Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Every week a little booklet from TAM arrived on the desks of commercial television programme planners, with BBC and ITV ratings graphs printed side by side. They showed mass decampments from one channel to the other, a stark piece of propaganda for market populism. Double Your Money pulled in the millions, then the Hallé Orchestra or Foreign Press Club got rid of them. You could also track mass exoduses as viewers left part way through a programme. On 10 October 1955 the BBC put on a lavish production of La Traviata. TAM’s figures revealed that viewers showed willing by tuning in to watch (perhaps because, initially, there was only the Hallé Orchestra on the other side), then started fidgeting a few minutes in until, by the end, almost the entire audience had evaporated. The most spectacular migrations were to be found during party political broadcasts. When the prime minister Anthony Eden appeared on the BBC, four out of five viewers turned over to ITV’s People Are Funny. From March 1956, the BBC and ITV were required to air such broadcasts simultaneously.42

  Many people, unfamiliar with or suspicious of scientific sampling, felt these ratings had a bizarre and misleading precision. The expanding industries of market research and data analysis attracted particular unease on the left, the critic Richard Hoggart attacking the desire to ‘elevate the counting of heads into a substitute for judgement’. This new cult of number crunching seemed to reduce people to mere statistical agglomerations, and to have little interest in what they really thought and felt. The Labour newspaper Tribune accused programme planners of relying on figures issuing from the ‘TAM Fairyland’, of catching ‘Galluping consumption’ and being ‘Chart drunk’.43

  Whichever way the ratings were calculated, the new channel was popular. At first it was only available to those within range of its single transmitter, on Beulah Hill, Croydon. By October 1955, though, 2 million people were listening to it on cable radio relayed by the Rediffusion Group, which was often available in council flats. Sunday Night at the London Palladium got the biggest radio audience, though much of it, from the Tiller Girls lifting their legs at the start, to the stars waving on the revolving stage at the end, was surely meant to be seen. Many knew about the programmes without having seen them. Comedians on BBC television and radio mimicked the transatlantic vowels of Hughie Green and the side-of-the-mouth speech of Sergeant Joe Friday in Dragnet (‘just the facts, ma’am’). Members of Burton-on-Trent Archery Club equipped their arrows with whistles because they made this noise in flight on Robin Hood. By the end of 1957, seventy-two per cent of viewers with access to ITV watched it more than they did the BBC.44

  The concept of ‘primetime’ emerged, partly because ITV could fulfil its public service obligations by putting its more serious shows outside those peak hours. ITV had plenty of highbrow material – fortnightly Hallé concerts, conversations with Edith Sitwell, Jacob Bronowski discussing science, A. J. P. Taylor delivering extempore history lectures – but this tended to be shown outside primetime. Even in graveyard slots, though, these shows were often very popular. Kenneth Clark’s ATV series, Art and Artists and Five Revolutionary Painters, made a greater impact among ordinary viewers than his later, more lauded Civilisation. Despite his patrician manner, Clark had mastered the difficult art of looking through the camera to the viewer at home – learned by example, he said, when he saw Arthur Askey, on the opening night of Granada TV, go right up to the lens and shake his fist at it in mock anger. A friend of Clark’s told him that in a Covent Garden pub ‘he found two of the market porters discussing Caravaggio; he thought he was suffering from an hallucination. The railway porters at Charing Cross used to sit up with their children long after bedtime to listen to talks on Michelangelo.’45

  Britain, wrote the Daily Mirror, was suffering from ‘Telemania’, a collective madness for which it listed a number of symptoms. When ITV broke down on Sunday 22 January 1956, delaying Sunday Night at the London Palladium for nearly an hour, thirty-one per cent of viewers had carried on watching the dead screen. The BBC bachelor announcer Peter Haigh, with his carefully trimmed moustache and beautifully modulated voice, had received over 10,000 letters from women that year and dozens of marriage proposals. ‘I adore all your loving, charming ways you have for me, Peter,’ Edna from Derby wrote. ‘I absolutely idolise your wonderful personality … Life could be very lonely without you. Peter, please be mine for ever …’ Numerous ailments were blamed on television, from thrombosis to asthenia (‘television legs’). In the British Medical Journal, a consultant noted several cases of ‘television angina’ at London’s St Mary’s Hospital. Westerns, he discovered, were the most likely to produce heart pangs in viewers, though they had little effect on the Welsh, who were more likely to be affected by sad programmes. All viewers found commercials ‘entirely painless’.46

