by Joe Moran
In the 1970s, one side of the main street got blurry BBC signals via a communal aerial and the odd ghostly apparition of ITV appeared during electrical storms. Then, on 2 January 1985, the old 405-line signal stopped, the government being anxious to find extra frequencies for the nascent mobile phone network. This rendered the old H-shaped aerials redundant, and the village was again televisionless. In the early 1990s villagers began to be doorstepped by satellite television reps, proffering free dishes and a year’s free subscription if they would sign up.
The absence of television seemed to have helped Thixendale to forge a strong community spirit, and the thirty-odd local children learned to read more quickly than their friends from other villages. Then in June 1996 Thixendale held a festival, ‘Life Without TV’, which showcased the villagers’ skills, such as pottery, tile-making and woodwork, that had flourished without television. But the proceeds, shared with the church roof fund, were used to pay for a new £10,000 hilltop aerial. Villagers paid an annual fee towards its upkeep and received a local newsletter, Fuzzy Lines, updating them on reception. But one afternoon in May 1999, just as the village’s children were on their way home from school, there was a lightning storm. A thunderbolt zapped the aerial of one of the houses and ran along its shared cable, burning out the entire system, including fourteen of the village’s television sets. Perhaps an Old Testament God was punishing the villagers for their presumption in wanting to watch Changing Rooms. ‘I’ve never been able to get a decent picture,’ said Charles Brader, a local farmer to whom the thunderbolt mattered little. ‘But it really doesn’t make much difference. It’s like opening your post. Every now and then something interesting comes along but you still forget about it two minutes later.’70
The story of the last televisionless village in the kingdom was a neat one, but only partly true. There were still many other isolated hamlets and villages, mostly in parts of south Wales such as Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion, or the outer Western Isles of Scotland, without a TV signal. It was part of the lore of shipping that oil tankers went through the Minch between the Outer and Inner Hebrides, rather than skirting Harris and Lewis, because it was the only way to get a decent TV reception. Receiving a TV picture in these parts involved chance and luck. The Hebridean island of Iona had one because Penry Jones, a former head of religious broadcasting at ITV and BBC, retired there and managed to get the Glengorm mast on the Isle of Mull adjusted to take account of chinks in the hills, while also persuading the council to build a communal aerial on top of the only suitable building, the public toilet.71
One of the worst places in Britain for reception was, perhaps surprisingly, the centre of London, because of all the tall, steel-framed buildings with metallised windows that blocked the TV signal. While Thixendalians were clubbing together for a television aerial, almost 700 residents in a block of flats on the Isle of Dogs were launching a compensation claim against the London Docklands Development Corporation and Olympia and York, developers of the 800-foot Canary Wharf tower. For three years, from 1989 to 1992, until BBC engineers took pity on them and installed a booster mast, the residents had no reception. ‘I like the soaps, especially EastEnders, even though it is not really like life in the East End,’ said one of the complainants, Rose Humphries, a widow recovering from breast cancer. ‘When the picture went, I had to keep telephoning my daughter to find out what happened next.’ In 1997, after a series of appeals, the case reached the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. The law lords conceded that television was ‘a great distraction and relief from the circumscribed nature of the lives of aged, lonely and bedridden people’. But they did not think the deprivation of television an ‘actionable nuisance’, especially since, as TV signals were invisible, developers could not be expected to know of their existence before putting up a building.72
Watching television may still not have been enshrined in law as a basic human right. But perhaps it did not need to be, for it was now available to anyone prepared to pay for a satellite dish. By the end of the television century, geostationary TV satellites could beam down on every square foot of land in the country. There were hundreds of satellite and cable channels, and many broadcast continually from morning to night, as did ITV and BBC1. Test Card F, the once ubiquitous girl with the Alice band who appeared when there was nothing on TV, had vanished from our screens, for there was no need of a screensaver when there always something on, even if it was only pages from Ceefax in the small hours on BBC2. The cathode ray Ancient Mariner carried on talking to its viewers whatever time it was, and whether or not it had anything to say.
