by Joe Moran
For these women whose lives were filled with amorphous, endless tasks such as housework and childcare, Crossroads offered a punctuation mark or caesura in the day. A young woman with a six-month-old baby who lived on the ninth floor of a Birmingham high-rise said she often looked out of the window and counted the cars passing along the road below. ‘If you are so isolated that you resort to counting cars,’ Hobson concluded, ‘the importance of a television serial to “look forward to”, even when it is less than perfect, does not seem so strange.’22
Not one of Hobson’s interviewees commented on the programme’s poor production values. Viewer surveys suggested that women were less likely than men to condemn soap operas as implausible or unrealistic, not because they were more credulous but because they simply filtered this information out. When Hobson watched the programme with her interviewees, the presence of another person seemed to sharpen their faculties and they would say, ‘Well, it wasn’t so good tonight,’ when, as far as Hobson could tell, it was the same as ever. They could overlook hammy acting, shoddy camerawork and creaky scripts as long as they felt the inexorable momentum of the unending storyline.23
When Meg was axed from Crossroads, the Birmingham Evening Mail received hundreds of protest letters, a large number of which were from late middle-aged or elderly women in working-class areas like West Bromwich or Smethwick. For many of these women, Meg – with her carefully groomed hair, smart jackets and sitting room with sherry glasses, decanter and white telephone – suggested a precarious middle-class respectability to which they also aspired. One of the most common reasons for viewers to write to the ATV studios was to ask where they could buy Meg’s wallpaper and curtains, and the most successful piece of promotional merchandise was a print of a painting that hung in her living room.24
At the Crossroads motel, romance was never tainted by sex, even the mildest curse was never uttered and no one smoked, it being against IBA rules at that hour. ‘We like our middle-class image because it enables us to behave nicely and wear nice clothes which the public like to see,’ Gordon said. ‘We are told reliably that there is peace and quiet [in Northern Ireland] when Crossroads is on. And I think it is because people are leading such abnormal lives there that they look forward to switching on every night and seeing a more or less normal existence.’ Hobson made a similar point about the axing of Meg, which was announced just before a summer of riots in Brixton, Liverpool, Birmingham and other English cities. Crossroads, which was on directly before or after news bulletins showing burning cars and buildings, suggested a reassuring normality and continuity that its viewers saw threatened by Meg’s imminent departure.25
On the eve of bonfire night, another kind of blaze engulfed the television screens of Crossroads viewers: the motel was on fire, and a tremulous Meg was last seen staring at a bottle of tranquillisers after leaving a note to her daughter. As a plangent oboe piped an Andante version of the Crossroads theme, hundreds of fans, some in tears, called the switchboard to demand whether Meg had died in the fire. The producers had added to their anxiety by staging a fake funeral, both the Sun and ITN News showing pictures of undertakers removing a body from the motel’s ashes. After being left dangling over the weekend, though, viewers discovered that Meg was alive and leaving on the QE2 for America.
The viewers’ pleas had reprieved her. ‘The elderly people who lived for nothing else … it was to them going to be a real bereavement,’ conceded Jack Barton. After getting hundreds of thank you letters, he said he felt like a Home Secretary who had saved someone from the gallows. Peter Ling, co-creator and sometime writer of Crossroads, watched it every afternoon in Hastings, with his family, especially his daughter, Vicky, making fun of it. Once, while she and her father were walking on the pier, an elderly woman attendant recognised him. ‘I am a widow and live by myself,’ she told him. ‘I have no family and I get very lonely, but every day I watch Crossroads. I live with Meg and all the others. They have become part of my family.’ ‘Daddy,’ Ling’s daughter said as they walked off, ‘I’ll never laugh at Crossroads again.’26
‘I am watching my life ebbing away,’ wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary on 28 November 1983. That evening he had been sitting with his octogenarian mother, Louie, in her flat across the hallway from his own, in a mansion block off London’s Euston Road, watching Coronation Street and Thora Hird ‘in some rubbish about a funeral parlour’. They had lived opposite each other like this for over a decade and, having always refused to own a television, Williams spent many hours watching his mother’s set. Writing his diary late at night, he would often use it to complain about that evening’s television, and his judgements on the primetime schedules of the 1970s and 1980s showed little patience for programmes now remembered as classics. The Good Life had ‘not a laugh line in it’. Porridge was ‘sickening and disgusting’. The Two Ronnies was a ‘comedy formula’ without any comedy, ‘like watching the Japanese immaculately performing a Morris Dance’. On the rare occasions Williams found something he liked – Leonard Rossiter in Rising Damp, Telly Savalas’s minimalist acting in Kojak or the ‘sad & rugged courage’ of Les Dawson – it was when this formulaic urge to please, this sense of obligatory collective enjoyment, was absent.
