by Joe Moran
Grade’s carefully cultivated image, enhanced by his cigar and red braces, was that of an impresario who went with his intuitions rather than relying on what he called ‘the mumbo-jumbo jargon’ of concept testing and demographics. ‘It smelt like a Sunday show,’ he said after moving Tenko. ‘It was just instinct.’ In fact, Grade worked closely with Pamela Reiss from the BBC’s Broadcasting Research Department and relied on research which showed that audiences were happy to watch more demanding drama later on Sunday night. In autumn 1984 this department questioned 1,500 viewers. Asked to write out last night’s and tomorrow night’s schedule on ITV and BBC1, it turned out that most could name only two programmes, one of which was the news. Grade decided that the schedules must have ‘fixed time points that are almost like alarm clocks in viewers’ minds’. The research showed that viewers thought naturally in hours and half hours. For years they had misread the unshakeable fixtures of Thursday evening, thinking that Tomorrow’s World was on at 7 p.m. and that Top of the Pops followed at 7.30, when in fact they were both usually on five minutes before or after that. Grade insisted that, even though the international standards were twenty-five and fifty-five minutes to accommodate commercials, BBC programmes should now be made in half-hour and hour-long segments.38
Grade was also helped by a four-volume publication of Proustian proportions from the Broadcasting Research Department, Daily Life in the 1980s, which exhaustively examined the behaviour of Britons in the summer and winter of 1983–4, each volume containing over 600 pages of statistical tables. A ‘scheduler’s Bradshaw’, as one critic called it, it carefully mapped the activities of every Briton over four years old (toddlers never having been counted statistically as viewers), in quarter hours, from 6 a.m. to 2.30 a.m. – so, for example, it could tell you how many five- to nine-year-old children were in sight of a television when Crackerjack was broadcast on Friday afternoon at 4.50 p.m., or exactly how many people were awake and available to view television at 9.30 p.m. in the winter (ninety-one per cent) and in the summer (sixty-nine per cent). There were 52.4 million people in the country over four years old and every winter night, about 25 million of them were sitting dutifully in front of a television, like Kenneth Williams and his mother. If you measured the total audience at any time between the peak hours of 6.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m., it was always around this number.39
This broad mass of 25 million people had retained the desire to watch a wide range of programmes and there seemed to be a large element of randomness about their likes and dislikes. Tenko had initially been rejected by one BBC commissioner, its co-writer Jill Hyem revealed, because, he said, ‘no one’ll want to know about an all-woman cast looking their worst’. And yet its female-dominated, quotidian storylines about the rationing of sanitary towels, the non-delivery of Red Cross parcels or the organising of games of rounders proved to be absorbing when put in the right place in the week. ‘I was impressed by your portrayal of women over 30 as human beings,’ wrote one male viewer. ‘Men usually find it easy to relate to a woman in her twenties, probably because their mothers were that age when they were young boys. We need to see older women more often if we are to perceive them as real people.’40
Another programme that showed how unexpected viewers’ tastes could be was One Man and His Dog. It was presented by a Staffordshire-born naturalist, Phil Drabble, who had initially declined to take part because he thought it would make viewers ‘drop off their perch with boredom’. Consisting largely of shepherds whistling and calling out commands (‘Come by, Meg’, ‘Steady lass!’) to a dog trying to get a bleating flock of sheep into a pen somewhere on a British hillside, it introduced viewers to this traditional rural skill and turned the border collie into a cult hero. By the mid 1980s it had a primetime audience of 8 million on Tuesday nights on BBC2, most of them town- and sofa-dwelling vicarious shepherds, the majority of them women.
