by Joe Moran
At 6.25 p.m., as living room lights came on across the country, came The Generation Game, presented by Bruce Forsyth, celebrating its 100th edition. It was unusual for the evening’s star attraction to be on so early in the schedule, but Bill Cotton felt that weekend viewers were especially likely to stick with one channel, being won or lost by the success of the early ‘build’. Forsyth’s job was to hook in viewers to BBC1 and keep them there, just as he had done when working as the second-spot comic on variety bills. ‘Every Saturday, to the mortification of Independent Television, in the fireside months from September to January, about 18 million people, fresh from football matches, sweeping leaves, or moody contemplation of betting slips, watch this man and his young wife go through a routine of whose every small thematic variation an idiot could be a connoisseur,’ wrote the critic Richard North.35 ‘Ladies, gentlemen and children,’ Forsyth began (the show often being the last thing younger children were allowed to watch, washed and in their pyjamas), ‘Nice to see you; to see you nice.’
The Generation Game felt fresh because, although studio recorded, it had the atmosphere of a stage show. Forsyth asked for the first rows of seating to be lit, so he could see the audience’s faces, and he moved the show along quickly as though it were live, to build up momentum. He had learned early on the value of the audience in creating an ambience when he had first appeared on television, aged eleven, in August 1939. The studio set at Radiolympia was designed to look like a lounge in someone’s home. ‘There was no audience seated in front of me in rows of wooden chairs – and, somehow, I had to create my own atmosphere,’ Forsyth recalled with a wince. ‘The moment passed ignominiously.’36 On The Generation Game he was like a human Basil Brush, all fake snarls and eyes raised to heaven as he mocked the contestants’ attempts to throw pots or stretch dough. He claimed to have learned this skill in wartime concert parties, studying faces in order to pick the right person to ridicule. The prizes at the end of the show passed on a conveyor belt, a panoply of 1970s consumerism: canteen and cutlery sets, teasmaids, his’n’hers bathrobes, matching vinyl luggage, cuddly toys.
At 7.25 p.m., about 12.5 million people carried on watching for The Duchess of Duke Street, a new period drama in the mould of ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs which benefited from being sympathetically sandwiched between The Generation Game and, at 8.15 p.m., The Two Ronnies. This slickly professional show, now drawing in nearly 20 million viewers, had not changed its formula in half a decade. In between the comic sketches, there was Ronnie Corbett narrating a long shaggy-dog story from an armchair; a filmed comedy series, in this case a Spike Milligan-penned romp called ‘The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town’; and a musical pastiche finale, all of it bookended by Corbett and Barker sitting at desks reading fake news items (‘And in a packed programme tonight … and it’s good-night from me …’).
At 9 p.m. came Starsky and Hutch. With a pulsating musical score pushing the action on, the crime-fighting duo screeched and wailed through the streets of LA in their red Ford Torino with the go-faster stripes, crashing through piles of cardboard boxes as they went, before jumping over walls and fire escapes and apprehending felons by handcuffing them on the bonnets of cars. One measure of Starsky and Hutch’s British appeal was the way it had turned a previously drab item, the cardigan – the chunky-belted type with Aztec patterns worn by Starsky – into an image of urban cool and the most popular item both in knitting patterns in women’s magazines and at British Home Stores.37
After the news, at 10.20 p.m., the famous Barry Stoller theme tune heralded the start of Match of the Day, which could still bring in 13 million viewers late on Saturday night, often catching pub-goers who had left just before closing time. At the end, its donnish presenter, Jimmy Hill, reminded viewers to put their clocks back, and then at 11.20 p.m., 10 million viewers stayed up to see Glenda Jackson and Desmond Morris being interviewed on Parkinson, which brought the glamour of late-night American talk shows to British television. At twenty past midnight, Michael Parkinson signed off and ended this classic Saturday night, the armchair nation united on BBC1.
