Armchair Nation (16 page)

I peer into my magic mirror like a fourteen-stone cigar-smoking Lady of Shalott … I have already passed uncounted hours half-hypnotised by the jiggling and noisy images … [Television] does not seem to bring the outside world closer to me but pushes it further away … I feel I am taking a series of peeps, perhaps from the darkened smoke room of a giant spaceship, at another planet, with whose noisy affairs I am not involved at all
.

J. B. Priestley
¹

In July 1951, Gilbert Harding began chairing a new TV quiz show,
What's My Line?
, in which panellists had to guess what members of the public did for a living. It did not go well. He mistook a male nurse for a panel beater and kept interrupting him to say his answers were wrong. When the nurse revealed his mistake, Harding told viewers, ‘This is the last time I ever appear on television.' But he reappeared as a panellist on the show a few weeks later and seemed no happier, telling one equivocal contestant, ‘I'm tired of looking at you.' A viewer complained: ‘I felt like walking out of my own drawing room.'
²
There was talk of scrapping the programme, not because Harding was rude but because it was as dreary as he had feared it might be.

Gradually, though, viewers were drawn into the panel's attempts to identify jelly baby varnishers and pepper pot perforators. By the end of the year it was the most popular show on television.
What's My Line?
, the
Glasgow Herald
assured its readers before the opening of Kirk O'Shotts, ‘is good fun, and when the challenger happens to be a saggar maker's bottom knocker, can be hilarious'. One panellist, Lady Isobel Barnett, was sent paintings and needlework portraits of her face, modelled from the TV screen by viewers. Newspapers ran on their front pages the story that another panellist, Barbara Kelly, had dropped an earring under her chair. But Harding was the main attraction and he inspired that odd mixture of veneration, resentment and illusory intimacy that we now associate with celebrity, a phenomenon wrongly thought modern. ‘Right, I've seen Gilbert Harding now,' said one man loudly as he passed him in the street. ‘You can take him out and shoot him.'
³

Often he appeared drunk, for which occasions the BBC coined the phrase, ‘Mr Harding was overcome by the heat from the studio lights.' But he really was troubled by the hot arc lights, and would often remove his jacket on screen. In December 1952, he appeared in the middle of the Great Smog, the worst of London's pea soupers. Showing the panache for penitence that endeared him to viewers, he telephoned the Press Association later that evening stating that his behaviour was caused by ‘asthma aided by fog – I may have over-fortified myself against it … viewers were not wrong in thinking I was a bit tiddly'.
⁴
Well-wishers sent in cough mixtures and bronchial cures. But a few weeks later, with no London smog to exonerate him, he upset people again by being rude to the ventriloquist's dummy, Archie Andrews.

Many watched the programme hoping Harding would be rude. A friend told him he imagined
What's My Line?
as a bullfight, with Harding as the bull, the challengers as the picadors and the host Eamonn Andrews, awarding points against him, as the matador. While demurring, Harding conceded that he did detect ‘the elemental odours of the bull ring – and of the bear pit – in what is supposed to be a mild Sunday evening's amusement'.
⁵
Hilde Himmelweit, a social
psychologist and director of a four-year Nuffield Foundation research project on children and television, argued that TV offered ‘the appeal of infringed conventions' in a way that was safely enjoyable because it was vicarious and contained elements of roleplay and pretence. She found that children, perhaps unfamiliar with this wish-fulfilling aspect of the medium, were left uneasy and anxious by Harding. Joan, herself ‘a rather aggressive child', said, ‘He's just horrible. I don't like him. Everybody claps when he comes on, but I think he's absolutely disgusting. He's absolutely born to disgust me. I hate him.'
⁶

The rising levels of rudeness were a familiar postwar anxiety. Since the late 1940s, commentators had been noting the increasing incivility of the working classes, particularly ex-servicemen who seemed reluctant to return to pre-war standards of deference. The writer J. L. Hodson called it ‘a mild revolt against society'. As Ross McKibbin has argued of this period, the middle classes valued apolitical qualities such as niceness, humour and ‘not making a scene', which they used implicitly to contrast themselves with the bolshy working classes.
⁷
Although he had the look of a reactionary old colonel, it was clear which side Harding was on: he disliked genteel obfuscation and had a column in the
People
campaigning forcefully on behalf of victims of rapacious landlords, bad service or poor food.

‘My favourite TV star is Gilbert Harding,' wrote Mrs R. B. Dring from Spalding, Lincolnshire in a letter to
TV Mirror
. ‘Why? Because he is all the things I am not. I am a mouse. I eat badly cooked food in an hotel without a word of complaint … Oh! To demand good food for my good money! To tear off a strip to someone who annoys me. To say “shut up” to people whose idle chatter bores me. To refuse a cracked cup and to be grumpy when I feel grumpy.' Harding's rudeness spoke to a vague impatience that postwar life had not lived up to the wartime promise of a better, fairer society to come. The Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor, himself a combative performer soon to be nicknamed the ‘sulky Don' after an appearance on the TV discussion programme
In the News
, defended Harding in a
Daily Herald
column titled ‘Let's be rude!' ‘I have no sympathy with those amateur schoolmarms who sit over their television sets, waiting for something that
offends them,' he wrote. Harding was ‘a symbol of protest against the soft good-taste that surrounds us at every turn', and what people called rudeness was really ‘pulling down the curtains of pretence that keep out the noises of the world'.
⁸

