by Joe Moran
78. Kevin O’Lone, ‘BBC? It drives you to drink!’, Daily Mirror, 5 September 1979.
79. Viner, Nice to See It, To See It, Nice, p. 65; Letters, Radio Times, 8–14 September 1979, p. 83; Michael Parkin, ‘And lo, ITV did rise from the dead’, Guardian, 25 October 1979.
80. Stanley Reynolds, ‘Tellyless in Camberwell’, Guardian, 1 September 1979; Keith Waterhouse, ‘All on the card’, Daily Mirror, 11 October 1979; ‘ITV viewers do switch over, BBC claims’, Guardian, 17 September 1979.
81. Stewart Lee, ‘And now this …’, Guardian, 15 July 1995.
82. Peter Hooper, ‘Where has central heating gone wrong?’, Guardian, 7 October 1971; Stephen Games, ‘Is your central heating really necessary?’, Guardian, 14 September 1982; ‘Double-glazing also cuts the bills’, Guardian, 2 April 1982; Nick Cole, ‘Save it – with insulation and double glazing’, Guardian, 3 March 1979.
7. A barrier against the silences
1. Laurie Taylor and Bob Mullan, Uninvited Guests: The Intimate Secrets of Television and Radio (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p. 44.
2. ‘Wives rush to bet on J.R.’, Daily Mirror, 27 May 1980.
3. Mick Brown, ‘Oil in the family’, Radio Times, 2–8 September 1978, 14; Jane Root, Open the Box (London: Comedia, 1986), p. 55.
4. Paul Rixon, TV Critics and Popular Culture: A History of British Television Criticism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 56–7.
5. Mike Poole, ‘The cult of the generalist: British television criticism 1936–83’, Screen, 25, 2 (March 1984), 55.
6. Clive James, North Face of Soho: More Unreliable Memoirs, Volume IV (London: Picador, 2006), p. 46.
7. Clive James, Visions Before Midnight: Television Criticism from the Observer 1972–76 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 14.
8. Clive James, The Crystal Bucket: Television Criticism from the Observer 1976–79 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 13; Clive James, ‘The Pinter sisters’, Observer, 24 September 1978.
9. Taylor and Mullan, Uninvited Guests, p. 21.
10. Barry Took (ed.), Points of View (London: BBC, 1981), pp. 12–13.
11. John Ellis, ‘TV pages’, in Bob Franklin (ed.), Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 236.
12. Clifford Davis, ‘Noele Gordon sacked!’, Daily Mirror, 22 June 1981; Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 18, 15; Rosalie Horner, ‘All cloak and dagger as we wait for Meg to peg out’, Daily Express, 22 October 1981.
13. ‘Who’s cross about Crossroads?’, Daily Mirror, 1 November 1978.
14. Sunday Telegraph, 6 April 1975, quoted in Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 22; Jack Waterman, ‘“Crossroads” – en route to nowhere’, Listener, 15 January 1976, 48; Michael Grade interviewed by Philip Dodd on Nightwaves, BBC Radio 3, 21 February 2011.
15. Hobson, Crossroads, p. 49; Lewis Chester, All My Shows Are Great: The Life of Lew Grade (London: Aurum, 2010), p. 119.
16. Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley, ‘Introduction’, in The Nationwide Television Studies (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 4.
17. Charlotte Brunsdon, The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 10; Hobson, Crossroads, p. 119; John W. Pettinger, From Dawn Till Dusk: A History of Independent Television in the Midlands (Studley: Brewin Books, 2007), p. 71.
18. Pettinger, From Dawn Till Dusk, p. 64.
19. Hobson, Crossroads, p. 120.
20. Tony Hatch, ‘The Crossroads theme tune’ at crossroadsnetwork. co.uk/oldsite/themetune.htm (accessed 11 June 2011).
21. Robert Low, ‘“Down-market” BBC for Breakfast TV’, Observer, 2 January 1983; Hobson, Crossroads, p. 113.
22. Hobson, Crossroads, p. 117.
23. Hobson, Crossroads, pp. 108, 118.
24. Hobson, Crossroads, p. 139; Brunsdon, The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera, p. 80.
25. Ray Gosling, ‘Friends and neighbours’, Listener, 12 January 1978, 47–8; Hobson, Crossroads, p. 146.
26. Hobson, Crossroads, pp. 172–3; ‘Obituary: Peter Ling’, Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2006.
27. The Kenneth Williams Diaries, ed. Russell Davies (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 686, 492, 505, 771, 475, 250–51.
