by Joe Moran
Just as Sky began its Premier League coverage, Nick Hornby published his affecting and influential book about football fandom, Fever Pitch. Hornby’s contention that ‘the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score’ contrasted eloquently with satellite football’s hype.21 Grassroots fanzines and a raft of Hornby-influenced fan memoirs recalled the terraces of the 1970s as a sensual world of cigarette smoke, proximate bodies and BO, an implicit retort to the touchless, passive voyeurism of televised football. The Sky deal had also reinstated Match of the Day, as the BBC won back from ITV the rights to broadcast highlights, and a wave of nostalgia greeted the return of this late Saturday night fixture. In the mid 1990s the BBC broadcast Match of the Seventies, highlights of old editions of Match of the Day intercut with evocative 1970s music: a fascinating social document resurrecting all kinds of lost phenomena, from footballers’ bushy sideburns to the standing crowds swaying like a single organism. Football, formerly associated with a lumpen masculinity, was now a way for men to think lyrically about longing, loss and the local and familial ties unravelled by globalisation and the free market. It became what literary theorists call a reverse discourse, a critique of the dominant culture that also validated it, for it allowed fans to carry on watching Premier League football on satellite television without feeling part of the relentless mercantilism of the modern game.
The received wisdom for years had been that television was slowly killing the live game. When Match of the Day began in August 1964, it was broadcast on BBC2 because the Football League was worried about its effect on crowd numbers, and only agreed to it being broadcast on a channel not then available outside London and which hardly anyone was watching. There had been a long-term decline in attendance since the late 1940s and a particularly sharp fall with the rise of colour television in the early 1970s. The historical pattern seemed clear, but the received wisdom turned out to be wrong. In the new satellite football era, match attendances remained buoyant as fans seemed quite prepared to pay inflated prices to watch live games they could see at home much more cheaply, or even to do both and pay twice over for the same product. As customers, they were as irrational and captive as the typical Hornbyesque narrator of the football fan memoir.
Satellite football created a new way of watching television. Walking through a town centre on Sunday afternoons or Monday evenings, you would see the coloured chalkboards outside pubs advertising live football and hear the mingled sounds of pub cheers and Martin Tyler’s Sky commentary wafting through the open air. Enormous BBC plasma screens, twenty-five metres square, grew on stilts in city squares, where crowds would congregate for matches. Goal celebrations became part of public life, and a news footage cliché. A reporter would be sent to a bar for a big game, with the camera trained not on the screen but the supporters, showing them edging towards the screen, open-mouthed in anticipation at a goal chance and then erupting with joy or throwing back their heads in despair. Sometimes they would show the more subdued groans when the other side scored. Rarely in modern times had public life been given over to such self-abandoning extremes of anguish and euphoria.
Such public television was, of course, how Baird had once imagined the future of his invention. His former laboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho was now an espresso bar with slatted metal chairs and tables spilling over on to the pavement, and much of its back wall was taken up by a huge TV screen which lit up the room when football matches, especially Italian ones, were shown. When a goal went in, the customers celebrated with a fervour that would have astonished the forty scientists from the Royal Institution who once queued up in evening dress along a narrow staircase in order to inspect a quivering image of the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
The novelist Kingsley Amis did not have a subscription to Sky Sports. Apart from cricket and snooker he did not care for televised sport, especially, he wrote to his friend Philip Larkin, ‘filthy soccer’.22 And yet as he entered his seventies, watching television consumed much of his evening life. Always scared of flying and unable to drive, he now feared even everyday travel, including the Underground, and was afraid of being left on his own at night with nothing to occupy him. He lived with his first wife, Hilly, her husband Lord Kilmarnock and their son, on Regents Park Road in north London. Amis paid the mortgage and Hilly acted as his housekeeper, bringing him his suppers on a tray and sitting with him in front of the TV – a small, portable set, with an indoor aerial, which sat on top of a chest of drawers in Amis’s bedroom.
