Armchair Nation (35 page)

Brown lived with his elderly mother, Mhairi, in a council house on the Stromness seafront. In the evenings she watched TV, and he had to try to blank out the noise from
Dr Who, Top of the Pops
and
The Monkees
with the sound turned up high. For Brown, who believed that the perfect poem was ‘a cold pure round of silence', it was the booming sound of the television set he objected to more
than the pictures – that and the tedious pub talk it spawned about last night's programmes. ‘The story-teller is being pushed out by the frightful bore who will give you opinions about Vietnam and the colour problem and heart transplants,' he wrote, ‘not really his own opinions at all but some prejudiced odds and ends that have stuck in his mind from a discussion witnessed on
Panorama
the night before.'
²⁷

For Brown, the obsession with new technology on the islands was a form of displaced religious idolatry. ‘Progress is a goddess who, up to now, has looked after her children well. The sky is scored with television aerials,' he wrote in 1969 in
An Orkney Tapestry
. ‘The notion of progress is a cancer that makes an elemental community look better, and induces a false euphoria, while it drains the life out of it remorselessly.' Brown dated this zeal for progress back to the arrival of newspapers on the islands in the 1820s, which turned language from ‘a sacred mystery' into ‘the stilted elegances of a newspaper column'.
²⁸

In this long view, however, lay the seeds of an eventual accommodation with television. Mary Whitehouse, without Brown's deep historical sense, thought television a new and explosively dangerous phenomenon. For Brown, antagonistic to modernity in general and regarding the Reformation and the industrial revolution as terrible wrong turnings, television carried no special weight. Slowly he found himself prepared to give ‘half a genuflection in the direction of the goddess Progress' that his fellow Orcadians had so eagerly embraced. After his mother's death in 1967, he moved a few hundred yards to another council flat where, despite still not possessing a fridge or a phone, he had installed a rented black-and-white television set. ‘How easy it is, in the evening after the day's work,' he conceded, ‘to sit back in the armchair and let the facile images flood through the mind.'
²⁹

In 1971 Brown began a weekly column for the
Orcadian
. Since writing for the
Orkney Herald
in the 1950s, his tone had softened, and he now regaled his readers with the trivia of his everyday life. He lamented the fact that he no longer walked up Brinkie's Brae, the hill overlooking the town, as the lure of TV became too great, and that his television watching, and that of his fellow Stromnessians, had killed off the local cinema which had brought the townfolk together twice a
week. In May 1973, the debut production of John McGrath's touring radical theatre company, 7:84, came to Stromness.
The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
was a powerful piece of theatre about how the Highland Scots had been disinherited to make way for more profitable sheep, stags and North Sea oil. Brown, though, did not go to see it. Guiltily, he stayed in to watch
Cider with Rosie
on BBC1. But he did later catch the performance in Orkney's main town, Kirkwall, after which he admonished his fellow Orcadians, more gently now than he used to do in the
Herald
, for their addictive TV watching and unconcern about the world beyond their living rooms.
³⁰

Brown felt that, despite the howl of rage from one end of the country to another, the TV curfew in the winter of 1973–4 had been one of the best things to come out of the economic crisis. Instead of being ‘lulled to sleep by the nightly anodyne – the benediction of that old one-eye in the corner of the living room' with its ‘dance of irrelevant shadows', it had been a relief to yank the plug out of the wall and write a letter, talk or ‘simply drink your ale and dream'. The return of television with the general election campaign had been a rude awakening. So important did politicians think themselves, he felt, that the fuel shortage was forgotten in favour of piped TV with ‘the three superstars, and their satraps, posturing and mouthing'. This, he thought, only added to the general feeling of apathy and disillusionment.
³¹

