Armchair Nation (19 page)

ITV's extended hours dealt a glancing blow for the apathetic majority who wanted the most draconian Sabbath restrictions to be lifted against the well-organised minority who did not. In 1953 a bill to permit more Sunday amusements had been defeated after strong
lobbying from the churches and the Lord's Day Observance Society. But the Postmaster General now ruled that television on Sundays could start from 2 p.m., although no children's programmes would be allowed until 4.30 p.m. to protect Sunday School, and 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. would remain blank to protect Evensong. The Sabbath honed out of the new ITV schedules was a continental one, a Sunday morning left clear for churchgoing and an afternoon made up of the sequinned costumes and shiny candelabras of Liberace, the singing cowboy Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger, and then, at 5.30 p.m., one of the biggest draws of the week,
The Adventures of Robin Hood
. Iona and Peter Opie found this new schedule swiftly integrated into children's lore. In October 1956, travelling to Alton, Hampshire on a school bus, they heard children sing a new song to the theme tune of
Robin Hood
: ‘Liberace, Liberace, riding through the glen, Liberace, Liberace, with his band of men …' By 1957, the singing cowboy had been added to a skipping song used by eleven-year-old girls in Swansea: ‘Hi, Roy Rogers! How about a date? Meet me at the corner at half past eight …'
³⁸

ITV also introduced tighter, better defined schedules. Many BBC shows only appeared fortnightly, and overruns were common since, with just one channel, viewers tended to watch whatever came along and there was no pressing need for punctuality. But this was changing slowly even before ITV: BBC audience research suggested weekly series had more impact, and the corporation began a ‘get tough' policy on sticking to time sheets. In December 1954, the comedian Max Wall was faded out when Saturday night's
Variety Parade
overran, to make way, to viewers' dismay, for a talk by the Welsh novelist Jack Jones. Two months later, 200 viewers complained when a Brazilian mime artist was cut off in mid-flow after
Café Continental
went over time.

Many of the ITV moguls and producers, like Lew Grade and Val Parnell, had a background in variety where the running order was sacrosanct. If acts went over time in variety theatres, they risked not being booked again, and so they would often time themselves with a cigarette; when it burned down to the stub, they knew they had to get
off. ITV went straight to the American pattern of weekly shows in the same slot each week, with meticulous timing because commercial breaks had to be met. Faced with its slick rival, the BBC began to use its interludes only in emergencies. ‘I think the policy of giving the public “time off” to make a cup of tea or other activities is over,' said one BBC executive just before the arrival of ITV. ‘I do not think we can afford to let go of our audience for a moment.'
³⁹

‘There is something spectral about the television public,' a
Times
leader put it a fortnight before ITV began. ‘It does not shuffle forward in sturdy queues or suddenly flood the street outside a theatre, but is glimpsed in desolate forests or delicate traceries of aerials and alarming, faceless statistics.'
⁴⁰
But the arrival of ITV made the nation's viewers an object of serious social-scientific study for the first time. The BBC had only started collecting viewing figures systematically in 1952. Women researchers, the ‘clipboard queens' who were such a feature of daily life in the 1950s, would interview about 2,500 people in the street each day about their previous night's viewing. But the BBC's head of audience research, Robert Silvey, was a highminded man, a Quaker, who hated the idea of publishing ‘top twenty' ratings lists and thought the BBC should be trying to attract non-viewers to the set rather than competing with ITV.

This suspicion of ratings charts was quite common: when the Top Twenty programme began on Radio Luxembourg in 1948, it was not a countdown of the bestselling records, but of the most popular sheet music. Bestseller lists for books, routine in the US since the 1890s, did not properly arrive in Britain until the
Sunday Times
began printing them, contentiously, in 1974. ITV, needing solid data for its advertisers, could not afford to be so squeamish. So it contracted TAM (Television Audience Measurement) which took a representative sample of several thousand homes and connected an electromechanical ‘Tammeter' to each TV set. By working out which
wavelength the television was tuned into, this could tell advertisers what programmes people were watching. As TAM's publicity put it, ‘Time Buying's like Trawling. The Chap Who Knows Fish, NETS 'EM.'
⁴¹

Every week a little booklet from TAM arrived on the desks of commercial television programme planners, with BBC and ITV ratings graphs printed side by side. They showed mass decampments from one channel to the other, a stark piece of propaganda for market populism.
Double Your Money
pulled in the millions, then the Hallé Orchestra or
Foreign Press Club
got rid of them. You could also track mass exoduses as viewers left part way through a programme. On 10 October 1955 the BBC put on a lavish production of
La Traviata
. TAM's figures revealed that viewers showed willing by tuning in to watch (perhaps because, initially, there was only the Hallé Orchestra on the other side), then started fidgeting a few minutes in until, by the end, almost the entire audience had evaporated. The most spectacular migrations were to be found during party political broadcasts. When the prime minister Anthony Eden appeared on the BBC, four out of five viewers turned over to ITV's
People Are Funny
. From March 1956, the BBC and ITV were required to air such broadcasts simultaneously.
⁴²

