Armchair Nation (17 page)

Television, in this supposedly soporific era before the arrival of ITV, was probably not as dull as it is remembered. The BBC was, for instance, beginning to create fresh forms of television comedy suitable for both northerners and southerners, who had such different tastes in the pre-television era that variety producers ran separate shows for different ends of the country. ‘Before television,' the comedian Reg Varney recalled, ‘if you went up north and they suspected you were a cockney they did
not
want to know.' The comedian most successfully bridging this divide was Southampton's Benny Hill. In 1951, after being slow handclapped at the Sunderland Empire – which had a daunting reputation among southern comedians, because the audience, many of whom were from the shipyards, would throw washers at acts they didn't like – he came off stage and was sick in the dressing-room sink. A few weeks later, Hill had a triumphant debut on television. His habit of underplaying, which was swallowed up on the big stages, was ideal for the small screen. In 1953 he rented his first TV and watched it constantly at home in Kilburn, absorbing every detail.
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He began to fashion a definitively televisual comedy, doing impressions of Philip Harben and a famous take-off of
What's My
Line?
in which he impersonated all the panellists, including Harding, using rapid camera cutaways.

The
Charlie Chester Show
brought the American-style ‘giveaway' quiz to British television before ITV did, although the modest prizes – such as nylon tights, a razor blade or a packet of crisps – reflected a residual asceticism. Another well-loved programme was
Ask Pickles
, in which Wilfred Pickles and his wife Mabel made viewers' dreams come true by, for instance, allowing them to meet a tame kangaroo or play a Stradivarius.
Ask Pickles
viewers were clearly fascinated by television, for the most common request was to be able to see how a programme was made. George Aubertin of Compton Potters' Arts Guild, a William Morris-inspired artists' collective in Surrey, appeared on the show as the owner of the hands in the potter's wheel interlude. Aubertin explained anticlimactically that he wasn't making anything in particular, just doodling away as he had been asked to do.
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Children especially loved
Ask Pickles
, although according to the Nuffield television inquiry, these ‘comprised mainly duller children from secondary modern schools', and ‘being duller they were also the most gullible and the most cliché-ridden'. The universal favourite with all children, irrespective of their dullness, was
Fabian of the Yard
, based on the real-life exploits of Detective Inspector Robert Fabian, played by Bruce Seton, who would scream round the London streets in a Humber Hawk squad car solving grisly murders, a year before PC Dixon began plodding round Dock Green. Even Gilbert Harding praised the inventiveness of children's television. ‘I miss Mr Turnip so much,' he confessed to
Picture Post
readers after the bad-tempered string puppet from the Saturday afternoon show
Whirligig
was retired. ‘Some of the B.B.C.'s programmes for children are absolutely enchanting,' Lord Hailsham told parliament. ‘
Andy Pandy
, for instance, at four o'clock in the afternoon.' At Manchester University, its official historians note, women students could be found knitting while watching
Andy Pandy
in their union lounge.
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Just as they secretly liked watching Harding explode, viewers seemed to welcome a mild subversiveness elsewhere. The most
popular character in
The Grove Family
, an otherwise pedestrian soap opera about a north London builder and his family interspersed with
Archers
-style homilies about how to buy a television licence or secure your windows against burglars, was the cantankerous ninety-year-old northerner Grandma Grove, a grown-up child whose catch-phrases were ‘I'm faint from lack of nourishment' and ‘I want me tea'. The
Daily Mail
's Peter Black saw the actress who played her, Nancy Roberts, waiting on a bench at London Airport for a plane, ‘surrounded by curious and reverent fans'.
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On Thursday nights, a snatch of a Bach violin sonata and a box spinning on an electric Lazy Susan announced the start of
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
A panel of archaeologists, or sometimes art historians or anthropologists, tried to identify objects donated by a museum, with the chairman, Glyn Daniel of St John's College, Oxford, awarding points to either the panel or the museum. It had started in 1952 but only became a national craze, watched by over 5 million viewers, towards the end of 1953, when, according to
Picture Post
, the 89-year-old Egyptologist Dr Margaret Murray ‘brought the house down when she successfully identified a nineteenth-century mid-European wicker bed-bug trap'. Remembered now for its Reithian earnestness, the programme actually had a fine sense of showmanship. A young production assistant, David Attenborough, visited the museums and developed a knack for selecting objects with narrative potential: a moustache-lifter made by the Hairy Ainu of Japan, a horse's knucklebones used as Roman dice, a crocheted mid-Victorian fly settle. The rakish archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was the star. He would twiddle his moustache, pretend to be baffled and then identify the object with a flourish, often claiming he was there when it was dug up. ‘It is no good picking up something and saying “this is a Samoan cake mould” – viewers want to see how you arrived at your decision,' he said.
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Buried Treasure
, in which Wheeler and Daniel explored ancient sites like Pompeii and Orkney's Skara Brae, got even higher viewing figures than
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
with a similarly winning mix of didacticism and diversion. Its first episode, in June 1954, ‘The Peat
Bog Murder Mystery', about the discovery of the strangled Tollund Man by Danish peat cutters, ensured its immediate popularity. The programme began with Tollund Man's head revolving on a turntable to reveal a remarkably preserved, serene face. Back in the Lime Grove studios, the announcer Noëlle Middleton served Wheeler and Daniel a reconstruction, based on Tollund Man's stomach contents, of his last meal: a greyish, oily porridge made mainly of barley and linseed. After Wheeler concluded that Tollund Man ‘probably committed suicide to escape his wife's cooking', an offended Dane wrote in insisting his ancestors would never have tolerated such food. This was probably Wheeler playing to the gallery again because, according to the producer Paul Johnstone, ‘the actual taste, though unexciting, was quite reasonable … The mash that many farm-horses are fed on is not very different.'
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Librarians reported that shelves on which archaeology books had sat neglected for years were suddenly empty, and museums noted an upsurge of interest in their collections. ‘Especially for those of us who were in our fifth and sixth forms at the time, this was really the Golden Age of archaeology on television,' wrote the television producer Paul Jordan in 1981. ‘It is not too much to say that these programmes created the classes of '59, '60 and '61 that have gone on to include some of our leading academic archaeologists and excavators.' Glyn Daniel was less certain of the value of television, being ‘on the whole disappointed with its educative impact on the general public' and worried that it might have given an impetus to ‘bullshit archaeology', the ‘ley-hunters and the pyramidiots' who emerged with the 1960s counterculture and who found ‘the signs of the zodiac in the quiet hedgerows of the English countryside'.
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David Attenborough went on, at the end of 1954, to present
Zoo Quest
, a programme with a similarly shrewd eye for what would entertain viewers. The mission to capture animals in west Africa for London zoo provided a strong narrative line, while studio scenes showed the captured animal in the kind of close-ups they were unable to get on location with the film and lenses then available. To persuade people to keep watching, Attenborough gave the series an objective,
a rare animal to pursue:
picarthates gymnocephalus
, the bald-headed rock crow. He doubted this creature would be alluring enough, but when his cameraman Charles Lagus was driving him down Regent Street in an open-top sports car and a bus driver leaned out of his cab and asked him, in a neat piece of tmesis, if he was ever going to catch ‘that
Picafartees gymno-bloody-cephalus
', he knew it had lodged itself in the public mind. The most memorable episode of
Zoo Quest
came at the end of the third series, in 1956, when Attenborough managed to trap a Komodo dragon, an antediluvian ten-foot lizard that many viewers had thought was mythical. ‘We regard Attenborough as the finest type of young Englishman – unpretentious, humorous, resourceful and humane with his animals,' said a fitter and turner on the BBC's viewer panel. ‘A grand boy! How well he tells his story too.'
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Another quasi-educative programme popular with viewers was
Television Dancing Club
, which began each week with Victor Silvester's ballroom orchestra playing the signature tune, ‘You're dancing on my heart'. On this show, amateur dancers competed with each other, their efforts judged by postal vote, with about 8,000 viewers sending in postcards each week to Lime Grove, London W12. ‘Don't just pick the best lookers,' Silvester cautioned viewers, ‘– the prettiest girl and the best looking man, but give your vote to the couple that you think show the best style, footwork, rhythm and movement.'

