Armchair Nation (42 page)

On the eve of bonfire night, another kind of blaze engulfed the television screens of
Crossroads
viewers: the motel was on fire, and a tremulous Meg was last seen staring at a bottle of tranquillisers after leaving a note to her daughter. As a plangent oboe piped an
Andante
version of the
Crossroads
theme, hundreds of fans, some in tears, called the switchboard to demand whether Meg had died in the fire. The producers had added to their anxiety by staging a fake funeral, both the
Sun
and ITN News showing pictures of undertakers
removing a body from the motel's ashes. After being left dangling over the weekend, though, viewers discovered that Meg was alive and leaving on the
QE2
for America.

The viewers' pleas had reprieved her. ‘The elderly people who lived for nothing else … it was to them going to be a real bereavement,' conceded Jack Barton. After getting hundreds of thank you letters, he said he felt like a Home Secretary who had saved someone from the gallows. Peter Ling, co-creator and sometime writer of
Crossroads
, watched it every afternoon in Hastings, with his family, especially his daughter, Vicky, making fun of it. Once, while she and her father were walking on the pier, an elderly woman attendant recognised him. ‘I am a widow and live by myself,' she told him. ‘I have no family and I get very lonely, but every day I watch
Crossroads
. I live with Meg and all the others. They have become part of my family.' ‘Daddy,' Ling's daughter said as they walked off, ‘I'll never laugh at
Crossroads
again.'
²⁶

‘I am watching my life ebbing away,' wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary on 28 November 1983. That evening he had been sitting with his octogenarian mother, Louie, in her flat across the hallway from his own, in a mansion block off London's Euston Road, watching
Coronation Street
and Thora Hird ‘in some rubbish about a funeral parlour'. They had lived opposite each other like this for over a decade and, having always refused to own a television, Williams spent many hours watching his mother's set. Writing his diary late at night, he would often use it to complain about that evening's television, and his judgements on the primetime schedules of the 1970s and 1980s showed little patience for programmes now remembered as classics.
The Good Life
had ‘not a laugh line in it'.
Porridge
was ‘sickening and disgusting'.
The Two Ronnies
was a ‘comedy formula' without any comedy, ‘like watching the Japanese immaculately performing a Morris Dance'. On the rare occasions Williams found something he
liked – Leonard Rossiter in
Rising Damp
, Telly Savalas's minimalist acting in
Kojak
or the ‘sad & rugged courage' of Les Dawson – it was when this formulaic urge to please, this sense of obligatory collective enjoyment, was absent.

Williams's TV criticism was not disinterested. His television career had been in decline since his one-man series,
The Kenneth Williams Show
, had flopped in 1970, the man on the bacon counter at his local supermarket calling it ‘rotten' and the janitor at his block of flats telling him cheerfully that it was ‘a load of shit'.
²⁷
By the early 1980s his TV appearances were mostly confined to chat shows and voice-overs for children's cartoons and commercials. In his diary, he veered restlessly between complaining that camp stars like John Inman and Larry Grayson had stolen his act and believing that it was all beneath him anyway.

A fiercely intelligent autodidact, Williams in the 1970s had been employed as a television critic for the
Radio Times
. ‘It is the capacity for taking pains which I admire,' he wrote, opening his first monthly column. While his alternating fellow columnists, Jonathan Raban and Margaret Drabble, happily declared their love for
That's Life
or
The Goodies
, Williams wrote with self-conscious erudition about
Panorama
and
The Book Programme
. But at home he was obliged to watch the undemanding television his mother liked, occasionally conceding that its killing of time could be merciful. ‘The fact remains,' he wrote, ‘that the flickering screen in the room is a barrier against the silences & the embarrassment of mute interludes when conversation peters out.'
²⁸

Viewers like Kenneth Williams and his mother, watching mostly whatever came along, were supposed to be an endangered tribe. Television producers feared that the primetime audience was about to be shrunk severely by the video cassette recorder, an object that people were buying even in the middle of a recession. Domestic video recorders had arrived in Britain in the mid 1970s but had been slow to take off. According to the writer and broadcaster Derek Cooper, some of the earliest adopters were in the Presbyterian strongholds of the Western Isles, where Sunday viewing was a clear Sabbath breach but
videotaping programmes to watch in midweek was more ambiguous, God's position on time-shifting being moot. Another early adopter was Tony Blackburn, who would record
Crossroads
each day and watch it the next morning over breakfast before going to the studio to do his Radio 1 show.
²⁹

Britons were still more likely to rent electronic equipment than to buy it, and this helped the video market grow at a time when it was shared by two incompatible Japanese systems, Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS. In more
dirigiste
France, all imported VCRs had to clear customs at Poitiers and VCR owners had to pay an annual licence fee; in Thatcherite Britain there were no such restrictions against cheap Japanese imports. Applied to pop promos, TV shows and the domestic recorder, ‘video' became one of the modish words of the early 1980s, endowed, along with related vocabulary like ‘rewind' and ‘freeze-frame', with connotations of contemporaneity just as colour television had been a decade earlier.

