Armchair Nation (32 page)

BBC1 and ITV agreed on a single date for the launching of a full colour service: Saturday 15 November 1969. That month, travellers at London Euston were treated to a ‘Colour Comes to Town' exhibition which had been touring the country since starting at Croydon two years earlier – in order to show off colour TV and dispel some
of the myths about it, including the nasty rumour that its radiation made men sterile. Programmes premiering in colour that weekend included
Dixon of Dock Green, The Harry Secombe Show
and
Match of the Day
– and Sunday's Royal Variety performance, which showed comedian Ronnie Corbett nursing a black eye, more visible in colour, after walking into a door. The hundreds of viewers who rang the BBC and ITV to complain that their sets were still showing black-and-white pictures were gently informed that they needed to buy colour TVs.
⁷³

One of the highlights of that first colour weekend was the opening episode of a five minute stop-frame animation series conceived especially for colour, and inspired by its co-creator Oliver Postgate's viewing of the moon expeditions. It told of a race of pink, mousey creatures with long noses, Clangers, who lived on a moon-like planet and spoke in an echoey, whistling, nonsense language. Clangers were so named because they hid under clanging metal lids to avoid the junk left floating around their orbit by the earth's space programmes, and the first episode included a shot of a lonely earth from space that must surely have been inspired by the Apollo 8 broadcasts. Meant for children but broadcast late on Sunday afternoons just before the news, it soon acquired a loyal adult following. Postgate picked up a hitchhiking university student who recognised him solely from his euphonious voice, and another group of students wrote asking for his recipe for the Clangers' signature dish, blue string pudding. The
New Scientist
praised the programme's ‘gentle chaffing' of ‘the whole sober apparatus of science that spends countless millions to enable selected Americans to murmur monumental platitudes over the vasty reaches of space'.
⁷⁴

The second moon landing on 23 November, the first in colour, was an anticlimax. The coloured moon in orbit turned out to be a light shade of concrete. ‘If I wanted to look at something I thought was the same colour I'd go and look at my driveway,' the Apollo 12 astronaut, Pete Conrad, told viewers, deflatingly. On the moon itself the colour camera broke, and the moonwalk reverted to monochrome. ‘As marathon television, moon-landings have already lost their edge,'
concluded the jazz musician and critic George Melly. ‘This seems odd, even somehow disgraceful, but I think it's true for most people. A troupe of acrobats, accompanied by a drum roll, finish their act by doing their most difficult feat but, unless they fail, they only do it once. This mission, dramatically, was identical with the first.'

In July 1969, BBC1 had begun showing a new series,
Star Trek
, with an unfortunately timed second episode: in ‘The Naked Time', screened the day before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the Starship Enterprise tried to evacuate a team of scientists from a planet which was about to break up, only to find they had all mysteriously died. Compared to
Star Trek
, the moon missions were untelevisual, and sci-fi's scientific accuracy about outer space made them more a corroboration than a revelation. Between blast-off and splash-down there was not much to see apart from the short daily updates from the astronauts, and not much to listen to except the flat intercom sounds of mission control. Melly reflected on this from the perspective of his peer group, perhaps the last generation, he speculated, to be excited about the technology of television. It was hard, he decided, ‘to flog one's sense of wonder hour after hour', especially when the moon's surface looked like ‘a hard-sell commercial for Maltesers'.
⁷⁵
If you had seen one moon landing, you had seen them all.

Marshall McLuhan's argument that the electronic age would recreate an archaic world of communal orality fell down when it came to television, an inescapably visual medium. He skirted round this problem by arguing that TV was still essentially an oral phenomenon because it offered such a poor quality image – which may have been true of the flickering images posted by Telstar, and the shadowy messages sent from the moon, but wasn't true of Cilla Black in 625-line colour. ‘We see colour with the cone of our eye, black-and-white with the edges,' said McLuhan. ‘Colour is more in demand in a primitive society. So are spiced dishes. I predict a return of hot sauces to American cuisine.' But most viewers, at least in Britain, welcomed colour television not for its spicing up of reality but for its revelation of the ordinary. ‘Instead of making you feel that it is a modern marvel, one feels it is just what we deserve,' wrote the TV critic Stanley Reynolds
of this new invention, which he saw as a natural progression rather than a paradigm shift.
⁷⁶

For its first festive season in full colour, BBC1 adopted a new, light blue globe ident including the words ‘BBC1 colour', a gentle hint to the ninety-nine per cent of viewers watching in black and white to buy a colour set. And the end of the year saw a new ritual: the Christmas double issue of the
Radio Times
and the
TV Times
, with their separate covers clearly illustrating the cultural differences between the BBC and ITV and their idea of their viewers: the former, a tasteful montage of ribbons, wintry scenes and wassailers, and the latter, Des O'Connor in a Santa hat. Flicking through these bumper issues, you could see the Christmas schedules padded out with Morecambe and Wise,
Aladdin
with Bernie Winters,
Singin' in the Rain
and
The Engelbert Humperdinck Show
.

Television had gone all the way to the moon and discovered its viewers preferred instant
Laramie
. ‘Back in the roomful of furniture and family, we sit watching Petula Clark singing “Holy Night”,' wrote the playwright Peter Nichols, spending Christmas Day crammed into the tiny living room of his in-laws' semi-detached house in Bristol with extended family. ‘Val Doonican crooning a lullaby to Wendy Craig, the Young Generation dancing the life of Jesus. The children are shouted at every time they block an adult's view. They want to play with the toys they've been given, not grasping that the important part, the giving, is over for another year and they should sit like grateful mutes and let us watch our favourite stars.'
⁷⁷

Millions might watch television, but on the other hand, last night's television was even deader than yesterday's newspaper because you couldn't even wrap fish and chips in it
.

