Armchair Nation
Page 30
Snooker’s slow decline as a televisual sport was as capricious and mysterious as its rise. After the black ball final, it never again captivated viewers in quite the same way. By watching the techniques of the game’s best players on television, talented young players like Stephen Hendry, John Parrott and Alan McManus assimilated tactical lessons that once took a lifetime to learn. As these young players came through, frame times dropped dramatically. Counter-intuitively, this seemed to make the game less exciting. For, like Test cricket, the excitement of snooker had to be earned through the possibility of boredom and the sense that players might, when faced with the simple task of knocking balls into pockets on a flat, unchanging table, be gradually reduced to their last reserves of skill and nerve.
In the spring of 1985, the BBC launched its ‘Domesday Project’ to mark the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book the following year. That summer, about 1 million people started work as surveyors, many of them children taken from 9,000 schools. The project divided the whole of Britain into 23,000 4 × 3 km areas called Domesday Squares or ‘D-Blocks’ in which the volunteer surveyors wrote about their local area and about their daily lives, the information being recorded on the BBC’s own successful brand of microcomputer. The author of the teachers’ guide for the project, Professor Ted Wragg of Exeter University, pointed out that schoolchildren had contributed to this sort of data gathering before, helping to sort the seeds that Darwin had brought back from his voyage in the Beagle, and working on the geographer Dudley Stamp’s land use survey of the 1930s.53
Despite these high-minded precedents, a great number of the children in the Domesday Project simply wrote about watching TV. It was clear that, despite the arrival of the first, primitive computer games and the new presence of a video rental shop on every high street, children were still mostly captive customers watching what was put in front of them, from prosaic sitcoms like Terry and June and Don’t Wait Up, to high-gloss soaps like Dallas and Dynasty. The Domesday entries, written by anonymous contributors asked to record what they thought would interest people reading in another thousand years, read as though written for a passing Venusian. ‘A television is like a box run on electricity and when you switch it on you can watch films and sport and lots of other things,’ said one young viewer. ‘Television is one of the main entertainments in the Penistone area,’ said another. ‘To some people it has become a third parent, they become addicted to it.’54
Television was now eating up the last vacant hours in the schedules. An often cited concept in the new media studies was ‘flow’, a term coined by Raymond Williams. In 1972 Williams and his wife Joy were on their way to Stanford, where he was to take up a research fellowship for a year. Newly landed in the United States by boat, they spent a night watching TV in a Miami motel. They found themselves bemused by the grammar of American television in which programmes went into the incessant ad breaks without a pause, seamlessly and surreally. Television could run ‘from the dinosaur loose in Los Angeles to the deep-voiced woman worrying about keeping her husband with her coffee to the Indians coming over the skyline and a girl in a restaurant in Paris suddenly running from her table to cry’.55 After arriving at Stanford, Williams spent much of the year in his flat in Escondido Village watching and writing a book about television. On Californian TV the normal rules of scheduling had little purchase: you could watch movies from 6 a.m. into the small hours.
In America, Williams decided, watching television was a pursuit in its own right, almost unrelated to what was being watched. This was the state to which the medium aspired, insatiably occupying any blank moments in the schedules until it achieved the condition of uninterrupted ‘flow’.56 Television’s natural instinct was simply to go on and on, to consume the infinite time stretching out in front of it, like those cartoons where Bugs Bunny is frantically laying down railway track so the train he is on can keep moving.
At the same time that Williams was arriving in Miami, ITV was responding to the end of restrictions on broadcasting hours by expanding its weekday afternoon programmes. BBC radio’s daytime audiences declined sharply as listeners became viewers of the legal drama Crown Court, the rustic soap opera Emmerdale Farm, The Indoor League, in which people played dominoes, table football and shove halfpenny in pubs, and Mr and Mrs, which quizzed married couples on each other’s quirks and rituals: ‘What would your husband do if his trouser zip broke?’ ‘What is the waste paper basket in your bedroom made of?’ Ian Trethowan, Radio 4’s controller, worried that ITV now had ‘an attractive pattern of afternoon entertainment, aimed particularly at housewives – the same audience at which Radios Two and Four had for years set their caps’.57
Until the arrival of breakfast television in 1983, however, British TV had mostly denied its uniqueness as a medium by dividing itself up into programmes that preserved the discrete categories of pre-TV culture, in the sense that they each belonged to a particular genre and viewers were expected to watch them from start to finish. Breakfast television was instead definitively televisual, its main organising principle being the clock in the corner of the screen. Items were only about four minutes long, the assumption being that people would dip in at any point and not watch for more than twenty minutes. The discordant mood shift, or what producers called ‘light and shade’, became routine, as items on keep fit and horoscopes ran straight into ones about alopecia and cancer, stitched together with a general tone of bright-eyed, muted concern (‘The doctor said it was just a cyst, didn’t he?’) and slightly manic cheerfulness. Breakfast television, one BBC executive said, was about ‘being nice to people’.58
The Australian Bruce Gyngell, who took over as managing director of ITV’s breakfast franchise, TV-AM, in 1984, helped establish the tone for breakfast television and much of what followed it in the schedules. ‘I set out to make TV-AM eternal summer,’ he said, ‘so that all those lost, lonely people would have a place in the world they could turn on and feel warm and bright.’ On TV-AM’s Good Morning Britain, the preferred style of furniture was a modified sofa, like an upholstered bench, to suggest informality while making guests sit up properly because, said Gyngell in one of many omniscient-sounding pronouncements, ‘the hip-bone should never be lower than the knee-bone. Otherwise all you see is knees.’
