Armchair Nation (27 page)

It was not until late on Saturday 25 November 1962, though, that Hoggart became convinced that ‘the box in the corner could offer, was prepared to offer, a funny and slightly subversive angle on our lives'. At 10.45 p.m., the first edition of
That Was the Week That Was
went out – scheduled then because, according to the BBC's assistant controller Donald Baverstock, viewers on a Saturday night were the furthest distance from the working week and at their most relaxed, private and prepared for irreverence. Malcolm Bradbury, a young English lecturer at the University of Birmingham, similarly recalled the ‘enormous euphoria' the programme inspired among his contemporaries, ‘as if the great British log jam was being broken at last'.
¹⁵

TW3
, as it came to be called, relished the fact that lots of people were complaining about it. One of its weekly features was a scorecard of who had phoned in to complain or congratulate them about the previous programme, the latter number invariably being the greater. The team summed up what the presenter David Frost called ‘the ludicrousness of the incipient Grundyism'
¹⁶
– Mrs Grundy being the personification of priggishness in Thomas Morton's 1798 play
Speed the Plough
– with a sketch in the final programme of the first series in which Millicent Martin and Roy Kinnear played a suburban couple watching
TW3
at home. ‘It was satire wasn't it?' said Kinnear. ‘Mucky jokes. Obscenity – it's all the go nowadays.'

And yet when the
Daily Telegraph
criticised the programme in a leader, its letters page suggested that readers mostly dissented. ‘Let us be thankful,' wrote one, ‘that, at last, there is at least one television programme offering adult and stimulating entertainment.'
TW3
's viewers – a near exact cross-section of the population, geographically and demographically – were overwhelmingly positive about it. A 92-year-old couple wrote to say it had transformed their lives, and teenagers, television's ficklest audience, were regular viewers. Schoolteachers reported that pupils had begun reading newspapers; the headmistress of a girls' school instructed her sixth form to stay up to watch it. After the TV technicians' union leader George Elvin made a bewildering statement on the programme, Frost immediately invited any children watching to précis his words. By Monday he had received thousands of replies, which surprised him with their ‘hipness and intelligence'.
¹⁷

Richard Hoggart hoped that television might help to create an intelligent common culture that would enrich the lives of those who did not have access to the usual routes to intellectual and cultural capital – a sort of free education by stealth and serendipity. Television, he felt, could ‘offer sudden flashes of insight in pictures or words: epiphanies, which we do not forget'. He later recalled watching Jacqueline du Pré performing Elgar's Cello Concerto on television – most likely Christopher Nupen's BBC
Omnibus
film broadcast in 1967, which included a complete performance of the concerto – as
the cameras moved in close on her swaying, rapt style of playing, with those familiar crescendo jumps in her seat, all done without looking at a score. It was, thought Hoggart, ‘an extraordinary instance of totally absorbed creativity by an artist … Without television one could simply not see this happening at all, and that is a great gift.' So it is clear why he was so energised by
TW3
's appeal to all classes and ages. Its success, he said, proved that ‘people are more intelligent and discriminating than they are allowed to be by those who simply exploit the sentimental and glamorous side of their tastes with big commercial variety shows'.
¹⁸

When
TW3
returned to the nation's television screens amid much anticipation in the autumn of 1963, though, its first few programmes were disappointing. As its producer Ned Sherrin put it, quoting Cole Porter, the public's love affair with the show had been ‘too hot not to cool down'. If television did offer the possibility of an intelligent common culture, the audience for it seemed capricious and liable at any moment to be tempted away by what was on the other side. For a new craze had taken over late on Saturday nights: ITV's adventure series
The Avengers
, with the kind of preposterous plotting and pop sensibility which that autumn seemed to contrast so freshly with
TW3
's satirical earnestness. It was the favourite TV programme among Eton College boys, which probably had less to do with its old Etonian star, Patrick Macnee, than with his co-star Honor Blackman, playing an anthropology PhD and judo expert called Cathy Gale, who threw men through plate glass windows while dressed in black leather utility suits and thigh boots.
¹⁹

Just as
TW3
was losing its edge, someone emerged who would certainly have been seen by its team as a reincarnation of Mrs Grundy. Norah Buckland, the wife of the rector of Longton, Staffordshire, hearing complaints from her husband's parishioners about television, had hired a set and was troubled by what she saw. She shared her
fears with her friend, Mary Whitehouse, an art teacher from Claverley near Wolverhampton. On 5 May 1964, Buckland and Whitehouse launched a ‘Clean Up TV' campaign at Birmingham Town Hall. ‘We recognise that the period between 6 and 9.15 is a period for family viewing,' Whitehouse told the 2,000-strong audience, consisting mostly of churchgoing housewives like herself. ‘Well, I think we're being palmed off, because last Thursday evening, we sat as a family and we saw a programme that started at 6.35. And it was the dirtiest programme that I have seen for a very long time.'

