Armchair Nation (47 page)

Kennedy thought that television's real power came not in these intermittently shocking episodes but in its slow-burning, osmotic pervasiveness as it filled the schedules and slotted wordlessly into and around our daily routines. ‘As a viewer I think of television as being comparable to a long train journey,' he wrote. ‘As one gazes vacantly out of the window a succession of ever-changing images passes by … For the essence of television is its ephemerality: it is a world of flickering images, each dying at the moment it is born … survivors being pulled from wreckage, Miss World being crowned, one fish gobbling up another.' Amid the copious literature on television's baleful influence, he reflected, little attention had been paid to the most universal effect, its capacity to induce sleep. Kennedy had even once fallen asleep while
appearing
on television, during an interview with a particularly boring peer. ‘I know of no other agency except alcohol which can so rapidly and effortlessly bring the head to the chest,' he wrote of TV, ‘and the two combined are as good as any sleeping pill.'
⁷⁸

In the summer of 1988, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith of the British Film Institute announced a project inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of Mass Observation the previous year. Drawing on Mass Observation's tradition of day surveys, in which participants recorded everything they did on a single day, he conceived ‘One Day in the Life of Television', which would document ‘the impact of television on the life and culture of the nation on a single day: November 1'. The date, a Tuesday, had no special significance: it was chosen simply because it was far enough ahead to allow the event to be planned. The project would supply, as Mass Observation had intended to do when it was founded in the 1930s, first-person vividness rather than the
dry empiricism of statistics, and give a sense of what viewers really thought, ‘from the Surrey stockbroker to the unemployed labourer, from the children in a London tower block, to a miner's family in Yorkshire'.
⁷⁹
The BFI handed out over 600,000 diary leaflets through bookshops, newsagents, libraries and supermarkets, with volunteers being asked to record what they watched and how they felt about it. About 7,000 schoolchildren and 11,000 adults completed diaries.

For many, the day's viewing began with breakfast TV. ‘Jeremy Paxman, looking like a moose playing Noel Coward, is cheerfully putting the boot into a politician as usual,' wrote Thelma Sutton, a retired secretary in Woking, watching the BBC's
Breakfast Time
. Other diarists found Paxman ‘opinionated, boorish, self-satisfied' and ‘rude, ignorant and extremely unpleasant', or else they found him ‘brilliantly incisive' and admired his ‘lovely, wicked grin'. Thus began a pattern that continued for the rest of the day, with diarists tending to watch television as a confirmation of their own existing attitudes.

After breakfast television was over, Robert Kilroy-Silk walked on to the set of his discussion programme,
Day to Day
, and announced today's issue: marital rape. ‘I felt that it was a bit too sensitive an issue to be tackled at 9.30 a.m.,' wrote David Green, aged fourteen, from Holywood, County Down, who like a lot of schoolchildren was on his half-term holiday. On ITV at 10.30 a.m. a magazine programme just a few weeks old began:
This Morning
, hosted by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan. Among diarists, the most intensely watched item in this programme was a segment on the season's new knitting colours. ‘Day-time viewing must be the most socially unacceptable mass participation sin of the 1980s,' wrote Diana Hutchinson, a housewife from Stourport-on-Severn. ‘We all watch, we all pretend we don't.'

After the lunchtime news came the day's most talked about show:
Neighbours
, a daily Australian soap bought in as a cheap import for the launch of the BBC's daytime schedules. If it seemed to resemble an antipodean reincarnation of
Crossroads
, that was because it was made by the same production team; it even had a similarly earwormish theme tune written by Tony Hatch. On 1 November, Nellie Mangel invited Harold Bishop to the church dance and the pregnant
Daphne felt unwell while minding the coffee shop – for the raw material on Melbourne's Ramsay Street, just as in the Crossroads motel, was small domestic incident. And yet it was the one show that diarists seemed to recall perfectly. Thousands wrote about it and tried to rationalise their watching of it. Among this latter group was the TV presenter, Roy Castle, who stopped work on his rockery to watch it, he wrote, in order to tell his daughter what had happened when she came home from school.
⁸⁰

Fourteen-year-old Justin Delap, a boarder at St Edward's School in Oxford, missed his lunch to get a seat in the television room, where almost his entire house had gathered to watch
Neighbours
. ‘Had to watch the early showing of
Neighbours
,' wrote another diarist in Brighton. ‘Have a board meeting of Sussex Opera this evening …' Students had a special affection for it, one Cardiff undergraduate describing the eyes turning to the screen in the student canteen when the theme tune started, ‘as automatically as Pavlov's dogs used to salivate'. A Staffordshire Polytechnic student claimed the union cafeteria was losing so much money at lunchtime that they had installed a large TV to enable diners to watch
Neighbours
. Diarists noted that they now used phrases like ‘g'day', ‘what a wombat' and ‘shot through', but made no mention of the rising inflexion that linguists call Australian Questioning Intonation, and which
Neighbours
surely helped to popularise.
⁸¹

