Armchair Nation (55 page)

The journalist Peter Hitchens thought the rot had set in with colour TV, which made even bad programmes look so enticing that the best storyteller could not compete with them. The unspoken secret of the 1990s was that television had become ‘a free national child-minding service', he complained, as adults shamelessly used ‘the flickering, braying, never-silent device to mesmerise the next generation, so that they can get on with their grown-up lives'. This was how millions of parents had found out about the death of Princess Diana, as their children switched on their ‘electronic dripfeeds' one Sunday in August 1997 and, instead of cartoon wallpaper, got the news. ‘To leave a child unsupervised in front of a television set,' Hitchens concluded, ‘is no less dangerous than giving it neat gin, or putting it within reach of narcotics.'
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As in the late 1950s, the anti-television voices of the late 1990s
crossed the political spectrum, for TV could be blamed both for the breakdown of family life and for selling the capitalist waking dream of aspirational consumerism. At a time when Prozac and other anti-depressants were raising awareness of mental illness as a medical condition, the psychotherapist Oliver James saw TV as the prime culprit in creating what he called ‘the low serotonin society'. By overpromoting glamour and wealth and lowering reserves of self-esteem over the last half century, he believed, television had been ‘the engine-room' of a ‘psychic holocaust'.
⁶⁸

Around the time that George Mackay Brown was becoming belatedly acquainted with daytime TV, a small community in the Yorkshire Wolds, about twenty miles east of York, achieved brief renown for not watching TV at all. Thixendale, an isolated village of barely a hundred souls in the shelter of the six dales from which it took its name, was revealed by several newspapers to be the land that had managed to escape television for sixty years. The village lay in a steep-sided, dry valley reached by narrow country lanes and approached from every angle by chalk escarpments. Thixendale had long been used to being cut off by snow as these lanes became impassable in winter, and as television spread it found itself cut off from television as well. Unlike the harder rocks of the Yorkshire dales and moors, Wolds chalk is soft, so when glacial meltwater rushed across it at the end of the last ice age it created rounded peaks and deep valleys that the novelist Winifred Holtby called ‘fold upon fold of the encircling hills, piled rich and golden beneath a tranquil sky'.
⁶⁹
It also created a Bermuda triangle for the TV signal which now defended Thixendalians from
Supermarket Sweep
and
Ready Steady Cook
.

In the 1970s, one side of the main street got blurry BBC signals via a communal aerial and the odd ghostly apparition of ITV appeared during electrical storms. Then, on 2 January 1985, the old 405-line
signal stopped, the government being anxious to find extra frequencies for the nascent mobile phone network. This rendered the old H-shaped aerials redundant, and the village was again televisionless. In the early 1990s villagers began to be doorstepped by satellite television reps, proffering free dishes and a year's free subscription if they would sign up.

The absence of television seemed to have helped Thixendale to forge a strong community spirit, and the thirty-odd local children learned to read more quickly than their friends from other villages. Then in June 1996 Thixendale held a festival, ‘Life Without TV', which showcased the villagers' skills, such as pottery, tile-making and woodwork, that had flourished without television. But the proceeds, shared with the church roof fund, were used to pay for a new £10,000 hilltop aerial. Villagers paid an annual fee towards its upkeep and received a local newsletter,
Fuzzy Lines
, updating them on reception. But one afternoon in May 1999, just as the village's children were on their way home from school, there was a lightning storm. A thunderbolt zapped the aerial of one of the houses and ran along its shared cable, burning out the entire system, including fourteen of the village's television sets. Perhaps an Old Testament God was punishing the villagers for their presumption in wanting to watch
Changing Rooms
. ‘I've never been able to get a decent picture,' said Charles Brader, a local farmer to whom the thunderbolt mattered little. ‘But it really doesn't make much difference. It's like opening your post. Every now and then something interesting comes along but you still forget about it two minutes later.'
⁷⁰

The story of the last televisionless village in the kingdom was a neat one, but only partly true. There were still many other isolated hamlets and villages, mostly in parts of south Wales such as Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion, or the outer Western Isles of Scotland, without a TV signal. It was part of the lore of shipping that oil tankers went through the Minch between the Outer and Inner Hebrides, rather than skirting Harris and Lewis, because it was the only way to get a decent TV reception. Receiving a TV picture in these parts involved chance and luck. The Hebridean island of Iona had
one because Penry Jones, a former head of religious broadcasting at ITV and BBC, retired there and managed to get the Glengorm mast on the Isle of Mull adjusted to take account of chinks in the hills, while also persuading the council to build a communal aerial on top of the only suitable building, the public toilet.
⁷¹