Some programmes made little impression and then mysteriously struck a chord. Only Fools and Horses, a sitcom about unlicensed market traders living in a council block in Peckham, had first gone out on Tuesday nights in September 1981, attracting a modest BBC1 audience of under 8 million and many letters from viewers asking what the title meant. It was only when the second series was repeated in the summer of 1983, to fill a gap in the schedules during a BBC technicians’ strike, that it began to emerge slowly as the most popular sitcom of the decade, adding new words to the common language like ‘lovely jubbly’ and ‘plonker’ (a word for the penis originating in 1960s London that, as often happens with penis synonyms, had become an innocent name for an idiot). Despite the choices offered by video and the remote control, viewers did not seem to behave like carefully discriminating consumers. Seemingly unglamorous dramas, obscure sports and underwhelming sitcoms could turn almost overnight into national obsessions. Grade was fond of quoting the wisdom of his former boss at LWT, Cyril Bennett, that ‘hits are 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent accident’.41
Grade soon found to his cost that, once acquired, viewers’ allegiances were hard to shift. In January 1985, Thames Television announced that it had bought the next series of Dallas, poaching it from the BBC. Grade retaliated by announcing that the BBC’s remaining sixteen episodes would not be shown. Dallas was taken off air and replaced by repeats of The Two Ronnies. A Sheffield councillor presented a petition containing 3,000 signatures to Margaret Thatcher, asking her to help get the lost episodes back, and the Sun ran three editorials on the subject. ‘Do we have to act like spoiled children,’ another frustrated viewer, Spike Milligan, asked in a letter to the Guardian. ‘Michael Grade is paid by public monies to put Dallas out when the public want it, and not withhold it to play “yaboo sucks to you” with Thames Television. Grow up.’42 Dallas resumed on 27 March after Grade and the BBC backed down, a discomfiting moment which confirmed that the viewer remained anchored in peculiar loyalties and strange habits – further proof, if it were needed, of the indispensability of the scheduler.
One phenomenon encapsulated the mercurial nature of the television audience and how it could slowly and collectively be drawn into something seemingly unexciting: the cult of snooker. Without television, snooker would have been forever a minority sport because the largest audience that can be afforded any meaningful view of a snooker table is a couple of thousand. Until the late 1960s, it had been a subterranean working-class pastime, with a tiny professional élite eking out a living in dingy clubs and holiday camps, occasionally appearing on Grandstand as a filler between horse races or when rain stopped play in the cricket: usually a single frame, with the finish timed to coincide with the runners going down to the starting gate or the covers coming off. Numbered balls were meant to make the game intelligible to viewers watching in black and white, but were too small to read in long shot.
In the late 1960s, the Grandstand producer Philip Lewis was one of the first people in Birmingham to have a colour set for BBC2 programmes and, wondering which sport would be most enhanced by colour and easiest to film with the few colour cameras then available, he woke up one morning with the answer in his head. The single-frame tournament Pot Black began in the summer of 1969, in the week after the moon landing, and quickly became one of BBC2’s most popular programmes, even though the vast majority of viewers were watching it in monochrome. The Sunday Telegraph compared the players favourably with the ‘hysterical pooves of the football field’. The snooker commentator Ted Lowe, who helped to develop Pot Black, required every player to sign a contract obliging him to wear a dinner suit. The first Pot Black champion, Ray Reardon, believed this helped to remove the stigma of seediness that had attached to snooker since the 1930s when the billiard halls were places where stolen goods changed hands and illegal gambling was rife. Lowe remained irritated that the profession’s bad boy, Alex Higgins, on the strength of a doctor’s note of dubious provenance, got away without wearing a bow tie.43
But the colour TV studio lights were a major technical obstacle to broadcasting the long game. The light glared off the
balls and the heat was such that players lost pounds in weight and the Formica on the cushion rails burned their hands. During the 1976 world championship finals it became so hot that the players threatened to strike. But Nick Hunter, producing the championship for the BBC, could see on screen the reddened ends of Alex Higgins’s fingers, bitten down through nerves, and was convinced that, if they could just sort out the lighting, snooker could provide a source of slowly absorbing psychological drama. Over the next two years, the BBC perfected a glare-free, shadowless canopy of lights that also reduced the heat on the table.44
