Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  Appearing in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph, the profile of Essex man accurately reflected the squeamishness of some older Tories about the more vulgar manifestations of Thatcherism. He was the cartoonish resident of an imagined place, but one with just enough sociological verisimilitude to gain purchase in the public imagination. One of the images of social change in the 1980s was the sold-off council house and, along with the other signs of militant individualism on its exterior that marked out the homeowner from the tenant, from stone cladding to coaching lamps, was the satellite dish that many local councils forbade their tenants from erecting.

  Satellite dish wars tended to be fiercest where the social classes mingled. Dishes on secluded detached houses, in new docklands apartments or indeed in the sprawling ex-council estates of inner Essex, were uncontentious. Dish battles were fought either within picturesque villages, where natives lived alongside blow-in commuters and second homers, or in gentrifying areas of urban terraces, particularly in London where rising house prices were forcing the middle classes to colonise places like Battersea, Stoke Newington and Hackney.7 Here the relationship between the middle-class incomers and the established working-class residents was sometimes testy, as gentrifiers tended to worry about the aesthetic integrity of terraces being destroyed by piecemeal alterations like PVC windows and satellite dishes.

  Dishes joined washing lines and willow herb as black marks in best-kept village competitions. ‘We are now in danger of having forests of intrusive satellite dishes and other metalwork springing up across the rooftops of England,’ the Council for the Protection of Rural England protested. ‘I’d certainly think twice about buying a house if the next door neighbour had one of those filthy little carbuncles stuck up,’ said Auberon Waugh. ‘Because what he’s telling me is that he’s the sort of incurious moron who lives on 24 hours a day drivel.’ The Guardian called satellite dishes ‘identified non-flying objects, staring motionlessly south-east like pilgrims at an electronic Mecca’. They told us we now lived in ‘the age of warts and carbuncles: and programmes beamed in from on high to reassure us all of the benefits of being a nation of consumers rather than producers’.8

  When Sky’s rival, British Satellite Broadcasting, was about to launch, it took out full-page advertisements with a picture of a dinner plate, a reference to Sky’s claim that its dishes would be no bigger than one. On the authority of the British Ceramics Manufacturers’ Association, BSB stated that the average dinner plate was ten inches across. ‘Dear Rupert,’ the ad said, ‘if your satellite dish is a dinner plate, you must eat whopping dinners.’9 Unlike Sky, BSB did not have to share its satellite with continental Europe, but had its own British satellite, Marco Polo, whose signal was aimed straight at Manchester. So BSB’s distinctive ‘squarial’ dishes really would be the size (although not the shape) of a dinner plate.

  BSB launched inauspiciously on an April weekend in 1990, as day trippers packed coast roads during an unexpected heatwave, and most people indoors were watching BBC2 as Stephen Hendry beat Jimmy White to become world snooker champion. Although BSB promoted itself as a quality broadcaster, some of its initial offerings appeared to stretch this claim. They included Wife of the Week, which required wives to identify their husbands by their distorted voices; Jupiter Moon, a soap opera set on board a twenty-first-century spaceship polytechnic, soon nicknamed ‘Crossroads in Space’; and Heil Honey, I’m Home!, a spoof sitcom, which did not survive beyond its pilot, in which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun live next door to a Jewish couple. BSB struggled to attract subscribers, and in November 1990 Sky effectively took it over in a merger. Its Marco Polo satellite became instant cosmic rubbish, left like Telstar to career uselessly round the earth in its eternal orbit. The odd BSB squarial can sometimes still be seen on the sides of houses, tilted towards the skies as though it hasn’t given up hope of picking up a lost episode of Jupiter Moon.

