Armchair Nation (22 page)

The smaller ITV regional stations relied on still more makeshift identities. Tyne Tees Television, starting in January 1959, covered an area with a strong sense of its own apartness but little unity. The ‘northeast' was a recent and nebulous term, first used widely in the interwar years in connection with the Jarrow march and efforts to revive the region's economy. But Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside all had different newspapers, with no equivalent of, say, the
Yorkshire Post
or the
Western Mail
to unite the region. The new channel had provisionally been called ‘North East Television' but its owner, George Black, was worried that its acronym could be extrapolated to ‘Nettie', Geordie slang for toilet. For similar reasons, the name Tyne, Wear and Tees Television was also vetoed.
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The new company soothed the wounded feelings of Wearsiders by commissioning a start-up theme called the ‘Three Rivers Fantasy'.

Anglia Television, broadcasting across the flatlands from the Wash to the Thames Estuary, had an agricultural feel. Dick Joice, a tenant farmer dressed in cavalry twills and brogues, who did not own a television until he started appearing on it, was the face of the channel. As well as presenting
Farming Diary
, a programme interspersed with commercials for fertiliser and new types of sugar beet, he was the anchorman for
About Anglia
, the first regional news programme with its own weather forecast, keenly watched by the region's many farmers and fishermen. In one memorable edition in January 1963, in the middle of the coldest winter of the century, Joice presented
the programme from Wroxham Broad in Norfolk, sitting at a desk perched on the frozen water while reporters skated round him under the arc lights.
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Southern Television's catchment area ran along the south coast from the New Forest to the agricultural prairies of Kent. Its chalk streams were some of the best fishing waters in the country, and the programme controller, Roy Rich, wanted a series about the region's speciality, fly fishing, then a rich man's sport and thus attractive to advertisers. So began, in 1959, Jack Hargreaves's
Gone Fishing
, which mutated the following year into a much-cherished series about the countryside,
Out of Town
. Its format barely changed in twenty-one years. Viewers discovered Hargreaves in a set made to look like a shed, dressed in tweeds, gumboots and a fly-festooned cap. Sitting at a trestle bench and smoking a briar pipe, he would simply start talking, without introduction, about an old country skill like cider making or onion stringing, before leading into a film about fishing for roach or cutting the Winchester water meadows.

Hargreaves avoided that glassy, eyeball-swivelling, autocue stare at the viewer, for he had intuited, like Kenneth Clark, that the most successful television presenting is really a form of soliloquy. He had no script, believing that stumbling over words and repeating himself was more natural, and he did not always look at the camera because he felt that people in conversation often looked away from each other. ‘I'm not talking to two million people 20 miles away,' he mused. ‘I'm talking to three people exactly 14 feet distant. That's the average size of any TV audience, and the distance they sit from their set.'
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His sentences had a comforting, epigrammatic quality.
The countryside would fall apart without baler twine. There's nothing more dopey than a dopey cod. Freezers have taken the fun out of beans
. In the Southern region,
Out of Town
regularly beat
Coronation Street
in the ratings.

Another local programme,
In Kite's Country
, presented by a former army major called Oliver Kite, was also regularly in Southern Television's Top Ten. Like Hargreaves, Kite was a ‘spieler', simply adlibbing in his slow rich voice over film of him catching grayling while
blindfold or with a paper bag over his head. He received about 350 letters a week from viewers, a huge number for a programme never shown outside the region. One man, who wrote to say how sorry he was that he would no longer be able to watch
In Kite's Country
now that he was leaving the area, was found to be awaiting release from Parkhurst.
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The most artificial ITV region was Border Television, broadcasting from September 1961 to a population of about half a million, outnumbered four to one by sheep, and awkwardly straddling two countries, from Walter Scott's fairy-haunted lowlands to the Cumbrian lakes. Its most popular programme was
Cock of the Border
, a weekly knockout competition in which rival quizzers, piano players and darts throwers from places like Workington, Stranraer or Kelso competed against each other – a canny way of bringing together a region made up of small, dispersed towns.

But the most difficult balancing act of all was the responsibility of Ulster Television. Its declared aim was to build bridges across the divided community, a commercial imperative anyway since it needed to reach as many viewers as possible. But straightaway its late-night religious spot,
End the Day
, created a row between Catholics, Protestants and Presbyterians about the allocation of slots. Ulster TV's approach to the emerging Troubles was simply to ignore them. The channel director Brum Henderson wanted it to provide ‘television for the Shankill and Falls Roads', the working-class, Protestant and Catholic areas of west Belfast, rather than for the BBC viewers along the Malone and Antrim Roads, the affluent suburbs of the north and south.

