Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  By now Harding had been displaced as the most recognisable face on television by a man he likened to ‘obsequious granite’: the BBC’s ever-present anchorman, Richard Dimbleby. His voice’s gentle ascension and declension was heard on all important state occasions, issuing from somewhere above The Mall or Horse Guards Parade, or the soundproofed commentators’ box high up in the triforium at Westminster Abbey. From here he produced an unremitting rivulet of words, with never an ‘er’ or ‘erm’ to separate them, the result of being well prepared, speaking slowly and making pauses seem pregnant with intention and meaning. On general election nights, he kept up a non-stop salvo of comment, combining Reithian authority with boyish enjoyment. And he was watched by one in four adults every Monday night on Panorama, ‘the weekly window on the world’. When this programme’s reporter James Mossman did a piece on the City, warning small investors of the risks of high share prices by showing them a picture of a high window (‘all the better to throw yourself out of, my dear’), and the next day stock market shares tumbled after a wave of selling orders, the newspapers described it as ‘Dimbleby’s dip’.91

  Like Harding, Dimbleby was a devoted viewer. While he rationed his children’s viewing and worried about it damaging family life, at home in his Sussex farmhouse he watched Phil Silvers, Perry Mason and the Black and White Minstrel Show without fail, explaining feebly that doing so was a professional duty. According to his son Jonathan, when he watched current affairs programmes ‘he kept up a barrage of critical comment like a football manager barracking the opposing team … “Who’s that nincompoop masquerading as an interviewer?”, “Get camera one in close, for God’s sake” …’ Dimbleby had his own critics, particularly of his panegyric, neo-Gothic style of commentary on royal occasions, with that King James Bible feel for rhythm and cadence, exemplified by his famous sentence in 1953: ‘The moment of the Queen’s crowning is come.’ Even before the coronation, the Sunday Express filled a page with letters for and against him, the againsts calling him a ‘cat-been-at-the cream’ and a ‘banana-oil exuding character’.92

  Mostly, though, Dimbleby was trusted and treasured. A flawless filibusterer, he was made for the unpredictability of live television, and his fifty-five minutes of shameless padding when Princess Margaret was late reaching the Royal Yacht Britannia after her wedding in May 1960 showed a master at work. He refused to use the newfangled ‘teleprompter’, regarding it as a device that would cut him off from his viewers. Instead he relied on notes scribbled on his left hand or shirt cuff, effortlessly stretching or contracting his links to order and fingering his spectacles or touching his ear to cue up the film. His fleshy face and ripened voice, the way he put his hands in his suit jacket pockets to conceal his girth, his rolling chuckle, his gentle sparring with the Panorama camera crew – all had a calming effect. The Daily Sketch called him ‘an institution of the television age, a comfortable, rotund embodiment of security and promise, the Town Crier of the Telly whose very appearance seems to bring assurance that it’s 8.25 and all’s well’.93

  While Dimbleby assumed the role of national town crier, Harding was no longer as gripping a personality as he once was. ‘Only hunger will drive me to take part in panel games again,’ he had pledged, rashly and wrongly, in 1955. Harding’s rudeness on What’s My Line? tailed off slightly, partly because he had cut down on drinking as his health deteriorated. When he appeared on Face to Face on 18 September 1960, his fame was only the equal of his interviewer, who had also risen rapidly to prominence in a medium he mistrusted. John Freeman did not normally watch TV but he had recently been in hospital and, immobile and unable to read, had been a captive audience. ‘I emerged from the long vigil driven half mad with irrational frustration and resentment directed, perhaps unreasonably, at some of the nation’s best-loved figures,’ he wrote in the New Statesman that May. ‘I cannot help feeling depressed and alarmed by the utter triviality of ninetenths of the flood of pictures which are so earnestly and expensively hurled at us.’

  On Face to Face, Freeman’s face was unseen. Kingsley Martin, his editor at the New Statesman, called him ‘the only man who made himself famous by showing the public his backside’,94 although, with the camera pointing over his shoulder, he actually showed them just the back of his head. When people recognised Freeman on London buses, an experience he hated, it was his voice they registered.

