Armchair Nation

by Joe Moran

  In fact, The X Factor was a grotesque caricature of democracy. It flattered viewers by reminding them constantly that the result was in their hands, while simultaneously getting them to pay to provide free product testing on new artists. It claimed to be empowering but was actually infantilising. The utopian promise of democratic interactivity held out at the start of the digital era was now reduced to a single phone call, a triumph of direct-line consumerism. Before viewers cast their votes, the show worked brazenly on their emotions through the sentimentality of the contestants’ backstories, the casual pseudomalice of the judges, and the baying audience at the Circus Maximus of the auditions, belittling the deluded souls who wrongly presumed themselves to have the X factor.

  ‘Future generations,’ the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt told the Royal Television Society, ‘will learn more about us from what we watched on TV than from any historian. And looking at our media in 2010, they will conclude that it was deeply, desperately centralised.’ Why, asked Hunt, did Birmingham, Alabama have eight local TV stations but Birmingham, England had none? He praised one of the few local channels, Witney TV, which had a policy of only covering positive news, from charity auctions to local fetes, as ‘a hyper-local initiative that is helping to prove that the Big Society is alive and well in David Cameron’s constituency’.57

  The Big Society was one of the big policy phrases of the new coalition government, its aim being ‘to create a climate that empowers local people and communities’. As an idea, the Big Society relied heavily on the positive connotations of the word ‘local’: local communities, local charities, local sourcing, local post offices, local television. But the recent history of these local stations was unpromising. Hunt invited a merchant banker, Nicholas Shott, to review the commercial prospects of local TV. His report found that the two dozen local stations formed since the 1996 Broadcasting Act, which allowed new channels to take out restricted service licences to broadcast on spare analogue frequencies, had met with ‘limited success’.58 This was mandarin understatement, for almost all these companies had failed to attract enough investors or advertisers and had stopped broadcasting.

  The Isle of Wight’s TV-12 channel, for example, coming from a converted caretaker’s bungalow in the grounds of a Newport school, had filmed local bands playing in pubs and an amateur dramatic society, The Ferret Theatre Company, putting on plays. But it was replaced by Solent TV which, even after it diluted its local content with cheap imports such as Futbol Mundial and old black-and-white films, also went out of business. Lanarkshire TV, broadcasting from an old lunatic asylum near Kirk O’Shotts with a sign outside saying ‘Brace yourself, Lanarkshire!’, had a talent show called Talented Lanarkshire, a quiz night from Lanark Grammar School and a local constable appealing for witnesses in a small-scale version of Crime-watch. It was replaced by Thistle Television, which broadcast to a wider catchment area and interspersed this local material with Sky News and the QVC shopping channel. It too went bust.

  The free market ethos that had governed the television industry since the 1990 Broadcasting Act treated viewers as rationally selective consumers – part of a general trend in cultural and political life. This ethos did not really see television watching as a collective activity; instead, it saw the TV audience more as an accumulation of lots of individual consumer preferences. But this assumed that viewers always knew exactly what kind of television they liked before they watched it, as though they were choosing items from a supermarket aisle to put in their trolleys. When asked in consumer surveys, people did say they wanted more local news, and Waddington Village Television, that short-lived Granada experiment from the start of the satellite era, showed that very local TV could be surprisingly addictive. But in practice, when presented with the amateurish efforts of small stations trying to sustain themselves with low advertising revenue, viewers usually preferred to watch more lavishly produced network television.

  That there was an untapped desire for local content among viewers was clear even from a national, primetime show like The X Factor. This started locally, with auditions held across the country, and regularly revealed the intensity of regional feeling, particularly in northern and Celtic areas. Two mediocre, tartan-tie wearing wedding singers from Ayr, the MacDonald Brothers, were kept in the show for weeks by millions of Scottish viewers who, as the letters page of the Daily Record attested, were considerably more exercised about their fate than about the survival of Gaelic language television. When the America’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan met Gordon Brown at the Treasury in November 2006, Brown expressed his irritation at the MacDonald Brothers’ progress, saying ‘they’re giving Scotland a bad name’.59 At the Liverpool auditions, the audience cheered contestants when they called out the names of the streets they lived in. Thousands of Northern Irish viewers complained when they could not get through on the phone lines to vote for Eoghan Quigg, a young singer from Dungiven in County Derry who had just been voted off the show – controversies about vote rigging being another recurrent aspect of the show’s caricaturing of democracy.

