by Joe Moran
‘People could hardly go out to dinner with friends,’ claims Smith’s biographer, ‘without being served up Delia’s mixed-leaf Caesar salad, her chicken basque or the fromage frais cheesecake with strawberry sauce.’53 But how many fromage frais cheesecakes or rillettes of duck with confit of cranberries were actually eaten at 1990s dinner parties remains unknown, because what people do around dinner tables leaves as little trace as what they do in front of their televisions.
‘Our dreamscapes have become domesticated – we now look for fantasy and escape in our back gardens and on our dinner tables,’ wrote Andy Medhurst in Sight and Sound in 1999. ‘These are programmes where we’re invited to prioritise home life, be knowledgeable consumers (but never seriously question the ethics of consumption), temper our daydreams with the acknowledgement that only hard work really delivers, learn just a little from feminism and pretend that only the middle classes exist.’54 Medhurst was writing about a new type of lifestyle television, the makeover show, in which experts did up homes or gardens over a frenetic couple of days and showed them to the surprised and usually (but not always) pleased occupants.
‘I love that Changing Rooms. I get loads of ideas from it – I can’t wait to get out of here and decorate my own place,’ said Tim, an inmate in a Midlands prison who described himself as a ‘Christian heavy metal biker’, and who sported a leather jacket over his prison uniform and numerous tattoos and piercings. ‘I definitely want deep red, textured walls … I like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. I’d like to be Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. I know he’s a bit camp, but I’d model myself on him. He’s cultured, he’s stylish. Classy without being boring. That’s how I want to be.’ Llewelyn-Bowen was the Changing Rooms designer who, dressed in leather trousers, frock coats and jewel-toned shirts with outsized cuffs, dismissed the Victorian ‘design-o-saurs’ who had policed interior decoration and stopped ordinary people from expressing their tastes.55
While he was certainly well known, Llewelyn-Bowen’s influence on domestic design was probably minimal compared to the BBC’s DIY expert of the 1950s and 1960s, Barry Bucknell, a home improvement modernist who recommended covering period features such as fireplaces and dust-collecting panelled doors with fibreboard. Bucknell received up to 35,000 letters a week from viewers and employed ten secretaries to sort through it. The eclectic, post-Bucknell ‘retro’ styles seen on Changing Rooms predated the programme. B&Q, the historian Raphael Samuel noted in 1994, was now full of ‘archaicizing aids’ like staircase spindles, damask wallpapers and ceramic tiles.56 Llewelyn-Bowen was most renowned, in fact, for making contestants burst into tears with his garish designs. Favourite Changing Room techniques, such as stencilling, the rag-rolling of unsightly walls and the use of MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard) for architectural moulding effects, were employed so often on the programme that it probably hastened their journey into démodé visual clichés.
Gardeners, by nature people who are happy to wait for flowers to bloom and trees to mature, seemed particularly unconvinced by makeover programmes. Writing in The Garden, the Royal Horticultural Society’s journal, gardening experts often criticised makeover shows, and readers’ letters suggested that their opinions were widely shared. The Gardeners’ Question Time presenter, Eric Robson, argued that celebrated gardens such as Sissinghurst and Stourhead would not now exist if our ancestors had behaved as we did, covering our little plots of land with container-grown shrubs, low-maintenance perennials and decking, which would ‘soon be to gardens what avocado suites are to bathrooms’. Alan Titchmarsh, the presenter of Ground Force, at which Robson’s animus was directed, countered that it aimed to ‘appeal to and inspire those who would never dream of watching Gardeners’ World and to whom the garden was a foreign country whose language and customs were beyond comprehension’.57
But gardening programmes had long stood for a different kind of populism, which believed in imparting esoteric knowledge to anyone prepared to make use of it by expending patient effort. Television gardeners had pioneered an unaffected, intimate way of talking to viewers. The owner of a hard mongrel rural accent forged mostly in the south Midlands, Percy Thrower could never work from a script so he always ad libbed, believing that the plant would tell him what it wanted him to say. Perhaps because viewers thus found it easy to identify with them, Thrower and other Gardeners’ World presenters profoundly affected gardening trends. An unapologetic user of paraquat and DDT, Thrower curated the age of lawns and rosebeds; his successor, Geoff Hamilton, a jeans-wearing, muddy-kneed socialist and environmentalist, introduced them to the organic era, building his own garden in Rutland from wasteland, happily recycling egg cartons for seedlings and polythene from the dry cleaners for the greenhouse. Habit-loving gardener-viewers trusted these presenters and were suspicious of change. ‘When you took over Gardeners’ World from Geoff Hamilton my heart sank,’ wrote a viewer to Alan Titchmarsh after his sudden assumption of presenting duties when Hamilton died of a heart attack in the summer of 1996. ‘I have been watching you closely over the past few months. You’ll do.’58
Ground Force seemed at first to have an equally striking effect on gardening trends. When Robert Pearcey, a painter and decorator, was convicted of stealing pebbles from the beach at Budleigh Salterton in Devon, the local mayor blamed Ground Force and its love of dry gardens full of shingle and stones. At Chesil Beach in Dorset, gardeners were sneaking on to the beach at night in search of plunder, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows. So many grey shale pebbles were taken from a shingle ridge at Crackington Haven on the Cornish coast that the cliff was in danger of collapse.
