Armchair Nation (40 page)

The large audiences would remain in the coming years but, subtly, the tone and ambience of primetime television was changing.
Abigail's Party
, with its lack of a laughter track, foreshadowed a less variety-oriented television comedy which did not demand that we all laughed at the same things. On
The Kenny Everett Video Show
, which had replaced
Opportunity Knocks
on Monday nights, the star,
when not in character, wore a shirt and jeans and performed without a studio audience, with only a few gruff cameramen reacting to his jokes. For the comedian Stewart Lee, then aged ten and watching on a television in Solihull, ‘the tinkling of genuine human laughs, however few, was a beautiful sound'.
⁸¹

The light entertainment now remembered as the quintessence of 1970s TV had the ulterior motive of advertising the benefits of colour sets. The BBC in particular wanted people to buy the more expensive colour licences to offset the increased cost of making colour programmes. The hard selling of colour was led by the Miss World and Eurovision Song Contest spectaculars, and the star-with-guests specials hosted by stars like Lulu, Cliff Richard and Val Doonican, with their garish cerise backdrops and troupes of writhing dancers in sequins and tulle. By the end of the 1970s, though, colour television was the norm, and primetime programmes did not need to sell colour so energetically. A note of dry humour crept into primetime programmes, especially if they were hosted by the Irish presenter Terry Wogan, whose commentary on the Eurovision Song Contest genially subverted the whole charade, and who made much of the fact that the prizes on his quiz show,
Blankety Blank
, were rubbish: a mug tree, a plastic bicycle, a weekend in Reykjavik.

Perhaps there is even a relationship between improved heat insulation and changing styles of television around this time. Many families now had more than one TV set and the whole house was warmer: more than half Britain's 19 million homes had central heating, compared to a quarter at the start of the decade. Double glazing, only in ten per cent of homes by 1979, was about to experience a boom, thanks in part to a series of commercials featuring the Derbyshire farmer-turned-TV personality Ted Moult (‘fit the best, fit Everest'), and by 1982 Britain was second only to West Germany in the amount of double glazing being installed.
⁸²
TV programmes still attracted vast audiences. But they could not intuitively assume that they were speaking to a single family, crowding round the same set for social and actual warmth.

And it was only a few days before Bert Tilsley died [on TV] that our dog had got knocked over. My husband was sitting on the settee watching Coronation Street. Tears streaming down his face. I said, “What's the matter with you?” He said, “I'm thinking of the dog with Bert Tilsley dying.” Fancy comparing the two. You've never seen anything like it. Tears rolling down his face
.

Joyce, 42,
c
. 1986
¹

At the end of the late May Bank Holiday Monday in Britain in 1980, the Dallas oil magnate, JR Ewing, was working late in his office when an unseen hand poked round the door and shot him in the chest with a revolver. A few minutes later, on the BBC
Nine O'Clock News
, a reporter confirmed that Ewing had been critically wounded. There was no shortage of people wanting to kill him: his alcoholic, estranged wife Sue Ellen; his sworn business enemy Cliff Barnes; his mistress and sister-in-law Kristin, who was carrying his baby and had screamed ‘I'll kill him' when JR had her arrested on a jumped-up prostitution charge; and Lusty Dusty, Sue Ellen's ex-lover who was thought to have died in a car crash but possibly hadn't. The next day, thousands of people, most of them women, placed money on who
had shot JR, the surprise favourite being the theoretically posthumous Lusty Dusty at 6–4. The bookmaker William Hill took £50,000 in bets, more than it had made on most of the Bank Holiday races.
²

When the first episode of
Dallas
had been shown in September 1978, the BBC seemed rather sheepish about it. ‘Corn it may all be, but it is corn of the most compulsive sort,' said the
Radio Times
. The phrase ‘wall to wall
Dallas
', evoked throughout the 1980s to suggest a nightmarish future swamped by cable and satellite television pap, was coined by Alasdair Milne, the BBC's director of programmes and then director general ultimately responsible for putting
Dallas
on British TV.
³
Even when it became the BBC's highest rated programme, Britons liked to believe that, unlike Americans, they watched it with a squint, finding it addictive but absurd. On his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show, Terry Wogan deployed
Dallas
as a running joke.

Another emigrant to the UK fed this flattering national self-image that British viewers knowingly enjoyed
Dallas
as kitsch. Since 1972, Clive James had written a television column for the back page of the
Observer
's review section. Before James, TV criticism had received little attention as a literary form. While film and theatre reviews inhabited the present tense and addressed a potential audience, television critics reheated last night's schedule for the benefit of people who had already seen or would never see it. In the early days critics phoned in their copy late at night from their living rooms, having watched it at the same time as other viewers, which did not always encourage careful reflection. The more thoughtful reviewers, like Philip Purser, T. C. Worsley and Peter Black, had all previously been theatre critics and tended to focus on prestige programmes like single plays and documentaries, often looking down on the American imports, light entertainment shows and soap operas that most viewers watched.
⁴

