Armchair Nation (43 page)

The art of scheduling could be used to buoy up a less popular programme, by ‘hammocking' it between two more popular ones, so that it benefited from ‘inheritance' at the start (viewers staying tuned to the same channel having tuned in for a previous programme) and ‘pre-echo' at the end (viewers tuning in early to watch a favourite programme, seeing the last bit of the preceding one and deciding to watch it next week). ITV's current affairs series
World in Action
was typically placed after an 8 p.m. comedy like
In Loving Memory
(the ‘rubbish about a funeral parlour' that Kenneth Williams watched with his mother), and before a popular drama like
Quincy
at 9 p.m. – a mass exodus to BBC1 also being halted by the windfall of having
Panorama
on the other side.

The recognised master of the scheduling arts was Lew Grade's nephew, Michael Grade, appointed controller of BBC1 in 1984. Grade had begun his career working on the
Daily Mirror
sports page and compared television scheduling to arranging newspaper layout, presenting stories in attractive forms for maximum impact. He went on to work as a showbusiness agent, where, like his uncle, he learned to work out the running order on a variety bill, which again was good training for scheduling. He first honed these skills directly in the 1970s as head of light entertainment and then director of programmes at London Weekend Television. In theatre, you could try out new ideas and unproven actors out of town before exposing them
to the West End. On LWT, a weekend channel that began at 7 p.m. on Friday evening, when viewers wanted to be entertained at the end of a working week, there was nowhere to hide the quirky or experimental. ‘Every night on LWT was Saturday night at the London Palladium,' wrote Grade. ‘There was no televisual equivalent of a wet Monday evening at the Hackney Empire.'
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Grade remembered one LWT programme with a salutary shudder:
Bruce Forsyth's Big Night
. In 1978 Forsyth, the star of the BBC's
Generation Game
, defected to LWT to present a lavish variety show which took up nearly two hours of Saturday primetime, with comic turns, star guests, audience participation games like Teletennis and Beat the Goalie, and the UK Disco Championships. ‘We want to get away from the awful slot thinking which says that situation comedies have to be half an hour, and not a second longer,' one LWT executive said. ‘It's a bit like the sports formula for Saturday afternoons – full of different kinds of goodies.' But the show was a famous failure, beaten easily in the ratings by the new
Generation Game
with Larry Grayson on BBC1. ‘During the year the news was bad and the weather was worse,' argued the IBA's annual report. ‘Many people turned to comedy and light entertainment with great expectations. Sometimes those expectations were realised. Sometimes they were not. The national press, in cynical and bitter mood, saw gloom everywhere. The most obvious victim was
Bruce's Big Night
.'
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But Grade knew better than to blame the winter of discontent or the newspapers. Instead, this chastening episode convinced him of the need for tight scheduling, ‘that awful slot thinking' in which an evening's entertainment had connected segments that built up to a climax like a multi-course gourmet meal.

In another of his comparisons, Grade likened the schedules to a supertanker, because the long gap between commissioning and broadcasting meant that changing course took time. So when he became controller of BBC1, he took the listings home and saw what could be done by tinkering with the arrangement of programmes that had already been commissioned. His first inspired tweak was moving
Tenko
, a drama series tracing the lives of a group of women from Singapore interned in a Japanese POW camp, from Thursday
to Sunday night, increasing its audience from 5 to 11 million. He also told Robin Day, the presenter of
Question Time
on Thursday nights, not to close with his usual advice to ‘sleep well' because this might dissuade viewers from staying up for the programme that followed. And he repeated the two episodes of the struggling soap opera
EastEnders
together on Sunday afternoons, thus boosting its ratings and achieving the ‘
Dallas
effect' of getting it talked about. Just over 30 million people watched its Christmas Day episode in 1986, the highest television audience of the decade. It was, wrote the
That's Life
presenter Esther Rantzen of Grade's scheduling skills, ‘like watching an expert window dresser adjusting a bauble on a Christmas tree to make it shine'.
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Grade's carefully cultivated image, enhanced by his cigar and red braces, was that of an impresario who went with his intuitions rather than relying on what he called ‘the mumbo-jumbo jargon' of concept testing and demographics. ‘It smelt like a Sunday show,' he said after moving
Tenko
. ‘It was just instinct.' In fact, Grade worked closely with Pamela Reiss from the BBC's Broadcasting Research Department and relied on research which showed that audiences were happy to watch more demanding drama later on Sunday night. In autumn 1984 this department questioned 1,500 viewers. Asked to write out last night's and tomorrow night's schedule on ITV and BBC1, it turned out that most could name only two programmes, one of which was the news. Grade decided that the schedules must have ‘fixed time points that are almost like alarm clocks in viewers' minds'. The research showed that viewers thought naturally in hours and half hours. For years they had misread the unshakeable fixtures of Thursday evening, thinking that
Tomorrow's World
was on at 7 p.m. and that
Top of the Pops
followed at 7.30, when in fact they were both usually on five minutes before or after that. Grade insisted that, even though the international standards were twenty-five and fifty-five minutes to accommodate commercials, BBC programmes should now be made in half-hour and hour-long segments.
³⁸

