Armchair Nation (51 page)

Such public television was, of course, how Baird had once imagined the future of his invention. His former laboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho was now an espresso bar with slatted metal chairs and tables spilling over on to the pavement, and much of its back wall was taken up by a huge TV screen which lit up the room when football matches, especially Italian ones, were shown. When a goal went in, the customers celebrated with a fervour that would have astonished the forty scientists from the Royal Institution who once queued up in evening dress along a narrow staircase in order to inspect a quivering image of the head of a ventriloquist's dummy.

The novelist Kingsley Amis did not have a subscription to Sky Sports. Apart from cricket and snooker he did not care for televised sport, especially, he wrote to his friend Philip Larkin, ‘filthy soccer'.
²²
And yet as he entered his seventies, watching television consumed much of his evening life. Always scared of flying and unable to drive, he now feared even everyday travel, including the Underground, and was afraid of being left on his own at night with nothing to occupy him. He lived with his first wife, Hilly, her husband Lord Kilmarnock and their son, on Regents Park Road in north London. Amis paid
the mortgage and Hilly acted as his housekeeper, bringing him his suppers on a tray and sitting with him in front of the TV – a small, portable set, with an indoor aerial, which sat on top of a chest of drawers in Amis's bedroom.

For Amis, watching television was both a congenial evening routine and a way of affirming his political and cultural aesthetic. He believed the best fiction was narrative and character-driven, the best poetry was recitative and understandable, the best restaurant food was unpretentious and advertised on the menu in English, and the best television was soap operas, sitcoms and popular drama. Like Larkin, he got impatient over poetic pretension and artistic earnestness. ‘You deduce from this that I now have a television set,' wrote Larkin to another friend, the English professor Brian Cox, in 1981, ‘and find it rots the mind comfortably, but I don't as a rule watch “serious” things: sport, old films, Miss World are my level.' Both Amis and Larkin hated being bored, and had the intellectual self-confidence summarily to dismiss highbrow culture they found dull. Amis had got his first TV set in the mid 1950s and became immediately irritated with the hostile sociologising about it that he called ‘Hoggart-wash', which dealt with ‘the putative corruption of some inadequately visualised pools-telly-and-fish-and-chips Everyman', an attitude he saw as ‘a protest made on behalf of others who are deemed too comatose or inarticulate to make it for themselves'.
²³

In his own, intermittent career as a TV critic for the
Observer
in the 1970s, Amis wrote freely and admiringly about the wrestling or
The Generation Game
but grudgingly and disobligingly about foreign films and documentary. In his column in the
Radio Times
he presented himself as an average, sensual man, a television-watching Sancho Panza torn between the nature programme
Bellamy's Britain
and going to the pub on a Sunday lunchtime, or between
The Marriage of Figaro
and
Kojak
on the other side. He was a firm fan of Benny Hill and
The Dick Emery Show
, of which he wrote that ‘nothing disturbs the ordered calm of my household more than an attempt to prevent me from watching it, and people who ring me up while it's on have been known to burst into tears'.
²⁴

In the 1980s, Amis's populism became increasingly entwined with his support for the Thatcherite attack on liberal-professional élites, and his objection to a mentality he called ‘sod the public' in the arts and service industries. He believed subsidies corrupted the relationship between artists and audiences and accused the Arts Council of funding ‘plays without plots' and ‘poems that are meaningless patterns of letters'. In a 1984 essay, ‘Television and the intellectuals', Amis argued that the viewer also faced ‘a semi-benign semi-conspiracy to foist on him what is thought to be good for him'. Television, he felt, should be an escape from such cultural nannyism: it should stick to what customers paid to see and the medium did best, such as sport, family sagas, crime and comedy series.
²⁵

Amis's television viewing may have been partly a sally in the culture wars of the Thatcher years, but there was no sense of position-taking about his two favourite programmes,
The Bill
and
Coronation Street
, which he followed devotedly. Amis had long believed that the novel needed to regenerate itself not through avant-garde experiment but by drawing on genre fiction, with its capacity for combining pleasingly familiar formulae with creative reinvention. Having already written a detective story (
The Riverside Villas Murder
, 1973) and an episode of the
Z Cars
follow-up,
Softly, Softly
, he was interested in crime drama long before a serial set in Sun Hill police station in the East End began in 1984, with its memorable staccato theme tune, ‘Overkill', accompanied by wailing police sirens and an insistent saxophone riff.

The Bill
was not strictly speaking a soap opera: its episodes were self-contained narratives, but with recurring characters, allowing viewers to dip in and out. Storylines were uncluttered, steering clear of the officers' private lives. One of the serial's unwritten rules was that a police officer appeared in every scene, allowing it to deal with adult themes before the 9 p.m. watershed, because the police generally arrived at the scene of a crime after the grisly stuff had already happened. Many of the characters felt like old friends: like Bob Cryer (Eric Richard), the eternally patient duty sergeant who had not been the same since he killed an armed robber who turned out to have an unloaded gun; loveable, crisp-quaffing failure DC ‘Tosh' Lines (Kevin
Lloyd), with his scruffy moustache, crumpled suit and battered old Volvo; and Sun Hill's darling, Viv Martella (Nula Conwell), shockingly shot dead in 1993 by building society robbers.

