Armchair Nation (30 page)

‘The conceit of this long-haired brigade is appalling,' complained one Brighton viewer. ‘The Beatles have become an embarrassment to Britain,' agreed Dorothy Roberts in Great Yarmouth. ‘Even my fifteen-year-old son admits they are tripe now.' On Boxing Day 1967, around 14 million people had watched, or at least started to watch,
Magical Mystery Tour
, billed anodynely in the listings as a ‘coach trip by the Beatles around the West Country'. Given its plum place in the Christmas schedules, at 8.35 p.m. just after a Petula Clark special, they could not have anticipated what they saw, a faux new wave film based on self-indulgent improvisations. The phone calls began before the programme ended, dismissing it as ‘rubbish' and ‘piffle', or simply asking, ‘What was it all about?' ‘They must have made it up as they went along,' said a pensioner from Chelsea, perceptively. ‘They needn't have bothered for me.'
⁴⁹

The reaction to
Magical Mystery Tour
supported Kenneth Adam's findings about British viewers, in the sense that its audience seemed most irritated not by the brief striptease scene or the reference to naughty girls and knickers in the song ‘I Am A Walrus' to which Mary Whitehouse had objected, but by the wilfully boring and obscure. ‘We tried to present something different for the viewers, but according to the newspapers it did not come off,' said Paul McCartney, graciously, on David Frost's chat show on 27 December. ‘Was it really as bad as all that? Some people must have liked it, surely.' A few did – like Garth and Carol Tucker from London W4, who wrote to the
Listener
to say how pleased they were that TV, normally an insipid medium, had shown some bite. They placed the film ‘within the anarchist/surrealistic tradition that stretches back to Vigo and early Buñuel'.
⁵⁰

The Tuckers would have been dismayed at some further evidence
that television and its viewers were addicted to linear narrative and suspicious of the avant-garde. The most ambitious serialisation the BBC had ever undertaken,
The Forsyte Saga
, had started to be shown on Saturday nights on BBC2 from January 1967, which at the time was only available to 8 million viewers. Many people on Britain's fringes could still not get the new channel; others did not want or could not afford the new 625-line set necessary to receive it. ‘My own small gesture will be to cancel the regular order for the
Radio Times
,' wrote a disenfranchised Galsworthy fan, Sigrid Morden, from Montacute Road, Catford. But the saga did succeed in attracting a new audience to BBC2, viewing figures growing at a rate of 200,000 a week and eventually reaching 6 million, as well as dramatically hiking the sales of Galsworthy's novels. Malcolm Muggeridge deplored the new trend, which he was sure Galsworthy would have hated, of putting colour photographs of the actors from the series on the covers of the Penguin paperbacks.
⁵¹

But it was only in September 1968, when the series began a re-run on BBC1 on Sunday nights, that its popularity reached critical mass, particularly among those viewers who felt alienated from the radical bohemianism of the decade. ‘We are tired of having a guilty conscience if we are luckier than our neighbours, and of trying to take the burdens of Vietnam and Biafra on our shoulders,' wrote Mrs A. Boydell, fastening on the saga as a still point in a turbulent world. ‘Above all, we are sick of the sight and sound of scruffy teenagers and students and kitchen sink drama!' An antiques dealer interviewed for BBC1's
Talkback
, gesturing to a series of art deco statues which he could not have given away a year earlier but which were now worth about £30 each, thought the saga had been ‘tremendously effective in conjuring up the terrible disease of nostalgia'.
⁵²

There was a further stark reminder that not every TV viewer felt at home amid the liberal currents of the time: when Soames Forsyte raped his wife Irene after she had appeared to be unfaithful to him,
Late Night Line-Up
canvassed the opinion of Oxford Street shoppers and discovered that fifty-four per cent supported Soames. But perhaps this figure is slightly less shocking when one considers that Soames
had by then become an intricate, many-sided character, whose very unlovability earned him sympathy from viewers because he seemed aware of it yet powerless to change. Alan Hewitt, a civil servant, reflected shrewdly that Soames ‘believed in the sanctity of contract; he was an obsessional type of character, which is why he was drawn to the law, which always has an intellectual answer … He's got no flair for human relationships at all, I would say, wouldn't you?'
⁵³

