Armchair Nation (46 page)

Night-time television, a world of re-runs and jarring combinations with a weird, parallel relationship with waking reality, seemed definitively Baudrillardian. The twenty-four-hour schedules of America, he wrote, meant that televisions were often seen ‘functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms … There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room … It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages.'
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For all its incongruities, night-time television in Britain was an immediate success. Central TV's
Prisoner: Cell Block H
, an Australian series about life in a women's prison, had nearly a million viewers at 1 a.m. in the Midlands alone. The numbers watching in the long, insomniac stretch between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. were much smaller – about 100,000 across Britain – but advertisers prized these cheap slots because late-night television appealed to the young, and young men in particular, who were traditionally hard to reach. Judging by its content, night-time TV seemed to be aimed at a community of odd-balls, nonconformists, nighthawks, returning clubbers and distress purchasers who were prepared simply to watch the perpetual flow of television and see what came up from the vaults. But perhaps these viewers were also glimpsing the future of TV, one where its disposable content would matter less than its omnipresent occupation of the schedules.

Whereas peaktime TV was now acquiring a cultural memory through video, this kind of television had its hard drive wiped each day as though it had never been. While primetime shows referenced
the passing of the seasons and years, the daytime and night-time shows existed only from one day to the next. Like the summertime Christmases at the Crossroads motel, they inhabited not the linear time of the real world but the recurring, self-contained time of television. And yet, because of their habit-forming regularity, these programmes could inspire great loyalty and affection in viewers. They drew their power from the fact that they mirrored the taken-for-granted, seemingly eternal nature of everyday life itself, what the French critic Maurice Blanchot called ‘the inexhaustible, irrecusable, always unfinished daily'. As television filled up every hour of the day and night, it came to seem as natural and endless as daily life itself. ‘The everyday is our portion of eternity,' Blanchot wrote. ‘For in the everyday we are neither born nor do we die: hence the weight and the enigmatic force of everyday truth.'
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For many viewers, 4.30 p.m. each weekday was a point as fixed as a monastery's canonical hours.
Countdown
, the word and numbers game, had been the first show on Channel 4 when it launched on 2 November 1982. On that first Tuesday, 4.5 million people watched it; only 800,000 returned the next day, which its presenter, Richard Whiteley, later claimed as the biggest audience drop in television history.
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Initially, Whiteley seemed ill at ease. ‘I always feel so sorry for the little man who presents it,' said Mark, a student interviewed by Dorothy Hobson, now undertaking research on Channel 4. ‘He looks as if he's not quite in control. He seems hesitant as to whether he should stop things.' But, slowly, he either grew into his role or his gaucheness became endearing. He began dressing in colourful jackets, reading out letters, addressing viewers as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of Countdownia', and delivering little homilies at the start of each show.

While its French parent programme,
Des Chiffres et des Lettres
, adopted computerised displays and touch screens,
Countdown
still used paper and felt tips, with the letters and numbers on linoleum tiles, so that even by the late 1980s its look was becoming appealingly retro. ‘To the degree that he is influenced by play, man can check the monotony, determinism, and brutality of nature,' wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his classic book about the human
instinct for play,
Homo Ludens
. ‘He learns to construct order, conceive economy, and establish equity.'
Countdown
fulfilled Huizinga's definition of play: its limits were finite, its rules were fixed, it was voluntary rather than a moral duty, its ethos was egalitarian and it was undertaken seriously but with an awareness that it was ultimately pointless, a way of simply enjoying and celebrating a moment in time. The winner of each series received the humble prize of a set of dictionaries and a
Countdown
teapot. Viewers played along with pen and paper; it appealed to the same instincts as Scrabble, crossword puzzles and word games, what George Orwell called ‘the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the
privateness
of English life'.
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Presenting the Yorkshire regional programme
Calendar
along-side
Countdown
, Whiteley went on to appear over 10,000 times on TV, more than anyone except Carol Hersee, the daughter of a BBC engineer who appeared as the little girl in Test Card F. With its large clock and Alan Hawkshaw's ticking theme music counting down each thirty-second round, the show's metatheme was the passing of time itself, but its own time never ran out because there was always another round, another episode, another ‘same time tomorrow'. On daytime television, where shows were stripped across a seemingly everlasting succession of weeks, the presenters gained a kind of immortality. ‘You were my afternoon comfort blanket. You were my afternoon sit-down, between work and getting the supper ready,' wrote Helen Hooper in Friern Barnet after Whiteley died suddenly in 2005. ‘You had only to see his face,' said Christina in London, ‘to feel good, at home, in a human, kind, gentle space.'
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In 1985, Peter Collett, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford, later to become better known as one of the resident experts on
Big Brother
, conducted an experiment. He and his team built a box resembling an old 1950s television cabinet which contained a hidden, low-light video camera to record the activities of viewers in twenty
homes over a week. Looking at the tapes, he found that people were in the room for only eighty per cent of the time the set was switched on. Even when they managed to stay in the same room as the TV, they only looked at it sixty-five per cent of the time. While ‘watching' TV they also ate dinner, argued, listened to records, read, did homework or housework, kissed and hugged each other. From the viewing diaries they were also asked to keep, it was clear that they greatly overestimated how much attention they paid to the programmes.
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An ITV series in the spring of 1987,
Watching You Watching Us
, masochistically repeated this experiment, filming six families in front of two-way TV sets. One family spent an entire episode of
EastEnders
dividing up and eating a Chinese takeaway between themselves, Toby the terrier and Bozo the boxer. By the end of the programme, Bozo was the only one still in the room, and he was not watching very attentively. Another family left the room en masse as soon as
Crossroads
began, the entire episode flickering on alone without an audience. It was Baudrillard's vision of postmodernity, played out not in an American motel but an English living room. For unlike a cinema, where the lights go down and the projector starts whirring only when there is an audience in the auditorium, television carries on regardless of whether anyone is watching it. In their 1986 book
Uninvited Guests
, the sociologists Laurie Taylor and Bob Mullan discovered a number of viewers who put the set on as soon as they came into the house, as unthinkingly as they switched on the lights. ‘If you turn the light on, you might as well turn the TV on,' said one. ‘Might as well be on the same switch, really.'
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In
Watching You Watching Us
, even people who claimed to give the set their undivided attention turned out to be less attentive than they thought. Professor Geoffrey Gilbert, a biophysical scientist recently retired from Birmingham University, and his Hungarian wife, Lilo, at first stood out as role models of attentiveness. Each made a careful note of things they wanted to watch and then honed this list down to a final, smaller list. They insisted that they never had the TV on unless it commanded their full attention. As it turned out, though, she often shifted her gaze to the
Guardian
on her lap, and
he was under the impression that
The Archers
was a TV programme. Collett's study made a similar discovery: although the presumption was that educated people watched more selectively and thoughtfully, they were actually almost as likely to be distracted as anyone else.
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In the 1970s, the former BBC television executive Stuart Hood had written a melancholy article for the
Listener
which stated that there were ‘few experiences more salutary for the professional communicator than to have to watch television in a provincial hotel'. On one such occasion Hood had seen the absent-minded viewing of hotel guests interrupted by comings and goings from the bar and noise from the jukebox. As soon as the news was over, they rose and deserted the room ‘like a flock of startled birds'. Now programme makers were confronted with the disquieting evidence that viewers behaved similarly even in their own living rooms. ‘The inference that I wanted producers to take away,' wrote the BBC executive Will Wyatt when he saw Collett's research, ‘was that you should not be afraid of giving a bit more information rather than a bit less, of reminding people of what had already been shown, of going out of your way to attract and retain attention.' Worried that viewers were paying insufficient attention to their programmes, programme makers invented a new televisual grammar that kept viewers awake by repeatedly telling them what they had just seen and what was coming up.