The BBC began full daily coverage of the world championship in 1978. A little rectangular patch of baize at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield held viewers’ concentration for the next two weeks as two bow-tied duellists pushed twenty-two balls around it with long, tapered sticks. ‘It could be a subversive experiment in mass hypnosis: millions of Britons transfixed before the shifting dots like rabbits facing a swaying weasel,’ reflected Peter Fiddick. In 1979, viewers followed the dazzling progress of Terry Griffiths, a former postman from Llanelli who had learned to play during a postal strike, as he won the championship at his first attempt. The next year, the world championship competed for airtime with a six-day siege of the Iranian Embassy in London, with the climax of one interrupting that of the other. At 7.23 p.m. on 5 May, the novelist Frederick Forsyth was watching the final on BBC1 as it built to a suspenseful climax. ‘Cliff Thor-burn and Hurricane Higgins were tied at 17 frames each; the world crown hung on the 35th frame,’ he wrote. ‘Then the screen blanked and turned to a blizzard of white dots that eventually dissolved into a street scene. The language in my own sitting room went as blue as the sky outside.’45
Brian Wenham, the BBC2 controller, was a snooker fan and happily used it as an audience builder for the channel’s more highbrow programmes. Wenham also gave generous time in his channel’s schedules to his other great loves, classical music and opera, and perhaps snooker was not dissimilar: its pleasures were also incremental and demanded commitment from the viewer in order to overcome the dull or ponderous moments. Snooker filled up television’s twilight hours, in the daytime and late into the night, when the game, interrupted only by the presenter David Vine’s deep Devonian voice and the hushed, sparse commentary of ‘whispering’ Ted Lowe, had a sepulchral stillness.
Lowe had acquired his whisper at Leicester Square Hall in the early days of TV snooker in the 1950s, when he sat with the commentator Raymond Glendenning in the crowd, giving him expert tips not meant to be picked up by the microphone. By the 1980s, Lowe tended to speak less, on the assumption that viewers did not need to have the game explained so much. Once he collapsed during a match between Cliff Thorburn and Doug Mountjoy and was carried off on a stretcher while the reserve commentator Jack Karnehm was called, eight minutes of play passing without comment.46 There were no complaints from viewers, so used were they to long stretches of silence, interspersed only with the metronomic scoring of the referee, occasional throat clearing from the audience and the sound of baked resin balls clacking against each other and plopping into holes.
Snooker was unhurried, unedited television. Whole minutes passed unproductively as players examined the balls from various angles, prepared to take a shot and thought better of it, instead furrowing their brows or scratching their cheeks. Jeremy Isaacs, head of Channel 4, believed the dyed green of the baize aided the sport’s late-night popularity, because it was soothing to look at, with the balls travelling in neat parallel lines as they bounced off cushions. The smartly blazered referee would occasionally caress the balls with his white-gloved hands like a butler polishing the family silver. It was a case study in the fundamental meaninglessness of television and how it could draw people into a spectacle whose significance was entirely symbolic and circular, as futile as all sport ultimately is. ‘The familiar ritual is as restful as watching waves break,’ wrote the author Gordon Burn, ‘and, miraculously, it is a tranquillity that can be piped, Mogadon in the ether, into the country’s living rooms.’47
As players took it in turns at the table, the tiniest accidental glances or the mere friction of the baize could hand a match to an opponent. ‘There is something fascinating about the game: the absolute precision required,’ wrote George Mackay Brown in his council flat in Stromness, Orkney, where he had recently thrown out his ‘Stone Age TV’ and installed a colour set. ‘The slight subtle touch of ball on ball; the wild foray that sets them in a scatter, helter-skelter, all over the green baize table. The moving colours themselves fascinate the eye … It is exciting and soothing at the same time.’ The author A. S. Byatt, who had loathed the group passions and intimate contact of competitive sport since her schooldays, became entranced by the beautiful geometry of snooker with its ‘lines of force playing across a clear green screen, human dramas which were part of the lines of force, the suffering and exulting faces briefly picked out by the cameras’.48 Like the TV wrestlers whom they had replaced in the nation’s imaginings, snooker players had nicknames – Cliff ‘the Grinder’ Thorburn, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, ‘Steady’ Eddie Charlton, Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White – that conveyed their personalities in vivid shorthand. And there was something courtly and chivalrous about the way they would celebrate an opponent’s 147 break or own up to a foul shot even if no one else had noticed. Clive James, a fan since the first series of Pot Black, thought that unlike other sports, in which gamesmanship was now routine, snooker confirmed Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum that a game consisted of the rules by which it is played. Snooker, James reflected, was in essence ‘two young men in black tie who would rather die than cheat’.49
