Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Joyce, 42, c. 19861

  At the end of the late May Bank Holiday Monday in Britain in 1980, the Dallas oil magnate, JR Ewing, was working late in his office when an unseen hand poked round the door and shot him in the chest with a revolver. A few minutes later, on the BBC Nine O’Clock News, a reporter confirmed that Ewing had been critically wounded. There was no shortage of people wanting to kill him: his alcoholic, estranged wife Sue Ellen; his sworn business enemy Cliff Barnes; his mistress and sister-in-law Kristin, who was carrying his baby and had screamed ‘I’ll kill him’ when JR had her arrested on a jumped-up prostitution charge; and Lusty Dusty, Sue Ellen’s ex-lover who was thought to have died in a car crash but possibly hadn’t. The next day, thousands of people, most of them women, placed money on who had shot JR, the surprise favourite being the theoretically posthumous Lusty Dusty at 6–4. The bookmaker William Hill took £50,000 in bets, more than it had made on most of the Bank Holiday races.2

  When the first episode of Dallas had been shown in September 1978, the BBC seemed rather sheepish about it. ‘Corn it may all be, but it is corn of the most compulsive sort,’ said the Radio Times. The phrase ‘wall to wall Dallas’, evoked throughout the 1980s to suggest a nightmarish future swamped by cable and satellite television pap, was coined by Alasdair Milne, the BBC’s director of programmes and then director general ultimately responsible for putting Dallas on British TV.3 Even when it became the BBC’s highest rated programme, Britons liked to believe that, unlike Americans, they watched it with a squint, finding it addictive but absurd. On his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show, Terry Wogan deployed Dallas as a running joke.

  Another emigrant to the UK fed this flattering national self-image that British viewers knowingly enjoyed Dallas as kitsch. Since 1972, Clive James had written a television column for the back page of the Observer’s review section. Before James, TV criticism had received little attention as a literary form. While film and theatre reviews inhabited the present tense and addressed a potential audience, television critics reheated last night’s schedule for the benefit of people who had already seen or would never see it. In the early days critics phoned in their copy late at night from their living rooms, having watched it at the same time as other viewers, which did not always encourage careful reflection. The more thoughtful reviewers, like Philip Purser, T. C. Worsley and Peter Black, had all previously been theatre critics and tended to focus on prestige programmes like single plays and documentaries, often looking down on the American imports, light entertainment shows and soap operas that most viewers watched.4

  By the mid 1970s, cheaper video recording, assiduous lobbying by the Sunday Times critic Elkan Allan and the desire of television producers to have their work given more serious consideration began to force changes. The BBC started showing some programmes to critics before transmission; its preview day, usually a Friday, came to be known as ‘Elkan’s day’. Critics could now be more considered in their responses. James largely avoided the preview days or the little cinemas around London’s Wardour Street requisitioned as TV viewing theatres, preferring to watch on a domestic television as his readers did. But writing for a Sunday newspaper, he had more time to hone his rococo, allusive style, which made his reviews creative works in themselves, often more artful than the programmes he was writing about. He did not originate the witty, epigrammatic television column – Bernard Levin, Nancy Banks-Smith and Alan Coren all predated him – but he turned it into a glamorous genre, becoming as important to his newspaper as Kenneth Tynan had been as its theatre critic a generation earlier. James’s column was said to be worth an extra 10,000 on the Observer’s circulation.5

  Ever since sailing to England from Australia in 1961, James had been fascinated by the relentless variety and ubiquity of British television. While studying at Cambridge, he would watch the whole evening’s schedules in the Footlights clubroom, until the channels shut down. Starting out as a freelance writer in the late 1960s, he would channel-hop through the evening at his Swiss Cottage flat before settling down to write through the night.6 When Karl Miller asked him to contribute a TV column to the Listener, he simply wrote about the programmes he was watching anyway. Borrowing a line from the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Browne, James called his first collection of TV criticism Visions Before Midnight (1977), an inspired title when television finished before the witching hour and was a fleeting apparition that had to be written about from memory. Without a video recorder, like most viewers at this time, James often had two sets running at once so as not to miss anything.

