Armchair Nation (36 page)

At 9 p.m. came
Starsky and Hutch
. With a pulsating musical score pushing the action on, the crime-fighting duo screeched and wailed through the streets of LA in their red Ford Torino with the go-faster stripes, crashing through piles of cardboard boxes as they went, before jumping over walls and fire escapes and apprehending felons by handcuffing them on the bonnets of cars. One measure of
Starsky and Hutch
's British appeal was the way it had turned a previously drab item,
the cardigan – the chunky-belted type with Aztec patterns worn by Starsky – into an image of urban cool and the most popular item both in knitting patterns in women's magazines and at British Home Stores.
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After the news, at 10.20 p.m., the famous Barry Stoller theme tune heralded the start of
Match of the Day
, which could still bring in 13 million viewers late on Saturday night, often catching pub-goers who had left just before closing time. At the end, its donnish presenter, Jimmy Hill, reminded viewers to put their clocks back, and then at 11.20 p.m., 10 million viewers stayed up to see Glenda Jackson and Desmond Morris being interviewed on
Parkinson
, which brought the glamour of late-night American talk shows to British television. At twenty past midnight, Michael Parkinson signed off and ended this classic Saturday night, the armchair nation united on BBC1.

Of course, history is rarely so neat. A consensus can be suffocating for those who feel excluded from it, and underneath the communitarian noises of primetime television there lay buried tensions. These tensions emerged a few weeks later, on 1 December, when an unknown punk band, the Sex Pistols, appeared on Thames TV's live teatime magazine programme,
Today
, to promote their first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK'. The presenter Bill Grundy, unsympathetic to punk and a little over-refreshed, invited the band to ‘say something outrageous' and one member, Steve Jones, obliged with ‘you dirty bastard' and ‘what a fucking rotter'. After this unedifying exchange, Thames broadcast a full apology on screen twice later that day and quickly suspended Grundy. Next day's tabloid newspapers seemed especially exercised about the time of the swearing: at 6.25 p.m., in the middle of ‘family viewing', just before
Opportunity Knocks
. A lorry driver, who was so enraged that his eight-year-old son had seen it that he kicked in the screen of his new £380 TV set, was widely quoted. ‘I was so angry and disgusted with this filth that I took a swing with my boot,' he said.
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The imagining of the Sex Pistols' TV appearance as a seminal
moment in recent British cultural history is partly retrospective.
Today
was only shown in the London area, and the tabloids played their allotted role in helping a band seeking notoriety to become notorious. Some younger viewers, though, did seem to welcome the Sex Pistols for cutting through the blandness of family TV. ‘It was like someone had jumped into the television from the real world and shouted out to me to wake up and start living,' wrote Jonathan Ross, then aged sixteen and living in Leytonstone. ‘It made those of us who had seen these naughty kids show no respect for an authority that we all secretly knew was lousy and hypocritical feel like fabulous, dangerous rebels.' Aged twenty-two, Declan McManus, who had just signed for Stiff Records for £150 as Elvis Costello, was similarly energised. Waiting for a train on Whitton station the next day on the way to his job as a data entry clerk in London, he saw ‘all the commuters were reading the papers when the Pistols made headlines … It was as if it was the most awful thing that ever happened … it was a great morning – just to hear people's blood pressure going up and down over it.'
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Young people had been progressively distancing themselves from primetime television since the mid 1950s, when the emergence of TV as the main domestic entertainment meant the decline of radio as a family form and its pursuit of the young listener. The mid 1970s represented perhaps the peak of their alienation from television. As the music critic Simon Frith points out, television added little to popular music: most people's TV sets had poor sound quality and the sound was now relatively worse compared with the improved definition of the hi-fi and FM radio. Much of the music on 1970s television was anti-rock, a sort of counter-revolution against the 1960s. The musical diet of
Opportunity Knocks
consisted largely of youth brass bands, citizens' choirs singing ‘Bobby Shafto', crimplene-clad pianists and boy sopranos in kilts.
Top of the Pops
required its acts to lip-synch, an affront to rock's growing insistence on liveness and authenticity. It was a light entertainment show, with scantily clad dancing girls, garishly dressed DJs and glitter balls, a visual cornucopia that probably accounted for the initially surprising fact that it was the favourite programme among deaf children.
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As the only programme on television with chart music, it was still watched avidly by teenagers, many of whom would wait impatiently each Thursday evening for
Tomorrow's World
to end, with a cassette recorder and microphone poised near the television's speaker.
Top of the Pops
was a lodestone of the generational tensions that were an inevitable feature of one-television households, as something unfolding unexpectedly on screen could uncover an issue that ordinarily remained unspoken, delighting teenagers and shocking parents who had mostly grown up before rock'n'roll.

