by Joe Moran
Earlier that year the editor of the Listener, Karl Miller, had invited Williams, a Cambridge English don, to write a monthly television column. Williams was a relative newcomer to the medium, having bought his first set only in 1964, but he soon made up for lost time. An old friend, David Holbrook, who would call up at the family cottage to find Williams watching something unlikely like a gymkhana, said, ‘I had the impression he watched for hours … he’d leave the set on while we tried to talk, and it just flowed over him.’ Williams was a prominent figure in the New Left, making the occasional foray to London to speak and protest about Vietnam. When at home, however, this private man, who often felt tired in the evenings, spent much of his time watching television.
With a background in adult education, Williams had long seen the value of TV and radio as ‘jet-propelled missionaries’,65 and in 1963 he had taken part in Anglia TV’s ‘Dawn University’, shown at quarter past seven each morning – a forerunner of the Open University that began eight years later. Like Richard Hoggart, he hoped that television might form part of what he called ‘the long revolution’ towards an educated, participatory, democratic culture in its blurring of the distinction between high and low culture, a division infected by the class system that had afflicted British society since at least the seventeenth century. Like Hoggart, he found television often fell short of these expectations.
Writing for the Listener gave Williams’s television viewing a raison d’être and a routine. He would buy the Radio Times and TV Times on Friday, highlight things to watch the next week and then write about them the following Sunday morning. There was little he would not watch and have an opinion about, from the Horse of the Year Show to Sportsnight with Coleman. A rare exception was the investiture of Prince Charles in July 1969, which, as a Welsh nationalist and republican, he boycotted. Staying in Wales at the time, he claimed that he forgot about it until the shops at Abergavenny began to close early, and was then too busy building a dry stone wall.66
Williams aimed to write as a normal viewer, watching television programmes blend into each other rather than, as most television reviewers did, seeing them as discrete entities like plays or films. For he could see that television’s defining quality was its surreal and jarring combinations, compounded in the case of the Apollo 8 broadcasts by the fact that the spacecraft reached the moon on Christmas Eve, and festive specials like Christmas Night with the Stars and Doddy for Christmas were interrupted by ticker-tape summaries, moving across the bottom of the screen, informing viewers that the astronauts were now in orbit or were having a sleep. Patrick Moore, commenting on the Apollo mission for BBC television, complained of one especially egregious intrusion. On Christmas Eve, as he was commentating on the ‘critical burn’, a perilous moment in the mission when the astronauts had to fire the lunar module’s rocket to lock them into a closed path round the moon, the BBC interrupted him to go to the children’s programme Jackanory.67
No one was really sure how to turn these events into television: the contrast between the domesticity of the medium and the enormity of the achievement was too great. On 20 July 1969, the night of the moon landing, ITV started early at 6 p.m. with Man on the Moon, a variety and chat show with a revolving panel of guests, hosted by David Frost. ‘Hello and good evening on the night of the great adventure,’ Frost welcomed viewers. ‘The end of an incredible voyage and the beginning of what may be a whole new world for all of us. Because tonight man lands on the moon and steps into the age of Flash Gordon …’ There were some odd tonal shifts as Frost segued from interviewing the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell and the historian A. J. P. Taylor to introducing Cilla Black singing or Eric Sykes doing a sketch about a Mancunian bullfighter.
Outside broadcasts, from a London discotheque and a big screen in Trafalgar Square, gauged the public mood. A phone-in, an idea Frost had imported from New York, inspired a Mr Roberts of Eastbourne to call and ask if moondust could help him grow bigger pumpkins. BBC1, meanwhile, ran its normal programmes until 8.45 p.m., just half an hour before the touchdown, being reluctant to cut into Dr Finlay’s Casebook and The Black and White Minstrel Show. The BBC’s viewer panel judged BBC1’s moon-night Omnibus special, ‘So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?’, featuring Pink Floyd, the Dudley Moore trio and actors reading poetry, to be ‘a last minute shambles … a scrappy and boring “hotch-potch” that did scant justice to so historic an occasion’.68
This is probably why 14.5 million viewers watched ITV’s coverage of the touchdown compared with 12 million on the BBC, the first time ITV’s ratings had overtaken the BBC’s for a major news event. During the descent, ITV showed live pictures of the moon as seen from the top of ITN’s Kingsway HQ, along with a static shot of the team at Mission Control, with pre-prepared captions. At 9.18 p.m., the words ‘The Eagle has landed’ appeared on screen a couple of seconds before Neil Armstrong said them. The majority of viewers were back with James Burke and Patrick Moore on the BBC for the moonwalk and Britain’s first ever all-night TV broadcast – a hastily prepared one, since it had been supposed that the astronauts would sleep until commencing their moonwalk at around 6 a.m. GMT. Many children, and some adults, came down early next morning, switched on the television and found that they had missed it all.