But Harding's ill temper had another source closer to home: his discomfort with television as a medium. A Cambridge graduate with abortive careers as a teacher, barrister and
Times
journalist behind him, he was frustrated, among other things, by what he felt to be the waste of his talents in his new career as a ‘tele-phoney'. In his
People
column, he pronounced himself mortified at being pointed out on a Tube train while T. S. Eliot was ignored, no doubt happily so, in the same carriage. ‘Do you think that I planned and plotted, or lost a wink of sleep, scheming to spend a considerable part of my life trying to identify hog-slappers, cheese-winders' clerks, or theatre fireman's night companions?' he asked. He had better things to be doing, and so, he implied, did his viewers. This attitude was quite common. After becoming famous for appearing on
What's My Line?
, the actor Robert Morley fretted that it was ‘all too easy, the values are all wrong'. The writer and journalist Marghanita Laski also suffered guilt pangs when, after being on the panel, she was sent butter and apples through the post and offered nylons under the counter, all ‘for a parlour game I wouldn't even have played at home'.
⁹
Both relented, Laski returning to the screen as
Panorama
's book reviewer and Morley going on briefly to host
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
.

Harding's solution to the trivial inconsequence of
What's My Line?
was more eccentric: he over-invested it with seriousness and meaning. He disliked the way that women preened themselves before coming on the show, so they all looked alike and he could not tell the black pudding stringers from the knitting needle knobbers; and he resented the diploma that challengers were given to say they had beaten the panel, because he thought it encouraged oblique and evasive replies to his questions. The public fascination with
What's My Line?
bemused him and he hoped one day he ‘might be able to watch the programme, and try to find out for myself what it is that makes it so popular'.
¹⁰
He could not, of course, watch himself, because almost all television
at the time was broadcast live, a fact which perhaps displeased him as much as its phoniness. He reserved his greatest praise for those whose achievements had a more enduring memorial than the fast and fleeting fame of the new media age. His Christmas radio broadcast in 1953, in which he quoted Macaulay's description of the Puritans (‘Their palaces were houses not made with hands: their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away') moved many listeners to tears. He seemed uniquely unsuited to an evanescent medium which simply died on the evening air.

‘Why, at this stage of progress,' asked Harding in January 1954, ‘should we need to have these seemingly interminable intervals of 8–10 minutes, watching the tide coming in, or two palm trees waving to us from the beach?'
¹¹
These were the BBC interludes, a stock of ambient films put into service when there was an underrun or one of the still recurrent technical breakdowns. Their purpose was to rationalise and anonymise the stop-start interruptions that had bedevilled the viewing experience since the war. At first, announcers would bustle into camera position and announce an emergency musical interval accompanied by a caption reading ‘Please do not adjust your set'. Then there was a gramophone record of whichever announcer was on duty (‘We apologise for the fault …') with the needle always poised at the right point so it could be deployed as needed. The interludes, introduced in February 1952 with a film of vespers music at St Benedict's School, Ealing, automated this process still further. Apart from the Jamaican beach mentioned by Harding, and a few films of Scottish lochs and rivers, they were mostly versions of southern English pastoral. A team of horse-drawn ploughs gradually worked their way across a field in Tillingham, Essex. A windmill's sails slowly turned over some harvested wheat in Pakenham, Suffolk. A boat made a leisurely trip down the Thames near Maidenhead.

The interlude most notorious for its hypnoidal qualities was the
potter's wheel, in which a potter's hands worked away perpetually at a ball of clay that seemed at times to be tantalisingly metamorphosing into a bowl, or a high-sided pot, but was never, ever finished. The interludes were meant to be storyless and circular like this, because they could be pulled at any time and the viewers returned to the programme. Their accompaniment was the kind of light music, with its origins in seaside and palm court orchestras – short divertimenti, with swooshing harps, trilling flutes and cascading violins – that was the BBC's background noise well into the rock'n'roll era. As much as the potter's wheel itself, this music, by composers like Charles Williams, Haydn Wood and Leslie Bridgewater, evokes television's ambience in the Edwardian summer before ITV. ‘The BBC had things all its own way and in the early years of the fifties it reflected life in Britain accurately enough: well mannered, class-ridden, deferential and exceedingly dull,' writes the broadcaster John Humphrys in his autobiography, précising this established view. ‘Heaven help us, but we really did sit for what seemed like hours between programmes watching a pair of hands moulding a chunk of wet clay.'
¹²

Harding's writings as television critic for
Picture Post
offer some corroboration of this retrospective judgement on his own era. He especially disliked the raft of shows, spawned by the success of
What's My Line?
, in which dinner-jacketed men and evening-gowned women played parlour games with challengers, guessing which famous relatives they had or why they had been in the news. ‘Static, sedate, sedentary and verbose,' Harding judged them. ‘The people we are expected to sit and listen and look at would hardly be called attractive, even by their mothers.' At a public Brains Trust held in Liverpool, Harding heard several in the audience say they had either returned or sold their TV sets because there was nothing on them worth watching. One elderly lady, no longer able to walk, had banished her set from her room except for
What's My Line?
.
¹³

But Harding was torn about television. He could find it suffocatingly formal, as for instance while watching the imperious Douglas Craig presenting
Opera for Everybody
, when he felt as though he ought to raise his hand and ask to leave the room. But he could also
find it overly familiar, complaining of the ugly, cloying habit of using Christian names, which he thought ‘almost as bad as the “Good evenings” in
What's My Line?
'. At a time when many work colleagues still addressed each other as Mr and Mrs, this was a frequent complaint. A newspaper leader criticised ‘this quite unnecessary air of intimacy on the part of people who may have never set eyes on each other before'. Evelyn Waugh refused all requests for television interviews because of ‘the bandying about of Christian names and so forth, of the kind which deeply shocks me in some of the performances I have sometimes begun to hear'.
¹⁴
These people worried not about the boring interludes, but, as people have always done, about television propelling its viewers too quickly into an unfamiliar future.