Armchair Nation (56 page)

By the time Potter died in 1994, his vision that TV could create a common culture seemed not only dead, but unmourned. Many welcomed the end of communal viewing. ‘For Huw Wheldon's generation the possibility of broadcasting attracting the whole nation to a common culture, like a village drinking from the same well, was a sustaining ideal,' said the television producer Tony Garnett in his 1996 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture. ‘It was also merely the social manifestation of the technology of the day.' Now Britain was in the vanguard of a new age of digital television, promising hundreds of new channels. Since the digital TV signal was condensed into binary code, it took up less space on the airwaves than analogue, and so consumer choice would no longer be artificially narrowed by the shortage of wavelengths. The outgoing BBC director general, John Birt, predicted that ‘broadcasting will one day no longer be a shared cultural experience'.
⁸

The independent television producer, Peter Bazalgette – the man behind many of the makeover shows and docusoaps that now filled the schedules, such as
Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms, Ground Force
and
Pet Rescue
– was a cheerleader for this new economy. Born in the year of the coronation, his memory of the common culture of
the three-channel era was of a dull, monochrome world in which the screens went blank on Sundays to protect Evensong (‘One wonders how many of the Pharisees who instituted such rules actually turned up for the Nunc Dimittis themselves'), well-meaning greybeards produced television plays that were really like filmed theatre, and Kenneth Clark's
Civilisation
– ‘an almost mystical totem for the miserable brigade … wheeled out frequently as an example of what we have lost' – had fewer than a million viewers. This broadcasting era, he felt, had been ruled by a BBC–ITV cartel, controlling the airwaves and imposing its tastes on the public. Now, in the new age of multiplying channels and digital recorders, viewers would be able to watch what they wanted, when they wanted.
⁹

The new ideal was instant interactivity, just as it had been for those
Manchester Guardian
-reading would-be viewers in 1934 who thought that television would allow them to see distant places like Oberammergau or St Peter's Square in Rome. The twenty-first-century viewer would be able to crop the image on screen or zoom in on a detail, download films, order takeaways, check bank balances and book holidays from an armchair. In place of a common culture, the digital age offered a profusion of personal choice. A BBC advertisement for its new digital channels had Stephen Fry sitting at the dinner table with his television, asking it to ‘pass the salt please, darling'.

The real viewer, however, remained inconveniently unconvinced by this brave new world of variety and abundance. So far Britons had largely resisted cable and satellite TV; it had only been a success because the minority that used these channels were willing to spend more on them than anyone had guessed, particularly for football. On 4 September 1998, with the whole nation returned from its summer holidays and back to work and school, and the BBC, Sky and ITV preparing to launch their new digital channels, most viewers were far more interested in a new ITV quiz show.

The host, Chris Tarrant, sat with the first contestant, a drama student called Graham Elwell, in the middle of a chrome and Perspex amphitheatre, and told him he was ‘fifteen questions away from winning one million pounds'. Elwell sailed through the first
question, correctly identifying the part of its body a woodpecker uses for pecking, for £100. As the stakes got higher, 140 tailor-made snatches of music subliminally built up tension like a film score, and intelligent light fixtures known as Vari-Lites that could change colour automatically, originally used by the rock group Genesis on their 1982 world tour, grew darker and dimmer. On £64,000, Elwell phoned a friend, his granddad, to ask him which country lay between Ghana and Benin. His granddad didn't know, and Elwell took the money.

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
helped set the pattern for terrestrial TV's attempt to retain viewers in the digital age by returning television to the form in which Baird had first introduced it to viewers: a live, interactive spectacle. Thanks to a premium rate phone line for would-be contestants, it also turned this interactivity into a revenue stream. David Briggs, the show's co-deviser, correctly foresaw that it would encourage family members to call answers at the screen and castigate contestants for their ignorance, a phenomenon he called ‘shoutability'. The first series ran every night of the week, building up momentum, and increasing the suspense by carrying answers to questions over the ad breaks. By the end of its ten-day run, two-thirds of British adults had seen it at least once.
¹⁰
A common culture that was supposed to have zapped into glistening fragments was continuing to form round the television set, as viewers found themselves unexpectedly exercised about what Kojak's first name was, or who presented the Channel 5 show
Naked Jungle
in the nude.

In the summer of 2000, a series of enigmatic billboard posters appeared throughout the country featuring nothing but a giant staring eye. The programme they promoted seemed to resemble a device for simply watching time unfold, rather like those webcams depicting mundane activities inside people's homes that now had cult followings on the internet. Almost every night for nine weeks, viewers could watch a group of young adults living in a purpose-built, space-age bungalow
on Three Mills Island in east London, cut off from the world by the Bow Backs, a spaghetti junction of tributaries of the River Lea. Their every move recorded by cameras, the ten housemates talked, flirted, slept and argued over whether to put tofu on the weekly shopping list, before being voted out of the house in turn. The Geordie-accented narrator, Marcus Bentley, enhanced the sense of Beckettian uneventfulness with his lugubrious way of delivering lines like ‘the housemates are in the living room, passing round the Jaffa Cakes' and ‘to alleviate the boredom, Darren suggests they make farm animals out of potatoes'.