But Brown's broadsides against television were becoming fainthearted: a mark of respect, in part, to his dead mother, a lover of the lowbrow with a vast, non-judgemental capacity for enjoyment. His argument was with progress, not with the tastes of ordinary Orcadians, with which he had always tried to connect. He disliked what he saw as a tendency to obscurity and angst in modern art and literature and realised that television could sometimes offer what he wanted to produce: an accessible and ecumenical folk art. Now, once ‘that mysterious potent mast' on Keelylang Hill was up and running, he reminded Orcadians in the spring of 1976, they would have three channels instead of just BBC1. He could watch the nature programmes on BBC2 and, on Grampian Television, that unfamiliar cultural form,
the commercial, with its ‘melting rapture of voice and image'. And for the first time, it would all be in colour, although Brown himself clung mulishly to monochrome. ‘We old-fashioned ones are living in a drab workaday world – greyly we spend our evenings,' he noted with a residue of proud asceticism.
³²

In its issue for 23 October 1976, the
Radio Times
revived its 1930s tradition of a fireside issue heralding the start of the autumn schedules. The artist Peter Brookes's cover for this issue, ‘Home for the evening', showed autumn leaves cascading down on to an armchair with a jug of Ovaltine and a copy of the
Radio Times
on a side table, its sub-heading suggesting that the turning back of the clocks meant ‘an extra hour's darkness for viewing'. If you flicked through the pages of this issue, the first day of the TV listings was, as usual, a Saturday night. Thanks to the scheduling skills of its head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, and the controller of BBC1, Bryan Cowgill, the BBC was winning the ratings battle on this key night of the week (although slightly less key for ITV, because Sunday closing meant that advertisers were keener on the Friday and Sunday slots) and for the first time ever most people were watching in colour. The BBC1 schedule for that Saturday night, 23 October, has entered popular memory as a classic seven hours of popular, quality entertainment: the golden age condensed into a single evening's television.

The BBC's ascendancy began at 4.50 in the afternoon, when about a million viewers turned over from the ITV wrestling especially to watch the ‘full classified football results' on
Grandstand
, ninety minutes of footballing melodrama turned into a simple, soothing litany of numbers and names delivered in alphabetical order. Len Martin's reading of the results had the quality of a rite, bringing calm to the late afternoon, disturbed only by the scraping of pencils against pools coupons. His urbane BBC voice, carrying the merest trace of its antipodean origins, pre-announced the results through cadence and
intonation, so viewers could tell whether the first-named team had won, lost or drawn without looking up from their coupons.

At 5.30 p.m., after the news and
Tom and Jerry
, came
The Basil Brush Show
, hosted by a glove puppet fox with a gap-toothed grin, taste in natty suits and plum-cake accent inspired by Terry-Thomas. Like much of that evening's entertainment, the show addressed viewers through the dual register of pantomime: Basil's staccato laugh and self-admiring response to his own jokes (‘Boom boom!') appealed to children, while his topical jokes and subversive comments about British Rail or ‘Mary Lighthouse' kept adults interested. ‘Basil is a great creation and I recommend his raucous tomfoolery to the producers of
Masterpiece Theatre
,' wrote the playwright Tom Stoppard in the
Radio Times
. For the poet and critic D. J. Enright he was ‘a cuddly innocent and a hard-boiled sophisticate: a fantasist who can suddenly turn coolly rational … Basil Brush belongs to that small band of anthropomorphised animals, headed by Toad of Toad Hall, who operate successfully in both worlds.'
³³

At 6 p.m., the whirling, electronic theme tune and time-tunnel graphics announced the arrival of
Doctor Who
. The BBC's head of drama Sydney Newman had created this programme thirteen years earlier to stem the haemorrhaging of fathers from the TV screen on late Saturday afternoon in the hiatus between the end of
Grandstand
and the start of
Juke Box Jury
, and the need to attract adults as well as children had lain behind the decision to make the Doctor a mature man rather than a juvenile lead. The mid 1970s was
Doctor Who
's most popular period, with a new producer, Philip Hinchcliffe, who moved the series into Gothic, grown-up areas, and a new doctor played by Tom Baker who, after a teething period in which viewers were unsure about his displacement of the well-loved Jon Pertwee, had settled into the role as a jelly-baby-eating, cerebral eccentric with a floppy hat and long stripey scarf.