28. Christopher Stevens, Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams (London: John Murray, 2010), pp. 311, 293; The Kenneth Williams Diaries, pp. 533, 681.
29. Derek Cooper, Hebridean Connection (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 21; ‘Top of the Pops for Tony’, Daily Mirror, 31 October 1978.
30. Kenneth Gosling, ‘Christmas TV viewing shows big decline’, The Times, 11 January 1983; Peter Lennon, ‘How will the liberated viewer swing?’, Listener, 3 March 1983, 5.
31. Michael Poole, ‘Failing to rate’, Listener, 9 February 1984, 14; Robin Stringer, ‘Recorded TV is often never seen’, The Times, 1 February 1984; Peter Fiddick, ‘TV’s missing millions’, Guardian, 11 February 1983; Ann Gray, Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 169.
32. Chris Horrie and Steve Clarke, Fuzzy Monsters: Fear and Loathing at the BBC (London: Heinemann, 1994), p. xiv.
33. Michael Tracey, The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 108.
34. Nancy Banks-Smith, ‘Blessed release’, Guardian, 23 January 1984; BBC Annual Report and Handbook 1984 (London: BBC, 1984), p. 285.
35. Michael Grade, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 92.
36. James Murray, ‘The Forsyth saga’, Daily Express, 7 October 1978; Rosalie Horner, ‘Press blamed for Brucie flop’, Daily Express, 9 November 1979.
37. Mihir Bose, Michael Grade: Screening the Image (London: Virgin, 1992), pp. 157, 165; Esther Rantzen, ‘The tough TV lessons Michael has taught me’, Mail on Sunday, 4 April 2004.
38. Michael Grade, ‘What TV in US taught me’, Observer, 26 August 1984; Bose, Michael Grade, pp. 159–60, 162–3; Grade, It Seemed Like a Good Idea, p. 186.
39. Peter Anghelides, ‘Overrated ratings’, Listener, 22 January 1987, 28; Daily Life in the 1980s, Vol. 1: Broadcast Media Use and Associated Activities, Summer 1983 (London: BBC Data, 1984), p. 3; Bose, Michael Grade, p. 159.
40. Jill Hyem, ‘Entering the arena: writing for television’, in Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer (eds), Boxed In: Women and Television (London: Pandora, 1987), pp. 153–4.
41. Phil Drabble, A Voice in the Wilderness (London: Pelham Books, 1991), p. 86; Graham McCann, Only Fools and Horses: The Untold Story of Britain’s Favourite Comedy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), pp. 94, 126; Michael Grade: On the Box, Episode 1: New Dawn, BBC Radio 2, 2 April 2012.
42. Bose, Michael Grade, pp. 172–3; Spike Milligan, ‘Soap bubbles’, Guardian, 28 January 1985.
43. Donald Trelford, Snookered (London: Faber, 1986), p. 75; Mike Cable, ‘Ray, reared on snooker’, Radio Times, 31 January 1974, 6; Gordon Burn, Pocket Money: Bad-Boys, Business-Heads and Boom-Time Snooker (London: Mandarin, 1992), pp. 166–7.
44. Trelford, Snookered, pp. 67–8, 78–9.
45. Peter Fiddick, ‘Top of the pots, the new television spectacular’, Guardian, 29 April 1978; Frederick Forsyth, ‘Foreword’, in Pete Scholey, Who Dares Wins: Special Forces Heroes of the SAS (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2008), p. 11.
46. Trelford, Snookered, pp. 72–3.
47. Trelford, Snookered, p. 33; Gordon Burn, ‘There’s nothing normal about snooker’, Listener, 28 April 1983, 7.
48. George Mackay Brown, Rockpools and Daffodils: An Orcadian Diary 1979–1991 (Edinburgh: Gordon Wright Publishing, 1992), pp. 120, 146; A. S. Byatt, ‘I was a Wembley virgin’, Observer, 30 June 1996.
49. Clive James, A Point of View (London: Picador, 2011), p. 324.
50. Burn, Pocket Money, pp. 29, 65.
51. Mordecai Richler, On Snooker (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2001), p. 49.
52. Trelf
ord, Snookered, p. 187; Eamonn Andrews, ‘Taylormade on cue’, Catholic Herald, 15 November 1985.