  In a series of Sunday Times articles, the freelance anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer explored the effects of ‘televiewing’, based on interviews with English people between school and retirement age in November 1957. On a typical Sunday evening, Gorer noted, two out of five of them were watching TV, so ‘with the possible exception of listening to broadcast news bulletins during the gravest periods of the war, it seems probable that never in recorded history have so many English people been so concentrated in a single occupation’. Gorer was particularly concerned that television was corroding the tradition of nonconformist self-discipline among the working class. Nearly half of working-class viewers were ‘addictive’, watching for four hours a night, ‘all sense of proportion lost in their gross indulgence; their family life, if not wrecked … at least emptied of nearly all its richness and warmth’. Housewives were especially prone to addiction. The ATV medical soap opera Emergency – Ward 10 created compulsive symptoms in its mostly female audience, with mothers and teenage daughters eagerly working together to clear away dinner plates in time to watch it, and husbands corralled into washing up on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  Gorer compared these findings with those he published in his book Exploring English Character in 1955. Then, a significant proportion of his interviewees saw inactivity as ‘sloth’; now they called it ‘relaxing’ and considered it good for them. Rather conveniently ignoring the fact that television was widespread by 1955, Gorer concluded that ‘this quite profound change in the way English men and women view their own inactivity is very closely connected with the spread of television’. In private notes written after watching television for ten nights in October 1957, Gorer betrayed some of his preconceptions. Television, he felt, was ‘a key-hole, a hole in the wall, gratifying or scopophilic, voyeuristic, spying, what have you, desires … with all the feelings of superiority, gratified curiosity, brothel visiting’.47

  If you read beyond his impulsive conclusions, Gorer’s findings were less shocking. Three men out of four and three women out of five made no special arrangements to view programmes. Only about a quarter of viewers regularly discussed television with their intimates; it served more as a comfortably neutral conversational topic for comparative strangers, like the unseasonableness of the weather. Gorer also classified a sixth of Britons as television ‘abstainers’, people who were far more numerous among the middle-aged, elderly and prosperous. They worried that television would come to rule their lives, ‘as though they considered the TV set an uncanny object, almost with a will of its own, in some ways analogous to the “influencing machine” which is so regular a feature in the delusions of many mad people’. The children’s author Enid Blyton wrote to Gorer twice after reading his articles, worried about television’s trance-like effect on her young readers. But she herself loved Peter Scott’s nature programmes and the TV plays too much to stop watching: ‘I shall never be an abstainer, though I do feel, after reading your article, that, for the sake of the sanity and well-being of the world eventually, there MUST be at least a quota of these.’48

  A small quota did exist. Lord Beveridge, the wartime architect of the welfare state, told the House of Lords in January 1957 that he and his wife had seen BBC television while convalescing for ten da
ys on the south coast. It seemed mostly, he felt, to consist of ‘hideous shouting by hideous people … Our conclusion, from our week of strenuous watching in the Bournemouth Hotel, is that we have both decided that we would not have television, even if it were offered us as a gift.’ ‘A TV set will enter Manchester Grammar School over my dead body,’ said its High Master, Eric James. The poet John Betjeman had no television at The Mead, his house in Wantage, which was typical in his upper-middle-class social set. ‘Not to have a “telly”,’ Betjeman’s biographer notes, ‘was as much the done thing as to drive a Land Rover.’ When Betjeman appeared on the ‘idiot box’, he asked his church friends Bart and Jessie Sharley – a primary school teacher and former secretary untroubled by class anxieties about the medium – if he could come to their house and watch it.49

