Armchair Nation
Page 8
The arrival of television in the north of England was an important moment in the symbolic forging of a postwar national identity. In an era before motorways and shuttle flights, southerners still regarded the north as another country, and carried over from the 1930s an idea of the region as one of slums, smokestacks and dole queues. Many northerners, while baulking at these stereotypes, felt distant from London or ‘that Lunnon’. Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express contrasted the coming of television to Luton and Blackburn. For Luton, which was only an hour by train from London and which shared the early release of new films with the West End, television was ‘a pleasant dollop of cream on top of an already rich entertainment cake’; for Blackburn, where Charlie Chaplin’s silent film City Lights was still showing twenty years after it was made, and an evening trip to Manchester was a rare and middle-class treat, its coming was momentous. For the north, television would be ‘a revolution in the routine of a million lives’. Among those northerners who could already get television, Mosley had met pub regulars earnestly discussing the merits of Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss’s comedy shtick on Turn it Up, and miners who loved the ballet dancers. ‘Regular whippets, some of these kids,’ he overheard one say.
Mosley, a Lancashire expat living in London, then began to undermine his own argument by being offended on the north’s behalf. He had detected with rising irritation the insult to the north in nearly every newspaper reference to the opening of Holme Moss, particularly the southerner who talked of ‘the inevitable increase in cheap entertainment, the debasing of cultural values’ which this new audience would demand. Mosley predicted instead a howl of protest from the north when it saw what the south had been putting up with: ‘TV debased by the north? This home of the Hallé Orchestra, of the Liverpool Rep., of Manchester Public Library, of Wilfred Pickles, black puddings, Eccles cakes? The north will drag TV’s standards up from the mud.’29
But there was no such howl of protest on Holme Moss’s opening night, as Alexandra Palace offered an extended taster of its regular features for new viewers. A genial, bearded chef, Philip Harben, known for his striped butcher’s apron, one-handed way of breaking an egg and habit of talking to his Prestige saucepans, made a three-minute omelette. Annette Mills sat at a grand piano and introduced the string puppet Muffin the Mule, who danced on the piano top and whispered in her ear, against a white background so you couldn’t see his strings (much). The comic actor Eric Barker, presenter of the sketch show The Eric Barker Half-Hour, warned northern viewers not to adjust their sets during the still frequent technical hitches.
The following January, ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards, the radio comedian, warned students at his installation as Rector of Aberdeen University that an ‘even greater menace [than radio] is lurking across the border. Preparing to insinuate its way into your lives is the tangible terror of television … Already the first Kirk O’Shotts have been fired.’ Kirk O’Shotts was the site of the new transmitter, a piece of barren north Lanarkshire moorland near an old Protestant Kirk and the former coalmining town of Shotts and just a few hundred yards from the main Edinburgh–Glasgow road. John Watson, the mast rigger, had to climb it once a week in an insulating flying suit to chip off great hundredweight clumps of ice and dislodge ‘streamers’, congealed wet fog clouds formed by strong winds. At the top of the mast he could see as far north as Stirling, the gateway to the Highlands, and, on a clear day, could make out one of the spans of the Forth Bridge. At night he saw the villages between Glasgow and Edinburgh, which would soon be welcoming television, ‘stretching in a kind of fairy-light chain from East to West’.30
Television arrived in Scotland at a delicate time in the history of the union, when the Scottish Covenant, a petition to create a devolved parliament, had been signed by around 2 million Scots. Scottish MPs constantly reminded their English counterparts that John Logie Baird had been a Dunbartonshire man and that if Scots continued to be deprived of one of their great inventions, they would lose faith in the Act of Union. Jean Mann, the Labour MP for Coatbridge and Airdrie, argued that television might induce Scots to stay in the mining districts and Highland villages, as well as solving ‘the problem of juvenile delinquency and matrimonial disturbances – why wives leave home and why husbands leave home’.31 Scots also complained about the increase by a third of the tax on television sets imposed in the 1951 budget, which would mean an extra £20 on the cheapest sets when television finally arrived.