But the theft of stones to make rockeries had preceded Ground Force. Geoff Hamilton, to dissuade plunderers among Gardeners’ World viewers, had shown them how to make rocks out of an artificial aggregate called Hypertufa. And it was Gardeners’ World, rather than Ground Force, which had started the decking boom of the late 1990s. When Titchmarsh laid decking in his Hampshire garden on Gardeners’ World (which he had christened Barleywood just before the copy deadline for the Radio Times that listed his first programme as presenter), and stained it deep blue, Cuprinol launched a preservative called ‘Barleywood Blue’ which became the bestselling colour for trellises and fences. The spread of decking in back gardens, so prevalent by the early 2000s that its stained wood effects could be seen from the new satellite imaging sites like Google Earth, was just part of a more general move, evident since the rise of the garden centre in the 1960s, towards seeing gardens as outdoor living rooms.59
In his next book, Up the Down Escalator (2002), Charles Lead-beater attributed the mushrooming of makeover programmes to a cult of ‘inner escape’ and a ‘retreat into domesticity as an antidote to innovation and change’. ‘The more our working lives seem to involve screens, computers and ephemera, the more we seem to like gardens, changing our rooms and cooking,’ he wrote. ‘Or perhaps it is simply that we like the idea of doing all these things and so we celebrate the possibility with glossy television programmes.’60 Or perhaps lifestyle TV was not really about ‘us’ at all. Post-Thatcherite political culture tended to see the public as a single, apolitical entity – a mostly homogeneous, property-owning middle class, made up of ‘ordinary taxpayers’ and ‘hard-working families’. In this quasi-mythical middle England, pop-psephological caricatures such as ‘Mondeo Man’, ‘Worcester Woman’ and ‘Pebbledash People’ lived. Here, uncomfortable divisions of class and wealth could be skirted over with more nebulous allusions to leisure and lifestyle. This was just the kind of England (and, occasionally, the rest of Britain) featured in makeover shows. It was suburban, family-focused and, above all, homeowning – since there wasn’t much point making over a rented flat or bedsit.
Mostly, though, these makeover shows were about the economics of television. They were partly a product of new technology, for cameras had become smaller and lighter and it was now easy to film in living rooms and small gardens. Compressing activities that normally took much longer into neat little half hours of mi
ld tension, false jeopardy and instant reaction, they also fitted a world in which more and more half-hour scheduling slots had to be filled cheaply. Medhurst called it ‘the snowballing daytime-isation of evening TV’.61 With more pressure to create replicable formats, the cheap, formulaic programmes that had filled the daytime schedules since the late 1980s were colonising primetime. These programmes then had an afterlife of repeats in the daytime, or on satellite and cable channels devoting themselves solely to ‘lifestyle’, like the Carlton Food Network, Granada Sky Food & Wine Channel or UK Living. Here, from breakfast into the middle of the night, you could watch people cooking dinner, doing up spare bedrooms and installing garden water features.
