Armchair Nation (49 page)

At first there were no more than a few thousand of these odd-looking contraptions in the whole of the country. When Rupert Murdoch's Sky television launched in February 1989, many high street shops were waiting to see what demand was like and had dishes just for display purposes. Audience numbers were sometimes only in three figures. If his audience got any smaller, the Sky News anchor John Stapleton said privately, he would be locked up for talking to himself.
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Broadcast from a satellite registered in Luxembourg, Sky was exempt from Britain's media laws and the duties of a public service broadcaster and its schedules relied heavily on imitative or recycled shows stripped across the week. Electronic signals were being imprinted on to carrier waves, shot into space from giant aerial dishes to a two-tonne satellite spinning in geostationary orbit and then beamed back down to earth – a 44,600 mile trip – all so that a few thousand people could watch a recycled ITV quiz show,
Sale of the Century
, repeats of
General Hospital
and a talent show called
Keith Chegwin's Star Search
.

Gradually, though, more dishes sprouted under the eaves of houses as the audiences grew, and a row began to brew about the ‘woks on the wall', as Liverpudlians named them after the hemispherical Chinese pan popularised by the TV chef Ken Hom. Astra's signal was concentrated on middle Europe, and Britons needed large dishes to gather up the waves from outer space, which became fainter the further north you got. Sky dishes in the south were two feet across,
but north of Aberdeen they had to be three feet, and above that size, in Shetland or the Outer Hebrides, you needed planning permission.
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Underneath these arguments about the look and size of the dishes, other anxieties simmered. For the resilient British class system had infected even the seemingly private act of watching television. Cable television had been slow to take off in part because it was associated with the municipal piping in of television in tower blocks and council estates. By comparison, satellite dishes at first had an upmarket image because they were mostly owned by electronics enthusiasts and rich European expats wishing to watch television in their own language. Dishes appeared on the roofs of hotels such as the Dorchester on Park Lane, and Harrods had reported ‘enormous interest' when it started selling them before Christmas 1985. By the following February they had sold eleven. ‘For the status-conscious, a parabolic television antenna is what now piques the neighbours,' said
The Times
in 1986.
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Sky, though, targeted its dishes at relatively prosperous working-class men, the upwardly mobile standard bearers of Thatcherite popular capitalism, who were known to be keen on new gadgetry and home entertainment. Impatient with aesthetic concerns which he viewed as disguised class snobbery, Rupert Murdoch saw the prominent white dishes not as an eyesore but a free advertisement.

One part of the country became particularly associated with the satellite dish. An unsigned newspaper profile on 7 October 1990, headed ‘Mrs Thatcher's bruiser', had invented a new phrase: ‘Essex man'. The profile was written by Simon Heffer, a resident of the county, who had conducted his anthropological fieldwork on commuter trains to and from Liverpool Street. Essex man was the child of parents who had been shipped out from the East End to new towns like Basildon and Harlow after the war. A bedrock of support for the new Tory Party, he was ‘young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren'. His recreations were ‘drinking with his mates, watching sport on Sky television, playing with his car and thinking about (and occasionally attempting) sexual intercourse'. The accompanying illustration featured a muscly-necked young man in a sharp suit standing outside his ex-council house with a new car in the drive and
a satellite dish on the roof.
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Essex man was largely confined to inner Essex, a wobbly crescent of land stretching north and east of London from Enfield to Southend. Its spiritual and geographical epicentre was Chigwell, the constituency of the Tory MP Norman Tebbit and home of Alan Sugar, the man Murdoch had entrusted to make his satellite dishes.

Appearing in the pages of the
Sunday Telegraph
, the profile of Essex man accurately reflected the squeamishness of some older Tories about the more vulgar manifestations of Thatcherism. He was the cartoonish resident of an imagined place, but one with just enough sociological verisimilitude to gain purchase in the public imagination. One of the images of social change in the 1980s was the sold-off council house and, along with the other signs of militant individualism on its exterior that marked out the homeowner from the tenant, from stone cladding to coaching lamps, was the satellite dish that many local councils forbade their tenants from erecting.

Satellite dish wars tended to be fiercest where the social classes mingled. Dishes on secluded detached houses, in new docklands apartments or indeed in the sprawling ex-council estates of inner Essex, were uncontentious. Dish battles were fought either within picturesque villages, where natives lived alongside blow-in commuters and second homers, or in gentrifying areas of urban terraces, particularly in London where rising house prices were forcing the middle classes to colonise places like Battersea, Stoke Newington and Hackney.
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Here the relationship between the middle-class incomers and the established working-class residents was sometimes testy, as gentrifiers tended to worry about the aesthetic integrity of terraces being destroyed by piecemeal alterations like PVC windows and satellite dishes.

Dishes joined washing lines and willow herb as black marks in best-kept village competitions. ‘We are now in danger of having forests of intrusive satellite dishes and other metalwork springing up across the rooftops of England,' the Council for the Protection of Rural England protested. ‘I'd certainly think twice about buying a house if the next door neighbour had one of those filthy little carbuncles stuck up,' said
Auberon Waugh. ‘Because what he's telling me is that he's the sort of incurious moron who lives on 24 hours a day drivel.' The
Guardian
called satellite dishes ‘identified non-flying objects, staring motionlessly south-east like pilgrims at an electronic Mecca'. They told us we now lived in ‘the age of warts and carbuncles: and programmes beamed in from on high to reassure us all of the benefits of being a nation of consumers rather than producers'.
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When Sky's rival, British Satellite Broadcasting, was about to launch, it took out full-page advertisements with a picture of a dinner plate, a reference to Sky's claim that its dishes would be no bigger than one. On the authority of the British Ceramics Manufacturers' Association, BSB stated that the average dinner plate was ten inches across. ‘Dear Rupert,' the ad said, ‘if your satellite dish is a dinner plate, you must eat whopping dinners.'
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Unlike Sky, BSB did not have to share its satellite with continental Europe, but had its own British satellite, Marco Polo, whose signal was aimed straight at Manchester. So BSB's distinctive ‘squarial' dishes really would be the size (although not the shape) of a dinner plate.

