by Joe Moran
In 2005, the Canadian writer Craig Taylor returned to the Suffolk village where Ronald Blythe had written Akenfield and Peter Hall had made the film of the same name, based loosely on Blythe’s 1969 book. Shown on ITV one Sunday evening in January 1975, Hall’s film drew 15 million viewers, twice the anticipated number. Despite a challenging score by Michael Tippett, improvised dialogue and some strong Suffolk dialect from the amateur cast (‘I toowd yew that hehf ewr agoo’), it seems, in a period of stagflation and rising energy prices, to have left an impression on desensitised urban viewers attracted to the simpler life. The next day Peter Hall’s taxi driver congratulated him on Akenfield on the way to the theatre, and Princess Margaret phoned him to say she didn’t understand why anyone had complained it was hard to understand the dialect, because she hadn’t found it hard at all. ‘Though of course,’ she added, ‘one did grow up there, in Norfolk at any rate.’39
Craig Taylor noted that the broad Suffolk accent captured by Blythe and Hall had now been practically snuffed out by TV, making way for the estuarine vowels and glottal stops of south-eastern English, just as the young had also rejected the western rolled ‘r’ in the television era because of its country bumpkin associations. Dennis Potter, who had written in 1962 about his love of the Forest of Dean dialect – a rich mix of ‘the speed and lilt of the Welsh borderland, the broad, lengthened vowel sounds and buttery emphases of the West country and many distinctive local words and rhythms of its own’ – would have found a similar levelling effect in his homeland: not the sort of common culture he had craved.40
‘People don’t look at the fields now … They’re living urban lives in the countryside – not just here, but all over the place,’ said one of Craig Taylor’s interviewees in Akenfield, the 83-year-old Ronald Blythe himself. ‘Because, after all is said and done, the same television programmes, same newscasters, same everything are seen by everyone in Britain, every night, from the Orkneys to Cornwall.’ At nearby Otley Agricultural College, they were treating the spread of gardening makeover programmes as a recruiting tool and a source of jobs for their graduates. ‘Horticulture,’ the prospectus said, ‘is the new rock’n’roll.’41
A year after Taylor went back to Akenfield, the broadcaster Eric Robson returned to his birthplace, Newcastleton, a Scottish village just a few miles from the English border. One evening, at the top of Holm Hill, the summit overlooking the village, he struck up a conversation with an elderly man, muffled against the cold, and told him about the book he was writing, on whether the border between the two countries still mattered. The only border that amounted to anything, the old man replied, was between STV’s Loch Lomond-set soap opera Take the High Road and Coronation Street. ‘Television has rubbed us all flat,’ he said.42
Sheepdog trials were still shown on digital channels, and there was even the odd One Man and His Dog special on BBC2. But the rural people who were unhappy with the depiction of country life on television did not seem to want their interests hived off into specialist channels hidden away in the higher reaches of the channel numbers, seen only by those adventurous with the buttons on their remote controls. They wanted the main channels to convey the realities of rural life to themselves and others: television as common culture.
The television-watching nation seemed to be splintering in other directions. The voices in favour of Scottish independence had been rising in volume since the Thatcher era, when many Scots felt they had been forgotten by the south. The Gaelic music revival, led by bands and singers such as Runrig, Oi Polloi and Julie Fowlis, and reinforced by folk festivals like the Feis and the official use of Gaelic in the devolved Scottish parliament, had given the language a newly progressive image; and this parliament, now dominated by nationalists, was pressing for the BBC to spend more of its licence fee on Scottish programmes. And so, on 19 September 2008, the BBC inaugurated a Scottish Gaelic channel, Alba, the first mainstream channel to come entirely from Scotland. Its opening programme was Eilbheas, in which a Gaelic teenager assuages his loneliness on the Isle of Lewis by becoming friends with the ghost of Elvis Presley. In care homes in the Western Isles, free digital boxes were provided for the large number of elderly Gaelic speakers.