Those who had heard about the schedule change in time saw, just before 4 a.m., Armstrong’s left boot leaving a blurred piece of ladder and stepping gingerly on to the moon. For Christopher Hitchens, a 21-year-old student at Balliol College, Oxford and member of the International Socialists, the moonwalk summed up his ambivalent feelings about America. ‘I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! … Who could forbear to cheer?’ he wrote later. ‘Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?’ Most British televisions were still 405-line black-and-white sets, giving off a smoky, lunar glare that added to the unearthliness of the images which, for sleep-deprived Britons, must have had the quality of a dream. At his home in Gospel Oak, north London, Michael Palin finally went to bed at 5 a.m., ‘with the image in my mind of men in spacesuits doing kangaroo hops and long, loping walks on the moon, in front of a strange spidery object, just like the images in my mind after reading Dan Dare in the old Eagle comics’.69
‘The frequent silences more moving than sound … the strange transparent ballet as the astronauts became “moon happy” …,’ wrote Joan Broadbent from Alcester to the Radio Times. ‘It was all exciting, of great interest, and wonderful.’ But the rock photographer Ray Stevenson, watching the moonwalk with his friend David Bowie and Bowie’s girlfriend, Angela Barnett, found it disappointing. ‘It was dull, black and white fuzzy footage of people walking slowly,’ he said. Bowie had just released a song called ‘Space Oddity’ and told IT magazine that he wanted it to be ‘the first anthem of the Moon, play it as they hoist the flag, and all that’, while also describing it as an antidote to ‘space fever’.70
Bowie claimed the song was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he saw three times when it was released in 1968, but the music critic Peter Doggett points out that it may also have been triggered by the BBC sci-fi drama Beach Head, broadcast on BBC2 in colour on 28 January 1969, just as Bowie was writing it. This was about a disillusioned space pilot, Commandant Tom Decker, who has a breakdown while push-buttoning his way through his thirty-seventh mission to an alien planet. The song, which has Major Tom looking back at earth from his tin-can space capsule and reflecting on its vulnerability, also suggests that Bowie saw the Apollo 8 broadcasts. Watching the moonwalk, he was amazed to see that the BBC had complied with his wishes and used ‘Space Oddity’ as background music. ‘I couldn’t believe they were doing that,’ he said. ‘Did they know what the song was about?’71
In order to make the expensive experiment of colour TV a success,
it had to become domesticated and routine. Viewers were urged not to put the saturation up too high on their colour sets, to go for the muted, restful tones in the middle rather than the dazzling colours at the top of the dial. ‘There are those who seem to feel that a streak of gold across the forehead of an actor, just under the line of his hair or wig, is a pleasing effect,’ wrote the musicologist Henry Raynor. ‘The accurate tuning of a colour set is an art which some people seem to be quite happy to leave unlearnt, as though colour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.’72
BBC1 and ITV agreed on a single date for the launching of a full colour service: Saturday 15 November 1969. That month, travellers at London Euston were treated to a ‘Colour Comes to Town’ exhibition which had been touring the country since starting at Croydon two years earlier – in order to show off colour TV and dispel some of the myths about it, including the nasty rumour that its radiation made men sterile. Programmes premiering in colour that weekend included Dixon of Dock Green, The Harry Secombe Show and Match of the Day – and Sunday’s Royal Variety performance, which showed comedian Ronnie Corbett nursing a black eye, more visible in colour, after walking into a door. The hundreds of viewers who rang the BBC and ITV to complain that their sets were still showing black-and-white pictures were gently informed that they needed to buy colour TVs.73
