show on ITV1. The Coronation Street bug had proved as phantasmal as the Millennium Bug, its nomenclatural ancestor.

  In the analogue era, television had depended on the power of the transmitter, and how far its radio waves could reach from the top of a hill. In the digital era, television was not so reliant on geography and landscape; as well as radiating from transmitters, it could live on internet catch-up sites and be downloaded on to laptops or mobile phones. Those raised in an analogue world were familiar with each medium’s flawed attempt to transcribe a message from one physical object to another: the white noise of the radio, the hiss of the cassette tape, the crackle of stylus on scratched vinyl or the flicker of electrons against the back of the cathode ray tube were all part of the listening or viewing experience. But digital media stored information in binary ones and noughts that bore no telltale trace of whichever material objects were used to carry and decipher these abstract symbols. On a cathode ray tube, the numberless electrons had to be continually fired at the back of the phosphor-coated screen to make each millisecond of television picture and pull off the illusion of persistent vision, so no two televisual moments were exactly the same. On a digital television, each pixel was the product of binary code that could be endlessly decoded and revisited. Television no longer needed to move from one place to another at a unique moment in time. Now it seemed to come from nowhere and be everywhere, as omnipresent as the air.

  Television was losing its connection with place. As the digital switch-over happened gradually by ITV region, the disappearance of the analogue signal marked the effective demise of these regions, which had essentially been defined by the reach of the ana
logue transmitters. This nationalisation of television, an unintended side effect of the digital revolution, passed largely without comment, probably because ITV’s regions had been losing their identities for years anyway. Their in-vision announcers, a quaint throwback to the BBC years of McDonald Hobley and Sylvia Peters, had disappeared by the late 1980s, and their start-up themes had been rendered superfluous with the arrival of twenty-four-hour TV. Their proud idents and fanfares had given way to the cleaner, blander, corporate fonts of ITV. Finally, in the early 2000s, the visual identity of the regions vanished entirely into a set of branded idents for ‘ITV1’: gnomic visual poems showing people hugging trees, examining their beer bellies or falling asleep on trains.

  Ironically, the ITV regions had enjoyed a brand loyalty of which the modern digital channels could only dream. Some Midlands viewers carried on referring to ITV as ATV, while in the Fens they still called it Anglia. These invented regions had taken on a tangible truth. Anglia had somehow united its vast catchment area into an imagined community, to the extent that other organisations, from Anglia Ruskin University to Anglia Railways, had copied its historically spurious name. The north-west remained defined by its ITV region, evoked often in the weather forecast (‘a bit of a gloomy day in Granadaland’). Tyne Tees, according to the historian Richard Lewis, had played a crucial role in scripting a collective identity for that recent invention, the north-east.33 But now the analogue signal was fading away, and the idea of the regions along with it.

  ITV companies had long used their regional news programmes to forge an identity and lock viewers into their early evening schedules – especially in the early days of commercial television, when there was no BBC regional news programme until BBC Midlands began in 1964. These programmes were often appealingly untutored and amateurish. They were usually fronted by middle-aged men of long service who were given the time and space to develop their eccentricities. Mike Neville, the long-running presenter of the BBC’s Look North and then Tyne Tees’ North East Tonight, had begun his career as an announcer, where he developed the skill of filling in if a programme underran, what he called ‘talking to a clock’.34 Because he instinctively knew that five seconds equalled fifteen or twenty words, he became expert at weaving in extempore witticisms during breakdowns. The Durham folksinger Jez Lowe’s song, ‘Mike Neville Said It (So It Must Be True)’, a poignant account of hearing about pit closures on the regional news, conveys the affection that Neville inspired in north-easterners, a sense that he was on their side against the world. In the song, Neville breaks the news that ‘our mining days are through’ as gently he can, before moving on to a story about a sheep that sings the blues, ‘even though inside you know his heart was burning’.

  Eric Wallace of Border’s nightly Lookaround, known affectionately to locals (after the Cumbrian dialect words for ‘news’ and ‘look’) as ‘Crack’n’deek-about’, was almost as loved as Neville. The local-accented Wallace had worked on the programme since 1968 and often waylaid viewers with accounts of his early life working at Carr’s biscuit factory in Carlisle. He had covered the warp and weft of the region’s life, from UFO sightings on the Solway Firth to Lake Windermere’s version of the Loch Ness Monster, from the Lockerbie disaster to the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001: long, heartbreaking interviews with distraught farmers who had been forced to burn all their cattle, conveying the region’s distress in a way that the national news could not. Like his north-west counterpart, Tony Wilson, a Cambridge-educated polymath who founded the experimental Factory Records and the Haçienda nightclub while incongruously presenting Granada Reports, Wallace had an unlikely avant-garde hinterland: an aficionado of German expressionist cinema, he had directed a number of arthouse films including I Can Lick Any Girl in the House (1976) and Stimmung (1986).