The most repeated fact about
The Forsyte Saga
is that it forced vicars to abandon Evensong. This fear about the decline of Sunday churchgoing had been voiced since television emerged as a mass medium. A survey conducted among Methodist ministers in 1952 suggested that, while most Sunday services ended before the evening's television began, congregations were increasingly unenthusiastic about after-service activities if these prevented them getting home in time to watch it. One minister complained that television was turning worshippers into clock-watchers and if he dared to go overtime in the Sunday evening service there was a mass flit during the final hymn. ‘It's no use hiding the fact that
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
is more popular than going to church on a cold winter's night,' said a Woking vicar after the start of ITV, explaining why he had moved Evensong half an hour back. By the mid 1960s, many other vicars had shifted Evensong to an earlier time so their parishioners could be home in time to watch the Sunday night film.
⁵⁴

Churchgoing had been declining since the end of the Victorian era, and Evensong had long been especially endangered because it was intended for two dwindling groups, farmworkers and servants (which was why the upper and middle classes had their main meal early on Sunday afternoon, so that their servants could attend). The dramatic fall in religious observance from the late 1950s onwards, both in adult churchgoing and children's attendance at Sunday School, was often blamed on television – not an argument heard so much in America, where the medium was even more entrenched but where about half the population still attended church regularly. Mary Whitehouse's campaign to clean up TV was underpinned by her belief that Britain was a Christian country and should have its values reflected on its
televisions, combined with a fear that churchgoing was giving way to television viewing.

There was supposed to be no television on Sundays between 6 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. to encourage church attendance, but a blind eye was turned so long as the programmes shown were religious. White-house had no objection to the congregational, non-denominational hymn singing of
Songs of Praise
, introduced pragmatically by the BBC in 1961 to make use of outside broadcast units lying idle after filming football games on Saturday afternoons. But she was dismayed at the BBC's acknowledgement in this slot of the existence of humanists and the kind of radical, questioning theology promoted by Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, and his suffragan John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich. One of the BBC's ‘God Slot' programmes helped to inspire the Clean Up TV campaign:
Meeting Point
, so-called because it sought ‘to bring together those who believe that man is a spiritual being and those who believe no such thing'. Its episode on 8 March 1964, about which Whitehouse heard secondhand from her pupils, had a panel of experts debating the morality of premarital sex.
Meeting Point
was, she wrote, ‘a classic example of the way in which the BBC, with its penchant for “South Bank” religion, was allowing itself to be used as a launching platform for the “new morality”'.
⁵⁵

The threat to Evensong posed by
The Forsyte Saga
was part of these wider battles. Not even the Forsytes, in fact, could kill it off for good. Many vicars simply changed the time of the service, as they had done before for other programmes.
The Times
ran a correspondence from clergymen, some arguing that the BBC should alter the schedules ‘to satisfy those who wish to follow their devotions to both God and the Forsytes', and others insisting that ‘the important thing is that people should worship God, not that they should worship Him at 6.30 p.m.'. The decline of Evensong had a special undercurrent of pathos because it was a liturgically lyrical ritual with a plangent, evocative name and valedictory associations with twilight and nightfall. ‘The familiar Sunday evening ritual in parish churches, with a few gathering to sing the evening hymns, and to hear again the prayer
to Lighten Our Darkness – that was now over,' wrote A. N. Wilson about the ‘defining moment' of
The Forsyte Saga
.
⁵⁶