The audience felt ‘vulnerable’ at breakfast time, he claimed, so the TV-AM set was in cheering pinks and yellows, male presenters wore patterned-knit V-necks and women pastel dresses. Early news bulletins were crisp, to attract a male audience. ‘As the show moves on,’ Gyngell explained, ‘it becomes softer. By 8.30 it is mainly female. Between 8.30 and 8.40 it changes pace. The women have got the family off and like to relax.’ Breakfast TV, he felt, should be soundled to allow people to follow it while doing other things. ‘Television has a grammar to it … It’s got to flow,’ he said. ‘This is one of the great problems of British television – they spend all their energy on the content, not enough on the form.’59
It took time for the mood and flavour of breakfast television, a triumph of form over content, to migrate to the rest of the day. There were still Zen-like moments of stillness and contemplation in the otherwise endless flow of programmes. Much airtime was filled with ‘Test Card F’, the little girl with an Alice band playing noughts and crosses on a blackboard easel who had occupied tens of thousands of hours of screentime since the arrival of colour TV in 1967. The accompanying music, by unknown session artists or little-known combos like the Stuttgart Studio Orchestra, the KPM All-Stars or Mr Popcorn’s Band, had its unlikely fans, who hated it being dismissed as bland ‘lift muzak’.
As a teenager, Bob Stanley would watch the test card solely for the music, and record it on C60 cassette tapes. For him it had a pleasingly furtive quality, for the card was not really meant to be watched and listened to, unless you were an engineer. Listening to the test card, he felt, had influenced the eclectic, soothing mix of kitsch pop, dance music and European synth instrumentals of his band Saint Etienne. Perhaps over-egging its import
, he also detected the test card’s influence in the work of groups like the Pale Fountains and Portishead and the 1990s lounge music boom.60
There were other dead hours, filled with programmes not designed for extended mass viewing: a long series of IBA engineering announcements ‘for the radio and television trade’ each morning, informing people that the Caradon transmitter was not on full power or reminding them to correctly polarise their television aerials; news and weather from the teletext service Ceefax, the pages changing languidly to accommodate even the slowest reader; and Open University programmes – which used to be shown on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but which now, with the growing use of the video recorder, had been shunted into the daytime and late night schedules – in which a lecturer explained velocity diagrams in engineering mechanics or dissected a sheep’s brain.
This gentle-paced world disappeared on 27 October 1986, when BBC1’s new daytime service began, with unbroken programming from breakfast to after school. ITV followed its example a year later, the IBA having refused to allow it to shift its schools programmes on to Channel 4 until the new channel’s transmitters could reach every school in the land. Television now ran continuously from daybreak to midnight. The key insight from research undertaken by both channels on public attitudes to daytime TV was the feelings of guilt that watching it aroused, although this guilt was felt more in the affluent south-east than other regions, more among women (who saw it as distracting them from their domestic obligations) than men, and more in the morning than in the afternoon.61
This research influenced the scheduling pattern that developed, with the mornings given over to magazine programmes with a semi-educational slant and a sense that you could dip into them while doing something else. The afternoons had re-runs of American soaps or quiz shows shown at the same time each weekday, a technique borrowed from US television known as ‘stripping’ and designed to make viewing a daily habit. Ann Gray found that Dewsbury housewives guiltily combined watching daytime TV with housework, seeing it as a snatched treat or a reward for work completed. They caught Robert Kilroy-Silk’s post-breakfast talk show between coming back from the school run and beginning the cleaning, or squeezed in the Napa Valley soap opera Falcon Crest between bringing the kids home from school and starting to make their tea.62
When broadcasters had lobbied for more hours in the daytime, they cited the deprived audience of housewives, shiftworkers and pensioners. No one mentioned unemployed people (or students, another group traditionally demonised as feckless and lazy). And yet the two great expansions in daytime television, in 1972 and 1986, both occurred, probably coincidentally, when unemployment reached unprecedented levels. In 1972, unemployment rose above a million for the first time since the 1930s, a then shocking statistic which led to Edward Heath being booed in the House of Commons; in 1986 it rose to over 3 million. In the great depression, jobless men had been highly visible: they queued up outside ‘the labour’, hung around on street corners or congregated in public libraries, and were often accused of repairing to the cinema immediately after collecting their dole money. But in the 1980s, as Ben Pimlott pointed out, unemployed people were ‘nowhere to be seen: scattered through a hundred council estates, sitting in clubs, or slumped in front of television sets’. This, he felt, had contributed to the resigned acceptance of unemployment figures that would have been seen as intolerable a generation earlier.63 Unemployed people were the hidden viewers of daytime television, unmentioned by advertisers, broadcasters or politicians.
