by Joe Moran
The real Telstar, however, was the photogenic sea stack itself: 450 feet of Orcadian sandstone almost exactly level, as Brasher kept pointing out, with London’s new Post Office Tower, bringing the mingled terror and pleasure of the Kantian sublime to BBC1. A sailor wrote to the Radio Times to say that he had sailed past the Old Man on many occasions, but it took this broadcast to reveal to him the immensity of the cliff faces. It looked spectacular on the Saturday night, floodlit with the arc lights against the swirling Atlantic waves, while the climbers bivouacked on a ledge. ‘I suspect that the Old Man of Hoy broadcast will never be superseded as the perfect live broadcast,’ wrote another of the climbers, Chris Bonington. ‘It had every ingredient – a perfect, very obvious summit, a scale which was also perfect, since the climbers clinging to the tower were dwarfed by its size, yet were not totally lost in its immensity.’ Fifteen million people saw them reach the summit late on Sunday afternoon. One viewer said that the pictures were so clear they gave him vertigo.47
The broadcast ended with an abseil down to the bottom by Bonington, a dramatic single plunge because of the overhang at the top of the stack, his frame silhouetted against the sky. ‘Once upon a time, you had to go all the way to Everest to earn public acclaim,’ reflected Patey with typical self-deprecation. ‘Now, you need only appear on television hanging upside down from the end of a rope. In more ancient times, the same sort of enthusiasm was aroused by public hangings.’ By creating an event that could not easily be outdone, though, the BBC ensured that climbing would not become a fixture in the schedules. The first colour TV climb, of the Anglesey cliffs on 30 August 1970, was an anticlimax, not helped by being on what was traditionally the worst viewing weekend of the year, the August bank holiday, for which the BBC’s head of drama, Sydney Newman, always used to save what he called ‘the real dogs’ among its output of plays.48 As so often in the history of television watching, the climbing of the Old Man of Hoy had resonated with viewers through a strange chemistry that was unique and unrepeatable.
‘The conceit of this long-haired brigade is appalling,’ complained one Brighton viewer. ‘The Beatles have become an embarrassment to Britain,’ agreed Dorothy Roberts in Great Yarmouth. ‘Even my fifteen-year-old son admits they are tripe now.’ On Boxing Day 1967, around 14 million people had watched, or at least started to watch, Magical Mystery Tour, billed anodynely in the listings as a ‘coach trip by the Beatles around the West Country’. Given its plum place in the Christmas schedules, at 8.35 p.m. just after a Petula Clark special, they could not have anticipated what they saw, a faux new wave film based on self-indulgent improvisations. The phone calls began before the programme ended, dismissing it as ‘rubbish’ and ‘piffle’, or simply asking, ‘What was it all about?’ ‘They must have made it up as they went along,’ said a pensioner from Chelsea, perceptively. ‘They needn’t have bothered for me.’49
The reaction to Magical Mystery Tour supported Kenneth Adam’s findings about British viewers, in the sense that its audience seemed most irritated not by the brief striptease scene or the reference to naughty girls and knickers in the song ‘I Am A Walrus’ to which Mary Whitehouse had objected, but by the wilfully boring and obscure. ‘We tried to present something different for the viewers, but according to the newspapers it did not come off,’ said Paul McCartney, graciously, on David Frost’s chat show on 27 December. ‘Was it really as bad as all that? Some people must have liked it, surely.’ A few did – like Garth and Carol Tucker from London W4, who wrote to the Listener to say how pleased they were that TV, normally an insipid medium, had shown some bite. They placed the film ‘within the anarchist/surrealistic tradition that stretches back to Vigo and early Buñuel’.50
