Armchair Nation Read online

  Despite its veneer of fly-on-the-wall authenticity, the film was actually a set-up: a public service documentary made on behalf of the Samaritans, with Krish calling out careful instructions to his subject. And yet it still seems to me to convey something important and often unspoken about watching television. The elderly widower in Krish’s film had the most minimal relationship possible with Bruce Forsyth; he happened to be in the same room when Forsyth was on the television, which happened to be switched on. The TV audience is a momentary collective like this, an insubstantial gathering across millions of living rooms which anyone can join by making the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set.

  But collective memories of watching TV tend to home in instead on those moments, such as Tynan’s use of the F-word, when viewers took offence or were otherwise angered, excited or rapt by television. Indeed, the only continuous record of viewers’ responses deals precisely with these reactions. The BBC was the first television company to begin logging viewers’ calls in a ‘duty log’, not always enthusiastically. ‘We must deal with telephone enquiries,’ said the BBC’s Chief Television Liaison Officer in the early 1950s. ‘For goodness sake, why must they ring? Why can’t they let us get on with our job of putting programmes on the air?’14

  When the Television Duty Office moved to the fourth floor of the new Television Centre in White City in the 1960s, the operation became more professional and less obviously irritated by its callers. While two TV sets, one tuned to BBC1 and the other to BBC2, chattered away continually in one corner, the small group of shift-working duty officers scrawled down summative points from calls, before transferring them to two typewriters, one for each channel. In the 1980s the duty log became a cut-and-paste, word processed document, until it was outsourced, at the end of the millennium, to a private company working from a Belfast call centre. All commercial TV stations are also now required by law to keep duty logs.

  Duty logs provide a complete record of what was shown on television, including any late runnings and last minute changes, so the police and lawyers regularly use them to check the alibis of suspects who say they were at home watching TV when a crime took place. Alongside the large number of calls from people who clearly phone just to talk to someone (nicknamed ‘lonely hearts’ by the duty officers) they supply a random stream of consciousness about television, although certain things – cruelty to animals, criticism of the royal family or the union flag being flown upside down – will reliably create a reaction. Most calls are simple requests for information about the name of an actor or incidental music, but there are also compliments and, of course, complaints: some sane and reasonable, others idiosyncratic and contrarian and communicated in that tone of suffocating earnestness, pained self-importance and pointless anger that will be familiar to anyone who reads internet message boards.

  Just as it would be unwise of future historians to read the anonymous comments on websites as expressions of the collective mentality of our era, it would be equally unwise of us to pore over the duty logs in search of typical viewers. Most of us are not moved to ring up a stranger to let them know what we think about what we are watching. After a few false starts, the English language settled on the word ‘watch’ to describe what people do in front of televisions. But ‘watch’, which shares its origins with ‘wake’ and conveys associations of keenly looking and keeping guard, is not always the right word to denote our relationship to the TV set. Much viewing is absent-minded or indifferent, and even the intense feelings that the TV generates are usually fleeting and soon forgotten. Television’s greater significance in our lives surely stems from its slowly accrued habits and rituals, the way it mingles with our other daily routines and comes to seem as natural as sleeping and waking.

  Britain’s single time zone and its small number of channels have meant that television, in its ways of talking to its viewers, has assumed that it represents ‘the private life of the nation state’, to use the critic John Ellis’s phrase.15 But viewers in Lerwick or St Helier have watched television with a different eye and ear to those in London (except during the substantial part of television’s history when they were not able to watch it at all). Television has served as a distorted mirror through which to reflect on what defines the nation, and the nation’s margins. So I have tried to tell the story that follows through the voices of those who have watched television in different parts of the islands, without presuming the existence of some imagined, scattered, national community brought together in front of the set. This book is mostly about individuals in specific places, usually but not always sitting in living rooms, watching TV and reflecting on what they see.

  Yet I have also found that there is another kind of armchair nation – not perhaps the united, countrywide family that primetime television assumes it is addressing, but a more improvised community of viewers, formed wordlessly and unconsciously through collective habits and behaviours. Aerials and satellite dishes spring up silently on roofs, living-room curtains close, streets and roads empty of people and cars, the tills in public houses are stilled and the boiling of kettles synchronises across the nation – all because people are watching television. Precisely because it is so fragile and intangible and demands so little of those who belong to it, the armchair nation can create a sense of commonality among people who may have little else in common. And perhaps this collective habit of watching TV, which has taken up so much of our waking lives, can tell us something about who we are and what matters to us.