Williams’s TV criticism was not disinterested. His television career had been in decline since his one-man series, The Kenneth Williams Show, had flopped in 1970, the man on the bacon counter at his local supermarket calling it ‘rotten’ and the janitor at his block of flats telling him cheerfully that it was ‘a load of shit’.27 By the early 1980s his TV appearances were mostly confined to chat shows and voice-overs for children’s cartoons and commercials. In his diary, he veered restlessly between complaining that camp stars like John Inman and Larry Grayson had stolen his act and believing that it was all beneath him anyway.
A fiercely intelligent autodidact, Williams in the 1970s had been employed as a television critic for the Radio Times. ‘It is the capacity for taking pains which I admire,’ he wrote, opening his first monthly column. While his alternating fellow columnists, Jonathan Raban and Margaret Drabble, happily declared their love for That’s Life or The Goodies, Williams wrote with self-conscious erudition about Panorama and The Book Programme. But at home he was obliged to watch the undemanding television his mother liked, occasionally conceding that its killing of time could be merciful. ‘The fact remains,’ he wrote, ‘that the flickering screen in the room is a barrier against the silences & the embarrassment of mute interludes when conversation peters out.’28
Viewers like Kenneth Williams and his mother, watching mostly whatever came along, were supposed to be an endangered tribe. Television producers feared that the primetime audience was about to be shrunk severely by the video cassette recorder, an object that people were buying even in the middle of a recession. Domestic video recorders had arrived in Britain in the mid 1970s but had been slow to take off. According to the writer and broadcaster Derek Cooper, some of the earliest adopters were in the Presbyterian strongholds of the Western Isles, where Sunday viewing was a clear Sabbath breach but videotaping programmes to watch in midweek was more ambiguous, God’s position on time-shifting being moot. Another early adopter was Tony Blackburn, who would record Crossroads each day and watch it the next morning over breakfast before going to the studio to do his Radio 1 show.29
Britons were still more likely to rent electronic equipment than to buy it, and this helped the video market grow at a time when it was shared by two incompatible Japanese systems, Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS. In more dirigiste France, all imported VCRs had to clear customs at Poitiers and VCR owners had to pay an annual licence fee; in Thatcherite Britain there were no such restrictions against cheap Japanese imports. Applied to pop promos, TV shows and the domestic recorder, ‘video’ became one of the modish words of the early 1980s, endowed, along with related vocabulary like ‘rewind’ and ‘freeze-frame’, with connotations of contemporaneity just as colour television had been a decade earlier.
Even so, the television ratings for Christmas 1982 were shocking. They suggested that so many people were renting videos, playing with their new video games or recording programmes to watch later, that there were 6 million fewer viewers than in Christmas 1981. The audience figures for the sitcom Last of the Summer Wine had fallen mysteriously from 17 to 9.9 million. Manchester University held a symposium with the title ‘Is broadcasting going off the air?’ and Charles Denton said, ‘We have search-parties out looking for audiences.’30 But this supposedly vanishing audience was a blip, probably caused by a glitch in the ratings system which meant that if a viewer was video-recording a programme at the same time as watching it, the ratings meter thought the set was switched off.
