Armchair Nation (28 page)

Adam soon found some painful corroboration for his portrait of the typical viewer as habit-loving and boredom-fleeing. When BBC2 started in April 1964, he announced that the new channel called on the viewer ‘occasionally to stretch himself a little further' and ‘to push back the horizon a little'. But when faced with the new schedules – highlights of the first week including
Materials for the Engineer
, an evening with the Russian comic Arkady Raikin (‘Mr Khrushchev's favourite funny man') and a youth theatre production of
Julius Caesar
from the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon – viewers seemed unwilling to have their horizons pushed back. By June, fewer than a fifth of those who had seen BBC2 intended to become regular viewers and nearly half thought its programmes worse than those on ITV and BBC1. Among BBC2 viewers there were twice as many men as women – probably, said the polling company, ‘due only to male intellectual curiosity'.
²⁶

While public arguments raged about cutting-edge drama or satirical shows, most people carried on watching programmes like
The
Man from UNCLE
or
Dr Finlay's Casebook
. Richard Hoggart's new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham announced itself as more interested in this broad mass of popular shows than the occasional piece of bad language on TV. In his inaugural professorial lecture, Hoggart worried about the tendency for charming compères and saccharine serials to make life seem easy, so that anyone finding it hard felt like an exile in front of the television set.
This is Your Life
, for instance, represented ‘hopes, uncertainties, aspirations, the search for identity in a moving society … the wish for community and the recognition – far down – of an inescapable loneliness'.
²⁷

According to Barry Miles, a member of the 1960s underground who, in April 1967, helped organise a happening called the ‘14-Hour Technicolor Dream' at the now deserted Alexandra Palace, ‘the sixties began in black and white and ended in colour'. Britain in the first half of the decade still clung to austerity greys and browns and much of the mediated world – newspapers and much photography and cinema – was in black and white. The Beatles were a monochrome band, all grey suits and half-shadowed photographs, before they burst into primary hues in the films
Help!
and
Yellow Submarine
and on Sergeant Pepper's gatefold cover. Richard Avedon's psychedelic, tone-reversed posters of the Beatles ornamented countless bedsit walls and started a trend for colour solarisation on albums and posters. Psychedelic culture's embracing of colour was a way of conveying synaesthesia, the sense that sounds could be seen as bursts of colour when under the influence of LSD.

The arrival of colour television at around the same time as this more general embracing of colour was no coincidence. As early as 1961, when colour TV was clearly on its way, the
Sunday Times
owner, Roy Thomson, argued that ‘newspapers must reply to colour with colour', and the following year his newspaper created the first
colour supplement.
²⁸
The same was true of film: no one, it was thought, would go to see a black-and-white film in the cinema with colour TV at home. Publishers started using more colour on book covers and the full-colour paperback was born, especially in a new generation of children's books like Brian Wildsmith's
ABC
(1962) and Maurice Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are
(1963). But the colour that entered the television set was of a more subtly reshaped reality than the day-glo colours and kaleidoscopic whirls of the counterculture. On 21 April 1967, about fifty BBC executives sat in front of huge colour sets in half a dozen houses watching
Late Night Line-Up
. ‘It was a revelation, a vision of the noumenon,' wrote Anthony Burgess, appearing on the programme with Jonathan Miller and Angus Wilson. They all kept getting up to look at the monitor screen to see each other in colour.
²⁹

On black-and-white television, certain hues had to be avoided to keep the picture stable, including checked or striped clothing and, oddly, black and white. (The ‘white' coats worn by the doctors in
Emergency – Ward 10
were yellow and the BBC's male announcers would wear beige shirts under their dinner jackets.) Now, in colour, the
Late Night Line-Up
presenter Joan Bakewell was encouraged to wear simple, not too bright colours; black and white showed up particularly well. ‘I shall be surprised if there is not a strong move to pastel shades in clothes for both men and women by 1969,' Kenneth Adam predicted confidently (and wrongly) about colour TV's effect on fashion.
³⁰
The engineers experimented tentatively with
Late Night Line-Up
over the next few nights, at one point bravely placing a bowl of fruit on a coffee table.

The arrival of colour television had been long delayed because of the failure to agree internationally which colour system to use. When Europe finally agreed on a standard, the 625-line BBC2 was the only British station with the technology to go colour immediately. David Attenborough, the BBC2 controller, wanted the kudos of making his channel the first colour one in Europe. It was believed that the Russians intended to introduce a colour service in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1967, and the
French were also thought to be planning a start at the end of the year in time for the Winter Olympics in Grenoble.
³¹
But Attenborough did not want to repeat the mistake of the American TV networks, which had started colour gradually and so treated the few hours of colour each week as a spectacular advertisement for it, making programmes of self-defeating complexity which most viewers, watching in monochrome, found disappointing.

Colour would thus arrive in two phases: a ‘colour launching period' of about four hours a week, which would whet the public's appetite and allow the retail trade to begin selling colour sets, and a full-scale, official unveiling of colour TV in December. Zero hour for the launching period was Saturday 1 July 1967, with a live transmission from Wimbledon: an obvious choice because it was easy to film with just three colour cameras. At 2 p.m., BBC2 switched from monochrome shots of Henley regatta and the colour camera panned in on the presenter Peter West, artfully flanked by flowerpots and a green umbrella. The Radio and Television Retailers' Association guessed that there were no more than 5,000 colour sets in Britain; the manufacturers' body put the number in the hundreds.
³²
The industry had been thrown by Attenborough's decision to steal a march on the Europeans and there weren't enough sets to sell to those who could afford them – who were not many, since they cost £300, a third of the price of a new Ford Zephyr. Colour viewing parties swelled the numbers slightly, and a few TV critics were allowed to watch in colour at BBC Television Centre, in the hope that they would reveal this miraculous vision to the unconverted. Even so, the first day of colour TV was probably viewed by about 10,000 people, 5,000 fewer than were watching in real colour on Centre Court.