The Tuckers would have been dismayed at some further evidence that television and its viewers were addicted to linear narrative and suspicious of the avant-garde. The most ambitious serialisation the BBC had ever undertaken, The Forsyte Saga, had started to be shown on Saturday nights on BBC2 from January 1967, which at the time was only available to 8 million viewers. Many people on Britain’s fringes could still not get the new channel; others did not want or could not afford the new 625-line set necessary to receive it. ‘My own small gesture will be to cancel the regular order for the Radio Times,’ wrote a disenfranchised Galsworthy fan, Sigrid Morden, from Montacute Road, Catford. But the saga did succeed in attracting a new audience to BBC2, viewing figures growing at a rate of 200,000 a week and eventually reaching 6 million, as well as dramatically hiking the sales of Galsworthy’s novels. Malcolm Muggeridge deplored the new trend, which he was sure Galsworthy would have hated, of putting colour photographs of the actors from the series on the covers of the Penguin paperbacks.51
But it was only in September 1968, when the series began a re-run on BBC1 on Sunday nights, that its popularity reached critical mass, particularly among those viewers who felt alienated from the radical bohemianism of the decade. ‘We are tired of having a guilty conscience if we are luckier than our neighbours, and of trying to take the burdens of Vietnam and Biafra on our shoulders,’ wrote Mrs A. Boydell, fastening on the saga as a still point in a turbulent world. ‘Above all, we are sick of the sight and sound of scruffy teenagers and students and kitchen sink drama!’ An antiques dealer interviewed for BBC1’s Talkback, gesturing to a series of art deco statues which he could not have given away a year earlier but which were now worth about £30 each, thought the saga had been ‘tremendously effective in conjuring up the terrible disease of nostalgia’.52
There was a further stark reminder that not every TV viewer felt at home amid the liberal currents of the time: when Soames Forsyte raped his wife Irene after she had appeared to be unfaithful to him, Late Night Line-Up canvassed the opinion of Oxford Street shoppers and discovered that fifty-four per cent supported Soames. But perhaps this figure is slightly less shocking when one considers that Soames had by then become an intricate, many-sided character, whose very unlovability earned him sympathy from viewers because he seemed aware of it yet powerless to change. Alan Hewitt, a civil servant, reflected shrewdly that Soames ‘believed in the sanctity of contract; he was an obsessional type of character, which is why he was drawn to the law, which always has an intellectual answer … He’s got no flair for human relationships at all, I would say, wouldn’t you?’53
The most repeated fact about The Forsyte Saga is that it forced vicars to abandon Evensong. This fear about the decline of Sunday churchgoing had been voiced since television emerged as a mass medium. A survey conducted among Methodist ministers in 1952 suggested that, while most Sunday services ended before the evening’s television began, congregations were increasingly unenthusiastic about after-service activities if these prevented them getting home in time to watch it. One minister complained that television was turning worshippers into clock-watchers and if he dared to go overtime in the Sunday evening service there was a mass flit during the final hymn. ‘It’s no use hiding the fact that Sunday Night at the London Palladium is more popular than going to church on a cold winter’s night,’ said a Woking vicar after the start of ITV, explaining why he had moved Evensong half an hour back. By the mid 1960s, many other vicars had shifted Evensong to an earlier time so their parishioners could be home in time to watch the Sunday night film.54
Churchgoing had been declining since the end of the Victorian era, and Evensong had long been especially endangered because it was intended for two dwindling groups, farmworkers and servants (which was why the upper and middle classes had their main meal early on Sunday afternoon, so that their servants could attend). The dramatic fall in religious observance from the late 1950s onwards, both in adult churchgoing and children’s attendance at Sunday School, was often blamed on television – not an argument heard so much in America, where the medium was even more entrenched but where about half the population still attended church regularly. Mary Whitehouse’s campaign to clean up TV was underpinned by her belief that Britain was a Christian country and should have its values reflect
ed on its televisions, combined with a fear that churchgoing was giving way to television viewing.