Many people, unfamiliar with or suspicious of scientific sampling, felt these ratings had a bizarre and misleading precision. The expanding industries of market research and data analysis attracted particular unease on the left, the critic Richard Hoggart attacking the desire to ‘elevate the counting of heads into a substitute for judgement'. This new cult of number crunching seemed to reduce people to mere statistical agglomerations, and to have little interest in what they really thought and felt. The Labour newspaper
Tribune
accused programme planners of relying on figures issuing from the ‘TAM Fairyland', of catching ‘Galluping consumption' and being ‘Chart drunk'.
⁴³

Whichever way the ratings were calculated, the new channel was popular. At first it was only available to those within range of its single transmitter, on Beulah Hill, Croydon. By October 1955,
though, 2 million people were listening to it on cable radio relayed by the Rediffusion Group, which was often available in council flats.
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
got the biggest radio audience, though much of it, from the Tiller Girls lifting their legs at the start, to the stars waving on the revolving stage at the end, was surely meant to be seen. Many knew about the programmes without having seen them. Comedians on BBC television and radio mimicked the transatlantic vowels of Hughie Green and the side-of-the-mouth speech of Sergeant Joe Friday in
Dragnet
(‘just the facts, ma'am'). Members of Burton-on-Trent Archery Club equipped their arrows with whistles because they made this noise in flight on
Robin Hood
. By the end of 1957, seventy-two per cent of viewers with access to ITV watched it more than they did the BBC.
⁴⁴

The concept of ‘primetime' emerged, partly because ITV could fulfil its public service obligations by putting its more serious shows outside those peak hours. ITV had plenty of highbrow material – fortnightly Hallé concerts, conversations with Edith Sitwell, Jacob Bronowski discussing science, A. J. P. Taylor delivering extempore history lectures – but this tended to be shown outside primetime. Even in graveyard slots, though, these shows were often very popular. Kenneth Clark's ATV series,
Art and Artists
and
Five Revolutionary Painters
, made a greater impact among ordinary viewers than his later, more lauded
Civilisation
. Despite his patrician manner, Clark had mastered the difficult art of looking through the camera to the viewer at home – learned by example, he said, when he saw Arthur Askey, on the opening night of Granada TV, go right up to the lens and shake his fist at it in mock anger. A friend of Clark's told him that in a Covent Garden pub ‘he found two of the market porters discussing Caravaggio; he thought he was suffering from an hallucination. The railway porters at Charing Cross used to sit up with their children long after bedtime to listen to talks on Michelangelo.'
⁴⁵

Britain, wrote the
Daily Mirror
, was suffering from ‘Telemania', a collective madness for which it listed a number of symptoms. When ITV broke down on Sunday 22 January 1956, delaying
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
for nearly an hour, thirty-one per cent of viewers had carried on watching the dead screen. The BBC bachelor announcer Peter Haigh, with his carefully trimmed moustache and beautifully modulated voice, had received over 10,000 letters from women that year and dozens of marriage proposals. ‘I adore all your loving, charming ways you have for me, Peter,' Edna from Derby wrote. ‘I absolutely idolise your wonderful personality … Life could be very lonely without you. Peter, please be mine for ever …' Numerous ailments were blamed on television, from thrombosis to asthenia (‘television legs'). In the
British Medical Journal
, a consultant noted several cases of ‘television angina' at London's St Mary's Hospital. Westerns, he discovered, were the most likely to produce heart pangs in viewers, though they had little effect on the Welsh, who were more likely to be affected by sad programmes. All viewers found commercials ‘entirely painless'.
⁴⁶

In a series of
Sunday Times
articles, the freelance anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer explored the effects of ‘televiewing', based on interviews with English people between school and retirement age in November 1957. On a typical Sunday evening, Gorer noted, two out of five of them were watching TV, so ‘with the possible exception of listening to broadcast news bulletins during the gravest periods of the war, it seems probable that never in recorded history have so many English people been so concentrated in a single occupation'. Gorer was particularly concerned that television was corroding the tradition of nonconformist self-discipline among the working class. Nearly half of working-class viewers were ‘addictive', watching for four hours a night, ‘all sense of proportion lost in their gross indulgence; their family life, if not wrecked … at least emptied of nearly all its richness and warmth'. Housewives were especially prone to addiction. The ATV medical soap opera
Emergency – Ward 10
created compulsive symptoms in its mostly female audience, with mothers and teenage daughters eagerly working together to clear away dinner
plates in time to watch it, and husbands corralled into washing up on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Gorer compared these findings with those he published in his book
Exploring English Character
in 1955. Then, a significant proportion of his interviewees saw inactivity as ‘sloth'; now they called it ‘relaxing' and considered it good for them. Rather conveniently ignoring the fact that television was widespread by 1955, Gorer concluded that ‘this quite profound change in the way English men and women view their own inactivity is very closely connected with the spread of television'. In private notes written after watching television for ten nights in October 1957, Gorer betrayed some of his preconceptions. Television, he felt, was ‘a key-hole, a hole in the wall, gratifying or scopophilic, voyeuristic, spying, what have you, desires … with all the feelings of superiority, gratified curiosity, brothel visiting'.
⁴⁷