Armchair Nation (38 page)

The writer Gwyn Thomas, the unofficial poet laureate of the English-speaking southern valleys and an eloquent regular on chat shows like
Parkinson
, dismissed Welsh as ‘elitist gobbledygook'. Even some Welsh language loyalists did not want a separate channel. Jac L. Williams, Professor of Education at Aberystwyth, wrote many letters to newspapers from 1973 until his death in 1977, arguing that it would exile Welsh speakers to a broadcasting ghetto on an obscure wavelength. By the end of the 1970s, a ‘Ban Welsh Telly' group had acquired 30,000 members in monoglot Avon and Somerset. The movement was strongest in Weston-super-Mare, where ‘Ban Welsh Telly' stickers adorned the rear window of every other car. Even today, the town's residents attribute antipathy to the Welsh to the days when they had to watch Welsh-language television. When, in September 1978, HTV, the Welsh ITV station, dubbed the western film
Shane
into Welsh, the ‘Ban Welsh Telly' group complained to the newly formed Commission for Racial Equality. Both Welsh and non-Welsh speakers seemed equally disapproving of Wyoming cowboys conversing in Cymraeg, and it was sufficiently imprinted in the nation's memory that, twenty-three years later, the MP for Ceridigion, Simon Thomas, told parliament: ‘That experiment has gone down in Welsh history and will never be tried again.'
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On the evening of 25 December 1977, 28.5 million people arranged themselves in front of a television, between 8.55 p.m. and 10.05 p.m.,
to watch
The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show
. This moment has entered British folklore as the culmination of television's potential to bring the extended national family together. For the historian Ben Pimlott, updating his late father's social history,
The Englishman's Christmas
, in 1978, this viewing figure suggested that Morecambe and Wise had taken over from the Queen's Christmas broadcast as the essential element of the secular festival, especially ‘for those who digest their mid-day Christmas dinner in an armchair' – and this despite the fact that it was the least festive show in the schedules, with barely a slither of tinsel or a Santa hat in sight. In Jonathan Coe's 1970s-set novel
The Rotters' Club
, the sixteen-year-old protagonist watches the show with his parents and experiences an epiphanic moment, ‘a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter'.
⁶⁰
The moment of unanimity ended with a certain narrative neatness when, in January 1978, Morecambe and Wise defected shockingly to ITV, after which their careers, by common consent, went into sharp decline.

Morecambe and Wise were certainly loved, but not uncritically or universally so. It was in fact a recurring motif among TV critics throughout the 1970s that Morecambe and Wise's Christmas show was not as funny as last year's. ‘Ernie and I have always prided ourselves on seeing the red light before anyone else,' Morecambe said in 1973, predicting that the show would not survive much longer. ‘We think there is a saturation point at which people can take so much of a good thing.'
⁶¹
In 1974, after their new series slipped down the ratings, they took a break and were off screen for over a year.

Television's weakness as a medium is that it relies a lot on repetition, prolonging a successful formula long after its potential is exhausted. And Morecambe and Wise, who had learned their trade in the variety halls where resuscitating old gags was the norm, believed in letting the audience eternally in on the joke. They depended so much on the reassuring reiteration of stock phrases and comic business that it is hard to pin down the invisible moment when this may have tipped over into staleness. The Radio 1 DJ John Peel found them ‘extravagantly unfunny' and thought ‘their best work in several years
was the current television commercial for Texaco'. Watched today, the 1977 show does not seem like a classic. It started with a lame skit on ‘Starkers and Krutch' and finished not with the triumphant ‘There is nothing like a dame' number from
South Pacific
that everyone remembers, but with Elton John playing piano in an empty studio while Eric and Ernie, dressed in drag as cleaners, looked on. ‘I thought the ending didn't quite come off,' the comedian Les Dawson said. Many felt Morecambe had been funnier ad libbing with Dickie Davies on ITV's
World of Sport
on Christmas Eve.
⁶²

ITV's Christmas programmes in 1977 were so unappetising that when the schedules were announced a few weeks earlier, several advertising agencies officially complained. On Christmas Day, ITV showed
Sale of the Century, Stars on Christmas Day
and, at 9 p.m. when Morecambe and Wise were on, a re-run of the film
Young Winston
. To have detained half the nation for an hour and ten minutes with this on the other side was no great achievement. In any case, ratings at this time were disputed, the difference between BBC and ITV claims often being huge. The famous figure of 28.5 million viewers came from the BBC's own audience research, based on telephone interviews and viewing diaries. ITV's figures, which sampled homes using electronic measuring devices attached to TV sets, suggest that the 1977 Christmas special was only the eleventh most-watched programme of the decade with 21.3 million viewers, behind less fondly remembered shows like a 1977 episode of
This is Your Life
and a 1971 edition of
The Benny Hill Show
. According to ITV, even the 1977
Mike Yarwood Christmas Special
, which preceded Morecambe and Wise on BBC1, got more viewers (21.4 million), so that, far from uniting the nation in laughter, Morecambe and Wise made 100,000 people switch over or turn off the TV.
⁶³

But the national affection for Morecambe and Wise was real enough. They may never have been as good as they used to be, but they were always popular and, albeit fitfully, funny. After moving to the BBC in 1968 and acquiring a new writer, Eddie Braben, they had become distinct characters: an idiot disguised as an intellectual (Ernie) and a subversive disguised as an idiot (Eric). It was Braben's
idea to have them sitting up together in a double bed, Ernie working on ‘the play what I wrote' while Eric read
The Dandy
and smoked a pipe. The television playwright John Mortimer called it ‘an English marriage, missing out the sex as many English marriages do'.
⁶⁴

