Armchair Nation (63 page)

A few days after the Crystal Palace switchover, I went for a walk around my neighbourhood in the early evening. The houses here are
Coronation Street
-style terraces – like Granada's fictional street, they were built in 1902 and are named Coronation Villas to mark the accession of Edward VIII – and there are no walk-up steps to separate house from pavement. So as I passed each home, without even trying to look in, I could see televisions, mostly showing that now half-a-century-old programme,
Coronation Street
, through the bay windows. These TV screens are more detailed and smoothly moving than ever before, and they are as big and wide as wallcharts, magnifying the talking heads in the corner of the room so that shaving rash and undyed hair roots are visible. As usual, high-definition television is presented as our inevitable appointment with the progress we all wanted all along. But I wonder if humankind, like Gulliver inspecting the giant blemished faces of the Brobdingnagians, will be able to bear this much reality.

The televisions may be huge, but the people watching them remain as inscrutable as ever. We still know remarkably little about this
terra incognita
, the living room with the TV on. Who are these square-eyed
spectres, hidden behind curtains or briefly glimpsed like this at lighting-up time? From its first incarnations, people feared that television would create supine, insular citizens. As early as 1930, the
Manchester Guardian
wondered whether, ‘with all the stars of entertainment twinkling and chattering on the parlour wall', television would ‘seal us up in a gaol of domesticity'.
⁹
The human shadows that we see through the windows of houses as we pass them, briefly illuminated by the flickering television screen, have sometimes seemed to resemble the cave dwellers in Plato's
Republic
, turning their backs on the cold light of the world in favour of their own illusory reality created by the silhouette of a fire playing on the back wall.

The media historians Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz once compared the mass viewing of television to the
seder
, the Jewish ritual marking the start of Passover. Jews celebrate the
seder
in their own homes, which are open to extended family and sometimes strangers, and these millions of synchronised, homebound microevents take place around a symbolic centre, a sense that the Jewish diaspora is celebrating all at the same time. Dayan and Katz saw television as a similar kind of ‘festive viewing', a powerful social chemistry bonding society together.
¹⁰
But on the whole, this has only been sporadically true, and even big events like the coronation and the moon landing, which Dayan and Katz focus on, have produced too wide a range of reactions to be compared to a religious ritual. Not everyone wants to be part of the armchair nation, and there is always something on the other side – or the off switch.

But even if they are not a virtual society organised as ritualistically as the
seder
, television viewers are surely more than just a collection of lots of atomised, a-collective individuals slumped in front of the box. If you were to magic your way into the countless British living rooms (not to mention oil rigs, prisons, lighthouses, hospitals, boarding schools, care homes …) where television has been watched over tens of thousands of days, you would no doubt find some of those passive, Platonic cave dwellers. But you would also find millions of micro-communities, all doing similar things such as laughing, crying, arguing, querying (‘who's he again?'), irritatedly ‘shushing' those not
watching as attentively as them, passing verdicts (‘well, that wasn't up to much …') – but in individual, idiosyncratic ways that would seem as rich and varied as television itself.

As I walked past the houses, and heard the dying fall of
Coronation Street
dialogue from one house being picked up again by another as I passed it, I wondered about the fate of the analogue signal that would soon be no longer of this earth. When high fidelity television started in 1936, it began simultaneously broadcasting through space. For nearly eighty years these high frequency waves have been radiating into the skies at the speed of light, swept across our planet by its rotation. Imagine a huge, invisible mass of carrier waves, most of which we will never see again, at the leading edge of which, and already past several thousand stars by now, is the smooth, matinee idol voice of Leslie Mitchell saying ‘Hello Radiolympia. Ladies and gentlemen, “Here's Looking at You”.'

In 1976, Woodruff Sullivan of the University of Washington decided to work out just what the earth's radio leakage actually was. He concluded that, were sentient alien beings to exist, the thing most likely to indicate our presence to them, because of their number and the consistency of their frequencies, would be our television carrier waves.
¹¹
At the time there was much excitement about the launching of Voyager I and II, the space probes sent off into the farthest reaches of the galaxy with a disc containing birdsong, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, pictures of the Sydney Opera House and the Pyramids and messages recorded in various languages (‘Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday') for the bemusement of hypothetical aliens. Sullivan simply pointed out the obvious: only light could make headway in the almost unimaginable distances of interstellar space, and so remnants of old television were far more likely to give our position away than those snail-slow Voyager aircrafts, which have only just left the outer reaches of our solar system, and will not pass another planet for another 40,000 years.

By collecting information about the thousands of television masts then in operation, Sullivan was able to speculate about the nature of the waves that would be picked up elsewhere. The weaker signals of
the smaller masts would be masked by the pervasive interstellar static emitted throughout the universe known as cosmic microwave background radiation, some of which appears on a TV screen when it is not tuned into a channel (that random pattern of hyperactive dots the Scandinavians compare to warring ants). But the TV masts with the strongest power, then concentrated in western Europe, America and Japan, would be detectable above this galactic noise. Assuming they knew about the Doppler effect, the shift in frequency of an observed wave because the observer or the source has moved, an alien picking up these signals would be able to work out the size of our planet and perhaps seasonal changes – in winter, for example, fewer leaves on the trees would make the waves stronger.
¹²
And that would be before they even sat down to watch the programmes.

Just before Christmas 2011, NASA announced that its space telescope had discovered Kepler 22b, the first confirmed planet to orbit squarely within what scientists call the ‘Goldilocks zone' of a Sun-like star, where temperatures would be just right to allow surface water throughout its orbit and thus sustain life. It is 600 light years away from earth, which means that in about 600 years' time, some civilised aliens on this earth-like planet, assuming they had managed to invent something resembling a cathode ray tube and a TV aerial, could be watching the current offerings on ITV2 or Sky Living and wondering if they really represent the summit of human creativity and achievement.

