Armchair Nation (11 page)

As well as being the controller of BBC television, Collins was a writer and something of an amateur ethnographer, given to extrapolating the hidden life of his viewers from tiny visual clues. This side interest in domestic anthropology was evident in one of his first published pieces, written in 1929, when he was twenty-one, for the
News Chronicle
. In ‘London from a Bus Stop', he observed the capital from the top of a double-decker bus late one afternoon, watching lights go on in the windows of rows of suburban houses, blinds being drawn and ‘the tired city clerk push open the little gate of his small front garden and put his latchkey into his front-door'. In 1945 he had published a sprawling, bestselling novel called
London Belongs to Me
. ‘If you start walking westwards in the early morning from somewhere
down in Wapping or the Isle of Dogs,' he wrote in its preface, ‘by evening you will still be on the march, still in the midst of shabby little houses – only somewhere over by Hammersmith by then.'
¹⁹
In the novel, Collins gradually reduces this immense, everyday sameness to readability through the intricate lives of his characters and their chance encounters with each other.

When he became controller of television in 1947, Collins retained this desire to imagine mass society and what was going on in those ‘shabby little houses'. His office on the top floor of Alexandra Palace was like an eyrie, with a bay window out of which he could see the endless rows of redbrick north London artisans' villas arranged in parallel lines. He had a television in the office and when it was on, he would look out of his window and practise his ‘stout Cortez act' by ‘gazing with a wild surmise into the blue', wondering who else in this immense city might be watching too.
²⁰

Whenever he journeyed back to London on the train, Collins's spirits rose when he looked out of the window and saw the new pattern of H-shaped aerials peppering the skyline: ‘Row upon row of small houses, where a year or so ago there was nothing to be seen but the usual huddle of cowls and chimney-pots, now carry these queer antennae on their rooftops as though every home were displaying some new brand of talisman.' His excitement, he wrote, stemmed from the fact that he felt he knew something about the life that went on in the homes beneath the aerials, and could almost spirit himself inside to look at the family sitting in front of the set, a sort of ‘ghost across the suburbs' peering over 100,000 different shoulders at everything from Shakespeare plays to cookery demonstrations. On a trip to Sutton Coldfield just before the transmitter opened, Collins spotted a small cottage with a green gate and an aerial sticking out just above the eaves. He found himself touched by this ‘simple act of faith' in anticipation of ‘that magical moment on December 17 when the box in the corner is going to spring into life'.
²¹

Collins was a populist who, before moving to television, had headed the new Light Programme on radio, launching well-loved programmes like
Dick Barton – Special Agent, Housewives' Choice
and
Have a Go!
He was a great champion of the newer medium, soon to resign in frustration at the low priority given to it by the BBC, to become a key player in the development of ITV. A large part of his job, he felt, was to persuade the people in the modest villas he saw spread out before him to go to the radio dealers and put down a deposit on a television set. In 1950, shortly after resigning his post, he rebuked T. S. Eliot, who, after returning from the US where ‘the television habit' was now entrenched, had written to
The Times
to express his apprehension. Collins's response was that seventeenth-century Puritans had been anxious about the theatre-going habit, and Victorians about the novel-reading habit. Eliot's fears were ‘merely anti-Caxtonism brought up to date'.
²²

The Sutton Coldfield mast opened just before Christmas 1949. At 7.55 p.m. on Saturday 17 December, viewers waited in vain for the tuning picture as McDonald Hobley said they were ‘having a bit of trouble', and an empty screen eventually dissolved to show Sylvia Peters in Birmingham, apologetically welcoming the Midlands into the TV family. There followed a variety revue from the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, featuring Stanley Holloway and Jolly ‘Dynamite' Jefferson, and a game of ice hockey between Earls Court Rangers and Nottingham Panthers from the Empress Hall, London. ‘The interim programme with music, showing the course of a river from source to sea, was done with painted backcloths and seemed both slow and dull,' said the
Manchester Guardian
. However, it conceded, ‘a talk on “Gates”, warning the child about the dangers of leaving gates open in the country, was attractively done'.
²³

Some thought the spread of television should not be a priority in these austere times. The general secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union criticised the policy of ‘TV cake for all' while there was a shortage of telephones. It was absurd, he said, that a family within seventy miles of Birmingham could sit in comfort and watch a cabaret show in London but would have to search for a red telephone box to call a doctor a couple of miles away. The telephone famine, he feared, might not end for another twenty years.
²⁴
He was overly optimistic: in 1972, 200,000 people were still on the waiting list for telephones.

But such dissenting voices were rare. The first Sutton Coldfield broadcast went far beyond its intended range. Pictures reached a busy main road in Moss Side in the south of Manchester, and the southern suburbs of Liverpool, although nearer the centre the traffic got in the way of reception. At Thorne in Yorkshire, eighty miles from the mast, an audience of 200 watched a single set in the town hall, with only slight interference from passing buses and a nearby fridge. Eric Foulkes, a radio engineer in Rhyl, reported that the pictures had made it all the way over the Clwydian hills and were only spoiled by flashes caused by car ignitions. At 7 a.m. the following morning, a Sunday, George Samways, a Cheadle Hulme radio dealer, was woken by a telephone call from a man who had seen television the previous night on a communal set and wanted his own set installed straightaway. By lunchtime, twenty more people had phoned with orders, too eager to wait until Samways's shop opened on Monday.
²⁵