  James wrote about the banal, everyday television that newspaper critics had traditionally ignored. Believing that, since watching television was now a near universal experience, he could dispense with plot summary, he packed in esoteric cultural references, quoting Rilke or Pater while reviewing Charlie’s Angels or The Incredible Hulk. If the word had been in wide currency then, this stylistic promiscuity and eclectic mixing of high and low culture might have been called ‘postmodern’. James preferred to cite John Keats’s notion of negative capability, a way of being receptive to the multifarious nature of the world without bounding it with categories or judgements – a useful mindset, had Keats but known it, for the TV critic.7

  James believed that, in all its chaotic diversity, British TV was ‘an expanding labyrinth which Daedalus has long since forgotten he ever designed’. He had little patience with would-be moral censors like Mary Whitehouse who assumed that television had some directing, malign intention behind it. Television offered no answers or resolutions; it was an authorless, collective fiction too vast to generalise about or summarise. One of his favourite subjects was Dallas and its strange, riveting details, from its southern pronunciations (prarlm for problem, lernch for lunch) to the way that Sue Ellen moved her mouth in different directions to convey emotion. ‘It washes my mind cleaner than ever before,’ he wrote after the first few episodes. ‘Try taking Dallas away from me and giving me some other product in exchange. I’ll break both your arms.’8

  It was not clear, though, that everyone in Britain watched Dallas as wryly. The Southfork women helped to create a fashion for shoulder pads and coiffeured hair, and the Ewings’ habit of taking breakfast outside had, according to one study, contributed to the booming market for patio doors and furniture.9 And at least some people were genuinely anxious to learn the identity of JR’s killer for, in order that no one find out the ending in advance, the crucial episode had to be flown from Los Angeles to London in two boxes of film, escorted by private detectives and with an extra £120 being paid in order for the precious cargo to have its own passenger seat. The usual two-week gap between the American and British screening of episodes was compressed for this episode, although some British fans spent that morning’s small hours listening to the radio bulletins giving the game away, as it was shown in America at 3 a.m. GMT.

  Dallas police charged JR’s attempted murderer on 22 November 1980 at 9.10 p.m. on BBC1. Her identity (Kristin, who had tried to frame Sue Ellen by hiding the gun in her closet) was an inevitable anticlimax. ‘An imbecile curiosity has now compelled me to sit through two further boring episodes – mainly composed of hospital visits from his dreadful family and the drooling of his estranged wife,’ wrote Alex James of East Moseley, Surrey, to the BBC’s Points of View. ‘I no longer care who shot JR. I only wish the public spirited assassin had been a better marksman, and that he or she had not wasted the remaining bullets in the revolver.’10

  Television had never before been so much a subject of public discussion. As tabloid newspapers competed among themselves for a declining readership, they clung parasitically to the younger medium as a source of gossip. The Sun and the Daily Mirror now had double-page TV sections which became the most read part of the newspaper. Pre-publicity for programmes, from on-air trailers to newspaper previews, also became more visible. The arrival of the VHS tape having enabled bulk copying, one of the familiar features of the London landscape in the 1980s was the number of motorcyc
le couriers racing through the streets to deliver preview tapes to critics.11 TV executives began referring to ‘the Dallas effect’: generating an audience for a show through news coverage, encouraging viewers to believe they would be missing out by not watching it.

  But many programmes continued to attract intensely loyal audiences without being part of this kind of publicity buzz at all. While Britain was being introduced to JR Ewing, Crossroads, an ATV soap opera set in a Midlands motel, was quietly reaching its three thousandth episode. Because it had twice as many episodes per week as Coronation Street, it was now by far the longest story ever told in Britain, thousands of bit-part actors having walked through the motel lobby or mouthed pleasantries in the bar. Until they all synchronised watches on 1 April 1975, the different ITV regions often showed it out of synch, so Crossroads Christmases could happen in the summer and vice versa, which added to the sense that the motel existed at a wonky angle to the rest of the universe, unbounded by the linear tyranny of seasons and years. During the ITV strike of 1979, a small group of viewers had rung the ATV studios daily to ask what was happening at the motel while Crossroads was off air. By the end of the 1970s, its viewing figures exceeded 20 million, and it vied with Coronation Street as Britain’s most popular programme, remarkable for a serial shown before many people had got home from work.