9
A GLIMMER ON THE DULL GREY TUBE
Hundreds of millions of people thus spend time every day flipping from one channel to the next, editing their own montages based on chance whilst looking for the news programme or game show that takes their fancy … Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.
Robert Hughes1
‘I first saw television when I was in my late teens. It made my heart pound,’ said Dennis Potter in a lecture in Edinburgh in 1993. ‘Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights, that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help to emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance.’ Born in 1935, Potter was brought up in Berry Hill, a coalmining village in the Forest of Dean, which did not receive television until the opening of the Wenvoe transmitter in 1952, and so he came of age just as it was emerging as a mass domestic medium. His feelings about that ‘little grey-faced monster squatting in our living rooms’ remained conflicted throughout his life.2
These conflicted feelings were already evident when he began his career as a professional television watcher, a job he got through illness. After being hired as a Daily Herald reporter in 1961, his knees became painfully swollen, the early stages of the psoriatic arthropathy that afflicted him for the rest of his life, and he began to work from home as the paper’s TV critic, watching in his Hammersmith flat and phoning in the copy late at night, his deadline meaning that he could only write about primetime shows. He was already a reluctant fan of the great popular serials and soap operas that emerged in the late 1950s to put a strain on the National Grid. His first TV column, in May 1962, a review of Wagon Train, revealed him to be an addict of the television western, ‘the most productive folklore of all time’. And in his second, he confessed to being hooked on Emergency – Ward 10.3
A key moment in Potter’s conversion into being a television writer came when he was hospitalised and wrote about the uncanny experience of watching this medical soap while being treated: ‘Shimmering on the screen is the mythical, glamorised world of godlike doctors and nubile, toothpaste-smiling nurses. But the real world of bedpans and squeaking tea trolleys around one is far less like the cover of a glossy film magazine.’ One of his earliest TV plays was Emergency Ward 9 (1966), set in a seedy hospital a world away from Ward 10, where ATV’s Lew Grade permitted the scriptwriters only five deaths per year.4
As Potter wrote his first plays, he was driven on by the knowledge that both coalminers and Oxford dons might be watching, that TV could offer a way of reaching both his parents and his university friends, unlike the middle-class medium of the theatre. Two-channel television could, he felt, satisfy his yearning for ‘at least the possibility of a common culture’.5 But he was also painfully aware that this shared televisual culture often served up undemanding pap, much of which he was forced to watch while bed-ridden in hospital. Potter had something of the lay preacher about him, making him both exasperated with and sympathetic to the viewers who used television as a soporific. ‘I have often looked out of the train windows on the approaches to Paddington Station … and at thickening dusk seen the tower blocks loom up,’ he wrote in 1983 about the train journey he regularly made from his home in Ross-on-Wye to London. ‘At almost every porthole in the gloomy blocks, floor upon floor upon floor, the lilac flicker of the television set comes
from deep within the rooms … Many old communities … have been broken apart, to be replaced with this flickering illusion of communality.’6
Potter’s vision of a common culture, he came to see, had proved as elusive on television as it had in the rest of society. His own plays were mostly acclaimed but only intermittently reached large audiences. Even Potter’s family thought his target audience in the Forest of Dean was puzzled and repelled by his work. ‘To be quite honest, you see, I’m not awfully keen on his plays,’ said Iris Hughes, Potter’s former school teacher. ‘They’re not everybody’s cup of tea, you know. And he did tend to run the forest down.’ Potter grew disillusioned about his ability to reach a wide audience through television and dismissed the idea of a golden age when the whole nation was sitting around a set. Only when the TV was switched off, he reflected in his Edinburgh lecture, did it pick up ‘a direct or true reflection of its viewers, subdued into a glimmer on its dull grey tube … The already aborted dream of a common culture … has long since been zapped into glistening fragments.’7
