Armchair Nation (23 page)

If it had acknowledged the existence of these viewers, Ulster Television would have been able to charge higher advertising rates. But Telifis Éireann was due to begin broadcasting and the signal from its new mast on Truskmore Mountain in Sligo was going to reach into Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry, many Republicans viewing television as a weapon in the struggle for unification. Wishing to remain aloof from this struggle, the ITA asked TAM to stop short at the border on their maps showing the coverage of Ulster TV. Officially, no southern Irish viewer watched ITV. The Post Office would not even allow
Northern Irish cable companies, of which there were many because television reception in the region was so poor, to pipe Telifis Éireann into homes.
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British TV had also gained a foothold on the French mainland along the north-western coastal strip of Brittany and Normandy, as far south as Rennes. Tall thirteen-element television aerials began appearing on the stone-grey houses, pointed towards the BBC link transmitter on Torteval, on the south-west tip of Guernsey. Television had been slower to make an impact in France than in Britain and in 1959 there were still just a million sets, with many middle-class families only admitting to having TV ‘pour les gosses' [for the kids]. But installing a specially adapted set for the BBC programmes was a status symbol among the coastal bourgeoisie and there were enough French viewers for the English programmes to be listed in the regional newspaper
Ouest France
.

A Monsieur Bourdet had bought a TV set as early as 1946 to pick up the BBC, and got good pictures for the coronation. By 1955 his set was so well known that it featured in
Ouest France
with the headline: ‘Hundreds Pack Cherbourg Back Street Watching English Television Through Window.' When Channel Television started broadcasting ITV in 1962,
Coronation Street
became so popular in northwest France that, in a hotel at Carteret in Normandy, the proprietor changed the mealtimes so guests could watch it. There was even some (illegal) French advertising on Channel TV and in the coastal town of Dinard they founded ‘a Cercle des Amis de Channel'. The TV signal made the most unlikely, intrepid journeys. In October 1956, an NBC official picked up a BBC broadcast in New York and immediately telephoned the corporation and said, ‘I'm looking at a lady stirring pudding.' It was Marguerite Patten making bread.
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While the TV signal stretched beyond Britain's borders, some parts of the country remained out of reach. The bringing of a signal to these
sparsely populated areas was technically difficult and expensive, and certainly not justified by the small amount of increased licence fee money it would bring. But one of the BBC's responses to the start of ITV was to exploit the fact that the commercial channel had erratic coverage across the nation. The director of BBC Television, George Barnes, declared in the
Radio Times
that the corporation aimed to be national in both range and character: ‘Television must reach into every home that wants it, and events must be televisable wherever they occur.'
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The last big group to be deprived of television were the million or so Scots thinly spread through the Highlands and Islands. Here even electricity was an innovation. In the early 1950s the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board had begun a massive project for heading new dams and diverting rivers. This brought electricity lines on steel pylons to the remotest crofters, who could finally dispense with their tilly lamps and peat-burning hearths. Television aerials now sprung up hopefully in improbable places. In August 1957 the BBC opened a new transmitter at Rosemarkie in the Black Isle on the west coast, which reached another 100,000 people and made television available to ninety-three per cent of Scots. Men began walking about remote areas of the Highlands with portable TV sets, searching for a signal like prospectors looking for mineral wealth. But isolated villages were often too scattered to justify the cost of a booster mast and the Highland peaks and inlets might have been designed by a disapproving Presbyterian god to get in the way of graven images.

Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader and MP for Orkney and Shetland, often warned the House of Commons that the absence of a decent television reception in his constituency would lead to an exodus from the islands. The first televisions had arrived on Orkney in October 1955 when a new transmitter opened at Meldrum in Aberdeenshire, 250 miles away. A fourteen-inch set cost over fifty guineas, at a time when the average Orkney farm wage was less than £10 a week, and many parts of the islands did not yet have electricity; but some of the islanders who did have it were prepared to take a chance on getting a reception. ‘We rubbed our eyes the other morning, for only a few
fields away on a prominent chimney we saw an absolute outsize among television aerials. We thought that this must be the first one in Orkney, but we are credibly informed that there are now three in the town,' wrote Ernest Marwick, a Kirkwall bookshop assistant, in the
Orkney Herald
. ‘Reception on Wednesday was first-class and we watched entranced even that incredible opening programme, a discussion on thumb-sucking. We felt then that there was more than an element of truth in the old man's comment, “Soon there'll no' be a sock mended in the country.”' Orkney was well outside Meldrum's theoretical range but the lack of trees on the islands, and the flat terrain, aided reception. ‘Later in the week when the screen yielded nothing but a fluorescent blizzard,' Marwick cautioned, ‘we felt that after all television to Orkney is indeed in the thumb-sucking stage.'
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Some doubting Thomases at the Pier Head in Stromness, where old men gathered to gossip and set the world to rights, thought that Orkney's supposed ‘viewers' were telling fibs. The owner of the local radio shop was moved to put photographs of TV sets in action in his window. ‘There is a stir of wonder at the Pier Head these days because a new phenomenon of this mighty scientific age has reached Stromness,' reported another
Herald
columnist. ‘After water-closets, telephones and concrete streets has come Television, and it has conquered nearly all hearts … Those from the Pier Head who managed to insinuate themselves into the houses where TV was installed saw wonders surpassing all they had ever imagined … But perhaps the word “saw” had better be qualified. Sometimes, in the midst of his mirth Wilfred Pickles disintegrated. Sometimes the lovely ladies reading the news were pelted with violent all-obliterating hail-storms. Sometimes, especially when a car passed, the footballers were swept clean from the screen in a flash of white light …'
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These words were written by a 34-year-old poet, George Mackay Brown, who was always wary of new technology. Although he rarely left Orkney, he had by chance seen the first day of television in the lowlands. As a mature student at Newbattle Abbey College in Midlothian, Brown had taken a day trip to Dalkeith with a friend one spring morning in March 1952. Walking up the high street, they noticed a
small crowd standing in the lobby of a radio dealer's. Brown made his way to the front and saw a screen on which a doctor was explaining rheumatism to a woman patient. ‘“Man, man,” said an old man at my elbow, “It's wonderful, is it no? Soon they'll be able to see into your very mind,”' Brown told his
Herald
readers. ‘It was a horrible thought.'

