Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Viewers remained exercised about very particular details. A museum assistant from Wrexham, watching A Question of Sport at 8.30 p.m., was ‘a bit disappointed with the pullover of question master David Coleman, plain black’, while eleven-year-old Master A. Heath-cote of Chelmsford noted sadly that the BBC2 sitcom Colin’s Sandwich had ‘nothing to do with sandwiches’. The favourite primetime programmes among the diarists were repeats: a ten-year-old episode of Rising Damp and a thirteen-year-old Fawlty Towers. As the TV audience fell off sharply, BBC1 still netted 6 million viewers for its (second) repeat showing of Meerkats United at 10.25 p.m., a programme about these tiny southern African mongooses living in tight-knit colonies, who solved childcare problems collectively and who stood sentry in trees on strict rotation, sniffing the air and keeping an eye out for predators while their friends foraged for insects and lizards. ‘Only by working as a team,’ explained the narrator David Attenborough, ‘can they play on the hostile pitch of the southern African desert.’ Viewers seemed to love the programme less for this perhaps unThatcherite message than for the meerkats’ eerily human faces, with their small noses and large eyes accentuated by surrounding patches of dark fur.85 The BBC1 audience dropped drastically for the TV discussion programme Network at 10.55 p.m., and still more severely when a man from the Open University began lecturing them about computer graphics. Well before midnight, almost everyone was in bed.

  The One Day project had aimed ‘to reveal Britain’s relationship with its television service at a time when it is poised to change for ever’. A bill to deregulate the television industry then going through parliament, finally enshrined in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, championed the idea that consumers, not the ITV–BBC duopoly, should decide what they watched, and that there should be more channels and more television for them to choose from. But while they were often scathing about the programmes available to them on four channels, few diarists felt that deregulation would lead to better ones. ‘Satellite and cable, I firmly believe, will destroy television in this country,’ wrote Gareth Hughes, a sales executive from Newbridge, Gwent. ‘Politicians and money moguls … get their way and we, the poor plebs, suffer. I suppose that’s democracy? … What I want to know is, who among the British public wants all this satellite garbage?’86

  In far-flung parts of Britain like the Scilly Isles, where the nearest cinema was in Penzance and bad weather often delayed the arrival of newspapers and post, diarists seemed particularly attached to their televisual routines and sceptical about change, as did those who watched TV in communal spaces like care homes, boarding schools and oil rigs. For Edward Street, lighthouse keeper on the Lizard, the most southerly point of mainland Britain, television was his only amusement, and he noted that in such isolation one could develop unusual interests. ‘I was on one particular lighthouse where the three things we watched without fail were Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm and the Financial Times index,’ he wrote. ‘For some reason we’d become totally besotted with the FT index and so everything would stop as we sat down at the end of the midday news just to find out what the index was doing.’87 The BFI project’s sample was of course slanted in favour of people who cared enough about television to produce a diary about it. But it was clear that many felt television formed part of a collective national conversation and they enjoyed the sense that they were watching what others were watching, even if what most of them were watching was Neighbours.

  Neighbours seemed to be as near to a communal culture as the nation possessed, bringing together people of different ages, social classes and ethnicity. The sociologist Marie Gillespie, doing fieldwork among Asian teenagers in Southall, found them to be avid fans, while their parents remained lukewarm about British television. Indian families had been early adopters of the video recorder, using it to view Bombay cinema, which they saw as a way of maintaining links with their country of origin and teaching their children its language and customs. Gillespie compared them to the Gastarbeiter Turkish community in West Germany, a similarly strong video-watching culture created out of a sense of marginalisation from the mainstream. By 1989, when about half of British homes had a video, eighty per cent of Southall homes had one. Southall’s Asian teenagers, though, were less likely to enjoy Bollywood films and had latched on to the all-white, suburban characters of Neighbours, using them as a way of talking indirectly about their own families, and the importance in Punjabi culture of family honour or izzat, which depended on the chastity of daughters. The gossipy character, Mrs Mangel, had entered their lingo (‘Oh! She’s a right Mangel!’) to describe an interfering adult.88

