CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
The BBC Written Archive
Prologue: The Duty Officer’s Report
Chapter One: Children’s Programmes
Chapter Two: The Royal Family
Chapter Three: Religion
Chapter Four: Comedy
Chapter Five: Drama
Chapter Six: Bad Taste
Chapter Seven: Radio Swearing
Chapter Eight: Radio Satire
Chapter Nine: That Was The Week That Was
Chapter Ten: The Profumo Affair
Chapter Eleven: Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life
Chapter Twelve: That Word
Chapter Thirteen: Tonight And Man Alive
Chapter Fourteen: Grange Hill
Chapter Fifteen: The Weather Forecast
Chapter Sixteen: Miscellaneous Complaints, Grumbles, Irritations, Arguments, Whinges And Moans
Appendix: Most Watched Television In Britain In The 1960S
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
‘Dear Sir,
I have never before been so incensed by a T.V. programme that I have tried to telephone from my home in the country to protest. I am sorry your number was engaged, but not surprised, as no doubt hundreds of other decent citizens were also telephoning at the same time …’
For anyone who regularly feels tempted to put pen to paper, I’m Sure I Speak For Many Others is an alternative history of the BBC, from its triumphant broadcast of the coronation in 1953, to that Tynan moment, the controversial That Was The Week That Was, and the groundbreaking Grange Hill.
Stretching across over forty years of programming, these never before seen letters represent the joy, the fury and the wit of the nation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colin Shindler is a bestselling author, film screenwriter, TV producer and well respected lecturer in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. His previous books include Sunday Times bestseller National Service, Four Lions, and Manchester United Ruined My Life which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.
THE BBC WRITTEN ARCHIVE
For nearly a hundred years there has been a broadcasting organisation called the BBC. And for nearly a hundred years the people who watch and listen to its programmes have been writing letters to complain about them and to praise them. These letters are a barometer of our changing social attitudes.
In a corner of the grounds of Caversham Park, a few miles outside Reading, sits a small and undistinguished white 1930s bungalow. If it weren’t for the BBC sign outside you would pass down the suburban street it faces without a second glance. As you enter the building you are transported back in time, to a GP’s practice in a county town, or your grandmother’s hall. But this is all an illusion. For once the door is closed, this modest bungalow seemingly goes on forever. Behind the unassuming frontage and entrance hall lie numerous extensions and new buildings; each room is filled to the brim with the production notes, requests and forms that are a fundamental part of programme making. If, for example, you want to know how many extras were asked for by Ian Macnaughton, the producer of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for the filming of the Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch you will be able to find the answer. Much more interesting, however, are the files of letters dating back to the start of the BBC in 1922. These are the true glory of the BBC Written Archive.
The files labelled ‘Reports on Programme Correspondence’ contain monthly reports. The file for May 1958, for example, reveals that during that month the BBC received 12,944 letters. The Telephone Correspondence file for the same month shows they also received a further 181 phone calls. Perhaps not surprisingly, the BBC has not kept all 12,944 letters. Instead it was the job of Kathleen Haacke for over twenty years, from the late 1940s right through to the 1960s, and later that decade the delightfully named Betty Kitcat, to summarise the correspondence received and to extract sections of particular interest. The selections that Kathleen, Betty and their successors made are the first step in our journey into the minds of the British public throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
To an extent the letters have been pre-selected. Not every file from every production was sent to Caversham. The decision to destroy the files instead of sending them to Caversham might have been made by an overworked production secretary or a producer who did not think his or her programme would be the subject of historical study decades later. Not every production file which was eventually sent to Caversham has been retained by the Archive, mostly, I am assured, for reasons of space but since none of the programmes I produced for the BBC over a period of twenty years are there I am inclined to attribute the decision to pure caprice (or malice).
There is an overwhelming preponderance of letters from the 1960s, the decade in which Hugh Carleton Greene was the Director General and the decade in which the BBC lost its stuffy 1950s ‘Auntie’ image and opened itself up to stories and ideas which reflected the social turmoil of the time. Greene had been a journalist in Berlin during the inter-war years and had been much influenced by the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany. He had also seen at first hand the impact of the dead hand of government on cultural expression during the Nazi years before the war. It was Greene who made it possible for men like Sydney Newman, the innovative Head of Drama who brought working class drama to the screen, and Huw Wheldon, who edited the pioneering arts strand Monitor, to hire the people who created the BBC’s reputation for artistic excellence.
Nobody disputed the distinction of series like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Alistair Cooke’s America, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth or Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. However, many of the groundbreaking productions of the BBC in the 1960s were not received with unanimous acclaim despite their current iconic status. The comedy series Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part were thought to be vulgar and blasphemous. Z Cars was a police series whose gritty portrayals of life on the streets of Kirkby, a suburb of Liverpool (or Newtown as it was called in the programme), shocked audiences that had been happy to believe that P.C. George Dixon could keep the London borough of Dock Green free of crime with a clip round the ear of a teenage delinquent. The Wednesday Play (or Play for Today as it became) included major works by Dennis Potter, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett. Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction are the most famous examples of this strand and their depictions of homelessness and illegal back street abortion in Clapham horrified and outraged many.