In the Radio Times in May 1996, Polly Toynbee derided the content of daytime television. There was now, she pointed out, a varied audience during the day: more people putting in shift hours or working from home, early retired people and, with the mass expansion of higher education in the 1990s, a new army of students with flexible hours. But this was not reflected in daytime TV. ‘Most of it looks cheap and designed for no one in particular – perhaps some computerised calculation of the lowest common denominator,’ she complained. ‘It is a tepid, dishwater soup, without character or flavour, inhabiting some cardboard world 20 years out of date, in some imaginary middle suburbia.’
Toynbee conceded that were some exceptions, like the ‘awful but magic insanity’ of Supermarket Sweep, an unrepentant paean to consumerism in which contestants in colour-coded sweatshirts pelted up and down the aisles trying to cram food into their trolleys. It had an audience of more than 3 million and was, according to the New Musical Express, causing an epidemic of lateness for morning lectures among students. But mainly, Toynbee concluded, daytime television was ‘Stupidvision – where most of the presenters look like they have to pretend to be stupid because they think their audience is … It talks to the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine and the microwave, without much contact with the human brain.’62
Daytime viewers, at least those who expressed an opinion, agreed. Toynbee invited Radio Times readers to send in their dream schedules to replace the ‘weary grunge of the past’ and they wrote in asking for repeats of classic dramas like Poldark, prestige documentary series like Civilisation and the Ascent of Man, and lessons in foreign languages, life drawing or how to play a musical instrument. ‘Women and men felt that daytime TV was aimed at an imaginary housewife whom they had never met,’ concluded the BFI’s study based on the submissions of its television diarists. They felt guilty, ‘like adulterers’, about watching TV in the daytime. Young people in particular thought it was ‘trivial and insulting to women’ and men were embarrassed at watching what they thought was a female ‘daytime ghetto’.63
The BFI study found that viewers were more likely to treat television as moving wallpaper when they were lonely or depressed. ‘TV … gives an air of colour, light, movement in the corner of the room which I can ignore at will but keeps at bay the very oppressive feeling of being alone,’ wrote an elderly widow, living in remote rural Lancashire, for her television diary. An elderly man, also living alone, found television a comfort when feeling vulnerable or ill, and when he was particularly anxious he liked to watch the children’s programme Postman Pat. During the period of the study, a teacher got divorced, lost her job and had a breakdown. She went from carefully choosing what to watch to sitting numbly in front of Saturday night shows like Blind Date and Beadle’s About. The guilt people felt at relying on television as a ‘visual anti-depressant’ was exacerbated because so many of the programmes were now about cooking, gardening and decorating, activities undertaken vicariously through the TV screen. ‘There is something unbearably poignant,’ reflected Auberon Waugh, ‘in the BBC’s claim that 3.5 million people regularly watch a low-budget mid-afternoon cookery programme called Ready Steady Cook.’64
In January 1996, suffering from inoperable bowel cancer and coming stoically towards the end of his life, George Mackay Brown was housebound, with little energy even to read, and found himself watching great tranches of daytime television for the first time. ‘On TV, there is a group of Australian families caught up in some perpetual string of dramas,’ he told regular readers of his column in the Orcadian. ‘It is called Neighbours and is very popular with young people. I’m glad that, in our little neighbourhood in Stromness, there are few of these heart-wrenchings and deceptions, rages and reconciliations … I don’t intend to watch it more … The dialogue is not exactly spellbinding, nor is the Australian accent the most beautiful on this earth.’
Without identifying them by name, Brown also seems to have watched the high-octane, confessional American talk shows presented by Ricki Lake and Oprah Winfrey and their homegrown ITV equivalent Vanessa Feltz. Their culture of therapeutic excess and emotional incontinence must have seemed quite alien to this bard of Orkney. They discussed, he noted, ‘things which most people hide away in their heart’s core … out it all comes, and the audience loves it, and now and then somebody stands up and either upbraids or congratulates the person in the hot seat. And if the show seems to be flagging, there is a lady who keeps it going the way a conductor handles a choir or an orchestra; and the lurid pot begins to bubble again.’
It is sad to imagine Brown, the great chronicler of the silent weight of ritual, tradition and landscape, who believed that ‘all relationships and all words end in solitude and in silence’, ending his life watching shouty programmes with titles like ‘I’m terrified of my own child’ and ‘Help! I married a love rat.’ A small mercy is that the genre’s exploitative nadir, The Jerry Springer Show, was at that time confined to the UK Living channel and Brown is unlikely to have seen it. ‘I hope I won’t be watching afternoon TV for very much longer,’ he signed off his column.65 He died in April, just three months later.