By the mid 1970s, cheaper video recording, assiduous lobbying by the
Sunday Times
critic Elkan Allan and the desire of television producers to have their work given more serious consideration began to force changes. The BBC started showing some programmes to critics before transmission; its preview day, usually a Friday, came to be known as ‘Elkan's day'. Critics could now be more considered
in their responses. James largely avoided the preview days or the little cinemas around London's Wardour Street requisitioned as TV viewing theatres, preferring to watch on a domestic television as his readers did. But writing for a Sunday newspaper, he had more time to hone his rococo, allusive style, which made his reviews creative works in themselves, often more artful than the programmes he was writing about. He did not originate the witty, epigrammatic television column – Bernard Levin, Nancy Banks-Smith and Alan Coren all predated him – but he turned it into a glamorous genre, becoming as important to his newspaper as Kenneth Tynan had been as its theatre critic a generation earlier. James's column was said to be worth an extra 10,000 on the
Observer
's circulation.
⁵

Ever since sailing to England from Australia in 1961, James had been fascinated by the relentless variety and ubiquity of British television. While studying at Cambridge, he would watch the whole evening's schedules in the Footlights clubroom, until the channels shut down. Starting out as a freelance writer in the late 1960s, he would channel-hop through the evening at his Swiss Cottage flat before settling down to write through the night.
⁶
When Karl Miller asked him to contribute a TV column to the
Listener
, he simply wrote about the programmes he was watching anyway. Borrowing a line from the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Browne, James called his first collection of TV criticism
Visions Before Midnight
(1977), an inspired title when television finished before the witching hour and was a fleeting apparition that had to be written about from memory. Without a video recorder, like most viewers at this time, James often had two sets running at once so as not to miss anything.

James wrote about the banal, everyday television that newspaper critics had traditionally ignored. Believing that, since watching television was now a near universal experience, he could dispense with plot summary, he packed in esoteric cultural references, quoting Rilke or Pater while reviewing
Charlie's Angels
or
The Incredible Hulk
. If the word had been in wide currency then, this stylistic promiscuity and eclectic mixing of high and low culture might have been called ‘postmodern'. James preferred to cite John Keats's notion of negative
capability, a way of being receptive to the multifarious nature of the world without bounding it with categories or judgements – a useful mindset, had Keats but known it, for the TV critic.
⁷

James believed that, in all its chaotic diversity, British TV was ‘an expanding labyrinth which Daedalus has long since forgotten he ever designed'. He had little patience with would-be moral censors like Mary Whitehouse who assumed that television had some directing, malign intention behind it. Television offered no answers or resolutions; it was an authorless, collective fiction too vast to generalise about or summarise. One of his favourite subjects was
Dallas
and its strange, riveting details, from its southern pronunciations (
prarlm
for problem,
lernch
for lunch) to the way that Sue Ellen moved her mouth in different directions to convey emotion. ‘It washes my mind cleaner than ever before,' he wrote after the first few episodes. ‘Try taking
Dallas
away from me and giving me some other product in exchange. I'll break both your arms.'
⁸

It was not clear, though, that everyone in Britain watched
Dallas
as wryly. The Southfork women helped to create a fashion for shoulder pads and coiffeured hair, and the Ewings' habit of taking breakfast outside had, according to one study, contributed to the booming market for patio doors and furniture.
⁹
And at least some people were genuinely anxious to learn the identity of JR's killer for, in order that no one find out the ending in advance, the crucial episode had to be flown from Los Angeles to London in two boxes of film, escorted by private detectives and with an extra £120 being paid in order for the precious cargo to have its own passenger seat. The usual two-week gap between the American and British screening of episodes was compressed for this episode, although some British fans spent that morning's small hours listening to the radio bulletins giving the game away, as it was shown in America at 3 a.m. GMT.

Dallas police charged JR's attempted murderer on 22 November 1980 at 9.10 p.m. on BBC1. Her identity (Kristin, who had tried to frame Sue Ellen by hiding the gun in her closet) was an inevitable anticlimax. ‘An imbecile curiosity has now compelled me to sit through two further boring episodes – mainly composed of hospital
visits from his dreadful family and the drooling of his estranged wife,' wrote Alex James of East Moseley, Surrey, to the BBC's
Points of View
. ‘I no longer care who shot JR. I only wish the public spirited assassin had been a better marksman, and that he or she had not wasted the remaining bullets in the revolver.'
¹⁰

Television had never before been so much a subject of public discussion. As tabloid newspapers competed among themselves for a declining readership, they clung parasitically to the younger medium as a source of gossip. The
Sun
and the
Daily Mirror
now had double-page TV sections which became the most read part of the newspaper. Pre-publicity for programmes, from on-air trailers to newspaper previews, also became more visible. The arrival of the VHS tape having enabled bulk copying, one of the familiar features of the London landscape in the 1980s was the number of motorcycle couriers racing through the streets to deliver preview tapes to critics.
¹¹
TV executives began referring to ‘the
Dallas
effect': generating an audience for a show through news coverage, encouraging viewers to believe they would be missing out by not watching it.