Armchair Nation (48 page)

Neighbours
seemed to be as near to a communal culture as the nation possessed, bringing together people of different ages, social classes and ethnicity. The sociologist Marie Gillespie, doing fieldwork among Asian teenagers in Southall, found them to be avid fans, while their parents remained lukewarm about British television. Indian families had been early adopters of the video recorder, using it to view Bombay cinema, which they saw as a way of maintaining links with their country of origin and teaching their children its language and customs. Gillespie compared them to the
Gastarbeiter
Turkish community in West Germany, a similarly strong video-watching culture created out of a sense of marginalisation from the mainstream. By 1989, when about half of British homes had a video, eighty per cent of
Southall homes had one. Southall's Asian teenagers, though, were less likely to enjoy Bollywood films and had latched on to the all-white, suburban characters of
Neighbours
, using them as a way of talking indirectly about their own families, and the importance in Punjabi culture of family honour or
izzat
, which depended on the chastity of daughters. The gossipy character, Mrs Mangel, had entered their lingo (‘Oh! She's a right Mangel!') to describe an interfering adult.
⁸⁸

Many viewers seemed to watch
Neighbours
without taking it seriously, or at least they excused their watching of it in these terms. Clive James's professionally flippant voice, accepting of kitsch and impatient of divisions between high and low culture, was now widely imitated. When his tenure at the
Observer
ended in 1982, other poets and novelists – Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Hugo Williams, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Adam Mars-Jones – started to be employed as television critics by newspapers and magazines. Dissecting popular culture was now a serious activity. The
Listener
had begun a guest column,
Schlockwatch
, in which contributors wrote about their weakness for popular television. Joan Bakewell commended the ITV guessing game,
Through the Keyhole
; George Melly sang the praises of the teenage quiz show
Blockbusters
; and Paul Theroux wrote of his fondness for
Coronation Street
and his delight at seeing a poster for
The Mosquito Coast
, the film of his novel, in Rita Fairclough's newsagents.
⁸⁹

The earnest
Crossroads
viewers whom Dorothy Hobson talked to in the early 1980s would not have understood this new, slyly populist tone. On Easter Monday 1988, after more than 4,500 episodes,
Crossroads
had come to an end, the motel closing its doors for the last time and Meg's daughter, Jill Chance, leaving her husband and driving off with her new man to found a new hotel. This time there was no stop shot at the end. On the mid-morning BBC television show
Open Air
, presenter Pattie Coldwell broke down during a live broadcast from the Midlands motel. ‘I never thought I would be in tears over
Crossroads
,' she said, ‘but I am.' Although
Crossroads
still had about 12 million viewers, its audience was disproportionately old and poor and thus unappealing to advertisers. ‘We did a survey of
what newspapers
Crossroads
viewers read,' said the producer William Smethurst, who had tried to rebrand the serial as
Crossroads, Kings Oak
. ‘It was depressing. More of them read the
Daily Star
, which was going through its Daily Bonk phase, than the numbers who ever saw any of the quality papers. I realised there was no point in clever, funny writing if no one would appreciate it.'
⁹⁰

The elderly
Crossroads
fans who had written to the
Birmingham Evening Mail
about Meg's departure, fearful that they were being forgotten, had their fears vindicated. Commercial broadcasters now preferred to attract what they called ‘ELVs' or ‘elusive light viewers', such as teenagers and the young people with disposable incomes coveted by advertisers. When the ITV controller, Greg Dyke, dropped the Saturday afternoon wrestling in 1988, he said it was ‘stuck in a timewarp' and ‘personified the old English working class sitting round the telly, staring blankly'. A few months later ITV also cancelled the darts and bowls, and Channel 4 pulled snooker from its schedules, because these sports, too, had a relatively elderly audience.
⁹¹

A quarter of Britain's television viewing was now done by the 8 million people over sixty-five. A third of them had hearing problems, and one in ten wore hearing aids, which made radio listening difficult; on a winter's evening ninety-five per cent watched TV. But this group of viewers was statistically invisible because the ratings system lumped over fifty-fives together, all 15 million of them, so as not to draw advertisers' attention to the fact that millions of their potential viewers were economically inactive pensioners. Over fifty-fives made up ten per cent of the audience for
Top of the Pops
, and eighteen per cent of the audience for
Blue Peter
. One and a half million of them watched the ITV cartoon,
Dangermouse
, half a million more than its target audience of four to nine year olds.
⁹²

Yet broadcasters behaved as though this most loyal group of viewers did not exist. The commercials populating daytime television, promoting denture fixant and walk-in baths, were the only real clue that they watched television at all. These older viewers were the ones who seemed most to welcome the filling out of the daytime schedules and the diurnal routines of daily quiz shows and regional news, the
television that was now stripped across the week and existed in its own little bubble of recurring time. ‘Television is an absolute boon for the lonely,' wrote Ivy Ryalls, a retired woman from Alvaston, Derbyshire, in her ‘One Day' diary. ‘At a flick of the switch one's rooms can be peopled. When my husband died 10 years ago, the loneliness was dreadful … I remember many sleepless nights and the utter relief when the sunrise opening of early morning television meant that there were other people awake in the world besides me.'
⁹³

Years ago I was walking down a street in a suburban town in the evening. The streets were empty, there was a feeling of dereliction. I passed this shop full of television sets, and I was on all of them. I thought ‘Christ, that's awful.' I found it quite disturbing
.