  In May and June 1990, Channel 4 screened a series called The Television Village. The previous spring, Granada Television, with the help of Manchester University’s European Institute for the Media and students from Salford University and Preston Polytechnic, had brought the satellite television of the near future to a guinea pig group of sixty-five homes in the village of Waddington in Lancashire’s Ribble Valley. For five weeks these homes received twenty-nine channels, from Sky and BSB to European imports. So that rows about ugly dishes did not complicate the villagers’ attitudes, they ran a TV cable along a convenient brook running through the centre of the village. Granada also helped the villagers set up a local community station, Waddington Village Television. The Independent Broadcasting Authority lent them a small TV mast which was erected on soft ground next to a local farmer’s pig slurry tip.10

  Everyone in Waddington could receive the village channel, which broadcast each evening between 7 and 8 p.m. from the church hall, its badminton lines still visible. The evening programmes included cubs meetings, parish council sittings, music from the local barber shop singers and the vicar Alan Bailey giving his thoughts for the day. The only technical glitch came when sheep nibbled through the wires in the transmitter field. The village station gained ninety-five per cent of the available audience, beating not only the satellite channels but EastEnders and Coronation Street as well. People in neighbouring villages like Bashall Eaves and Grindleton adjusted their aerials to pick up the evening hour of WVTV.

  Apart from a delegation of farmers who turned up at the Granada command centre at eight o’clock one evening to ask if the late-night porn could be shown earlier because they had go to bed before it started, the experiment suggested that people preferred programmes about their own community to glossier alternatives. At the end of the experiment, a panel of villagers interviewed David Waddington, the home secretary and local MP, in the village hall. One villager asked why they were getting more television when fewer people were watching it. ‘It’s a free country,’ Waddington answered. What about all the rubbish on the satellite channels, a woman asked. ‘If people are prepared to pay for rubbish, that’s up to the people,’ he replied.11

  One satellite channel did, though, prove popular with the residents of Waddington: Sky Sports, which was broadcasting Serie A Italian football and re-runs of old FA Cup Finals. Viewing figures for television football had been declining since the late 1970s onwards, and hooliganism had cast a pall over the game, but England’s excellent run in the 1990 World Cup had altered public perceptions of the sport, adding new fans and allowing existing ones to declare their interest more fervently. Karl Miller, after watching the semi-final between England and West Germany at his house in Chelsea, described the young midfielder Paul Gascoigne as ‘strange-eyed, pink-faced, fair-haired, tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun – a marvellous equivocal sight’. When, in extra time, Gascoigne had to fight back tears after being booked for a foul which meant he would miss the final should England get to it, Miller protested that the tackled player had ‘rolled about in a piece of German theatre that might have earned him a place in Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht’.12

  The game was decided by a new form of torment for England fans: a penalty shoot out. When Chris Waddle blasted the ball high over the bar to give Germany victory, the Electricity Board braced itself for a soar in demand. It was a summer evening and it had got dark during the match, and they feared a mass switching on of lights as soon as it was over. Instead, viewers were shocked into paralysis and it was not until eight minutes after Waddle’s penalty that the demand for electricity surged to 2800 megawatts, beating the previous record set by The Thorn Birds.13

  The day after the match, it became clear that what had most affected viewers had not been the penalty shoot out, but Gascoigne’s tears. ‘We can cry in public as long as we look like we are trying not to,’ argues Tom Lutz in his book Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears. ‘We can continue to issue those tearful demands we supposedly stopped making at the age of five or eight by employing conventional gestures that both disgui
se and display our weeping.’ Like Gilbert Harding’s frantically swallowed emotion on Face to Face thirty years earlier, Gascoigne’s tears had this touching quality of being both hidden and revealed. Instead of crying when he was booked, he screwed up his face and gasped for breath, trying to conquer his emotions. He sobbed freely only after extra time, when the camera discovered him in a crowd of players being comforted by his manager Bobby Robson. John Moynihan noted that Gascoigne, whom he felt had played only sporadically well, had ‘charmed a great many English female television-watchers with his wisecracks and tears, women, in many cases, who didn’t know the difference between a football and a tangerine’.14