Emerging 1980s bands often survived on the dole and inhabited a twilit world occupied in part by daytime TV. The songs of Nigel Blackwell, leader of the Birkenhead group Half Man Half Biscuit, are concerned, in the music critic Paul du Noyer’s words, with ‘people too educated to be on the dole but too luckless or lazy to be anywhere else. They take a witty revenge on the drivel of popular culture, without denying their fascination with it.’64 Half Man Half Biscuit songs include dense allusions to pre-school programmes like Trumpton and the daytime television personalities of the era such as Una Stubbs and Lionel Blair (the team captains of the frenetic charades game Give Us a Clue) and the snooker referee Len Ganley.
Television now also began to colonise the night-time. The traditional closedown of programmes around midnight came with certain familiar rituals: ITV’s epilogue from a vicar, the national anthem (a continuation of the patriotic tradition practised in cinemas and theatres), and the announcer’s injunction to remember to switch off your set, followed by the high-pitched whine for those who had fallen asleep in front of it (necessary because of the propensity of the older valve televisions to overheat and catch fire). Even if people had a valid reason to be up after midnight, these nannyish rituals suggested, they were not to be encouraged to do so by television. But the Peacock Committee on Broadcasting, reporting in July 1986, drew attention to ‘the non-occupied night-time hours’ of the television wavelengths and concluded in über-Thatcherite mode that the unused airtime should simply be sold to the highest bidder. In 1987, fearing the government would franchise out these night-time hours to an outsider as they had done with breakfast television in 1983, several ITV regions began preemptively broadcasting through the whole night. Douglas Hurd, now the home secretary, accused them of exercising ‘squatters’ rights’.65
Watching this new ITV night-time service a couple of months after it started, the journalist Stephen Pile found himself ‘plunged into a world as strange and exotic as anything Jacques Cousteau or Alice in Wonderland ever discovered’. The shows that punctuated these early hours were televisual Polyfilla: re-runs of The Partridge Family and Batman, old Hollywood ‘B’ movies, or phone-ins with callers discussing their personal problems with an on-screen psychiatrist. Nighttime TV was a world in which normal scheduling rules surrendered to surreal juxtapositions: a Hammer horror film like Taste the Blood of Dracula might be blithely followed by 50 Years On: More Newsreel Clips from 1937, with monochrome footage of Henry Hall’s farewell performance or a motorcycle scramble at Bagshot Heath. ‘I staggered off to bed at 5.30 a.m., stunned,’ wrote Pile. ‘It was the most bizarre series of programmes I have seen in my entire life.’66
‘Television knows no night. It is perpetual day,’ mused the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, an alien adrift in American motel rooms just as Raymond Williams had been, and marvelling at this ubiquity at a time when French TV still closed down around midnight. ‘TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things. It is the incessant light, the incessant lighting, which puts an end to the alternating round of day and night.’ A persistent theme of Baudrillard’s work was that our contemporary culture of postmodernity was one populated by the ‘hyperreal’, in the sense that endlessly replicated media images had merged with and displaced reality. Ours was a culture of the ‘simulacrum’, the copy that had supplanted the original and taken on a strange, self-generating life of its own.
Night-time television, a world of re-runs and jarring combinations with a weird, parallel relationship with waking reality, seemed definitively Baudrillardian. The twenty-four-hour schedules of America, he wrote, meant that televisions were often seen ‘functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms … There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room … It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages.’67
For all its incongruities, night-time television in Britain was an immediate success. Central TV’s Prisoner: Cell Block H, an Australian series about life in a women’s prison, had nearly a million viewers at 1 a.m. in the Midlands alone. The numbers watching in the long, insomniac stretch between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. were much smaller – about 100,000 across Britain – but advertisers prized these cheap slots because late-night television appealed to the young, and young men in particular, who
were traditionally hard to reach. Judging by its content, night-time TV seemed to be aimed at a community of odd-balls, nonconformists, nighthawks, returning clubbers and distress purchasers who were prepared simply to watch the perpetual flow of television and see what came up from the vaults. But perhaps these viewers were also glimpsing the future of TV, one where its disposable content would matter less than its omnipresent occupation of the schedules.
Whereas peaktime TV was now acquiring a cultural memory through video, this kind of television had its hard drive wiped each day as though it had never been. While primetime shows referenced the passing of the seasons and years, the daytime and night-time shows existed only from one day to the next. Like the summertime Christmases at the Crossroads motel, they inhabited not the linear time of the real world but the recurring, self-contained time of television. And yet, because of their habit-forming regularity, these programmes could inspire great loyalty and affection in viewers. They drew their power from the fact that they mirrored the taken-for-granted, seemingly eternal nature of everyday life itself, what the French critic Maurice Blanchot called ‘the inexhaustible, irrecusable, always unfinished daily’. As television filled up every hour of the day and night, it came to seem as natural and endless as daily life itself. ‘The everyday is our portion of eternity,’ Blanchot wrote. ‘For in the everyday we are neither born nor do we die: hence the weight and the enigmatic force of everyday truth.’68