One such charged moment had come in July 1972, when David Bowie performed ‘Starman' on
Top of the Pops
dressed in a multicoloured lycra catsuit, languidly putting his arm round guitarist Mick Ronson and looking at him seductively. Many key figures in popular music from the late 1970s onwards – Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, Marc Almond of Soft Cell – have cited this broadcast as a watershed in their musical and sexual education. For a fourteen-year-old Chislehurst schoolgirl called Susan Ballion, later Siouxsie Sioux, it meant three minutes of miraculous flight from her surroundings, for she watched it while ill in hospital with ulcerative colitis in a room where ‘people were coughing their guts up or walking around with blood hanging from a cradle on a support'.
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Forty years later, the journalist Dylan Jones wrote a book,
When Ziggy Played Guitar
, entirely about these three-and-a-half minutes of television which, he wrote, ‘caus[ed] havoc in millions of sitting rooms all over Britain … It was thrilling, slightly dangerous, transformative. For me, and for those like me, it felt that the future had finally arrived.' But then, shocked to discover that he must have seen it, as a twelve-year-old, on a black-and-white set when he remembered watching it in colour, he wondered if he was ‘a victim of False Memory Syndrome, and this was my mutable past, a patchwork of dates, times, and pictures, images that rattle past like a scratched DVD'.
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Not for the first time, a moment of television had merged with the mythologising memory of it.

Another memorable, consensus-shaking event occurred in
December 1975, when John Hurt played Quentin Crisp in the ITV drama
The Naked Civil Servant
. Fourteen-year-old George O'Dowd ‘watched it open-mouthed … Everyone thought he was “disgusting”. I thought he was brave and stylish, I wanted to meet him.' ‘Quentin' became a taunt at his school, Eltham Green Comprehensive in south London, but O'Dowd, already chased by skinheads for being effeminate, saw in Hurt's impersonation of Crisp the seeds of his own later reincarnation as Boy George. Another teenager, Martin Degville from Walsall, rushed back home to watch it. ‘After about fifteen minutes of this thing being on,' he recalled, ‘my father's face was starting to go red, and he started faffing, and then turned it off. So I turned it back on. And he's going, “You can't watch this, these people!” … My father got so incensed he actually kicked the TV. He's a very straight guy, fought in the Second World War and everything, so to him this kind of thing was very disgusting.'
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Degville, later lead singer of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, was as intrigued as O'Dowd by Crisp's aesthetic. The New Romantic look adopted by many of these teenage television watchers when they reached adulthood in the late 1970s, of dyed, lacquered hair, rouge and painted fingernails, owed something to Quentin Crisp as well as to Bowie. But the emerging gay liberation movement was disapproving of Crisp's fatalistic, asexual acceptance of his camp otherness. ‘[Quentin Crisp] has set the “gay” world back twenty years,' wrote an anonymous letter-writer to
Gay News
after watching
The Naked Civil Servant
. ‘There is no need to slap us and the hets in the face with “high camp” … Quentin, keep it to yourself. No need to write books about it, have it on the box. Who wants to know?'
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Undeclared, comic homosexuals were a staple of the TV screen, another symptom of the generation gap. Dick Emery had originated many of his TV characters, including the lisping, pink-trousered Clarence with his catchphrase, ‘Hallo honky tonk', during his time in RAF gang shows in Normandy, where cross-dressed entertainers were a necessity and a camp subculture, with its own lingo and mannerisms, thrived. Emery conceded that ‘most comedians recognise that by becoming a little precious they can raise an instant laugh', a
useful ploy ‘when you're faced with an unresponsive audience staring blankly at you across their plates of steak and chips. Why the suggestion of homosexuality should be funny is imponderable – perhaps our laughter is defence, a reaction against hidden fears about our innermost tendencies.'
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Younger gay activists thought that camp held back the cause of equality. ‘They do not come much lower than Larry Grayson,' wrote
Gay News
of the effeminate comic whose catchphrases were ‘shut that door', ‘what a gay day' and ‘look at the muck in 'ere'. ‘He will become a “superstar” while he confuses and distresses our young teenage brothers.' Another gay rights campaigner thought Mr Humphries, the fey sales assistant played by John Inman in the department store sitcom
Are You Being Served?
, was ‘like a nail in the coffin of what we were trying to achieve'. In 1977, when
TV Times
readers voted Inman television personality of the year, gay rights protestors picketed his show at the Brighton Dome.
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No one in the 1970s thought television was passing through an Elysian age, but then no one ever does when they are passing through one. Even before the Annan Committee on Broadcasting described the BBC's attitude to complaints as ‘not only cavalier, but aggressive and arrogant', there was a growing sense within the corporation that it needed to be more responsive to its viewers. ‘If a churchy gloom suddenly darkens the BBC Club, somebody somewhere is bound to be talking about access,' wrote Jonathan Raban in the
Radio Times
. ‘How does one stop television from turning into a bland, glittering monster, owned by vast corporations and manned by the trained professionals, who are the only people equipped to understand how the damn thing works?'
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Sensing the political mood even before Annan reported in 1977, the BBC published leaflets titled ‘It's your BBC' or ‘It's one BBC – and it's yours', explaining how viewers could contact them, and it held the
first of a series of a public meetings in Truro in 1976. These tended to be polite affairs. At a meeting at the Octagon, an eighteenth-century chapel in Bath, in October of that year, the audience was drawn mostly from representatives of local societies, like the Walcot Towns-women's Guild and the Loyal Order of the Moose, and ‘concluded with the clergyman thanking the BBC for taking so much trouble, offering an assurance that the corporation is deeply loved'.
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