Armchair Nation (29 page)

Only about 20,000 of Britain's 15 million sets – one home in every 750 – were yet in colour. The Postmaster General's decision to let BBC2 go it alone, and for colour TV to begin, in his words, as ‘a rich man's toy', meant that few viewers were willing to pay for colour just for the minority channel. Only England had the television transmitters set up for colour, and in some parts of the country there was still no television at all. In the remote crofts of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, they complained of ‘television starvation'. Local dealers often took it upon themselves to bring television to the farthest flung outposts
before the official transmitters arrived. Television had arrived unofficially on the Isle of Lewis in 1959, six years before a mast officially arrived in the Outer Hebrides on Wester Ross, when a Stornoway TV dealer bought an old radio mast for £25 and brought the first TV, illegally, to about 1,000 homes.
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In 1964 an electrician discovered a weak signal on the top of Mallaigvaig, a hill behind the port of Mallaig on the mainland opposite Skye. He installed a portable, battery-powered set on the hilltop and the town's residents climbed up in darkness to watch the evening programmes. A local firm tried unsuccessfully to install piped television from there to the town. The proprietor, David McMinn, said: ‘We have had persistent letters to MPs but we have been getting nowhere … The demand … well everybody's frantic for it. Take the winter up in this west coast. There is nothing by way of entertainment in these places.' As for the Isle of Skye itself, its relay transmitter kept being delayed. The islanders' anger came to a head in September 1963 when, according to the
Stornoway Gazette
, many Skyemen had to travel as far as Fort Augustus or Inverness to see the Rangers v. Real Madrid European Cup tie on television.
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The mast on Skriaig in Skye finally opened in March 1966, just in time for the World Cup for which Scotland had failed to qualify.

‘Is this not the land of the bens and glens and the heroes?' asked the chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Scotland, Sir David Milne, quoting an old Scottish song. ‘But it is the bens, and there are so many of them and so much of them, which get in the way of the viewing and listening of the heroes, and the heroes' wives and families.' The most ambitious project to bring television to the Highlands was the ‘Great Glen Chain', a ribbon of transmitter links running from Rosemarkie on the Moray Firth to Oban on the west coast, along the loch-filled geological fault that bisects Scotland. Finished in 1963, it brought television to remote outposts on the western seaboard like Ballaculish, Kinlochleven and Ardgour. The Scottish secretary Michael Noble said that not since the time of General Wade, the eighteenth-century army officer who built roads and bridges as a way of controlling the Scots, had the Highlands been made so open to the influence of the
south. He did not underrate ‘the dangers to Gaelic culture inherent in what the transmitters would bring'. By the mid 1960s, ninety-seven per cent of Scots had TV reception.
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In the Western Isles and parts of the Highlands, the Free and Free Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, formed in the mid-nineteenth century, still held a puritan grip on cultural life. Their kirks were unadorned, Presbyterians believing that the word of the Bible was all, and best heard without visual diversions, so they were naturally ill-disposed to television. In the summer there was a communion season, an elongated Sabbath from Thursday to Monday with church services twice a day. Sermons focused on the dangers of the congregation ‘backsliding', through Sabbath breaches like drinking, driving and watching TV. ‘A flood of lurid salacious matter emanates into our homes via a means which to date has resented and resisted all attempt at control and stricture,' stated the 1966 annual report on Religion and Morals issued by the Synod of Glenelg in Lochalsh. ‘The Sabbath, for some unknown reason, seems to be the day when this medium excels in its foul moral oozings.'
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But there was also a great appetite for television in isolated regions, particularly in the far north. The Highlands and Islands Film Guild, fighting a rearguard action against depopulation, had begun a touring cinema in 1946, showing films in the hamlets and villages of the crofting counties. Villagers in remote areas eagerly awaited the arrival of the Guild and the showing of the films would often be followed by a
ceilidh
. But the spread of television from the early 1960s onwards affected attendances drastically, especially among the over-thirties. On the edges of the nation, the march of technological progress was accelerated: Shetland, which had only seen its first film in 1950, had television thirteen years later. Struggling to attract audiences, the Guild folded in 1970.

