Armchair Nation (37 page)

A lesser known subtext of this era is that it was one of energetic experiments in access television. Alongside the lavish light entertainment of primetime, a parallel make-do-and-mend universe of local TV had formed. Community television had begun in the early 1970s as an offshoot of the cable TV network which had grown up in areas where reception was poor or the transmitters did not yet reach. Now the spread of transmitters meant that the cable companies were worried that they could no longer promise clearer pictures in most areas, and they needed to find new markets. So in 1972 the government allowed them to start a small number of community TV channels with programmes made by local people.

Greenwich Cablevision, which should really have been called Plumstead Cablevision because it operated from a shop next to a greengrocer's on Plumstead High Street, had a Saturday night variety show called
Greenwich Meantime
which offered an early career break for the comedy duo Hale and Pace, and a weekly
Special Report
on subjects such as ‘Behind the scenes of the Entertainments Department of Greenwich Council'. Community television benefited from the fact that some areas still had poor reception. The people of Plumstead had a dreadful TV picture from the Crystal Palace transmitter which, on its way east, bumped into the immovable object of Shooters Hill, one of the highest points in London. Greenwich Cablevision solved this problem by picking up its signal from a mast on top of one of the borough's new high-rise blocks and piping it to thousands of homes. Reception in Sheffield was almost as bad: the city nestles in a natural amphitheatre with much of it built on the hillsides, and it has over 2 million trees, a particular problem for television signals in the summer when they are in leaf. The fact that tenants in Sheffield's
20,000 council homes were forbidden to erect roof aerials was a further boost for the new channel, Sheffield Cablevision, which broadcast dominoes and darts from Sheffield pubs and
Hullabaloo
, an anarchic Saturday morning children's programme inspired by ATV's
Tiswas
.

Since they were not allowed advertising, the community TV channels were perennially poverty-stricken. Swindon Viewpoint, whose programmes included
This is Swindon
and
Report Swindon
, was the last to stop broadcasting in 1976, even EMI's bequeathing the station's equipment for £1 having failed to save it. But community TV had one last hurrah: Milton Keynes Channel 40, which went on air in December 1976. Milton Keynes, built on a sloping hill with a valley to the north and east, and with thousands of London plane trees planted along the main boulevards, also got bad TV reception, and the Milton Keynes planners approved of cable television because they, as in Sheffield, preferred not to have unsightly TV aerials ruining the skyline.

A child of the Labour government, Channel 40 was generously funded by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, and intended to foster a sense of community in a new town full of displaced families. Groups could borrow facilities to make their own programmes and it was piped in to all new houses for free, for four hours per week. In the almost primetime hours between 6 p.m. and 7.30 p.m., it pulled in sixteen per cent of the available audience.
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It ended in 1979, not because it made an ill-advised April Fool's joke about the new city being razed to the ground, but because the new Tory government was hostile to the no-strings, direct grants on which it depended.

The local aspect of community television made it watchable: there was novelty in seeing your own high street, the local school's Christmas play, or neighbours talking about lacemaking or model trains. In Milton Keynes, organisers of protests about a nursery school closure and library cuts managed to reverse the decisions after making programmes about them. But most people wanted to watch television, not make it. The tiny number of volunteers were mainly techno-literate single men, with a seasonal rush of students and schoolchildren in the summer months. By contrast, the access programmes on the main channels – BBC2's
Open Door
, HTV and Tyne Tees all offered studio
facilities and airtime to members of the public to make their own programmes – were oversubscribed. But, the Annan committee found, viewers were rather less enthusiastic about watching local pressure groups campaigning against urban motorways or arguing for cuts in the rates.
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Another crack in the image of the unified armchair nation was that regional television was flourishing. The Annan committee saw the ITV–BBC duopoly as a metropolitan élite imposing its tastes on the rest of the population and stifling the voices of the regions. From today's perspective, this judgement seems harsh. The ITV regions had always been strange, makeshift entities, defined mainly by the reach of the transmitters, and fighting for viewers with the fickleness and ferocity of Balkan states. The regions were also at the mercy of the ITV franchise rounds: in the last big one of these in 1968, Granada-land had been cut to half its size, reduced to a rump west of the Pennines. The Granada chairman Sidney Bernstein's half-serious threat to appeal to the United Nations fell on deaf ears.

The arrival of colour TV in the late 1960s also created problems for the regions because more transmitters were required and, until a transmitter was built, no one knew for sure how far its signal – what engineers called its ‘fall-out' – would reach. When Yorkshire TV built a colour transmitter at Bilsdale on the North Yorkshire Moors in 1969, Tyne Tees discovered to its dismay that the signal could reach as far as Newcastle, and the two companies were forced to merge under a holding company.
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A similar problem occurred when the signals from Anglia's new colour transmitter at Belmont strayed into Yorkshire; Anglia ended up renting out the mast and many Norfolk viewers suddenly found themselves watching Yorkshire Television.

And yet, just as with the ‘historic' English counties which are really nothing more than pragmatic divisions of fairly recent vintage, ITV viewers became oddly attached to their regional companies. Each had
their start-up themes for the beginning of the day's television, jaunty marches like Border's ‘Keltic Kavalcade' or Southern Television's ‘Southern Rhapsody', composed by Richard Addinsell (better known for the Warsaw Concerto), accompanying a montage of regional scenes. Each had their short idents to introduce the programmes they had made, usually with bold brass and vibraphone fanfares similar to those used by Hollywood studios at the start of films. London Weekend Television's ident was three coloured stripes forming to depict the course of the River Thames through the capital which, at least according to its designer Terry Griffiths, resembled the initials ‘L' and ‘W'. Colloquially known as the ‘stripey toothpaste', for London viewers it announced the arrival of the weekend. Thames TV's London skyline mirrored in the river may have been associated more mundanely with the working week, but it was still the most famous ident on the network, an emblem of metropolitan self-assurance.