British television had always assumed, as the minimum commitment to its imagined and often imaginary national community of viewers, the sharing of a common language. While the combined forces of political devolution and digital television were now openly questioning this assumption, the issue had been simmering away since the late 1970s, when the Annan committee argued that television should give more of a voice to the regions. BBC Alba might never have happened if the Conservative home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, had got his way when, on 12 September 1979, he announced that the government would not be honouring its election pledge to establish a Welsh language TV channel. Plaid Cymru had lost seats in the election and the people of Wales had rejected a Welsh assembly in a referendum, and the new Tory government believed that Welsh nationalism was in retreat. But that Christmas, while watching The Muppet Show with his grandchildren, the leader of Plaid Cymru, Gwynfor Evans, hatched a plan for a grand gesture. On 3 May 1980, the 69-year-old Evans threatened to fast to the death unless the government agreed to a Welsh channel. Before the start of his fast on 5 October, Evans held a series of tearful rallies throughout Wales where he talked of his possible death.
Margaret Thatcher refused to give in to threats, but that September the more pragmatic Whitelaw, worried about the violence and unrest that might follow Evans’s death, gave the go ahead for the fourth channel, Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C). On the Embankment wall opposite the House of Commons appeared the legend ‘Gwynfor 1, Whitelaw 0’. Evans, motivated as much by his desire to revive Plaid Cymru and create a nationalist reawakening as his wish for a fourth channel, thought it a pity Whitelaw had surrendered so soon.43
Even after the arrival of S4C, the tensions persisted. HTV now rebranded itself as an English language channel for Welsh people and sought to win back the non-Welsh speaking viewers who had turned their aerials to England. ‘HTV Wales speaks your kind of language,’ said advertisements in Welsh newspapers in October 1982, a few days before the start of S4C, as HTV inaugurated its first English language soap opera, Taff Acre. But S4C, which became best known for its children’s cartoons, Super Ted and Fireman Sam, and was often the subject of ridicule for its low ratings, does seem to have helped to halt the decline of Welsh. By the 1991 census, the number of Welsh speakers had stabilised and by 2001 it had increased to over a fifth of the population, a cultural revival also evident in bands such as Catatonia and Super Furry Animals and singers such as Cerys Matthews and Duffy, all of whom have sung in Welsh; and in S4C-funded Welsh language films such as the Oscar winning anti-war biopic Hedd Wyn (1992) and Gadael Lenin (Leaving Lenin, 1993). Some Welsh nationalists, however, felt that the language issue had distracted them from their broader political aims, and that the expansion of Welsh television provided a career path for the nation’s intellectual élite, depriving their movement of its natural leaders. ‘Talented people became part of the “intellywelshia”,’ suggested Gwynfor Evans’s biographer, ‘indulging themselves in the fashionable suburbs of west Cardiff, rather than leading “Plaid” back to “Welsh Wales”.’44
For Scottish nationalists, as for the Welsh, television had turned from enemy to ally: having blamed it initially for eroding their local traditions and languages, they realised that it could be used to protect and develop them. But Scottish Gaelic was never as widespread as Welsh. Native speakers were mainly found in the Western Isles, which had suffered chronic economic decline and population loss for over a century. According to the 1981 census, there were only 82,000 Gaelic speakers, less than two per cent of Scots. The number of people who spoke only Gaelic had not been recorded since the 1971 census, when it was just 477.
