Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  But the most difficult balancing act of all was the responsibility of Ulster Television. Its declared aim was to build bridges across the divided community, a commercial imperative anyway since it needed to reach as many viewers as possible. But straightaway its late-night religious spot, End the Day, created a row between Catholics, Protestants and Presbyterians about the allocation of slots. Ulster TV’s approach to the emerging Troubles was simply to ignore them. The channel director Brum Henderson wanted it to provide ‘television for the Shankill and Falls Roads’, the working-class, Protestant and Catholic areas of west Belfast, rather than for the BBC viewers along the Malone and Antrim Roads, the affluent suburbs of the north and south.

  With only about 50,000 televisions in the whole of Northern Ireland, UTV had modest advertising revenue and little money for its own programmes. Its local flavour came from shoestring but very popular early evening shows such as The Romper Room with ‘Miss Adrienne’, in which a group of invited local children listened to stories and played games, and Tea Time with Tommy, in which a former salesman from London’s Mile End Road read out viewer requests and banged out tunes on his piano. Ulster TV’s slide promotion ads, a still picture with a voiceover being a bargain at £1 per second, also added to its regional feel. ‘It would make a big difference to our appeal,’ thought Henderson, ‘if Ulster Television was not only promoting Surf and Pepsodent, but also car dealerships on the Newtownards Road and animal feed producers in Cookstown.’75

  Despite their improvised, amateurish feel, the regional stations inspired great loyalty from viewers. Although often seen through a sea of static, Scottish Television was soon trouncing the BBC in the ratings, a combination of its populist network programmes and its symbolic break with Londonism. On Friday nights, it broadcast a piece of cathode ray tartanry called Jig Time, an evening of reels and figure dances in ‘the old barn’, which began with the doors opening and the presenter inviting the viewers in to ‘sit on the straw’. Its popularity led the BBC to respond with the White Heather Club, an even more sanitised ceilidh where the men wore kilts with sensible shirts and ties, Andy Stewart compèred and Jimmy Shand’s accordion led the band. Delivering the McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August 2007, Jeremy Paxman cited it as definitive proof that television never had a golden age.

  The most popular local programmes were the ramshackle lunchtime variety shows shown in most regions. STV’s The One O’Clock Gang was hosted by an Italian-born Glaswegian, Larry Marshall, whose lowlands fame was such that when he visited Lanark one Saturday afternoon, the streets were closed and mounted police deployed to disperse the crowds. Advertisers loved the rather similar One O’Clock Show on Tyne Tees because most women in this region did not work and many north-east men and children came home for lunch. Over 150,000 viewers, the biggest lunchtime audience in the country, watched the comedian Jack ‘Wacky Jacky’ Haig (later known to the nation as Monsieur LeClerc in the French resistance sitcom ’Allo ’Allo!) and George Romaine, a former electrician at Shildon Wagon Works, billed as ‘Shildon’s Singing Son’. Instead of the TV Times, Tyne Tees had its own ITV listings publication, The Viewer, which was soon the biggest selling magazine in the north-east with 300,000 readers, not all of whom had televisions.76

  Tyne Tees had promised to be the most regional of the ITV stations but the oral nature of much of the area’s popular culture, from dialect humour to song, did not easily translate to television. Bobby Thompson, the local comedian who had been such a hit on regional BBC radio as ‘the Little Waster’, looked uncomfortable on TV and his show was quietly dropped. Radio shows broadcast on the regional Home Service like Wot Cheor, Geordie! and Voice of the People, which used the new portable tape recorders to conduct vox pops with locals, attained record listening figures well into the 1960s.77

  In all regions, the main attraction of ITV for viewers was the national, networked programmes, which often caused some confusion over where they originated. Viewers turned up at the Tyne Tees studios on Newcastle’s City Road wanting to meet Hughie Green from Double Your Money or Michael Miles from Take Your Pick, and a woman arrived with her two grandsons hoping to see the horses from Wagon Train. The regions made the networked programmes their own. Ulster Television was the first region to buy Coronation Street from Granada, Brum Henderson intuiting that viewers in the cobbled terraced streets of Belfast would feel at home with such a setting.78