  And yet The X Factor was interested in the regions only insofar as they provided a provincial context from which the potential star could escape. Like Madame Bovary dreaming of Paris fashions or Chekhov’s three sisters sighing for Moscow, those auditioning wished only to be allowed to make the journey to boot camp or the London finals, and receive the beneficence of the head judges. The X Factor used bountiful central budgets to create a televisual sensorium with spectacular pyrotechnics, tension-creating music and the basso profundo of Peter Dickson, whose grandiloquent, pause-laden introductions made his voice as recognisable to British viewers as Richard Dimbleby’s had been half a century earlier. A familiar ritual thus played out each Saturday night in autumn, with the magical incantations ‘calls cost 50p from landlines, mobile networks may vary’ and ‘please ask the bill-payer’s permission’ causing millions of thumbs to press urgently on keypads, and the closing of the phone lines conducted with the solemnity of a sacred rite. Talented Lanarkshire could never have matched this sense of theatre.

  The habit of communal television watching had proved surprisingly resilient. Despite confident predictions at the start of the digital era about the end of ‘linear viewing’, most people still sat down each night and flicked through the channels to see what was on. As with video in the 1980s, catch-up sites and digital recorders had encouraged an element of time shifting but had not destroyed primetime or shared viewing. Some viewers were taking laptops to bed to watch programmes on the BBC iPlayer, or lying in with it at weekends, but otherwise the iPlayer had roughly the same peak hours as TV, with the same programmes being watched. And precisely because there was so much television available and so many ways of watching it, programme makers placed a high worth on family-centred, live television that would be watched and talked about across the nation.

  The social networking site Twitter, with its improvised invention of the identifying hashtag, allowed vast virtual communities to meet to discuss shows while they were being broadcast: a universe of instant reaction and ongoing commentary, much of it inane and noisemaking, some of it funny and insightful. Television programmes began publishing these hashtags in their opening titles to encourage viewers to tweet; producers followed the feed to get free market research. People still seemed to seek that ephemeral, undemanding togetherness created by watching the same programmes. While governments carried on reciting the mantra of individual choice, television pointed to the residual longing for a collective national life.

  Shows like The X Factor revived Dennis Potter’s vision of television as a mass democratic form that could break through Britain’s traditional class and educational barriers. For better or worse, they were probably now the nearest we had to a common culture. ‘I sit in a first-class carriage on the Liverpool to Euston route,’ complained the record producer Pete Waterman. ‘You might think my fellow commuters – businessmen, MPs, a clutch of lawyers and a smattering of City brokers – had bet
ter things to discuss on the two-hour journey. Our ailing economy perhaps, or the state of public transport? Apparently not. They witter endlessly about who’s been ousted from [The X Factor] and whether they should have stayed put.’ At a Private Eye lunch, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis and the former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil were overheard having a prolonged and animated discussion – about who should win The X Factor.60

  Potter would presumably have loathed The X Factor, although given the inbred contrarianism that led him to write occasional paeans of praise to The Black and White Minstrel Show, we cannot be sure. It is more likely that he would have been baffled and bewildered by it, and especially by the way it had become almost obligatory to watch and talk about it. Intelligent, literate people were now supposed to watch popular TV with savviness and sarcasm, not judgemental earnestness. Potter had high expectations of television and its viewers, which is why he felt so disappointed when it and they failed to live up to them. It is hard to imagine him viewing The X Factor with the requisite reserves of wry detachment and kitsch pleasure.