  But regional news was dying and in Cumbria, the first English region to switch over to digital, it was dying fastest. Just as White-haven was losing its analogue signal, ITV announced that Border and Tyne Tees would merge their regional news programmes. Had Wallace, who had died in 2004, still been presenting it, there would have been an even fiercer campaign against Lookaround’s axing. As it was, thousands of ‘Save Lookaround’ stickers and hours of petition-gathering outside the region’s supermarkets failed to save it. On Shrove Tuesday, 24 February 2009, the long-serving presenter, Fiona Armstrong, seemed close to tears during the last ever edition from Carlisle as she made small talk with her co-host about making pancakes later on. The next day, the new super-regional news began broadcasting from a Gateshead business park, presented, as all regional programmes now seemed to be, with the bland professionalism of a rolling news channel. The big cities of the north-east now got the bulk of the news, and Workington AFC’s football results would probably never be read out on TV again.

  Intermittent mutterings had long been heard that television was a metropolitan medium which overlooked the country’s rural fringes, mutterings which now became more insistent. The social divide between town and country was particularly fractious in the New Labour years, with many political arguments – on foxhunting, supermarkets, fuel prices, second homes – having this undeclared civil war at their heart. New Labour, associated with a north London metropolitan media class, insisted that people in the countryside had most to gain from digital television, because analogue reception was worse in rural areas and those in listed cottages could not always get planning permission for a satellite dish. The language was of digital ‘exclusion’, a New Labour catchword applied to everything from social deprivation to school expulsion to TV reception. Like other forms of New Labourite modernisation, the benefits of digital were assumed to be universal and apolitical; anyone clinging to analogue was ‘excluded’, left out of the inevitable march towards the future – a digital ‘have-not’, or, worse, a refusenik.

  With low inflation and steady growth, these years were ones of prosperity for much of urban and suburban Britain, but they also coincided with a crisis in farming and rural communities, from foot and mouth to a longer-term problem of overproduction, with farmers relying heavily but barely subsisting on EU and government subsidies. The Countryside Alliance, formed in 1997 to oppose an anticipated ban on hunting with dogs, sought to tap into this wider sense that a way of life was under threat and that the modern urbanites who bought meat wrapped in supermarket plastic did not understand the bucolic ways of life and death. Many rural people felt that their lives were unrepresented on television, particularly since the farming programmes that used to be on Sunday lunchtimes had all disappeared in the 1980s, an especially urbanite decade on television. ‘You’d watch the burgeoning Channel 4 and it was all telling you about London,’ recalled Darren Flook, born in 1971 in the industrial, coalmining countryside outside of Newcastle. ‘It was sending out a signal to the entire country saying: leave your shitty villages and come and live here in wonderful media-land and you’ll have a life of never-ending clubbing and glamour and wonderfulness.’35

  This resentment about the neglect of rural life found a focus when, in 1999, the BBC cancelled One Man and His Dog. This programme, a kind of rustic, alfresco snooker that fashioned slow pleasures out of watching shepherds guide sheep into pens, had been an unexpected hit in the 1980s; but its viewing figures had dropped to under a million and it seemed to be coming to the end of its natural life. Its presenter Phil Drabble had already left the programme, saying ‘it gets boring watching dogs chase stroppy sheep around the same sort of course’. But its cancellation coincided with a wider sense that television had forgotten the countryside. The culture secretary, Chris Smith, said it was a ‘wonderful programme … which I have watched with pleasure over the years’ and axing it was a ‘big mistake’. The Daily Telegraph began a campaign to reinstate One Man and His Dog, which was meant to culminate in a march of shepherds and their dogs on BBC Television Centre, although this never materialised. Robin Page, the show’s presenter, accused Television Centre of being dominated by a ‘metrocentric élite’ with an ‘inner-M25
mindset’.36

  There were sporadic attempts to heal the growing sense of estrangement between town and country. In 2000, the BBC2 controller Jane Root, mindful of the protests about One Man and His Dog, commissioned Clarissa and the Countryman, in which the TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright and the Border farmer Johnny Scott travelled round talking to country people like gun-makers and shrimp-fishers. Its model was Jack Hargreaves’s programme Out of Town, which had ended in 1982, just as ‘out of town’ was becoming a prefix for ‘supermarket’. Evoking Hargreaves’s example, the presenters intended their programme to help bridge the gulf of understanding between rural and urban viewers. Instead, it seemed to underline the divisions, getting good audiences but angering others with its coverage of fox hunting in the Cheviots and hare coursing in the Lancashire marshes. The ninety-year-old Barbara Castle complained in the House of Lords about the programme’s claim that the banning of hunting would destroy rural life. ‘To hear some people talk, you would think that none of us who supports a total ban on hunting with dogs had ever seen a blade of grass,’ she said.37

  On Out of Town, Jack Hargreaves had held together competing groups with an interest in rural life, such as second-home owners, blood sports enthusiasts, weekend anglers, environmentalists and self-sufficiency enthusiasts. His emollient personality helped, but so did the less fractious rural politics of the time. Dickson Wright, instead, had to be assigned her own special branch officer after receiving death threats from animal rights activists. The Countryfile presenter, Adam Henson, also received death threats after presenting a studiedly neutral report on a proposed badger cull. ‘We are going to burn your children,’ one of them said. Some rural viewers, meanwhile, felt that ‘welly telly’ like Countryfile and Springwatch presented the countryside as a playground refuge for urbanites rather than a living, working entity.38