They evolved a unique way of engaging with viewers, melding theatricality with intimacy. Clinging to their variety background, they worked on a raised platform that looked like a proscenium stage with tabs and wings, and at some point in each show they clowned in front of a plush red curtain. While this staginess gave the show a sense of occasion, their producer John Ammonds also got them to look at specific cameras, with Morecambe watching carefully for the camera light to come on so that he could treat its lens as a mirror, adjusting his tie, flashing his smile and wiggling his spectacles at viewers. John McGrath, a former
Z Cars
writer who had given up TV to try to create a genuinely proletarian theatre, and whose touring show George Mackay Brown had seen on Orkney, respected Morecambe and Wise as creators of a real folk art with the same direct engagement with its audience and the same democratic variety – of songs, playlets, sketches and stand-up comedy – as the Welsh
noson lawen
and the Scottish
ceilidh
.
⁶⁵

While Morecambe and Wise were performing their Christmas shows for the BBC, television had yet to acquire a reliable collective memory. Archiving was erratic. Even when shows began to be video-recorded in the late 1950s, the tapes were as expensive as a small car and so engineers routinely wiped and reused them. Peter Cook pleaded in vain for his 1960s comedy series,
Not Only … But Also
, to be preserved, even offering to pay for the tapes and the storage costs. Despite this, the BBC taped over the series, an act criticised by Cook's co-star Dudley Moore when he appeared on
Parkinson
. The 1970s, too, saw much wiping of old black-and-white shows because it was thought viewers who had recently paid for a colour TV licence would never
want to see them again. The ITV channels took even less care of their old programmes, being unwilling to pay to store or insure them. The critic T. C. Worsley rightly called television ‘the ephemeral art'.
⁶⁶

Those who took television seriously as an art form fretted often about its impermanence. Dennis Potter still felt a sense of paralysing anticlimax as the end credits rolled on each of his television plays, even though he knew more people had watched them than would have seen Agatha Christie's
The Mousetrap
in its entire West End run. ‘The pictures flow on easy as tapwater,' he wrote. ‘A play which has taken months to write, characters who have leapt up gibbering in your mind when you are trying to sleep, ideas which have simmered feverishly in your blood like a virus – all used up, all at once, all gone.' In his often dyspeptic television reviews in the
New Statesman
and the
Sunday Times
, Potter returned to the same theme: the TV was becoming nothing more than a domestic appliance for passing the time, ‘a box that can be plugged into the same socket as a hairdryer or a coffee perculator'.
⁶⁷
In an age before archiving, he worried about the fragile connection between writer and viewer, desperately wanting television to be a more enduring medium to justify the effort he put into his work.

Before the domestication of the video recorder, there was an industry of records and books based on television programmes, especially comedy – probably because, if shared humour does affirm membership of a group as Bergson claimed, that group may want something more concrete to hold on to than the fading memory of laughter. The first Monty Python film,
And Now for Something Completely Different
… (1971), was a compilation of re-shot television highlights, aimed at the American market, but it did better business in the UK because viewers wanted to see their favourite sketches again. On their first theatre tour in 1971, the team noted that audiences preferred what they knew to new material, and greeted sketches recycled from television with applause after their first few lines, like rock fans cheering the opening bars of a song. Comedy fans accumulated cultural capital among their peers by knowing routines off by heart, as did troubadours before the arrival of the printing press. Perhaps the Dead
Parrot sketch would never have become seminal in a world populated by the domestic video recorder, because there would have been less playground or common room cachet in being able to recite a sketch that was purchasable and replayable.

BBC Television's fortieth anniversary in 1976 had prompted a round of introspection about the medium and the showing of many old programmes, in the first major attempt by television to explore its own history. That same year the BBC reached an agreement with the actors' union Equity and the technicians' unions which allowed them to present more of this kind of archive material. (The unions had feared that repeating shows indefinitely would cut down on new productions and put actors and technicians out of work.) When the BBC finally set up its Film and Videotape Library in 1978 in response to the Annan Report's call for proper archiving, it coincided happily with the arrival of home video recorders which were starting to open up new markets for old programmes. Suddenly television performers had the possibility of an artistic afterlife. Videotape began stacking along miles of shelving in the BBC's two vast warehouse hangars on Windmill Road in Brentford, close to the runway at Heathrow.

Television now had its own version of the library at Alexandria, and in years to come, when the BBC and the British Film Institute both launched appeals for missing material, romantic tales would be told of fans coming across lost material that had miraculously survived the scorched earth policies of the past. In 1983, two episodes of
Doctor Who
materialised in a basement of the Church of Latter Day Saints in Wandsworth. In 2001, nineteen cans of film of the lost second series of
Dad's Army
were discovered in a shed after being rescued years earlier from a skip outside Elstree studios. Two years later, an engineer was rummaging in a BBC tape archive at Kingswood Warren in Surrey when he came across a spool titled ‘Opening of BBC2'. He played it and saw a man at a desk in a V-neck jumper and tie reading from cards: it was Gerald Priestland, in the Alexandra Palace newsroom, explaining that a massive power cut in west London had disrupted programmes. ‘I ploughed on through every scrap of unedited Reuters tape they could feed me,' Priestland wrote
later. ‘After what seemed like an eternity of ad-libbing about Japanese fishery disputes and trains de-railed in Tunisia, I was taken off the air.' The disastrous launch of BBC2, which the corporation would probably have preferred to forget, could now be re-lived. Rumours thrive that other lost programmes exist and change hands between collectors – more missing
Doctor Who
episodes, the Beatles on
Juke Box Jury
, the classic 1961 sci-fi series
A for Andromeda
– but they have never resurfaced.
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