  In June 1981, it did briefly make headlines. The Daily Mirror revealed that Noele Gordon, who had played the motel owner, Meg Mortimer, since the first episode, was to be axed. Charles Denton, director of programmes for Central Television, soon to take over the Midlands franchise from ATV, promised her demise would be ‘absolutely spectacular’ and ‘even better than who shot JR’. Hundreds called the studios, pleading with the producers to change their minds. A more sanguine Daily Star invited readers to send in ideas about how Meg should be written out, and awarded a £25 prize for the suggestion that she be beaten to death with a frying pan. Pupils at Keir Hardie Junior School in Newham, east London, sent the Crossroads producer Jack Barton an illustrated book showing different ways in which Meg could be killed, from poisoning to drowning.12

  Crossroads had long excited conflicting responses. Some of its assumed awfulness was folk legend perpetuated by non-viewers. The lobby telephone never did carry on ringing after it was answered, and not since the programme’s earliest days, when it was filmed from a disused Aston cinema using theatre flats, had the walls of the set wobbled. Nor did the beanie-hatted innocent, Benny Hawkins, ever disappear for six months in search of a spanner, although Shughie McFee the motel chef did vanish for three years when, in order to save money, the kitchen set was dismantled. Recorded ‘as live’ with minimal rehearsal, Crossroads did contain fluffed lines, garbled crosstalk and continuity errors, though not as many as collective memory insists.

  The serial’s roots were in the romantic melodrama of repertory theatre, from where it inherited its clunky dialogue exposition and static staginess. Women walked round sofas and held on to them, or dabbed their eyes with the corners of handkerchiefs. Men gripped women’s arms and looked deep into their eyes.

  ‘We’ve said goodbye before, it’s not too difficult.’

  ‘Oh, why did you have to come home? I was perfectly happy. It’s over, Hugh. It was over a long time ago. We’ve just been daydreaming.’

  ‘Try looking at me when you say things like that.’

  ‘Oh, I hate you!’

  The cramped, internal sets and endless medium close-ups created a series of tableaux, more theatrical than televisual. The hard-of-hearing and non-native speakers did at least welcome another of its residues from local rep, the tendency of its actors to over-enunciate their lines. ‘David Hunter [the motel manager], in particular, speaks so clearly that it is a great help to people like me,’ wrote a Ugandan Asian immigrant to the Daily Mirror in 1978.13

  ‘To criticize Crossroads is to criticize sliced white bread, or football or keg beer – you are made to feel it’s class snobbism,’ claimed the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Unfortunately, the ordinary people are wrong, and the critic is right and Crossroads is bad, slack, inept and untruthful, even within its own miserable limits.’ ‘This serial is just about the most stunning, stupefying affront to intelligence and proper human values perpetrated on British television,’ agreed the Listener. The programme’s fiercest critic was the Independent Broadcasting Authority which was ultimately responsible for it being on air, and whose chairwoman, Lady Brigette Plowden, described it as ‘distressingly popular’.14 In 1980, the IBA ordered that the show be cut from four to three episodes a week (having already imposed a cut from five to four episodes in 1967) to improve its production values. On neither occasion was any improvement apparent. Even the ITV companies who broadcast Crossroads did not like it much, an attitude they betrayed by shunting it round the teatime schedules or putting it on so early that it clashed with the BBC children’s programmes. In January 1981, ATV moved it from 6.30 p.m. to 6.05 p.m., angering many Midlands viewers who could no longer get home in time to watch it.