  Many viewers seemed to watch Neighbours without taking it seriously, or at least they excused their watching of it in these terms. Clive James’s professionally flippant voice, accepting of kitsch and impatient of divisions between high and low culture, was now widely imitated. When his tenure at the Observer ended in 1982, other poets and novelists – Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Hugo Williams, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Adam Mars-Jones – started to be employed as television critics by newspapers and magazines. Dissecting popular culture was now a serious activity. The Listener had begun a guest column, Schlockwatch, in which contributors wrote about their weakness for popular television. Joan Bakewell commended the ITV guessing game, Through the Keyhole; George Melly sang the praises of the teenage quiz show Blockbusters; and Paul Theroux wrote of his fondness for Coronation Street and his delight at seeing a poster for The Mosquito Coast, the film of his novel, in Rita Fairclough’s newsagents.89

  The earnest Crossroads viewers whom Dorothy Hobson talked to in the early 1980s would not have understood this new, slyly populist tone. On Easter Monday 1988, after more than 4,500 episodes, Crossroads had come to an end, the motel closing its doors for the last time and Meg’s daughter, Jill Chance, leaving her husband and driving off with her new man to found a new hotel. This time there was no stop shot at the end. On the mid-morning BBC television show Open Air, presenter Pattie Coldwell broke down during a live broadcast from the Midlands motel. ‘I never thought I would be in tears over Crossroads,’ she said, ‘but I am.’ Although Crossroads still had about 12 million viewers, its audience was disproportionately old and poor and thus unappealing to advertisers. ‘We did a survey of what newspapers Crossroads viewers read,’ said the producer William Smethurst, who had tried to rebrand the serial as Crossroads, Kings Oak. ‘It was depressing. More of them read the Daily Star, which was going through its Daily Bonk phase, than the numbers who ever saw any of the quality papers. I realised there was no point in clever, funny writing if no one would appreciate it.’90

  The elderly Crossroads fans who had written to the Birmingham Evening Mail about Meg’s departure, fearful that they were being forgotten, had their fears vindicated. Commercial broadcasters now preferred to attract what they called ‘ELVs’ or ‘elusive light viewers’, such as teenagers and the young people with disposable incomes coveted by advertisers. When the ITV controller, Greg Dyke, dropped the Saturday afternoon wrestling in 1988, he said it was ‘stuck in a timewarp’ and ‘personified the old English working class sitting round the telly, staring blankly’. A few months later ITV also cancelled the darts and bowls, and Channel 4 pulled snooker from its schedules, because these sports, too, had a relatively elderly audience.91

  A quarter of Britain’s television viewing was now done by the 8 million people over sixty-five. A third of them had hearing problems, and one in ten wore hearing aids, which made radio listening difficult; on a winter’s evening ninety-five per cent watched TV. But this group of viewers was statistically invisible because the ratings system lumped over fifty-fives together, all 15 million of them, so as not to draw advertisers’ attention to the fact that millions of their potential viewers were economically inactive pensioners. Over fifty-fives made up ten per cent of the audience for Top of the Pops, and eighteen per cent of the audience for Blue Peter. One and a half million of them watched the ITV cartoon, Dangermouse, half a million more than its target audience of
four to nine year olds.92

  Yet broadcasters behaved as though this most loyal group of viewers did not exist. The commercials populating daytime television, promoting denture fixant and walk-in baths, were the only real clue that they watched television at all. These older viewers were the ones who seemed most to welcome the filling out of the daytime schedules and the diurnal routines of daily quiz shows and regional news, the television that was now stripped across the week and existed in its own little bubble of recurring time. ‘Television is an absolute boon for the lonely,’ wrote Ivy Ryalls, a retired woman from Alvaston, Derbyshire, in her ‘One Day’ diary. ‘At a flick of the switch one’s rooms can be peopled. When my husband died 10 years ago, the loneliness was dreadful … I remember many sleepless nights and the utter relief when the sunrise opening of early morning television meant that there were other people awake in the world besides me.’93

  8

  THE AGE OF WARTS AND CARBUNCLES

  Years ago I was walking down a street in a suburban town in the evening. The streets were empty, there was a feeling of dereliction. I passed this shop full of television sets, and I was on all of them. I thought ‘Christ, that’s awful.’ I found it quite disturbing.

