Armchair Nation (13 page)

On 1 June 1953, an eccentrically attired individual known only as ‘the Doctor' landed his flying police box in Muswell Hill on the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II. Puzzled by a concentration of television aerials on the same ordinary working-class street (Florizel Street, which the televisually literate would know as the original name for
Coronation Street
), the Doctor and his partner, Rose, discovered that a radio trader, Magpie, was selling them television sets for the absurdly low price of £5. They swiftly uncovered a plot whereby these television sets were turning viewers into faceless zombies by sending electrical rays through the set and sucking out their souls, while the police hid the victims so as not to spoil the upcoming festivities. An alien being called the Wire had turned itself into electrical form,
and now, disguised as a female announcer speaking in strangulated received pronunciation on Magpie's television sets, was introducing dull panel shows in black and white. On coronation day, the Wire planned to complete its regeneration by imbibing the souls of the millions of Britons watching TV. Just in time, the Doctor climbed to the top of the Alexandra Palace mast while its electrical waves crackled across north London's rooftops, turned the receiver back into a transmitter and reduced the Wire to a white dot.

This was not, of course, a moment in the history of television but a 2006 episode of
Doctor Who
called
The Idiot's Lantern
. But it does usefully summarise the vulgate view, that television in 1953 was primitive and lifeless, that only a tiny cohort of the middle classes had seen it and that it was ripe for Cinderella-like transformation by the coronation. ‘Like many others of the postwar generation, my first memory belongs to the young Queen: in my recollection her coronation in June 1953 heralded the arrival of a television in the corner of the living room and consequently the start of the dissipation of my juvenile sense of reality,' wrote the broadcaster Nick Clarke in 2003, in his book
Shadow of a Nation
. Surveying half a century of TV since then, Clarke saw this new Elizabethan age as one of growing cynicism, tawdriness and discontent. Television, he wrote, ‘was the butterfly that emerged from its chrysalis' in the 1950s and ‘grew into a ravening beast'. Its culminating nadir was reality TV, ‘one of the great misnomers of the age', which proved only that Britain was suffering from ‘the dry-rot of unreality'.
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But this idea of the coronation as a watershed for both television and the nation is unconvincing. By then, television in Britain was nearly thirty years old, had accumulated thousands of broadcasting hours and been seen by millions. One reason for this widespread belief that 1953 was television's year zero is the sparse evidence of moving images before then. The coronation marked the start of the wide use of telerecording, a crude method of making a copy of a programme as it went out live by pointing a 16mm film camera at the screen – which had the side effect of giving us a poor sense of what it was like for viewers to watch at the time, for it is like looking at the world through a Vaseline-smeared lens. Hardly any pre-1953 television survives,
consigning once unforgettable characters like Joan Gilbert and Algernon Blackwood to the prehistoric era, a half-memory getting ever fainter as each year the number of viewers who saw them declines.

Nor does it seem right, as historian D. R. Thorpe suggests, that ‘it was actually the television coverage of King George VI's funeral, watched in countless shared “front rooms”, that sparked off the mass purchasing of sets in time for 2 June 1953'. The king's funeral procession was certainly seen by the largest television audience yet, about 4.5 million people. Kirk O'Shotts was even opened for a single day on 15 February, a month before its official opening, to broadcast it, although, since the BBC only announced this the day before, it is unlikely that many Scots saw it. The funeral was also an event made for televising. The black-veiled new queen, the lilies on the coffin quivering in the breeze, the birds flying above Windsor Castle's Round Tower as the flag was lowered, all showed up in beautiful chiaroscuro. ‘Almost it seemed too intimate a picture for public diffusion,' wrote Reginald Pound in the
Listener
. ‘One's impulse was to step back from the screen, to have no part in this magnificent trespass.' But the coming of mass television was a continuum, not something sparked by one event. The number of new television licences rose from 400,000 in 1950, to 700,000 in 1951 and 1952, to 1,100,000 in 1953, suggesting that the sales hike for the coronation was part of a steady, inexorable rise.
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A Coronation Commission, chaired by Prince Philip, had ruled that the Westminster Abbey ceremony would not be televised, the sole concession being to allow cameras west of the organ screen so the processions could be seen. The phrase ‘west of the organ screen' was repeated ad infinitum over the course of 1952. For some it came to symbolise the anachronism of a pre-war caste system which offered a privileged view to the favoured few. ‘Beyond the precincts of Westminster, from the shores of Cornwall to the grey waters of the Clyde, from the warm sunlight of the Weald of Kent to the green-blue loveliness of the Lakes,' wrote the
Daily Mirror
's Cassandra, ‘at least fifteen million of Her Majesty's subjects will be abruptly shuttered off by what appears to be a monumental piece of mis-judgement.' For others, the organ screen defended precious tradition from the
pernicious instincts of mass voyeurism. In this camp was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who, preparing to sail home from the US in September 1952, told reporters, ‘The world would have been a happier place if television had never been discovered.'
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The undisclosed reason for the Commission's decision was the Queen's reluctance to be televised. There were no cameras in the Abbey at her wedding in 1947, she refused to let her Christmas broadcast be filmed and she had asked the BBC not to let cameras settle on her face during Horse Guards Parade or Trooping the Colour. A number of grey eminences, notably Lord Swinton, a veteran in Churchill's cabinet, succeeded in persuading her, and in October, the Commission decided that cameras would be allowed beyond the screen, as long as there were ‘no close-ups'. There was a rumour that the Queen's grandmother, Queen Mary, had been decisive in allowing television into the Abbey because she would be too ill to attend in person. But the rumour was untrue – and irrelevant because, three months before the coronation was broadcast on television, she died.
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The news that the coronation would be fully televised increased the pressure to make television truly national. Worried about a resurgent Germany and the onset of the Cold War, in 1951 the government had diverted money into rearmament and indefinitely postponed the building of more transmitters. In the north-east, miners' lodges passed resolutions against the region's continuing televisual deprivation, and Whitley Bay council lobbied the government on behalf of the 3 million people cut off by the Pennines from the Holme Moss signal. In October 1952, the same month that the Coronation Commission reversed its decision, the Postmaster General announced that transmitters at Pontop Pike, a moorland peak in County Durham, and Glencairn Hill, in the Belfast hills overlooking the city, would be built after all, so that people in these areas could see the coronation. Opening on the same day, 1 May 1953, these one-kilowatt masts were
makeshift, austerity affairs housed in old pre-war outside-broadcast vans, with none of the soaring grandeur of Sutton Coldfield or Holme Moss. On each hilltop, a skeleton staff of eight engineers lived in a rudimentary wooden hut with an Elsan chemical toilet.

