by Joe Moran
Television Dancing Club included a short dancing lesson with Silvester and his partner Peggy Spencer explaining how to do the Turning Cross, the Side Hover or the Lock Step. Ballroom dancing was still beating broadcasting as the second largest entertainment industry after the cinema, and every local palais had a learner night. So we can assume that at least some viewers were carefully following Silvester’s and Spencer’s feet, although the size and picture quality of their TV screens must have made it difficult. Betty Maxwell and her husband Robert, a publisher and businessman, peered at their tiny television and tried to learn the steps. ‘We would clear the furniture in the drawing room to one side and have such a lot of fun, trying to follow the instructions to the tunes of Silvester’s orchestra,’ Betty wrote later. ‘We would inevitably collapse in laughter, and after most sessions would end up making love on the carpet.’24
Rather than boredom, the emotion most likely to be generated by the television set at this time was fear. On 14 December 1954, the Daily Express headline read, ‘Wife dies as she watches.’ Beryl Kathleen Mirfin, a forty-year-old mother of two, watching ‘the TV horror play’ on Sunday at home in Herne Bay, with her husband and two friends, had collapsed and died of a heart attack. When the doctor arrived, he asked, ‘Was she watching the TV play?’ The story was not quite as alarmist as the headline. Mrs Mirfin had died only about half an hour in, and the shocking scenes of Peter Cushing as Winston Smith lying in a makeshift coffin while receiving electric shocks did not come until the final half hour. ‘My wife enjoyed TV,’ said her estate agent husband. ‘I don’t think the play itself caused her collapse. She was mending a glove during the play and talking of making a trip to London today. She was not a nervous type of woman.’25
Even if it did not kill Mrs Mirfin, the adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, did upset many viewers. ‘If the play “Nineteen Eighty Four” is intellectual, thank God I have no brains,’ wrote S. Challacombe from Torquay to the BBC. ‘You have endeavoured to open the gates of Hell to millions of people only just recovering from two diabolical wars and who are painfully seeking a tranquil mind with which to inspire the coming generation,’ wrote another viewer. A number of letters complained about 1984 following What’s My Line?; even more complained about it being shown on a Sunday.26
Sixteen-year-old John Sutherland’s Colchester home did not have a TV set but, intrigued by the playground gossip about 1984, he booked a place with a better-off school friend for the repeat performance, which went ahead the following Thursday despite demands in parliament that it be cancelled. Sutherland thought the Big Brother on the posters in the TV film had ‘a disconcerting resemblance to Gilbert Harding, the moustachioed grump on the What’s My Line? panel’.27 Apart from the moustache the resemblance was slight, but the connection made sense, for Harding’s face in 1954 was almost as ubiquitous as Big Brother’s in 1984.
‘Is the Minister aware,’ the MP for Central Norfolk asked in parliament, ‘that owing to the almost entire absence of television reception in East Anglia, many people there do not even know what Mr. Gilbert Harding looks like?’ But this surely wasn’t true. Harding’s face appeared all the time in newspaper advertisements selling everything from Kraft Salad Cream to Basildon Bond writing paper. While working in a Lambeth branch of Boots the Chemist, Christine Homan noticed that his endorsement of Macleans Double-Action Indigestion Tablets started a trend for customers requesting named brands: instead of ‘something for indigestion’, they wanted ‘those Gilbert Harding Tablets’. Roger Storey, later employed as Harding’s secretary, would see his face, dominated by his heavy-rimmed glasses, in a poster for his ‘Man o’ the People’ column opposite the railway station at Penge where he lived. ‘It was a scraper-board drawing, about twenty times larger than life, showing him in his most ferocious, glowering mood,’ Storey wrote later. ‘Seeing it every morning as I started for the office almost made me flinch.’28
In the 1953 film Consider the Oracle, Harding, playing an augur who lived at the bottom of a well, was instantly identifiable by his resonant voice, heard often on the radio as well as on TV. This voice was so familiar it was broadcast by loud speaker at the Serpentine Lido in Hyde Park, reminding people to use the litter baskets. In 1954, Harding was Britain’s semi-benevolent Big Brother – a phrase that the TV play, rather than Orwell’s book, interleaved into the national imagination. Five days after the first broadcast, a Nottingham jury acquitted Eric Lee, who had drunk six pints of beer and driven on the wrong side of the road, after his counsel suggested to a police officer that he went to grab Lee ‘like Big Brother’.29