According to a study of four Midlands prisons in the early 1990s,
The Bill
was the most popular programme among inmates, rivalled only by the rural soap opera
Emmerdale
. Between 1991 and 1996, the British Film Institute asked several hundred people to keep diaries of their television watching. The most popular programme with men, particularly those over sixty like Amis, was
The Bill
. When he died in 1995, Amis's daughter Sally kept her portion of his ashes in an urn, and when
The Bill
was on she would sit the urn next to her and watch it with him.
²⁶

Amis had watched
Coronation Street
from the start. Arguing in an article in the
TV Times
in 1964 that television was improving as the viewer who would watch anything became extinct, the main planks in his argument – which dutifully mentioned only ITV programmes in a publication that refused to acknowledge the existence of the other side – were
University Challenge, The Avengers
and
Coronation Street
. ‘Must you be a moron to enjoy
Coronation Street
?', Amis mused,
à propos
those viewers who wrote to the character, Len Fair-clough, threatening to beat him up if he did not change his ways. Amis answered himself in the negative, adding that ‘Patricia Phoenix, who plays Elsie Tanner, must be one of the most beautiful women on television'.
Coronation Street
suggested to Amis that television's primitive phase was ending and ‘that old glassy-eyed viewer, anchored in front of his set whatever is on it, is on the way out'.
²⁷

When
Coronation Street
began, it seemed to be rooted in the dark, monochromatic social realism that Amis professed to dislike. In 1963, at a village debating society in Hayfield, where its creator Tony Warren lived, one speaker blamed the programme for causing unemployment in the north, because its bleak imagery dissuaded
businesses from investing in the region; another said it made viewers believe that ‘northerners were peasant morons'. As late as 1974, an Oldham councillor called for the series to be scrapped, because ‘people who see
Coronation Street
think we are all married to Hilda Ogdens, wear clogs and have outside loos'. But it had always had elements of human comedy, with pitch-perfect northern dialogue and deft character touches, and even its earliest programmes teased the edges of its everyday realism, including one memorable 1964 episode – broadcast just as Amis was defending the show in the
TV Times
– based on the plot of
High Noon
, with Len Fairclough as the sheriff. The arrival of colour in 1969 seemed to detach the soap definitively from its roots in the new wave northern social realism of the early 1960s. John Betjeman, another fan, saw it as Manchester's version of the most comic and warmest of Dickens's novels,
Pickwick Papers
.
²⁸

Actual streets like Coronation Street were already being demolished in great numbers when the programme began: a common sight in Salford was an entire row of houses marked with an X, under sentence of demolition. Granada soon had to build its own outdoor set, there being no suitable streets left near its Deansgate studios in which to film exteriors. The street used in the credits, Archie Street, nicknamed ‘Coronarchie Street' by locals, was condemned in 1967 in Salford's last great slum clearance scheme and finally demolished in 1971, when Bernard Youens and Jean Alexander, who played Stan and Hilda Ogden, went along to pay their last respects, in character.
²⁹

Coronation Street was now an intertextual, mythic entity, having more relationship to the paintings of L. S. Lowry, the street photography of Shirley Baker or the plays of Shelagh Delaney than to any real Salford – although the famous opening credits, of huddled rooftops with television aerials, trees in blossom and a cat looking for a shady spot under a wall, were less sombre than these earlier visual representations. A diligent curator of this kind of self-conscious ‘urban pastoral' (to borrow the historian Chris Waters's term) was Steven Morrissey, brought up in the
Coronation Street
-style terraces of Stretford and Moss Side, who would, as a teenager, unsuccessfully submit script ideas for the soap to Granada and who, in 1985,
interviewed Pat Phoenix for the zeitgeisty style magazine
Blitz
as well as ensuring that she adorned the cover of the Smiths' single ‘Shakespeare's Sister'.
³⁰

Even if the cobbled Coronation Street was now a parallel universe without a real world template, viewers still imagined it as a definite place, with so many tangled relationships and ancestral antagonisms that the serial had to employ its own full-time historian, Daran Little, to monitor the elongated backstories and maintain internal consistency. In the seemingly ephemeral genre of soap opera,
Coronation Street
had developed its own sophisticated rituals of commemoration. At the Granada Studios Tour in Deansgate, Manchester, which attracted 5,000 visitors a day, the main attraction was the
Street
's outdoor set, built from bricks and tiles salvaged from Manchester demolitions. Tourists could walk along the cobbles, touch Jack and Vera Duckworth's ill-advised stone cladding at number 9 and look through the houses' letter boxes or windows where, disappointingly, they saw only a long empty space full of studio equipment, with an upper gallery for actors to appear at bedroom windows.

Kingsley Amis, who had always believed that art should craft a self-contained world of conscious artifice with only a glancing relationship to ‘reality', was a natural fan of
Coronation Street
. One can imagine his response to the increasingly insistent criticism, voiced in a 1991 Channel 4 documentary,
J'Accuse … Coronation Street
and subsequent comments by the chair of the Broadcasting Standards Council, Lord Rees-Mogg, that the
Street
failed to represent the multi-ethnic makeup of the real Salford.
³¹
While its BBC rival
East-Enders
engaged tenaciously with social issues like racism or homophobia, the
Street
spun its own alternative reality out of dry wit and near caricature.