  Melvyn Bragg1

  The great historian of the English landscape, W. G. Hoskins, often complained of the despoliation of its countryside by soulless modernity. But there was one part of the modern world he admired. ‘Goonhilly is one of the most marvellous sites in England,’ he enthused in a BBC2 series, Landscapes of England, in May 1978.

  What caps it all is the way that as you approach these immense saucers there are circular barrows – the burial mounds of Bronze Age men. It is the combination of these burial mounds four thousand years old and Goonhilly Earth Station which is to me a magnificent conjunction of the ancient world and the future. Goonhilly is obviously not just scenery: it is pure landscape and as deeply moving as any landscape fashioned a thousand or so years ago. Goonhilly at sunset, with no man in sight, silently listening all the time to the most remote signals. It is a scene that would have inspired Thomas Hardy.2

  It is not surprising Hoskins made his peace with modernity here. The postwar phenomena he most hated, such as trunk roads, concrete airfields and bombing ranges, were all about noise and restless movement. But the architecture of television relies on the silent, invisible, quasi-magical radio wave. By the time Hoskins celebrated it, Goonhilly had become the largest satellite station on earth, with sixty huge, stainless steel mushrooms rising on their spindly bipods. They were so big and so many that Goonhilly had its own permanent team of painters who spent each day hanging like spiders on a metal web, priming and topcoating each dish with chlorinated rubber, to protect against rust and the ravages of the sea air. The names of the dishes – Uther, Lancelot, Guinevere, Percival, Pellinore – were grand reminders of the region’s connections with Arthurian legend.

  But Goonhilly’s location on the extreme edge of England already mattered less in the age of geostationary satellites, which did not need to be tracked across the sky as they orbited the earth. In July 1969, when Goonhilly’s engineers worked through the night to bring images of the moon landing to Britain, their technical triumph went unremarked, for in the few short years since Telstar, television from space had become a trick repeated to the point of banality. In July 1985, an enormous new dish, Merlin – known unofficially as the Blue Peter, which covered its official opening – carried the Live Aid concert to 2 billion people. But this was to be Goonhilly’s last great triumph. As the first transatlantic broadcasts faded from memory, the nearby Telstar Café, on the lonely B3292 road crossing the Downs, renamed itself the Goonhilly Tea Rooms. In 2006, Goonhilly’s satellite operations began to be wound down and outsourced to another earth station in Hertfordshire. Now, instead of coming from these far-off places on the edge of the nation, satellite television is centralised in order to cut costs.

  But there is still something impressive about this patch of heathland, with its curious confluence of the ancient and futuristic that Hoskins identified. It seems fitting that the 10,000-strong crowd assembled here in August 1999 were the only people in Britain to see the full solar eclipse, as the clouds covering the rest of the West Country miraculously parted just before the day turned dark, and birds roosted confusedly on the satellite dishes. The dishes, which sometimes share the skyline with Goonhilly’s famous two-humped Bactrian camels carrying holidaymakers across the downs, are now being developed into a space-themed outreach centre with the potential to communicate with future piloted missions to Mars.

  The satellite dish had already lost much of its space-age lustre when, a few weeks before Christmas 1988, some strange-looking objects began to appear on the outside walls of British houses. They were pointed heavenwards, not towards the star of Bethlehem, but towards a signal from the Astra satellite, which had just been launched from a rocket in a remote jungle clearing in Kourou, in the equatorial rain forests of French Guiana. White, round, about three feet wide and shaped like outsized frying pans, they resembled shrunken versions of the Goonhilly dishes. Advertisements for them drew on the imagery of rocket launches and cratered moonscapes familiar from science fiction movies and the Apollo missions. But now, as the space race had ended and the Cold War was petering out, satellites had become mundane; when stuck on the sides of houses the dishes looked incongruous and bizarre.