Whitehouse did not name it, but according to the listings it was the first episode of
Between the Lines
, a satirical Scottish comedy show billed as ‘a series of light-hearted enquiries into matters of no importance' with Fulton Mackay, later more famous as the warder in the sitcom
Porridge
, as its linkman. ‘
Between the Lines
is “an enquiry in depth”,' went the
Radio Times
billing. ‘And there is no limit to the depth to which we may sink during the next six weeks. For the subject of our first report we have chosen “The Tender Trap”. Or, in a word (an unfortunate word): marriage! Among future subjects are “Jock, The Vanishing Aboriginal” and “The English. Are They British?”' Whitehouse disliked this new kind of irreverent comedy – one critic called
Between the Lines
‘
TW3
in kilts' – almost as much as she disliked the
Wednesday Play
, which she felt indirectly censored vast areas of normal, suburban life. ‘We are told that the dramatists are portraying real life,' she said to her Birmingham audience, ‘but why concentrate on the kitchen sink when there are so many pleasant sitting rooms?'
²⁰

‘Clean Up TV' was not just about cleaning up TV, but about which versions of reality should emanate from the television screen. One of Whitehouse's favourite programmes was
Dixon of Dock Green
, a Saturday teatime ritual in the form of a weekly, secular parable. At the start of each episode, PC Dixon appeared in front of the local police station, saying ‘Good evenin' all', to viewers and announcing the scripture for the day, the criminal case study with a moral message that was to follow. At the end of the story he addressed a brief homily to the camera based on what viewers had just seen, before wishing them ‘Goodnight, all'.

Richard Hoggart dismissed
Dixon of Dock Green
as a form of ‘half-art' with little relation to police procedure. He noted that one Lancashire force had switched from wearing caps to helmets simply as a public relations exercise because, after PC Dixon, helmets were associated with the reassuring traditional bobby. Hoggart preferred
Z Cars
, a case-hardened series about a police force in a northern new town which had turned the flawed Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns) into one of the best-known characters on television, and upset many police officers who felt it brought the force into disrepute. Lincolnshire's chief constable, John Barnett, one of nineteen chief constables who signed Whitehouse's Clean Up TV petition, insisted that
Dixon of Dock Green
was more accurate, and went on to propose civil disobedience against the BBC's proposed licence fee increase.
²¹

It is hard to know exactly how widespread Whitehouse's concerns were, because the BBC had a non-disclosure policy about complaints, and news of them filtered out erratically, such as on
TW3
. When the BBC2 arts show
Late Night Line-Up
revealed that the corporation had been ‘flooded with protests' after the backstreet abortion drama,
Up the Junction
, was broadcast in November 1965, its producers were admonished for ignoring a rule that ‘no reference should be made to numbers or the tone of calls of protest received' because of ‘a determination not to allow the lunatic fringes, who, as the Duty Log shows, are so often the majority of the callers, to dominate the front pages'. For the BBC's director general Hugh Carleton Greene, the killer fact about Clean Up TV was that, at the Birmingham meeting, literature from the right-wing Christian group Moral Rearmament was available. The BBC's attitude to complainants combined a determination not to give in to interest groups with a professional confidence verging on aloofness. ‘Viewers – at least the peculiar kind who write letters – see only what they want to see,' concluded Kenneth Robinson, an early presenter of the BBC feedback series,
Points of View
, which began in 1961. Taking all the letters home to read was, he wrote, ‘an unbelievable weekly wallow in viewers' bigotry, prejudice and illiteracy'.
²²

The BBC did divulge that its drama about homelessness,
Cathy Come Home
, shown in December 1966, prompted ‘dozens of telephone calls and letters', which seems a small figure for what is now regarded as a consciousness-changing television event. Whitehouse said later that the play had led to the launching of the charity, Shelter, making it a piece of propaganda which was contrary to the BBC charter. But Shelter was already in existence, and shrewdly placed an advert in newspapers the day after the repeat in January 1967: ‘Did you see Cathy last night?' It had just been announced that St Pancras Station's buildings were to be saved from demolition, after a public campaign led by John Betjeman. After the
Cathy Come Home
repeat, many viewers rang the BBC and wrote to newspapers, suggesting that St Pancras's empty hotel rooms and offices should be used as a hostel for the homeless. But the angriest viewers of
Cathy Come Home
were the council housing officials who felt their profession had been besmirched by it. When it was repeated, the Local Government Information Office asked the 2 million council employees in England and Wales to watch it and check for factual inaccuracies.
²³

By 1965, Clean Up TV, now with a membership of 7,000, had become the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association and was calling for a National Viewers' Council, without which, it said, the licence fee was ‘taxation without representation'. It stood for a nascently Thatcherite sense of lower middle-class grievance in what was not yet called ‘middle England', a land occupied by the decent provincials ignored by the cliquish, metropolitan professionals. Whitehouse saw herself as an envoy of the silent, suburban millions watching stony-faced at home while the London-based programme makers amused each other, and their rowdy studio audiences yelped sycophantically at their jokes. She called them the ‘intellectual freebooters of the South' and an ‘in-grown intellectual coterie', and in a letter to the
Financial Times
asked: ‘Is it not time that common sense was allowed to blow away the hot air generated by the power-houses of the “intellectuals”?'
²⁴
Her support, which did tend to be strongest in Wales, Scotland and the northern English provinces, seems to have been substantial without ever constituting a majority of viewers. A
petition to clean up TV, delivered to the House of Commons on 3 June 1965, contained 366,355 signatures.

But what of the millions who did not sign? In a BBC paper, the corporation's director of television Kenneth Adam tried to build up an ‘identikit' of the average viewer, a rarely spotted animal who spent about two and half hours a day in front of the TV. Occasionally he enjoyed a memorable event like the Telstar broadcast, wrote Adam, but mostly he liked familiar shows with which he resented interference, and indeed was outraged far more by overruns and rescheduling than sex or violence. He disliked arguments about religion, but ‘enjoyed the vague well being which good hymn singing brought him'. He was quick to spot errors of fact in quizzes or anachronisms in dramas, which for Adam suggested a deep-rooted desire for participation which television was not satisfying. A significant minority of viewers, he claimed, were ‘addicts'. They wrote ‘somewhat illiterately' to complain that TV finished too early, and made up the several hundred thousand people who, during a recent TV strike, had sat watching the test card.
²⁵