The terror inspired by 1984 was not unusual. Sitting in darkened rooms in front of the low-definition picture and echoey sound of a 1950s television set, children were especially fearful. The Quatermass Experiment, a series about an astronaut returning to earth infected with the spores of an alien life-form, was shown quite early on Saturday evening, at 8.15 p.m., in the summer of 1953 and watched by many children. Pam Ayres, then aged six and watching on a newly bought set in Stanford in the Vale, Berkshire, found it ‘bleakly terrifying’. She did not know whether to ‘watch it and be mortified, or remove myself to another part of the unheated house and there, frozen and alone with my imaginings, quake anyway’. The Nuffield television inquiry discovered one boy who, for three weeks after watching Quatermass, had turned his bed round the other way.30
An adaptation of Jane Eyre and a dramatisation of the life of Edgar Allen Poe also aroused a nameless dread in children. One mother noted that her ten-year-old daughter and six-year-old son were frightened to go to bed and would shout ‘Jane Eyre’ loudly in their bedrooms to scare each other. ‘It showed you the coffin,’ said an eleven-year-old boy of the Poe programme. ‘It showed you – you were supposed to be inside the coffin and there was a glass top to the coffin and you could see them turning the earth on top of it and he kept on shouting “No! No! It’s not safe! I’m alive!” And they take it away and you kept on seeing the earth being poured in. (pause) Horrible.’ The most startling result of the 1984 broadcast was that thousands of people seemed incapable of turning off the television even if they were petrified, rather as though it were a two-way telescreen in Oceania. ‘Mother said, “They hadn’t ought to be allowed to put this sort of thing on the telly,” but she made no effort to leave the room or switch it off,’ recalled Jean Baggott, then aged seventeen, watching in the Black Country. That Thursday, they sat down together, ‘frightened witless’, to watch the repeat.31
Some people saw this as an argument for a commercial channel, so at least people could turn over to ‘the other side’, but it is hard to find much evidence of great dissatisfaction with the BBC at this time. The viewer Harding discovered in Liverpool, boycotting the television except for What’s My Line?, seems atypical. The readers’ letters from the TV Mirror, admittedly a self-selecting sample, suggested that TV was enriching their lives, introducing them to archaeology, opera or well-known public figures, widening their range of interests. ‘My husband is now taking an interest in ballet, and I in boxing,’ wrote one contented viewer. ‘My wife and I are invalids and aged 75,’ wrote another, R. S. Craven of Vicarage Road, Alton, Hants. ‘We have our television set in the bedroom. Our last meal is taken at 4.30 in the afternoon and then we get into bed. We listen to the radio until TV is due to come on in the evening.’ A Radio Rediffusion survey of people who had returned its rented TV sets found some dissatisfaction with the BBC, particularly among the working class: ‘I just couldn’t keep on paying, especially for the awful programmes that were shown on it.’32 But this was a skewed sample of people who had returned televisions, when far more people were renting or buying them.
Meanwhile the number of licence owners had risen steadily to over 4 million, and the Postmaster General estimated that there were now 170,000 owners of unlicensed sets. The temptation to evade payment became stronger on 1 June 1954, when a combined TV and radio licence increased from £2 to £3, while the radio-only licence rema
ined at £1. These ‘TV pirates’, who were getting the programmes free while others subsidised them, were newspaper folk devils. The new TV ‘detection van’ was a familiar and feared sight by late summer, with eleven in service. It followed the same principle used during the war to sound out secret radios operated by German spies. Equipped with three loop aerials on its roof, tuned to the magnetic field in a working TV, it could pinpoint a set in an actual room, so even people who lived in blocks of flats were not safe, although many thought they were, and others believed that removing their outside aerials would help them evade discovery. Queues formed at post office licence counters wherever the van was spotted. A piece of folk legend, the dummy aerial erected by non-TV owners to impress the neighbours, turned out to be true. The detection van engineers sometimes asked about these aerials, and the embarrassed householder would hurry off to buy a licence they did not need.33
On 22 September 1955, London viewers tuned in, many with a mild sense of guilt at being disloyal to the BBC, to ‘independent television’. Posters on the Underground had warned viewers they would need to adjust their aerials, and every TV installation man in London was busy converting sets to receive ‘Channel 9’. Just after 7 p.m., the familiar tones of Leslie Mitchell, who had inaugurated BBC Television nineteen years earlier, announced over elevated shots of the capital that ‘a new public service is about to be launched over the rooftops of old London … a new Elizabethan enterprise … is about to pass into the exacting domain of public life’. Over on the newly named BBC television service, Mortimer Wheeler was saying to Professor Thomas Bodkin on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?: ‘Come, come Tom: it doesn’t matter what you say. Nobody is watching us tonight.’
