Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (47 page)

Contrary to the fears, the assumption that new money only chased old art was quickly disproved. The record for a living artist reached $20.68 million in November 1989 when Sotheby’s in New
York sold De Kooning’s abstract work
Interchange
to a Japanese collector. At one stage, when the bidding had stalled at $1.7 million, a Swedish bidder audaciously upped the ante and
got the price moving again by shouting ‘$6 million dollars!’
³¹
High-end art had joined private equity finance as the preserve of
international risk-takers, unafraid to play ‘chicken’ when bidding for trophy assets. What was more, the
new giants of financial success and excess were keen to
sponsor as well as to buy. The Turner Prize was launched in 1984 for ‘the person who, in the opinion of the jury, has made the greatest contribution to art in Britain in the previous twelve
months’. By 1987, the prize was being underwritten by Drexel Burnham Lambert, the US investment bank at the centre of a takeover mania using the sort of methods that Gordon Gekko would have
endorsed in
Wall Street
. In 1985, Charles Saatchi, whose firm of Saatchi & Saatchi had become the most famous name in British advertising and held the Conservative Party account, opened
with his wife, Doris, the Saatchi Gallery in a converted paint factory off London’s Abbey Road. It became the showcase for the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the nineties, many of whom in
the mid-eighties were about to enrol as students at Goldsmith’s College and for whom Saatchi’s early promotion of contemporary American art would provide a source of inspiration. In
both the creative enmity it spurred and the sponsorship and patronage it generated, Thatcherism defined the culture of its times.

Next Programme Follows Shortly

In 1979, Britain had only three television channels and, on average, 70 per cent of viewers were tuned to ITV.
^EN19
A decade later,
broadcasting was undergoing a transformation, with four terrestrial channels supplemented by a plethora of subscription channels reaching homes through cable and satellite. The transformation was
made possible by technological advances. At the start of the eighties, a household wanting to receive images directly from satellites in space would have needed a 10-foot-diameter dish, but by 1989
a dish scarcely the size of a dustbin lid would suffice. But while improving technology made satellite TV a practical proposition, it did not mean there was any consensus that it was desirable
– prophesiers of ‘more is worse’ warned that greater choice would diminish standards and Americanize British culture. Having waxed enthusiastically about the ‘white
heat’ of a coming technological revolution in 1963, former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson chaired a committee on future developments in broadcasting in 1979 and duly warned the Commons
that Britain would shortly be subjected to ‘a foreign cultural invasion through the satellite’, which would undermine the quality of the BBC and the advertising revenue of ITV – a
prospect summed up in the next day’s
Daily Express
front page as ‘TV PIRATES FROM SPACE’.
³²

Such were not the attitudes of the Thatcher government, which, ignoring
calls to preserve the status quo, introduced permissive legislation encouraging new companies to
enter the broadcasting market. This expansion might not have happened had Labour been in power. The media policy adopted by Labour’s National Executive Committee in 1982 pledged to block any
channel that relied on subscription charges, because ‘we believe that all citizens should receive an equal public service regardless of wealth and geographical location’.
³³
The problem with this stance was that the costs of starting up a satellite broadcasting company on a scale to compete with existing terrestrial broadcasters
proved to be far beyond what advertising revenue alone could generate, hence the need to charge for the service.

There was little sign of this ideological fault line during the passage of the Broadcasting Act 1980, which led to the creation of Channel 4. Rather, there was broad cross-party consensus
towards establishing the first national television channel since BBC 2’s launch in 1964. In September 1979, the new Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, expressed the Conservative
government’s ambition for Channel 4 to broadcast ‘programmes appealing to and, we hope, stimulating tastes and interests not adequately provided for on the existing
channels’.
³⁴
While this could be taken to mean offering the microphone to racial, sexual or political minority groups, the criteria were
sensibly not spelt out. It would be publicly owned, via the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), which as the state regulator of commercial television was ultimately answerable to the Home
Office, but funded by the fifteen regional companies that comprised the ITV network, which, in turn, would recoup the cost by selling its advertising space in their own regions. In other respects,
Channel 4 was intended to stimulate greater competition; it would commission programmes rather than make them itself. This dependence upon independent production companies encouraged
free-marketeers to hope that, by diversifying the number of television’s content providers, not only might a more entrepreneurial spirit animate the industry but the trade unions’ grip
on it might be slackened. The greatest controversy prior to Channel 4’s launch was caused by the Conservatives’ reneging on a promise to establish the fourth channel in Wales as a
Welsh-language broadcaster, a decision that sparked in the principality a campaign against paying the licence fee, attacks on transmitters, and even a threat by Plaid Cymru’s president,
Gwynfor Evans, to go on hunger strike until the government caved in. This it duly did, and the Welsh-language S4C was launched the day before Channel 4 went live.