For Amis, watching television was both a congenial evening routine and a way of affirming his political and cultural aesthetic. He believed the best fiction was narrative and character-driven, the best poetry was recitative and understandable, the best restaurant food was unpretentious and advertised on the menu in English, and the best television was soap operas, sitcoms and popular drama. Like Larkin, he got impatient over poetic pretension and artistic earnestness. ‘You deduce from this that I now have a television set,’ wrote Larkin to another friend, the English professor Brian Cox, in 1981, ‘and find it rots the mind comfortably, but I don’t as a rule watch “serious” things: sport, old films, Miss World are my level.’ Both Amis and Larkin hated being bored, and had the intellectual self-confidence summarily to dismiss highbrow culture they found dull. Amis had got his first TV set in the mid 1950s and became immediately irritated with the hostile sociologising about it that he called ‘Hoggart-wash’, which dealt with ‘the putative corruption of some inadequately visualised pools-telly-and-fish-and-chips Everyman’, an attitude he saw as ‘a protest made on behalf of others who are deemed too comatose or inarticulate to make it for themselves’.23
In his own, intermittent career as a TV critic for the Observer in the 1970s, Amis wrote freely and admiringly about the wrestling or The Generation Game but grudgingly and disobligingly about foreign films and documentary. In his column in the Radio Times he presented himself as an average, sensual man, a television-watching Sancho Panza torn between the nature programme Bellamy’s Britain and going to the pub on a Sunday lunchtime, or between The Marriage of Figaro and Kojak on the other side. He was a firm fan of Benny Hill and The Dick Emery Show, of which he wrote that ‘nothing disturbs the ordered calm of my household more than an attempt to prevent me from watching it, and people who ring me up while it’s on have been known to burst into tears’.24
In the 1980s, Amis’s populism became increasingly entwined with his support for the Thatcherite attack on liberal-professional élites, and his objection to a mentality he called ‘sod the public’ in the arts and service industries. He believed subsidies corrupted the relationship between artists and audiences and accused the Arts Council of funding ‘plays without plots’ and ‘poems that are meaningless patterns of letters’. In a 1984 essay, ‘Television and the intellectuals’, Amis argued that the viewer also faced ‘a semi-benign semi-conspiracy to foist on him what is thought to be good for him’. Television, he felt, should be an escape from such cultural nannyism: it should stick to what customers paid to see and the medium did best, such as sport, family sagas, crime and comedy series.25
Amis’s television viewing may have been partly a sally in the culture wars of the Thatcher years, but there was no sense of position-taking about his two favourite programmes, The Bill and Coronation Street, which he followed devotedly. Amis had long believed that the novel needed to regenerate itself not through avant-garde experiment but by drawing on genre fiction, with its capacity for combining pleasingly familiar formulae with creative reinvention. Having already written a detective story (The Riverside Villas Murder, 1973) and an episode of the Z Cars follow-up, Softly, Softly, he was interested in crime drama long before a serial set in Sun Hill police station in the East End began in 1984, with its memorable staccato theme tune, ‘Overkill’, accompanied by wailing police sirens and an insistent saxophone riff.
The Bill was not strictly speaking a soap opera: its episodes were self-contained narratives, but w
ith recurring characters, allowing viewers to dip in and out. Storylines were uncluttered, steering clear of the officers’ private lives. One of the serial’s unwritten rules was that a police officer appeared in every scene, allowing it to deal with adult themes before the 9 p.m. watershed, because the police generally arrived at the scene of a crime after the grisly stuff had already happened. Many of the characters felt like old friends: like Bob Cryer (Eric Richard), the eternally patient duty sergeant who had not been the same since he killed an armed robber who turned out to have an unloaded gun; loveable, crisp-quaffing failure DC ‘Tosh’ Lines (Kevin Lloyd), with his scruffy moustache, crumpled suit and battered old Volvo; and Sun Hill’s darling, Viv Martella (Nula Conwell), shockingly shot dead in 1993 by building society robbers.
