Armchair Nation (52 page)

‘I never allowed the programme to become a platform for debate, moral or otherwise,' said the serial's long-running producer Bill Podmore who, although he had retired in 1988, had established this idea of the street as a kind of dramatic sitcom. ‘I regard that as the province of documentary, not light entertainment.' In the early 1990s, these sitcom characters were in their prime: the brassy pub landlady
Bet Lynch, the winsome shop assistant Mavis Barlow, the squabbling but strangely uxorious Duckworths – Pickwickian characters all, but with a touching vulnerability. This period also saw the introduction of a character who would last only a few years but linger long in the memory: the barmaid Raquel Wolstenhulme, her film-star first name contrasting eloquently with her down-to-earth northern surname. Played with great subtlety and tenderness by Sarah Lancashire, she had, wrote Nancy Banks-Smith, an ‘almost saintly idiocy' and was ‘a rare creation, lovely, funny and incapable of unkindness … a wicket-splintering spin on dumb blondeness'.
³²
Amis would surely have loved her.

With the TV volume turned up high, he would cheer the best bits of
Coronation Street
(‘Bloody marvellous – you wouldn't want to change a word of that!') and boo his least favourite characters (‘Get her off – I can't stand the sight of her!'). The poet and critic Neil Powell suggests that Amis's later novels betray the effects of his nights in front of the TV.
The Folks that Live on the Hill
(1988), for instance, feels like a soap opera, with subplots featuring minor characters interrupting the main action, and its denouement bringing the whole cast together in a pub not unlike the Rovers Return. Some of his later works, such as the novel
Difficulties with Girls
(1989), and his posthumously published guide to English usage,
The King's English
(1997), refer explicitly to
Coronation Street
. After primetime, Amis retired to bed reluctantly with a book, avoiding the late night arts programmes with their talking heads and ‘crappy opinions'.
³³

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called them ‘life strategies' or ‘ingenious techniques of exorcism': the self-deluding subterfuges we use to deny the reality of our own mortality. The trick was to make ‘the whole of life into a game of bridge-crossing … so that no bridge seems to loom ominously as the “ultimate” one … Nothing seems to vanish forever, “for good” – so that it cannot reappear again.'
³⁴
It is doubtful that Amis would have had much patience with Bauman's speculative postmodern sociology, but he was certainly a man full of phobias and existential fears and this seems a fairly convincing explanation, at least in part, for his fondness for soap operas.

While Amis was watching
Coronation Street
in Regents Park Road, the poet Stephen Spender, his mobility curtailed after an accident while running for a bus, had become a devotee of
Neighbours
. At his home in St John's Wood, Spender also enjoyed a Newcastle-set crime series called
Spender
, about a plain-clothes detective with unorthodox methods. ‘He seems to spend most of his time watching youths, who turn out to be drug addicts, pee in men's rooms where they do most of their illicit business,' Spender explained in a letter to the poet Alan Ross. ‘He gets his kicks out of arresting them. It is quite well written and funny to those who share his name.'
³⁵
A lifelong champion of modernism who was at the heart of the literary establishment, Spender seems a more unlikely fan than Amis of soap operas and crime dramas. ‘The critical faculty is somehow suspended when people watch it,' reflected his son-in-law Barry Humphries on Spender's
Neighbours
habit. But perhaps it is not so unlikely. Spender, like Amis, was the right age to be watching television – older, less mobile people being, in the broadcasters' language, more ‘available to view'. He was not alone in finding himself slowly and semi-accidentally drawn into television's formerly unfathomable rituals.

Soap operas now took up more of the viewing week. Several of the BFI's television diarists worried that their favourite programme would be axed if Thames lost out in the franchise auction of 1992,
³⁶
but while Thames did lose the franchise, the new owner, Carlton, carried on commissioning
The Bill
and indeed switched it to three nights a week – not surprisingly, since it was so popular. By 1994, all three major British soaps,
Coronation Street, Brookside
and
East-Enders
, had also increased their number of episodes to three a week. Many people had feared that the auctioning off of ITV franchises, mostly to the highest bidder, would plunge the channel downmarket. But the most immediate effect seemed to be to increase the importance in the schedules of soap operas and popular dramas
like
Inspector Morse, Soldier, Soldier
and
London's Burning
– the kind of uncomplicated lower-middlebrow consumerism that Kingsley Amis longed for.

And yet television was changing in subtler ways. Ratings were now an ever more precious currency, the data gathered silently from a few thousand homes by an unheard telephone call from a mainframe computer at the dead of night, and processed in time to deliver the rough viewing figures, or ‘unconsolidated overnights', to the office computers of channel controllers the next morning before being emailed to their underlings. The new BBC director general, John Birt, was an advocate of the ‘consumer-facing' ethos that had been transforming the public sector since the Thatcher era. For years the BBC's Broadcasting Research Department had been a separate fiefdom with little direct influence on programme making. Now the central planning and strategy units undertook audience research themselves and it began to shape commissioning and scheduling.