There was supposed to be no television on Sundays between 6 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. to encourage church attendance, but a blind eye was turned so long as the programmes shown were religious. White-house had no objection to the congregational, non-denominational hymn singing of Songs of Praise, introduced pragmatically by the BBC in 1961 to make use of outside broadcast units lying idle after filming football games on Saturday afternoons. But she was dismayed at the BBC’s acknowledgement in this slot of the existence of humanists and the kind of radical, questioning theology promoted by Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, and his suffragan John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich. One of the BBC’s ‘God Slot’ programmes helped to inspire the Clean Up TV campaign: Meeting Point, so-called because it sought ‘to bring together those who believe that man is a spiritual being and those who believe no such thing’. Its episode on 8 March 1964, about which Whitehouse heard secondhand from her pupils, had a panel of experts debating the morality of premarital sex. Meeting Point was, she wrote, ‘a classic example of the way in which the BBC, with its penchant for “South Bank” religion, was allowing itself to be used as a launching platform for the “new morality”’.55
The threat to Evensong posed by The Forsyte Saga was part of these wider battles. Not even the Forsytes, in fact, could kill it off for good. Many vicars simply changed the time of the service, as they had done before for other programmes. The Times ran a correspondence from clergymen, some arguing that the BBC should alter the schedules ‘to satisfy those who wish to follow their devotions to both God and the Forsytes’, and others insisting that ‘the important thing is that people should worship God, not that they should worship Him at 6.30 p.m.’. The decline of Evensong had a special undercurrent of pathos because it was a liturgically lyrical ritual with a plangent, evocative name and valedictory associations with twilight and nightfall. ‘The familiar Sunday evening ritual in parish churches, with a few gathering to sing the evening hymns, and to hear again the prayer to Lighten Our Darkness – that was now over,’ wrote A. N. Wilson about the ‘defining moment’ of The Forsyte Saga.56
The Sunday night period drama, from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey, which the historian Simon Schama would later accuse of ‘servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia’, came to acquire that same sense of valediction, a raking over of the dying embers of the weekend, as Evensong. Sunday evening, as a Sabbatarian hangover from church-going and pub opening hours, was the night when people were most likely to stay in, and they wanted to watch something calming and cheering before work and school in the morning. In a column in the Church Times, Ronald Blythe blamed the demise of Evensong on ‘the best television of the week, plus, I used to suspect, some connivance by the clergy to rid themselves of this service’.57
As for that mythical era, ‘the 1960s’, most people lived it vicariously through the TV screen. In July 1969, Bernard Davies, a tutor at Chorley College of Education, watched Top of the Pops in a shabby, unpainted docklands youth club by the Leeds–Liverpool canal. ‘On the screen, swaying bodies, gay and fashionable clothes, space-age décor, music to match,’ he wrote. ‘The weekly ritual confirmation of youth’s popular image. Freedom, wealth, confidence, unconventionality – all unmistakeably symbolised.’ Meanwhile, all around him, he saw ‘a microcosm of Lancashire’s imprisoned youth’, sitting in shapeless sweaters and jeans, their faces drawn and undernourished. In these places which the affluent society had not reached, the revolution was watched on television.58
Ronald Blythe’s 1969 book, Akenfield, suggested that the counterculture had also bypassed the English village but that television was changing it in slower and subtler ways. Blythe had spent several months riding round the Suffolk village of Charsfield and its environs on a Raleigh bike, talking to three generations of villagers and transcribing their oral histories. These interviews included familiar laments about viewers hiding away in their houses: the local branch secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers worried that television kept men away from union meetings, and the Women’s Institute president noted that the attractions of television were making it difficult to attract new members, and that when they had a quiz the teams could always identify commercials (which she could not, being unfamiliar with ITV).