On the eve of launch, Channel 4’s chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, assumed the austere public service mantle of the BBC’s first director general, insisting that ‘Channel 4 is
the last Reithian Channel! Reithian!’
³⁵
What Sir John Reith would have made of the opening schedule on 2 November 1982 can only be imagined:
it began with the anagram-themed quiz show
Countdown
before moving on to
Brookside
, a soap opera set in suburban Liverpool, while the centrepiece of the evening
schedule was the first Film on Four,
Walter
, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Ian McKellen as a mentally disabled man, and including scenes of homosexual molestation in a psychiatric
ward. These first offerings set the tone for what was to follow: the critically acclaimed
Walter
demonstrated the channel’s determination to tackle subject matter that mainstream
entertainment had generally avoided, while
Brookside
and
Countdown
retained large audiences over the next twenty years, the latter still occupying its mid-afternoon slot thirty years
later. As it transpired, the most embarrassing failure in the early weeks was less with the programmes than the commercials – of which there were insufficient to fill the time slots allocated
to them. The refusal of the actors’ union, Equity, to permit the screening of any adverts featuring professional actors until their repeat performance fees had been improved ensured that only
a few amateurish sales pitches were aired, followed by light music and a test card assuring viewers that the ‘next programme follows shortly’.

Assessing the channel’s success depended upon how the viewing figures were interpreted. Its remit to cater for non-mainstream tastes necessarily ensured that it could scarcely hope to
appeal as broadly as the well-established fare offered by the BBC and ITV. That it managed to attract 23 million viewers per week was therefore an achievement, albeit modified by the reality that
few watched for more than short periods, hence its average share of total weekly television viewing was only 4 per cent (its lowest recorded share came in the week following Christmas 1982 when it
managed just a 2.8 per cent share). It was on this basis that
The Sun
began taunting it as ‘The Channel that Nobody Watches’. While many of its early programmes failed to attract
a discernible following, a few did capture the imagination – in particular,
Treasure Hunt
, though this was attributed to the trailing cameraman’s rear-angle shots of Anneka Rice
leaping energetically from helicopters in search of hidden clues, while from a distant studio semi-sedentary contestants ungraciously urged her to get a move on. It was not the new channel’s
dabbling in the sort of game shows that could easily have appeared on ITV that embroiled it in controversy so much as its endeavours to honour the remit to accommodate marginalized or alternative
tastes. When it was revealed that New Year’s Day 1983 would be marked with
One in Five
– a show for gay people – the right-wing Tory MP John Carlisle went so far as to
argue that this was grounds for shutting the broadcaster down: ‘The channel is an offence to public taste and decency,’ the member for Luton West protested, ‘and should be drummed
off the air forthwith.’
³⁶
In the event, the programme’s viewing figures – at 858,000 – represented somewhat less than one
fifth of the population, though they were nevertheless sufficient to ensure that Jeremy Isaacs was collared during a dinner at the
German embassy by the employment secretary,
Norman Tebbit, who assured him: ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know, doing all these programmes for homosexuals and such. Parliament never meant that sort of thing. The different
interests you are supposed to cater for are not like that at all. Golf and sailing and fishing. Hobbies. That’s what we intended.’
³⁷

Whatever the intentions of the politicians who legislated it into life, Channel 4 demonstrated a preparedness to push boundaries that the BBC and ITV had preferred only to brush against. In
doing so, it remained accountable for what it broadcast to the IBA, against whom Mary Whitehouse unsuccessfully brought a prosecution for dereliction of duty when it permitted the channel to screen
the violent borstal drama
Scum
, which had originally been commissioned – and then dropped – by the BBC. In particular, Channel 4 pioneered showing X-rated/certificate 18 films on
national television, albeit restricting the range to those with artistic pretentions. These included Derek Jarman’s discordant vision of punk Britain in
Jubilee
and the unapologetic
homoeroticism of his
Sebastiane
, which the IBA permitted on condition that Channel 4 electronically inserted a masking strip over the film’s one erect penis. There was no covering up
blasphemy, however, and the regulator initially banned Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
from being shown. Eventually, Jeremy Isaacs came up with a means of showing films that some viewers
might find offensive when he devised a small red triangle to appear continuously in the top left-hand corner of the screen to symbolize that the film contained adult content. Initially, the
triangle also appeared in the TV listings, but was soon removed when it became clear that it was encouraging higher viewing figures than would otherwise have been expected – the only rational
explanation for why almost 2.4 million people switched on after midnight to watch
Themroc
, a French film about cave-dwellers with no dialogue, which in September 1986 became the first film
to be branded with the mark of Isaacs. Having proved the law of unintended consequences, the experiment was discontinued the following year.

