Armchair Nation (25 page)

Television had been feared as a dazzling, enticing medium liable to produce ‘telemania'. But more detailed research suggested, as Geoffrey Gorer put it, that it acted as ‘a mechanical tranquilliser', inducing only a light hypnosis. Gorer's interviewees said they bought
televisions for relaxation, ‘to alleviate loneliness or immobility' or as ‘a device for having their grandchildren around them'. Even children failed to be spellbound. According to the Nuffield study, viewing soon became ‘a habit on which the child fell back when nothing more interesting was available'. Iona and Peter Opie concluded that television had only a ‘superficial effect' on street rhymes, chants and games, and that it was ‘remarkable how little the new arts have affected child lore'.
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Tom Harrisson, while in Bolton, noted disapprovingly the habit of what he called ‘negative viewing', simply having the television on, comparable to the housewife's pre-war habit of ‘keeping the radio on all day'. But he still felt that people overestimated television's influence. Its greatest impact among ‘culturally unsophisticated' Lancashire people was in ‘presenting something which they have been doubtful, suspicious about, as if it was a
fait accompli
, an ordinary accepted part of respectable thinking and opinion, controversial or otherwise. The moment a thing has got on to TV, it exists in another level of reality.' The best example of this, he felt, had been the growth in prestige of the painter L. S. Lowry after he appeared on TV. Conversely, a television programme on art galleries in Lancashire ‘might almost incidentally shatter Bolton's complacency about its dreadful collection'.
¹⁰⁸

For Frank Allaun, TV was a cheap way for his poorer constituents to press their faces up against the glass, like Victorian urchins, and experience remotely the new world of consumer affluence. He told the Commons that the opening and closing credit shots of
Coronation Street
were filmed in his constituency: in Archie Street, in the congested district of Ordsall alongside the Manchester Ship Canal. There were Coronation Streets in every town in the north, he said, in a far worse state than the one on television, with houses without hot water, inside toilets or damp courses. But many had TVs – now an everyday luxury, a way for the poorest in the country to arrive in the modern era on the cheap and view its new abundance from the edges. The BBC producer Tom Sloan had a similar insight one wet Sunday in 1961, after driving up to Liverpool to do an outside broadcast. ‘For
the first time in my life, I saw the industrial north of England, the rows of terraced houses, fronting on to the cobbled roads, glistening in the rain,' he said. ‘The sheer ghastliness of it all was overpowering, but on the roof of every house, there was a television aerial. Antennae reaching for escape to another world. And, heaven knows, why not?'
¹⁰⁹

There was life before Coronation Street, but it didn't add up to much
.

Russell Harty
¹

One Monday evening in May 1961, a calamitous power cut plunged a whole swathe of south-east England into darkness. The lights went out all over London, Surrey, Kent and Sussex, in the biggest failure the National Grid had yet known. For two and a half hours, chaos reigned. Cars piled up at intersections when traffic lights stopped working, trains stopped when the signals stalled, Scotland Yard was flooded with calls from misbehaving burglar alarms, planes at Gatwick were grounded as the runways blacked out, and at a blind people's rally in Kent, the blind had to guide the sighted out of the building. When the surge of current returned around midnight, two television sets in Southend Road, Beckenham exploded and burst into flames. The Electricity Board blamed the short circuit on a huge increase of demand in Wimbledon at 9.27 p.m., just after the end credits had rolled on that week's episode of ITV's western series
Wagon Train
.

Wagon Train
was one of the most popular shows on TV, and that evening the BBC was showing
Time Remembered
, a play by the absurdist French dramatist Jean Anouilh, thus siphoning even
fewer viewers away from ITV than usual. Westerns like
Wagon Train, Laramie, Maverick, Bonanza
and
Rawhide
were some of the most popular programmes on TV, probably because they were definitively televisual. Even young children could work out what was happening when, either through youthful incomprehension or the bad acoustics of their TV sets, the dialogue went over their heads. Heroes were always clean-shaven, villains always moustachioed and scarred. Those shot from behind would always throw back their shoulders and jerk up their heads; a shot from the front always occasioned an instant clasp of the stomach. ‘Virtually every day,' recalled Griff Rhys Jones, seven years old in 1961, ‘we sat in front of the black-and-white television in the brown, shiny Bakelite box with an armoury of “Lone-Star” cap-revolvers and Winchester repeater rifles close by on the sofa, in order to shoot down the “baddies”.'
²
Gunfire crackle from the TV rang out incessantly in Britain's living rooms, especially since the guns were always so badly aimed, hundreds of shots being fired before anyone was even hit.

Broadcasters had long been aware of the power they held to synchronise human behaviour in remarkable ways. As early as 1935 Lord Reith noted that engineers could gauge the popularity of radio programmes by the drop in water consumption and the sudden peak load when they ended. In the mid 1950s they began to notice a similar effect in television, when
Children's Hour
– especially when a cultish, anarchic glove puppet called Sooty, his ears darkened with soot to show up on black-and-white TV, was on – seriously depleted electricity supplies, because it started at 5 p.m. and overlapped with the working day. The Electricity Board estimated that, if the BBC would only shift the programme half an hour forward, it would save the equivalent of a full power station on peak demand.
³

The ending of popular shows placed a particular strain on the National Grid, because the electricity used in running TVs was small compared to the much greater amounts needed to operate lights, electric kettles and water pumps for flushing toilets. No longer did people open the fridge door or make a pot of tea as a matter of individual whim; television immobilised them all for set periods before springing
them into life when a programme ended. Surges in demand of half a million kilowatts, the output of a large power station, could occur at the end of certain shows, threatening the knife-edge balance of the country's electricity supply. Thus, after the catastrophic impact of
Wagon Train
on Wimbledon, was a new yardstick created for assessing the popularity of TV programmes.