  Around the emblematic awfulness of Crossroads hovered a more important and enduring argument between the guardians of public service ‘quality’ television, who had been in the ascendancy since the Pilkington Report of 1962, and the emergent champions of consumer populism. For everyone agreed that Crossroads was rubbish, except for its millions of viewers. As the critic Alexander Walker once wrote about the managing director of ATV who had first commissioned it, ‘the only people who seem to like Lew Grade’s shows seem to be people’.15

  At the time of Meg’s departure, Dorothy Hobson was researching Crossroads for her PhD at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. The arrival of the video recorder had given a boost to the emerging discipline of media studies by allowing for the careful textual analysis of programmes. (In 1975, when the CCCS had begun a pioneering study of the magazine programme, Nationwide, they had to take it in turns to watch it together in each other’s houses, making a sound tape and taking copious notes.)16 Yet media studies had still to establish itself fully as a reputable academic subject. One wonders if Richard Hoggart, who retained a strong desire to distinguish between good and bad art, would have thought the study of a poorly regarded soap opera an appropriate subject for the research centre he had founded in the year that Crossroads began.

  For Charlotte Brunsdon, who was also studying Crossroads at the CCCS, the defensiveness she felt about her research topic conflated in her mind with the anti-provincial attitudes of her metropolitan friends, who would say ‘Poor you!’ when she told them she lived in Birmingham. As Dorothy Hobson found, ATV viewers tended to identify with Crossroads characters because they were ‘sort of close to Birmingham people … not common, but unassuming’. Older Midlands viewers already knew and liked Noele Gordon because, in the early days of ATV, she presented many of its regional programmes, including over 2,000 performances of the popular daytime variety show Lunch Box, which ran from 1956 to 1964, and which once attracted a studio audience of 27,000 for an outside broadcast at Nottingham Forest’s football ground.17

  In 1958, the ATV Midlands controller, Philip Dorté, complained to its London office that ‘Noel Gordon [sic], whose face and voice is so well known to every Midlands man, woman and child, is asked at Television House who she is and what she wants’.18 ATV seemed more concerned with making and exporting networked shows than speaking for its region, which was in any case historically ill-defined. Lew Grade was said to care more about Birmingham, Alabama, than Birmingham, England, and a myth persisted that he had chosen the name ‘ATV’ because it sounded like ‘ITV’ in a Brummagem accent. Although Black Country vowels in Crossroads tended to emerge from the mouths of peripheral characters like cooks and cleaners, Midlands viewers still prized Crossroads as one of the few programmes about their own region.

  Crossroads, like most soaps, was easy to ridicule from afar. Its lines of dialogue in isolation sounded like things no one said in real life (‘I don’t know, Jill, but
I intend to find out!’) and its plots about poisonings, bigamy and unexploded bombs were absurd in summary. Spread over three or four episodes a week, though, the melodrama spaced itself out and weeks went by without much incident. (The most notoriously bizarre storyline, in which the cleaner Amy Turtle was accused of being a Russian spy, Amelia Turtlovski, was just a lighthearted subplot.) Most Crossroads characters were decent and stoical, trying to deal with ordinary problems as they came up, and the viewers Hobson met said they preferred this to the high emotional pitch of Dallas.19 The serial’s slowly accumulated familiarity made a scratched sideboard or a mildly rebellious teenager seem as meaningful on screen as they would be in the real world.

  Crossroads formed a set of time-honoured late afternoon rituals: as the teatime commercials for Findus Crispy Pancakes or Birds Eye Potato Waffles faded out and the ATV fanfare sounded, the episode began with the nine-note motif that its composer Tony Hatch described as ‘the call-sign which gets the family in front of the TV set’,20 followed by a slight pause before the strangely compelling main theme. At the end of each episode – after the distinctive closing credits, slightly unsteady caption cards crisscrossing up and sideways across the screen – came a final ‘stop shot’. Designed to remind the audience what had happened in the final scene, perhaps adding a line of dialogue (‘I’ll never let her go, Barbara, never!’), it set up the cliff-hanger for the next episode.

  Visiting the homes of women Crossroads viewers around Birmingham and watching the show with them, Hobson found that Crossroads held their full attention, despite being in a timeslot normally occupied by programmes which anticipated viewers dipping in and out as they made the tea or put young children to bed. Forty per cent of British homes now had more than one television and the second set was often a black-and-white portable kept in the kitchen. Hobson saw housewives watching the portable set while cooking or washing up and then hurriedly diving into the living room to view critical moments in colour, or just to see what someone was wearing.21