Grade was also helped by a four-volume publication of Proustian proportions from the Broadcasting Research Department,
Daily Life
in the 1980s
, which exhaustively examined the behaviour of Britons in the summer and winter of 1983–4, each volume containing over 600 pages of statistical tables. A ‘scheduler's Bradshaw', as one critic called it, it carefully mapped the activities of every Briton over four years old (toddlers never having been counted statistically as viewers), in quarter hours, from 6 a.m. to 2.30 a.m. – so, for example, it could tell you how many five- to nine-year-old children were in sight of a television when
Crackerjack
was broadcast on Friday afternoon at 4.50 p.m., or exactly how many people were awake and available to view television at 9.30 p.m. in the winter (ninety-one per cent) and in the summer (sixty-nine per cent). There were 52.4 million people in the country over four years old and every winter night, about 25 million of them were sitting dutifully in front of a television, like Kenneth Williams and his mother. If you measured the total audience at any time between the peak hours of 6.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m., it was always around this number.
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This broad mass of 25 million people had retained the desire to watch a wide range of programmes and there seemed to be a large element of randomness about their likes and dislikes.
Tenko
had initially been rejected by one BBC commissioner, its co-writer Jill Hyem revealed, because, he said, ‘no one'll want to know about an all-woman cast looking their worst'. And yet its female-dominated, quotidian storylines about the rationing of sanitary towels, the non-delivery of Red Cross parcels or the organising of games of rounders proved to be absorbing when put in the right place in the week. ‘I was impressed by your portrayal of women over 30 as human beings,' wrote one male viewer. ‘Men usually find it easy to relate to a woman in her twenties, probably because their mothers were that age when they were young boys. We need to see older women more often if we are to perceive them as real people.'
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Another programme that showed how unexpected viewers' tastes could be was
One Man and His Dog
. It was presented by a Staffordshire-born naturalist, Phil Drabble, who had initially declined to take part because he thought it would make viewers ‘drop off their perch with boredom'. Consisting largely of shepherds whistling and calling
out commands (‘Come by, Meg', ‘Steady lass!') to a dog trying to get a bleating flock of sheep into a pen somewhere on a British hillside, it introduced viewers to this traditional rural skill and turned the border collie into a cult hero. By the mid 1980s it had a primetime audience of 8 million on Tuesday nights on BBC2, most of them town- and sofa-dwelling vicarious shepherds, the majority of them women.

Some programmes made little impression and then mysteriously struck a chord.
Only Fools and Horses
, a sitcom about unlicensed market traders living in a council block in Peckham, had first gone out on Tuesday nights in September 1981, attracting a modest BBC1 audience of under 8 million and many letters from viewers asking what the title meant. It was only when the second series was repeated in the summer of 1983, to fill a gap in the schedules during a BBC technicians' strike, that it began to emerge slowly as the most popular sitcom of the decade, adding new words to the common language like ‘lovely jubbly' and ‘plonker' (a word for the penis originating in 1960s London that, as often happens with penis synonyms, had become an innocent name for an idiot). Despite the choices offered by video and the remote control, viewers did not seem to behave like carefully discriminating consumers. Seemingly unglamorous dramas, obscure sports and underwhelming sitcoms could turn almost overnight into national obsessions. Grade was fond of quoting the wisdom of his former boss at LWT, Cyril Bennett, that ‘hits are 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent accident'.
⁴¹

Grade soon found to his cost that, once acquired, viewers' allegiances were hard to shift. In January 1985, Thames Television announced that it had bought the next series of
Dallas
, poaching it from the BBC. Grade retaliated by announcing that the BBC's remaining sixteen episodes would not be shown.
Dallas
was taken off air and replaced by repeats of
The Two Ronnies
. A Sheffield councillor presented a petition containing 3,000 signatures to Margaret Thatcher, asking her to help get the lost episodes back, and the
Sun
ran three editorials on the subject. ‘Do we have to act like spoiled children,' another frustrated viewer, Spike Milligan, asked in a letter to the
Guardian
. ‘Michael Grade is paid by public monies to put
Dallas
out
when the public want it
, and not withhold it to play “yaboo sucks to you” with Thames Television. Grow up.'
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Dallas
resumed on 27 March after Grade and the BBC backed down, a discomfiting moment which confirmed that the viewer remained anchored in peculiar loyalties and strange habits – further proof, if it were needed, of the indispensability of the scheduler.

One phenomenon encapsulated the mercurial nature of the television audience and how it could slowly and collectively be drawn into something seemingly unexciting: the cult of snooker. Without television, snooker would have been forever a minority sport because the largest audience that can be afforded any meaningful view of a snooker table is a couple of thousand. Until the late 1960s, it had been a subterranean working-class pastime, with a tiny professional élite eking out a living in dingy clubs and holiday camps, occasionally appearing on
Grandstand
as a filler between horse races or when rain stopped play in the cricket: usually a single frame, with the finish timed to coincide with the runners going down to the starting gate or the covers coming off. Numbered balls were meant to make the game intelligible to viewers watching in black and white, but were too small to read in long shot.

In the late 1960s, the
Grandstand
producer Philip Lewis was one of the first people in Birmingham to have a colour set for BBC2 programmes and, wondering which sport would be most enhanced by colour and easiest to film with the few colour cameras then available, he woke up one morning with the answer in his head. The single-frame tournament
Pot Black
began in the summer of 1969, in the week after the moon landing, and quickly became one of BBC2's most popular programmes, even though the vast majority of viewers were watching it in monochrome. The
Sunday Telegraph
compared the players favourably with the ‘hysterical pooves of the football field'. The snooker commentator Ted Lowe, who helped to develop
Pot
Black
, required every player to sign a contract obliging him to wear a dinner suit. The first
Pot Black
champion, Ray Reardon, believed this helped to remove the stigma of seediness that had attached to snooker since the 1930s when the billiard halls were places where stolen goods changed hands and illegal gambling was rife. Lowe remained irritated that the profession's bad boy, Alex Higgins, on the strength of a doctor's note of dubious provenance, got away without wearing a bow tie.
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