By the end of 1983 a quarter of British homes had a video recorder, more than any other European country, but viewers mostly carried on viewing in real time; thirteen per cent of recorded television was never even watched. The TV critic Peter Fiddick suggested that VCRs helped to reduce ‘television guilt’, allowing people to record things they felt they should have watched without having to actually watch them. The timer switch for pre-recording was also notoriously difficult to work. The sociologist Ann Gray asked a group of women in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire to colour-code their domestic gadgets: pink for feminine, blue for masculine and lilac for neither. While VCRs were lilac, the timer function was a deep blue – which is odd when, as Gray pointed out, women routinely operated the equally difficult time settings on washing machines.31 The most likely explanation is that women simply did not care enough to work out how to use the timer because, against expectations, the video recorder had not turned viewers into energetic time shifters.
But there was another threat to the homogeneous mass audience, sitting down to watch the same programmes each evening. Ever since the Annan Report, the political mood had favoured breaking up the comfortable ITV–BBC duopoly and increasing viewer choice, an ambition helped along by the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982. When the Tories retained power on a landslide in 1983, they were bolder about placing free market economics at the heart of policy. The BBC’s monopoly of the licence fee, which Margaret Thatcher preferred to call a ‘compulsory levy’ and a ‘poll tax backed by criminal sanctions’,32 together with the Thatcherite perception of left-wing bias in the corporation, made it a likely candidate for the bracing discipline of market forces.
At the beginning of 1984, newspapers quoted ‘ministerial sources’ attacking the BBC’s showing of an American mini-series which, unprecedentedly, they had promoted with a billboard campaign across the country announcing, ‘The Thorn Birds are coming on BBC1’. The informant was a Home Office minister, Douglas Hurd, who suggested, on the strength of his wife having seen the first episode, that the series was so awful that it might jeopardise the BBC’s proposed licence fee increase.33 A hostile press campaign against the BBC began, accompanied by that partly manufactured anger from its commercial rivals that was to become familiar in the coming years.
The Thorn Birds certainly satisfied the Thatcherite market imperative: after the end of the penultimate episode, in which Father Ralph de Bricassart broke his vow of chastity and made love to the heroine Meggie on a remote Australian beach, the Electricity Board reported an increase of 2200 megawatts, the biggest surge in the National Grid’s history. ‘The series was much criticised for wooden stereotyping of many characters, for thin writing and implausible melodrama and its placing in the schedules,’ conceded the BBC handbook. ‘But [it] had a narrative drive that proved compulsive. It drew enormous audiences.’34 The controversy suggested that drawing a big audience was not enough on its own to justify the licence fee, for the most contentious thing about the series was its place in the schedules: it had clashed with the prestigious ITV series Jewel in the Crown and, more shockingly, the BBC’s long-running current affairs programme, Panorama, had been dropped for its duration.
In this new environment in which broadcasters had to satisfy both the demand for high ratings and the more nebulous expectations of public service broadcasting, the art of the scheduler was crucial. Each channel now employed programme planners whose job was to sit in an office with clock grids of each quarter year, plotting shifts in mass viewing habits like generals in a war room planning troop manoeuvres. Horizontally they divided the thirteen weeks into series runs of six, seven and so on, and vertically they divvied up the broadcasting hours into time slots. Guided by programme synopses, audience research and ratings graphs, they then arranged the programmes, on sticky-backed coloured squares, along these grids in agreeable patterns, taking note of immovable objects like the news and certain received wisdoms about what went where. Early evening programmes were magazine-style, with short items that did not require viewers’ full attention, to catch people coming in from work or eating their dinner. As viewers settled down after dinner, the primetime sitcoms and quiz shows followed. Serious programmes, like documentaries, arrived after nine, later-dining middle-class viewers having finished eating by then.
This delicate arrangement of an evening’s entertainment was called ‘vertical’ scheduling and was fairly well known. More arcane, and becoming more important, was ‘horizontal’ or ‘jugular’ scheduling, to compete with rival channels. The secret of this dark art was that most viewers were, like Kenneth Williams and his mother, listless rather than carefully selective consumers. Even when the costs of changing channels were minimal – and becoming more minimal with the growing popularity of the infra-red TV remote control – there was a carry-over effect from one show to the next, which today’s proponents of nudge economics would call a ‘status quo bias’. Those invisible, unaccountable social engineers, the horizontal schedulers, were thus able magically to induce inertia in millions of people, tempting them with the next offering so they would carry on watching the same channel for the whole evening.