Non-Anglia viewers mainly saw its revolving silver knight before the syndicated and hugely popular quiz show
Sale of the Century
, when the snatch of Handel's Water Music, arranged by Sir Malcolm Sargent, ended with the perhaps anticlimactic affirmation, ‘And now, from Norwich, it's the quiz of the week.' (‘Thanks to this opening line, a lot of people thought I lived in Norwich,' said the show's host, Nicholas Parsons.)
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Granadaland, with its ‘G-arrow' ident, now symbolised the north-west – stretching from Liverpool Bay to the mountains of Snowdonia and the Lake District, and from the Pennine ridge to the Black Country chimneys – just as eloquently as it once had the north, although Liverpudlians always resented the fact that its centre of gravity was unmistakably Mancunian. Westward TV's galleon, a model of Sir Francis Drake's
Golden Hind
, and Grampian's eight notes from ‘Scotland the Brave', were the defiant motifs of minnow stations wresting airtime from the big ITV companies.

The nation mainly got to know Southern Television's star-like ident (‘the station that serves the south') through Jack Hargreaves's
Out of Town
, which by the 1970s was being shown throughout the country. It now aimed at being as evocative as it was informative, giving urban viewers what the former Southern Television controller
Roy Rich called ‘a dream of the green fields beyond'. Beyond the Southern region they saw
Out of Town
episodes out of synch and long after they were made, happily watching fish being caught in the middle of winter or lambing in August. Noting that Hampshire, where he lived, emptied in the morning as people travelled to London for work, Hargreaves realised that many of his viewers no longer had any real contact with rural life. ‘I've got to hook every sort of viewer, particularly the ones who have never held a fishing rod,' he said. ‘You can't do that just by showing them a lot of floats and telling them how to breed champion maggots.'
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Most of Hargreaves's viewers were unaware that he was a Southern Television executive and former magazine editor who felt just as at home in the Savile Club as on the River Test. The Clydeside trade union leader, Jimmy Reid, watching in Glasgow, thought
Out of Town
‘a gem of a programme' and ‘the answer to those TV moguls who plead poverty as an excuse for diminishing standards'. Another fan, George Harrison, now living in semi-rural seclusion near Henley-on-Thames, had the idea, while watching one episode on restoring old leather books, of publishing his autobiography/lyric book,
I Me Mine
, as a hand-bound limited edition.
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Farming programmes were a familiar feature of the regional schedules for Sunday lunchtime, often with little concession to what was called the ‘over the shoulder' lay audience. Despite this, viewing figures for Tyne Tees'
Farming Outlook
suggested that at least two-thirds of its viewers were non-farmers, unfazed by in-depth items about crop rotation and tied cottages. The show was mini-networked to Yorkshire TV, Border, STV and Grampian, and the presenter Peter Williams found himself being hailed by lorry drivers as far north as Aberdeen. At a time when 15,000 men were leaving farming each year for the factories and docks where, even during a recession, they could earn in a week what a farm paid in a month, these programmes also alerted urban viewers to the realities of agrarian capitalism. ‘These agricultural programmes do yeoman service,' said the Annan Report, ‘explain[ing] the importance of agriculture and forestry to our largely urban community who consume agricultural
products without understanding much about the toil and hazards of production.'
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Regional opt-outs were common. The Tyne Tees show,
What Fettle?
(Geordie for ‘How're you doing?'), was one of the north-east's most popular programmes, with entire villages being bussed into the studio to watch folk music, ballads and comedy themed around the region's great interests, such as coal, fishing or football. When the impressionist Mike Yarwood began mimicking Russell Harty on his BBC show, the studio audience laughed; but those in the landmass between London and the Scottish Highlands must have been baffled, for Harty's LWT chat show was transmitted in the London area only, and then, for obscure reasons, by Grampian. At a reception in the Town Hall of his hometown in 1975, the Mayor said to Harty, ‘You may be a big cheese in London, but you're bugger-all in Blackburn.'
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The campaign for a Welsh language television channel, spear-headed by the small but vocal Welsh Language Society, was also reaching a climax. At the national
Eisteddfodau
, speakers often pointed out television's baleful influence in not only presenting an almost unbroken diet of English but also in cutting down the amount of talking, which could have been in Welsh. Welsh language protestors, many of them students or lecturers at Welsh universities, began climbing up television transmitters and trying to disrupt programmes. At 9.05 p.m. on 4 March 1977, protestors invaded the buildings at the Winter Hill transmitter on the West Pennine Moors and managed briefly to switch off the ITV series
Raffles
across the Granada region. ‘I tried to explain that radio and TV signals are no respecters of geographical or political boundaries,' wrote the duty officer, ‘and I tried to point out to them that inhabitants of N. Wales did not have to tune their sets to the Granada channel if they did not wish to receive it. But all this fell on deaf ears.'
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Advocates of a separate Welsh channel professed concern for the non-Welsh-speaking majority who had to put up with Welsh programmes like the BBC's Carmarthenshire-set soap opera,
Pobol y Cwm
. This had long been a complaint of Wales's non-Welsh speaking majority. In 1964, more than 5,000 viewers in Aberystwyth signed
a petition protesting about the launch of a new BBC television service for Wales, fearing they might lose their favourite programmes, like
Z Cars
and
Steptoe and Son
, for Welsh language ones. According to a Radnorshire parish council in a 1973 submission to the Committee on Broadcasting Coverage, these Welsh programmes made most Welshmen ‘aliens at their own firesides'. Wales had become ‘a television electrician's paradise', with non-Welsh speakers paying to have their aerials retuned and turned towards English transmitters.
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