Armchair Nation (34 page)

Much of
Saturday Night
was filmed in one of the little terraced side streets off Belfast's Dublin Road: the ‘wee street' inhabited by comic characters like Derek the camp window cleaner (first heard in the radio soap
The McCooeys
), Orange Lil, a Protestant woman bedecked in Union Jack facepaint, and Ballymena Sarah, who refused to have Sunday papers in her house, all played by Young himself. It was a street in which Catholics and Protestants anachronistically inhabited the same row of terraced houses, for in this period there were huge population movements as families dispersed, often after
intimidation, to live among people of their own religion. Young often put on a slight southern Irish accent when playing a Catholic, to avoid hitting too close to home.
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He had a soft spot for mawkish monologues, one of which was called ‘Such a little time' and ended, ‘For we're here such a little time and there's just no time to hate.' Each show ended with him saying, to long applause: ‘It's a great wee country. Do us a favour, will yis – stop yer fightin'.' At the end of 1972, the BBC's Broadcasting House in Belfast received hundreds of letters and Christmas cards, thanking them for cheering them up with
Saturday Night
. ‘When the story of that period is written,' recalled Pat Loughrey when he was controller of BBC Northern Ireland in the 1990s, ‘I believe James Young will be seen as a major figure. I for one will never forget his weekly entreaty “Will you stop fighting”. He was a very shrewd judge of this place and of all our hidden prejudices.' When Young died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 56, in July 1974, he was mourned across the divided community. The funeral procession ran all the way from his home in Ballyhalbert, a small village on the east coast of the Ards peninsula where he lived, through different parts of Belfast. On the Newtownards Road in Protestant east Belfast, housewives gathered in small groups, men stood outside pubs and workers downed tools. Along May Street in the Catholic Markets area, locals blessed themselves as the coffin went by, many of them weeping.
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The belief that laughter could help to sew up the torn social fabric was not an attitude confined to Northern Ireland. The primetime schedules were full of sitcoms and light entertainment aimed at the whole family, for in 1975 only six per cent of homes had more than one television set. All comedy was performed in front of a studio audience, a Greek chorus inside the television set intending to prod the viewers at home into laughter. All television comedy producers at this time were, consciously or not, disciples of Henri Bergson, who believed that ‘laughter appears to stand in need of an echo … laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry … How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!' Philip Jones, head of light entertainment at Thames Television,
had a theory that farces no longer worked on film because actors could not time laughs without an audience. Nineteen thirties screwball comedies had been shown to preview audiences and then sent back to the editing suite so the laughter-making moments could be spaced apart. They did not seem as funny as they once did, Jones felt, because ‘we are subconsciously missing the urf-urf-urf at the local Odeon'.
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Jones, like James Young, also believed that laughter was inherently inclusive and conciliatory, and that difficult social issues might somehow by smoothed over by sitcom conventions.
Love Thy Neighbour
, the Thames TV comedy series about the conflict between a black and a white family living next door to each other, would, he told the
Daily Express
, ‘help take some of the heat out of race relations'. Tania Rose of the Race Relations Board disagreed, saying she hadn't met a black person who wasn't ‘offended to hell by it'. A primary headmaster in Fife reported that children in his school had made a black worker's life a misery, ‘calling him names like “coon” and “sambo”, having picked them up from the programme
Love Thy Neighbour
'.
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A common complaint from viewers was that the audience in the studio was overreacting and finding everything far too hilarious. The BBC and ITV companies had vast operations doling out free tickets to works outings, schools and pensioners' clubs who came up in coachloads to watch shows being recorded, and creating studio laughter was a fine art. The comedian Ronnie Barker was convinced that fat people laughed more readily because their fleshy bottoms did not feel so uncomfortable on the hard seats. Ken Dodd believed in limbering up his studio audience with one-liners to ‘get the chuckle-muscles working'. Producers like David Croft, co-creator of
Dad's Army
, were masters at creating the right ambience: hiding the tubular steel rostra seating with curtains so the audience were cosied up and the sound was warmer, balancing the microphones above the audience's heads like an orchestra and winding up the fader at exactly the right moment to create a rush of reassuring laughter. Croft moved each recording along quickly, tolerating minor slip-ups by the actors so the audience would not get bored and would not have to feign laughter at endless retakes.
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Any autosuggestive living-room laughter that these techniques
generated quickly rose and died behind the walls of millions of private houses, leaving little evidence that it ever existed. We do know that on one Monday evening in March 1975, a fifty-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn laughed so heartily at an episode of
The Goodies
about Lancashire's answer to Kung Fu, the school of Ecky Thump, that he slumped on the settee and died of a heart attack. The journalist Brian Viner remembers his adoptive father laughing so hard at the first episode of
Fawlty Towers
in September 1975 that he fell off his Parker Knoll armchair. As with
Monty Python
, though, some needed to learn to find it funny. Michael Palin laughed a little at his friend John Cleese during that first episode, while his house guests remained silent. But the last episode in the series, in which Basil Fawlty offended some German hotel guests by repeatedly mentioning the war, had Palin ‘laughing as long and as loud as anything since
Hancock and the Vikings
'.
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This orthodoxy that viewers needed a studio audience to nudge them into laughing created a certain sort of comedy. Script editors would tick a script for the laughs and actors tended to clown, to go for the guffaw rather than a throwaway or wry effect. Like characters in Ben Jonson comedies, those in
Dad's Army
had a distinctive humour, reverberating through their catchphrases: ‘We're all doomed.' ‘Don't Panic!' ‘Do you think that's awfully wise, sir?' ‘Stupid boy.' Croft reinforced this reassuringly one-note quality with his distinctive end credit sequences, which had the words ‘you have been watching' and the actors performing a curtain call, a little vignette of their characters over studio applause.