  The self-educated working class was often similarly hostile to television. Conducting research among working-class families in Huddersfield, the sociologists Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden found a Mr and Mrs Abbott, who had no educational qualifications and had never been further than Blackpool, but who were voracious collectors of travel books and maps: ‘We get this map out of the Holy Land on a Sunday night and settle down to it. Others can have their TV. We don’t want that row!’ Jackson and Marsden found other working-class autodidacts in the town with a similar attitude: ‘Television, we don’t want that. Give me a book. Them chaps can’t put that picture that you can see when you read them books on to them screens, can they? No chap can. It’s here [tapping his head].’50

  The Labour Party, still wedded to John Maynard Keynes’s vision of an automated future in which the biggest problem would be how to fill the expanding hours of leisure, argued that governments needed to provide more cultural and sporting facilities and wider access to the countryside, to compete with the passive charms of television. In his influential The Future of Socialism, the Labour MP Anthony Crosland called for more open-air cafés, pleasure gardens, local theatres and later closing hours for pubs. Many on the left worried that television watching would reduce working men’s participation in public life, particularly at union meetings. Apathy had always worried the Labour Party most, because it had most difficulty getting its vote out in elections. It complained in vain to ITV about its schedule for general election night in October 1959, believing that Clint Eastwood in Rawhide at 7 p.m. followed by the quiz show Dotto at 8 p.m. would deter people from the polling booths.51 (Since the election was a Tory landslide, this tempting night in is unlikely to have made much difference to the result.) The Labour leader Harold Wilson had more success in 1964, persuading the BBC to shift Steptoe and Son an hour later to 9 p.m., when the polls closed.

  Dennis Potter, a coalminer’s son just graduated from Oxford, articulated these fears about working-class apathy and impoverished cultural literacy in the telemaniac age in his books The Glittering Coffin (1960) and The Changing Forest (1962). Potter noted how, as TV sets had invaded his native Forest of Dean, the working men’s clubs emptied, the rugby team struggled to make up the numbers and chapel membership fell. The television, the most beautiful object that had ever entered a miner’s house, had turned the mostly unused ‘best’ room, the front parlour, into a proper living space and ‘a minor revolution was finally consummated when supper was eaten in the room to the pale flicker of the Lime Grove light’. On the BBC radio programme The Brains Trust in April 1960, Potter forecast gloomily that the twenty-first century would be dominated by ‘twenty-one-inch television screens in every room and the constant throbbing of commerce’.52

  Television was at the heart of other anxieties about social change. The boom discipline of sociology was beginning to map the lost community of the slum terraces that were knocked down in the great postwar clearances, and to worry about the modern dormitory suburbs and housing estates where boredom and neurosis (‘new town blues’) germinated, particularly among young wives. In Family and Kinship in East London, Michael Young and Peter Willmott contrasted the dense social networks of the Bethnal Green streets, where nearly every turning had a street party for the 1953 coronation, with the London County Council’s housing estate in Dagenham, where neighbours glanced at each other through the net curtains and watched television. In Dagenham, ‘the magic screen in its place of honour in the parlour’ had privatised life and fragmented community. In one home, where a two-month-old baby was stationed in its pram in front of the set, ‘the scene had the air of a strange ritual. The father said proudly: “The tellie keeps the family together. None of us ever have to go out now.”’53

  Willmott and Young probably overestimated the vibrancy of traditional working-class street life, mining huge symbolism from a sporadic phenomenon, the coronation street party, when they might instead have focused on the coronation as a moment that consolidated the rise of television. Most coronation street parties were actually moved to the Saturday before, or late afternoon on the day itself, to avoid clashing with watching the event on TV.54 The inner-directed television households that Willmott and Young found in Dagenham were simply an acceleration of a trend occurring just a few years later in Bethnal Green.