As Greene threw open the windows and tried to let in the outside air, many thousands of licence fee payers believed that he had merely let in the stinking and polluted air rising from the sewers, and the result of their protests was the start of the Clean Up TV Campaign, led by Mary Whitehouse, who regarded Hugh Greene as Public Enemy Number One. As we can see from the chapter on Radio Swearing, certain sections of the British public had long made its objections known to what it regarded as blasphemous and obscene, but it was in the 1960s that the letters poured into the BBC in a veritable torrent because these new programmes were part of a deliberate effort on the part of the Corporation under Greene’s directorship to tackle controversial subjects like sex, religion, the monarchy and Parliament, which the BBC had traditionally eschewed. It was believed by the outraged correspondents that in transmitting plays with a title like The Year of the Sex Olympics, or letting David Frost and Ned Sherrin satirise the Queen, Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, or possibly worst of all, letting Kenneth Tynan say the word ‘fuck’ on a late-night television discussion about censorship, the BB
C was betraying its traditional role in British life.
There was a reason why the BBC was the nation’s favourite ‘Auntie’. The BBC had had ‘a good war’. The voices of Alvar Lidell and John Snagge reading the news or Richard Dimbleby and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas reporting from the front line had been extremely reassuring to people who had been facing the real possibility of invasion, defeat and occupation by a barbaric foe. Just as the women who had succeeded triumphantly in the workplace during the war were escorted back to domestic routine when the men came home, so the BBC in the 1950s seemed to retreat with a sigh of relief to the safety of Workers’ Playtime, Music While You Work, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and What’s My Line?
When Greene, Wheldon and Newman abandoned this safety net and deliberately sought new, difficult and challenging areas of programme-making, many people were confronted by a stream of images and ideas which they found unpleasant if not frightening. Much was made in the post-war years of the atmosphere in which young children could grow up and prosper, free from the Depression, war and austerity that had blighted the early years of their parents in the 1930s and 1940s. The BBC had a part to play in this idea, it was believed, but by promoting Alf Garnett, Albert Steptoe and David Frost, Hugh Greene’s BBC had seemingly abandoned the ethos of middle-class values and deference to traditional authority which had been the hallmark of its behaviour since 1922. It had not opened the door to a new cultural freedom: instead, it had stimulated and encouraged a collapse of moral values.
This was the kind of thinking that persuaded the letter writers of the 1960s to implore BBC executives to cancel shows like That Was the Week That Was and Till Death Us Do Part. In writing such letters, they believed that it was within the power of the BBC to restore Britain to the place it had held as a great power before 1945.
There are many letters in this collection that will make readers of today smile if not laugh out loud, though beneath the smile is a more serious intention.
They are fascinating historical documents, and the letters are reproduced exactly as written including the spelling mistakes. Some of the longer letters have been trimmed of their repetitions but all the words are those of the original authors. Annotated comments in square brackets or in italics are mine.
The traditional BBC response to a letter addressed to the Director General was usually a printed postcard thanking the author for the views expressed, of which note would be duly (not) taken. It didn’t do much for the frustrated author who was confronted with the stark realisation of the waste of a threepenny stamp. On the other hand, some letters addressed to specific individuals by name did produce a personal response. In the files there are to be found many well written and carefully worded responses that did more than simply acknowledge the original letter.
There are copies of a number of letters written by Huw Wheldon which elicit nothing but the greatest admiration. He does understand why viewers are getting so worked up by bad taste, swearing and, as they now say, ‘scenes of a sexual nature’, which in 2017 are as nothing in a television climate that includes a naked dating series at 10 p.m. on Channel 4. Wheldon tries sincerely and with passion to explain why artists need to venture down avenues of human behaviour which make some audiences uncomfortable. He begs their forgiveness and appreciates the anger they feel but he believes that writers and programme-makers must be allowed to explore their own originality and creativity, which might also mean the inclusion of words and ideas that some people will find offensive. It is a thoroughly admirable and eloquent defence of artistic freedom but it has not been included herein because the book was always intended to showcase only the views of the general viewing public.
