Armchair Nation (61 page)

But perhaps Brown's viewing of
The X Factor
still carried a trace of his background as a son of the Manse. For instead of watching just for entertainment, he drew improving morals from it, and sought to link it to the New Labourite politics of individual aspiration, his vision of what he called ‘an
X Factor
Britain'. ‘These shows,' he said, ‘are saying to people, “Look, if you've got a talent you don't have to know someone. You can just apply and we'll have a look at what you're like.”' Just as
The X Factor
was unearthing untapped talent, we needed to ‘eradicate failure across our education system' in order to ‘unlock all the talents of all of the people'.
⁵⁴

This eagerness of politicians to discuss their television viewing was relatively new. ‘None of our party leaders have television sets,' Tony Benn wrote in his diary in 1958. ‘How can one lead a great party unless one keeps in touch with the people?' The then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, although an astute performer on TV, did not own a set and, as the member of a distinguished publishing family, feared it would take the place of books. Harold Wilson and James Callaghan made rather arch references to their viewing of
Coronation Street
, and Margaret Thatcher claimed to be a fan of the Whitehall sitcom
Yes, Minister
but barely watched anything, acquiring her sense of television as an inefficient, complacent industry from the size of the crews that came to interview her. Tony Blair was the first prime minister fully to embrace television viewing as shorthand
for a contemporary and populist attitude, claiming to be a ‘modern man' who came from the generation of ‘the Beatles and colour TV', and revealing that
Pop Idol
was ‘regular family viewing'.
⁵⁵

Post-New Labour politicians, forty-somethings who grew up during the now tenderly recalled age of three-channel colour television, talked freely of their watching habits. During the 2010 general election campaign, David Cameron told the
Radio Times
of his youthful enthusiasms for
Tiswas, Neighbours
and the daytime quiz show
Going for Gold
.
⁵⁶
Several senior politicians claimed to enjoy
The X Factor
, and Tory strategists read its voting patterns as a way of gauging popular attitudes to people who worked in the public services, single mothers and asylum seekers – assuming, like Brown, that the show had something to teach them about democracy.

In fact,
The X Factor
was a grotesque caricature of democracy. It flattered viewers by reminding them constantly that the result was in their hands, while simultaneously getting them to pay to provide free product testing on new artists. It claimed to be empowering but was actually infantilising. The utopian promise of democratic interactivity held out at the start of the digital era was now reduced to a single phone call, a triumph of direct-line consumerism. Before viewers cast their votes, the show worked brazenly on their emotions through the sentimentality of the contestants' backstories, the casual pseudomalice of the judges, and the baying audience at the Circus Maximus of the auditions, belittling the deluded souls who wrongly presumed themselves to have the X factor.

‘Future generations,' the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt told the Royal Television Society, ‘will learn more about us from what we watched on TV than from any historian. And looking at our media in 2010, they will conclude that it was deeply, desperately centralised.' Why, asked Hunt, did Birmingham, Alabama have eight local TV stations but Birmingham, England had none? He praised one of the few local
channels, Witney TV, which had a policy of only covering positive news, from charity auctions to local fetes, as ‘a hyper-local initiative that is helping to prove that the Big Society is alive and well in David Cameron's constituency'.
⁵⁷

The Big Society was one of the big policy phrases of the new coalition government, its aim being ‘to create a climate that empowers local people and communities'. As an idea, the Big Society relied heavily on the positive connotations of the word ‘local': local communities, local charities, local sourcing, local post offices, local television. But the recent history of these local stations was unpromising. Hunt invited a merchant banker, Nicholas Shott, to review the commercial prospects of local TV. His report found that the two dozen local stations formed since the 1996 Broadcasting Act, which allowed new channels to take out restricted service licences to broadcast on spare analogue frequencies, had met with ‘limited success'.
⁵⁸
This was mandarin understatement, for almost all these companies had failed to attract enough investors or advertisers and had stopped broadcasting.

The Isle of Wight's TV-12 channel, for example, coming from a converted caretaker's bungalow in the grounds of a Newport school, had filmed local bands playing in pubs and an amateur dramatic society, The Ferret Theatre Company, putting on plays. But it was replaced by Solent TV which, even after it diluted its local content with cheap imports such as
Futbol Mundial
and old black-and-white films, also went out of business. Lanarkshire TV, broadcasting from an old lunatic asylum near Kirk O'Shotts with a sign outside saying ‘Brace yourself, Lanarkshire!', had a talent show called
Talented Lanarkshire
, a quiz night from Lanark Grammar School and a local constable appealing for witnesses in a small-scale version of
Crime-watch
. It was replaced by Thistle Television, which broadcast to a wider catchment area and interspersed this local material with Sky News and the QVC shopping channel. It too went bust.