BSB launched inauspiciously on an April weekend in 1990, as day trippers packed coast roads during an unexpected heatwave, and most people indoors were watching BBC2 as Stephen Hendry beat Jimmy White to become world snooker champion. Although BSB promoted itself as a quality broadcaster, some of its initial offerings appeared to stretch this claim. They included
Wife of the Week
, which required wives to identify their husbands by their distorted voices;
Jupiter Moon
, a soap opera set on board a twenty-first-century spaceship polytechnic, soon nicknamed ‘
Crossroads
in Space'; and
Heil Honey, I'm Home!
, a spoof sitcom, which did not survive beyond its pilot, in which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun live next door to a Jewish couple. BSB struggled to attract subscribers, and in November 1990 Sky effectively took it over in a merger. Its Marco Polo satellite became instant cosmic rubbish, left like Telstar to career uselessly round the earth in its eternal orbit. The odd BSB squarial can sometimes still be seen on the sides of houses, tilted towards the skies as though it hasn't given up hope of picking up a lost episode of
Jupiter Moon
.

In May and June 1990, Channel 4 screened a series called
The Television Village
. The previous spring, Granada Television, with the help of Manchester University's European Institute for the Media and students from Salford University and Preston Polytechnic, had brought the satellite television of the near future to a guinea pig group of sixty-five homes in the village of Waddington in Lancashire's Ribble Valley. For five weeks these homes received twenty-nine channels, from Sky and BSB to European imports. So that rows about ugly dishes did not complicate the villagers' attitudes, they ran a TV cable along a convenient brook running through the centre of the village. Granada also helped the villagers set up a local community station, Waddington Village Television. The Independent Broadcasting Authority lent them a small TV mast which was erected on soft ground next to a local farmer's pig slurry tip.
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Everyone in Waddington could receive the village channel, which broadcast each evening between 7 and 8 p.m. from the church hall, its badminton lines still visible. The evening programmes included cubs meetings, parish council sittings, music from the local barber shop singers and the vicar Alan Bailey giving his thoughts for the day. The only technical glitch came when sheep nibbled through the wires in the transmitter field. The village station gained ninety-five per cent of the available audience, beating not only the satellite channels but
EastEnders
and
Coronation Street
as well. People in neighbouring villages like Bashall Eaves and Grindleton adjusted their aerials to pick up the evening hour of WVTV.

Apart from a delegation of farmers who turned up at the Granada command centre at eight o'clock one evening to ask if the late-night porn could be shown earlier because they had go to bed before it started, the experiment suggested that people preferred programmes about their own community to glossier alternatives. At the end of the experiment, a panel of villagers interviewed David Waddington, the home secretary and local MP, in the village hall. One villager asked why they were getting more television when fewer people were watching it. ‘It's a free country,' Waddington answered. What about all the rubbish on the satellite channels, a woman asked.
‘If people are prepared to pay for rubbish, that's up to the people,' he replied.
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One satellite channel did, though, prove popular with the residents of Waddington: Sky Sports, which was broadcasting Serie A Italian football and re-runs of old FA Cup Finals. Viewing figures for television football had been declining since the late 1970s onwards, and hooliganism had cast a pall over the game, but England's excellent run in the 1990 World Cup had altered public perceptions of the sport, adding new fans and allowing existing ones to declare their interest more fervently. Karl Miller, after watching the semi-final between England and West Germany at his house in Chelsea, described the young midfielder Paul Gascoigne as ‘strange-eyed, pink-faced, fair-haired, tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun – a marvellous equivocal sight'. When, in extra time, Gascoigne had to fight back tears after being booked for a foul which meant he would miss the final should England get to it, Miller protested that the tackled player had ‘rolled about in a piece of German theatre that might have earned him a place in Goethe's
Walpurgisnacht
'.
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The game was decided by a new form of torment for England fans: a penalty shoot out. When Chris Waddle blasted the ball high over the bar to give Germany victory, the Electricity Board braced itself for a soar in demand. It was a summer evening and it had got dark during the match, and they feared a mass switching on of lights as soon as it was over. Instead, viewers were shocked into paralysis and it was not until eight minutes after Waddle's penalty that the demand for electricity surged to 2800 megawatts, beating the previous record set by
The Thorn Birds
.
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The day after the match, it became clear that what had most affected viewers had not been the penalty shoot out, but Gascoigne's tears. ‘We can cry in public as long as we look like we are trying not to,' argues Tom Lutz in his book
Crying: A Natural and Cultural
History of Tears
. ‘We can continue to issue those tearful demands we supposedly stopped making at the age of five or eight by employing conventional gestures that both disguise and display our weeping.' Like Gilbert Harding's frantically swallowed emotion on
Face to Face
thirty years earlier, Gascoigne's tears had this touching quality of being both hidden and revealed. Instead of crying when he was booked, he screwed up his face and gasped for breath, trying to conquer his emotions. He sobbed freely only after extra time, when the camera discovered him in a crowd of players being comforted by his manager Bobby Robson. John Moynihan noted that Gascoigne, whom he felt had played only sporadically well, had ‘charmed a great many English female television-watchers with his wisecracks and tears, women, in many cases, who didn't know the difference between a football and a tangerine'.
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