An attempt has been made to preserve the anonymity of the writers except in certain circumstances when the author is a public figure: for example, Clement Attlee, shortly to become the Prime Minister, Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury and, inevitably, Mrs Mary Whitehouse. Her rather gentle chiding of the BBC in 1961 in neat handwriting on a small piece of lavender-coloured stationery, stands in marked contrast to her much more strident communications and demands later in the decade. It is of course appreciated that these letters were not written with the intention of ultimate publication so the addresses from which they originated have been shortened to make identification impossible. After considerable research it might be possible to identify who the Honorary Secretary of the Skegness Hoteliers Association was when the gentleman who held that distinguished office wrote in to protest about the BBC’s outrageous implication that the air in Skegness was not as bracing as the inhabitants of that Lincolnshire coastal town had always maintained. It would, however, be a rather pointless exercise since he was only doing the job he had been appointed to carry out.
I Am Sure I Speak for Many Others … is the story of the people’s BBC, because from these letters we can learn a great deal about Britain and the British people in the years since the end of World War II. Who are the people who write these letters? Why are they so unbelievably upset about things that appear to us now to be astonishingly trivial? Why can’t a lot of them, who appear to have enjoyed the benefit of a good education, nevertheless reveal themselves as unable to spell properly? (Maybe texting, internet trolling and comprehensive school education aren’t the only reasons for the current blight of appalling spelling.) More importantly, what do those letters and the programmes that inspired them tell us about how life used to be in Great Britain? The answer is that, taken as a whole, the letters contained in this book tell us exactly how we have become the nation we now are.
PROLOGUE
THE DUTY OFFICER’S REPORT
In the days before radio phone-ins, emails, blogs and internet trolls, the general public had two principal ways of making the BBC aware of their observations on its programmes. One way, of course, was to write a letter or preferably, as the BBC would always politely remind its viewers and listeners, ‘a postcard’. This was intended to keep the complaints brief but, as the following pages indicate, nothing really replaced a good loud moan on the Basildon Bond.
The other way was to telephone BBC Television Centre in London on 743 8000, which got you through to the main switchboard. Out of hours, i.e. during the course of the evening when the programmes were actually broadcast, the telephone was invariably answered by an elderly commissionaire in uniform with a peaked cap, armed with a pencil and a pad of lined paper. Painstakingly, he wrote down the litany of complaints from the licence fee payers who were invariably irritated that they could not speak directly to the person responsible for their irritation.
The Duty Officers’ logs were then typed up and circulated to the relevant department the following day. There was the occasional paean of praise but, like the letters, they were far outweighed by the complaints. However, it was recognised by the BBC that these protests were a useful way of keeping track of exactly what the licence payers felt strongly about and, again like the letters, they provide a helpful guide to contemporary reaction.
If we take a typical evening, say Saturday 18 January 1975, we get a fairly typical cross-section of telephone calls. Bear in mind this was the BBC at its strongest. The lineup of programmes included such ratings stalwarts as Doctor Who, Jim’ll Fix It, All Creatures Great and Small, Kojak, The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, then Match of the Day and Parkinson. It might have terrified ITV, who could never find the smallest dent in that lineup, but it didn’t impress some of the viewers. The BBC commissionaire licked his pencil stub and began to transcribe the phone calls …
LULU
A lady: What have you done to Lulu? She has no tone, and she looks terrible.
WEATHER
Tell Barbara Edwards she’s talking a load of rubbish. It’s bucketing down in Epsom and has been all day, and she said all rain had finished and moved her little black dots off the map.
DOCTOR WHO
Anon. man: Thought that the new series of this programme was absolutely pathetic, even for children of 43. There were holes in the plot an
d it was like watching a leaky sieve.
NEWS
Anon. man: Screamed down the telephone that he wished to speak to someone in the News department because, he claimed, during the course of the bulletin the word ‘project’ had been pronounced two different ways, i.e. ‘project’ and ‘prowject’ and he wished to complain. He was told that his complaint would be noted by the D[uty] O[fficer] and passed to News but he refused to leave his name, went on shouting very loudly, said I had obviously never been to school, was extremely unintelligent, and could go and drown myself – at which point I hung up.
All this, the DO must have been thinking, for £38.53 a week less tax deducted at source. And now for something completely similar … I Am Sure I Speak for Many Others: Unpublished Letters to the BBC.
STAR LETTER
This is possibly the most brilliant suggestion for a new and original BBC radio series ever submitted by a listener …
New Malden, Surrey
15 January 1946
To: Messrs. The British Broadcasting Corporation, London
Dear Sirs,
That you do your utmost to please all ‘listeners’ is, I am sure, to be appreciated.
There is, however, one section of the public for whom, to the best of my knowledge, you have never catered.
A great opportunity will shortly present itself.
Why not give us an hour of Chess? – a game between Dr. Tartakowa, this year’s Hastings Champion and the winner of the International Tournament now in progress in London.
Thousands of Chess enthusiasts would be ready with boards and record pads.
Something new – Something Great!
Yours truly
N. R.
No record of a reply to this innovative idea is to be found in the BBC Archive ….
CHAPTER ONE
I'm Sure I Speak For Many Others... Page 1