  The Face to Face interview with Harding is remembered for one moment – a famous few seconds to which, when the programme’s producer, Hugh Burnett, died in December 2011, all his obituaries referred. As Harding slumped slightly in his chair, breathing heavily, the camera homed in on his sad, pouchy face, sweating as usual under the arc lights. Burnett was constantly urging his cameramen to go in tighter, believing, as the ancient Greeks did, that the face was the mirror of the soul, that ‘the twitch of a muscle in the corner of a mouth gives no room for compromise or manoeuvre’. Freeman then asked Harding if he had ever been in the presence of a dead person. Harding’s face panicked, rather like that infinitesimal flicker of doubt that revealed a facecrime in 1984, and he choked out, ‘Yes. Only once’, while his shaking hands flicked at his cigarette lighter. Harding’s mother, to whom he was very close and who had once said of television that ‘it seems such a silly thing to make him famous’, had died a few weeks earlier.95

  Monday’s newspapers accused Freeman of humiliating Harding. Viewers complained about him ‘sweating under a police interrogation’ and ‘positively frying under the lamps’, and criticised the merciless close-ups. ‘I would not be surprised to see the lights go up and find an S.S. man with rubber hose standing in the corner,’ said one viewer. ‘A little less menacing, please.’ Another described Freeman as ‘professionally impertinent’ and said it had been ‘like watching a doctor probe a wound’.96

  Thus was the folk memory of the Harding interview swiftly entrenched, with Harding as the repressed Englishman who, like a character in a Rattigan play, had feeling finally wheedled out of him. But there was no need for wheedling; Harding had been painfully direct right from the start of the interview, admitting he was profoundly unhappy because ‘there’s not much point asking people whether they’re coal heavers from Wigan or chimney sweepers from Stoke on Trent’. He had long been a fan of Face to Face. After watching the first episode, an interview with the Nuremberg judge Lord Birkett, he rushed to Lime Grove from his West End flat to offer his congratulations. Nor was his own appearance on the programme a live ambush as many thought. The BBC had acquired its first Ampex video recorder two years earlier and this episode of Face to Face was pre-recorded, because Harding was appearing live earlier that evening on What’s My Line? Indeed, the interview had been trailed on the cover of that week’s Radio Times with some of its key lines printed inside next to the TV listing.97 Harding had seen and approved the programme beforehand.

  Freeman did not make Harding cry, as the folk memory insists he did – unless you define weeping, as some scientists do, as anything from a lump in the throat upwards. Nor, even if he had cried, would he have been the first person to do so on television. Tears were fairly common on Ask Pickles, which one critic described as ‘embarrassing in its encouragement of public cuddling as a national characteristic’, and the ‘glycerine grief’ of This is Your Life was a regular source of press opprobrium. On 17 February 1958, the actress Anna Neagle had cried on This is Your Life – after being shown a clip of Jack Buchanan, a close friend who had died the previous year – and the panicked director kept the scene in long shot, while Eamonn Andrews awkwardly patted Neagle’s head. The next week’s newspapers called the show a ‘revolting emetic’, a ‘stomach-heaving pie’, a ‘subtly disgusting programme’ and ‘the cruel keyhole’.98

  But people were less shocked by Harding’s ‘tears’ than by his announcing straightforwardly that he ‘should be very glad to be dead’. The Daily Express made no mention of him crying but printed a screen capture with the headline: ‘The very moment he said it.’ Suicide was about to b
e decriminalised in the 1961 Suicide Act, but strong religious and moral objections to it remained. ‘If a man wants to be dead he has every right to say so, shouting it from the grave tops,’ wrote the journalist Merrick Winn, defending him. ‘I question only Mr Harding’s knowledge of human psychology. No man, sane, can ever want to be dead, however much he thinks he does … So long may he live.’99

  Eight weeks later, Harding was crossing the pavement opposite Broadcasting House after recording a radio programme, when he collapsed. ‘Only his chauffeur was with him,’ said The Times, seemingly eager to turn Harding’s death into an allegory about the ultimate loneliness of fame. In fact he had fallen into the arms of Christopher Saltmarshe, a BBC producer and old friend from Cambridge, and a group of home-wending office workers milled around as his driver rushed to get his oxygen cylinder from the car. Alice Capan, a charwoman entering Portland Place, also spotted him. ‘Oh look! It’s Gilbert Harding!’ she said to her two workmates, just as Harding, holding an inhaler, fell to the floor.100