Of course, history is rarely so neat. A consensus can be suffocating for those who feel excluded from it, and underneath the communitarian noises of primetime television there lay buried tensions. These tensions emerged a few weeks later, on 1 December, when an unknown punk band, the Sex Pistols, appeared on Thames TV’s live teatime magazine programme, Today, to promote their first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’. The presenter Bill Grundy, unsympathetic to punk and a little over-refreshed, invited the band to ‘say something outrageous’ and one member, Steve Jones, obliged with ‘you dirty bastard’ and ‘what a fucking rotter’. After this unedifying exchange, Thames broadcast a full apology on screen twice later that day and quickly suspended Grundy. Next day’s tabloid newspapers seemed especially exercised about the time of the swearing: at 6.25 p.m., in the middle of ‘family viewing’, just before Opportunity Knocks. A lorry driver, who was so enraged that his eight-year-old son had seen it that he kicked in the screen of his new £380 TV set, was widely quoted. ‘I was so angry and disgusted with this filth that I took a swing with my boot,’ he said.38
The imagining of the Sex Pistols’ TV appearance as a seminal moment in recent British cultural history is partly retrospective. Today was only shown in the London area, and the tabloids played their allotted role in helping a band seeking notoriety to become notorious. Some younger viewers, though, did seem to welcome the Sex Pistols for cutting through the blandness of family TV. ‘It was like someone had jumped into the television from the real world and shouted out to me to wake up and start living,’ wrote Jonathan Ross, then aged sixteen and living in Leytonstone. ‘It made those of us who had seen these naughty kids show no respect for an authority that we all secretly knew was lousy and hypocritical feel like fabulous, dangerous rebels.’ Aged twenty-two, Declan McManus, who had just signed for Stiff Records for £150 as Elvis Costello, was similarly energised. Waiting for a train on Whitton station the next day on the way to his job as a data entry clerk in London, he saw ‘all the commuters were reading the papers when the Pistols made headlines … It was as if it was the most awful thing that ever happened … it was a great morning – just to hear people’s blood pressure going up and down over it.’39
Young people had been progressively distancing themselves from primetime television since the mid 1950s, when the emergence of TV as the main domestic entertainment meant the decline of radio as a family form and its pursuit of the young listener. The mid 1970s represented perhaps the peak of their alienation from television. As the music critic Simon Frith points out, television added little to popular music: most people’s TV sets had poor sound quality and the sound was now relatively worse compared with the improved definition of the hi-fi and FM radio. Much of the music on 1970s television was anti-rock, a sort of counter-revolution against the 1960s. The musical diet of Opportunity Knocks consisted largely of youth brass bands, citizens’ choirs singing ‘Bobby Shafto’, crimplene-clad pianists and boy sopranos in kilts. Top of the Pops required its acts to lip-synch, an affront to rock’s growing insistence on liveness and authenticity. It was a light entertainment show, with scantily clad dancing girls, garishly dressed DJs and glitter balls, a visual cornucopia that probably accounted for the initially surprising fact that it was the favourite programme among deaf children.40
As the only programme on television with chart music, it was still watched avidly by teenagers, many of whom would wait impatiently each Thursday evening for Tomorrow’s World to end, with a cassette recorder and microphone poised near the television’s speaker. Top of the Pops was a lodestone of the generational tensions that were an inevitable feature of one-television households, as something unfolding unexpectedly on screen could uncover an issue that ordinarily remained unspoken, delighting teenagers and shocking parents who had mostly grown up before rock’n’roll.