All that week, Brown saw radio dealers' vans running along the streets of Dalkeith bringing television to miners' houses. The next Saturday evening he went to Newbattle's local pub, the Justinlees tavern, and was astonished to see his local MP, Jo Grimond, in a roundtable discussion on TV. As a heavy drinker, Brown was especially interested in television's effect on pubs and their bar receipts. Some miners, he noted, drank only a pint in front of the TV, hypnotised ‘by the flickering articulate shadows', while others drank twice as fast. He and his friends did not dare ask for a set to be installed in college ‘for we knew instinctively how those ancient austere walls would have disapproved'. In his often ill-tempered, jeremiadic column in the
Herald
, Brown worried about what this ‘startling box of tricks' would do to the islands when it arrived.
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While his local MP hoped that television might keep at home those young people who would otherwise leave, Brown feared that television would give them a taste for the cities, and cut islanders off from their common traditions, particularly the storytelling culture carried over by the Norsemen a thousand years before. His friend, Ernest Marwick, agreed that Orkney's rich tradition of improvised entertainment and house-to-house visiting was imperilled. He worried that children's imaginations would become ‘entirely identified with flickering, over-heated vacuities'.
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Orcadians gave short shrift to these Cassandras. Unlike other remote parts of Scotland, two brakes on the relentless progress of television were largely absent: the strictest forms of Presbyterianism had not taken hold, and most islanders did not speak Gaelic as they did in the Western Isles. Brown had been present at the official ceremonial switching on of electricity in Stromness in 1947 and he always feared that, having leapfrogged the industrial revolution and come
late to the modern age, Orcadians would be greedy for new gadgetry. He was right. They swiftly embraced television, especially during the winter when it was dark for all but six hours, although the reception was crackly and sometimes interrupted by interference from Russian TV.

Then, in January 1959, came the opening of Orkney's own TV mast on the site of a former radar station at Netherbutton. Hundreds of second-hand sets from the south were unloaded daily by plane at Grimsetter airfield as Orcadians prepared themselves excitedly for clear pictures. One farmer told the
Herald
that before television, the cold nights used to keep visitors away and his wife would end up talking so much he was forced to pretend he was asleep. Now they had brought pails and a grinding stone into the living room so they could prepare food for their hens and calves while watching TV. As elsewhere, television in Orkney did not obliterate other activities – borrowings from the county library reaching record levels in 1959
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– but it surely hastened the death, two years later, of the hundred-year-old
Orkney Herald
.

The relentless advance of the TV signal meant that Gilbert Harding, from his stuccoed terraced house near the Brighton seafront, could now get three channels: the BBC from Crystal Palace, Southern Television from the Isle of Wight and Anglia from Mendlesham. His housekeeper, Joan Smith, would change the stations for him frequently. For a man who professed antipathy to the medium, he watched a lot of it. Most evenings he would sit, drink and watch TV, wearing only a dressing gown and pyjamas while his colleagues wore dinner jackets on screen. He especially liked westerns and quiz shows and, having a low opinion of modern schooling, became exasperated when a contestant couldn't answer simple questions: ‘I knew that when I was ten!'
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Brian Masters, a friend of Harding's, said that he would carry
on one-way discussions with people on the television and would ‘get quite violent about it' – on one occasion arguing intensely with the
Tonight
presenter Cliff Michelmore on screen and then phoning him up to continue the argument for real. Harding would cook meals for himself and his housekeeper, starting to prepare these before the evening's viewing began and then sitting himself down in a chair in the hallway so that he could watch the BBC on the living-room set and ITV on the dining-room set, slipping back to the kitchen during a boring bit or an ad break. Often the food was not ready to eat until television had closed down for the night.
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By now Harding had been displaced as the most recognisable face on television by a man he likened to ‘obsequious granite': the BBC's ever-present anchorman, Richard Dimbleby. His voice's gentle ascension and declension was heard on all important state occasions, issuing from somewhere above The Mall or Horse Guards Parade, or the soundproofed commentators' box high up in the triforium at Westminster Abbey. From here he produced an unremitting rivulet of words, with never an ‘er' or ‘erm' to separate them, the result of being well prepared, speaking slowly and making pauses seem pregnant with intention and meaning. On general election nights, he kept up a non-stop salvo of comment, combining Reithian authority with boyish enjoyment. And he was watched by one in four adults every Monday night on
Panorama
, ‘the weekly window on the world'. When this programme's reporter James Mossman did a piece on the City, warning small investors of the risks of high share prices by showing them a picture of a high window (‘all the better to throw yourself out of, my dear'), and the next day stock market shares tumbled after a wave of selling orders, the newspapers described it as ‘Dimbleby's dip'.
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