Few now remembered how contentious
Dad's Army
had been before its first broadcast in 1968, when there was a disastrous showing of a pilot episode to an invited audience, the evidence for which Croft hid at the bottom of his in-tray, and several on the BBC's viewer panel expressed unease at its mockery of the Home Guard. When it was broadcast, however, only one ex-Home Guard soldier wrote to express mild offence. After a few weeks, former Home Guard members were writing in with reminiscences and ideas for episodes, drawings of home-made weapons and offers of fatigues and buttonhole badges.
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The programme's tone, a masterful juggling act of ridicule and tenderness, had quickly turned away wrath.

Croft's other sitcom from this era,
It Ain't Half Hot, Mum
, depicting the exploits of a Royal Artillery Concert Party based in Deolali, India, in the war, was more problematic. With the studio a mock-up of a parade ground with charpoys and mosquito nets, and a sand pit and conifer wood near King's Lynn standing in for the North-West Frontier, it recreated the Raj just as Asian immigration was becoming a focus of attention. The tightening of controls in the 1971 Immigration Act had led to an increase in migration as wives and children, fearing further restrictions, came to reunite their families. Racial violence intensified, with paint and fire bombs thrown at immigrants' houses.

Croft's co-author Jimmy Perry said later that they had written the series ‘to explain why we had so many Asians living in the UK and how we became a multiracial society; it was the effect of the aftermath of Empire. But when people started to dismiss the show as racist it filled me with despair … The strange thing is that British Asians loved it – and still do – they call it “our programme”.' It does seem that, at a time when the National Front was growing in popularity and ‘paki bashing' by gangs of skinhead youths was at its height, many Asians found
It Ain't Half Hot, Mum
reassuring. Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, whose east African-Asian parents had emigrated from Tanzania during the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, recalled her family being ‘swept away by the rarity and simplicity of the portrayals, happy to see ourselves on television at all. At least the characters representing us in comedies appeared human and humorous, not barbaric, oppressed or rebellious.'
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Meera Syal, a teenager living in Essington near Wolverhampton, associated the programme with the fun-poking culture of the Punjab, from where her family had emigrated. She still felt uneasy about one character: the obsequious native bearer, Rangi Ram, played by a blacked-up English actor, Michael Bates. But Syal's parents liked Bates because, having served as an officer in Burma, he spoke mainly in Urdu and Punjabi on the programme, only delivering punchlines in English, and it gave them a feeling of insider knowledge. According
to a reporter for
The Times
who interviewed Asian families in South-all, sometimes known as ‘little Punjab', in the summer of 1976, they often found little else on British TV that they liked. Southall had three cinemas, showing a diet of Indian films, and they were all thriving when, in the age of colour television, most others in the country seemed to be in terminal decline.
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The government's General Household Survey, published in April 1976, showed the extent to which TV now dominated people's waking lives. Ninety per cent of Britons watched television as their main leisure pursuit: women for an average of twenty hours a week, men for seventeen. In 1976 more than a million households switched to colour licences, which for the first time outnumbered monochrome ones. As colour TV crossed from luxury item to near-universal symbol of affluence in the middle of a recession, a press campaign about welfare ‘scroungers', launched by the National Association for Freedom and supported by right-wing Tory MPs such as Iain Sproat, focused on how they were wasting their handouts on colour TVs. Urban myths flourished: immigrants were buying colour TVs with Social Security furniture vouchers because the sets had stands and doors that allowed them to be classed as furniture; those on supplementary benefit got grants for colour TVs as ‘essential' household items.
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Since the start of the decade, a new phrase had entered the estate agents' vocabulary of mod cons: ‘Col/TV rec'd', announcing the arrival of the colour transmitter in an area. But on Britain's extreme edges, its arrival was overdue and often technically difficult. The colour TV signal for the Channel Islands had to travel all the way from Stockland Hill in Devon to Alderney, and had more water to cross than any other signal in the British Isles, making it vulnerable to what engineers call ‘scattering' from the surface of the water. The signal, when it arrived, was weak and liable to interference from French TV transmitters. But a new, manoeuvrable aerial christened SABRE (Steerable Adaptive
Broadcast Reception Equipment) was able to amplify the signal from Stockland Hill and nullify interference from any French transmitters using the same channel. Channel Islanders had colour images by July 1976, just in time for the Montreal Olympics.

Four days later, colour TV reached the Outer Hebrides. A signal a foot wide, containing the colour programmes on all three main channels, left the Rosemarkie transmitter on the east coast and, in a giant game of virtual pinball, was deflected around mountain ranges by booster transmitters until it arrived at a new mast at Eitshal, towering over a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis. Colour came to Shetland when an unmanned transmitter opened on the bird sanctuary of Fair Isle late afternoon on Christmas Eve 1976, just in time for the
Jim'll Fix It Christmas Special
and a film called
Million Dollar Duck
. Apart from a few isolated pockets like the Isle of Barra, which could still only get BBC1 in grainy black and white, colour TV now covered the kingdom.

On Orkney, which had beaten its North Sea neighbour to colour by eight months, the poet George Mackay Brown recorded the excitement among his fellow islanders about the building of the colour TV transmitter on the high moors in the centre of the mainland. Over the last few years he had been chronicling the spread of television on Orkney with resentment merging into resignation. By the mid 1960s, BBC television had become fully part of island life and the giant communal bonfires that used to celebrate ancient festivals like Beltane and Lammas had mostly been replaced by the lacklustre flicker of thousands of cathode ray tubes. ‘TV personalities like Cliff Michel-more, Inspector Barlow and Fanny Cradock are spoken about more familiarly by islanders now than are the people who live in outlying farms,' Brown complained. ‘The shadows on a screen have become more real than their flesh-and-blood neighbours.'
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