The Belfast signal had to be routed through Kirk O'Shotts, across seventy miles of Scottish hills and thirty miles of sea, and by the time it was scattered over the rooftops of the six counties to about 900 TV aerials, the results were mixed. Belfast and the flat country surrounding the city got a passable reception, but beyond it there were only fading pictures and the sound arriving in whispers. In this poorest part of the kingdom there was little clamour for television, but Ulster Unionists welcomed it as a sign that Northern Ireland was fully part of the UK, while Irish Nationalists were deeply suspicious not only of the coronation but of the anglicising influence of BBC television. Thomas Henderson, MP for the Shankill, said that ‘all creeds and classes not only in Northern Ireland but throughout the great British Commonwealth of Nations' were looking forward to the coronation ‘with pleasure and joy'. The existence of a Royal Ulster Constabulary armed guard, stationed at the transmitter, suggested otherwise.
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Many who had rented or bought televisions especially for the coronation had them installed in time for the FA Cup Final, the first football game to reach a mass TV audience, and the first to be postponed until the end of the football league so that people watching it on television would not affect attendance at other games. One BBC executive commented that the main worry in the north-east was ‘not whether the transmitter will be radiating in time for the coronation, but whether it will be working in time for them to see the Cup Final'.
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The twenty-year-old John Moynihan, later a football writer, was invited to an FA Cup Final tea party at a mansion block in St John's Wood to watch on a set owned by his friend's father, a Jewish antique dealer. The roar that greeted the teams, he wrote, ‘resounded out of every crack of Mr H's set' and ‘the ball made a tump thumping sound in the television like firm punching in a boxing ring'.

The game was dull but with a thrilling ending: Blackpool, 1–3 down to Bolton with twenty-two minutes left, managed to win 4–3
with two goals set up by the 38-year-old wizard of dribble, Stanley Matthews, whom most of the 10 million viewers were seeing for the first time, and who turned most neutrals into Blackpool fans. As he started to run the game, Moynihan wrote, ‘the pitch even on that small set seemed to push Matthews towards us and out into the room so that tiny, weaving figure was now the prince of the earth'. Blackpool's winning goal in the dying moments saw the living room come to life as ‘men seized cushions and hugged them to their bellies … The room was electric, the television screen swarming with Blackpool players hugging and embracing and we were hugging and embracing.'
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It was already clear that televised football could rouse the most passive viewer in a way that a royal event never could. The mass viewing of the ‘Matthews final' was a watershed in the acceptance of the FA Cup Final as the key English national sporting ritual. Comparing it with the Lord's Test on the same day, where England's batsmen had struggled, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus wondered if the ‘drama and heroism' of the final was indicative of football replacing cricket as the ‘game of the people'.
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In the days leading up to the coronation, viewers adjusted their sets while picking up the build-up programmes. On
About the Home
, the television chef Marguerite Patten told them how to pre-prepare melon cocktails and salmon mousse to eat in front of the television. Two Metropolitan police officers gave advice to viewers on preventing house burglars on coronation day, and how to behave along the coronation route. On coronation eve, cameras on the Mall showed the already continuous line of pavement occupants and occasional tree dwellers preparing to spend the night in the rain. The BBC's Barrie Edgar talked to some of them, including a Swiss mountain guide and a family who had sailed all the way from Australia in a ketch. It was perhaps the first attempt at manufacturing atmosphere through a new genre, the vox pop, which Nick Clarke would later call ‘one of the most artificial kinds of broadcasting ever devised'.
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