  Despite the suddenness, for only the previous Sunday he had appeared live on What’s My Line?, Harding’s death was not a great shock. He had long seemed mortal. Throughout the 1950s, newspaper readers were familiar with the same story appearing in euphemistic form: ‘The BBC announced last night that Mr Gilbert Harding, on advice from his doctors, has “sorrowfully been compelled to cancel his immediate engagements for sound and television broadcasting” … Mr Gilbert Harding has been ordered by his doctor to remain in bed for an indefinite period …’ Many of the Harding obituaries anticipated that his memory would fade as quickly as a television set ticked away its heat. ‘I fear that Yorick will survive only as a legend,’ wrote his friend, the novelist Compton Mackenzie, while the TV cook Fanny Cradock called him ‘a twentieth-century Johnson who lacked a Boswell’.101

  The waters did seem to close quickly over Harding’s fame. Newspapers published an appeal for contributions from friends and admirers for a book on him, but four months later they had received fewer than forty letters. He seemed to belong to the era of transient live television that was now coming to an end. As Brian Masters pointed out, part of the viewers’ excitement at What’s My Line? had been that they thought they were seeing a real person in the raw, unmediated by direction or autocue.102 A superb impromptu speaker with a natural feel for the musicality of a sentence, his words had come alive on air but had no afterlife. He had published few words of note other than dictated newspaper and magazine columns and two mostly ghostwritten memoirs.

  The death of Richard Dimbleby resonated far more with viewers. After his son, David, revealed in November 1965 that his father had cancer, 7,000 people wrote to him in hospital, including several who feared they might have cancer themselves and had now been emboldened to face their doctors. A Berkshire road worker wrote to say, ‘Hope you get better soon, Mr Dimbleby – see you down my road one of these days.’ When he died on 22 December, one of the letters received by his family said, ‘It is with tears in my eyes that I learn tonight of Richard Dimbleby’s death. It is as though a part of England itself had gone.’103

  By then Harding was mostly forgotten. Madame Tussaud’s, which had once displayed his effigy with the caption ‘The Most Famous Man in Britain’, had melted it down. The Brighton Wax Museum also melted down their Gilbert Harding in 1963; according to his biographer, although this sounds rather too neat, it was recycled to make a model of Christine Keeler. But as it turned out, Harding’s contemporaries were too pessimistic about his name being writ on water. While the minor authors or Oxbridge dons to whose number he might have belonged survive only as library catalogue entries or unnoticed portraits in college halls, his memory endures, though only a few snatches of his face and voice remain. As someone whose fame was limited quite precisely to the 1950s, his photograph was used in the 1990s in an experiment to assess the long-term face and name recognition of Alzheimer’s patients.104

  In 1961, the MP for Salford East, Frank Allaun, revealed that shortly before he died, Harding, in one of those random acts of kindness that made his grouchiness more affecting, had paid for eight televisions for housebound elderly people in his constituency. After ensuring the televisions were installed, Allaun had received effusive thank-you letters: ‘I usually go to bed at 9 o’clock because I am alone, but last night I stayed up until 12 o’clock.’ ‘This is to tell you I will not have another lonely winter … I cannot thank you enough for the wonderful present I have received.’ ‘What great happiness and pleasure it will bring me in my lonely hours … I am delighted.’105 Allaun was speaking in a House of Commons debate about whether to allow TV licence waivers for pensioners – a concession finally granted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, although only for those over seventy-five, thirty-nine years later.

  A television set was now within most people’s means. A new sight in the urban landscape was the unwanted telly left on the local tip or on a roadside skip, as affluent viewers upgraded to bigger and sleeker models. At the end of 1960 a long-agreed change on the cathode ray tube production lines made the standard television set nineteen inches wide. ‘This was the most expensive two inches in the industry’s history,’ wrote the Economist, ‘for the only way to dispose of nearly one and a half million sets with seventeen-inch screens was by virtually giving them away.’ In August 1961, a boy in Luton bought two seventeen-inch televisions for a shilling and a penny the pair.106 Older sets were reconditioned as ‘shilling in the slot’ televisions with a meter attached, an expensive way of watching TV that appealed to poor people because it did not require a deposit or leave them in debt.