John Osborne
¹

Late one Sunday night in October 1969, a bearded castaway clambered out of the sea, collapsed on to a deserted beach and, to the strains of Sousa's Liberty Bell march and a surreal cartoon flattened abruptly by a giant foot borrowed from Bronzino's painting,
Venus and Cupid
, introduced a new comedy series on BBC1. The first show included a sketch about a joke so funny it caused people to die laughing. If the scattergun, bemused laughter of the studio audience was any indication, there was no danger of this happening in Britain's living rooms. But for those who found it fresh and funny,
Monty Python's Flying Circus
offered an exhilarating sense of discovery. ‘The most gratifying feature of the show's success,' Michael Palin (the bearded castaway) confided to his diary, ‘is the way in which it has created a new viewing habit, the Sunday night late-show. A lot of people have said how they rush home to see it – in Bart's Hospital the large television room is packed – almost as if they are members of a club.'
²

The BBC's seemingly lukewarm support for the series encouraged
this
esprit de corps
. Placed in the slot usually occupied by religious programmes, it was taken off for two weeks after the first episode and then its time-slot kept being shifted. The second series, starting in September 1970, went out at 10.10 p.m. on Mondays, when the regions could opt out and show local programmes, so only London and northern England saw it, at least until the repeats.
Monty Python
was made by six young men who had obviously been watching television since the early 1950s, and was aimed at a televisually literate audience familiar with its genres and conventions. At least one of the Pythons must have seen the Old Man of Hoy broadcasts, for their sketch about climbing the north face of the Uxbridge Road was clearly based on Chris Brasher's excitable commentary in 1967, and in another episode Eric Idle announced that ‘Lulu will be tackling the Old Man of Hoy'.

As it was nudged round the schedules, the Pythons played on the confusion by delaying the opening credits or adding a hanging joke after the end credits. They subverted the whole continuity grammar of television, from BBC1's rotating globe to awkward transitional phrases like ‘And now for something completely different', coined by
Blue Peter
's founding presenter, Christopher Trace. The Pythons saw that, because television feared silence and awkwardness, it ended up normalising the abnormal: an anchorman could spout nonsense as long as he carried on talking with po-faced reasonableness. With its strange segues,
Monty Python
mimicked the tendency for TV shows to meld together with the confabulated fluency of a dream. George Harrison, going through the Beatles' painful break-up, thought it ‘the only “real” thing on the BBC'. ‘I remember watching the very first Monty Python show that ever came on, on BBC2 [
sic
],' he told
Melody Maker
. ‘Derek Taylor [the Beatles press officer] and I were so thrilled by seeing this wacky show that we sent them a telegram saying “Love the show, keep doing it.” … I couldn't understand how normal television could continue after that.'
³

But normal television did continue. Nearly 24 million viewers watched the Miss World contest, held in the Albert Hall in November 1970. The compère, Bob Hope, was introducing the event when twenty-five women burst on to the stage mooing like cows, blasting
whistles and squirting water pistols filled with ink. Thus were ITV viewers introduced to a new movement, Women's Liberation, of which most of them had never heard.

Women's Lib followed the pattern of much post-1968 radical protest: it aimed to disrupt public spectacles and jolt the audience out of their roles as docile consumers. The Miss World contest, watched by half the country with a casual, unthinking sexism, was an obvious target. ‘The spectacle is vulnerable,' reflected two of the instigators, Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jiminez, in
Shrew
, the London Women's Liberation Workshop journal. ‘However intricately planned it is, a handful of people can disrupt it and cause chaos … The spectacle isn't prepared for anything other than passive spectators.'
⁴
This group of women realised, rather like the Pythons, that television naturalised the absurd, and they aimed to draw attention to this fact by rendering the event even odder than it already was.

After a minute of pandemonium, however, the women were dragged away and Miss World carried on. As usual, the contestants all walked to the camera with one hand resting on their hips, shoulders swinging, maintaining their grinning rictuses throughout, and they all longed to travel on the
QE2
or meet Prince Charles – an unflinching observation of the solemn, anaphrodisiac ritual later satirised by the Pythons in their ‘Summarise Proust Competition'. Miss World remained one of the highest rated TV shows for the next decade, although it is unlikely viewers took it as seriously as its organisers. ‘I think it's very funny,' said Germaine Greer, author of
The Female Eunuch
, which was published a month before Miss World 1970, ‘and certainly every time I've ever watched it, there's been more malicious comment in the room, more fun made of the whole business, than people sitting open-mouthed at what they imagined was a real contest of female pulchritude.'
⁵

Popular memory likes to package decades into unified entities with a particular character. This kind of decadology sees the 1970s as an era of sequinned, tinselly entertainments, such as Miss World, and of political and economic crises: Britain as ‘Weimar without the sex', in Christopher Hitchens's phrase, with kitsch television rather than decadent cabaret being the wilful distraction from the world outside
the living room.
⁶
But while Britain faced serious problems, such as rising unemployment, spiralling inflation and a falling pound, these were not experienced with the same intensity throughout the decade. Most 1970s television reflected the normal resilience and continuity of ordinary life rather than any desire to escape from harsh realities. Nor was Miss World especially typical of the rest of television; in the expanding schedules, there were just as many programmes with the cleverness and complexity of
Monty Python
.