Armchair Nation (31 page)

Ballard's youngest child, Bea, noted that her father was unusual in that, unlike her friends' parents, he did not ration his children's television watching, and in the school holidays the Ballards became aficionados of daytime soaps and magazine shows, before all gathering round the television in the evening, after homework, to watch
Dad's Army
or
Steptoe and Son
. Ballard thought Steve McGarrett in
Hawaii Five-O
(‘Book 'em, Danno, murder one!') was the epitome of cool, partly because he drove a 1968 Mercury Park Lane Brougham, and he had always admired the kind of powerful, streamlined American cars he first saw in Shanghai, while himself only ever driving mid-range family saloons.
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As often with Ballard, this bathetic life in front of the television was at odds with the apocalyptic tone of his fiction, which tended to take an acknowledged condition of modern life, such as the television-watching habit, and extrapolate it into a cultural pathology. In his 1972 short story, ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth', Ballard described a near future in which the world's population, its appetite whetted by live broadcasts from Vietnam, sits supine in front of the television as it travels back in time to show the Battle of Waterloo or John F. Kennedy's assassination, complete with real deaths. Ballard's own life in front of the set was more prosaic. ‘The 1960s,' he wrote later, ‘were an exciting decade that I watched on television.'
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Given his laissez-faire and catholic approach to television viewing, and his professional interest in sci-fi, it seems likely that Ballard would have stayed up with his children late into the night for the televisual event of the decade's end, the moon landing. Viewers had already watched a full-scale dress rehearsal of this event just before Christmas 1968, when the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to escape earth's gravity, presented twenty-minute broadcasts at about 1.30 p.m. British time. The first, on 22 December, showed the astronaut Neil Anders clowning around with a toothbrush, turning weightlessness into a party game, and, also for the first time in history, a glimpse of the earth from interplanetary space, as James Lovell pointed his cigar-box sized camera out of the cabin window. Sadly the telephoto lens failed to work, turning the earth into a tiny blob of light, resembling a distant bicycle headlight on a dark road.

The next day, though, viewers could clearly see the earth from 175,000 miles away. Britain was in the shaded area, shrouded in cloud. Raymond Williams, watching in his cottage at Hardwick, a village just outside Cambridge, considered it ‘a new way of seeing' and compared it to the revolving earth that had been BBC1's channel ident since 1963. He saw ‘the north and west in ragged shadow; the bright Caribbean; the atlas shapes of the Americas … I glanced from its memory to the spinning globe of BBC-1 presentation: light, untextured, slightly oiled. It was necessary to remember that both were television.'
⁶⁴

Earlier that year the editor of the
Listener
, Karl Miller, had invited Williams, a Cambridge English don, to write a monthly television column. Williams was a relative newcomer to the medium, having bought his first set only in 1964, but he soon made up for lost time. An old friend, David Holbrook, who would call up at the family cottage to find Williams watching something unlikely like a gymkhana, said, ‘I had the impression he watched for
hours
… he'd leave the set on while we tried to talk, and it just flowed over him.' Williams was a prominent figure in the New Left, making the occasional foray to London to speak and protest about Vietnam. When at home, however, this private man, who often felt tired in the evenings, spent much of his time watching television.

With a background in adult education, Williams had long seen the value of TV and radio as ‘jet-propelled missionaries',
⁶⁵
and in 1963 he had taken part in Anglia TV's ‘Dawn University', shown at quarter past seven each morning – a forerunner of the Open University that began eight years later. Like Richard Hoggart, he hoped that television might form part of what he called ‘the long revolution' towards an educated, participatory, democratic culture in its blurring of the distinction between high and low culture, a division infected by the class system that had afflicted British society since at least the seventeenth century. Like Hoggart, he found television often fell short of these expectations.

Writing for the
Listener
gave Williams's television viewing a raison d'être and a routine. He would buy the
Radio Times
and
TV Times
on Friday, highlight things to watch the next week and then write about them the following Sunday morning. There was little he would not watch and have an opinion about, from the
Horse of the Year Show
to
Sportsnight with Coleman
. A rare exception was the investiture of Prince Charles in July 1969, which, as a Welsh nationalist and republican, he boycotted. Staying in Wales at the time, he claimed that he forgot about it until the shops at Abergavenny began to close early, and was then too busy building a dry stone wall.
⁶⁶

Williams aimed to write as a normal viewer, watching television programmes blend into each other rather than, as most television reviewers did, seeing them as discrete entities like plays or films. For he could see that television's defining quality was its surreal and jarring combinations, compounded in the case of the Apollo 8 broadcasts by the fact that the spacecraft reached the moon on Christmas Eve, and festive specials like
Christmas Night with the Stars
and
Doddy for Christmas
were interrupted by ticker-tape summaries, moving across the bottom of the screen, informing viewers that the astronauts were now in orbit or were having a sleep. Patrick Moore, commenting on the Apollo mission for BBC television, complained of one especially egregious intrusion. On Christmas Eve, as he was commentating on the ‘critical burn', a perilous moment in the mission when the astronauts had to fire the lunar module's rocket to lock them into a closed
path round the moon, the BBC interrupted him to go to the children's programme
Jackanory
.
⁶⁷

No one was really sure how to turn these events into television: the contrast between the domesticity of the medium and the enormity of the achievement was too great. On 20 July 1969, the night of the moon landing, ITV started early at 6 p.m. with
Man on the Moon
, a variety and chat show with a revolving panel of guests, hosted by David Frost. ‘Hello and good evening on the night of the great adventure,' Frost welcomed viewers. ‘The end of an incredible voyage and the beginning of what may be a whole new world for all of us. Because tonight man lands on the moon and steps into the age of Flash Gordon …' There were some odd tonal shifts as Frost segued from interviewing the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell and the historian A. J. P. Taylor to introducing Cilla Black singing or Eric Sykes doing a sketch about a Mancunian bullfighter.