  But these new ITV fiefdoms, defined by nothing more concrete than market convenience and the reach of the TV signal, had confused identities and leaky borders. Tyne Tees stretched beyond the north-east into the North Riding of Yorkshire and up to the Scottish lowlands, and was even reported to have been seen in Esbjerg, Denmark. A viewer in Monster in South Holland photographed his television to prove that he could pick up Anglia TV. Bloodless military campaigns were fought in fringe areas, trying to get viewers to swivel their aerials. Anglia was notorious for its imperialist raids on rival enclaves. From its 1,000-foot Mendlesham mast, then the tallest structure in Europe, it soon extended deep into Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire. After it built its new transmitters at Sandy Heath and Belmont in 1965, its catchment area reached from Buckinghamshire in the south to Yorkshire in the north. Anglia’s best known face, Dick Joice, fronted the campaign to persuade viewers to turn their aerials. He spent three months visiting every fringe town and village of any size to ‘beat the Anglia drum’, enjoying particular success along the eastern coast where they preferred Anglia’s agricultural programmes to the urbanite offerings of Tyne Tees and ATV.79

  The TV signal is no respecter of human-made borders; the only ruler it obeys is the landscape. The engineers could try tilting the beam of the transmitter a little to produce what they called ‘asymmetrical radiation’, but the signal mostly went where it wanted to go, alighting on whichever aerials happened to be pointing in its direction. In Northern Ireland this was a serious political problem. Ulster TV, from its transmitter at Black Mountain above Belfast, reached half the population south of the border, where there were about 90,000 sets in a country that officially had no television. Northern Irish viewers would often complain about their southern neighbours, the ‘lookers-in over the wall’, watching their programmes for free. A feature of the skyline in Irish towns was the multitude of especially tall aerials erected to pick up the distant signals of British transmitters. A chartered Aer Lingus plane full of these aerials had left Cardiff Airport for Dublin a few days before the coronation in 1953. When Jeremy Lewis left England to study at Trinity College Dublin in the autumn of 1961, the first thing he noticed coming in to the city on the train were ‘the outsize television aerials on top of all the houses, bending in the direction of Wales like arms stretched out in supplication’.80

  If it had acknowledged the existence of these viewers, Ulster Television would have been able to charge higher advertising rates. But Telifis Éireann was due to begin broadcasting and the signal from its new mast on Truskmore Mountain in Sligo was going to reach into Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry, many Republicans viewing television as a weapon in the struggle for unification. Wishing to remain aloof from this struggle, the ITA asked TAM to stop short at the border on their maps showing the coverage of Ulster TV. Officially, no southern Irish viewer watched ITV. The Post Office would not even allow Northern Irish cable companies, of which there were many because television reception in the region was so poor, to pipe Telifis Éireann into homes.81

  British TV had also gained a foothold on the French mainland along the north-western coastal strip of Brittany and Normandy, as far south as Rennes. Tall thirteen-element television aerials began appearing on the stone-grey houses, pointed towards the BBC link transmitter on Torteval, on the south-west tip of Guernsey. Television had been slower to make an impact in France than in Britain and in 1959 there were still just a million sets, with many middle-class families only admitting to having TV ‘pour les gosses’ [for the kids]. But installing a specially adapted set for the BBC
programmes was a status symbol among the coastal bourgeoisie and there were enough French viewers for the English programmes to be listed in the regional newspaper Ouest France.

  A Monsieur Bourdet had bought a TV set as early as 1946 to pick up the BBC, and got good pictures for the coronation. By 1955 his set was so well known that it featured in Ouest France with the headline: ‘Hundreds Pack Cherbourg Back Street Watching English Television Through Window.’ When Channel Television started broadcasting ITV in 1962, Coronation Street became so popular in northwest France that, in a hotel at Carteret in Normandy, the proprietor changed the mealtimes so guests could watch it. There was even some (illegal) French advertising on Channel TV and in the coastal town of Dinard they founded ‘a Cercle des Amis de Channel’. The TV signal made the most unlikely, intrepid journeys. In October 1956, an NBC official picked up a BBC broadcast in New York and immediately telephoned the corporation and said, ‘I’m looking at a lady stirring pudding.’ It was Marguerite Patten making bread.82