By the time Potter died in 1994, his vision that TV could create a common culture seemed not only dead, but unmourned. Many welcomed the end of communal viewing. ‘For Huw Wheldon’s generation the possibility of broadcasting attracting the whole nation to a common culture, like a village drinking from the same well, was a sustaining ideal,’ said the television producer Tony Garnett in his 1996 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture. ‘It was also merely the social manifestation of the technology of the day.’ Now Britain was in the vanguard of a new age of digital television, promising hundreds of new channels. Since the digital TV signal was condensed into binary code, it took up less space on the airwaves than analogue, and so consumer choice would no longer be artificially narrowed by the shortage of wavelengths. The outgoing BBC director general, John Birt, predicted that ‘broadcasting will one day no longer be a shared cultural experience’.8
The independent television producer, Peter Bazalgette – the man behind many of the makeover shows and docusoaps that now filled the schedules, such as Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms, Ground Force and Pet Rescue – was a cheerleader for this new economy. Born in the year of the coronation, his memory of the common culture of the three-channel era was of a dull, monochrome world in which the screens went blank on Sundays to protect Evensong (‘One wonders how many of the Pharisees who instituted such rules actually turned up for the Nunc Dimittis themselves’), well-meaning greybeards produced television plays that were really like filmed theatre, and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation – ‘an almost mystical totem for the miserable brigade … wheeled out frequently as an example of what we have lost’ – had fewer than a million viewers. This broadcasting era, he felt, had been ruled by a BBC–ITV cartel, controlling the airwaves and imposing its tastes on the public. Now, in the new age of multiplying channels and digital recorders, viewers would be able to watch what they wanted, when they wanted.9
The new ideal was instant interactivity, just as it had been for those Manchester Guardian-reading would-be viewers in 1934 who thought that television would allow them to see distant places like Oberammergau or St Peter’s Square in Rome. The twenty-first-century viewer would be able to crop the image on screen or zoom in on a detail, download films, order takeaways, check bank balances and book holidays from an armchair. In place of a common culture, the digital age offered a profusion of personal choice. A BBC advertisement for its new digital channels had Stephen Fry sitting at the dinner table with his television, asking it to ‘pass the salt please, darling’.
The real viewer, however, remained inconveniently unconvinced by this brave new world of variety and abundance. So far Britons had largely resisted cable and satellite TV; it had only been a success because the minority that used these channels were willing to spend more on them than anyone had guessed, particularly for football. On 4 September 1998, with the whole nation returned from its summer holidays and back to work and school, and the BBC, Sky and ITV preparing to launch their new digital channels, most viewers were far more interested in a new ITV quiz show.
The host, Chris Tarrant, sat with the first contestant, a drama student called Graham Elwell, in the middle of a chrome and Perspex amphitheatre, and told him he was ‘fifteen questions away from winning one million pounds’. Elwell sailed through the first question, correctly identifying the part of its body a woodpecker uses for pecking, for £100. As the stakes got higher, 140 tailor-made snatches of music subliminally built up tension like a film score, and intelligent light fixtures known as Vari-Lites that could change colour automatically, originally used by the rock group Genesis on their 1982 world tour, grew darker and dimmer. On £64,000, Elwell phoned a friend, his granddad, to ask him which country lay between Ghana and Benin. His granddad didn’t know, and Elwell took the money.
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? helped set the pattern for terrestrial TV’s attempt to retain viewers in the digital age by returning television to the form in which Baird had first introduced it to viewers: a live, interactive spectacle. Thanks to a premium rate phone line for would-be contestants, it also turned this interactivity into a revenue stream. David Briggs, the show’s co-deviser, correctly foresaw that it would encourage family members to call answers at the screen and castigate contestants for their ignorance, a phenomenon he called ‘shoutability’. The first series ran every night of the week, building up momentum, and increasing the suspense by carrying answers to questions over the ad breaks. By the end of its ten-day run, two-thirds of British adults had seen it at least once.10 A common culture that was supposed to have zapped into glistening fragments was continuing to form round the television set, as viewers found themselves unexpectedly exercised about what Kojak’s first name was, or who presented the Channel 5 show Naked Jungle in the nude.
