by Joe Moran
For many viewers, 4.30 p.m. each weekday was a point as fixed as a monastery’s canonical hours. Countdown, the word and numbers game, had been the first show on Channel 4 when it launched on 2 November 1982. On that first Tuesday, 4.5 million people watched it; only 800,000 returned the next day, which its presenter, Richard Whiteley, later claimed as the biggest audience drop in television history.69 Initially, Whiteley seemed ill at ease. ‘I always feel so sorry for the little man who presents it,’ said Mark, a student interviewed by Dorothy Hobson, now undertaking research on Channel 4. ‘He looks as if he’s not quite in control. He seems hesitant as to whether he should stop things.’ But, slowly, he either grew into his role or his gaucheness became endearing. He began dressing in colourful jackets, reading out letters, addressing viewers as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of Countdownia’, and delivering little homilies at the start of each show.
While its French parent programme, Des Chiffres et des Lettres, adopted computerised displays and touch screens, Countdown still used paper and felt tips, with the letters and numbers on linoleum tiles, so that even by the late 1980s its look was becoming appealingly retro. ‘To the degree that he is influenced by play, man can check the monotony, determinism, and brutality of nature,’ wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his classic book about the human instinct for play, Homo Ludens. ‘He learns to construct order, conceive economy, and establish equity.’ Countdown fulfilled Huizinga’s definition of play: its limits were finite, its rules were fixed, it was voluntary rather than a moral duty, its ethos was egalitarian and it was undertaken seriously but with an awareness that it was ultimately pointless, a way of simply enjoying and celebrating a moment in time. The winner of each series received the humble prize of a set of dictionaries and a Countdown teapot. Viewers played along with pen and paper; it appealed to the same instincts as Scrabble, crossword puzzles and word games, what George Orwell called ‘the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life’.70
Presenting the Yorkshire regional programme Calendar along-side Countdown, Whiteley went on to appear over 10,000 times on TV, more than anyone except Carol Hersee, the daughter of a BBC engineer who appeared as the little girl in Test Card F. With its large clock and Alan Hawkshaw’s ticking theme music counting down each thirty-second round, the show’s metatheme was the passing of time itself, but its own time never ran out because there was always another round, another episode, another ‘same time tomorrow’. On daytime television, where shows were stripped across a seemingly everlasting succession of weeks, the presenters gained a kind of immortality. ‘You were my afternoon comfort blanket. You were my afternoon sit-down, between work and getting the supper ready,’ wrote Helen Hooper in Friern Barnet after Whiteley died suddenly in 2005. ‘You had only to see his face,’ said Christina in London, ‘to feel good, at home, in a human, kind, gentle space.’71
In 1985, Peter Collett, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford, later to become better known as one of the resident experts on Big Brother, conducted an experiment. He and his team built a box resembling an old 1950s television cabinet which contained a hidden, low-light video camera to record the activities of viewers in twenty homes over a week. Looking at the tapes, he found that people were in the room for only eighty per cent of the time the set was switched on. Even when they managed to stay in the same room as the TV, they only looked at it sixty-five per cent of the time. While ‘watching’ TV they also ate dinner, argued, listened to records, read, did homework or housework, kissed and hugged each other. From the viewing diaries they were also asked to keep, it was clear that they greatly overestimated how much attention they paid to the programmes.72
An ITV series in the spring of 1987, Watching You Watching Us, masochistically repeated this experiment, filming six families in front of two-way TV sets. One family spent an entire episode of EastEnders dividing up and eating a Chinese takeaway between themselves, Toby the terrier and Bozo the boxer. By the end of the programme, Bozo was the only one still in the room, and he was not watching very attentively. Another family left the room en masse as soon as Crossroads began, the entire episode flickering on alone without an audience. It was Baudrillard’s vision of postmodernity, played out not in an American motel but an English living room. For unlike a cinema, where the lights go down and the projector starts whirring only when there is an audience in the auditorium, television carries on regardless of whether anyone is watching it. In their 1986 book Uninvited Guests, the sociologists Laurie Taylor and Bob Mullan discovered a number of viewers who put the set on as soon as they came into the house, as unthinkingly as they switched on the lights. ‘If you turn the light on, you might as well turn the TV on,’ said one. ‘Might as well be on the same switch, really.’73