One of the worst places in Britain for reception was, perhaps surprisingly, the centre of London, because of all the tall, steel-framed buildings with metallised windows that blocked the TV signal. While Thixendalians were clubbing together for a television aerial, almost 700 residents in a block of flats on the Isle of Dogs were launching a compensation claim against the London Docklands Development Corporation and Olympia and York, developers of the 800-foot Canary Wharf tower. For three years, from 1989 to 1992, until BBC engineers took pity on them and installed a booster mast, the residents had no reception. ‘I like the soaps, especially
EastEnders
, even though it is not really like life in the East End,' said one of the complainants, Rose Humphries, a widow recovering from breast cancer. ‘When the picture went, I had to keep telephoning my daughter to find out what happened next.' In 1997, after a series of appeals, the case reached the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. The law lords conceded that television was ‘a great distraction and relief from the circumscribed nature of the lives of aged, lonely and bedridden people'. But they did not think the deprivation of television an ‘actionable nuisance', especially since, as TV signals were invisible, developers could not be expected to know of their existence before putting up a building.
⁷²

Watching television may still not have been enshrined in law as a basic human right. But perhaps it did not need to be, for it was now available to anyone prepared to pay for a satellite dish. By the end of the television century, geostationary TV satellites could beam down on every square foot of land in the country. There were hundreds of satellite and cable channels, and many broadcast continually from morning to night, as did ITV and BBC1. Test Card F, the once ubiquitous girl with the Alice band who appeared when there was nothing on TV, had vanished from our screens, for there was no need of a
screensaver when there always something on, even if it was only pages from Ceefax in the small hours on BBC2. The cathode ray Ancient Mariner carried on talking to its viewers whatever time it was, and whether or not it had anything to say.

Hundreds of millions of people thus spend time every day flipping from one channel to the next, editing their own montages based on chance whilst looking for the news programme or game show that takes their fancy … Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment
.

Robert Hughes
¹

‘I first saw television when I was in my late teens. It made my heart
pound
,' said Dennis Potter in a lecture in Edinburgh in 1993. ‘Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights, that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help to emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance.' Born in 1935, Potter was brought up in Berry Hill, a coalmining village in the Forest of Dean, which did not receive television until the opening of the Wenvoe transmitter in 1952, and so he came of age just as it was emerging as a mass domestic medium. His feelings about that ‘little grey-faced monster squatting in our living rooms' remained conflicted throughout his life.
²

These conflicted feelings were already evident when he began his career as a professional television watcher, a job he got through illness. After being hired as a
Daily Herald
reporter in 1961, his knees
became painfully swollen, the early stages of the psoriatic arthropathy that afflicted him for the rest of his life, and he began to work from home as the paper's TV critic, watching in his Hammersmith flat and phoning in the copy late at night, his deadline meaning that he could only write about primetime shows. He was already a reluctant fan of the great popular serials and soap operas that emerged in the late 1950s to put a strain on the National Grid. His first TV column, in May 1962, a review of
Wagon Train
, revealed him to be an addict of the television western, ‘the most productive folklore of all time'. And in his second, he confessed to being hooked on
Emergency – Ward 10
.
³

A key moment in Potter's conversion into being a television writer came when he was hospitalised and wrote about the uncanny experience of watching this medical soap while being treated: ‘Shimmering on the screen is the mythical, glamorised world of godlike doctors and nubile, toothpaste-smiling nurses. But the real world of bedpans and squeaking tea trolleys around one is far less like the cover of a glossy film magazine.' One of his earliest TV plays was
Emergency Ward 9
(1966), set in a seedy hospital a world away from Ward 10, where ATV's Lew Grade permitted the scriptwriters only five deaths per year.
⁴

As Potter wrote his first plays, he was driven on by the knowledge that both coalminers and Oxford dons might be watching, that TV could offer a way of reaching both his parents and his university friends, unlike the middle-class medium of the theatre. Two-channel television could, he felt, satisfy his yearning for ‘at least the possibility of a common culture'.
⁵
But he was also painfully aware that this shared televisual culture often served up undemanding pap, much of which he was forced to watch while bed-ridden in hospital. Potter had something of the lay preacher about him, making him both exasperated with and sympathetic to the viewers who used television as a soporific. ‘I have often looked out of the train windows on the approaches to Paddington Station … and at thickening dusk seen the tower blocks loom up,' he wrote in 1983 about the train journey he regularly made from his home in Ross-on-Wye to London. ‘At almost every porthole in the gloomy blocks, floor upon floor upon floor, the lilac flicker of the television set comes from deep within the rooms
… Many old communities … have been broken apart, to be replaced with this flickering illusion of communality.'
⁶

Potter's vision of a common culture, he came to see, had proved as elusive on television as it had in the rest of society. His own plays were mostly acclaimed but only intermittently reached large audiences. Even Potter's family thought his target audience in the Forest of Dean was puzzled and repelled by his work. ‘To be quite honest, you see, I'm not awfully keen on his plays,' said Iris Hughes, Potter's former school teacher. ‘They're not everybody's cup of tea, you know. And he did tend to run the forest down.' Potter grew disillusioned about his ability to reach a wide audience through television and dismissed the idea of a golden age when the whole nation was sitting around a set. Only when the TV was switched off, he reflected in his Edinburgh lecture, did it pick up ‘a direct or true reflection of its viewers, subdued into a glimmer on its dull grey tube … The already aborted dream of a common culture … has long since been zapped into glistening fragments.'
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