Armchair Nation (2 page)

In memories of television, nostalgia often mixes with condescension. It is customary to belittle the experience of watching early TV, in a way that perhaps I have also been guilty of in my own recollections, above. The set took ten minutes to warm up. The screen was as small as a postcard. And when it wasn't switched on, the TV was hidden away guiltily behind a double door like a triptych, or modestly covered with an antimacassar. It was a time, according to the journalist A. A. Gill, summarising this orthodoxy, ‘when the whole world was in 405 lines, took two minutes to warm up and vanished into a white dot at 11 p.m. after a vicar had told you off'.
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We like to think of early television watchers as naïfs, responding with wide-eyed amazement to what seem to us absurd or antediluvian programmes, from dull monochrome panel shows to the Saturday afternoon wrestling. Thus we unconsciously patronise the viewers of the past, as if we were colonialists wondering at the strange habits of a remote tribe.

This mixture of nostalgia and condescension fails to convey how rich and deep the history of British television is, much of it now surviving only as listings. Even in its early years, when broadcasts took up just a few hours a day, the relentlessness of daily television, combined with the fact that it was mostly live and unrecorded, meant there was far too much of it to enter the sorting house for shared memories. Leafing through old copies of the
Radio Times
and
TV Times
is a melancholy activity, an entry into a lost world of spent effort, used-up enjoyment and forgotten boredom. Most television, to which talented, energetic people devoted months or years of their lives, has left momentary imprints on our retinas and slightly less momentary imprints on our brains before vanishing into the uncaring ether.

Any history of watching television inevitably becomes a meditation on the nature of collective memory, for a programme that millions once watched but which has now faded into the atmosphere like a dream is a neat encapsulation of the elusive quality of memory itself. The most banal TV from the past can be extraordinarily evocative. Numerous
websites exhaustively dedicate themselves to collating and curating the old connective tissue of television, from continuity announcements to channel idents; there is even a group of devotees that meets every Easter in Leominster to share their enthusiasm for the design aesthetic and incidental music of the television test cards. But most television remains forgotten, and those bits that are remembered are often surrounded by wishful thinking and selective amnesia. What is remembered and forgotten is as revealing as the ‘real' history of watching television, which is ultimately too vast and unrecorded to be told.

Here, for instance, is one piece of both collective and selective memory. On Saturday 13 November 1965 at 11.19 p.m., on the late night satire show
BBC-3
, the host, Robert Robinson, asked the critic and literary manager of the National Theatre, Kenneth Tynan, if he would stage a play in which there was sexual intercourse. ‘Oh, I think so certainly,' replied Tynan, before adding as a seemingly casual afterthought, ‘I mean I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word “fuck” is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.' This, at least, is the gist of what Tynan said; it was live TV and no one was writing it down. Tynan's stammer,
Private Eye
said cruelly, had created the first thirteen-syllable four-letter word in history.
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The studio audience briefly inhaled its collective breath and the discussion carried on regardless.

The moment was too late for the Sunday newspapers but Monday's were filled with righteous anger. William Barkley of the
Daily Express
called it ‘the bloodiest outrage I have ever known' and accused Robinson of wearing a ‘lecherous leer' after the word was uttered. Barkley, who had stayed up with his family to watch
BBC-3
, said it was the first time he had ever heard the word used by ‘an adult male in the presence of women'. His wife switched off the television straightaway and said to their 28-year-old daughter, ‘It's time you went to bed.' Mary Whitehouse, of the newly formed National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, said Tynan should have his bottom smacked. ‘The BBC should restrict its time to those communicators who are acting from
noble
motives, if the word still has meaning amid the indifference and irresponsibility thrust down our unwilling throats,' wrote eight
students from the University of Essex Union. ‘If it is incapable of fulfilling this task, the service should cease to demoralise the nation by closing down.'
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Anonymous letters to Tynan were more sinister: ‘You will soon have the sack and my friends and I will be waiting for you to give you the best licking that you have ever had for your behaviour. So be careful and don't walk alone. We are waiting for you … you disgraceful blighter.'
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Read like this, from the perspective of our apparently liberal and enlightened present, the story runs along familiar lines, gently amusing us that something which today would barely turn a hair once caused such consternation.

But the story is more complicated than it at first appears. Although Tynan is routinely cited as the first person to use the F-word on British television, it had actually been used at least twice before. In June 1956 the playwright Brendan Behan employed it liberally on
Panorama
during an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge. No viewers protested, perhaps because Behan's diction was severely impaired by drink, although hundreds rang to complain that they could not understand his Dublin accent. A few years later, just after Ulster Television had begun in 1959, the man with the Sisyphean task of painting the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast appeared live on its teatime magazine programme
Roundabout
. The interviewer, Ivor Mills, asked if it was ever boring painting the same railings all year round. ‘Of course it's fucking boring,' the man replied.
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The channel's managing director, Brum Henderson, waited anxiously for the inescapable tsunami of complaint to arrive at the studios. In the event, not a single viewer, even in this deeply religious region in which play swings were padlocked on Sundays, rang or wrote in. It is a reminder to historians to display humility in making judgements about the past, for there are things about even our most immediate ancestors that we will never know or understand. Were the viewers of
Roundabout
simply not paying attention or half-asleep, or did they think the word was such an unlikely thing to hear on a teatime broadcast they assumed they were hallucinating? Is it even possible that,
without the collective prompting of other offended people, they were not offended at all?