In Watching You Watching Us, even people who claimed to give the set their undivided attention turned out to be less attentive than they thought. Professor Geoffrey Gilbert, a biophysical scientist recently retired from Birmingham University, and his Hungarian wife, Lilo, at first stood out as role models of attentiveness. Each made a careful note of things they wanted to watch and then honed this list down to a final, smaller list. They insisted that they never had the TV on unless it commanded their full attention. As it turned out, though, she often shifted her gaze to the Guardian on her lap, and he was under the impression that The Archers was a TV programme. Collett’s study made a similar discovery: although the presumption was that educated people watched more selectively and thoughtfully, they were actually almost as likely to be distracted as anyone else.74
In the 1970s, the former BBC television executive Stuart Hood had written a melancholy article for the Listener which stated that there were ‘few experiences more salutary for the professional communicator than to have to watch television in a provincial hotel’. On one such occasion Hood had seen the absent-minded viewing of hotel guests interrupted by comings and goings from the bar and noise from the jukebox. As soon as the news was over, they rose and deserted the room ‘like a flock of startled birds’. Now programme makers were confronted with the disquieting evidence that viewers behaved similarly even in their own living rooms. ‘The inference that I wanted producers to take away,’ wrote the BBC executive Will Wyatt when he saw Collett’s research, ‘was that you should not be afraid of giving a bit more information rather than a bit less, of reminding people of what had already been shown, of going out of your way to attract and retain attention.’ Worried that viewers were paying insufficient attention to their programmes, programme makers invented a new televisual grammar that kept viewers awake by repeatedly telling them what they had just seen and what was coming up.
Others redoubled the efforts to search for the perfect technical fix that could precisely measure an audience that was drifting off into video viewing and zapping through channels on the remote. One such innovation was the ‘passive people meter’ which relied not on the unreliable viewer pressing a button when they were watching, as the old Tammeter had done, but on new image recognition technology to identify precisely which faces in the room were pointed at the TV set. The critic Ien Ang had a phrase for this quest to turn the elusive, intangible activity of TV viewing into a measurable entity: ‘desperately seeking the audience’.75
Ludovic Kennedy, the presenter of the TV discussion programme Did You See?, thought that television made little lasting impression on its viewers. Since becoming one of the first ITN newsreaders in 1956, the high-born Kennedy had conveyed the impression of drifting absent-mindedly on to our screens having been, as one television critic put it, ‘good enough to drop by to see if he can lend a hand while on his way to the club’. He had no illusions about how long he would be remembered, for he knew that good programmes might take months or even years to make, be on for an hour and then be almost instantly forgotten. Indeed, Kennedy had already forgotten much of the television on which he had appeared. While writing his memoirs he discovered from ITN records that he had interviewed Errol Flyn
n and Tennessee Williams, but had no recollection of meeting either of them. For Kennedy, the people who worried about television corrupting people’s minds were confusing numbers with effect, and were assuming that a thing said on TV to millions of viewers had more resonance than something said by a friend one cared about.76
Kennedy’s sceptical, liberal voice was out of kilter with much of the public discussion about television at the time, which seemed afflicted by a kind of moral monomania directed against the permissive society in general and homosexuality in particular. Two private members’ bills in 1986 and 1987, by the Tory MPs Winston Churchill and Gerald Howarth, tried and failed to bring television within the Obscene Publications Act. In the run up to Howarth’s bill, Mary Whitehouse showed MPs extracts from Sebastiane (1975) and Jubilee (1977), two explicit films by the gay filmmaker Derek Jarman that had been shown late at night on Channel 4 in 1985, accompanied by a warning and a red triangle warning of adult content. Whitehouse also showed a notorious scene from Dennis Potter’s drama series, The Singing Detective, shown in November 1986, of a boy watching his mother having sex with her lover in a wood.