Even so, the television ratings for Christmas 1982 were shocking. They suggested that so many people were renting videos, playing with their new video games or recording programmes to watch later, that there were 6 million fewer viewers than in Christmas 1981. The audience figures for the sitcom
Last of the Summer Wine
had fallen mysteriously from 17 to 9.9 million. Manchester University held a symposium with the title ‘Is broadcasting going off the air?' and Charles Denton said, ‘We have search-parties out looking for audiences.'
³⁰
But this supposedly vanishing audience was a blip, probably caused by a glitch in the ratings system which meant that if a viewer was video-recording a programme at the same time as watching it, the ratings meter thought the set was switched off.

By the end of 1983 a quarter of British homes had a video recorder, more than any other European country, but viewers mostly carried on viewing in real time; thirteen per cent of recorded television was never even watched. The TV critic Peter Fiddick suggested that VCRs helped to reduce ‘television guilt', allowing people to record things they felt they should have watched without having to actually watch them. The timer switch for pre-recording was also notoriously difficult to work.
The sociologist Ann Gray asked a group of women in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire to colour-code their domestic gadgets: pink for feminine, blue for masculine and lilac for neither. While VCRs were lilac, the timer function was a deep blue – which is odd when, as Gray pointed out, women routinely operated the equally difficult time settings on washing machines.
³¹
The most likely explanation is that women simply did not care enough to work out how to use the timer because, against expectations, the video recorder had not turned viewers into energetic time shifters.

But there was another threat to the homogeneous mass audience, sitting down to watch the same programmes each evening. Ever since the Annan Report, the political mood had favoured breaking up the comfortable ITV–BBC duopoly and increasing viewer choice, an ambition helped along by the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982. When the Tories retained power on a landslide in 1983, they were bolder about placing free market economics at the heart of policy. The BBC's monopoly of the licence fee, which Margaret Thatcher preferred to call a ‘compulsory levy' and a ‘poll tax backed by criminal sanctions',
³²
together with the Thatcherite perception of left-wing bias in the corporation, made it a likely candidate for the bracing discipline of market forces.

At the beginning of 1984, newspapers quoted ‘ministerial sources' attacking the BBC's showing of an American mini-series which, unprecedentedly, they had promoted with a billboard campaign across the country announcing, ‘
The Thorn Birds
are coming on BBC1'. The informant was a Home Office minister, Douglas Hurd, who suggested, on the strength of his wife having seen the first episode, that the series was so awful that it might jeopardise the BBC's proposed licence fee increase.
³³
A hostile press campaign against the BBC began, accompanied by that partly manufactured anger from its commercial rivals that was to become familiar in the coming years.

The Thorn Birds
certainly satisfied the Thatcherite market imperative: after the end of the penultimate episode, in which Father Ralph de Bricassart broke his vow of chastity and made love to the heroine Meggie on a remote Australian beach, the Electricity Board reported
an increase of 2200 megawatts, the biggest surge in the National Grid's history. ‘The series was much criticised for wooden stereotyping of many characters, for thin writing and implausible melodrama and its placing in the schedules,' conceded the BBC handbook. ‘But [it] had a narrative drive that proved compulsive. It drew enormous audiences.'
³⁴
The controversy suggested that drawing a big audience was not enough on its own to justify the licence fee, for the most contentious thing about the series was its place in the schedules: it had clashed with the prestigious ITV series
Jewel in the Crown
and, more shockingly, the BBC's long-running current affairs programme,
Panorama
, had been dropped for its duration.

In this new environment in which broadcasters had to satisfy both the demand for high ratings and the more nebulous expectations of public service broadcasting, the art of the scheduler was crucial. Each channel now employed programme planners whose job was to sit in an office with clock grids of each quarter year, plotting shifts in mass viewing habits like generals in a war room planning troop manoeuvres. Horizontally they divided the thirteen weeks into series runs of six, seven and so on, and vertically they divvied up the broadcasting hours into time slots. Guided by programme synopses, audience research and ratings graphs, they then arranged the programmes, on sticky-backed coloured squares, along these grids in agreeable patterns, taking note of immovable objects like the news and certain received wisdoms about what went where. Early evening programmes were magazine-style, with short items that did not require viewers' full attention, to catch people coming in from work or eating their dinner. As viewers settled down after dinner, the primetime sitcoms and quiz shows followed. Serious programmes, like documentaries, arrived after nine, later-dining middle-class viewers having finished eating by then.

This delicate arrangement of an evening's entertainment was called ‘vertical' scheduling and was fairly well known. More arcane,
and becoming more important, was ‘horizontal' or ‘jugular' scheduling, to compete with rival channels. The secret of this dark art was that most viewers were, like Kenneth Williams and his mother, listless rather than carefully selective consumers. Even when the costs of changing channels were minimal – and becoming more minimal with the growing popularity of the infra-red TV remote control – there was a carry-over effect from one show to the next, which today's proponents of nudge economics would call a ‘status quo bias'. Those invisible, unaccountable social engineers, the horizontal schedulers, were thus able magically to induce inertia in millions of people, tempting them with the next offering so they would carry on watching the same channel for the whole evening.