But television was having more positive effects among the more taciturn gravediggers and farmworkers, ‘breaking down their silences’ and getting them ‘accustomed to the idea of dialogue’. Farm-minders who had never left the parish boundaries saw the wider world opened up to them nightly on television. Derek Warren, a 29-year-old ploughman, had not been to a pub for six years, preferring to watch television with his wife, enjoying travel programmes about ‘the tribes of people faraway’. ‘The big beer-drinking days are gone,’ Francis Lambert, a 25-year-old forge worker, agreed. ‘They drank because there wasn’t any television. Their houses were so boring, they were glad to get to the pub.’ Lambert liked TV drama, and was always on the lookout for scenes allowing him to indulge his professional interest. ‘You may not have noticed, but telly plays are full of wonderful ornamental ironwork,’ he told Blythe. ‘There was this programme the other day about the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution which showed a pair of gates. Marvellous, they were.’59
Although living only just outside London, the author J. G. Ballard was another viewer watching the set detached from the zeitgeist. In 1964 he had been widowed when his wife died suddenly of pneumonia while on a family holiday in Spain, and he was left bringing up three young children on his own in a semi-detached house in the west London suburb of Shepperton. Watching television was a habit that could fit easily into his disjointed routines as an author and single parent, a short story or book chapter being dashed off ‘in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash, and watching Blue Peter’.60
Arriving in postwar England from Shanghai as a teenager, Ballard found the country decrepit and backward-looking. He watched TV with his parents for the first time in Manchester around 1951, when the screen seemed to be ‘about the size of a light bulb’. In his first published short story, ‘Escapement’ (1956), the central character discovers to his horror that he is living out his life in the same, endless fifteen-minute time loop, in which various dull programmes repeat themselves on his television, including a panel game, modelled on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, in which three professors and a chorus girl try to guess the origins of a Roman pot while the question master, ‘a suave-voiced Oxford don’, makes feeble puns.61 Ballard welcomed the fresh air of ITV just as he embraced what he saw as other belated arrivals of Americanised modernity like motorway flyovers and airports.
Ballard’s youngest child, Bea, noted that her father was unusual in that, unlike her friends’ parents, he did not ration his children’s television watching, and in the school holidays the Ballards became aficionados of daytime soaps and magazine shows, before all gathering round the television in the evening, after homework, to watch Dad’s Army or Steptoe and Son. Ballard thought Steve McGarrett in Hawaii Five-O (‘Book ’em, Danno, murder one!’) was the epitome of cool, partly because he drove a 1968 Mercury Park Lane Brougham, and he had always admired the kind of powerful, streamlined American cars he first saw in Shanghai, while himself only ever driving mid-range family saloons.62
As often with Ballard, this bathetic life in front of the television was at odds with the apocalyptic tone of his fiction, which tended to take an acknowledged condition of modern life, such as the television-watching habit, and extrapolate it into a cultural pathology. In his 1972 short story, ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’, Ballard described a near future in which the world’s population, its appetite whetted by live broadcasts from Vietnam, sits supine in front of the television as it travels back in time to show the Battle of Waterloo or John F. Kennedy’s assassination, complete with real deaths. Ballard’s own life in front of the set was more prosaic. ‘The
1960s,’ he wrote later, ‘were an exciting decade that I watched on television.’63
Given his laissez-faire and catholic approach to television viewing, and his professional interest in sci-fi, it seems likely that Ballard would have stayed up with his children late into the night for the televisual event of the decade’s end, the moon landing. Viewers had already watched a full-scale dress rehearsal of this event just before Christmas 1968, when the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to escape earth’s gravity, presented twenty-minute broadcasts at about 1.30 p.m. British time. The first, on 22 December, showed the astronaut Neil Anders clowning around with a toothbrush, turning weightlessness into a party game, and, also for the first time in history, a glimpse of the earth from interplanetary space, as James Lovell pointed his cigar-box sized camera out of the cabin window. Sadly the telephoto lens failed to work, turning the earth into a tiny blob of light, resembling a distant bicycle headlight on a dark road.
The next day, though, viewers could clearly see the earth from 175,000 miles away. Britain was in the shaded area, shrouded in cloud. Raymond Williams, watching in his cottage at Hardwick, a village just outside Cambridge, considered it ‘a new way of seeing’ and compared it to the revolving earth that had been BBC1’s channel ident since 1963. He saw ‘the north and west in ragged shadow; the bright Caribbean; the atlas shapes of the Americas … I glanced from its memory to the spinning globe of BBC-1 presentation: light, untextured, slightly oiled. It was necessary to remember that both were television.’64