  Television certainly did inflict some collateral damage on other social habits. Cinemas began seriously to decline in the late 1950s as their mainly working-class audiences acquired TVs on a large scale. Between 1945 and 1959, over a hundred variety theatres shut down and those few that survived were dominated by nude revues or top-liners made famous by television. John Osborne’s play The Entertainer (1957) makes only passing reference to the new medium (‘Now who do you think would want a television in a pub? Blaring away, you can’t hear yourself think’), but his failed music hall act, Archie Rice, who performs with a nude revue, is clearly its casualty. At the beginning of the 1960 film version, a family walks past the hoardings outside the theatre where he is performing, saying ‘I’ve not seen him on the television’ and ‘he’s never been on TV’. Between 1953 and 1956 the number of provincial repertory companies halved, to around fifty-five, as they failed to compete with plays on television. ‘Once the audience had been introduced to solid-looking walls, furniture that they didn’t know by heart, and a butler who looked like a butler and not a heavily made-up eighteen-year-old,’ wrote the former repertory actor, Timothy West, ‘the end was clearly not far off.’55

  It was also harder now to lure audiences to the West End from the suburbs. The ‘Aunt Ednas’, as Terence Rattigan called the middle-class theatre audiences who wanted well-made, conventional plays with strong curtain lines, could find such middlebrow entertainment on television. The drama critic Philip Hope-Wallace concluded that theatre managers should ‘cease trying to appeal to the lowest common factor in amorphous groups of coach-trippers, narrowing the score rather to the hard core of metropolitan theatregoers’. The decline in reputation of playwrights like Rattigan and Noel Coward has usually been seen as an inevitable cultural revolution, a clearing away of pre-war dead wood, but the success of new writers like Osborne and Harold Pinter surely owed something to changes in the theatre dictated by television. By 1960 only about three per cent of the population was prepared to go to the theatre, and the industry was coming to be dominated by the West End and subsidised, civic theatres, catering for an educated minority ushered in by the postwar expansion of universities, and presenting a serious and improving face in order to get Arts Council and other funding. In an era when single dramas were popular commissions, these serious playwrights also found an audience on television. Pinter once worked out that it would take a thirty-year run of The Caretaker at the Duchess Theatre to get the same audience (6.3 million) as his Armchair Theatre play, A Night Out, shown on ITV in May 1960.56

  Rather than television simply wiping out other social habits, though, enthusiasms flowed in other directions. Many defunct cinemas were converted into bingo halls and there was a brief craze for ten-pin bowling. In the course of the 1950s, annual borrowings at public libraries rose from around 300 million to over 400 million. And one hobby flourished with the
arrival of television: knitting. A familiar sound in living rooms was the clicking of needles followed by the sudden, unconscious pause when something interesting came on screen. The cultural historian Claire Langhamer argues that knitting was popular among women at this time because it contained a residue of the work ethic, and so time spent watching TV while knitting was not ‘wasted’ because it was being used twice over. ‘I have little races with myself,’ said a 77-year-old woman. ‘I say, “Can you finish that pattern before the nine o’clock news?”’ The swing in the late 1950s away from heavy, chunky yarns to lighter, quick-knit types was probably television-led. A Walsall woman searched in vain in three towns before being told, ‘There is no call for Fair Isle patterns, people cannot concentrate on them and watch television.’57

  Geoffrey Gorer found two-thirds of his women viewers either knitted or did needlework when they watched, ‘addicts’ preferring the former and selective viewers the latter. ‘The more they watch the more they knit,’ he noted. ‘Today’s tricoteuses are not alarming creatures.’ In February 1959, after the women’s section of the British Legion banned knitting at its meetings on the grounds that it destroyed concentration, Panorama brought a group of women to Lime Grove (accompanied by BBC television’s resident knitting expert, James Norbury) to knit through an episode, and then questioned them about how much of the programme they had absorbed (a lot, as it happened). According to Gorer, gardening was the one activity from which even the most addictive viewers could not be distracted. For all the panic about telemania, television seemed to have found its place, not necessarily killing off old habits but slotting itself between and around them. The literary critic William Empson wrote to Gorer to say that, while he found his research ‘rather terrifying … the race of man is not destroyed so easily; it seems clear that, in the end, if they have time, they will manage to acquire a “tolerance” for their new poison’.58