53. Sarah Boseley, ‘Domesday 900 Project: kids’ stuff of which history is made’, Guardian, 7 February 1986.
54. ‘Television Programmes’, 1986, D-block GB-320000–540000; ‘Television’, 1986, D-block GB-424000–402000, BBC Domesday Reloaded Site at bbc.co.uk/history/domesday (accessed 9 January 2012).
55. Raymond Williams, ‘Impressions of U.S. television’, in Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings, ed. Alan O’Connor (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 25.
56. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, ed. Ederyn Williams (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 78–118.
57. David Hendy, Life on Air: A History of Radio Four (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 140.
58. Peter Fiddick, ‘A breakfast toast with jam on both sides’, Guardian, 16 July 1983.
59. Lynn Barber, ‘The vision of Bruce’, Independent on Sunday, 18 August 1991; Maggie Brown, ‘Not everyone’s cup of tea’, Independent, 24 February 1993; Andrew Lycett, ‘The day of the panther’, The Times, 26 August 1987.
60. Bob Stanley, ‘The test card: when a girl and a clown ruled the airwaves’, Guardian, 23 April 2012.
61. Roger Laughton, ‘Guilt … is watching it before lunch’, Guardian, 5 January 1987; Taylor and Mullan, Uninvited Guests, p. 196.
62. Gray, Video Playtime, pp. 39–40.
63. Ben Pimlott, ‘One nation, one sickness’, Guardian, 30 September 1985.
64. Paul du Noyer, Liverpool: Wondrous Place: Music from the Cavern to the Capital of Culture (London: Virgin, 2007), p. 204.
65. Paul Bonner with Lesley Aston, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. 5: ITV and the IBA 1981–92 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998), p. 135.
66. Stephen Pile, ‘Stuck on the tube after midnight’, Sunday Times, 27 September 1987.
67. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories (London: Verso, 1990), p. 169; Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), p. 50.
68. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday speech’, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 13, 20.
69. Dorothy Hobson, Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 152; Deborah Ross, ‘Richard Whiteley – No taste, no style, no shame. No contest’, Independent, 15 February 1999.
70. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 58; George Orwell, ‘The lion and the unicorn: socialism and the English genius’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, eds Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 77.
71. ‘Richard Whiteley: Your tributes’, at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_ point/4635131.stm (accessed 11 April 2010).
72. Peter Collett and Roger Lamb, Watching People Watching Television: Final Report to the I.B.A. (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, February 1986), p. 1.
73. Taylor and Mullan, Uninvited Guests, p. 182.
74. Collett and Lamb, Watching People, p. 15.
75. Stuart Hood, ‘As seen in the television lounge in a provincial hotel’, Listener, 18 May 1972, 663; Will Wyatt, ‘Television beyond the millennium’, in Peter Day (ed.), The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Essays on Science and Technology from the Royal Institution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 107; Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991).
76. Ludovic Kennedy, On My Way to the Club (London: Fontana, 1990), pp. 5, 402, 240, 404.
77. Farrah Anwar, ‘Under the knife’, Guardian, 20 March 1986; Jonathan Miller, ‘BBC deny sexy TV storm’, The Times, 2 December 1986; Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: The Authorised Biography (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 455–6.
78. Kennedy, On My Way to the Club, p. 404.
79. ‘Broadcast reviews the various aspects of the BFI’s One Day in the Life of Television experiment’, Broadcast, 25 November 1988, 21; ‘Millions sought for TV survey’ (press release), Angus Calder Papers, MOA, SxMOA28/10/5.
80. Sean Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life of Television (London: Grafton/BFI, 1989), pp. 18–22, 63, 53, xv, 133.
81. Bob Woffinden, ‘One day wonders’, Listener, 26 October 1989, 26; Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, pp. 134–6.
82. Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, p. 186, 395; Stephen Pegg, ‘A day in our television life’, Guardian, 29 May 1989.
83. Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, p. 216.
84. One Day in the Life of Television, ITV, 1 November 1989; Shyama Perera, ‘TV jilting starts Dartmoor trouble’, Guardian, 2 October 1986; Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, p. 383.
85. Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, pp. 298, 324.
86. ‘Millions sought for TV survey’; Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, p. 377.
87. Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life, p. 191.
88. Marie Gillespie, ‘Technology and tradition: audio-visual culture among South-Asian families in west London’, Cultural Studies, 3, 2 (May 1989), 226–8; Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 152.
89. Joan Bakewell, ‘Through the Keyhole’, Listener, 16 June 1988, 50; George Melly, ‘Blockbusters’, Listener, 28 April 1988, 50; Paul Theroux, ‘Coronation Street’, Listener, 31 March 1988, 50.
