01 Sep 2013 23:37:33
Moran, a youthful professor of cultural history, is scholarly but welcoming – as happy to reference Kenneth Williams as Raymond Williams – and has a good ear for the wry detail. There's plenty to smile at. In a sympathetic account of ATV's adored but critically lampooned soap Crossroads, he sums up the dilemma for 1970s quality controllers in a quote from the IBA chairwoman, who described the show as "distressingly popular", then tops it with the Evening Standard's critic Alexander Walker, who wrote: "The only people who seem to like Lew Grade's shows are people."
He revisits the furore over a decision by Ted Heath to impose a 10.30pm curfew on TV broadcasts in 1973, during the three-day week, with the story of how Heath airily cancelled Harold Wilson's TV rental when Heath moved into No 10 and installed a grand piano. Keith Waterhouse pronounced the curfew – an unconvincing energy-saving measure – "an ungracious act", adding: "Only one who spends his evenings playing the bloody organ, instead of watching a trashy old movie like any normal human being, would have thought of it."
By then, Heath was in a dwindling minority – earlier dissenters included John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh, who, deploring the tendency among presenters to address all and sundry by their Christian names, refused to be interviewed on TV. On the other hand, Moran dismisses the notion that TV brought with it a common culture that blossomed into the 60s and 70s – a golden age.
For some of us, that period has the quality of a true memory. With only three channels to choose from, didn't everyone eventually watch everything? And surely it was just about everyone. In 1961, London and half the south-east was plunged into darkness as millions switched on their kettles at the conclusion of Wagon Train. By 1972 there were more homes without a bath than a TV. Who, during those years, could fail to be aware of David Frost, Alf Garnett or Alan Whicker? Playground jokes circulated about Elsie Tanner and Len Fairclough; children's walls were plastered with Daleks or Illya Kuryakin; boys and dads drooled over Emma Peel. Our heads were full of advertising jingles. TV-watching was in the blood.
Moran cites one classic Saturday in 1976 when a peak audience of 20 million-plus sat bedazzled by the entertainment on BBC1, starting with the football results at five and hurtling through till midnight – Tom and Jerry, The Basil Brush Show, Doctor Who, The Generation Game, The Duchess of Duke Street, The Two Ronnies, Starsky and Hutch, Match of the Day and Parkinson. All in one night! And who can forget the 1977 Christmas Morecambe and Wise Show that attracted 28.5 million viewers?
But where in that cosy hearthside picture, Moran asks, was Britain's alienated youth? After all, it was only weeks after that historic triumphant Saturday on BBC1 that the Sex Pistols introduced the "fuck" word to live teatime viewing on Thames TV's Today programme with Bill Grundy. Moran argues that there had always been substantial sections of society left furious or anxious or sidelined by television: vicars astonished to find that people would rather watch The Forsyte Saga (the Downton Abbey of its day) than attend evensong; social commentators noting the decline in club-going, community sports and local trades union activity.
In 1970, an audience of 24 million watched the Women's Liberation Movement descend on the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall, blowing whistles and squirting ink out of water pistols. Regional variations also splintered the image of national togetherness, as did the perennial challenge of getting a TV signal into Britain's outlying areas.
Then, of course, there was Britain's notorious anti-unpleasantness campaigner Mary Whitehouse (and her National Viewers' and Listeners' Association), who had been voluble in her complaints about television since the first inklings of satire and adult-themed drama in the early 60s. We weren't quite all on the sofa together.
Another bete noire of Moran's is the vague idea that TV began with the Queen's coronation in 1953 – doubtless a vague idea born of the fact that nothing aired before 1953 was recorded. But three decades previously, in 1925, a million customers queued up over three weeks at Selfridges on Oxford Street to watch a demonstration of John Logie Baird's new invention (fashioned from light bulbs, bicycle lamps and a biscuit tin), which showed flickering images of figures printed on a card a few feet away. People were not wholeheartedly astonished – and many commentators were slow to see its importance – but here was history in embryo. In due course the BBC erected its mast in Alexandra Palace, Selfridges began to stock TV sets, and those rich enough to buy one (at 120 guineas a time by 1937) were soon gathered at a screen the size of a tea tray enjoying programmes about ironing or dipping sheep, or broadcasts from theatres and sporting arenas.
In fact, by 1953 hundreds of thousands of TV licences had been issued and Britain had its first TV superstar in Gilbert Harding, chairman of the irreverent live panel game What's My Line? For a few short years he was the most famous man in Britain (though, with no old footage to remember him by, his mark on history faded as fast as the white dot on screen at closedown).
The coronation was certainly a milestone (watched by 20.4 million and recorded for posterity), though Moran points out that much of the demand for sets in 1953 might equally be explained by the feverish enthusiasm for the FA Cup Final that year – the first broadcast to a mass audience and a game featuring Stanley Matthews, whom most of the 10 million TV audience would never have seen before. Moran points out, too, that the easing of credit controls in 1954, allowing people to buy sets – cheaper now at £60 – on hire purchase fuelled the growth of TV more than that one day of pageantry.
The book is a marathon of milestones: TW3, Telstar, the first moon landing (the BBC had hired Cilla Black for the occasion), colour, regional franchises, 24-hour TV, time-shifting, Tony Soprano, Murdoch, Delia, Attenborough, Big Brother, Cowell. But it's as broad as it's long (deep, too), with a hundred diversions, from the alchemy of ratings and scheduling to the resurgence of knitting.
In snooker – a declining sport rescued from working men's clubs and gloriously refettled for TV with black tie and absurd new rituals – Moran identifies "a case study in the fundamental meaninglessness of television". In the teary trials of reality TV ("the documentary reborn as a soap opera of the mundane") he sees "the undermining of stoicism". Both are examples of the power of television – in its repetition and reach, in its restless urge to replace one novelty with the next – to normalise the unusual and reshape a nation's conventions and tolerances. "The revolution will not be televised," intoned Gil Scott-Heron in 1970. By then it was already well under way and television was a part of it.
No history can be exhaustive, so I suppose there's no point complaining that Armchair Nation finds no room for my favourite American comedy of the 60s, Hogan's Heroes; other readers may feel the launch of Channel 4 might have merited more of a fanfare than it gets here. But in its insights, clarity and honest wit, it's hard to imagine a more engaging book on a subject everyone already thinks they know about. As in the best TV itself, you find yourself learning something new with almost no effort.