Meanwhile, the widely anticipated arrival of major new competition from cable and satellite technology failed to materialize. In the United States, cable had taken off and expectations were
similarly raised in Britain when the Broadcasting Act 1980 removed the legal restriction that required cable companies to carry only BBC and ITV. The immediate results met neither the
investors’ expectations nor the fears of the nation’s cultural and moral guardians. There was little interest in a channel owned by the
Daily Mirror
’s proprietor, Robert
Maxwell, nor even for Premiere, a film channel backed by the main Hollywood studios. The other option was Satellite Television plc, which was set up by Brian Haynes, a former producer at Thames
Television. Despite its name, the size of the dishes necessary to receive it meant that its miniscule British audience watched it through cable (what
followers it did attract
were mainly in West Germany and the Netherlands). Its claim to represent the future was undermined by its preference for screening repeats – though reruns of
Please Sir!
were the
inevitable consequence of a business model that relied on advertising revenue (scrambler technology was still insufficiently advanced to make a subscription service impregnable) for a channel with
a tiny audience. In 1983, with its debts mounting and its start-up capital exhausted, Satellite Television was not an attractive proposition, which was why Rupert Murdoch was able to buy a majority
stake in it for £1 (plus its debts). His thinking was simple: ‘When it was suggested to have a second ITV, they went for an upmarket choice – Channel 4, and this simply extended
the monopoly. This was, I believed, enormously vulnerable to attack. So all the time, I was looking for a way of giving the public an alternative.’
³⁸
But after four years of owning Sky (as it was ridd), and with its accumulated losses exceeding £10 million, it was still far from clear that the great newspaper
proprietor had much more idea what to do with satellite TV than had Brian Haynes. When the IBA rejected Murdoch’s bid for the sole franchise it was offering to a national direct satellite
broadcaster, it seemed he had backed a loser.

The lead ought to have come from Murdoch’s bête noir, the BBC, which in 1982 had been allocated two satellite channels. However, the corporation regarded the expense as greater than
the opportunity and withdrew from the race. Instead, in 1986 the IBA awarded the franchise – and with it a monopoly – to British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), a consortium originally
comprising Granada, Anglia Television, Pearson, Virgin Records and Alan Sugar’s company, Amstrad. BSB had not only seen off Murdoch but DBS UK, a consortium that included Michael Green of
Carlton Television, London Weekend Television (which shared with Thames the ITV franchise in London) and Saatchi & Saatchi. Where DBS UK had so underestimated the expense of a satellite
operation that they imagined they could offer an advertising-funded free-to-air service, BSB recognized that quality and profitability would come only by perfecting subscription television
encryption. The start-up costs, after all, were enormous, with BSB (under-)estimating that it would need to raise at least £450 million of high-risk capital, a sum that made it second only to
Eurotunnel as the largest private sector start-up in British history. Thus the security of knowing it had the sole franchise to operate was vital. But in granting the right to a monopoly, the IBA
had made conditions, tying BSB to using a new microchip transmitting system, D-MAC. Championed by both the British government and the European Commission, D-MAC was being devised by IBA technicians
to offer the high-definition picture quality that was thought to be necessary to trump encroaching Japanese competition and to set the standard for the future. Unfortunately, it was also costly and
time-consuming to perfect, thereby
delaying BSB’s launch from the intended date of September 1989 to April 1990. An additional regulatory condition was that BSB had to
pay £170 million to construct and launch its own Marcopolo satellites. These satellites had little spare capacity for adding extra channels. As Michael Grade, who was then at London Weekend
Television, subsequently put it: ‘It was incredible regulatory and government intervention that told them which satellite to use, how to do it, what they wanted. You can’t run a
business, a new start-up business, on the basis of civil servants and politicians telling you what the structure is going to be.’
³⁹
It was
exactly the sort of prescriptive culture that Murdoch scented an opportunity to undermine.