  While the TV signal stretched beyond Britain’s borders, some parts of the country remained out of reach. The bringing of a signal to these sparsely populated areas was technically difficult and expensive, and certainly not justified by the small amount of increased licence fee money it would bring. But one of the BBC’s responses to the start of ITV was to exploit the fact that the commercial channel had erratic coverage across the nation. The director of BBC Television, George Barnes, declared in the Radio Times that the corporation aimed to be national in both range and character: ‘Television must reach into every home that wants it, and events must be televisable wherever they occur.’83

  The last big group to be deprived of television were the million or so Scots thinly spread through the Highlands and Islands. Here even electricity was an innovation. In the early 1950s the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board had begun a massive project for heading new dams and diverting rivers. This brought electricity lines on steel pylons to the remotest crofters, who could finally dispense with their tilly lamps and peat-burning hearths. Television aerials now sprung up hopefully in improbable places. In August 1957 the BBC opened a new transmitter at Rosemarkie in the Black Isle on the west coast, which reached another 100,000 people and made television available to ninety-three per cent of Scots. Men began walking about remote areas of the Highlands with portable TV sets, searching for a signal like prospectors looking for mineral wealth. But isolated villages were often too scattered to justify the cost of a booster mast and the Highland peaks and inlets might have been designed by a disapproving Presbyterian god to get in the way of graven images.

  Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader and MP for Orkney and Shetland, often warned the House of Commons that the absence of a decent television reception in his constituency would lead to an exodus from the islands. The first televisions had arrived on Orkney in October 1955 when a new transmitter opened at Meldrum in Aberdeenshire, 250 miles away. A fourteen-inch set cost over fifty guineas, at a time when the average Orkney farm wage was less than £10 a week, and many parts of the islands did not yet have electricity; but some of the islanders who did have it were prepared to take a chance on getting a reception. ‘We rubbed our eyes the other morning, for only a few fields away on a prominent chimney we saw an absolute outsize among television aerials. We thought that this must be the first one in Orkney, but we are credibly informed that there are now three in the town,’ wrote Ernest Marwick, a Kirkwall bookshop assistant, in the Orkney Herald. ‘Reception on Wednesday was first-class and we watched entranced even that incredible opening programme, a discussion on thumb-sucking. We felt then that there was more than an element of truth in the old man’s comment, “Soon there’ll no’ be a sock mended in the country.”’ Orkney was well outside Meldrum’s theoretical range but the lack of trees on the islands, and the flat terrain, aided reception. ‘Later in the week when the screen yielded nothing but a fluorescent blizzard,’ Marwick cautioned, ‘we felt that after all television to Orkney is indeed in the thumb-sucking stage.’84

  Some doubting Thomases at the Pier Head in Stromness, where old men gathered to gossip and set the world to rights, thought that Orkney’s supposed ‘viewers’ were telling fibs. The owner of the local radio shop was moved to put photographs of TV sets in action in his window. ‘There is a stir of wonder at the Pier Head these days because a new phenomenon of this mighty scientific age has reached Stromness,’ reported another Herald columnist. ‘After water-closets, telephones and concrete streets has come Television, and it has conquered nearly all hearts … Those from the Pier Head who managed to insinuate themselves into the houses where TV was installed saw wonders surpassing all they had ever imagined … But perhaps the word “saw” had better be qualified. Sometimes, in the midst of his mirth Wilfred Pickles disintegrated. Sometimes the lovely ladies reading the news were pelted with violent all-obliterating hail-storms. Sometimes, especially when a car passed, the footballers were swept clean from the screen in a flash of white light …’85

  These words were written by a 34-year-old poet, George Mackay Brown, who was always wary of new technology. Although he rarely left Orkney, he had by chance seen the first day of television in the lowlands. As a mature student at Newbattle Abbey College in Midlothian, Brown had taken a day trip to Dalkeith with a friend one spring morning in March 1952. Walking up the high street, they noticed a small crowd standing in the lobby of a radio dealer’s. Brown made his way to the front and saw a screen on which a doctor was explaining rheumatism to a woman patient. ‘“Man, man,” said an old man at my elbow, “It’s wonderful, is it no? Soon they’ll be able to see into your very mind,”’ Brown told his Herald readers. ‘It was a horrible thought.’