As television filled the schedules with the type of shows that Toynbee called Stupidvision, the end of the millennium saw a revival of the cultural jeremiads against television that had last enjoyed a serious vogue in the late 1950s. In 1996, David Burke, a New Jerseyite computer programmer living in Brighton, launched the British branch of the anti-television organisation, White Dot. While modern TVs switched off with what Thomas Hardy called ‘an eyelid’s soundless blink’, White Dot was named after the tendency for older televisions to keep firing electrons after they were turned off, until the cathode ray cooled down, so they arrived all at once at the centre of the screen, creating a white dot that shrank into nothingness like a distant, imploding star.
White Dot’s ambitious aim was to reduce all televisions to dead screens. Burke stood on a broken television set one morning near Westminster Abbey in front of a sign saying ‘Get A Life’ and read out an open letter to Prince Charles asking him not to televise his coronation, when it came round. Burke felt that, since his mother’s coronation in 1953 had marked the start of widespread television viewing in the UK, a TV-free crowning of King Charles would have a nice historical symmetry. A few days later, Prince Charles’s office replied, politely refusing his request.66 Undaunted, White Dot organised an annual Turn Off TV Week and ritual events called zócalo (Mexican for ‘town square’) in which people sat outside their houses and chatted to each other instead of watching TV. It also promoted a universal remote control for turning off televisions in pubs. White Dot had some affinities with the Idler movement, associated with an eponymous magazine that advocated a life defined by neither the Protestant work ethic nor passive consumption. Tom Hodgkinson, editor and co-founder of The Idler, would later rail against the pernicious passivity engendered by television, banning it for his children and preferring to spend his own evenings chopping wood, brewing beer and beekeeping. Among the middle classes there was a revival of camping, festivals and other outdoor activities, an ethic of living an active life rather than a substitute one in front of the television.
The journalist Peter Hitchens thought the rot had set in with colour TV, which made even bad programmes look so enticing that the
best storyteller could not compete with them. The unspoken secret of the 1990s was that television had become ‘a free national child-minding service’, he complained, as adults shamelessly used ‘the flickering, braying, never-silent device to mesmerise the next generation, so that they can get on with their grown-up lives’. This was how millions of parents had found out about the death of Princess Diana, as their children switched on their ‘electronic dripfeeds’ one Sunday in August 1997 and, instead of cartoon wallpaper, got the news. ‘To leave a child unsupervised in front of a television set,’ Hitchens concluded, ‘is no less dangerous than giving it neat gin, or putting it within reach of narcotics.’67
As in the late 1950s, the anti-television voices of the late 1990s crossed the political spectrum, for TV could be blamed both for the breakdown of family life and for selling the capitalist waking dream of aspirational consumerism. At a time when Prozac and other anti-depressants were raising awareness of mental illness as a medical condition, the psychotherapist Oliver James saw TV as the prime culprit in creating what he called ‘the low serotonin society’. By overpromoting glamour and wealth and lowering reserves of self-esteem over the last half century, he believed, television had been ‘the engine-room’ of a ‘psychic holocaust’.68
Around the time that George Mackay Brown was becoming belatedly acquainted with daytime TV, a small community in the Yorkshire Wolds, about twenty miles east of York, achieved brief renown for not watching TV at all. Thixendale, an isolated village of barely a hundred souls in the shelter of the six dales from which it took its name, was revealed by several newspapers to be the land that had managed to escape television for sixty years. The village lay in a steep-sided, dry valley reached by narrow country lanes and approached from every angle by chalk escarpments. Thixendale had long been used to being cut off by snow as these lanes became impassable in winter, and as television spread it found itself cut off from television as well. Unlike the harder rocks of the Yorkshire dales and moors, Wolds chalk is soft, so when glacial meltwater rushed across it at the end of the last ice age it created rounded peaks and deep valleys that the novelist Winifred Holtby called ‘fold upon fold of the encircling hills, piled rich and golden beneath a tranquil sky’.69 It also created a Bermuda triangle for the TV signal which now defended Thixendalians from Supermarket Sweep and Ready Steady Cook.