The art of scheduling could be used to buoy up a less popular programme, by ‘hammocking’ it between two more popular ones, so that it benefited from ‘inheritance’ at the start (viewers staying tuned to the same channel having tuned in for a previous programme) and ‘pre-echo’ at the end (viewers tuning in early to watch a favourite programme, seeing the last bit of the preceding one and deciding to watch it next week). ITV’s current affairs series World in Action was typically placed after an 8 p.m. comedy like In Loving Memory (the ‘rubbish about a funeral parlour’ that Kenneth Williams watched with his mother), and before a popular drama like Quincy at 9 p.m. – a mass exodus to BBC1 also being halted by the windfall of having Panorama on the other side.
The recognised master of the scheduling arts was Lew Grade’s nephew, Michael Grade, appointed controller of BBC1 in 1984. Grade had begun his career working on the Daily Mirror sports page and compared television scheduling to arranging newspaper layout, presenting stories in attractive forms for maximum impact. He went on to work as a showbusiness agent, where, like his uncle, he learned to work out the running order on a variety bill, which again was good training for scheduling. He first honed these skills directly in the 1970s as head of light entertainment and then director of programmes at London Weekend Television. In theatre, you could try out new ideas and unproven actors out of town before exposing them to the West End. On LWT, a weekend channel that began at 7 p.m. on Friday evening, when viewers wanted to be entertained at the end of a working week, there was nowhere to hide the quirky or experimental. ‘Every night on LWT was Saturday night at the London Palladium,’ wrote Grade. ‘There was no televisual equivalent of a wet Monday evening at the Hackney Empire.’35
Grade remembered one LWT programme with a salutary shudder: Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night. In 1978 Forsyth, the star of the BBC’s Generation Game, defected to LWT to present a lavish variety show which took up nearly two hours of Saturday primetime, with comic turns, star guests, audience participation games like Teletennis and Beat the Goalie, and the UK Disco Championships. ‘We want to get away from the awful slot thinking which says that situation comedies have to be half an hour, an
d not a second longer,’ one LWT executive said. ‘It’s a bit like the sports formula for Saturday afternoons – full of different kinds of goodies.’ But the show was a famous failure, beaten easily in the ratings by the new Generation Game with Larry Grayson on BBC1. ‘During the year the news was bad and the weather was worse,’ argued the IBA’s annual report. ‘Many people turned to comedy and light entertainment with great expectations. Sometimes those expectations were realised. Sometimes they were not. The national press, in cynical and bitter mood, saw gloom everywhere. The most obvious victim was Bruce’s Big Night.’36 But Grade knew better than to blame the winter of discontent or the newspapers. Instead, this chastening episode convinced him of the need for tight scheduling, ‘that awful slot thinking’ in which an evening’s entertainment had connected segments that built up to a climax like a multi-course gourmet meal.
In another of his comparisons, Grade likened the schedules to a supertanker, because the long gap between commissioning and broadcasting meant that changing course took time. So when he became controller of BBC1, he took the listings home and saw what could be done by tinkering with the arrangement of programmes that had already been commissioned. His first inspired tweak was moving Tenko, a drama series tracing the lives of a group of women from Singapore interned in a Japanese POW camp, from Thursday to Sunday night, increasing its audience from 5 to 11 million. He also told Robin Day, the presenter of Question Time on Thursday nights, not to close with his usual advice to ‘sleep well’ because this might dissuade viewers from staying up for the programme that followed. And he repeated the two episodes of the struggling soap opera EastEnders together on Sunday afternoons, thus boosting its ratings and achieving the ‘Dallas effect’ of getting it talked about. Just over 30 million people watched its Christmas Day episode in 1986, the highest television audience of the decade. It was, wrote the That’s Life presenter Esther Rantzen of Grade’s scheduling skills, ‘like watching an expert window dresser adjusting a bauble on a Christmas tree to make it shine’.37
