Armchair Nation (26 page)

Somehow the precariousness of the satellite connection, the faint, wobbly image of a head appearing out of nowhere being interrupted by capering wavy lines, added to the sense of enchantment. For those with a living-room aerial, adjusting it was a long, nightly ritual, and viewers were well used to twiddling the vertical hold button on their sets just as the Goonhilly engineer had done to tune in Fred Kappel. Reception was still a hit or miss affair. Everything from faulty electric blankets to hairdryers caused interference. A feature of the urban landscape at this time was the construction cranes assembling high-rise buildings, which produced ghost images on TV sets. Prince Philip, attending the congress of the International Union of Architects in London, complained to representatives of a building firm that their new eighteen-storey building in Victoria Street was interfering with his viewing of the Test Match.
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Metal gasometers also stopped the TV signal getting through, although less so in the evenings, when their iron tanks sank back down as they released gas to homes.

Even televisions close to a transmitter were prone to getting pictures in negative form, known to engineers as the ‘Penge Pub Effect' because it was first identified in a public house near the new Crystal Palace mast soon after it opened in 1956. Now that most of the country had television, poor reception had replaced no reception as a common grievance. Early one Sunday morning in April 1961, Reginald Bevins, Postmaster General and MP for Toxteth, was asleep in his house in Queens Drive, Liverpool when he was awakened by a loud banging on the front door. His teenage son, sent to answer it, was confronted by a hundred television viewers from Peterborough who had driven 200 miles in a nine-van convoy to protest to him about the poor reception they were getting for ITV. They had brought a petition with nearly 20,000 signatures.
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Telstar had its own power system and onboard computer to retransmit the signal it received. This little space postman, not much bigger than a beach ball, seemed almost human and rather vulnerable, a tiny dot in the emptiness of space. At the Earls Court Radio
Show, a working model of Telstar revolved above a miniature Lizard peninsula bathed ‘in a wondrous green twilight like something out of a Chesterton story, as if the Flying Inn were just on the other side of Goonhilly,' as one visitor put it. The Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, wrote a playful concrete poem, ‘Unscrambling the waves at Goonhilly', in the form of a Telstar transmission which relays the names of real and imaginary aquatic creatures – dogfish, sardine, sardock, telfish – before identifying the magical, similarly seven-lettered name of the satellite itself.
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Two weeks after the launch of Telstar, more than half the population of Britain watched a live link-up between Europe and America which began with a short segment of a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, and ended with Eamonn Andrews balancing upon the rocks of the Lizard and a London bus passing over a floodlit bridge on the shimmering Thames.

On the night of 10 July, the record producer Joe Meek had been watching television alone in his flat-cum-recording studio above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road, London. Now a twenty-four-hour off licence next door to the Titanic Café, it has a small round plaque nailed to its first floor wall, next to a satellite dish, which says: ‘The Telstar Man Lived, Worked and Died Here.' Meek had long been fascinated by the capacity of radio waves to send magic rays invisibly through space. In 1948, at the age of nineteen, he had completed his national service as a mechanic at radar installations in the West Country, putting in long, lonely shifts in one-room buildings perched on isolated hills, directing his gaze and imagination skywards. When still in his teens he had built a nine-inch television set, the first in his home town of Newent on the edge of the Forest of Dean, although, since there was still no nearby TV mast, all it gave out was white noise.

In 1950 he went to work at an electrical shop in Newent, repairing
TV sets, a steady job in those days when sets were unreliable. He built another TV for his parents, ready for the first transmissions from Wenvoe in 1952. ‘It was a little 12″ screen,' his brother Eric remembered. ‘And it used to come on about half past seven at night, and we'd all get in there in the dark, draw all the curtains, switch it on and sit there till the Epilogue at about 12 o'clock. And when we put the lights on, the house was full – chock-a-block, full of people! They just used to sneak through the door and nobody said a word.'
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Meek came to London and serviced TVs in a radio shop on Edgware Road, before moving into record producing. He became increasingly unstable, dabbling in the occult and conducting séances to contact the spirit of Buddy Holly. Something of a late Victorian, he had made an imaginative association between the ability of humans to commune with each other through electrical wires and radio waves and the slightly older practice of telepathy.

Past midnight on 10 July, Meek sat on his sofa, enthralled by the television picture of Fred Kappel at his desk. After reluctantly going to bed, he lay there imagining Telstar orbiting several thousand miles above the earth. A tune gradually came into his head – something evocative of the speed of this little satellite and the vast distances it was covering – and he ran straight to his studio to hum it on to a tape.
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Later that week, he recorded his instrumental, ‘Telstar', with the Tornados. The deathless tune, played on a clavioline, conveyed the sense of a countdown, blast-off and ascent into the skies, followed by a plateauing guitar break evoking orbit. Meek passed the tape through compressors and echo chambers to make the sound echoey and uncanny. By the beginning of October the single had reached number one, where it stayed for four weeks. Its rinky-dink catchiness and ethereal strangeness seemed a fitting soundtrack for this new age of television. A rumour spread that the background noises on the track came from recording Telstar's launch and its aural signal in space. In fact, the rocket launch sound at the start was Meek's toilet flushing played in reverse, and the sound evoking radio waves was a pencil scraping against an ashtray.