But Professor Edwards was not the only observer looking coolly at the new mast. The BBC’s director in Scotland, Melville Dinwiddie, a former church minister who originated what became the religious ‘thought for the day’ on the Home Service, warned Scotland’s prospective viewers in the Radio Times that ‘discrimination is essential so that not every evening is spent in a darkened room, the chores of the house and other occupations neglected. We can get too much even of a good thing.’ On Friday 14 March, the day of television’s official arrival, the Glasgow Herald judged it generally good value for the £2 licence: ‘While some of it may not be of high quality, there is the consolation of the odd and the unexpected – the period films which appear on occasional afternoons and, recently, the well-thought-out substitute for a programme on NATO, a film about liver fluke in sheep. With all that, the television owner cannot possibly regret his purchase.’32
That evening, just before 7.30 p.m., the TV signal began its epic journey on an underground cable from Alexandra Palace to Holme Moss. From there it was beamed across a series of seven unattended hilltop masts, each about thirty miles apart, all the way to Scotland – rather as beacon fires had once been used on the Scottish borders to warn of English raiders. The penultimate link in the chain was a shining saucer-like reflector high up on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, which bounced the radio waves to Kirk O’Shotts.
James Stuart, the secretary of state for Scotland, opened the new service, sitting at a desk in what looked like a school hall, with tartan and the lion rampant on the curtain behind him. Even the young, said Stuart, had to regard television as remarkable. To him it seemed ‘not only uncanny but – were it not proved possible – impossible’. But he also worried it could interfere with school homework and might in politics ‘give to the telegenic orator an undue advantage over a less flamboyant, but no less thoughtful, rival’. Charles Warr, Dean of the Thistle, spoke a prayer of dedication followed by ten minutes of country dancing. ‘Speeches dreadful,’ wrote Cecil McGivern, controller of television, in a memo. ‘This sort of television dullness is most depressing.’ But Scottish viewers did not seem to find it dull. Outside Parkhead Public Hall, a crowd of people were let in 300 at a time to watch the single television set at half-hourly intervals. An audience of 200 in the Couper Institute, Cathcart would only move out and let the next audience in when the television sets were switched off.33
‘I desperately wanted a television set,’ recalled Richard Whiteley, aged eight in 1952, the son of a textile mill owner living in the west Yorkshire village of Baildon. ‘I used to go round to Anthony Naylor’s after school and watch his. His father was a surgeon in Bradford and therefore rather richer than us … They had a TV with a purple screen and a magnifying glass.’34 Eighty per cent of the population was now within range of a TV signal, but at £70 upwards, a television remained a big expense. On Tuesdays, the boys Whiteley and Naylor joined almost everyone else in sight of a set and watched Billy Bunter. The adventures of the Fat Owl of the Remove at Greyfriars School had sprung half a century earlier from the now defunct children’s comic Magnet, and had been transferred to television by his creator Frank Richards, now in his late seventies.
Each episode was screened twice, at 5.25 p.m. for children and 8 p.m. for adults. It revived an archaic Edwardian language for the TV age: ‘I say, you fellows’, ‘look here, you rotters!’, ‘leggo, you beasts!’ While he was out in public, people would playfully kick Gerald Campion, the 29-year-old father of two who played Bunter, in the seat of his pants, just as Bunter’s classmates did to
him. An eternal cadger of money, forever waiting on a postal order that never arrived, Bunter was a fitting antihero for a nation still short of capital and resources after the war. Some even read political symbolism into Bunter’s usually thwarted schemes to liberate sticky buns from the tuck shop. The Bradford MP Maurice Webb, in a debate on the crisis in food supplies in May 1952, protested that at the last election the minister of food had encouraged ‘the building up of his name as some sort of synonym of plenty, on the assumption that we are a nation of Billy Bunters and that the Conservative Party would provide some sort of lavishly stocked tuckshop when they got back to power’.35
On Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., Whiteley’s parents went round to the Naylors to watch Café Continental, an English mirage of ‘Gay Paree’ broadcast from the BBC’s Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush. It was a forty-five-minute Gallic fantasy of escape from the seemingly unending burden of postwar austerity, although the champagne buckets on the studio tables were actually filled with bottles of ginger ale. As each show began, viewers found themselves in a moving cab, with taxi and Parisian street noises supplied by BBC library sound effects, stopping in front of the café. A liveried commissionaire opened the cab door (a plywood cutout on castor wheels) and ushered them through the doors, the camera pausing to glance at the billboard on the right of the entrance with the names of the stars on that evening’s bill. The bearded maître d’hôtel (and real-life West End restaurateur), Père Auguste, beckoned viewers in, announcing in a guttural French accent: ‘Ah, bonsoir, m’sieurs, ’dames! Your table is reserved, as always. Entrez and amusez-vous bien.’ Inside were actors playing hat check girls, barmen and waiters scurrying round with napkins and trays, together with about a hundred invited viewers, the ones at the front all required to wear evening dress.