Like
The Basil Brush Show, Doctor Who
's audience was diverse. While more than half its viewers were over fifteen, Mary Whitehouse also blamed it for an epidemic of nightmares and bedwetting among under-sevens. One of the historical clichés about children's reactions
to this programme may have originated with Baker himself, who told a group of schoolchildren that
Doctor Who
frightened him so much he watched it from behind the sofa. Many young viewers, though, delighted in its scariness. After one 1976 episode, ‘The Seeds of Doom', they wrote in. ‘I liked the episode very much. I think it was one of the most scariest ones of all,' said one. Another commended the producers on their ingenious methods for killing off characters, such as ‘when Scorbie was pulled under the water when the plant came up and when Chase was killed in the compost machine'.
³⁴
That Saturday night saw the end of a chilling four-part story,
The Hand of Fear
, about a fossilised hand attempting to bring its previous owner back to life at a nuclear power station. It also saw the poignant departure of Sarah Jane, the most loved of the Doctor's female companions. Distracted by a summons to Gallifrey from the Time Lords, the Doctor shooed her out of the TARDIS in what he confidently (but wrongly) told her was Hillview Road, south Croydon.

At 6.25 p.m., as living room lights came on across the country, came
The Generation Game
, presented by Bruce Forsyth, celebrating its 100th edition. It was unusual for the evening's star attraction to be on so early in the schedule, but Bill Cotton felt that weekend viewers were especially likely to stick with one channel, being won or lost by the success of the early ‘build'. Forsyth's job was to hook in viewers to BBC1 and keep them there, just as he had done when working as the second-spot comic on variety bills. ‘Every Saturday, to the mortification of Independent Television, in the fireside months from September to January, about 18 million people, fresh from football matches, sweeping leaves, or moody contemplation of betting slips, watch this man and his young wife go through a routine of whose every small thematic variation an idiot could be a connoisseur,' wrote the critic Richard North.
³⁵
‘Ladies, gentlemen and children,' Forsyth began (the show often being the last thing younger children were allowed to watch, washed and in their pyjamas), ‘Nice to see you; to see you nice.'

The Generation Game
felt fresh because, although studio recorded, it had the atmosphere of a stage show. Forsyth asked for the first rows of seating to be lit, so he could see the audience's faces, and he moved
the show along quickly as though it were live, to build up momentum. He had learned early on the value of the audience in creating an ambience when he had first appeared on television, aged eleven, in August 1939. The studio set at Radiolympia was designed to look like a lounge in someone's home. ‘There was no audience seated in front of me in rows of wooden chairs – and, somehow, I had to create my own atmosphere,' Forsyth recalled with a wince. ‘The moment passed ignominiously.'
³⁶
On
The Generation Game
he was like a human Basil Brush, all fake snarls and eyes raised to heaven as he mocked the contestants' attempts to throw pots or stretch dough. He claimed to have learned this skill in wartime concert parties, studying faces in order to pick the right person to ridicule. The prizes at the end of the show passed on a conveyor belt, a panoply of 1970s consumerism: canteen and cutlery sets, teasmaids, his'n'hers bathrobes, matching vinyl luggage, cuddly toys.

At 7.25 p.m., about 12.5 million people carried on watching for
The Duchess of Duke Street
, a new period drama in the mould of ITV's
Upstairs Downstairs
which benefited from being sympathetically sandwiched between
The Generation Game
and, at 8.15 p.m.,
The Two Ronnies
. This slickly professional show, now drawing in nearly 20 million viewers, had not changed its formula in half a decade. In between the comic sketches, there was Ronnie Corbett narrating a long shaggy-dog story from an armchair; a filmed comedy series, in this case a Spike Milligan-penned romp called ‘The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town'; and a musical pastiche finale, all of it bookended by Corbett and Barker sitting at desks reading fake news items (‘And in a packed programme tonight … and it's good-night from me …').