The Sunday night period drama, from
The Forsyte Saga
to
Downton Abbey
, which the historian Simon Schama would later accuse of ‘servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia', came to acquire that same sense of valediction, a raking over of the dying embers of the weekend, as Evensong. Sunday evening, as a Sabbatarian hangover from church-going and pub opening hours, was the night when people were most likely to stay in, and they wanted to watch something calming and cheering before work and school in the morning. In a column in the
Church Times
, Ronald Blythe blamed the demise of Evensong on ‘the best television of the week, plus, I used to suspect, some connivance by the clergy to rid themselves of this service'.
⁵⁷

As for that mythical era, ‘the 1960s', most people lived it vicariously through the TV screen. In July 1969, Bernard Davies, a tutor at Chorley College of Education, watched
Top of the Pops
in a shabby, unpainted docklands youth club by the Leeds–Liverpool canal. ‘On the screen, swaying bodies, gay and fashionable clothes, space-age décor, music to match,' he wrote. ‘The weekly ritual confirmation of youth's popular image. Freedom, wealth, confidence, unconventionality – all unmistakeably symbolised.' Meanwhile, all around him, he saw ‘a microcosm of Lancashire's imprisoned youth', sitting in shapeless sweaters and jeans, their faces drawn and undernourished. In these places which the affluent society had not reached, the revolution was watched on television.
⁵⁸

Ronald Blythe's 1969 book,
Akenfield
, suggested that the counterculture had also bypassed the English village but that television was changing it in slower and subtler ways. Blythe had spent several months riding round the Suffolk village of Charsfield and its environs on a Raleigh bike, talking to three generations of villagers and transcribing their oral histories. These interviews included familiar
laments about viewers hiding away in their houses: the local branch secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers worried that television kept men away from union meetings, and the Women's Institute president noted that the attractions of television were making it difficult to attract new members, and that when they had a quiz the teams could always identify commercials (which she could not, being unfamiliar with ITV).

But television was having more positive effects among the more taciturn gravediggers and farmworkers, ‘breaking down their silences' and getting them ‘accustomed to the idea of dialogue'. Farm-minders who had never left the parish boundaries saw the wider world opened up to them nightly on television. Derek Warren, a 29-year-old ploughman, had not been to a pub for six years, preferring to watch television with his wife, enjoying travel programmes about ‘the tribes of people faraway'. ‘The big beer-drinking days are gone,' Francis Lambert, a 25-year-old forge worker, agreed. ‘They drank because there wasn't any television. Their houses were so boring, they were glad to get to the pub.' Lambert liked TV drama, and was always on the lookout for scenes allowing him to indulge his professional interest. ‘You may not have noticed, but telly plays are full of wonderful ornamental ironwork,' he told Blythe. ‘There was this programme the other day about the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution which showed a pair of gates. Marvellous, they were.'
⁵⁹

Although living only just outside London, the author J. G. Ballard was another viewer watching the set detached from the zeitgeist. In 1964 he had been widowed when his wife died suddenly of pneumonia while on a family holiday in Spain, and he was left bringing up three young children on his own in a semi-detached house in the west London suburb of Shepperton. Watching television was a habit that could fit easily into his disjointed routines as an author and single parent, a short story or book chapter being dashed off ‘in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash, and watching
Blue Peter
'.
⁶⁰

Arriving in postwar England from Shanghai as a teenager, Ballard found the country decrepit and backward-looking. He watched TV
with his parents for the first time in Manchester around 1951, when the screen seemed to be ‘about the size of a light bulb'. In his first published short story, ‘Escapement' (1956), the central character discovers to his horror that he is living out his life in the same, endless fifteen-minute time loop, in which various dull programmes repeat themselves on his television, including a panel game, modelled on
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
, in which three professors and a chorus girl try to guess the origins of a Roman pot while the question master, ‘a suave-voiced Oxford don', makes feeble puns.
⁶¹
Ballard welcomed the fresh air of ITV just as he embraced what he saw as other belated arrivals of Americanised modernity like motorway flyovers and airports.