Armchair Nation (41 page)

But many programmes continued to attract intensely loyal audiences without being part of this kind of publicity buzz at all. While Britain was being introduced to JR Ewing,
Crossroads
, an ATV soap opera set in a Midlands motel, was quietly reaching its three thousandth episode. Because it had twice as many episodes per week as
Coronation Street
, it was now by far the longest story ever told in Britain, thousands of bit-part actors having walked through the motel lobby or mouthed pleasantries in the bar. Until they all synchronised watches on 1 April 1975, the different ITV regions often showed it out of synch, so
Crossroads
Christmases could happen in the summer and vice versa, which added to the sense that the motel existed at a wonky angle to the rest of the universe, unbounded by the linear tyranny of seasons and years. During the ITV strike of 1979, a small group of
viewers had rung the ATV studios daily to ask what was happening at the motel while
Crossroads
was off air. By the end of the 1970s, its viewing figures exceeded 20 million, and it vied with
Coronation Street
as Britain's most popular programme, remarkable for a serial shown before many people had got home from work.

In June 1981, it did briefly make headlines. The
Daily Mirror
revealed that Noele Gordon, who had played the motel owner, Meg Mortimer, since the first episode, was to be axed. Charles Denton, director of programmes for Central Television, soon to take over the Midlands franchise from ATV, promised her demise would be ‘absolutely spectacular' and ‘even better than who shot JR'. Hundreds called the studios, pleading with the producers to change their minds. A more sanguine
Daily Star
invited readers to send in ideas about how Meg should be written out, and awarded a £25 prize for the suggestion that she be beaten to death with a frying pan. Pupils at Keir Hardie Junior School in Newham, east London, sent the
Crossroads
producer Jack Barton an illustrated book showing different ways in which Meg could be killed, from poisoning to drowning.
¹²

Crossroads
had long excited conflicting responses. Some of its assumed awfulness was folk legend perpetuated by non-viewers. The lobby telephone never did carry on ringing after it was answered, and not since the programme's earliest days, when it was filmed from a disused Aston cinema using theatre flats, had the walls of the set wobbled. Nor did the beanie-hatted innocent, Benny Hawkins, ever disappear for six months in search of a spanner, although Shughie McFee the motel chef did vanish for three years when, in order to save money, the kitchen set was dismantled. Recorded ‘as live' with minimal rehearsal,
Crossroads
did contain fluffed lines, garbled crosstalk and continuity errors, though not as many as collective memory insists.

The serial's roots were in the romantic melodrama of repertory theatre, from where it inherited its clunky dialogue exposition and static staginess. Women walked round sofas and held on to them, or dabbed their eyes with the corners of handkerchiefs. Men gripped women's arms and looked deep into their eyes.

‘We've said goodbye before, it's not too difficult.'

‘Oh, why did you have to come home? I was perfectly happy. It's
over
, Hugh. It was over a long time ago. We've just been
daydreaming
.'

‘Try
looking
at me when you say things like that.'

‘Oh, I
hate
you!'

The cramped, internal sets and endless medium close-ups created a series of tableaux, more theatrical than televisual. The hard-of-hearing and non-native speakers did at least welcome another of its residues from local rep, the tendency of its actors to over-enunciate their lines. ‘David Hunter [the motel manager], in particular, speaks so clearly that it is a great help to people like me,' wrote a Ugandan Asian immigrant to the
Daily Mirror
in 1978.
¹³

‘To criticize
Crossroads
is to criticize sliced white bread, or football or keg beer – you are made to feel it's class snobbism,' claimed the
Sunday Telegraph
. ‘Unfortunately, the ordinary people are wrong, and the critic is right and
Crossroads
is bad, slack, inept and untruthful, even within its own miserable limits.' ‘This serial is just about the most stunning, stupefying affront to intelligence and proper human values perpetrated on British television,' agreed the
Listener
. The programme's fiercest critic was the Independent Broadcasting Authority which was ultimately responsible for it being on air, and whose chairwoman, Lady Brigette Plowden, described it as ‘distressingly popular'.
¹⁴
In 1980, the IBA ordered that the show be cut from four to three episodes a week (having already imposed a cut from five to four episodes in 1967) to improve its production values. On neither occasion was any improvement apparent. Even the ITV companies who broadcast
Crossroads
did not like it much, an attitude they betrayed by shunting it round the teatime schedules or putting it on so early that it clashed with the BBC children's programmes. In January 1981, ATV moved it from 6.30 p.m. to 6.05 p.m., angering many Midlands viewers who could no longer get home in time to watch it.

Around the emblematic awfulness of
Crossroads
hovered a more important and enduring argument between the guardians of public
service ‘quality' television, who had been in the ascendancy since the Pilkington Report of 1962, and the emergent champions of consumer populism. For everyone agreed that
Crossroads
was rubbish, except for its millions of viewers. As the critic Alexander Walker once wrote about the managing director of ATV who had first commissioned it, ‘the only people who seem to like Lew Grade's shows seem to be people'.
¹⁵

At the time of Meg's departure, Dorothy Hobson was researching
Crossroads
for her PhD at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. The arrival of the video recorder had given a boost to the emerging discipline of media studies by allowing for the careful textual analysis of programmes. (In 1975, when the CCCS had begun a pioneering study of the magazine programme,
Nationwide
, they had to take it in turns to watch it together in each other's houses, making a sound tape and taking copious notes.)
¹⁶
Yet media studies had still to establish itself fully as a reputable academic subject. One wonders if Richard Hoggart, who retained a strong desire to distinguish between good and bad art, would have thought the study of a poorly regarded soap opera an appropriate subject for the research centre he had founded in the year that
Crossroads
began.