The free market ethos that had governed the television industry since the 1990 Broadcasting Act treated viewers as rationally selective consumers – part of a general trend in cultural and political life. This ethos did not really see television watching as a collective activity;
instead, it saw the TV audience more as an accumulation of lots of individual consumer preferences. But this assumed that viewers always knew exactly what kind of television they liked before they watched it, as though they were choosing items from a supermarket aisle to put in their trolleys. When asked in consumer surveys, people did say they wanted more local news, and Waddington Village Television, that short-lived Granada experiment from the start of the satellite era, showed that very local TV could be surprisingly addictive. But in practice, when presented with the amateurish efforts of small stations trying to sustain themselves with low advertising revenue, viewers usually preferred to watch more lavishly produced network television.

That there was an untapped desire for local content among viewers was clear even from a national, primetime show like
The X Factor
. This started locally, with auditions held across the country, and regularly revealed the intensity of regional feeling, particularly in northern and Celtic areas. Two mediocre, tartan-tie wearing wedding singers from Ayr, the MacDonald Brothers, were kept in the show for weeks by millions of Scottish viewers who, as the letters page of the
Daily Record
attested, were considerably more exercised about their fate than about the survival of Gaelic language television. When the
America's Got Talent
judge Piers Morgan met Gordon Brown at the Treasury in November 2006, Brown expressed his irritation at the MacDonald Brothers' progress, saying ‘they're giving Scotland a bad name'.
⁵⁹
At the Liverpool auditions, the audience cheered contestants when they called out the names of the streets they lived in. Thousands of Northern Irish viewers complained when they could not get through on the phone lines to vote for Eoghan Quigg, a young singer from Dungiven in County Derry who had just been voted off the show – controversies about vote rigging being another recurrent aspect of the show's caricaturing of democracy.

And yet
The X Factor
was interested in the regions only insofar as they provided a provincial context from which the potential star could escape. Like Madame Bovary dreaming of Paris fashions or Chekhov's three sisters sighing for Moscow, those auditioning wished only
to be allowed to make the journey to boot camp or the London finals, and receive the beneficence of the head judges.
The X Factor
used bountiful central budgets to create a televisual sensorium with spectacular pyrotechnics, tension-creating music and the basso profundo of Peter Dickson, whose grandiloquent, pause-laden introductions made his voice as recognisable to British viewers as Richard Dimbleby's had been half a century earlier. A familiar ritual thus played out each Saturday night in autumn, with the magical incantations ‘calls cost 50p from landlines, mobile networks may vary' and ‘please ask the bill-payer's permission' causing millions of thumbs to press urgently on keypads, and the closing of the phone lines conducted with the solemnity of a sacred rite.
Talented Lanarkshire
could never have matched this sense of theatre.

The habit of communal television watching had proved surprisingly resilient. Despite confident predictions at the start of the digital era about the end of ‘linear viewing', most people still sat down each night and flicked through the channels to see what was on. As with video in the 1980s, catch-up sites and digital recorders had encouraged an element of time shifting but had not destroyed primetime or shared viewing. Some viewers were taking laptops to bed to watch programmes on the BBC iPlayer, or lying in with it at weekends, but otherwise the iPlayer had roughly the same peak hours as TV, with the same programmes being watched. And precisely because there was so much television available and so many ways of watching it, programme makers placed a high worth on family-centred, live television that would be watched and talked about across the nation.

The social networking site Twitter, with its improvised invention of the identifying hashtag, allowed vast virtual communities to meet to discuss shows while they were being broadcast: a universe of instant reaction and ongoing commentary, much of it inane and noisemaking, some of it funny and insightful. Television programmes began
publishing these hashtags in their opening titles to encourage viewers to tweet; producers followed the feed to get free market research. People still seemed to seek that ephemeral, undemanding togetherness created by watching the same programmes. While governments carried on reciting the mantra of individual choice, television pointed to the residual longing for a collective national life.

Shows like
The X Factor
revived Dennis Potter's vision of television as a mass democratic form that could break through Britain's traditional class and educational barriers. For better or worse, they were probably now the nearest we had to a common culture. ‘I sit in a first-class carriage on the Liverpool to Euston route,' complained the record producer Pete Waterman. ‘You might think my fellow commuters – businessmen, MPs, a clutch of lawyers and a smattering of City brokers – had better things to discuss on the two-hour journey. Our ailing economy perhaps, or the state of public transport? Apparently not. They witter endlessly about who's been ousted from [
The X Factor
] and whether they should have stayed put.' At a
Private Eye
lunch, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis and the former
Sunday Times
editor Andrew Neil were overheard having a prolonged and animated discussion – about who should win
The X Factor
.
⁶⁰

Potter would presumably have loathed
The X Factor
, although given the inbred contrarianism that led him to write occasional paeans of praise to
The Black and White Minstrel Show
, we cannot be sure. It is more likely that he would have been baffled and bewildered by it, and especially by the way it had become almost obligatory to watch and talk about it. Intelligent, literate people were now supposed to watch popular TV with savviness and sarcasm, not judgemental earnestness. Potter had high expectations of television and its viewers, which is why he felt so disappointed when it and they failed to live up to them. It is hard to imagine him viewing
The X Factor
with the requisite reserves of wry detachment and kitsch pleasure.