After ITV’s sedate opening, the shows were certainly fresher and faster-paced than on the BBC. The ITN newsreaders weaved in phrases like ‘you’ll remember my saying on Tuesday …’ and ‘If you play chess you may be interested to know …’ On shows like Gun Law, The Adventures of Colonel March or The Scarlet Pimpernel, American-style pregnant orchestral throbbing enlivened the action. More ‘ordinary people’ appeared on screen, eating bowls of jelly with chopsticks or agonising about whether to open boxes that might contain a star prize or a tie pin. New linkmen, like Michael Miles and Hughie Green, winked and gurned at viewers while manhandling guests and saying things like ‘I want you to turn round so you can see all our nice friends at home.’ The fight for ITV had been a bitter one – Lord Reith compared its arrival with earlier invasions of smallpox and the bubonic plague – and for the BBC monopolists, Hughie Green’s cyclamate charm summed up the vulgarity of sponsored television. His populism, though, was heartfelt. ‘People do not want three hours of fucking King Lear in verse when they get out of a ten-hour day in the fucking coal pits,’ he said privately, ‘and fuck anybody who tries to tell them that they do.’34
The advertising jingles were designed to stick in the memory like adult nursery rhymes. The jingle king was the composer Johnny Johnston, ‘the thirty-second Mozart’: Keep going well, keep going Shell. One Thousand and One cleans a big, big carpet. Sleep sweeter, Bournvita. Rael-Brook Toplin, the shirts you don’t iron. Beanz meanz Heinz. In November the Sunday Dispatch published the results of a readers’ poll of favourite commercials: the runaway winner was a cartoon bearskinned soldier refusing to answer his sergeant major until he had finished a mildly minty, buttery lozenge. Unusually for a jingle, this one (‘Murray mints, Murray mints, too good to hurry mints’) had the right rhythm to enter the skipping repertoire. The anthropologists of children’s street games, Iona and Peter Opie, found it still being used as a skipping song among Edinburgh schoolchildren as late as 1975, long after it had ceased to be on television.35
The commercial breaks portrayed a society not quite yet entering the age of consumer plenty, with many residues from the era of thrift and austerity: advertisements for starch (before the rise of shirt collar stiffeners in the 1960s), home perms (killed off by the decline of the shampoo and set), and laxatives and liver salts (when ‘inner cleanliness’ was prized). The ads ushered in an unfamiliar world of applied science and market research, from white-coated men testing washing power to blind taste tests proving ‘you can’t tell Stork from butter’ (adapted by parents of mumbling children to ‘you can’t tell talk from mutter’). Viewers learned that margarine was pronounced with a soft ‘g’, armpits should be called ‘underarm’, and there was an important difference between ‘fast relief’ and ‘express relief’ of headaches. Toilet paper became softer and thicker, Andrex having raised such expectations. By 1961, there was nearly twice as much toothpaste used as in 1954.36
A more subtle transformation wrought by the arrival of ITV was in the nature of the televisual day. Just before the new channel launched, the Postmaster General increased the maximum permitted weekly hours of broadcasting from thirty-five to fifty per channel. ITV used these hours to greatly expand daytime television. Mary Hill, editor of the new Morning Magazine, directed it at young mothers who, she felt, would be busy in the afternoon with the two o’clock feed and fetching over-fives from school, but who might, after tidying and dusting, have a mid-morning breather with their babies having been settled down to sleep. ‘If you are one of those who can’t sit still there are lots of odd jobs that can be done while viewing – from ironing or polishing brass or silver to peeling the apples for lunch,’ she told TV Times readers.37