On the Isle of Harris, the new Hattersley looms, installed in crofters' homes to make tweed, could be operated while watching television, because they did not require the weaver to change bobbins, they stopped automatically if a thread broke, and cards could be inserted to make patterns. In crofting communities, knitting was another
common source of extra income, and another trade practised easily while watching television, although a (male) writer in the Dundee-based
People's Journal
worried that TV would distract the womenfolk from this important cottage industry.
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The wave of English hippies who came to the Western Isles in the late 1960s in search of a simpler life found themselves at odds with the islanders' embrace of modernity. When the folk singer Vashti Bunyan arrived with her boyfriend Robert Lewis on the Hebridean island of Berneray in 1969, having spent a year and a half driving all the way from London in a horse-drawn cart, they found newly minted rows of electricity and telegraph poles and television installed in the crofters' cottages. Their ambition to live a bucolic life was met with puzzlement and suspicion by the natives of Berneray, who were not prepared to turn their backs on modernity when it had barely arrived. ‘Remote areas are obsessed with communications,' wrote the Oxford anthropologist Edwin Ardener. ‘The world always beckons – the Johnsonian road to England, or the coast, or wherever it is, is an attraction to the young, for it leads from your very door to everywhere … The assiduity with which television is watched in remote areas has a particular quality. A programme on the Mafia is squirrelled away as part of the endless phantasmagoria of life that begins at Oban or Kelvinside.'
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Many in the Hebrides welcomed the late arrival of English TV as a way of breaking down the ‘brimstone curtain' imposed by the Free Church. The poet Iain Crichton Smith, brought up in Upper Bayble, a tiny Gaelic-speaking village on the Isle of Lewis, was ambivalent about TV because he was a fierce defender of Gaelic while lamenting the power of the Free Church, which he thought insular and philistine. He also resented tourists and exiled Hebrideans romanticising the islanders as noble savages. These were the kind of people, he thought, who, when they saw television sets in Hebridean houses, regretted their presence as if the natives had somehow let them down: ‘How could the islanders have betrayed him so profoundly, so cheated him of his dream?'
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Television was also getting more ambitious at depicting these remote areas of Britain to the rest of the country. Over a July weekend
in 1967, six climbers scaled Orkney's Old Man of Hoy live on BBC1, in the most technically complex outside broadcast yet attempted. Even before the broadcast could begin, sixteen tonnes of equipment had to be ferried from the Firth of Clyde into Rackwick Bay in army assault craft and dragged on sledges over a peat bog to the cliff edge by a Scots Guards platoon. The impact the ensuing broadcast had on viewers is more surprising because televised climbing was inherently methodical and laborious and had been tried several times before with little impact. The BBC had first experimented in 1963 with a live programme from Snowdon, but the action was so misted up by rain and the climbers so hard to pick out that one reviewer commented that it was ‘several hours of watching dirty cotton wool twitching in a draught'. Dougal Haston, one of the Old Man of Hoy team, could never understand why viewers wanted to watch such slow, repetitive moments, and wondered if, subconsciously, they were hoping someone would fall off.
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The BBC executive Chris Brasher, who was the commentator for the Hoy climb, was a compelling, driven character – already well-known as the pacemaker for Roger Bannister's four-minute mile in 1954 and as an Olympic gold medallist in 1956 – and he managed to get the climb commissioned in the face of doubters in the corporation. He insisted that it should not be just Saturday afternoon padding on
Grandstand
as the previous climbs had been, but a big event broadcast live to give it ‘a touch of the Colosseum'. It was also as stage-managed as it could be, with bolts and pitons pre-fixed partway up so the climbers could make a smoother ascent when they were live, but with the equipment artfully concealed. Viewers never saw the climbing cameramen or the sherpas carrying equipment.
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The climbers turned out to have a pleasingly rough-hewn eloquence, describing the crumbling sandstone on which they were trying to gain purchase as ‘cracking biscuits', ‘hard sugar' or ‘like climbing over gigantic dinner plates breaking under your feet', and reacting dryly to the fulmar petrels spraying vomit right into their faces. ‘If anything goes wrong,' one of them said, ‘the only medical equipment we'll need is a spade.' There was an intriguing contrast
between the earnest, monosyllabic hard men, like Dougal Haston and Pete Crew, and the new breed of climbing personalities whom Tom Patey called the ‘Telstars' – like Patey himself, who in one vertiginous moment swung out fifteen feet from the cliff on the rope, just for a laugh.
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The real Telstar, however, was the photogenic sea stack itself: 450 feet of Orcadian sandstone almost exactly level, as Brasher kept pointing out, with London's new Post Office Tower, bringing the mingled terror and pleasure of the Kantian sublime to BBC1. A sailor wrote to the
Radio Times
to say that he had sailed past the Old Man on many occasions, but it took this broadcast to reveal to him the immensity of the cliff faces. It looked spectacular on the Saturday night, floodlit with the arc lights against the swirling Atlantic waves, while the climbers bivouacked on a ledge. ‘I suspect that the Old Man of Hoy broadcast will never be superseded as the perfect live broadcast,' wrote another of the climbers, Chris Bonington. ‘It had every ingredient – a perfect, very obvious summit, a scale which was also perfect, since the climbers clinging to the tower were dwarfed by its size, yet were not totally lost in its immensity.' Fifteen million people saw them reach the summit late on Sunday afternoon. One viewer said that the pictures were so clear they gave him vertigo.
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The broadcast ended with an abseil down to the bottom by Bonington, a dramatic single plunge because of the overhang at the top of the stack, his frame silhouetted against the sky. ‘Once upon a time, you had to go all the way to Everest to earn public acclaim,' reflected Patey with typical self-deprecation. ‘Now, you need only appear on television hanging upside down from the end of a rope. In more ancient times, the same sort of enthusiasm was aroused by public hangings.' By creating an event that could not easily be outdone, though, the BBC ensured that climbing would not become a fixture in the schedules. The first colour TV climb, of the Anglesey cliffs on 30 August 1970, was an anticlimax, not helped by being on what was traditionally the worst viewing weekend of the year, the August bank holiday, for which the BBC's head of drama, Sydney Newman, always used to save what he called ‘the real dogs' among its output of plays.
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As so often in the history of television watching, the climbing of the Old Man of Hoy had resonated with viewers through a strange chemistry that was unique and unrepeatable.