Armchair Nation (62 page)

A friend has just given his television set to a surprised caller. Is he a candidate for the calendar or for the social services? He has turned the newscasters out, lock, stock and goodbye smiles, and is master in his own house. We should try it. It is a lay form of Trappism
.

Ronald Blythe
¹

In the middle of March 1969, a severe ice storm hit the southern Pennines. At the top of Emley Moor, the spun metal stays of the television mast twanged and whistled in the wind and great clumps of ice fell off, denting parked cars and piercing the roofs of houses. Since being completed three years earlier, the mast had acquired an ugly reputation among the surrounding villagers, who called it ‘the ice monster'. After receiving complaints from the council, the Independent Television Authority installed signs on approach roads and a flashing amber beacon on the mast to warn of ice falls. Muriel Truelove, before taking over as landlady of the nearby Three Acres Inn eight weeks earlier, anxiously paced out the distance between the mast and the pub to see whether the former would hit the latter if it ever fell down.
²

At 5.01 p.m. on Wednesday 19 March, it did. A crash like a thunder crack could be heard for miles around. The top section of the mast, made of meshed steel girders clad in fibreglass, narrowly missed two cottages as it pitched into a field a third of a mile away. A Methodist
chapel was sliced in two by one of the ice-laden, metal stays. Two men inside the building saw a cascade of ice hit the roof and then the stay come crashing through it. Silverwood Burt, a 68-year-old trustee of the chapel, was covered in plaster and woodwork, but was saved by the crash helmet he had borrowed for just such an eventuality. ‘I dived under some seats in the classroom,' said the caretaker, Jeffrey Jessop. ‘I laid there until it was all over, saying a lot of prayers.' The other stays whiplashed into the earth, with ten-feet-deep craters gouged in fields, and road surfaces where the wreckage fell smashed into tarmac fragments. The police closed all the roads to keep back sightseers who were crowding in through the fog, as breakdown crews hauled the debris away. ‘The whole superb structure which dominated the West Riding as effectively as its transmissions dominated the county's TV screens, has been reduced to tangled metal by nothing more sinister than drizzle,' said the
Yorkshire Post
.
³

When the mast came down, tens of thousands of the region's viewers, from the hill-shadowed villages of the West Riding to the coastal towns across the Yorkshire plain, were watching
Discotheque
, a children's pop show on ITV presented by Billy J. Kramer. Suddenly, a few minutes before a comedy show called
Do Not Adjust Your Set
was about to start, their screens disintegrated into static. As soon as the television went blank in the Leeds control room, the duty engineer's phone began ringing off the hook. Several callers demanded that the missed episode of
Coronation Street
be broadcast on BBC1 after closedown. Yorkshire TV's switchboard logged over 5,000 calls, mostly complaints about missing
Coronation Street
and
The Avengers
.
⁴
Over the next three days, seventeen Polish migrant workers put in eighteen-hour shifts in freezing 50 mph winds to build a temporary mast that covered most of the region, allowing Yorkshire TV to claw back its haemorrhaging advertising revenue. The only part of the original mast that survives now does service as Huddersfield sailing club's lookout tower, offering a panoramic view of the Boshaw Whams Reservoir.

By the end of the 1960s, the television set burbling away in the living room had come to signify normality and routine. The people
who rang the Leeds duty engineer to complain about missing
Coronation Street
probably gave little thought as to how its radio waves reached them. Television had become a mundane piece of wizardry, something only really noticeable when it broke down or was interrupted. Historically, the most vociferous complaints from viewers have not been about sex, violence or bad language, but about when television stops for no apparent reason or their favourite programmes are cancelled or postponed. What viewers seem to demand most of television is that it carries on, like an ever-flowing stream. And, mostly, it does: a non-stop, decades-old technical miracle. The collapse of the Emley Moor mast was a brief reminder of how much we take television for granted and how much it depends on apparatus that might, at some point, come crashing down on our heads.

Some of the original TV masts, which caused so much excitement when they were built, such as Holme Moss and Kirk O'Shotts, have stopped sending out television signals and now transmit mobile phone conversations or digital radio. The nameless engineers who kept television going in these remote places have long since moved on to other masts, retired or died. The remaining masts are mostly unsung in our cultural mythology, with a few eccentric exceptions. The Mancunian post-punk funk band A Certain Ratio recorded a song about the Granada region's Winter Hill transmitter in 1981, which consists of thirteen minutes of stubbornly monotonous drumming and a techno motif of just two alternating notes, meant to imitate a TV signal.

