Armchair Nation (58 page)

The octogenarian Richard Hoggart, who had co-authored the Pilkington Report on Broadcasting forty years earlier, and whose ideas about creating a common culture through television had influenced Dennis Potter when he was beginning his career, now joined this argument about quality. Hoggart worried not so much that good programmes would stop being made, but that television was losing the sense of an empathetic common ground. After fifty years of consumer populism, he feared a new tyranny of cultural relativism, in which everything had its place and value judgements were seen as elitist and patronising. Reserving the right to criticise bad television, Hoggart evoked the example of Anton Chekhov, who once spoke with ‘love and anger' to his own people: ‘You live badly, my friends; it is shameful to live like that …'
²⁶

In 2002 Hoggart complained, in language highly reminiscent of the Pilkington Report, about ‘cheap and nasty offerings aimed at people who are assumed to be both insufficiently educated and ill-informed'. The quiz show
The Weakest Link
, whose presenter's putdowns had earned her the sobriquet ‘The Queen of Mean', revealed a ‘mindless, cruel competitiveness and a disguised or perhaps unconscious contempt in the makers for those at whom they are directed'. Meanwhile the new highbrow digital channel BBC4, whose most popular shows drew about 50,000 viewers, offered ‘a little caviar for the snobs', allowing arts programmes to be ghettoised ‘so that – like the celebrated daft pianist in a brothel – they may not know and so may cease to complain about what goes on elsewhere in the building'.
²⁷

This feared fragmentation of audiences did not, however, quite materialise. In his book
The Shock of the Old
, the historian David Edgerton argues that our understanding of historical progress is ‘innovation-centric'. We think that technological change happens
inexorably and in linear fashion. So we focus on exciting new inventions and underestimate how much they will have to struggle against the forces of habit and inertia in our daily lives, and how resilient older, still serviceable technologies often turn out to be. The American theorist of technology, John Seely Brown, gave the name ‘endism' to this historical fallacy that new technologies like the internet would simply do away with older ones, like television.
²⁸

Words like ‘digital' and ‘new media' seem to belong inevitably to the future; ‘analogue' and ‘cathode ray' seem rooted in the past. And yet well into the new century, most Britons seemed unpersuaded by the choice offered by over 200 digital channels and carried on buying analogue televisions even when told they would soon be obsolete; and at the end of its first decade, forty years after the arrival of colour TV, 28,000 people still had a black-and-white TV licence. Notable among their number was the Labour MP Chris Mullin, who revealed he had been questioned by the
Daily Telegraph
, which uncovered the scandal of MP's expenses in 2009, about his claim for a £47 monochrome licence. He had owned his set for over thirty years, being averse to throwing away things that still worked. ‘The
Telegraph
reports that I claimed for a black-and-white TV licence,' he wrote in his diary, ‘which has been the subject of much amusement among colleagues, many of whom dwell in the world of plasma screens.'
²⁹

New Labour had come to power in 1997 extolling the consumer freedoms opened up by digital television and the internet. This commitment now began to conflict with a new anxiety germinating in the rioting of Asian youths in the summer of 2001 on the streets of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, crystallising in an atmosphere of post-9/11 suspicion and coming to a head with the London tube bombings of July 2005. While tabloid newspapers adopted a strident language directed against newly arrived immigrants and asylum seekers, politicians talked less flammably about the promotion of ‘community cohesion' and ‘Britishness'. The home secretary, David Blunkett, set up citizenship and language tests for those applying for British passports, and exhorted Asian parents to speak English to their children at home.

One of the issues underlying these anxieties was the fragmenting of
the television audience, for the most fertile markets for cable and satellite television had been Britain's 2.5 million British Asians. After late night programming aimed at minorities disappeared on mainstream channels in the 1990s as they went in search of the largest (or youngest) audiences, satellite channels like Zee TV, Alpha Bangla and Star TV, carrying the Indian subcontinent's most popular soaps, game shows and Bollywood movies, filled the gap. Young British Asians could now choose from dozens of channels speaking Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi or Bengali.

But the habit of communal viewing turned out to be more resilient than people had hoped or feared at the start of the digital era. Programmes like
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
, the celebrity ballroom dancing competition
Strictly Come Dancing
and the revived
Doctor Who
still brought millions of families together in front of the set on weekend nights. A 2006 government White Paper on the BBC recognised this shift and began to tweak the orthodoxy that the era of communal television watching was over. It now argued that the BBC should form part of the ‘national glue', bringing people together in ‘water-cooler moments', reflecting and reshaping national identity.
³⁰