Non-Gaelic speaking Scots were often ambivalent about Scottish programmes. ‘The memory of The White Heather Club lingers on as if it were only yesterday,’ wrote the fil
m and television critic John Caughie in 1982, ‘the voice of the Laird of Cowcaddens still rings in the ears, and although Hogmanay specials only happen once a year it takes at least twelve months to forget them.’ When the BFI asked viewers to keep diaries in the early 1990s, it found that many Scots, from Dumfries and Galloway to the Shetlands, disliked the Scottish opt-out programmes, especially the Gaelic ones. ‘I detest regional programmes …’ said a 21-year-old Beith woman, ‘they are aimed at “teuchters” – the kilt wearing, Gaelic speaking minority.’ ‘Whilst I agree that there should be some Gaelic TV programmes,’ said a 32-year-old Kilmarnock man, ‘I feel that STV put a number of them on at peak viewing times. No one in the central belt of Scotland can understand a bloody word of them.’ A study of articles and letters in Scottish newspapers in the late 1990s and early 2000s pointed to anti-Gaelic prejudice among non-Gaelic speaking Scots, who associated it with elderly, poor, Hebridean crofters.45
A Gaelic Television Fund created out of the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which added 200 more hours of Gaelic programmes a year on the BBC and STV, seemed to have had the effect of increasing the number of people learning Gaelic, especially in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but not fast enough to replace the dying native speakers. According to the 2001 census, the numbers of Gaelic speakers had fallen to 58,652, just over one per cent of the Scottish population. Scottish Gaelic did not deserve its own channel, wrote Allan Brown in the Sunday Times, because it was ‘attuned to a distant, pre-technological world’ and was ‘a rural patois, a bonsai idiolect’.46
Every Saturday night, Alba showed a live Scottish Premier League football match, with Gaelic-only commentary. The Gaelic translation company Cainnt Cultural Services provided English-speaking viewers with some useful phrases, including Tha e air a bhith air a h-uile pios feur (‘He’s covered every blade of grass’) and Tha feum againn a toirt a h-uile game mar a thig e (‘We just have to take each game as it comes’). The Scottish historian Michael Fry, who saw the Gaelic revival as an exercise in wishful thinking and special pleading by lowland intellectuals, said that most viewers only watched Alba for the sport, and that ‘the whole thing is being set up to make this channel appear more popular than it is … You don’t need Gaelic to watch football.’47 By the end of 2008, though, the audience for Alba was about 400,000, nearly seven times the number of Gaelic speakers.
Perhaps one of the attractions of Alba was that it bore little sign of what the Scottish nationalist intellectual Tom Nairn called the ‘vast tartan monster’, that ‘huge self-contained universe of Kitsch’, from Hootenannies to shortbread tins, which he felt had reduced the national psyche to infantilism and sentimentality.48 Instead, there were a few understated clarsachs and bagpipes and the beautiful Alba idents, with their traffic lights and cones bending towards the north star in the twilight; evocative glimpses of the far north, in sheepdog trials from Shetland or motoring programmes that test-drove cars on deserted Hebridean roads; and a blizzard of pleasing guttural noises punctuated by familiar words for which there was no Gaelic equivalent, like ‘empowering’ and ‘exhilarating’. For non-Gaelic speakers, watching BBC Alba had something of the strange poetry of the shipping forecast, that radio broadcast listened to intently by millions of people who, not being on ships, are not its intended audience.
For it seemed that, even in the digital era when audiences were supposed to pick and choose programmes to fit their own consumer demographic, television still clung to the literal, agricultural sense of the word ‘broadcast’. ‘The parable of the sower celebrates broadcasting as an equitable mode of communication that leaves the harvest of meaning to the will and capacity of the recipient,’ writes the philosopher John Durham Peters, in his book Speaking into the Air. ‘Though much is thrown, little is caught. And the failure of germination is not necessarily something to lament.’ Television viewing retained something of this unselective, ecumenical quality, so that Gaelic programmes broadcast into the democratic air might still form part of what Peters calls the ‘cumulative intelligence of the universe’.49
One show still brought the nation together like no other: The X Factor. Since the beginning of the century, this type of reality TV talent show had been transforming Saturday night entertainment, helped by new fibre-optic technology and a device called a Digital Main Switching Unit which allowed thousands of phone votes to be registered simultaneously. On 9 February 2002, the night of the final of the talent show Pop Idol, British Telecom reported that 57 million calls, at 10p each, were made on 28,000 dedicated lines to vote for the finalists, Will Young and Gareth Gates, equal to one call for nearly every person in Britain. The writer and radio presenter Francine Stock described it as ‘a kind of modern equivalent of the crowd response at a gladiatorial contest, but instead of using the thumbs up and thumbs down, we’re using our dialling fingers’.50