In her Christmas TV broadcast, the Queen used Telstar as a
metaphor for a world changing almost too rapidly. ‘This tiny satellite has become the invisible focus of a million eyes,' she said, striking an oddly melancholic note. ‘Yet some people are uncertain which star to follow, or if any star is worth following at all. What is it all for, they ask, if you can bounce … a television picture through the skies and across the world, yet still find lonely people living in the same street? The wise men of old followed a star: modern man has built one.'

Marshall McLuhan, the modish cultural theorist on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s, argued that, with the arrival of electronic media, we were seeing a revival of tribal humanity, a return to the archaic world of orality in contrast to the privatised, abstracted world of print, which he called, in the title of a book published in the year of Telstar,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
. A Catholic convert, he wrote quasi-religiously of the new global media creating ‘a general cosmic consciousness' and a ‘unified sensorium'.
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McLuhan often appeared on television, his intellectual style – synoptic, scatty, epigrammatic – being well suited to it. He seemed the perfect prophet for the space age, which briefly revived that earlier delight in television's ability to annihilate physical distance and watch remote events in real time.

But the space-age glamour of satellite television was fleeting. Telstar's successors did not career round the earth in a low oval orbit, from where their beeping progress could be eagerly tracked. They were parked in a geostationary orbital garage called the Clarke Belt, named after the sci-fi writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke. In an article in
Wireless World
in 1945, Clarke had first located this region, 23,300 miles above the equator, where satellites could circle the spinning earth in exactly twenty-four hours and so remain stationary above it. Here, unlike Telstar, the satellites would be mostly forgotten. As President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed Europe live at 7 p.m. on 7 May 1965 via Early Bird, the first satellite to be placed in such an orbit, Michael Miles carried on regardless on ITV's
Take Your Pick
as he had done for a decade, offering contestants money for the key to a box which might contain a star prize or some bread and dripping (‘I'll give you four pounds for that, five, six, seven – look, there might be a boiled egg in that box …') while the studio audience shouted
advice (‘Open the box!', ‘Take the money!'). On
Tonight
on BBC1, they showed a brief clip of LBJ before moving on to a film about the Land of the Midnight Sun. Another Tornados' single, ‘Early Bird', also written and produced by Joe Meek, failed to trouble the pop charts.

A special Early Bird simulcast from New York was another damp squib. ‘The nearest approach to live visual novelty that I saw was the corpse of an elderly baseball fan being carried out of the vast Astrodome at Houston,' wrote one TV critic. The same was true of
Our World
, a mammoth satellite link-up in June 1967 in which nineteen different nations presented segments, remembered now only for the Beatles singing ‘All You Need is Love'. ‘As we switched from pictures of cars streaming back into Paris on a summer evening to the enthralling spectacle of an iron and steel works in Linz,' wrote Michael Billington in
The Times
, ‘I was reminded of the melancholy truism that modern man has at his disposal fantastic power of communication and very little to say.'
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Even when Telstar launched, sceptical voices pointed out that American television was already here, and that seeing it instantly might not advance the cause of civilisation. Richard Dimbleby, hosting the Telstar broadcast, wryly observed that satellite TV would mean ‘instant
Laramie
'. And Telstar began its life in space just as, back on earth, the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting was criticising the ‘vapid and puerile' programmes on American-style commercial TV. It identified triviality as ‘a natural vice of television' and (quoting the Christian socialist historian R. H. Tawney) as ‘more dangerous to the soul than wickedness'. The committee examined the offerings of the six TV stations in New York on a winter evening, and found, to its chagrin, a choice of six westerns between 7.30 p.m. and 9 p.m.
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The committee's most influential member was a 43-year-old English lecturer at the University of Leicester. Richard Hoggart had
been appointed to the committee on the strength of his widely read
The Uses of Literacy
(1957), about the impact of mass media on the vernacular culture of the working class. This book ignored the now dominant mass medium of the time, apart from some brief generalised references to the dangers of reducing people to ‘a condition of obediently receptive passivity, their eyes glued to television sets'. The simple reason for the omission was that the Hoggarts had no television, only buying one in late 1957. Soon after, Hoggart became a public figure and his son Simon remembered ‘the neighbours cramming into our living room to see him appear on some earnest early Sunday evening inquiry into education'.
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On his appointment to the Pilkington Committee in 1960, Hoggart's wife, Mary, unguardedly told the
Sunday Times
that he liked
Hancock
and documentaries when he had ‘nothing better to do', but that ‘a whole fortnight might go by without him turning on the set'. But Hoggart was coming to believe that television had an unrivalled ability to guide popular attitudes. ‘Spend a week regularly watching television on either or both channels,' he wrote in a 1960 essay, a kind of addendum to his book entitled ‘The Uses of Television', ‘and you almost feel the cakes of custom being cracked open.' Hoggart began to watch more television and, standing in as the
Observer
TV critic in the summer of 1962, was generous in his praise of
Steptoe and Son
and Benny Hill, ‘a fugal comedian in both the musical and the psychiatric senses'.
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