One such charged moment had come in July 1972, when David Bowie pe
rformed ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops dressed in a multicoloured lycra catsuit, languidly putting his arm round guitarist Mick Ronson and looking at him seductively. Many key figures in popular music from the late 1970s onwards – Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, Marc Almond of Soft Cell – have cited this broadcast as a watershed in their musical and sexual education. For a fourteen-year-old Chislehurst schoolgirl called Susan Ballion, later Siouxsie Sioux, it meant three minutes of miraculous flight from her surroundings, for she watched it while ill in hospital with ulcerative colitis in a room where ‘people were coughing their guts up or walking around with blood hanging from a cradle on a support’.41
Forty years later, the journalist Dylan Jones wrote a book, When Ziggy Played Guitar, entirely about these three-and-a-half minutes of television which, he wrote, ‘caus[ed] havoc in millions of sitting rooms all over Britain … It was thrilling, slightly dangerous, transformative. For me, and for those like me, it felt that the future had finally arrived.’ But then, shocked to discover that he must have seen it, as a twelve-year-old, on a black-and-white set when he remembered watching it in colour, he wondered if he was ‘a victim of False Memory Syndrome, and this was my mutable past, a patchwork of dates, times, and pictures, images that rattle past like a scratched DVD’.42 Not for the first time, a moment of television had merged with the mythologising memory of it.
Another memorable, consensus-shaking event occurred in December 1975, when John Hurt played Quentin Crisp in the ITV drama The Naked Civil Servant. Fourteen-year-old George O’Dowd ‘watched it open-mouthed … Everyone thought he was “disgusting”. I thought he was brave and stylish, I wanted to meet him.’ ‘Quentin’ became a taunt at his school, Eltham Green Comprehensive in south London, but O’Dowd, already chased by skinheads for being effeminate, saw in Hurt’s impersonation of Crisp the seeds of his own later reincarnation as Boy George. Another teenager, Martin Degville from Walsall, rushed back home to watch it. ‘After about fifteen minutes of this thing being on,’ he recalled, ‘my father’s face was starting to go red, and he started faffing, and then turned it off. So I turned it back on. And he’s going, “You can’t watch this, these people!” … My father got so incensed he actually kicked the TV. He’s a very straight guy, fought in the Second World War and everything, so to him this kind of thing was very disgusting.’43
Degville, later lead singer of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, was as intrigued as O’Dowd by Crisp’s aesthetic. The New Romantic look adopted by many of these teenage television watchers when they reached adulthood in the late 1970s, of dyed, lacquered hair, rouge and painted fingernails, owed something to Quentin Crisp as well as to Bowie. But the emerging gay liberation movement was disapproving of Crisp’s fatalistic, asexual acceptance of his camp otherness. ‘[Quentin Crisp] has set the “gay” world back twenty years,’ wrote an anonymous letter-writer to Gay News after watching The Naked Civil Servant. ‘There is no need to slap us and the hets in the face with “high camp” … Quentin, keep it to yourself. No need to write books about it, have it on the box. Who wants to know?’44
Undeclared, comic homosexuals were a staple of the TV screen, another symptom of the generation gap. Dick Emery had originated many of his TV characters, including the lisping, pink-trousered Clarence with his catchphrase, ‘Hallo honky tonk’, during his time in RAF gang shows in Normandy, where cross-dressed entertainers were a necessity and a camp subculture, with its own lingo and mannerisms, thrived. Emery conceded that ‘most comedians recognise that by becoming a little precious they can raise an instant laugh’, a useful ploy ‘when you’re faced with an unresponsive audience staring blankly at you across their plates of steak and chips. Why the suggestion of homosexuality should be funny is imponderable – perhaps our laughter is defence, a reaction against hidden fears about our innermost tendencies.’45
Younger gay activists thought that camp held back the cause of equality. ‘They do not come much lower than Larry Grayson,’ wrote Gay News of the effeminate comic whose catchphrases were ‘shut that door’, ‘what a gay day’ and ‘look at the muck in ’ere’. ‘He will become a “superstar” while he confuses and distresses our young teenage brothers.’ Another gay rights campaigner thought Mr Humphries, the fey sales assistant played by John Inman in the department store sitcom Are You Being Served?, was ‘like a nail in the coffin of what we were trying to achieve’. In 1977, when TV Times readers voted Inman television personality of the year, gay rights protestors picketed his show at the Brighton Dome.46