The White Paper also rewarded the BBC for helping to rescue the government's digital policy after the calamitous failure of ITV Digital, a digital package known to terrestrial viewers through a series of commercials presented by the comedian Johnny Vegas and a knitted woollen monkey. While the ad was popular, and the replica monkeys given away free with a subscription were fetching hundreds of pounds on eBay, ITV Digital was not. Its reception problems were legendary; even opening a fridge door could knock out the signal. In 2002, its abandoned licences were relaunched as Freeview, a free service led by the BBC with only about thirty channels. It became the fastest new consumer technology to reach a million homes, ahead of the DVD player and PlayStation. Only eighteen months after its launch, around 3.5 million homes had it, with a bias towards the middle-aged and older. With viewers at last signing up to digital, the government could now begin to switch off the analogue signal, first launched at Alexandra Palace in 1936, so that the digital signal could be broadcast at full power across the country. Switching off analogue would also
allow the government to sell off these frequencies to mobile phone and broadband companies. The BBC would play a vital role, said the White Paper, in ‘building Digital Britain' just as it had first introduced Britons to black-and-white and colour TV.
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Labour MPs, however, feared that voters might punish them if the digital switchover did not work and left people without their favourite programmes in the run up to a general election. Worried about what they called the ‘
Coronation Street
bug', the government tested the waters at Ferryside and Llansteffan, two villages on opposite sides of the estuary of the River Tywi in Carmarthen Bay, served by the same tiny transmitter. On 30 March 2005, for around 500 homes and a few scattered beach chalets and static caravans, the analogue signal was switched off for the first time in Britain. Apart from a few unhappy residents hidden behind the Cliff, a wooded outcrop above Ferryside which the new signal couldn't get over, the villagers settled down to watch Wales lose to Austria at football on digital TV.

A little Cumbrian coastal outcrop, bounded by the Lake District on one side and the Irish Sea on the other, was the perfect place for the next and much bigger controlled experiment. Whitehaven had long been a televisual backwater. It had missed the coronation because it could not get television until the Isle of Man built a transmitter at the end of 1953. It did not have ITV until 1968, picked up Channel 4 six years late and still could not get Channel 5. One of the biggest firms in White-haven in the 1970s and 1980s had been the cable company British Relay, because analogue reception was so poor and homes on the new housing estate had no chimneys, which made fitting aerials difficult anyway.

A billboard in Whitehaven harbour with a countdown ticker, a giant blinking LED display, reminded people of the switchover's zero hour. The town's oldest resident, Florence Parnaby, aged 100, opened the official Digital Help Scheme shop, which, with an eye to an older demographic, was giving away a pile of cassette tapes with an audio step-by-step guide, alongside a bowl of mint humbugs.
³²
There was much local grumbling, particularly from the proprietors of Whitehaven's many guesthouses, who complained that they would have to convert multiple sets. But on the day of the switchover, hordes of people were
seen emerging from the town's electrical shops with set-top boxes. In the early hours of 14 November 2007, the analogue signal disappeared, painlessly, while most of Whitehaven was sleeping. At 3.27 a.m., all the digital channels arrived, just in time for a repeat of
The Jeremy Kyle Show
on ITV1. The
Coronation Street
bug had proved as phantasmal as the Millennium Bug, its nomenclatural ancestor.

In the analogue era, television had depended on the power of the transmitter, and how far its radio waves could reach from the top of a hill. In the digital era, television was not so reliant on geography and landscape; as well as radiating from transmitters, it could live on internet catch-up sites and be downloaded on to laptops or mobile phones. Those raised in an analogue world were familiar with each medium's flawed attempt to transcribe a message from one physical object to another: the white noise of the radio, the hiss of the cassette tape, the crackle of stylus on scratched vinyl or the flicker of electrons against the back of the cathode ray tube were all part of the listening or viewing experience. But digital media stored information in binary ones and noughts that bore no telltale trace of whichever material objects were used to carry and decipher these abstract symbols. On a cathode ray tube, the numberless electrons had to be continually fired at the back of the phosphor-coated screen to make each millisecond of television picture and pull off the illusion of persistent vision, so no two televisual moments were exactly the same. On a digital television, each pixel was the product of binary code that could be endlessly decoded and revisited. Television no longer needed to move from one place to another at a unique moment in time. Now it seemed to come from nowhere and be everywhere, as omnipresent as the air.

Television was losing its connection with place. As the digital switch-over happened gradually by ITV region, the disappearance of the analogue signal marked the effective demise of these regions, which had essentially been defined by the reach of the analogue transmitters.
This nationalisation of television, an unintended side effect of the digital revolution, passed largely without comment, probably because ITV's regions had been losing their identities for years anyway. Their in-vision announcers, a quaint throwback to the BBC years of McDonald Hobley and Sylvia Peters, had disappeared by the late 1980s, and their start-up themes had been rendered superfluous with the arrival of twenty-four-hour TV. Their proud idents and fanfares had given way to the cleaner, blander, corporate fonts of ITV. Finally, in the early 2000s, the visual identity of the regions vanished entirely into a set of branded idents for ‘ITV1': gnomic visual poems showing people hugging trees, examining their beer bellies or falling asleep on trains.

Ironically, the ITV regions had enjoyed a brand loyalty of which the modern digital channels could only dream. Some Midlands viewers carried on referring to ITV as ATV, while in the Fens they still called it Anglia. These invented regions had taken on a tangible truth. Anglia had somehow united its vast catchment area into an imagined community, to the extent that other organisations, from Anglia Ruskin University to Anglia Railways, had copied its historically spurious name. The north-west remained defined by its ITV region, evoked often in the weather forecast (‘a bit of a gloomy day in Granadaland'). Tyne Tees, according to the historian Richard Lewis, had played a crucial role in scripting a collective identity for that recent invention, the north-east.
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But now the analogue signal was fading away, and the idea of the regions along with it.