90. Ken Irwin, ‘Pattie’s tears for axed soap’, Daily Mirror, 29 March 1988; Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (London: Guinness Publishing, 1983), p. 43.
91. Simon Garfield, The Wrestling (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 145; Alan Tomlinson, ‘Introduction: consumer culture and the aura of the commodity’, in Tomlinson (ed.), Consumption, Identity, & Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 32–4.
92. Samantha Cook, ‘The elderly: a particularly valuable service’, in Janet Willis and Tana Wollen (ed.), The Neglected Audience (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 46–7; Taylor and Mullan, Uninvited Guests, 29.
93. Day-Lewis, One Day in the Life of Television, p. 387.
8. The age of warts and carbuncles
1. Lynda Lee-Potter, ‘I do know passion, but this is no autobiography’, Daily Mail, 11 June 1990.
2. W. G. Hoskins, One Man’s England (London: BBC, 1978), p. 74.
3. Peter Chippindale and Suzanne Franks, Dished!: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting (London: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 193.
4. Chippindale and Franks, Dished!, pp. 60, 64.
5. Michael Watts, ‘Spectrum: a dish for TV gluttons’, The Times, 18 February 1986.
6. ‘Mrs Thatcher’s bruiser’, Sunday Telegraph, 7 October 1990.
7. Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 159.
8. Patrick O’Hanlon and Richard Evans, ‘Sky launch boosts sale of dishes’, The Times, 4 February 1989; Chippindale and Franks, Dished!, p. 239; ‘Leading article: dishing the carbuncles’, Guardian, 14 July 1990.
9. Chippindale and Franks, Dished!, p. 64.
10. Raymond Fitzwalter, The Dream that Died: The Rise and Fall of ITV (Leicester: Matador, 2008), pp. 86–7.
11. Fitzwalter, The Dream that Died, p. 87; Peter Paterson, ‘Weak links in the chain gang’, Daily Mail, 20 June 1990.
12. Karl Miller, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 26 July 1990, 21.
13. Lin Jenkins, ‘Patriotic football fervour collapses at home and on the violent streets’, The Times, 5 July 1990.
14. Tom Lutz, Crying in Public: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 295; John Moynihan, ‘World Cup passions’, London Review of Books, 30 August 1990, 2.
15. Ian Hamilton, Gazza Italia (London: Granta, 1994), pp. 63–4; Anthony Giddens, ‘Gazza’s goal slump’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 21 December 1990, 11.
16. Brian Glanville, ‘Kick-off for the Moloch’, Listener, 19 December 1974, 835; Jason Cowley, The Last Game: Love, Death and Football (Lo
ndon: Pocket Books, 2009), p. 42.
17. John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 145.
18. Martin Amis, ‘The sporting week’, Observer, 27 August 1978; Martin Amis, ‘Football mad’, London Review of Books, 3 December 1981, 23.
19. Richard Lander, ‘Why Sky is over the moon’, Independent, 11 March 1992.
20. Jeevan Vasagar and Jon Brodkin, ‘Kenneth Wolstenholme dies at 81’, Guardian, 27 March 2002.
21. Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), p. 20.
22. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 14 October 1985, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 1009.
23. Philip Larkin to C. B. Cox, 13 January 1981, in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 1992), p. 637; Kingsley Amis, ‘Lone voices’, in What Became of Jane Austen?: And Other Questions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 160.
24. Kingsley Amis, ‘Preview’, Radio Times, 14 November 1974, 5.
25. Kingsley Amis, ‘An arts policy?’, in The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 248; Kingsley Amis, ‘Television and the intellectuals’, in The Amis Collection, pp. 257–8; Kingsley Amis, ‘Sod the public: a consumer’s guide’, in The Amis Collection, p. 239.
26. Yvonne Jewkes, ‘The use of media in constructing identities in the masculine environment of men’s prisons’, European Journal of Communication, 17, 2 (June 2002), 220; Duncan Petrie, ‘Critical discourse and the television audience’, in Duncan Petrie and Janet Willis (eds), Television and the Household: Reports from the BFI’s Audience Tracking Study (London: BFI, 1995), p. 105; Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 812.
27. Kingsley Amis, ‘Looking in is looking up’, TV Times, 7 February 1964, 7.
28. ‘Coronation Street the home of peasant morons?’, Guardian, 31 January 1963; Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 200; Elizabeth Walton, ‘And many happy Rovers Return’, The Times, 25 November 1985.