Armchair Nation (59 page)

ITV companies had long used their regional news programmes to forge an identity and lock viewers into their early evening schedules – especially in the early days of commercial television, when there was no BBC regional news programme until BBC Midlands began in 1964. These programmes were often appealingly untutored and amateurish. They were usually fronted by middle-aged men of long service who were given the time and space to develop their eccentricities. Mike Neville, the long-running presenter of the BBC's
Look North
and then Tyne Tees'
North East Tonight
, had begun his career as an announcer, where he developed the skill of filling in if a programme underran, what he called ‘talking to a clock'.
³⁴
Because he instinctively
knew that five seconds equalled fifteen or twenty words, he became expert at weaving in extempore witticisms during breakdowns. The Durham folksinger Jez Lowe's song, ‘Mike Neville Said It (So It Must Be True)', a poignant account of hearing about pit closures on the regional news, conveys the affection that Neville inspired in north-easterners, a sense that he was on their side against the world. In the song, Neville breaks the news that ‘our mining days are through' as gently he can, before moving on to a story about a sheep that sings the blues, ‘even though inside you know his heart was burning'.

Eric Wallace of Border's nightly
Lookaround
, known affectionately to locals (after the Cumbrian dialect words for ‘news' and ‘look') as ‘Crack'n'deek-about', was almost as loved as Neville. The local-accented Wallace had worked on the programme since 1968 and often waylaid viewers with accounts of his early life working at Carr's biscuit factory in Carlisle. He had covered the warp and weft of the region's life, from UFO sightings on the Solway Firth to Lake Windermere's version of the Loch Ness Monster, from the Lockerbie disaster to the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001: long, heartbreaking interviews with distraught farmers who had been forced to burn all their cattle, conveying the region's distress in a way that the national news could not. Like his north-west counterpart, Tony Wilson, a Cambridge-educated polymath who founded the experimental Factory Records and the Haçienda nightclub while incongruously presenting
Granada Reports
, Wallace had an unlikely avant-garde hinterland: an aficionado of German expressionist cinema, he had directed a number of arthouse films including
I Can Lick Any Girl in the House
(1976) and
Stimmung
(1986).

But regional news was dying and in Cumbria, the first English region to switch over to digital, it was dying fastest. Just as White-haven was losing its analogue signal, ITV announced that Border and Tyne Tees would merge their regional news programmes. Had Wallace, who had died in 2004, still been presenting it, there would have been an even fiercer campaign against
Lookaround
's axing. As it was, thousands of ‘Save
Lookaround
' stickers and hours of petition-gathering outside the region's supermarkets failed to save
it. On Shrove Tuesday, 24 February 2009, the long-serving presenter, Fiona Armstrong, seemed close to tears during the last ever edition from Carlisle as she made small talk with her co-host about making pancakes later on. The next day, the new super-regional news began broadcasting from a Gateshead business park, presented, as all regional programmes now seemed to be, with the bland professionalism of a rolling news channel. The big cities of the north-east now got the bulk of the news, and Workington AFC's football results would probably never be read out on TV again.

Intermittent mutterings had long been heard that television was a metropolitan medium which overlooked the country's rural fringes, mutterings which now became more insistent. The social divide between town and country was particularly fractious in the New Labour years, with many political arguments – on foxhunting, supermarkets, fuel prices, second homes – having this undeclared civil war at their heart. New Labour, associated with a north London metropolitan media class, insisted that people in the countryside had most to gain from digital television, because analogue reception was worse in rural areas and those in listed cottages could not always get planning permission for a satellite dish. The language was of digital ‘exclusion', a New Labour catchword applied to everything from social deprivation to school expulsion to TV reception. Like other forms of New Labourite modernisation, the benefits of digital were assumed to be universal and apolitical; anyone clinging to analogue was ‘excluded', left out of the inevitable march towards the future – a digital ‘have-not', or, worse, a refusenik.

With low inflation and steady growth, these years were ones of prosperity for much of urban and suburban Britain, but they also coincided with a crisis in farming and rural communities, from foot and mouth to a longer-term problem of overproduction, with farmers relying heavily but barely subsisting on EU and government subsidies.
The Countryside Alliance, formed in 1997 to oppose an anticipated ban on hunting with dogs, sought to tap into this wider sense that a way of life was under threat and that the modern urbanites who bought meat wrapped in supermarket plastic did not understand the bucolic ways of life and death. Many rural people felt that their lives were unrepresented on television, particularly since the farming programmes that used to be on Sunday lunchtimes had all disappeared in the 1980s, an especially urbanite decade on television. ‘You'd watch the burgeoning Channel 4 and it was all telling you about London,' recalled Darren Flook, born in 1971 in the industrial, coalmining countryside outside of Newcastle. ‘It was sending out a signal to the entire country saying: leave your shitty villages and come and live here in wonderful media-land and you'll have a life of never-ending clubbing and glamour and wonderfulness.'
³⁵