Over the fixed smiles of the dancers came the voice of the announcer Patti Morgan: ‘Now, Doris's dress has gathered lace in the underskirt, and shot ribbon round the neck … Doris's father is a taxi-driver, and you would never guess that he spent the last week of his holidays helping her to sew on the sequins …' Since the late 1920s, Silvester had championed the modern English Style, with its strict tempo and firm policing of steps. This dance band culture was now under threat from an Americanised culture of star vocalists, dance crazes and hit records marketed through jukeboxes and radio disc jockeys. Still unsure about pop music, though, BBC television helped to prolong the era of the dance bands, giving airtime to band leaders like Geraldo, Ted Heath and Billy Cotton long after
the rise of rock'n'roll. ‘
TV Dancing Club
has helped to bring back grace, elegance, beauty and style to dancing in this country,' wrote Douglas Brent in May 1954. It was the answer to ‘a new horror that is seeping into the ballrooms of Britain, an ugly, dreary, lifeless way of dancing known as The Creep … Teenagers in exaggerated Edwardian clothes (The Teddie Boys and Girls) gyrate stiffly in monotonous procession.'
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Television Dancing Club
included a short dancing lesson with Silvester and his partner Peggy Spencer explaining how to do the Turning Cross, the Side Hover or the Lock Step. Ballroom dancing was still beating broadcasting as the second largest entertainment industry after the cinema, and every local palais had a learner night. So we can assume that at least some viewers were carefully following Silvester's and Spencer's feet, although the size and picture quality of their TV screens must have made it difficult. Betty Maxwell and her husband Robert, a publisher and businessman, peered at their tiny television and tried to learn the steps. ‘We would clear the furniture in the drawing room to one side and have such a lot of fun, trying to follow the instructions to the tunes of Silvester's orchestra,' Betty wrote later. ‘We would inevitably collapse in laughter, and after most sessions would end up making love on the carpet.'
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Rather than boredom, the emotion most likely to be generated by the television set at this time was fear. On 14 December 1954, the
Daily Express
headline read, ‘Wife dies as she watches.' Beryl Kathleen Mirfin, a forty-year-old mother of two, watching ‘the TV horror play' on Sunday at home in Herne Bay, with her husband and two friends, had collapsed and died of a heart attack. When the doctor arrived, he asked, ‘Was she watching the TV play?' The story was not quite as alarmist as the headline. Mrs Mirfin had died only about half an hour in, and the shocking scenes of Peter Cushing as Winston Smith lying in a makeshift coffin while receiving electric
shocks did not come until the final half hour. ‘My wife enjoyed TV,' said her estate agent husband. ‘I don't think the play itself caused her collapse. She was mending a glove during the play and talking of making a trip to London today. She was not a nervous type of woman.'
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