With only about 50,000 televisions in the whole of Northern Ireland, UTV had modest advertising revenue and little money for its own programmes. Its local flavour came from shoestring but very popular early evening shows such as
The Romper Room
with ‘Miss Adrienne', in which a group of invited local children listened to stories and played games, and
Tea Time with Tommy
, in which a former salesman from London's Mile End Road read out viewer requests and banged out tunes on his piano. Ulster TV's slide promotion ads, a still
picture with a voiceover being a bargain at £1 per second, also added to its regional feel. ‘It would make a big difference to our appeal,' thought Henderson, ‘if Ulster Television was not only promoting Surf and Pepsodent, but also car dealerships on the Newtownards Road and animal feed producers in Cookstown.'
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Despite their improvised, amateurish feel, the regional stations inspired great loyalty from viewers. Although often seen through a sea of static, Scottish Television was soon trouncing the BBC in the ratings, a combination of its populist network programmes and its symbolic break with Londonism. On Friday nights, it broadcast a piece of cathode ray tartanry called
Jig Time
, an evening of reels and figure dances in ‘the old barn', which began with the doors opening and the presenter inviting the viewers in to ‘sit on the straw'. Its popularity led the BBC to respond with the
White Heather Club
, an even more sanitised
ceilidh
where the men wore kilts with sensible shirts and ties, Andy Stewart compèred and Jimmy Shand's accordion led the band. Delivering the McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August 2007, Jeremy Paxman cited it as definitive proof that television never had a golden age.

The most popular local programmes were the ramshackle lunchtime variety shows shown in most regions. STV's
The One O'Clock Gang
was hosted by an Italian-born Glaswegian, Larry Marshall, whose lowlands fame was such that when he visited Lanark one Saturday afternoon, the streets were closed and mounted police deployed to disperse the crowds. Advertisers loved the rather similar
One O'Clock Show
on Tyne Tees because most women in this region did not work and many north-east men and children came home for lunch. Over 150,000 viewers, the biggest lunchtime audience in the country, watched the comedian Jack ‘Wacky Jacky' Haig (later known to the nation as Monsieur LeClerc in the French resistance sitcom
'Allo 'Allo!
) and George Romaine, a former electrician at Shildon Wagon
Works, billed as ‘Shildon's Singing Son'. Instead of the
TV Times
, Tyne Tees had its own ITV listings publication,
The Viewer
, which was soon the biggest selling magazine in the north-east with 300,000 readers, not all of whom had televisions.
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Tyne Tees had promised to be the most regional of the ITV stations but the oral nature of much of the area's popular culture, from dialect humour to song, did not easily translate to television. Bobby Thompson, the local comedian who had been such a hit on regional BBC radio as ‘the Little Waster', looked uncomfortable on TV and his show was quietly dropped. Radio shows broadcast on the regional Home Service like
Wot Cheor, Geordie!
and
Voice of the People
, which used the new portable tape recorders to conduct vox pops with locals, attained record listening figures well into the 1960s.
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In all regions, the main attraction of ITV for viewers was the national, networked programmes, which often caused some confusion over where they originated. Viewers turned up at the Tyne Tees studios on Newcastle's City Road wanting to meet Hughie Green from
Double Your Money
or Michael Miles from
Take Your Pick
, and a woman arrived with her two grandsons hoping to see the horses from
Wagon Train
. The regions made the networked programmes their own. Ulster Television was the first region to buy
Coronation Street
from Granada, Brum Henderson intuiting that viewers in the cobbled terraced streets of Belfast would feel at home with such a setting.
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But these new ITV fiefdoms, defined by nothing more concrete than market convenience and the reach of the TV signal, had confused identities and leaky borders. Tyne Tees stretched beyond the north-east into the North Riding of Yorkshire and up to the Scottish lowlands, and was even reported to have been seen in Esbjerg, Denmark. A viewer in Monster in South Holland photographed his television to prove that he could pick up Anglia TV. Bloodless military campaigns were fought in fringe areas, trying to get viewers to swivel their aerials. Anglia was notorious for its imperialist raids on rival enclaves. From its 1,000-foot Mendlesham mast, then the tallest structure in Europe, it soon extended deep into Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire. After it built its new transmitters at Sandy Heath and
Belmont in 1965, its catchment area reached from Buckinghamshire in the south to Yorkshire in the north. Anglia's best known face, Dick Joice, fronted the campaign to persuade viewers to turn their aerials. He spent three months visiting every fringe town and village of any size to ‘beat the Anglia drum', enjoying particular success along the eastern coast where they preferred Anglia's agricultural programmes to the urbanite offerings of Tyne Tees and ATV.
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The TV signal is no respecter of human-made borders; the only ruler it obeys is the landscape. The engineers could try tilting the beam of the transmitter a little to produce what they called ‘asymmetrical radiation', but the signal mostly went where it wanted to go, alighting on whichever aerials happened to be pointing in its direction. In Northern Ireland this was a serious political problem. Ulster TV, from its transmitter at Black Mountain above Belfast, reached half the population south of the border, where there were about 90,000 sets in a country that officially had no television. Northern Irish viewers would often complain about their southern neighbours, the ‘lookers-in over the wall', watching their programmes for free. A feature of the skyline in Irish towns was the multitude of especially tall aerials erected to pick up the distant signals of British transmitters. A chartered Aer Lingus plane full of these aerials had left Cardiff Airport for Dublin a few days before the coronation in 1953. When Jeremy Lewis left England to study at Trinity College Dublin in the autumn of 1961, the first thing he noticed coming in to the city on the train were ‘the outsize television aerials on top of all the houses, bending in the direction of Wales like arms stretched out in supplication'.
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