  ‘Who is Gazza?’ asked Mr Justice Harman in the high court that September, after Paul Gascoigne Ltd had applied for an injunction against an unauthorised biography. ‘Paul Gascoigne is a very well-known footballer,’ explained his barrister, Michael Silverleaf. ‘As a result of his performance [in the World Cup] he has come to be very greatly recognised by the public in this country.’ After establishing that it was possible that television had made Gazza even more famous than the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, the judge concluded that, like the duke, Gazza had no legal protection against unwelcome biographers. ‘Gascoigne became Gazza at the moment of the tears,’ reflected Anthony Giddens, professor of sociology at Cambridge, in an essay in the Times Higher Education Supplement. ‘Gazza’s tears are not a nostalgic and self-pitying reaction to past glories lost … [they] are simultaneously comforting and disturbing, symbolising real achievement in a puzzling wider world in which, however, England’s role has become distinctly problematic.’15

  Football was not, of course, reinvented in one moment, and made the subject of such ambitious cultural semiotics, because of a single match on television. It had been gradually gaining middle-class viewers in the postwar era with the growth of TV coverage, while football grounds had remained mainly the preserve of the working classes. One of BBC2’s most popular programmes in the 1960s was Match of the Day, which Mary Whitehouse stayed up every Saturday night to watch after her husband and two sons had gone to bed. Televised football developed its own visual and verbal lexicon which made it ever more unlike the experience of watching on the terraces. When the BBC first used the slow-motion ‘action replay’ after a near miss in the opening match of the 1966 World Cup between England and Uruguay, the duty office was inundated with calls asking if the match was live or recorded. The World Cup Final of that year gained the biggest audience in British television history: more than 32 million, an even more impressive figure when one considers that the game involved only one of the home nations and that it is probably an underestimate, since the collective watching in public places that occurs during big sports games does not register well in ratings systems.

  But some worried that television was colonising and transforming British football just as it had done with American football. The ex-Spurs player Danny Blanchflower sincerely believed that televised football should be straight reportage, and that a boring match should be edited into equally boring highlights so as not to mislead the viewer. ‘Television is the Moloch of the age, into whose vast, undifferentiated maw anything and everything can disappear,’ agreed the journalist Brian Glanville. Editing was turning football into ‘something other than it is, vulgarising it into a thing of goals, shots and goalmouth escapes’. And yet televised football could animate viewers like no other kind of television. When Charlie George struck the winning goal for Arsenal in the 1971 FA Cup Final, five-year-old Jason Cowley was returning from the sweet shop with his sister and walking past a window in a Harlow street. ‘As the ball hit the back of the net it was as if a bomb had exploded inside the house, scattering bodies,’ Cowley wrote later. ‘If the windows weren’t already open I’d have sworn the sound of the celebrations inside would have blown out the glass.’16

  While the new scourge of hooliganism in the 1970s put many people off attending matches, the parallel universe of televised football achieved a new realism. Electronic cameras meant matches could be snappily edited, and on a colour set you could see everything beautifully, from churned-up goalmouths to the grass changing colour from late summer to spring. The Match of the Day presenter, Jimmy Hill, addressed the camera like an Open University lecturer, a textual critic revealing the game’s subtext, spotlighting a key player, passing judgement on whether a goal was offside and castigating ungentle-manly play. In their early work of media studies, Reading Television (1978), John Fiske and John Hartley noted that the programme abstracted football from its open-air, partisan, proletarian messiness. ‘Match of the Day is not football,’ they wrote, ‘in the way that Come Dancing is not dancing.’17

  Televised football brought in new, literate fans. Standing in for Clive James as the Observer’s television critic in August 1978, Martin Amis wrote about a whole weekend watching football, from Football Focus on Saturday lunchtime to The Big Match on Sunday afternoon. ‘Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew,’ he argued later, ‘despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike, who regard our addiction as affected, pseudo-proletarian, even faintly homosexual. We have adapted to this; we keep ourselves to ourselves – oh, how we have to cringe and hide!’18 This confession appeared in the London Review of Books. Its editor Karl Miller – who, along with John Moynihan had been part of a group of trailblazing middle-class Sunday footballers, made up of writers, artists, actors and journalists, who had begun playing on Hyde Park in the late 1950s – often gave intellectuals like A. J. Ayer and Hans Keller the space to write about their fandom. So when Sky, buoyed by the success of the 1990 World Cup, latched on to televised football as a way of selling dishes, it was drawing on a slightly subterranean, cross-class interest in the game that had been developing, with interruptions, since at least the 1960s.