Many show business managers had an unofficial television ban on their artists, not wanting their acts, perfected over many years, to be seen by millions and used up in one night. The producer Henry Caldwell realised he could conquer this problem by employing European artists such as singers, mime artists, conjurers and balloon sculptors. The acts had to be musical or visual because few of the performers could speak English, making it an ideally televisual show. The luminous Hélène Cordet (‘Et maintenant we breeng you …’), who had been spotted performing cabaret in London’s Pigalle restaurant, was compère. Although viewers often complained that they could not understand her because of her accent and her habit of looking away from the microphone when she announced the acts, men, in particular, forgave her these faults. ‘You should be put in the background of every programme,’ one wrote to her, ‘so that, if it is a dreadful bore, we can always look at you.’36
Richard Whiteley, while being driven across Baildon Moor one Saturday lunchtime, was so excited to see a bottle-green BBC outside-broadcast vehicle, a links van picking up the television signal and beaming it to Holme Moss, that he got his father to stop the car so they could meet the duty engineer. The engineers at these remote transmitting sites were the public’s main contact with the BBC and they were mildly heroic local figures, emissaries of the medium of the future. Like many schoolboys of this era, Whiteley was fascinated by television technology and spent the whole of the 1953 coronation broadcast trying to second guess the director’s camera positions and spot TV equipment in shot.37
For a brief period the television mast was part of the industrial sublime, that awkward British genre which has emerged at various historical moments to get excited about railway bridges or electricity pylons. These high-guyed steel lattice masts, the tallest of all humanmade structures, were like modern-day cathedral spires, their sight and even their names evoking provincial pride and signalling the arrival of modernity. The Radio Times, a leading patron of modern graphic art, put a series of television masts on its covers, usually drawn by one of its favourite artists, Cecil W. Bacon: concentric circles of radio waves pulsing out like ripples on water from the top of the mast, and houses with aerials on top, waiting expectantly to receive the signal. Drawing in delicate pen or scraper-board in a way that resembled wood engraving, Bacon made these new structures seem both excitingly modern and familiarly British.38
The transmitter was also a symbol of regional pride, even when the promiscuous reach of the television signal did not always map neatly on to cultural identities. With the opening of the new Wenvoe transmitter in the Vale of Glamorgan in August 1952, the people of south Wales learned that they were expected to share their mast with north and east Devonians, and the West Country was only marginally less dismayed than Wales at this dent to regional self-esteem. The first Welsh language programme, in March 1953, was a portrait of the famous quarryman turned autodidact and bibliophile, Bob Owen of Croesor. It excited many complaints from the English viewers who had to watch it as well, despite it being only twenty minutes long and in a slot normally filled by the test card. ‘I hope the English will cry with pain,’ wrote the Western Mail’s broadcasting correspondent. ‘The louder they cry, the sooner Wales will have its own television service.’ Another urgent patriotic requirement was to find a settled Welsh word for television, Radiolygiad (radio eye), Radlunio (radio pictures), and telefisiwm all being used without enthusiasm. A competition was launched and in May 1953 the chief judge T. H. Parry-Williams, professor of Welsh at Aberystwyth, announced the winner, Teledu – even though, as someone pointed out, this was also the name of the Malayan stink badger.39