When broadcast, the Derek Jarman films received a total of twenty complaints, compared with 300 protests about Channel 4’s handling of the American Football results. The Singing Detective’s ‘heaving bottom’ scene inspired fewer than a hundred telephone calls, not all critical, and some of them before it was actually shown, the event having already been trailed in the newspapers. The series producer, Kenith Trodd, believed that Potter had leaked the story of the heaving bottom to the press beforehand, in the hope that it would help the series attract a bigger audience. If this is true, it seems to have worked, because the second half of the series run, after the heaving bottom appeared, added another 2 million viewers.77
Kennedy thought that television’s real power came not in these intermittently shocking episodes but in its slow-burning, osmotic pervasiveness as it filled the schedules and slotted wordlessly into and around our daily routines. ‘As a viewer I think of television as being comparable to a long train journey,’ he wrote. ‘As one gazes vacantly out of the window a succession of ever-changing images passes by … For the essence of television is its ephemerality: it is a world of flickering images, each dying at the moment it is born … survivors being pulled from wreckage, Miss World being crowned, one fish gobbling up another.’ Amid the copious literature on television’s baleful influence, he reflected, little attention had been paid to the most universal effect, its capacity to induce sleep. Kennedy had even once fallen asleep while appearing on television, during an interview with a particularly boring peer. ‘I know of no other agency except alcohol which can so rapidly and effortlessly bring the head to the chest,’ he wrote of TV, ‘and the two combined are as good as any sleeping pill.’78
In the summer of 1988, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith of the British Film Institute announced a project inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of Mass Observation the previous year. Drawing on Mass Observation’s tradition of day surveys, in which participants recorded everything they did on a single day, he conceived ‘One Day in the Life of Television’, which would document ‘the impact of television on the life and culture of the nation on a single day: November 1’. The date, a Tuesday, had no special significance: it was chosen simply because it was far enough ahead to allow the event to be planned. The project would supply, as Mass Observation had intended to do when it was founded in the 1930s, first-person vividness rather than the dry empiricism of statistics, and give a sense of what viewers really thought, ‘from the Surrey stockbroker to the unemployed labourer, from the children in a London tower block, to a miner’s family in Yorkshire’.79 The BFI handed out over 600,000 diary leaflets through bookshops, newsagents, libraries and supermarkets, with volunteers being asked to record what they watched and how they felt about it. About 7,000 schoolchildren and 11,000 adults completed diaries.
For many, the day’s viewing began with breakfast TV. ‘Jeremy Paxman, looking like a moose playing Noel Coward, is cheerfully putting the boot into a politician as usual,’ wrote Thelma Sutton, a retired secretary in Woking, watching the BBC’s Breakfast Time. Other diarists found Paxman ‘opinionated, boorish, self-satisfied’ and ‘rude, ignorant and extremely unpleasant’, or else they found him ‘brilliantly incisive’ and admired his ‘lovely, wicked grin’. Thus began a pattern that continued for the rest of the day, with diarists tending to watch television as a confirmation of their own existing attitudes.
After breakfast television was over, Robert Kilroy-Silk walked on to the set of his discussion programme, Day to Day, and announced today’s issue: marital rape. ‘I felt that it was a bit too sensitive an issue to be tackled at 9.30 a.m.,’ wrote David Green, aged fourteen, from Holywood, County Down, who like a lot of schoolchildren was on his half-term holiday. On ITV at 10.30 a.m. a magazine programme just a few weeks old began: This Morning, hosted by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan. Among diarists, the most intensely watched item in this programme was a segment on the season’s new knitting colours. ‘Day-time viewing must be the most socially unacceptable mass participation sin of the 1980s,’ wrote Diana Hutchinson, a housewife from Stourport-on-Severn. ‘We all watch, we all pretend we don’t.’