  Sky had noticed the sharp rise in dish sales when they broadcast the Mike Tyson–Frank Bruno fight in February 1989, and England’s progress to the Cricket World Cup final in March 1992. But as ITV’s Greg Dyke prophesied, Britain’s national game would be ‘the biggest dish-driver of the lot’.19 In May 1992 Sky paid £304 million, more than ten times the current rate, for the rights to televise live games in the newly formed Premier League. On the first Sky ‘Super Sunday’ that August, a single match between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool was padded out into five hours of television. Pitch inspections and shots of the referee getting changed in his dressing-room preceded the game. During it, pitchside cameras raced down the touch-line with wingers or showed managers screaming ineffectually at players. After it, ex-footballer experts used electronic chalkboards to show how moves had developed. The Monday night game, inspired by the Monday night American football on US television, employed sumo wrestlers dressed in team colours, and cheerleaders, the ‘Sky Strikers’, as half-time distractions.

  The televised Premier League became turbo capitalism in excel-sis, a hyper-mercenary trade in which a small coterie of clubs secured much of the TV money for themselves and then proceeded to earn even more through merchandise and stock market flotations. Oddly, though, as clubs became detached from their localities, ruled by offshore interests and money markets, football’s emotional landscape was enriched. This new mood had been anticipated in the 1990 World Cup, even before Gazza’s tears. The BBC’s opening credits for its coverage had shown slow motion, balletic images of footballers, including the agonised ecstasy of Marco Tardelli’s goal celebration in the 1982 World Cup Final, over Luciano Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Turandot. New Order and the England squad’s 1990 World Cup song, ‘World in Motion’, was a similarly heady concoction of optimism and nostalgia, which began with a sample from Kenneth Wolstenholme’s BBC commentary at the end of the 1966 World Cup Final.

  As the final goal went in, Wolstenholme had said: ‘And here comes Hurst! He’s got – some people are on the pitch. They think it’s all over – it is now! It’s four!’ These words did not resonate immediately with viewers, no doubt because they were drowned out
by millions of living room cheers, which was probably just as well, since they inconveniently drew attention to the fact that the goal should have been disallowed because there were spectators on the field. It was only when the whole game was repeated on BBC2 in August 1966 that their concision and neatness caught the public mood, and continued to do so over the years as the nation rued its failure to repeat its only footballing triumph. As a piece of Wolstenholme commentary, it was atypical. He was best known for his clipped RAF tones and meaningful silences, for he believed that words should merely annotate what was on screen. Wolstenholme’s standard response when a player scored was ‘it’s a goal’, a phrase so familiar to 1960s TV viewers that the Beatles, none of whom were football fans, sampled it on a loop for an alternative mix of the song ‘Glass Onion’, which later appeared on Anthology 3.

  Over on ITV, only about 4 million viewers heard Hugh Johns’s more prosaic celebration of the winning goal and Hurst’s hat trick: ‘Geoff Hurst goes forward. He might make it three. He has! He has! And that’s it, that’s it!’ But Johns’s voluble commentaries, delivered in a rich voice honed in theatre rep, coarsened by chain smoking and lubricated with Brain’s Bitter, became the default style. David Coleman, who replaced Wolstenholme as the main BBC commentator for the 1970 World Cup, was similarly excitable, calling out players’ names in ascending pitch and then, when the goal went in, finishing with a crescendo ‘1–0!’ Sky’s football commentary, a torrent of atmospheric shouting and interjections by ‘summarisers’, followed this school of commentary to its outer edges. Towards the end of his life, Wolstenholme became sick of the ‘demeaning trivia’ of the commentators, and would turn the sound down when watching a game.20 But the best commentary, as his enduring eight words in 1966 showed, could provide a collective, emotional response to an event that lingered long in the memory.