The opening of a new transmitter tended to revive the habit of communal viewing. A Midlands viewer was watching the 1950 FA Cup Final at home when he was interrupted by two callers who asked if they could join him, and who said they belonged to a larger group that had split up and gone in search of television aerials. When a boxing match was televised from Birmingham, there were similar groups roaming the city's streets and willing to pay admission money, about two shillings and sixpence being the going rate, to enter houses with aerials.
²⁶

‘Already some two millions are held nightly by our modern Ancient Mariner, spellbinding in its darkened corner,' wrote Fyfe Robertson in the
Picture Post
in February 1951. ‘This newest bread-and-circus toy is irresistible. Though it will not replace tallow candles in the official index, it will join the pools in the unofficial cost of living.' Robertson conjectured hopefully that it would create ‘a rounded understanding of common interests in the baffling world of human endeavour … Television could most tellingly remind us that duodenal ulcers and young love and dandruff and the way we feel after a good meal are much the same everywhere.'
²⁷
Robertson was wrong on one point. Five years later, televisions and replacement cathode ray tubes did replace tallow candles in the retail price index, together with other items no
longer in everyday use, such as rabbits, turnips and distemper. In 1957, the rise of television was also decisive in the demise of that once best-selling photojournalism magazine,
Picture Post
, and Robertson had to find alternative employment as a reporter on BBC television's
Tonight
.

Working out where the new television masts were to go was much more complicated than simply picking the highest hills in the most populated areas. Unlike light, which travels only in straight lines, electromagnetic waves behave in strange and stubborn ways, bending round obstacles or bumps in the landscape, passing through trees, buildings and even hills, and reaching further than normal during electrical storms or other freak conditions in the upper atmosphere. Areas immediately below the transmitter can also suffer from signal ‘passover', when the line-of-sight radio waves fail to percolate downwards quickly enough from the high ground. Even the subsoil can affect reception: granite, for instance, forms a blanket under the earth that traps the radio waves. The first sign of television's arrival in an area was, therefore, the sight of captive balloons, with TV aerials attached, suddenly appearing on likely hilltops and escarpment edges, while a BBC van travelled round the area seeing how far the test signals could reach.

This is how a union flag and a BBC flag came to be flying above a soaring new mast at Holme Moss in the Pennines, 1,700 feet above sea level on the border between Derbyshire and Yorkshire. It was a lonely spot where only sheep, their fleeces grimy from the industrial breezes coming over from Manchester, grazed obliviously. ‘The giant stays which hold it, tethered to their concrete bases, stride away between the banks of the black moss for all the world like one of Wells's Martian machines arrested in mid-career,' wrote the
Manchester Guardian
. ‘The mast itself from a little distance looks as fragile and filigree and ten times more dramatic than the Skylon.'
²⁸

The Skylon was the starkly modern, cigar-shaped metal folly erected on London's South Bank for the Festival of Britain earlier that
year. Like the new breed of tethered TV mast, it had a steel lattice-work frame supported on cables, so that it seemed to float above the ground – the joke being that, like the UK economy, it had no visible means of support. Posters and mugs of the Skylon became collectors' items and it was used to promote the biro, the new pen it allegedly resembled. Holme Moss, which similarly seemed to float above the earth and was also spectacular when lit up at night with warning lights, generated a similar excitement.

The arrival of television in the north of England was an important moment in the symbolic forging of a postwar national identity. In an era before motorways and shuttle flights, southerners still regarded the north as another country, and carried over from the 1930s an idea of the region as one of slums, smokestacks and dole queues. Many northerners, while baulking at these stereotypes, felt distant from London or ‘that Lunnon'. Leonard Mosley in the
Daily Express
contrasted the coming of television to Luton and Blackburn. For Luton, which was only an hour by train from London and which shared the early release of new films with the West End, television was ‘a pleasant dollop of cream on top of an already rich entertainment cake'; for Blackburn, where Charlie Chaplin's silent film
City Lights
was still showing twenty years after it was made, and an evening trip to Manchester was a rare and middle-class treat, its coming was momentous. For the north, television would be ‘a revolution in the routine of a million lives'. Among those northerners who could already get television, Mosley had met pub regulars earnestly discussing the merits of Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss's comedy shtick on
Turn it Up
, and miners who loved the ballet dancers. ‘Regular whippets, some of these kids,' he overheard one say.

Mosley, a Lancashire expat living in London, then began to undermine his own argument by being offended on the north's behalf. He had detected with rising irritation the insult to the north in nearly every newspaper reference to the opening of Holme Moss, particularly the southerner who talked of ‘the inevitable increase in cheap entertainment, the debasing of cultural values' which this new audience would demand. Mosley predicted instead a howl of protest from the north when it saw what the south had been putting up with: ‘TV debased by
the north? This home of the Hallé Orchestra, of the Liverpool Rep., of Manchester Public Library, of Wilfred Pickles, black puddings, Eccles cakes? The north will drag TV's standards up from the mud.'
²⁹

But there was no such howl of protest on Holme Moss's opening night, as Alexandra Palace offered an extended taster of its regular features for new viewers. A genial, bearded chef, Philip Harben, known for his striped butcher's apron, one-handed way of breaking an egg and habit of talking to his Prestige saucepans, made a three-minute omelette. Annette Mills sat at a grand piano and introduced the string puppet Muffin the Mule, who danced on the piano top and whispered in her ear, against a white background so you couldn't see his strings (much). The comic actor Eric Barker, presenter of the sketch show
The Eric Barker Half-Hour
, warned northern viewers not to adjust their sets during the still frequent technical hitches.