According to a study of four Midlands prisons in the early 1990s, The Bill was the most popular programme among inmates, rivalled only by the rural soap opera Emmerdale. Between 1991 and 1996, the British Film Institute asked several hundred people to keep diaries of their television watching. The most popular programme with men, particularly those over sixty like Amis, was The Bill. When he died in 1995, Amis’s daughter Sally kept her portion of his ashes in an urn, and when The Bill was on she would sit the urn next to her and watch it with him.26
Amis had watched Coronation Street from the start. Arguing in an article in the TV Times in 1964 that television was improving as the viewer who would watch anything became extinct, the main planks in his argument – which dutifully mentioned only ITV programmes in a publication that refused to acknowledge the existence of the other side – were University Challenge, The Avengers and Coronation Street. ‘Must you be a moron to enjoy Coronation Street?’, Amis mused, à propos those viewers who wrote to the character, Len Fair-clough, threatening to beat him up if he did not change his ways. Amis answered himself in the negative, adding that ‘Patricia Phoenix, who plays Elsie Tanner, must be one of the most beautiful women on television’. Coronation Street suggested to Amis that television’s primitive phase was ending and ‘that old glassy-eyed viewer, anchored in front of his set whatever is on it, is on the way out’.27
When Coronation Street began, it seemed to be rooted in the dark, monochromatic social realism that Amis professed to dislike. In 1963, at a village debating society in Hayfield, where its creator Tony Warren lived, one speaker blamed the programme for causing unemployment in the north, because its bleak imagery dissuaded businesses from investing in the region; another said it made viewers believe that ‘northerners were peasant morons’. As late as 1974, an Oldham councillor called for the series to be scrapped, because ‘people who see Coronation Street think we are all married to Hilda Ogdens, wear clogs and have outside loos’. But it had always had elements of human comedy, with pitch-perfect northern dialogue and deft character touches, and even its earliest programmes teased the edges of its everyday realism, including one memorable 1964 episode – broadcast just as Amis was defending the show in the TV Times – based on the plot of High Noon, with Len Fairclough as the sheriff. The arrival of colour in 1969 seemed to detach the soap definitively from its roots in the new wave northern social realism of the early 1960s. John Betjeman, another fan, saw it as Manchester’s version of the most comic and warmest of Dickens’s novels, Pickwick Papers.28
Actual streets like Coronation Street were already being demolished in great numbers when the programme began: a common sight in Salford was an entire row of houses marked with an X, under sentence of demolition. Granada soon had to build its own outdoor set, there being no suitable streets left near its Deansgate studios in which to film exteriors. The street used in the credits, Archie Street, nicknamed ‘Coronarchie Street’ by locals, was condemned in 1967 in Salford’s last great slum clearance scheme and finally demolished in 1971, when Bernard Youens and Jean Alexander, who played Stan and Hilda Ogden, went along to pay their last respects, in character.29
Coronation Street was now an intertextual, mythic entity, having more relationship to the paintings of L. S. Lowry, the street photography of Shirley Baker or the plays of Shelagh Delaney than to any real Salford – although the famous opening credits, of huddled rooftops with television aerials, trees in blossom and a cat looking for a shady spot under a wall, were less sombre than these earlier visual representations. A diligent curator of this kind of self-conscious ‘urban pastoral’ (to borrow the historian Chris Waters’s term) was Steven Morrissey, brought up in the Coronation Street-style terraces of Stretford and Moss Side, who would, as a teenager, unsuccessfully submit script ideas for the soap to Granada and who, in 1985, interviewed Pat Phoenix for the zeitgeisty style magazine Blitz as well as ensuring that she adorned the cover of the Smiths’ single ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’.30
Even if the cobbled Coronation Street was now a parallel universe without a real world template, viewers still imagined it as a definite place, with so many tangled relationships and ancestral antagonisms that the serial had to employ its own full-time historian, Daran Little, to monitor the elongated backstories and maintain internal consistency. In the seemingly ephemeral genre of soap opera, Coronation Street had developed its own sophisticated rituals of commemoration. At the Granada Studios Tour in Deansgate, Manchester, which attracted 5,000 visitors a day, the main attraction was the Street’s outdoor set, built from bricks and tiles salvaged from Manchester demolitions. Tourists could walk along the cobbles, touch Jack and Vera Duckworth’s ill-advised stone cladding at number 9 and look through the houses’ letter boxes or windows where, disappointingly, they saw only a long empty space full of studio equipment, with an upper gallery for actors to appear at bedroom windows.