  Television had been feared as a dazzling, enticing medium liable to produce ‘telemania’. But more detailed research suggested, as Geoffrey Gorer put it, that it acted as ‘a mechanical tranquilliser’, inducing only a light hypnosis. Gorer’s interviewees said they bought televisions for relaxation, ‘to alleviate loneliness or immobility’ or as ‘a device for having their grandchildren around them’. Even children failed to be spellbound. According to the Nuffield study, viewing soon became ‘a habit on which the child fell back when nothing more interesting was available’. Iona and Peter Opie concluded that television had only a ‘superficial effect’ on street rhymes, chants and games, and that it was ‘remarkable how little the new arts have affected child lore’.107

  Tom Harrisson, while in Bolton, noted disapprovingly the habit of what he called ‘negative viewing’, simply having the television on, comparable to the housewife’s pre-war habit of ‘keeping the radio on all day’. But he still felt that people overestimated television’s influence. Its greatest impact among ‘culturally unsophisticated’ Lancashire people was in ‘presenting something which they have been doubtful, suspicious about, as if it was a fait accompli, an ordinary accepted part of respectable thinking and opinion, controversial or otherwise. The moment a thing has got on to TV, it exists in another level of reality.’ The best example of this, he felt, had been the growth in prestige of the painter L. S. Lowry after he appeared on TV. Conversely, a television programme on art galleries in Lancashire ‘might almost incidentally shatter Bolton’s complacency about its dreadful collection’.108

  For Frank Allaun, TV was a cheap way for his poorer constituents to press their faces up against the glass, like Victorian urchins, and experience remotely the new world of consumer affluence. He told the Commons that the opening and closing credit shots of Coronation Street were filmed in his constituency: in Archie Street, in the congested district of Ordsall alongside the Manchester Ship Canal. There were Coronation Streets in every town in the north, he said, in a far worse state than the one on television, with houses without hot water, inside toilets or damp courses. But many had TVs – now an everyday luxury, a way for the poorest in the country to arrive in the modern era on the cheap and view its new abundance from the edges. The BBC producer Tom Sloan had a similar insight one wet Sunday in 1961, after driving up to Liverpool to do an outside broadcast. ‘For the
first time in my life, I saw the industrial north of England, the rows of terraced houses, fronting on to the cobbled roads, glistening in the rain,’ he said. ‘The sheer ghastliness of it all was overpowering, but on the roof of every house, there was a television aerial. Antennae reaching for escape to another world. And, heaven knows, why not?’109

  5

  THE INVISIBLE FOCUS OF A MILLION EYES

  There was life before Coronation Street, but it didn’t add up to much.

  Russell Harty1

  One Monday evening in May 1961, a calamitous power cut plunged a whole swathe of south-east England into darkness. The lights went out all over London, Surrey, Kent and Sussex, in the biggest failure the National Grid had yet known. For two and a half hours, chaos reigned. Cars piled up at intersections when traffic lights stopped working, trains stopped when the signals stalled, Scotland Yard was flooded with calls from misbehaving burglar alarms, planes at Gatwick were grounded as the runways blacked out, and at a blind people’s rally in Kent, the blind had to guide the sighted out of the building. When the surge of current returned around midnight, two television sets in Southend Road, Beckenham exploded and burst into flames. The Electricity Board blamed the short circuit on a huge increase of demand in Wimbledon at 9.27 p.m., just after the end credits had rolled on that week’s episode of ITV’s western series Wagon Train.

  Wagon Train was one of the most popular shows on TV, and that evening the BBC was showing Time Remembered, a play by the absurdist French dramatist Jean Anouilh, thus siphoning even fewer viewers away from ITV than usual. Westerns like Wagon Train, Laramie, Maverick, Bonanza and Rawhide were some of the most popular programmes on TV, probably because they were definitively televisual. Even young children could work out what was happening when, either through youthful incomprehension or the bad acoustics of their TV sets, the dialogue went over their heads. Heroes were always clean-shaven, villains always moustachioed and scarred. Those shot from behind would always throw back their shoulders and jerk up their heads; a shot from the front always occasioned an instant clasp of the stomach. ‘Virtually every day,’ recalled Griff Rhys Jones, seven years old in 1961, ‘we sat in front of the black-and-white television in the brown, shiny Bakelite box with an armoury of “Lone-Star” cap-revolvers and Winchester repeater rifles close by on the sofa, in order to shoot down the “baddies”.’2 Gunfire crackle from the TV rang out incessantly in Britain’s living rooms, especially since the guns were always so badly aimed, hundreds of shots being fired before anyone was even hit.