But perhaps even the most fatuous, banal TV will be viewed in a kindlier light from billions of miles away, reduced to what it is in essence: an imperfect attempt to make a human connection across empty space. Bad television is still a technical triumph, needing huge reserves of labour and skill, much of it unacknowledged, to bring it to us. And like all attempts at conversation, it is a leap into the dark, with no guarantee it will be heard or understood. Who has not turned on a TV programme and felt that the people who created it, even though they might occupy the same small patch of our planet, were basically cognitive aliens, tuned to a different mental wavelength from our own? And yet somehow, out of mere shapes and shadows
made of electrons and pixels, television has sent us messages that we have managed to mould into meaning. It has spoken to us through the air and permeated our intimate lives, filling them with boredom and wonder, irritation and inspiration, dismay and delight.

The following abbreviations have been used:

BBC WAC: BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Reading

MOA: Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex

NA: National Archives at Kew

1
. David Jacobs, ‘Matt Monro',
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, online edition.

2
. D. J. Taylor, ‘A funny thing happened',
Independent
, 29 March 2001; ‘More child participation in new BBC TV programmes',
The Times
, 6 September 1973; David Oswell,
Television, Childhood, and the Home: A History of the Making of the Child Television Audience in Britain
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 50.

3
. Biddy Baxter,
Dear Blue Peter
(London: Short Books, 2008), p. 63.

4
. Simon Garfield,
The Wrestling
(London: Faber, 1996), p. 89.

5
. Roland Barthes,
Mythologies
(London: Vintage, 1993), p. 25.

6
. Raymond Williams,
Culture and Society 1780–1950
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 253.

7
. A. A. Gill, ‘Oh Lord, he's still stuck in the past',
Sunday Times
, 27 March 2005.

8
. John Sutherland and Stephen Fender,
Love Sex Death & Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature
(London: Icon, 2010), p. 432.

9
. William Barkley, ‘They've got it on the brain!',
Daily Express
, 16 November 1965; Philip Thody,
Don't Do It!: A Dictionary of the Forbidden
(New York: St Martin's Press, 1997), p. 154; letter from the
University of Essex Union to the BBC, 14 November 1965, BBC WAC, R41/279/1PCS.

10
. Dominic Shellard,
Kenneth Tynan: A Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 301.

11
. ‘Such a strange TV interview',
Daily Mirror
, 19 June 1956; Brum Henderson,
Brum: A Life in Television
(Belfast: Appletree Press, 2003), p. 72.

12
. Letter from Kenneth E. Pottle to the BBC-3 producer, 19 November 1965, BBC WAC, R41/279/3PCS; Shellard,
Tynan
, p. 300; ‘Housewives to defend liberal ideas',
Guardian
, 13 December 1965.

13
. Shellard,
Tynan
, p. 301; Robert Robinson,
Skip All That: Memoirs
(London: Century, 1996), p. 127; Kingsley Amis, ‘Swearing in decline?',
Guardian
, 17 November 1968.

14
. Ed Harris,
Not in Front of the Telly: 75 Years of the BBC's Complaints Department
(Clifton-upon-Terne: Polperro Heritage Press, 2002), p. 100.

15
. John Ellis,
Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 5.

1
. T. S. Eliot, ‘The music of poetry', in
On Poetry and Poets
(London: Faber, 1957), p. 32.

2
. Virginia Woolf, ‘Oxford Street tide', in
The London Scene
(London: Snowbooks, 2004), pp. 27, 29.

3
. Callisthenes, ‘Television: first public demonstration',
The Times
, 24 March 1925.

4
. John Durham Peters,
Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 29.

5
. Lindy Woodhead,
Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge
(London: Profile, 2007), p. 195; Callisthenes, ‘Television'.

6
.
The Race for Television
, Episode 2, Granada/ITV, 19 February 1985; Anthony Kamm and Malcolm Baird,
John Logie Baird: A Life
(Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 2002), p. 58.

7
. Gordon Honeycombe,
Selfridges: Seventy-Five Years: The Story of the Store 1909–1984
(London: Park Lane Press, 1984), p. 57.

8
. R. W. Burns,
British Television: The Formative Years
(London: Peregrinus/Science Museum, 1986), p. 110.

9
. Burns,
British Television
, p. 149.

10
. Eric Linden, ‘The first great love story of television',
TV Times
, 14 October 1955, 20–21.

11
. W. L. Wraight, ‘Reception of the B.B.C. 30-line television transmissions in Madeira',
Journal of the Television Society
, 2, 2 (June 1935), 27.

12
. Russell W. Burns,
John Logie Baird: Television Pioneer
(London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2000), p. 184.

13
. Burns,
British Television
, p. 152; ‘The week on the screen',
Manchester Guardian
, 19 July 1930.

14
. Anthony Burgess, ‘European culture: does it exist?',
Theatre Journal
, 43, 3 (October 1991), 302; Anthony Burgess, ‘Takeover',
Listener
, 23 May 1963, 884.

15
. Anthony Burgess, ‘Return to reality',
Listener
, 5 December 1963, 956; Anthony Burgess, ‘Why Benny is a king of comedy',
Guardian
, 1 December 1990.

16
. Anthony Burgess, ‘1948: An old man interviewed', in
1985
(London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 22.

17
. Anthony Burgess,
Little Wilson and Big God
(London: Penguin, 1988), p. 103.

18
. Burns,
British Television
, pp. 158–9; Kamm and Baird,
John Logie Baird
, p. 142.

19
. Kamm and Baird,
John Logie Baird
, p. 147; Burns,
British Television
, p. 160.