No one in the 1970s thought television was passing through an Elysian age, but then no one ever does when they are passing through one. Even before the Annan Committee on Broadcasting described the BBC’s attitude to complaints as ‘not only cavalier, but aggressive and arrogant’, there was a growing sense within the corporation that it needed to be more responsive to its viewers. ‘If a churchy gloom suddenly darkens the BBC Club, somebody somewhere is bound to be talking about access,’ wrote Jonathan Raban in the Radio Times. ‘How does one stop television from turning into a bland, glittering monster, owned by vast corporations and manned by the trained professionals, who are the only people equipped to understand how the damn thing works?’47
Sensing the political mood even before Annan reported in 1977, the BBC published leaflets titled ‘It’s your BBC’ or ‘It’s one BBC – and it’s yours’, explaining how viewers could contact them, and it held the first of a series of a public meetings in Truro in 1976. These tended to be polite affairs. At a meeting at the Octagon, an eighteenth-century chapel in Bath, in October of that year, the audience was drawn mostly from representatives of local societies, like the Walcot Towns-women’s Guild and the Loyal Order of the Moose, and ‘concluded with the clergyman thanking the BBC for taking so much trouble, offering an assurance that the corporation is deeply loved’.48
A lesser known subtext of this era is that it was one of energetic experiments in access television. Alongside the lavish light entertainment of primetime, a parallel make-do-and-mend universe of local TV had formed. Community television had begun in the early 1970s as an offshoot of the cable TV network which had grown up in areas where reception was poor or the transmitters did not yet reach. Now the spread of transmitters meant that the cable companies were worried that they could no longer promise clearer pictures in most areas, and they needed to find new markets. So in 1972 the government allowed them to start a small number of community TV channels with programmes made by local people.
Greenwich Cablevision, which should really have been called Plumstead Cablevision because it operated from a shop next to a greengrocer’s on Plumstead High Street, had a Saturday night variety show called Greenwich Meantime which offered an early career break for the comedy duo Hale and Pace, and a weekly Special Report on subjects such as ‘Behind the scenes of the Entertainments Department of Greenwich Council’. Community television benefited from the fact that some areas still had poor reception. The people of Plumstead had a dreadful TV picture from the Crystal Palace transmitter which, on its way east, bumped into the immovable object of Shooters Hill, one of the highest points in London. Greenwich Cablevision solved this problem by picking up its signal from a mast on top of one of the borough’s new high-rise blocks and piping it to thousands of homes. Reception in Sheffield was almost as bad: the city nestles in a natural amphitheatre with much of it built on the hillsides, and it has over 2 million trees, a particular problem for television signals in the summer when they are in leaf. The fact that tenants in Sheffield’s 20,000 council homes were forbidden to erect roof aerials was a further boost for the new channel, Sheffield Cablevision, which broadcast dominoes and darts from Sheffield pubs and Hullabaloo, an anarchic Saturday morning children’s programme inspired by ATV’s Tiswas.
Since they were not allowed advertising, the community TV channels were perennially poverty-stricken. Swindon Viewpoint, whose programmes included This is Swindon and Report Swindon, wa
s the last to stop broadcasting in 1976, even EMI’s bequeathing the station’s equipment for £1 having failed to save it. But community TV had one last hurrah: Milton Keynes Channel 40, which went on air in December 1976. Milton Keynes, built on a sloping hill with a valley to the north and east, and with thousands of London plane trees planted along the main boulevards, also got bad TV reception, and the Milton Keynes planners approved of cable television because they, as in Sheffield, preferred not to have unsightly TV aerials ruining the skyline.
A child of the Labour government, Channel 40 was generously funded by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, and intended to foster a sense of community in a new town full of displaced families. Groups could borrow facilities to make their own programmes and it was piped in to all new houses for free, for four hours per week. In the almost primetime hours between 6 p.m. and 7.30 p.m., it pulled in sixteen per cent of the available audience.49 It ended in 1979, not because it made an ill-advised April Fool’s joke about the new city being razed to the ground, but because the new Tory government was hostile to the no-strings, direct grants on which it depended.