  Satellite television used gigahertz frequencies, which terrestrial TV stations could not use because their very short wavelengths were absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere. They worked from space because the signal went straight up and down and crossed only a short stretch of the atmosphere, but the dish had to be perfectly aimed so that its bowl could gather up the super-weak waves. The engineers who installed the dishes on the sides of houses would use a compass and meter to check they were pointing at the precise bit of sky where the invisible Astra satellite was, no bigger than a car and hovering 22,300 miles over the equator. If a dish was too casually adjusted in fine weather, it might give poor pictures in the wet because of ‘rain fade’, the absorption of waves by water in the atmosphere. British dishes had to face south-east to pick up the signals from Astra centred on mainland Europe. Prospective satellite television viewers were told to go out at 10.30 a.m. or 2 p.m. to see where the sun hit their house, which was where they would have to mount the dish. Often, to the regret of those who thought they could hide it in their backyard, it had to be stuck high on the house front, just below the eaves, so the satellite could see it clearly – and so could everyone else.

  At first there were no more than a few thousand of these odd-looking contraptions in the whole of the country. When Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television launched in February 1989, many high street shops were waiting to see what demand was like and had dishes just for display purposes. Audience numbers were sometimes only in three figures. If his audience got any smaller, the Sky News anchor John Stapleton said privately, he would be locked up for talking to himself.3 Broadcast from a satellite registered in Luxembourg, Sky was exempt from Britain’s media laws and the duties of a public service broadcaster and its schedules relied heavily on imitative or recycled shows stripped across the week. Electronic signals were being imprinted on to carrier waves, shot into space from giant aerial dishes to a two-tonne satellite spinning in geostationary orbit and then beamed back down to earth – a 44,600 mile trip – all so that a few thousand people could watch a recycled ITV quiz show, Sale of the Century, repeats of General Hospital and a talent show called Keith Chegwin’s Star Search.

  Gradually, though, more dishes sprouted under the eaves of houses as the audiences grew, and a row began to brew about the ‘woks on the wall’, as Liverpudlians named them after the hemispherical Chinese pan popularised by the TV chef Ken Hom. Astra’s signal was concentrated on middle Europe, and Britons needed large dishes to gather up the waves from outer space, which became fainter the further north you got. Sky dishes in the south were two feet across, but nort
h of Aberdeen they had to be three feet, and above that size, in Shetland or the Outer Hebrides, you needed planning permission.4

  Underneath these arguments about the look and size of the dishes, other anxieties simmered. For the resilient British class system had infected even the seemingly private act of watching television. Cable television had been slow to take off in part because it was associated with the municipal piping in of television in tower blocks and council estates. By comparison, satellite dishes at first had an upmarket image because they were mostly owned by electronics enthusiasts and rich European expats wishing to watch television in their own language. Dishes appeared on the roofs of hotels such as the Dorchester on Park Lane, and Harrods had reported ‘enormous interest’ when it started selling them before Christmas 1985. By the following February they had sold eleven. ‘For the status-conscious, a parabolic television antenna is what now piques the neighbours,’ said The Times in 1986.5 Sky, though, targeted its dishes at relatively prosperous working-class men, the upwardly mobile standard bearers of Thatcherite popular capitalism, who were known to be keen on new gadgetry and home entertainment. Impatient with aesthetic concerns which he viewed as disguised class snobbery, Rupert Murdoch saw the prominent white dishes not as an eyesore but a free advertisement.

  One part of the country became particularly associated with the satellite dish. An unsigned newspaper profile on 7 October 1990, headed ‘Mrs Thatcher’s bruiser’, had invented a new phrase: ‘Essex man’. The profile was written by Simon Heffer, a resident of the county, who had conducted his anthropological fieldwork on commuter trains to and from Liverpool Street. Essex man was the child of parents who had been shipped out from the East End to new towns like Basildon and Harlow after the war. A bedrock of support for the new Tory Party, he was ‘young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren’. His recreations were ‘drinking with his mates, watching sport on Sky television, playing with his car and thinking about (and occasionally attempting) sexual intercourse’. The accompanying illustration featured a muscly-necked young man in a sharp suit standing outside his ex-council house with a new car in the drive and a satellite dish on the roof.6 Essex man was largely confined to inner Essex, a wobbly crescent of land stretching north and east of London from Enfield to Southend. Its spiritual and geographical epicentre was Chigwell, the constituency of the Tory MP Norman Tebbit and home of Alan Sugar, the man Murdoch had entrusted to make his satellite dishes.