This resentment about the neglect of rural life found a focus when, in 1999, the BBC cancelled
One Man and His Dog
. This programme, a kind of rustic, alfresco snooker that fashioned slow pleasures out of watching shepherds guide sheep into pens, had been an unexpected hit in the 1980s; but its viewing figures had dropped to under a million and it seemed to be coming to the end of its natural life. Its presenter Phil Drabble had already left the programme, saying ‘it gets boring watching dogs chase stroppy sheep around the same sort of course'. But its cancellation coincided with a wider sense that television had forgotten the countryside. The culture secretary, Chris Smith, said it was a ‘wonderful programme … which I have watched with pleasure over the years' and axing it was a ‘big mistake'. The
Daily Telegraph
began a campaign to reinstate
One Man and His Dog
, which was meant to culminate in a march of shepherds and their dogs on BBC Television Centre, although this never materialised. Robin Page, the show's presenter, accused Television Centre of being dominated by a ‘metrocentric élite' with an ‘inner-M25 mindset'.
³⁶

There were sporadic attempts to heal the growing sense of estrangement between town and country. In 2000, the BBC2 controller Jane Root, mindful of the protests about
One Man and His Dog
, commissioned
Clarissa and the Countryman
, in which the TV chef
Clarissa Dickson Wright and the Border farmer Johnny Scott travelled round talking to country people like gun-makers and shrimp-fishers. Its model was Jack Hargreaves's programme
Out of Town
, which had ended in 1982, just as ‘out of town' was becoming a prefix for ‘supermarket'. Evoking Hargreaves's example, the presenters intended their programme to help bridge the gulf of understanding between rural and urban viewers. Instead, it seemed to underline the divisions, getting good audiences but angering others with its coverage of fox hunting in the Cheviots and hare coursing in the Lancashire marshes. The ninety-year-old Barbara Castle complained in the House of Lords about the programme's claim that the banning of hunting would destroy rural life. ‘To hear some people talk, you would think that none of us who supports a total ban on hunting with dogs had ever seen a blade of grass,' she said.
³⁷

On
Out of Town
, Jack Hargreaves had held together competing groups with an interest in rural life, such as second-home owners, blood sports enthusiasts, weekend anglers, environmentalists and self-sufficiency enthusiasts. His emollient personality helped, but so did the less fractious rural politics of the time. Dickson Wright, instead, had to be assigned her own special branch officer after receiving death threats from animal rights activists. The
Countryfile
presenter, Adam Henson, also received death threats after presenting a studiedly neutral report on a proposed badger cull. ‘We are going to burn your children,' one of them said. Some rural viewers, meanwhile, felt that ‘welly telly' like
Countryfile
and
Springwatch
presented the countryside as a playground refuge for urbanites rather than a living, working entity.
³⁸

In 2005, the Canadian writer Craig Taylor returned to the Suffolk village where Ronald Blythe had written
Akenfield
and Peter Hall had made the film of the same name, based loosely on Blythe's 1969 book. Shown on ITV one Sunday evening in January 1975, Hall's film drew 15 million viewers, twice the anticipated number. Despite a challenging score by Michael Tippett, improvised dialogue and some strong Suffolk dialect from the amateur cast (‘I toowd yew that hehf ewr agoo'), it seems, in a period of stagflation and rising energy prices, to
have left an impression on desensitised urban viewers attracted to the simpler life. The next day Peter Hall's taxi driver congratulated him on
Akenfield
on the way to the theatre, and Princess Margaret phoned him to say she didn't understand why anyone had complained it was hard to understand the dialect, because she hadn't found it hard at all. ‘Though of course,' she added, ‘one did grow up there, in Norfolk at any rate.'
³⁹

Craig Taylor noted that the broad Suffolk accent captured by Blythe and Hall had now been practically snuffed out by TV, making way for the estuarine vowels and glottal stops of south-eastern English, just as the young had also rejected the western rolled ‘r' in the television era because of its country bumpkin associations. Dennis Potter, who had written in 1962 about his love of the Forest of Dean dialect – a rich mix of ‘the speed and lilt of the Welsh borderland, the broad, lengthened vowel sounds and buttery emphases of the West country and many distinctive local words and rhythms of its own' – would have found a similar levelling effect in his homeland: not the sort of common culture he had craved.
⁴⁰

‘People don't look at the fields now … They're living urban lives in the countryside – not just here, but all over the place,' said one of Craig Taylor's interviewees in Akenfield, the 83-year-old Ronald Blythe himself. ‘Because, after all is said and done, the same television programmes, same newscasters, same everything are seen by everyone in Britain, every night, from the Orkneys to Cornwall.' At nearby Otley Agricultural College, they were treating the spread of gardening makeover programmes as a recruiting tool and a source of jobs for their graduates. ‘Horticulture,' the prospectus said, ‘is the new rock'n'roll.'
⁴¹

A year after Taylor went back to Akenfield, the broadcaster Eric Robson returned to his birthplace, Newcastleton, a Scottish village just a few miles from the English border. One evening, at the top of Holm Hill, the summit overlooking the village, he struck up a conversation with an elderly man, muffled against the cold, and told him about the book he was writing, on whether the border between the two countries still mattered. The only border that amounted to
anything, the old man replied, was between STV's Loch Lomond-set soap opera
Take the High Road
and
Coronation Street
. ‘Television has rubbed us all flat,' he said.
⁴²

Sheepdog trials were still shown on digital channels, and there was even the odd
One Man and His Dog
special on BBC2. But the rural people who were unhappy with the depiction of country life on television did not seem to want their interests hived off into specialist channels hidden away in the higher reaches of the channel numbers, seen only by those adventurous with the buttons on their remote controls. They wanted the main channels to convey the realities of rural life to themselves and others: television as common culture.