The Yorkshire-born poet Simon Armitage once hymned the new 900-foot Emley Moor mast, a tapering, reinforced concrete tower completed in 1971, in a ten-minute visual poem for BBC2's
One Foot in the Past
series in 1993, and elsewhere described it as ‘like the after-burn of a rocket disappearing into the clouds'. In a 1996 BBC2 documentary,
I Remember the Future
, the presenter, Jonathan Meades, stood at the bottom of this mast in order to give a sense of its height and surprising girth, and proclaimed it ‘established by aliens in 1966 [
sic
] in order that 30 years later this film might reach you'. These ‘punctuation marks of human supremacy,' he mused, belonged to ‘that brief and far off parenthesis when Britain was modern', the
third quarter of the twentieth century, when public architecture was ‘self-celebratory, bloated, grandiose'.
⁵
No one, except the odd nonconformist like Meades, rhapsodises about TV masts any more.

While I was writing this book, the analogue signal slowly disappeared, region by region. One of the soundtracks to its writing was the constant repetition on the television and radio of the restful Welsh accent of the BBC newsreader Huw Edwards reminding me that my analogue television would soon be useless but that, if I were over seventy-five or registered disabled, I could get help. The technologically unschooled became reluctant students of the new vocabulary of the digibox and scart socket. At my local tip, I saw several dozen ‘fat-screen' televisions piled up in a skip. In America they call it the Super Bowl effect, the mass dumping of old TVs as viewers upgrade to sleeker, better sets in time for the sporting event of the year. The digital switchover was the Super Bowl effect in extremis. On some of these old TVs, as their former owners had thrown them casually away, the cathode ray tube had become separated from its plastic housing. Seen in the raw, the tubes seemed suddenly bulky and primitive, a Victorian technology that had survived improbably into the present.

‘They are so ubiquitous in life that their bodies in death litter our wastelands and edgelands,' the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write in their book
Edgelands
, about the old televisions you see abandoned on peri-urban wasteland and landfill. ‘And why does a dead TV's blank face resonate so much with us? Is this our image of oblivion?'
⁶
I have heard these clunky cubic sets end up on container ships bound for Nigeria, China and other countries unencumbered by legislation about the lead, strontium and other toxic substances inside them. There, ragpickers, usually young girls, plunder them for tiny amounts of precious metals like silver and caesium. They give no thought (and why should they?) to the
zillions of electrons that have flickered and died on their phosphorescent tubes for the amusement and bemusement of distant others.

On 4 November 2009, on the same day the Winter Hill transmitter switched to digital, an exhibition opened at the Urbis gallery in Manchester, called ‘Ghosts of Winter Hill'. Its conceit was that for half a century domestic life in Britain had been ruled by the TV set, and the north had helped to define this television era that was ending. ‘The collectivisation of the nation through the conduit of television is no longer anything like so concentrated. In fact it's infinitely diluted,' said Phil Griffin, the co-curator. ‘So, in some sense, I believe that one could argue that the television era is over.'
⁷
I went to the exhibition, a series of cutaway period sitting rooms looking out of place in Urbis's glassy, minimalist surroundings. There was a G-Plan 1950s room, an
Abigail's Party
-style 1970s room, a flatpack 1990s room, and in each of them was a contemporaneous television set, screening programmes from that decade that had come out of Manchester:
The Army Game, Top of the Pops
or
Cold Feet
played on a loop.

If the television era was over, though, it didn't feel like it. There were terrible warnings in Granadaland before the switchover that if we did not retune our sets all our programmes would disappear – the
Coronation Street
bug again – but I forgot to do anything, and when I turned the TV on the next day it had somehow righted itself and was all the same as usual. The programmes simply carried on as normal; there were no pomp-and-circumstance ceremonies from transmitter sites as there had been in the postwar era when analogue television arrived in a region. When London and the south-east switched over in April 2012, the Crystal Palace transmitter, the most important in the network with a range of over forty miles, did host a VIP event to mark the occasion. Interviewed by the BBC Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans on stage, Professor Brian Cox, whose own science programmes had been inspired by watching
Life on Earth
and Carl Sagan's
Cosmos
as a boy, went off-message by admitting a nostalgia for a four-channel world in which you could always ‘find something to watch that you didn't know you liked'.
⁸

As David Attenborough, whose career in television now spanned
sixty years, hit a big red button, sonorous
X Factor
-style music boomed out. Beams of light representing the invisible digital TV signals were now supposed to shoot up the tower and radiate over London. But, in the middle of the wettest April on record, it was pouring down. The beams reached no further than Brixton and the spinning searchlight at the top was covered by low cloud. The switching off of the analogue signal, which had caused so much excitement when it arrived across the country, was thus fittingly anticlimactic. The few valedictions in the newspapers were all for Ceefax, that primitive version of the internet that would be lost in the analogue switchover. Journalists eulogised about its Lego-like coloured graphics and the excitement of following football games by staring at the slowly changing scores.