The diarists often seemed to view television distractedly through the distorting prism of their own anxieties. An unemployed Sheffield woman, Alison Fell, watched the afternoon film,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, with her partner and saw it as a metaphor for their failing relationship and that ‘ludicrous thing' called love. ‘This brilliant, polished gem of a work laughed at our misery from behind the glass,' she wrote. Stephen Pegg, a forty-year-old former teacher from Clevedon, Avon, watched the BBC2 schools programmes
Seeing and Doing
and
How We Used To Live
as a way of clinging to his previous life. Just a year earlier, after experiencing slight stiffness in one hand, he had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Now he was unable to speak, dress, feed or wash himself, but managed to type
his diary with a head pointer on an electric typewriter. Television, he wrote ‘is now an important part of my life, many of its images reminding me of recent normality'. Pegg later won the prize for the best diary, a chance to meet the stars of
EastEnders
.
⁸²

At 5.35 p.m. came the second sitting of
Neighbours
. Michael Grade had made this final virtuoso scheduling tweak before moving to Channel 4 earlier that year. Grade's teenage daughter had reported the frustration of her classmates at missing
Neighbours
after they had become addicted to it during the holidays. They found themselves watching it at lunchtime in the school computer laboratory. So Grade moved the repeat from 10 a.m. the following day to later on the same day.
Neighbours
nearly doubled its audience to over 20 million. The only active
Neighbours
refusenik among the diarists was a company secretary, Alan Dunn, who, arriving home from work at 5.50 p.m., hid in his car for ten minutes while his family watched it indoors.
⁸³

In HM Prison Lewes in Sussex, the 560 inmates were only allowed to watch TV in the evening association period between 5.45 p.m. and 8 p.m. Their thin televisual gruel comprised the end of
Neighbours
, the national and regional news and a quiz show called
Telly Addicts
with Noel Edmonds. Prisoners were often disgruntled but captive viewers. ‘I don't like television anyway,' said one prison diarist, a long-term guest at Dartmoor. ‘It's either bang-up or watch it, isn't it?' Two years earlier, there had been a riot at Dartmoor when a key episode of
EastEnders
, during which Michelle Fowler jilted Lofty Holloway at the altar, was ruined by poor reception. About sixty men in B wing smashed chairs, tables and light bulbs when the pictures returned, to reveal Lofty crying in his bedsit. Stephen Plaice, the writer-in-residence at Lewes Prison and later scriptwriter for
The Bill
, wrote that the ten-feet-high television screen in C wing was an ‘Orwellian sight', looking over ‘depressed cons, slouched in their low-slung armchairs, flooding them with bright images of an outside world some have not seen for more than two decades'.
⁸⁴

Viewers remained exercised about very particular details. A museum assistant from Wrexham, watching
A Question of Sport
at 8.30 p.m., was ‘a bit disappointed with the pullover of question master
David Coleman, plain black', while eleven-year-old Master A. Heath-cote of Chelmsford noted sadly that the BBC2 sitcom
Colin's Sandwich
had ‘nothing to do with sandwiches'. The favourite primetime programmes among the diarists were repeats: a ten-year-old episode of
Rising Damp
and a thirteen-year-old
Fawlty Towers
. As the TV audience fell off sharply, BBC1 still netted 6 million viewers for its (second) repeat showing of
Meerkats United
at 10.25 p.m., a programme about these tiny southern African mongooses living in tight-knit colonies, who solved childcare problems collectively and who stood sentry in trees on strict rotation, sniffing the air and keeping an eye out for predators while their friends foraged for insects and lizards. ‘Only by working as a team,' explained the narrator David Attenborough, ‘can they play on the hostile pitch of the southern African desert.' Viewers seemed to love the programme less for this perhaps unThatcherite message than for the meerkats' eerily human faces, with their small noses and large eyes accentuated by surrounding patches of dark fur.
⁸⁵
The BBC1 audience dropped drastically for the TV discussion programme
Network
at 10.55 p.m., and still more severely when a man from the Open University began lecturing them about computer graphics. Well before midnight, almost everyone was in bed.

The One Day project had aimed ‘to reveal Britain's relationship with its television service at a time when it is poised to change for ever'. A bill to deregulate the television industry then going through parliament, finally enshrined in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, championed the idea that consumers, not the ITV–BBC duopoly, should decide what they watched, and that there should be more channels and more television for them to choose from. But while they were often scathing about the programmes available to them on four channels, few diarists felt that deregulation would lead to better ones. ‘Satellite and cable, I firmly believe, will destroy television in this country,' wrote
Gareth Hughes, a sales executive from Newbridge, Gwent. ‘Politicians and money moguls … get their way and we, the poor plebs, suffer. I suppose that's democracy? … What I want to know is, who among the British public wants all this satellite garbage?'
⁸⁶

In far-flung parts of Britain like the Scilly Isles, where the nearest cinema was in Penzance and bad weather often delayed the arrival of newspapers and post, diarists seemed particularly attached to their televisual routines and sceptical about change, as did those who watched TV in communal spaces like care homes, boarding schools and oil rigs. For Edward Street, lighthouse keeper on the Lizard, the most southerly point of mainland Britain, television was his only amusement, and he noted that in such isolation one could develop unusual interests. ‘I was on one particular lighthouse where the three things we watched without fail were
Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm
and the
Financial Times
index,' he wrote. ‘For some reason we'd become totally besotted with the
FT
index and so everything would stop as we sat down at the end of the midday news just to find out what the index was doing.'
⁸⁷
The BFI project's sample was of course slanted in favour of people who cared enough about television to produce a diary about it. But it was clear that many felt television formed part of a collective national conversation and they enjoyed the sense that they were watching what others were watching, even if what most of them were watching was
Neighbours
.