The life of engineers in the more isolated transmitter sites like Holme Moss and Kirk O’Shotts was a peculiar and solitary one, resembling the hardy masculine culture of an Antarctic base camp. To cope with the extreme cold, the walls of the transmitter building were built double and the roof covered with a thick layer of vermiculite to protect against clumps of ice falling from the mast. At Holme Moss, which was often snowbound in winter as heavy drifts formed on the flanks of the hill, the crew had iron rations and emergency living quarters. When the road was cut off, a local farmer walked across the snowy moors with bread, milk and eggs. During the long breaks in transmission in those early days, the mostly male members of staff amused themselves by playing cricket on the forecourt in the summer and sledging downhill in the winter. They would also play ‘drosser rolling’, a lethal-sounding game which involved liberating loose rocks from dry stone walls and rolling them down towards the reservoir 1,000 feet below.40
In the demonstration film shown each weekday morning for the benefit of engineers and sales assistants trying to sell televisions in radio shops, a long section dealt with the construction of Holme Moss to the music of an organ voluntary from Westminster Abbey, McDonald Hobley’s voiceover explaining that the mast builders had to cope with bitter winds from the Russian Urals and that the underground cable bringing the TV signal north from London had to zigzag through Macclesfield’s silk mills. The same demo film could be seen hundreds of times each year, the words ‘Holme Moss’ being thus very familiar to viewers, not just those from the north, who also saw it on their apology caption when television broke down. Holme Moss was such a common placemark in the mental topography of 1950s Britain that it was probably inevitable it would be climbed by Manchester University students in a rag week stunt and crowned with a university pennant, just as the Skylon had once been climbed by a Birkbeck College student. ‘Every age,’ explained Hobley in the demo film, ‘has left its landmarks on the country – the stone monolith, the cathedral spire, the Martello tower, the Victorian railway station, the television mast … drawn, like a straight pencil-mark up the sky …’
On 1 June 1953, an eccentrically attired individual known only as ‘the Doctor’ landed his flying police box in Muswell Hill on the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II. Puzzled by a concentration of television aerials on the same ordinary working-class street (Florizel Street, which the televisually literate would know as the original name for Coronation Street), the Doctor and his partner, Rose, discovered that a radio trader, Magpie, was selling them television sets for the absurdly lo
w price of £5. They swiftly uncovered a plot whereby these television sets were turning viewers into faceless zombies by sending electrical rays through the set and sucking out their souls, while the police hid the victims so as not to spoil the upcoming festivities. An alien being called the Wire had turned itself into electrical form, and now, disguised as a female announcer speaking in strangulated received pronunciation on Magpie’s television sets, was introducing dull panel shows in black and white. On coronation day, the Wire planned to complete its regeneration by imbibing the souls of the millions of Britons watching TV. Just in time, the Doctor climbed to the top of the Alexandra Palace mast while its electrical waves crackled across north London’s rooftops, turned the receiver back into a transmitter and reduced the Wire to a white dot.
This was not, of course, a moment in the history of television but a 2006 episode of Doctor Who called The Idiot’s Lantern. But it does usefully summarise the vulgate view, that television in 1953 was primitive and lifeless, that only a tiny cohort of the middle classes had seen it and that it was ripe for Cinderella-like transformation by the coronation. ‘Like many others of the postwar generation, my first memory belongs to the young Queen: in my recollection her coronation in June 1953 heralded the arrival of a television in the corner of the living room and consequently the start of the dissipation of my juvenile sense of reality,’ wrote the broadcaster Nick Clarke in 2003, in his book Shadow of a Nation. Surveying half a century of TV since then, Clarke saw this new Elizabethan age as one of growing cynicism, tawdriness and discontent. Television, he wrote, ‘was the butterfly that emerged from its chrysalis’ in the 1950s and ‘grew into a ravening beast’. Its culminating nadir was reality TV, ‘one of the great misnomers of the age’, which proved only that Britain was suffering from ‘the dry-rot of unreality’.41