To avert a similar disaster in future, the Electricity Board began employing statisticians to track the popularity of television programmes and to trace demand curves across each evening. These half a dozen men, the ‘demand forecasters', would sit in the new national control room in Park Street, London, leafing through copies of the
Radio Times
and
TV Times
. One of their jobs was to map the ‘TV pickup', the peak moment at which millions of people stopped watching television. It was a phenomenon felt most strongly in Britain, with its relatively few commercial breaks and large number of tea drinkers boiling electric kettles – unlike, for example, the Japanese, who used gas stoves.

In the control room the forecasters would monitor demand, relying on a mixture of intuition and experience, and instruct Britain's power stations to increase or reduce production accordingly. By the mid 1960s, computers had been introduced, enabling the impact of factors such as peak-hour viewing, mealtimes and seasonal changes to be accurately assessed. The computers would then issue instructions and, seconds later, vast turbines would rumble into life like waking monsters, just to maintain the state of electricity in the grid at the magical frequency of fifty cycles a second. For television was now a basic amenity, like electric light or tap water, that people expected to have at the flick of a switch. In seven British homes out of ten, a bluish-grey flicker radiated through the front windows each night.

Engineers had been trying for years to get television's high frequency radio waves to travel over longer distances and somehow override the
curvature of the earth. In the late 1940s, they floated the idea of carrying TV transmitters high up in the air on tethered airships, barrage balloons, or aeroplanes travelling in lazy circles 30,000 feet above the earth, sending out signals that would blanket the earth's surface like giant, upended ice-cream cones. Another more audacious plan was to bounce radio waves off the surface of the moon. In May 1959, in an experiment sponsored by the television manufacturer Pye, the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire sent morse code messages to the Cambridge Air Force Base in Massachusetts by this method. But the reception was poor and the signals could not be sent once the moon had set. The start of the space age intervened and on 10 July 1962, the Telstar satellite set off round the earth on an egg-shaped orbit, during which it would be visible on both sides of the Atlantic for just one hour. Several million viewers stayed up after midnight to watch a special broadcast from Goonhilly Downs on Cornwall's Lizard peninsula, not far from where Marconi had first sent his radio waves across the Atlantic.

Goonhilly, a sparse heathland at Britain's most southerly point, could almost have been designed for satellite broadcasts by a benevolent god familiar with the nature of the radio wave. During the war it had been home to RAF Drytree, which provided radar cover for Britain's Western Approaches, as it offered a sweeping view from horizon to horizon – which now allowed Telstar to be tracked easily as it raced across the sky in low orbit. It was away from industrial interference and radio noise: ‘electronically quiet', in engineer speak. And on the Lizard peninsula, an old sea bed lifted 400 feet above the waves, the Precambrian rock is made up mainly of serpentine, on which little grows except
Erica Vagans
, a heathland plant unique in its tolerance of magnesium in stony soil. There are thus few trees or bushes to block the path of the TV signal. Serpentine is also hard enough to bear the thousand-tonne weight of the giant satellite dish built to pick up Telstar's signal.

Drawn by a sense of history in the making, crowds of Lizard locals and holidaymakers had pitched their tents and started camp fires near the floodlit dish, jamming their cars along the narrow lanes
leading on to the moors. At 12.45 a.m. viewers on both BBC and ITV heard the voice of the Post Office engineer, John Bray, stationed at Goonhilly, saying that the huge dish had begun tracking, searching the skies along the predicted orbit for Telstar's signal. Bray had long been excited by television's ability to communicate over long distances. In the late 1920s, as a teenage engineering apprentice in Portsmouth's naval dockyards, he had built his own version of Baird's spinning disc receiver to pick up the thirty-line images from the BBC's mast on Selfridge's roof over sixty miles away, and a decade before Telstar, he had secured his footnote in television history by inventing the TV detector van. Bray had spent eighteen months overseeing the building of Goonhilly Earth Station. Although Telstar's most profitable line would be taking international phone calls, he knew it was satellite television that would excite the public. But as the public watched, Goonhilly's TV screens were picking up only static. The steerable dish searched the skies in vain for a signal that was as weak as that which would be received from a one-bar electric fire on the moon.

Then, at around 1 a.m., viewers saw a TV flicker tantalisingly into life, and a fuzzy image move manically up the screen as an engineer tried to tune it in. ‘That's a man's face …,' spluttered the BBC's commentator Raymond Baxter. ‘That's the picture … there it is. It's a man … there is the first live television picture across the Atlantic with rather less than four minutes of available time left.' Over on ITV, Ian Trethowan floundered in similar fashion: ‘Something is … there's a picture there … there is something different
there
. It looks like a face. It
is
a face. This is almost certainly, this is the first television picture to come across the Atlantic. It's a face. Madly fiddling with it or trying to, trying to hold it, just like you would at home. But this is … this is a face. It's bouncing around but you can see absolutely clearly this is a man, sitting behind a desk.' The face settled for a few seconds before vanishing. An aerospace firm placed an advertisement in several newspapers, showing the screen capture: ‘Do not adjust your set: THIS IS ONE OF THE GREATEST TV PICTURES EVER! … the Hawker Siddeley Group is proud to have supplied much of the tracking equipment.'
⁴
It was indeed a blurred image of a besuited,
bespectacled man sitting behind a desk: Fred Kappel, chairman of Telstar's funder, AT&T.