Others redoubled the efforts to search for the perfect technical fix that could precisely measure an audience that was drifting off into video viewing and zapping through channels on the remote. One such innovation was the ‘passive people meter' which relied not on the unreliable viewer pressing a button when they were watching, as the old Tammeter had done, but on new image recognition technology to identify precisely which faces in the room were pointed at the TV set. The critic Ien Ang had a phrase for this quest to turn the elusive, intangible activity of TV viewing into a measurable entity: ‘desperately seeking the audience'.
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Ludovic Kennedy, the presenter of the TV discussion programme
Did You See?
, thought that television made little lasting impression on its viewers. Since becoming one of the first ITN newsreaders in
1956, the high-born Kennedy had conveyed the impression of drifting absent-mindedly on to our screens having been, as one television critic put it, ‘good enough to drop by to see if he can lend a hand while on his way to the club'. He had no illusions about how long he would be remembered, for he knew that good programmes might take months or even years to make, be on for an hour and then be almost instantly forgotten. Indeed, Kennedy had already forgotten much of the television on which he had appeared. While writing his memoirs he discovered from ITN records that he had interviewed Errol Flynn and Tennessee Williams, but had no recollection of meeting either of them. For Kennedy, the people who worried about television corrupting people's minds were confusing numbers with effect, and were assuming that a thing said on TV to millions of viewers had more resonance than something said by a friend one cared about.
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Kennedy's sceptical, liberal voice was out of kilter with much of the public discussion about television at the time, which seemed afflicted by a kind of moral monomania directed against the permissive society in general and homosexuality in particular. Two private members' bills in 1986 and 1987, by the Tory MPs Winston Churchill and Gerald Howarth, tried and failed to bring television within the Obscene Publications Act. In the run up to Howarth's bill, Mary Whitehouse showed MPs extracts from
Sebastiane
(1975) and
Jubilee
(1977), two explicit films by the gay filmmaker Derek Jarman that had been shown late at night on Channel 4 in 1985, accompanied by a warning and a red triangle warning of adult content. Whitehouse also showed a notorious scene from Dennis Potter's drama series,
The Singing Detective
, shown in November 1986, of a boy watching his mother having sex with her lover in a wood.

When broadcast, the Derek Jarman films received a total of twenty complaints, compared with 300 protests about Channel 4's handling of the American Football results.
The Singing Detective
's ‘heaving bottom' scene inspired fewer than a hundred telephone calls, not all critical, and some of them before it was actually shown, the event having already been trailed in the newspapers. The series producer, Kenith Trodd, believed that Potter had leaked the story of the heaving
bottom to the press beforehand, in the hope that it would help the series attract a bigger audience. If this is true, it seems to have worked, because the second half of the series run, after the heaving bottom appeared, added another 2 million viewers.
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