Outside broadcasts, from a London discotheque and a big screen in Trafalgar Square, gauged the public mood. A phone-in, an idea Frost had imported from New York, inspired a Mr Roberts of Eastbourne to call and ask if moondust could help him grow bigger pumpkins. BBC1, meanwhile, ran its normal programmes until 8.45 p.m., just half an hour before the touchdown, being reluctant to cut into
Dr Finlay's Casebook
and
The Black and White Minstrel Show
. The BBC's viewer panel judged BBC1's moon-night
Omnibus
special, ‘So What If It's Just Green Cheese?', featuring Pink Floyd, the Dudley Moore trio and actors reading poetry, to be ‘a last minute shambles … a scrappy and boring “hotch-potch” that did scant justice to so historic an occasion'.
⁶⁸

This is probably why 14.5 million viewers watched ITV's coverage of the touchdown compared with 12 million on the BBC, the first time ITV's ratings had overtaken the BBC's for a major news event. During the descent, ITV showed live pictures of the moon as seen from the top of ITN's Kingsway HQ, along with a static shot of the team at Mission Control, with pre-prepared captions. At 9.18 p.m., the words ‘The Eagle has landed' appeared on screen a couple of seconds before Neil Armstrong said them. The majority of viewers were back with
James Burke and Patrick Moore on the BBC for the moonwalk and Britain's first ever all-night TV broadcast – a hastily prepared one, since it had been supposed that the astronauts would sleep until commencing their moonwalk at around 6 a.m. GMT. Many children, and some adults, came down early next morning, switched on the television and found that they had missed it all.

Those who had heard about the schedule change in time saw, just before 4 a.m., Armstrong's left boot leaving a blurred piece of ladder and stepping gingerly on to the moon. For Christopher Hitchens, a 21-year-old student at Balliol College, Oxford and member of the International Socialists, the moonwalk summed up his ambivalent feelings about America. ‘I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! … Who could forbear to cheer?' he wrote later. ‘Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?' Most British televisions were still 405-line black-and-white sets, giving off a smoky, lunar glare that added to the unearthliness of the images which, for sleep-deprived Britons, must have had the quality of a dream. At his home in Gospel Oak, north London, Michael Palin finally went to bed at 5 a.m., ‘with the image in my mind of men in spacesuits doing kangaroo hops and long, loping walks on the moon, in front of a strange spidery object, just like the images in my mind after reading Dan Dare in the old
Eagle
comics'.
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‘The frequent silences more moving than sound … the strange transparent ballet as the astronauts became “moon happy” …,' wrote Joan Broadbent from Alcester to the
Radio Times
. ‘It was all exciting, of great interest, and wonderful.' But the rock photographer Ray Stevenson, watching the moonwalk with his friend David Bowie and Bowie's girlfriend, Angela Barnett, found it disappointing. ‘It was dull, black and white fuzzy footage of people walking slowly,' he said. Bowie had just released a song called ‘Space Oddity' and told
IT
magazine that he wanted it to be ‘the first anthem of the Moon,
play it as they hoist the flag, and all that', while also describing it as an antidote to ‘space fever'.
⁷⁰

Bowie claimed the song was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film
2001: A Space Odyssey
, which he saw three times when it was released in 1968, but the music critic Peter Doggett points out that it may also have been triggered by the BBC sci-fi drama
Beach Head
, broadcast on BBC2 in colour on 28 January 1969, just as Bowie was writing it. This was about a disillusioned space pilot, Commandant Tom Decker, who has a breakdown while push-buttoning his way through his thirty-seventh mission to an alien planet. The song, which has Major Tom looking back at earth from his tin-can space capsule and reflecting on its vulnerability, also suggests that Bowie saw the Apollo 8 broadcasts. Watching the moonwalk, he was amazed to see that the BBC had complied with his wishes and used ‘Space Oddity' as background music. ‘I couldn't believe they were doing that,' he said. ‘Did they know what the song was about?'
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In order to make the expensive experiment of colour TV a success, it had to become domesticated and routine. Viewers were urged not to put the saturation up too high on their colour sets, to go for the muted, restful tones in the middle rather than the dazzling colours at the top of the dial. ‘There are those who seem to feel that a streak of gold across the forehead of an actor, just under the line of his hair or wig, is a pleasing effect,' wrote the musicologist Henry Raynor. ‘The accurate tuning of a colour set is an art which some people seem to be quite happy to leave unlearnt, as though colour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.'
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