One of the highlights of that first colour weekend was the opening episode of a five minute stop-frame animation series conceived especially for colour, and inspired by its co-creator Oliver Postgate’s viewing of the moon expeditions. It told of a race of pink, mousey creatures with long noses, Clangers, who lived on a moon-like planet and spoke in an echoey, whistling, nonsense language. Clangers were so named because they hid under clanging metal lids to avoid the junk left floating around their orbit by the earth’s space programmes, and the first episode included a shot of a lonely earth from space that must surely have been inspired by the Apollo 8 broadcasts. Meant for children but broadcast late on Sunday afternoons just before the news, it soon acquired a loyal adult following. Postgate picked up a hitchhiking university student who recognised him solely from his euphonious voice, and another group of students wrote asking for his recipe for the Clangers’ signature dish, blue string pudding. The New Scientist praised the programme’s ‘gentle chaffing’ of ‘the whole sober apparatus of science that spends countless millions to enable selected Americans to murmur monumental platitudes over the vasty reaches of space’.74
The second moon landing on 23 November, the first in colour, was an anticlimax. The coloured moon in orbit turned out to be a light shade of concrete. ‘If I wanted to look at something I thought was the same colour I’d go and look at my driveway,’ the Apollo 12 astronaut, Pete Conrad, told viewers, deflatingly. On the moon itself the colour camera broke, and the moonwalk reverted to monochrome. ‘As marathon television, moon-landings have already lost their edge,’ concluded the jazz musician and critic George Melly. ‘This seems odd, even somehow disgraceful, but I think it’s true for most people. A troupe of acrobats, accompanied by a drum roll, finish their act by doing their most difficult feat but, unless they fail, they only do it once. This mission, dramatically, was identical with the first.’
In July 1969, BBC1 had begun showing a new series, Star Trek, with an unfortunately timed second episode: in ‘The Naked Time’, screened the day before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the Starship Enterprise tried to evacuate a team of scientists from a planet which was about to break up, only to find they had all mysteriously died. Compared to Star Trek, the moon missions were untelevisual, and sci-fi’s scientific accuracy about outer space made them more a corroboration than a revelation. Between blast-off and splash-down there was not much to see apart from the short daily updates from the astronauts, and not much to listen to except the flat intercom sounds of mission control. Melly reflected on this from the perspective of his peer group, perhaps the last generation, he speculated, to be excited about the technology of television. It was hard, he decided, ‘to flog one’s sense of wonder hour after hour’, especially when the moon’s surface looked like ‘a hard-sell commercial for Maltesers’.75 If you had seen one moon landing, you had seen them all.
Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the electronic age would recreate an archaic world of communal orality fell down when it came to television, an inescapably visual medium. He skirted round this problem by arguing that TV was still essentially an oral phenomenon because it offered such a poor quality image – which may have been true of the flickering images posted by Telstar, and the shadowy messages sent from the moon, but wasn’t true of Cilla Black in 625-line colour. ‘We see colour with the cone of our eye, black-and-white with the edges,’ said McLuhan. ‘Colour is more in demand in a primitive society. So are spiced dishes. I predict a return of hot sauces to American cuisine.’ But most viewers, at least in Britain, welcomed colour television not for its spicing up of reality but for its revelation of the ordinary. ‘Instead of making you feel that it is a modern marvel, one feels it is just what we deserve,’ wrote the TV critic Stanley Reynolds of this new invention, which he saw as a natural progression rather than a paradigm shift.76
For its first festive season in full colour, BBC1 adopted a new, light blue globe ident including the words ‘BBC1 colour’, a gentle hint to the ninety-nine per cent of viewers watching in black and white to buy a colour set. And the end of the year saw a new ritual: the Christmas double issue of the Radio Times and the TV Times, with their separate covers clearly illustrating the cultural differences between the BBC and ITV and their idea of their viewers: the former, a tasteful montage of ribbons, wintry scenes and wassailers, and the latter, Des O’Connor in a Santa hat. Flicking through these bumper issues, you could see the Christmas schedules padded out with Morecambe and Wise, Aladdin with Bernie Winters, Singin’ in the Rain and The Engelbert Humperdinck Show.