Melvyn Bragg
¹

The great historian of the English landscape, W. G. Hoskins, often complained of the despoliation of its countryside by soulless modernity. But there was one part of the modern world he admired. ‘Goonhilly is one of the most marvellous sites in England,' he enthused in a BBC2 series,
Landscapes of England
, in May 1978.

What caps it all is the way that as you approach these immense saucers there are circular barrows – the burial mounds of Bronze Age men. It is the combination of these burial mounds four thousand years old and Goonhilly Earth Station which is to me a magnificent conjunction of the ancient world and the future. Goonhilly is obviously not just scenery: it is pure landscape and as deeply moving as any landscape fashioned a thousand or so years ago. Goonhilly at sunset, with no man in sight, silently listening
all the time to the most remote signals. It is a scene that would have inspired Thomas Hardy.
²

It is not surprising Hoskins made his peace with modernity here. The postwar phenomena he most hated, such as trunk roads, concrete airfields and bombing ranges, were all about noise and restless movement. But the architecture of television relies on the silent, invisible, quasi-magical radio wave. By the time Hoskins celebrated it, Goonhilly had become the largest satellite station on earth, with sixty huge, stainless steel mushrooms rising on their spindly bipods. They were so big and so many that Goonhilly had its own permanent team of painters who spent each day hanging like spiders on a metal web, priming and topcoating each dish with chlorinated rubber, to protect against rust and the ravages of the sea air. The names of the dishes – Uther, Lancelot, Guinevere, Percival, Pellinore – were grand reminders of the region's connections with Arthurian legend.

But Goonhilly's location on the extreme edge of England already mattered less in the age of geostationary satellites, which did not need to be tracked across the sky as they orbited the earth. In July 1969, when Goonhilly's engineers worked through the night to bring images of the moon landing to Britain, their technical triumph went unremarked, for in the few short years since Telstar, television from space had become a trick repeated to the point of banality. In July 1985, an enormous new dish, Merlin – known unofficially as the
Blue Peter
, which covered its official opening – carried the Live Aid concert to 2 billion people. But this was to be Goonhilly's last great triumph. As the first transatlantic broadcasts faded from memory, the nearby Telstar Café, on the lonely B3292 road crossing the Downs, renamed itself the Goonhilly Tea Rooms. In 2006, Goonhilly's satellite operations began to be wound down and outsourced to another earth station in Hertfordshire. Now, instead of coming from these far-off places on the edge of the nation, satellite television is centralised in order to cut costs.

But there is still something impressive about this patch of
heathland, with its curious confluence of the ancient and futuristic that Hoskins identified. It seems fitting that the 10,000-strong crowd assembled here in August 1999 were the only people in Britain to see the full solar eclipse, as the clouds covering the rest of the West Country miraculously parted just before the day turned dark, and birds roosted confusedly on the satellite dishes. The dishes, which sometimes share the skyline with Goonhilly's famous two-humped Bactrian camels carrying holidaymakers across the downs, are now being developed into a space-themed outreach centre with the potential to communicate with future piloted missions to Mars.

The satellite dish had already lost much of its space-age lustre when, a few weeks before Christmas 1988, some strange-looking objects began to appear on the outside walls of British houses. They were pointed heavenwards, not towards the star of Bethlehem, but towards a signal from the Astra satellite, which had just been launched from a rocket in a remote jungle clearing in Kourou, in the equatorial rain forests of French Guiana. White, round, about three feet wide and shaped like outsized frying pans, they resembled shrunken versions of the Goonhilly dishes. Advertisements for them drew on the imagery of rocket launches and cratered moonscapes familiar from science fiction movies and the Apollo missions. But now, as the space race had ended and the Cold War was petering out, satellites had become mundane; when stuck on the sides of houses the dishes looked incongruous and bizarre.

Satellite television used gigahertz frequencies, which terrestrial TV stations could not use because their very short wavelengths were absorbed by the earth's atmosphere. They worked from space because the signal went straight up and down and crossed only a short stretch of the atmosphere, but the dish had to be perfectly aimed so that its bowl could gather up the super-weak waves. The engineers who installed the dishes on the sides of houses would use a compass and meter to check they were pointing at the precise bit of sky where the invisible Astra satellite was, no bigger than a car and hovering 22,300 miles over the equator. If a dish was too casually adjusted in fine weather, it might give poor pictures in the wet because of ‘rain fade',
the absorption of waves by water in the atmosphere. British dishes had to face south-east to pick up the signals from Astra centred on mainland Europe. Prospective satellite television viewers were told to go out at 10.30 a.m. or 2 p.m. to see where the sun hit their house, which was where they would have to mount the dish. Often, to the regret of those who thought they could hide it in their backyard, it had to be stuck high on the house front, just below the eaves, so the satellite could see it clearly – and so could everyone else.