For Charlotte Brunsdon, who was also studying
Crossroads
at the CCCS, the defensiveness she felt about her research topic conflated in her mind with the anti-provincial attitudes of her metropolitan friends, who would say ‘Poor you!' when she told them she lived in Birmingham. As Dorothy Hobson found, ATV viewers tended to identify with
Crossroads
characters because they were ‘sort of close to Birmingham people … not common, but unassuming'. Older Midlands viewers already knew and liked Noele Gordon because, in the early days of ATV, she presented many of its regional programmes, including over 2,000 performances of the popular daytime variety
show
Lunch Box
, which ran from 1956 to 1964, and which once attracted a studio audience of 27,000 for an outside broadcast at Nottingham Forest's football ground.
¹⁷

In 1958, the ATV Midlands controller, Philip Dorté, complained to its London office that ‘Noel Gordon [
sic
], whose face and voice is so well known to every Midlands man, woman and child, is asked at Television House who she is and what she wants'.
¹⁸
ATV seemed more concerned with making and exporting networked shows than speaking for its region, which was in any case historically ill-defined. Lew Grade was said to care more about Birmingham, Alabama, than Birmingham, England, and a myth persisted that he had chosen the name ‘ATV' because it sounded like ‘ITV' in a Brummagem accent. Although Black Country vowels in
Crossroads
tended to emerge from the mouths of peripheral characters like cooks and cleaners, Midlands viewers still prized
Crossroads
as one of the few programmes about their own region.

Crossroads
, like most soaps, was easy to ridicule from afar. Its lines of dialogue in isolation sounded like things no one said in real life (‘I don't know, Jill, but I intend to find out!') and its plots about poisonings, bigamy and unexploded bombs were absurd in summary. Spread over three or four episodes a week, though, the melodrama spaced itself out and weeks went by without much incident. (The most notoriously bizarre storyline, in which the cleaner Amy Turtle was accused of being a Russian spy, Amelia Turtlovski, was just a lighthearted subplot.) Most
Crossroads
characters were decent and stoical, trying to deal with ordinary problems as they came up, and the viewers Hobson met said they preferred this to the high emotional pitch of
Dallas
.
¹⁹
The serial's slowly accumulated familiarity made a scratched sideboard or a mildly rebellious teenager seem as meaningful on screen as they would be in the real world.

Crossroads
formed a set of time-honoured late afternoon rituals: as the teatime commercials for Findus Crispy Pancakes or Birds Eye Potato Waffles faded out and the ATV fanfare sounded, the episode began with the nine-note motif that its composer Tony Hatch described as ‘the call-sign which gets the family in front of the TV
set',
²⁰
followed by a slight pause before the strangely compelling main theme. At the end of each episode – after the distinctive closing credits, slightly unsteady caption cards crisscrossing up and sideways across the screen – came a final ‘stop shot'. Designed to remind the audience what had happened in the final scene, perhaps adding a line of dialogue (‘I'll never let her go, Barbara, never!'), it set up the cliff-hanger for the next episode.

Visiting the homes of women
Crossroads
viewers around Birmingham and watching the show with them, Hobson found that
Crossroads
held their full attention, despite being in a timeslot normally occupied by programmes which anticipated viewers dipping in and out as they made the tea or put young children to bed. Forty per cent of British homes now had more than one television and the second set was often a black-and-white portable kept in the kitchen. Hobson saw housewives watching the portable set while cooking or washing up and then hurriedly diving into the living room to view critical moments in colour, or just to see what someone was wearing.
²¹

For these women whose lives were filled with amorphous, endless tasks such as housework and childcare,
Crossroads
offered a punctuation mark or caesura in the day. A young woman with a six-month-old baby who lived on the ninth floor of a Birmingham high-rise said she often looked out of the window and counted the cars passing along the road below. ‘If you are so isolated that you resort to counting cars,' Hobson concluded, ‘the importance of a television serial to “look forward to”, even when it is less than perfect, does not seem so strange.'
²²

Not one of Hobson's interviewees commented on the programme's poor production values. Viewer surveys suggested that women were less likely than men to condemn soap operas as implausible or unrealistic, not because they were more credulous but because they simply filtered this information out. When Hobson watched the programme with her interviewees, the presence of another person seemed to sharpen their faculties and they would say, ‘Well, it wasn't so good tonight,' when, as far as Hobson could tell, it was the same as ever. They could overlook hammy acting, shoddy camerawork and creaky
scripts as long as they felt the inexorable momentum of the unending storyline.
²³

When Meg was axed from
Crossroads
, the
Birmingham Evening Mail
received hundreds of protest letters, a large number of which were from late middle-aged or elderly women in working-class areas like West Bromwich or Smethwick. For many of these women, Meg – with her carefully groomed hair, smart jackets and sitting room with sherry glasses, decanter and white telephone – suggested a precarious middle-class respectability to which they also aspired. One of the most common reasons for viewers to write to the ATV studios was to ask where they could buy Meg's wallpaper and curtains, and the most successful piece of promotional merchandise was a print of a painting that hung in her living room.
²⁴

At the Crossroads motel, romance was never tainted by sex, even the mildest curse was never uttered and no one smoked, it being against IBA rules at that hour. ‘We like our middle-class image because it enables us to behave nicely and wear nice clothes which the public like to see,' Gordon said. ‘We are told reliably that there is peace and quiet [in Northern Ireland] when
Crossroads
is on. And I think it is because people are leading such abnormal lives there that they look forward to switching on every night and seeing a more or less normal existence.' Hobson made a similar point about the axing of Meg, which was announced just before a summer of riots in Brixton, Liverpool, Birmingham and other English cities.
Crossroads
, which was on directly before or after news bulletins showing burning cars and buildings, suggested a reassuring normality and continuity that its viewers saw threatened by Meg's imminent departure.
²⁵