  10

  CLOSEDOWN

  A friend has just given his television set to a surprised caller. Is he a candidate for the calendar or for the social services? He has turned the newscasters out, lock, stock and goodbye smiles, and is master in his own house. We should try it. It is a lay form of Trappism.

  Ronald Blythe1

  In the middle of March 1969, a severe ice storm hit the southern Pennines. At the top of Emley Moor, the spun metal stays of the television mast twanged and whistled in the wind and great clumps of ice fell off, denting parked cars and piercing the roofs of houses. Since being completed three years earlier, the mast had acquired an ugly reputation among the surrounding villagers, who called it ‘the ice monster’. After receiving complaints from the council, the Independent Television Authority installed signs on approach roads and a flashing amber beacon on the mast to warn of ice falls. Muriel Truelove, before taking over as landlady of the nearby Three Acres Inn eight weeks earlier, anxiously paced out the distance between the mast and the pub to see whether the former would hit the latter if it ever fell down.2

  At 5.01 p.m. on Wednesday 19 March, it did. A crash like a thunder crack could be heard for miles around. The top section of the mast, made of meshed steel girders clad in fibreglass, narrowly missed two cottages as it pitched into a field a third of a mile away. A Methodist chapel was sliced in two by one of the ice-laden, metal stays. Two men inside the building saw a cascade of ice hit the roof and then the stay come crashing through it. Silverwood Burt, a 68-year-old trustee of the chapel, was covered in plaster and woodwork, but was saved by the crash helmet he had borrowed for just such an eventuality. ‘I dived under some seats in the classroom,’ said the caretaker, Jeffrey Jessop. ‘I laid there until it was all over, saying a lot of prayers.’ The other stays whiplashed into the earth, with ten-feet-deep craters gouged in fields, and road surfaces where the wreckage fell smashed into tarmac fragments. The police closed all the roads to keep back sightseers who were crowding in through the fog, as breakdown crews hauled the debris away. ‘The whole superb structure which dominated the West Riding as effectively as its transmissions dominated the county’s TV screens, has been reduced to tangled metal by nothing more sinister than drizzle,’ said the Yorkshire Post.3

  When the mast came down, tens of thousands of the region’s viewers, from the hill-shadowed villages of the West Riding to the coastal towns across the Yorkshire plain, were watching Discotheque, a children’s pop show on ITV presented by Billy J. Kramer. Suddenly, a few minutes before a comedy show called Do Not Adjust Your Set was about to start, their screens disintegrated into static. As soon as the television went blank in the Leeds control room, the duty engineer’s phone began ringing off the hook. Several callers demanded that the missed episode of Coronation Street be broadcast on BBC1 after closedown. Yorkshire TV’s switchboard logged over 5,000 calls, mostly complaints about missing Coronation Street and The Avengers.4 Over the next three days, seventeen Polish migrant workers put in eighteen-hour shifts in freezing 50 mph winds to build a temporary mast that covered most of the region, allowing Yorkshire TV to claw back its haemorrhaging advertising revenue. The only part of the original mast that survives now does service as Huddersfield sailing club’s lookout tower, offering a panoramic view of the Boshaw Whams Reservoir.

  By the end of the 1960s, the television set burbling away in the living room had come to signify normality and routine. The people who rang the Leeds duty engineer to complain about missing Coronation Street probably gave little thought as to how its radio waves reached them. Television had become a mundane piece of wizardry, something only really noticeable when it broke down or was interrupted. Historically, the most vociferous complaints from viewers have not been about sex, violence or bad language, but about when television stops for no apparent reason or their favourite programmes are cancelled or postponed. What viewers seem to demand most of television is that it carries on, like an ever-flowing stream. And, mostly, it does: a non-stop, decades-old technical miracle. The collapse of the Emley Moor mast was a brief reminder of how much we take television for granted and how much it depends on apparatus that might, at some point, come crashing down on our heads.