Television had gone all the way to the moon and discovered its viewers preferred instant Laramie. ‘Back in the roomful of furniture and family, we sit watching Petula Clark singing “Holy Night”,’ wrote the playwright Peter Nichols, spending Christmas Day crammed into the tiny living room of his in-laws’ semi-detached house in Bristol with extended family. ‘Val Doonican crooning a lullaby to Wendy Craig, the Young Generation dancing the life of Jesus. The children are shouted at every time they block an adult’s view. They want to play with the toys they’ve been given, not grasping that the important part, the giving, is over for another year and they should sit like grateful mutes and let us watch our favourite stars.’77
6
THE DANCE OF IRRELEVANT SHADOWS
Millions might watch television, but on the other hand, last night’s television was even deader than yesterday’s newspaper because you couldn’t even wrap fish and chips in it.
John Osborne1
Late one Sunday night in October 1969, a bearded castaway clambered out of the sea, collapsed on to a deserted beach and, to the strains of Sousa’s Liberty Bell march and a surreal cartoon flattened abruptly by a giant foot borrowed from Bronzino’s painting, Venus and Cupid, introduced a new comedy series on BBC1. The first show included a sketch about a joke so funny it caused people to die laughing. If the scattergun, bemused laughter of the studio audience was any indication, there was no danger of this happening in Britain’s living rooms. But for those who found it fresh and funny, Monty Python’s Flying Circus offered an exhilarating sense of discovery. ‘The most gratifying feature of the show’s success,’ Michael Palin (the bearded castaway) confided to his diary, ‘is the way in which it has created a new viewing habit, the Sunday night late-show. A lot of people have said how they rush home to see it – in Bart’s Hospital the large television room is packed – almost as if they are members of a club.’2
The BBC’s seemingly lukewarm support for the series encouraged this esprit de corps. Placed in the slot usually occupied by religious programmes, it was taken off for two weeks after the first episode and then its time-slot kept bein
g shifted. The second series, starting in September 1970, went out at 10.10 p.m. on Mondays, when the regions could opt out and show local programmes, so only London and northern England saw it, at least until the repeats. Monty Python was made by six young men who had obviously been watching television since the early 1950s, and was aimed at a televisually literate audience familiar with its genres and conventions. At least one of the Pythons must have seen the Old Man of Hoy broadcasts, for their sketch about climbing the north face of the Uxbridge Road was clearly based on Chris Brasher’s excitable commentary in 1967, and in another episode Eric Idle announced that ‘Lulu will be tackling the Old Man of Hoy’.
As it was nudged round the schedules, the Pythons played on the confusion by delaying the opening credits or adding a hanging joke after the end credits. They subverted the whole continuity grammar of television, from BBC1’s rotating globe to awkward transitional phrases like ‘And now for something completely different’, coined by Blue Peter’s founding presenter, Christopher Trace. The Pythons saw that, because television feared silence and awkwardness, it ended up normalising the abnormal: an anchorman could spout nonsense as long as he carried on talking with po-faced reasonableness. With its strange segues, Monty Python mimicked the tendency for TV shows to meld together with the confabulated fluency of a dream. George Harrison, going through the Beatles’ painful break-up, thought it ‘the only “real” thing on the BBC’. ‘I remember watching the very first Monty Python show that ever came on, on BBC2 [sic],’ he told Melody Maker. ‘Derek Taylor [the Beatles press officer] and I were so thrilled by seeing this wacky show that we sent them a telegram saying “Love the show, keep doing it.” … I couldn’t understand how normal television could continue after that.’3
But normal television did continue. Nearly 24 million viewers watched the Miss World contest, held in the Albert Hall in November 1970. The compère, Bob Hope, was introducing the event when twenty-five women burst on to the stage mooing like cows, blasting whistles and squirting water pistols filled with ink. Thus were ITV viewers introduced to a new movement, Women’s Liberation, of which most of them had never heard.