One type of research acquired its own demonology: the ‘focus group', a cross-section of about eight people, invited to comment on existing or potential programmes in return for a small fee and some free pizza, perhaps with TV executives watching via a two-way mirror. The BBC's use of focus groups was partly political: a seemingly neutral, democratic research tool also embraced by political parties, they reinforced the BBC's sense of being answerable to its customers. But by the end of the millennium, the media had seized upon focus groups as a stick with which to beat both the New Labour government and the BBC. The focus group was now so associated with unimaginative conformity that the Rover 75 advertised itself with the slogan ‘rejected by focus groups', although, as it turned out, it was also rejected by car buyers. When Michael Wearing resigned as the BBC's head of drama serials in 1998, he said that focus groups were used ‘to placate a political loathing of anything in the arena of public service' and ‘patronisingly reduce the audience to the role of passive consumer'. Terry Wogan described ‘focus group' as ‘the two most devalued words in television and the sooner they get away from them the better'.
³⁷

The focus group became something of a bogeyman, when it was really just part of a general cultural shift at the BBC to more management-level decision making. It is hard to calibrate exactly what effect focus groups had on the programmes being shown, since the results were rarely made public. When she looked at focus groups while doing fieldwork at the BBC in the mid 1990s, the anthropologist Georgina Born found that ‘the quality of audience insights delivered was often achingly banal'.
³⁸
Anticipating what viewers wanted seemed to remain a hazardous and unpredictable business, because people do not always behave like the carefully deliberating consumers that focus groups assume them to be, perhaps especially when they are sitting in front of a television. Since it is difficult to talk about the experience of watching TV hypothetically, and viewers do not necessarily know what they will like until they have seen it, many market-tested programmes remained curious failures. Others were equally curious successes.

In August 1994, BBC1 scheduled
Animal Hospital Week
, a programme set in an RSPCA hospital in Holloway, over a whole week. Its unlikely choice of host was the artist and children's entertainer Rolf Harris, who had been a familiar face on British television for more than forty years, but whose career appeared to be over after his cartoon show was dropped by ITV in 1993. On the Wednesday night, a young man brought in his father's alsatian, Floss, who could only walk a few steps before his back legs collapsed. When he was told that the dog had to be put down, the man buried his head in Harris's shoulder, and both of them cried. This seems to have had a dramatic impact on viewers, for the next day the show's audience rose sharply to 9.5 million.
³⁹

The Oxford English don Peter Conrad, after watching a pet owner being told his cat's cancer was inoperable, concluded that the programme was ‘as gut-wrenching as
King Lear
'. When the new series of
Animal Hospital
in January 1995 was pitted against
The Bill
on Thursday evenings, it got over 11 million viewers against this seemingly impregnable megalith of the schedules. Viewers found themselves caring about the fate of a chicken found wandering lost around
Camden or a dog with a stick caught in its throat. Some BFI diarists insisted their pets enjoyed watching it as well.
⁴⁰

Animal Hospital
ensured the success of a new type of programme: the docusoap. Competition for ratings and declining budgets meant that in-house and independent producers, vying for the same primetime slots, swooped eagerly on successful, repeatable formulae. An unexpected hit like
Animal Hospital
could produce a television scheduling version of chaos theory, creating a domino effect that transformed the whole of primetime. Here was a new form of documentary that was cheap, because new digital editing suites meant that long observational shooting could be easily stitched into a narrative, and which the BBC could even loosely define as educational. The commercialisation of broadcasting, rather than making television producers more responsive to the needs of viewer-consumers, had simply created a different set of mostly unintended market conditions.

Kingsley Amis's hated form of the documentary, which he associated with well-meaning liberalism that talked down to viewers, had been in long-term decline and most TV people thought it would be a victim of the new market. No documentary of any sort had made it into the top 100-rated television programmes of 1993.
⁴¹
But now the documentary was reborn as a soap opera of the mundane. In each episode of
Airport
, a programme about Heathrow, different aspects of airport logistics were parsed into narrative strands: four Norwegian women lost their luggage and were refusing to fly on to Oslo until BA found it; the airport photographer waited in vain to take a picture of a supermodel; and a man dressed in a Womble costume found that he could not travel unidentified for security reasons.

While
Airport
made a celebrity of a camply officious Ground Services Manager for Aeroflot called Jeremy Spake,
Driving School
brought national renown to a Welsh cleaner, Maureen Rees, who had to write ‘L' and ‘R' on her hands because she could not tell left from right, and whose most memorable moment was running over her husband's foot. The peaktime schedules, once full of quizzes and sitcoms, were colonised by a new genre, ‘reality TV'. Few had
predicted its popularity, and it is unlikely any focus group had ever expressed a preference for it.

‘Personally I call her Delia, so totally has she taken on the nature of a family friend,' wrote Joan Bakewell in 1980, ‘bright and neat, competent without being bossy, friendly without being familiar.' The woman with the fairly uncommon forename and the most common English surname was perhaps fated to be known by the former. By 2001, ‘Delia' had entered Collins dictionary as both a noun and verb, from ‘Delia dish' to ‘doing a Delia'. Some of the hundreds of usages found in the Collins Bank of English included ‘the anti-Delia, anti-Aga backlash' and a list of middle-class British institutions such as ‘the Dordogne, dishwashers, Delia Smith and dyslexia'.
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By then, Delia had earned her first-name fame for her magically galvanising effect on Britain's amateur cooks.