Kingsley Amis, who had always believed that art should craft a self-contained world of conscious artifice with only a glancing relationship to ‘reality’, was a natural fan of Coronation Street. One can imagine his response to the increasingly insistent criticism, voiced in a 1991 Channel 4 documentary, J’Accuse … Coronation Street and subsequent comments by the chair of the Broadcasting Standards Council, Lord Rees-Mogg, that the Street failed to represent the multi-ethnic makeup of the real Salford.31 While its BBC rival East-Enders engaged tenaciously with social issues like racism or homophobia, the Street spun its own alternative reality out of dry wit and near caricature.
‘I never allowed the programme to become a platform for debate, moral or otherwise,’ said the serial’s long-running producer Bill Podmore who, although he had retired in 1988, had established this idea of the street as a kind of dramatic sitcom. ‘I regard that as the province of documentary, not light entertainment.’ In the early 1990s, these sitcom characters were in their prime: the brassy pub landlady Bet Lynch, the winsome shop assistant Mavis Barlow, the squabbling but strangely uxorious Duckworths – Pickwickian characters all, but with a touching vulnerability. This period also saw the introduction of a character who would last only a few years but linger long in the memory: the barmaid Raquel Wolstenhulme, her film-star first name contrasting eloquently with her down-to-earth northern surname. Played with great subtlety and tenderness by Sarah Lancashire, she had, wrote Nancy Banks-Smith, an ‘almost saintly idiocy’ and was ‘a rare creation, lovely, funny and incapable of unkindness … a wicket-splintering spin on dumb blondeness’.32 Amis would surely have loved her.
With the TV volume turned up high, he would cheer the best bits of Coronation Street (‘Bloody marvellous – you wouldn’t want to change a word of that!’) and boo his least favourite characters (‘Get her off – I can’t stand the sight of her!’). The poet and critic Neil Powell suggests that Amis’s later novels betray the effects of his nights in front of the TV. The Folks that Live on the Hill (1988), for instance, feels like a soap opera, with subplots featuring minor characters interrupting the main action, and its denouement bringing the whole cast together in a pub not unlike the Rovers Return. Some of his later works, such as the novel Difficulties with Girls (1989), and his posthumously published guide to English usage, The King’s English (1997), ref
er explicitly to Coronation Street. After primetime, Amis retired to bed reluctantly with a book, avoiding the late night arts programmes with their talking heads and ‘crappy opinions’.33
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called them ‘life strategies’ or ‘ingenious techniques of exorcism’: the self-deluding subterfuges we use to deny the reality of our own mortality. The trick was to make ‘the whole of life into a game of bridge-crossing … so that no bridge seems to loom ominously as the “ultimate” one … Nothing seems to vanish forever, “for good” – so that it cannot reappear again.’34 It is doubtful that Amis would have had much patience with Bauman’s speculative postmodern sociology, but he was certainly a man full of phobias and existential fears and this seems a fairly convincing explanation, at least in part, for his fondness for soap operas.
While Amis was watching Coronation Street in Regents Park Road, the poet Stephen Spender, his mobility curtailed after an accident while running for a bus, had become a devotee of Neighbours. At his home in St John’s Wood, Spender also enjoyed a Newcastle-set crime series called Spender, about a plain-clothes detective with unorthodox methods. ‘He seems to spend most of his time watching youths, who turn out to be drug addicts, pee in men’s rooms where they do most of their illicit business,’ Spender explained in a letter to the poet Alan Ross. ‘He gets his kicks out of arresting them. It is quite well written and funny to those who share his name.’35 A lifelong champion of modernism who was at the heart of the literary establishment, Spender seems a more unlikely fan than Amis of soap operas and crime dramas. ‘The critical faculty is somehow suspended when people watch it,’ reflected his son-in-law Barry Humphries on Spender’s Neighbours habit. But perhaps it is not so unlikely. Spender, like Amis, was the right age to be watching television – older, less mobile people being, in the broadcasters’ language, more ‘available to view’. He was not alone in finding himself slowly and semi-accidentally drawn into television’s formerly unfathomable rituals.