Others, like Peter Bazalgette, noted that phone-in votes were engendering the kind of public engagement that was missing from politics. The turnout at the 2001 general election had been only 59 per cent, the lowest since the wartime election of 1918, and membership of political parties had declined, particularly among the young people who watched reality shows. It became a truism that more people voted on premium rate lines for reality show contestants than in general elections – although, as J. G. Ballard surmised, the truism was probably untrue, because many of these phone votes were made up of multiple calls by the same people. ‘E-mail and mobile telephony have transformed the tenor of our lives … But we still only vote for the government once every four years or so,’ noted Bazalgette sadly. ‘Our democracy is divorced from the rhythm of the age.’51
Researchers from the Universities of London, East London and Sheffield, after spending two years watching children play, concluded that these new reality shows were feeding into playground life. Inspired by Iona and Peter Opie’s classic studies of children’s playground and street games in the 1950s, which had documented the incorporation of advertising jingles and TV theme tunes into clapping and singing games, the researchers discovered playground games based on dance routines from Britain’s Got Talent, The Jeremy Kyle Show and, especially, The X Factor. The playground researchers noticed one personality recurring constantly in children’s roleplay: Simon Cowell, the charismatic, caustic svengali who was mobbed during public auditions held round the country, who frequently appeared in the dreams of women and children, and who could silence studio audiences with a regal wave of his hand. Interviews with first-time voters in East Anglia found that most thought Cowell ‘a person of authority’ whose success had earned him the right to be rude. ‘He knows what he is talking about so he is someone who can say if you are crap,’ said one. Several put the case for Cowell to be prime minister.52
The incumbent, Gordon Brown, let it be known that he was a fan of The X Factor, and had found time to write letters of congratulation or commiseration to the finalists. It seemed unlikely viewing for the child of a Kirkcaldy minister from whom he had inherited that ethical and intellectual seriousness that marks out the Church of Scotland ministry. The Free Church had a long-held hostility to television, one which seems to have deeply affected another minister’s son, Lord Reith. After he left the BBC in 1938, the corporation presented Reith with a TV set, but he barely looked at it. His daughter, Marista Leishman, attributed this disaffection to his Presbyterianism. Her father, she wrote, ‘looked out at television from the scarcely opened door of an unadorned Free Church building, the glass of its windows frosted and crinkled as a barrier between the worshippers within viewing the distractions of worldly matters without’.53
But perhaps Brown’s viewing of The X Factor still carried a trace of his background as a son of the Manse. For instead of watching just for entertainment, he drew improving morals from it, and sought to link it to the New Labourite politics of individual aspiration, his vision of what he called ‘an X Factor Britain’. ‘These shows,’ he said, ‘are saying to people, “Look, if you’ve got a talent you don’t have to know someone. You ca
n just apply and we’ll have a look at what you’re like.”’ Just as The X Factor was unearthing untapped talent, we needed to ‘eradicate failure across our education system’ in order to ‘unlock all the talents of all of the people’.54
This eagerness of politicians to discuss their television viewing was relatively new. ‘None of our party leaders have television sets,’ Tony Benn wrote in his diary in 1958. ‘How can one lead a great party unless one keeps in touch with the people?’ The then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, although an astute performer on TV, did not own a set and, as the member of a distinguished publishing family, feared it would take the place of books. Harold Wilson and James Callaghan made rather arch references to their viewing of Coronation Street, and Margaret Thatcher claimed to be a fan of the Whitehall sitcom Yes, Minister but barely watched anything, acquiring her sense of television as an inefficient, complacent industry from the size of the crews that came to interview her. Tony Blair was the first prime minister fully to embrace television viewing as shorthand for a contemporary and populist attitude, claiming to be a ‘modern man’ who came from the generation of ‘the Beatles and colour TV’, and revealing that Pop Idol was ‘regular family viewing’.55
Post-New Labour politicians, forty-somethings who grew up during the now tenderly recalled age of three-channel colour television, talked freely of their watching habits. During the 2010 general election campaign, David Cameron told the Radio Times of his youthful enthusiasms for Tiswas, Neighbours and the daytime quiz show Going for Gold.56 Several senior politicians claimed to enjoy The X Factor, and Tory strategists read its voting patterns as a way of gauging popular attitudes to people who worked in the public services, single mothers and asylum seekers – assuming, like Brown, that the show had something to teach them about democracy.