After the lunchtime news came the day’s most talked about show: Neighbours, a daily Australian soap bought in as a cheap import for the launch of the BBC’s daytime schedules. If it seemed to resemble an antipodean reincarnation of Crossroads, that was because it was made by the same production team; it even had a similarly earwormish theme tune written by Tony Hatch. On 1 November, Nellie Mangel invited Harold Bishop to the church dance and the pregnant Daphne felt unwell while minding the coffee shop – for the raw material on Melbourne’s Ramsay Street, just as in the Crossroads motel, was small domestic incident. And yet it was the one show that diarists seemed to recall perfectly. Thousands wrote about it and tried to rationalise their watching of it. Among this latter group was the TV presenter, Roy Castle, who stopped work on his rockery to watch it, he wrote, in order to tell his daughter what had happened when she came home from school.80
Fourteen-year-old Justin Delap, a boarder at St Edward’s School in Oxford, missed his lunch to get a seat in the television room, where almost his entire house had gathered to watch Neighbours. ‘Had to watch the early showing of Neighbours,’ wrote another diarist in Brighton. ‘Have a board meeting of Sussex Opera this evening …’ Students had a special affection for it, one Cardiff undergraduate describing the eyes turning to the screen in the student canteen when the theme tune started, ‘as automatically as Pavlov’s dogs used to salivate’. A Staffordshire Polytechnic student claimed the union cafeteria was losing so much money at lunchtime that they had installed a large TV to enable diners to watch Neighbours. Diarists noted that they now used phrases like ‘g’day’, ‘what a wombat’ and ‘shot through’, but made no mention of the rising inflexion that linguists call Australian Questioning Intonation, and which Neighbours surely helped to popularise.81
The diarists often seemed to view television distractedly through the distorting prism of their own anxieties. An unemployed Sheffield woman, Alison Fell, watched the afternoon film, The Importance of Being Earnest, with her partner and saw it as a metaphor for their failing relationship and that ‘ludicrous thing’ called love. ‘This brilliant, polished gem of a work laughed at our misery from behind the glass,’ she wrote. Stephen Pegg, a forty-year-old former teacher from Clevedon, Avon, watched the BBC2 schools programmes Seeing and Doing and How We Used To Live as a way of clinging to his previous life. Just a year earlier, after experiencing slight stiffness in one hand, he had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Now he was unable to speak, dress, feed or wash himself, but managed to type his diary with a head pointer on an electric typewriter. Television, he wrote ‘is now an important part of my life, many of its images reminding me of recent normality’. Pegg later won the prize for the best diary, a chance to meet the stars of EastEnd
ers.82
At 5.35 p.m. came the second sitting of Neighbours. Michael Grade had made this final virtuoso scheduling tweak before moving to Channel 4 earlier that year. Grade’s teenage daughter had reported the frustration of her classmates at missing Neighbours after they had become addicted to it during the holidays. They found themselves watching it at lunchtime in the school computer laboratory. So Grade moved the repeat from 10 a.m. the following day to later on the same day. Neighbours nearly doubled its audience to over 20 million. The only active Neighbours refusenik among the diarists was a company secretary, Alan Dunn, who, arriving home from work at 5.50 p.m., hid in his car for ten minutes while his family watched it indoors.83
In HM Prison Lewes in Sussex, the 560 inmates were only allowed to watch TV in the evening association period between 5.45 p.m. and 8 p.m. Their thin televisual gruel comprised the end of Neighbours, the national and regional news and a quiz show called Telly Addicts with Noel Edmonds. Prisoners were often disgruntled but captive viewers. ‘I don’t like television anyway,’ said one prison diarist, a long-term guest at Dartmoor. ‘It’s either bang-up or watch it, isn’t it?’ Two years earlier, there had been a riot at Dartmoor when a key episode of EastEnders, during which Michelle Fowler jilted Lofty Holloway at the altar, was ruined by poor reception. About sixty men in B wing smashed chairs, tables and light bulbs when the pictures returned, to reveal Lofty crying in his bedsit. Stephen Plaice, the writer-in-residence at Lewes Prison and later scriptwriter for The Bill, wrote that the ten-feet-high television screen in C wing was an ‘Orwellian sight’, looking over ‘depressed cons, slouched in their low-slung armchairs, flooding them with bright images of an outside world some have not seen for more than two decades’.84