ITV’s extended hours dealt a glancing blow for the apathetic majority who wanted the most draconian Sabbath restrictions to be lifted against the well-organised minority who did not. In 1953 a bill to permit more Sunday amusements had been defeated after strong lobbying from the churches and the Lord’s Day Observance Society. But the Postmaster General now ruled that television on Sundays could start from 2 p.m., although no children’s programmes would be allowed until 4.30 p.m. to protect Sunday School, and 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. would remain blank to protect Evensong. The Sabbath honed out of the new ITV schedules was a continental one, a Sunday morning left clear for churchgoing and an afternoon made up of the sequinned costumes and shiny candelabras of Liberace, the singing cowboy Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger, and then, at 5.30 p.m., one of the biggest draws of the week, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Iona and Peter Opie found this new schedule swiftly integrated into children’s lore. In October 1956, travelling to Alton, Hampshire on a school bus, they heard children sing a new song to the theme tune of Robin Hood: ‘Liberace, Liberace, riding through the glen, Liberace, Liberace, with his band of men …’ By 1957, the singing cowboy had been added to a skipping song used by eleven-year-old girls in Swansea: ‘Hi, Roy Rogers! How about a date? Meet me at the corner at half past eight …’38
ITV also introduced tighter, better defined schedules. Many BBC shows only appeared fortnightly, and overruns were common since, with just one channel, viewers tended to watch whatever came along and there was no pressing need for punctuality. But this was changing slowly even before ITV: BBC audience research suggested weekly series had more impact, and the corporation began a ‘get tough’ policy on sticking to time sheets. In December 1954, the comedian Max Wall was faded out when Saturday night’s Variety Parade overran, to make way, to viewers’ dismay, for a talk by the Welsh novelist Jack Jones. Two months later, 200 viewers complained when a Brazilian mime artist was cut off in mid-flow after Café Continental went over time.
Many of the ITV moguls and producers, like Lew Grade and Val Parnell, had a background in variety where the running order was sacrosanct. If acts went over time in variety theatres, they risked not being booked again, and so they would often time themselves with a cigarette; when it burned down to the stub, they knew they had to get off. ITV went straight to the American pattern of weekly shows in the same slot each week, with meticulous timing because commercial breaks had to be met. Faced with its slick rival, the BBC began to use its interludes only in emergencies. ‘I think the policy of giving the public “time off” to make a cup of tea or other activities is over,’ said one BBC e
xecutive just before the arrival of ITV. ‘I do not think we can afford to let go of our audience for a moment.’39
‘There is something spectral about the television public,’ a Times leader put it a fortnight before ITV began. ‘It does not shuffle forward in sturdy queues or suddenly flood the street outside a theatre, but is glimpsed in desolate forests or delicate traceries of aerials and alarming, faceless statistics.’40 But the arrival of ITV made the nation’s viewers an object of serious social-scientific study for the first time. The BBC had only started collecting viewing figures systematically in 1952. Women researchers, the ‘clipboard queens’ who were such a feature of daily life in the 1950s, would interview about 2,500 people in the street each day about their previous night’s viewing. But the BBC’s head of audience research, Robert Silvey, was a highminded man, a Quaker, who hated the idea of publishing ‘top twenty’ ratings lists and thought the BBC should be trying to attract non-viewers to the set rather than competing with ITV.
This suspicion of ratings charts was quite common: when the Top Twenty programme began on Radio Luxembourg in 1948, it was not a countdown of the bestselling records, but of the most popular sheet music. Bestseller lists for books, routine in the US since the 1890s, did not properly arrive in Britain until the Sunday Times began printing them, contentiously, in 1974. ITV, needing solid data for its advertisers, could not afford to be so squeamish. So it contracted TAM (Television Audience Measurement) which took a representative sample of several thousand homes and connected an electromechanical ‘Tammeter’ to each TV set. By working out which wavelength the television was tuned into, this could tell advertisers what programmes people were watching. As TAM’s publicity put it, ‘Time Buying’s like Trawling. The Chap Who Knows Fish, NETS ’EM.’41