We do know this: many viewers admired Kenneth Tynan for what one called his ‘four-letter courage'. A Manchester student, Bronwen Lee, wrote to offer ‘moral support in your splendid action against the self-righteous philistines'. A Harlow Labour councillor, Avril Fox, was moved to arrange a meeting of anti-Mary Whitehouse viewers in the Cosmo pub, Bloomsbury. The Cosmo Group against censorship, announced a few days later on the
Guardian
women's page, soon had a membership of 500, including clergymen, housewives, a general and ‘one or two Wing Commanders' – the RAF, according to Fox, being especially anti-Whitehouse. Letters of support poured in from ‘villages and places like Guernsey, with one anguished cry from Neath'. In the country, Fox argued, television played a greater part in people's lives and they were fiercely opposed to censorship.
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Tynan probably meant to create a reaction. He claimed he had only used an old English word as it came up in the conversation, and to have edited himself would have been patronising to the viewer. Since he wasn't really answering the question, this seems disingenuous. Robert Robinson thought he had ‘grabbed at notoriety like a child', and the author Kingsley Amis felt he was ‘just showing off'.
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The BBC issued a qualified apology, pointing out that the word had been used on live TV in a serious discussion, and the controversy died a quick and natural death with no one losing their job over it.

A year before Tynan's use of the F-word, John Krish had made an affecting film documentary,
I Think They Call Him John
, which followed a widowed ex-miner living alone in a new London high-rise flat. The film shows him silently pottering round one Sunday, feeding his budgie, cooking two sausages and a potato for lunch, staring out of the window. Then, towards the end, as dusk descends on the flats, John switches on the television and his face is mirrored in the screen as he
sits down on a hard-backed chair and waits for the sound, which comes on in the middle of an ad break: ‘For whiteness that
shows
, she can depend on
Persil
.' After the break comes Beat the Clock, the section of
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
in which couples could win washing machines and fridges for playing silly games like bursting balloons with needles attached to their noses. John unwraps a boiled sweet and pops it in his mouth. ‘I
knew
you were an Ada!' cries the instantly familiar voice of Bruce Forsyth, through audience laughter. ‘As soon as you walked on there, I said, that's an Ada … Oh we do have fun! You have sixty seconds to do this little bit of nonsense, starting from … hold on, hold on, Ada, if you're going to make a farce of the whole thing …' John takes out an ironing board and glumly irons a shirt for no one in particular while the programme carries on, his one-sided encounter with Bruce Forsyth being his only human interaction that day.

Despite its veneer of fly-on-the-wall authenticity, the film was actually a set-up: a public service documentary made on behalf of the Samaritans, with Krish calling out careful instructions to his subject. And yet it still seems to me to convey something important and often unspoken about watching television. The elderly widower in Krish's film had the most minimal relationship possible with Bruce Forsyth; he happened to be in the same room when Forsyth was on the television, which happened to be switched on. The TV audience is a momentary collective like this, an insubstantial gathering across millions of living rooms which anyone can join by making the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set.

But collective memories of watching TV tend to home in instead on those moments, such as Tynan's use of the F-word, when viewers took offence or were otherwise angered, excited or rapt by television. Indeed, the only continuous record of viewers' responses deals precisely with these reactions. The BBC was the first television company to begin logging viewers' calls in a ‘duty log', not always enthusiastically. ‘We must deal with telephone enquiries,' said the BBC's Chief Television Liaison Officer in the early 1950s. ‘For goodness sake, why must they ring? Why can't they let us get on with our job of putting programmes on the air?'
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When the Television Duty Office moved to the fourth floor of the new Television Centre in White City in the 1960s, the operation became more professional and less obviously irritated by its callers. While two TV sets, one tuned to BBC1 and the other to BBC2, chattered away continually in one corner, the small group of shift-working duty officers scrawled down summative points from calls, before transferring them to two typewriters, one for each channel. In the 1980s the duty log became a cut-and-paste, word processed document, until it was outsourced, at the end of the millennium, to a private company working from a Belfast call centre. All commercial TV stations are also now required by law to keep duty logs.

Duty logs provide a complete record of what was shown on television, including any late runnings and last minute changes, so the police and lawyers regularly use them to check the alibis of suspects who say they were at home watching TV when a crime took place. Alongside the large number of calls from people who clearly phone just to talk to someone (nicknamed ‘lonely hearts' by the duty officers) they supply a random stream of consciousness about television, although certain things – cruelty to animals, criticism of the royal family or the union flag being flown upside down – will reliably create a reaction. Most calls are simple requests for information about the name of an actor or incidental music, but there are also compliments and, of course, complaints: some sane and reasonable, others idiosyncratic and contrarian and communicated in that tone of suffocating earnestness, pained self-importance and pointless anger that will be familiar to anyone who reads internet message boards.

Just as it would be unwise of future historians to read the anonymous comments on websites as expressions of the collective mentality of our era, it would be equally unwise of us to pore over the duty logs in search of typical viewers. Most of us are not moved to ring up a stranger to let them know what we think about what we are watching. After a few false starts, the English language settled on the word ‘watch' to describe what people do in front of televisions. But ‘watch', which shares its origins with ‘wake' and conveys associations of keenly looking and keeping guard, is not always the right word to
denote our relationship to the TV set. Much viewing is absent-minded or indifferent, and even the intense feelings that the TV generates are usually fleeting and soon forgotten. Television's greater significance in our lives surely stems from its slowly accrued habits and rituals, the way it mingles with our other daily routines and comes to seem as natural as sleeping and waking.