In the summer of 2000, a series of enigmatic billboard posters appeared throughout the country featuring nothing but a giant staring eye. The programme they promoted seemed to resemble a device for simply watching time unfold, rather like those webcams depicting mundane activities inside people’s homes that now had cult followings on the internet. Almost every night for nine weeks, viewers could watch a group of young adults living in a purpose-built, space-age bungalow on Three Mills Island in east London, cut off from the world by the Bow Backs, a spaghetti junction of tributaries of the River Lea. Their every move recorded by cameras, the ten housemates talked, flirted, slept and argued over whether to put tofu on the weekly shopping list, before being voted out of the house in turn. The Geordie-accented narrator, Marcus Bentley, enhanced the sense of Beckettian uneventfulness with his lugubrious way of delivering lines like ‘the housemates are in the living room, passing round the Jaffa Cakes’ and ‘to alleviate the boredom, Darren suggests they make farm animals out of potatoes’.
Once again, though, television demonstrated its ability to make viewers incrementally interested in the most apparently unpromising material. An engrossing drama developed involving one of the housemates, Nick Bateman, who was making up stories about himself and breaking the rules by writing notes to fellow contestants. Having uncovered his subterfuge, Bateman’s housemates confronted him at a house meeting, at which he dissolved into tears and then left the house. Rumours of this showdown spread around the country via email. In high-tech offices, the only places with fast enough bandwidth to watch it, employees crowded round computer screens to watch a live transmission on the Channel 4 website, which had already become the most popular site in Europe, forcing some employers to turn off their internet connections to stop people accessing it. George Alagiah broke the story as the lead item on the BBC One O’Clock News: ‘Nasty Nick falls foul of Big Brother. He’s thrown out after being caught cheating …’ To those caught up in the story, Bateman’s banal venality seemed like the intrigues of a modern-day Iago.
For others in that summer of the new millennium, Big Brother encapsulated the neurotic self-display of the modern media age. ‘Camcorders and the internet have stolen
our sense of shame, and soon the inhibited will be a minority,’ argued Cosmo Landesman. ‘The British are on the brink of becoming a nation of exhibitionists and voyeurs.’ Big Brother, wrote the novelist Will Self, was ‘a National Service of the ego. With its senseless and irrelevant democracy, its pitiful voyeurism, its decadence and counselling, Big Brother is bizarrely one of the least distorting of the lenses with which television currently regards our society.’11
Self’s friend, J. G. Ballard, was more open-minded. His early short stories had actually anticipated reality TV. In ‘Manhole 69’ (1957), three men take part in a sleep deprivation experiment; under fierce arc lights, they are watched continually by scientists from a circular observation window, and descend disastrously into catatonia. In ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962), thirteen astronauts who think they are on a century-long flight to a distant planet are actually in a simulated spaceship in a vast hangar on earth, an experiment to test the psychological effects of space travel, watched by scientists on a line of closed-circuit TV screens. The public, who are following the experiment closely, ‘are beginning to feel that there’s something obscene about this human zoo; what began as a grand adventure of the spirit of Columbus, has become a grisly joke’. Ballard’s scenarios were weirdly replicated in two Channel 4 Big Brother-inspired reality programmes: Shattered (2004), in which contestants competed for a prize fund of £100,000 by trying to stay awake for a week, and Space Cadets (2005), in which participants were tricked into thinking they were in a spaceship in low earth orbit. ‘Sooner or later,’ says the opportunistic TV documentarist Professor Sanger in Ballard’s 1987 novel The Day of Creation, ‘everything turns into television.’12