Once again, though, television demonstrated its ability to make viewers incrementally interested in the most apparently unpromising material. An engrossing drama developed involving one of the housemates, Nick Bateman, who was making up stories about himself and breaking the rules by writing notes to fellow contestants. Having uncovered his subterfuge, Bateman's housemates confronted him at a house meeting, at which he dissolved into tears and then left the house. Rumours of this showdown spread around the country via email. In high-tech offices, the only places with fast enough bandwidth to watch it, employees crowded round computer screens to watch a live transmission on the Channel 4 website, which had already become the most popular site in Europe, forcing some employers to turn off their internet connections to stop people accessing it. George Alagiah broke the story as the lead item on the BBC
One O'Clock News
: ‘Nasty Nick falls foul of Big Brother. He's thrown out after being caught cheating …' To those caught up in the story, Bateman's banal venality seemed like the intrigues of a modern-day Iago.

For others in that summer of the new millennium,
Big Brother
encapsulated the neurotic self-display of the modern media age. ‘Camcorders and the internet have stolen our sense of shame, and soon the inhibited will be a minority,' argued Cosmo Landesman. ‘The British are on the brink of becoming a nation of exhibitionists and voyeurs.'
Big Brother
, wrote the novelist Will Self, was ‘a National Service of the ego. With its senseless and irrelevant democracy, its pitiful voyeurism, its decadence and counselling,
Big Brother
is bizarrely one of the least distorting of the lenses with which television currently regards our society.'
¹¹

Self's friend, J. G. Ballard, was more open-minded. His early short stories had actually anticipated reality TV. In ‘Manhole 69' (1957), three men take part in a sleep deprivation experiment; under fierce arc lights, they are watched continually by scientists from a circular observation window, and descend disastrously into catatonia. In ‘Thirteen to Centaurus' (1962), thirteen astronauts who think they are on a century-long flight to a distant planet are actually in a simulated spaceship in a vast hangar on earth, an experiment to test the psychological effects of space travel, watched by scientists on a line of closed-circuit TV screens. The public, who are following the experiment closely, ‘are beginning to feel that there's something obscene about this human zoo; what began as a grand adventure of the spirit of Columbus, has become a grisly joke'. Ballard's scenarios were weirdly replicated in two Channel 4
Big Brother
-inspired reality programmes:
Shattered
(2004), in which contestants competed for a prize fund of £100,000 by trying to stay awake for a week, and
Space Cadets
(2005), in which participants were tricked into thinking they were in a spaceship in low earth orbit. ‘Sooner or later,' says the opportunistic TV documentarist Professor Sanger in Ballard's 1987 novel
The Day of Creation
, ‘everything turns into television.'
¹²

As usual, Ballard was more phlegmatic in life than on the page. Watching in his semi-detached house in Shepperton, he pronounced himself a fan of
Big Brother
while claiming only to have seen bits of it because his partner was addicted – and the fact that she voted ‘something like 30 times one evening' led him to discount the huge voting figures on the grounds that people were just pressing the redial button. He was intrigued by its seemingly uncut actuality, although he would have preferred the people to be unaware they were being filmed, as in
The Truman Show
, while conceding that this was unethical. As Ballard told
Spike
magazine:

Most television is low-grade pap, it's so homogenised it's like mental toothpaste. But
Big Brother
is a slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It is like Tracey Emin's
My Bed
. If you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way, then you become
obsessed by it. It's like those Andy Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed obsessively enough becomes interesting in its own right.
¹³

Ever since the 1990 Broadcasting Act allowed Channel 4 to sell its own advertising, inclining it to broadcast what would sell it most effectively, it had aimed its programmes at young people. Although most
Big Brother
viewers were female, a large minority were the elusive young male viewers coveted by advertisers. Over fifty per cent of students watched it regularly. For all its apparent longueurs, watching
Big Brother
was an intense, involving experience. The series invited gossip and discussion, as viewers tried to decipher the housemates' social performances. Both tabloid and heavyweight newspapers, with ever declining circulations, devoted pages of comment to
Big Brother
to draw in readers. It did seem that, in the summer of 2000, almost everyone was talking about the goings-on in that sealed compound in east London.

Big Brother
acquired a cultural symbolism that was much greater than its viewing figures, perhaps because it seemed to represent a
ne plus ultra
: television stripped to its barest essentials. The existential fear of wasting one's time on this earth with trivialities had long been at the heart of anxieties about watching TV, and
Big Brother
tapped into these anxieties because it was all about watching the passing of time – especially on the live web feed, where bored or insomniac viewers could look at housemates sunbathing or snoring. In the middle of these moments of torpor might come a strange piece of non-action, such as a housemate walking across the kitchen to open the fridge door, or sitting in silence pensively eating a chocolate biscuit.

Alongside this extreme mundanity came its opposite. For in the
Big Brother
house, life was lived at a higher emotional pitch than outside it. It compressed the normal arc of human relationships into several weeks and generated a great deal of shouting, moaning, bitching, hugging and crying. Crying is, as Charles Darwin wrote, one of the ‘special expressions of man', something no other animal does (although he conceded that the jury was still out on the Indian elephant).
¹⁴
And yet it is usually done in public sparingly, so in the most
public forum of all, television, it has had a peculiar force. After
Big Brother
, though, tears on television no longer drew their power, like Gilbert Harding's on
Face to Face
or Gazza's in the 1990 World Cup, from the desperate attempt by their shedders to conceal them. Perhaps one of the most significant, intangible legacies of reality TV was this undermining of stoicism, this sense that an adult shedding tears in public was an unremarkable thing. But this aspect of
Big Brother
only seems to have heightened the sense of estrangement of the ninety per cent of the population who were not watching it. On the night that Nick Bateman's eviction was broadcast, the show attracted a peak of 6 million viewers, around the same number as the current repeats of
Fawlty Towers
and
Tarrant on TV
.
¹⁵