  All that week, Brown saw radio dealers’ vans running along the streets of Dalkeith bringing television to miners’ houses. The next Saturday evening he went to Newbattle’s local pub, the Justinlees tavern, and was astonished to see his local MP, Jo Grimond, in a roundtable discussion on TV. As a heavy drinker, Brown was especially interested in television’s effect on pubs and their bar receipts. Some miners, he noted, drank only a pint in front of the TV, hypnotised ‘by the flickering articulate shadows’, while others drank twice as fast. He and his friends did not dare ask for a set to be installed in college ‘for we knew instinctively how those ancient austere walls would have disapproved’. In his often ill-tempered, jeremiadic column in the Herald, Brown worried about what this ‘startling box of tricks’ would do to the islands when it arrived.86

  While his local MP hoped that television might keep at home those young people who would otherwise leave, Brown feared that television would give them a taste for the cities, and cut islanders off from their common traditions, particularly the storytelling culture carried over by the Norsemen a thousand years before. His friend, Ernest Marwick, agreed that Orkney’s rich tradition of improvised entertainment and house-to-house visiting was imperilled. He worried that children’s imaginations would become ‘entirely identified with flickering, over-heated vacuities’.87

  Orcadians gave short shrift to these Cassandras. Unlike other remote parts of Scotland, two brakes on the relentless progress of television were largely absent: the strictest forms of Presbyterianism had not taken hold, and most islanders did not speak Gaelic as they did in the Western Isles. Brown had been present at the official ceremonial switching on of electricity in Stromness in 1947 and he always feared that, having leapfrogged the industrial revolution and come late to the modern age, Orcadians would be greedy for new gadgetry. He was right. They swiftly embraced television, especially during the winter when it was dark for all but six hours, although the reception was crackly and sometimes interrupted by interference from Russian TV.

  Then, in January 1959, came the opening of Orkney’s own TV mast on the site of a former radar station at Netherbutton. Hundreds of second-hand sets from the south were unloaded daily by plane at Grimsetter airfield as Orcadians prepared themselves excitedly for clear pictures. One farmer tol
d the Herald that before television, the cold nights used to keep visitors away and his wife would end up talking so much he was forced to pretend he was asleep. Now they had brought pails and a grinding stone into the living room so they could prepare food for their hens and calves while watching TV. As elsewhere, television in Orkney did not obliterate other activities – borrowings from the county library reaching record levels in 195988 – but it surely hastened the death, two years later, of the hundred-year-old Orkney Herald.

  The relentless advance of the TV signal meant that Gilbert Harding, from his stuccoed terraced house near the Brighton seafront, could now get three channels: the BBC from Crystal Palace, Southern Television from the Isle of Wight and Anglia from Mendlesham. His housekeeper, Joan Smith, would change the stations for him frequently. For a man who professed antipathy to the medium, he watched a lot of it. Most evenings he would sit, drink and watch TV, wearing only a dressing gown and pyjamas while his colleagues wore dinner jackets on screen. He especially liked westerns and quiz shows and, having a low opinion of modern schooling, became exasperated when a contestant couldn’t answer simple questions: ‘I knew that when I was ten!’89

  Brian Masters, a friend of Harding’s, said that he would carry on one-way discussions with people on the television and would ‘get quite violent about it’ – on one occasion arguing intensely with the Tonight presenter Cliff Michelmore on screen and then phoning him up to continue the argument for real. Harding would cook meals for himself and his housekeeper, starting to prepare these before the evening’s viewing began and then sitting himself down in a chair in the hallway so that he could watch the BBC on the living-room set and ITV on the dining-room set, slipping back to the kitchen during a boring bit or an ad break. Often the food was not ready to eat until television had closed down for the night.90