America's NTSC system for colour television, known contemptuously to British engineers as ‘Never Twice the Same Colour', was a natural heir to the hyperrealistic, highly saturated hues of Technicolor film. As Jonathan Miller told a New York audience for whom he had arranged a private showing of his BBC monochrome production of
Alice in Wonderland
, their colour TV was ‘all gangrene and custard'. Attenborough insisted that Britain's colour TV would be more
‘natural' than monochrome, a more accurate representation of what the eye perceived. This was the continuation of an argument running all the way through western art between metaphysical and realistic notions of colour. In the former tradition, colour was a quality to be celebrated in itself, from the opulent religious art of the middle ages to the intense colour contrasts of the abstract expressionists. In the latter, painters like Leonardo and Rembrandt used restrained colours and chiaroscuro to bring the viewer closer to reality. Attenborough, in aesthetics as well as by profession, was a naturalist, convinced that the ‘honeymoon of delight' on first seeing bright colours on a television set would wear off and the real gain would be that it would add information, give a sense of perspective and be more restful on the eye.
³³

Those who saw the first match in colour, in which another of Britain's Wimbledon nearly men, Roger Taylor, beat the South African Cliff Drysdale, were impressed by its naturalism, with the flesh tints, the hardest thing to get right, nothing like the luminescent skin tones of MGM musicals. Colour imposed a new drama on the game, with the players' faces darkening theatrically as clouds crossed the sun. The keen tennis fan noted the varied colour of the Centre Court turf and could see where the grass was sappy and a player might slip, and where it was brown and the ball might bounce awry. One detail inspired much comment: the bottles of orange and lime barley water by the umpire's chair. A little like the LSD trippers in the summer of love happening elsewhere, the first colour TV watchers found themselves reintroduced to the world, from the greenness of grass to the orangeness of orange juice.

In the launching period, it was the trivial detail that mesmerised: the cherry-red shirt of the Virginian, the chestnut-brown eyes of Joan Bakewell, the swirling clothes of the flower-bedizened Haight-Ashbury hippies on
Whicker's World
. There were also a lot of dull trade test colour films repeated over and over again, including ‘Prospect for Plastics', an industrial film documentary about the influence of plastics on our lives, and ‘Overhaul', a guided tour of London Transport's Aldenham bus overhaul works, before the full colour
service began at last on Saturday 2 December 1967. The big draw of the first weekend's schedules, moved from BBC1 especially for the occasion, was
The Black and White Minstrel Show
.

A small number of dissenters preferred the austere contrasts of black and white to what they saw as the bogus glamour of colour. Ken Loach said he would rather have made his 1967 film
Poor Cow
in monochrome, and John Boorman, who was moving away from making television documentaries into filmmaking, considered himself lucky to have been ‘trafficking in a contiguous monochrome world … a familiar reality transposed into a parallel universe … Reality is what we live, film is metaphor.' Others worried that colour would disenchant the world. The BBC's head of light entertainment, Tom Sloan, pointed out that colour TV was much less kind to skin than monochrome, mercilessly revealing brewer's bloom, bloodshot eyes and stained teeth. The comedian Dick Emery had a complete set of plastic crowns made for his new BBC2 colour show.
³⁴

Most critics, however, welcomed colour for its re-education of their vision. An emetic yellow tanktop worn by a right-wing Rhodesian in an interview ‘commented on the poor taste that goes with moneyed racism as well as a yard of closely argued print would have done,' wrote Peter Black. Nicholas Garnham felt that BBC2's new colour series on the life of Christ beautifully conveyed the Biblical symbolism of water as a lifegiving force, through the glaring white of the Dead Sea's foreshore salt and the emerald green Jordan surrounded by parched ochre. William Hardcastle, watching the US open golf championship, suddenly saw the whole point of colour TV when the camera caught ‘the full plump face of Nicklaus, furiously contemplating a putt, between the brightly trousered legs of a caddy'.
³⁵

The BBC Natural History Unit's
The Major
, a tender study of a year in the life of a village green oak tree destined to be felled, had already been shot in colour in 1963, ready to become one of BBC2's most repeated shows after the arrival of colour TV. Relying only on the understated revelations afforded by high-fidelity colour, it delicately interweaved images of local life, from Morris dancing to cricket matches, with footage of the wood ants and blue jays that made the
oak their home. Ron Eastman's
The Private Life of a Kingfisher
, with its stunning underwater shot of a kingfisher on the River Test in Hampshire diving to catch a fish, was also repeated many times.

Earlier 405-line black and white was not high definition enough to show a fishing line clearly, so fishing programmes tended to involve a presenter waggling a bendy stick unproductively in the air; but BBC2's new
Anglers' Corner
, with Bernard Venables, conveyed beautifully in 625-line colour the choreography of rod and line against the changing light of a day on the water. Percy Thrower, meanwhile, had been presenting
Gardening Club
, a studio programme with glassless greenhouses and soil bussed in each week, in black and white since 1954. In colour a studio garden looked unconvincing, so BBC2's new
Gardeners' World
was filmed at Magnolias, Thrower's own garden in Shrewsbury. Colour TV thus inadvertently created a more intimate relationship between gardening presenters and viewers. Thirty or forty cars were often parked by Magnolias, as people came to look at the garden, armed with binoculars. When Thrower held charity open days, thousands came, parking coaches and cars in nearby fields.
³⁶
These tourist trips to see someone's fairly ordinary back garden would never have happened without colour TV. It introduced viewers to the parochial natural world they thought they already knew, from gardens to river banks, and made them see it afresh.