In 1978, there were thirty-five hours of snooker on television; by 1985, 130 hours were given over just to the world championship in the spring, and there were seven or eight other major snooker tournaments a year on TV. But the 1985 World Championship turned out to be a dull tournament with few close games. The final, between Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor, looked like a mismatch from the start, although it did offer an intriguing personality clash. Davis, the reigning world champion, was known for his coolness and estuarine monotone, earning him the nickname ‘the Romford Robot’, with a certain alliterative licence since he was actually from Plumstead. His unremitting safety play, careful cue action and winning habit aroused little sympathy, which caused exasperation among those who saw it as a symptom of national defeatism. ‘[Davis] behaves as the British must behave if they are to maintain any position in the world,’ wrote Brian Walden in the Evening Standard. ‘Order, method, discipline, plus a stern control of eccentricity, is the passport to triumph in the modern world … [But] the marvellously proficient Davis is clapped with some reluctance. Does this not prove what an essentially frivolous people we are?’50
Taylor was from Coalisland, a poor Catholic town in Tyrone and scene of the first civil rights march in 1968. Never world champion and now being eclipsed by younger players, Taylor also had specially designed, upside down glasses with enormous lenses, worn high on his face so he could look through the most optically exact part of the lens. Even in a decade in which outsized spectacles were fashionable, they made him look, according to ‘Steady’ Eddie Charlton, ‘like Mickey Mouse with a welding shield on’.51
At 7.17 p.m. on the Saturday night of the final, Davis won the first frame of the evening session to take an 8–0 lead. ‘Taylor looks three inches shorter,’ said the commentator Clive Everton ruefully in the interval. ‘His head sunk into his neck. Even if he gets a chance now, he won’t be able to take it.’ Viewers deserted the game in their droves, turning over to watch The Price is Right or The Kenny Everett Television Show. Then Taylor began winning games and viewers slowly returned as they heard the score was narrowing. By the end of the first day, Taylor had pegged Davis back to 7–9. At 11.15 on the Sunday night, he drew level with Davis for the first time, tying the frames at 17–17 to take the match into a final frame. Some viewers had switched on to BBC2 to see Bleak House and had carried on watching
even though they had been told this was now postponed. After thirty minutes of edgy play, the score was 62–44 to Davis with four balls left on the table and Taylor needing all of them. He potted a tricky brown, blue and pink to ensure that a sport made for colour TV would enjoy its most mesmerising moment with two balls coloured black and white.
After a series of kamikaze attempts to pot the black, Taylor left Davis a fairly easy cut into the top pocket from close range. When Davis overcut it, Ted Lowe let out an astonished ‘No!’, more like an exhalation of breath than a word. The roar of the audience got louder as the white ball came to rest at the right angle for a half ball pot. This time, stretching a little to avoid using the rest, Taylor sank the black. It was 12.23 a.m., and 18.5 million people were still watching, the largest ever British TV audience after midnight.
In Coalisland, a huge crowd of people spilled out of Girvan’s snooker hall, where they had been watching on television. Others poured out of houses, in dressing gowns and with children on their shoulders, and paraded around the town, or drove round the town square, sounding their horns. A few weeks later, a tiny, crumpled letter arrived at Taylor’s father’s house in Coalisland, from the Maze prison, after being scrunched up and smuggled out in someone’s tooth: ‘Dennis O chara, on behalf of all the republican POWs I’d like to thank you for scaring the life out off us!!? … Some of the screws were not amused at you winning, and on Saturday they were like the cats who got the cream. However you fixed their wagons for them and at about 12.30 a.m. Monday morning there was a terrible din + banging round this camp as the lads got on to the doors, hammering to acknowledge your fantastic victory. Maith thu a chara [well done, my friend], it’s a while since we’ve had an opportunity to “Bang” in such good news.’ Later that year, October devotions in the Church of the Holy Trinity were specially rescheduled so Coalisland’s Catholics could watch Taylor on This is Your Life.52