  Some of the original TV masts, which caused so much excitement when they were built, such as Holme Moss and Kirk O’Shotts, have stopped sending out television signals and now transmit mobile phone conversations or digital radio. The nameless engineers who kept television going in these remote places have long since moved on to other masts, retired or died. The remaining masts are mostly unsung in our cultural mythology, with a few eccentric exceptions. The Mancunian post-punk funk band A Certain Ratio recorded a song about the Granada region’s Winter Hill transmitter in 1981, which consists of thirteen minutes of stubbornly monotonous drumming and a techno motif of just two alternating notes, meant to imitate a TV signal.

  The Yorkshire-born poet Simon Armitage once hymned the new 900-foot Emley Moor mast, a tapering, reinforced concrete tower completed in 1971, in a ten-minute visual poem for BBC2’s One Foot in the Past series in 1993, and elsewhere described it as ‘like the after-burn of a rocket disappearing into the clouds’. In a 1996 BBC2 documentary, I Remember the Future, the presenter, Jonathan Meades, stood at the bottom of this mast in order to give a sense of its height and surprising girth, and proclaimed it ‘established by aliens in 1966 [sic] in order that 30 years later this film might reach you’. These ‘punctuation marks of human supremacy,’ he mused, belonged to ‘that brief and far off parenthesis when Britain was modern’, the third quarter of the twentieth century, when public architecture was ‘self-celebratory, bloated, grandiose’.5 No one, except the odd nonconformist like Meades, rhapsodises about TV masts any more.

  While I was writing this book, the analogue signal slowly disappeared, region by region. One of the soundtracks to its writing was the constant repetition on the television and radio of the restful Welsh accent of the BBC newsreader Huw Edwards reminding me that my analogue television would soon be useless but that, if I were over seventy-five or registered disabled, I could get help. The technologically unschooled became reluctant students of the new vocabulary of the digibox and scart socket. At my local tip, I saw several dozen ‘fat-screen’ televisions piled up in a skip. In America they call it the Super Bowl effect, the mass dumping of old TVs as viewers upgrade to sleeker, better sets in time for the sporting event of the year. The digital switchover was the Super Bowl effect in extremis. On some of these old TVs, as their former owners had thrown them casually away, the cathode ray tube had become separated from its plastic housing. Seen in the raw, the tubes seemed suddenly bulky and primitive, a Victorian technology that had survived improbably into the present.

  ‘They are so ubiquitous in life that their bodies in death litter our wastelands and edgelands,’ the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write in their book Edgelands, about the old televisions you
see abandoned on peri-urban wasteland and landfill. ‘And why does a dead TV’s blank face resonate so much with us? Is this our image of oblivion?’6 I have heard these clunky cubic sets end up on container ships bound for Nigeria, China and other countries unencumbered by legislation about the lead, strontium and other toxic substances inside them. There, ragpickers, usually young girls, plunder them for tiny amounts of precious metals like silver and caesium. They give no thought (and why should they?) to the zillions of electrons that have flickered and died on their phosphorescent tubes for the amusement and bemusement of distant others.

  On 4 November 2009, on the same day the Winter Hill transmitter switched to digital, an exhibition opened at the Urbis gallery in Manchester, called ‘Ghosts of Winter Hill’. Its conceit was that for half a century domestic life in Britain had been ruled by the TV set, and the north had helped to define this television era that was ending. ‘The collectivisation of the nation through the conduit of television is no longer anything like so concentrated. In fact it’s infinitely diluted,’ said Phil Griffin, the co-curator. ‘So, in some sense, I believe that one could argue that the television era is over.’7 I went to the exhibition, a series of cutaway period sitting rooms looking out of place in Urbis’s glassy, minimalist surroundings. There was a G-Plan 1950s room, an Abigail’s Party-style 1970s room, a flatpack 1990s room, and in each of them was a contemporaneous television set, screening programmes from that decade that had come out of Manchester: The Army Game, Top of the Pops or Cold Feet played on a loop.