  2

  A WAKING DREAM

  There are words which are ugly because of foreignness or ill-breeding (e.g. television).

  T. S. Eliot1

  ‘Oxford Street … is a forcing house of sensation,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay for Good Housekeeping magazine in 1928. ‘The great Lords of Oxford Street are as magnanimous as any Duke or Earl who scattered gold or doled out loaves to the poor at his gates. Only their largesse takes a different form. It takes the form of excitement, of display, of entertainment, of windows lit up by night, of banners flaunting by day.’2 Woolf often shopped at Selfridge’s, at the street’s western end. From the moment you entered on the ground floor, with its heady perfume counter designed to disguise the bouquet of horse manure and other noxious gases from the street outside, Selfridge’s was meant to be a profusion of scents, sights and sounds. It displayed Louis Blériot’s plane on its lower ground floor the day after his cross-channel flight in July 1909, and Ernest Shackleton’s twenty-two-foot boat, the James Caird, on its roof in February 1920.

  The American owner, Harry Selfridge, was looking for another attraction to celebrate the opening of his western extension and the store’s sixteenth birthday. On a tip-off, he visited John Logie Baird’s Soho workshop and asked him to come and demonstrate his new invention. And so, one Wednesday morning in March 1925, in the electrical department on the first floor, this diffident-looking man in wire-rimmed glasses set up an odd contraption in one corner, assembled from such items as old cycle lamps, coffin wood and a biscuit tin (Rich Mixed), at the end of which was a rapidly spinning disc and a ‘danger’ sign. ‘The House of Selfridge has always gone out of its way to encourage other pilgrims on the Road of Progress,’ announced Callisthenes, Selfridge’s column in The Times. ‘And this picturesque apparatus with its cardboard and its bicycle chain is in direct succession to Blériot’s gallant monoplane and Shackleton’s brave boat.’3

  Television was a dream long before it was a fact. This Greco-Latin word, coined in French and borrowed by the English language in 1907, means ‘far sight’. Television was meant to defeat distance, to show events happening at the same time somewhere else. For centuries people had fantasised about the instantaneous journey of sound and vision across space. For St Augustine, the epitome of this incorporeal, telepathic communication was the angel, a word that means ‘messenger’. The holiest mortals were also thought to have this power. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order of Poor Clares, was supposed, from her convent
sickbed in Christmas 1252, to have watched midnight mass in the Basilica of St Francis a few miles away, projected on to the wall of her room. In 1958, Pope Pius XII declared this miracle to be the first television broadcast and named Clare the patron saint of television.

  In a world that takes instant communication as read, we forget how much our ancestors worried about everything being so far away from everything else and obsessed about the annihilation of distance. The early moderns often longed for some form of miraculous overcoming of the rootedness of the human body and the tiresomely dispersed physical world. ‘If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, Injurious distance should not stop my way,’ writes the lovelorn poet of Shakespeare’s 44th sonnet. Shakespeare’s contemporary, Robert Greene, invented a ‘magic mirror’ for spying on others in his Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (c. 1592). Someone at the BBC must have noted this work’s prophetic quality because in 1953, when the corporation broadcast an ‘Elizabethan night’ imagining what television would have been like in 1592, the centrepiece was a performance of Greene’s play.

  The harnessing of electricity revived this long-nurtured dream of instantaneous contact. The unstated ambition of modern media, the American philosopher John Durham Peters argues, has been to ‘mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means’.4 In the late nineteenth century, new inventions like telegraphy, the telephone and the phonograph had a near-mystical aura. The popular imagination linked them with those other late Victorian obsessions, mesmerism and telepathy, for they too seemed to fulfil the desire for an angelic communion, breaking down the painful distance between self and other. Einstein’s discovery that the speed of light was the fastest thing in the universe, on any earthly scale as good as instant, gave the dream a new impetus. Television was sometimes called ‘seeing by electricity’, and a moving human face reproduced at the speed of light on a screen seemed a form of miraculous double presence, unlike the dead shadows of the cinema, which simply recreated something that had once been but was no more. The earliest television viewers compared what they saw to visitations and apparitions. In the late 1920s, when engineers noticed that a duplicate radio signal could create a displaced, repeated image on the television screen, they naturally called it a ‘ghost’.

  During the week of its sixteenth birthday celebrations, a million people came through Selfridge’s doors. Baird’s demonstration was just one attraction in a series of exhibitions including a Japanese garden and displays of the earliest gramophone, first editions of Dickens and Queen Victoria’s old stockings. Sales assistants on the first floor handed out leaflets to shoppers: ‘The apparatus here demonstrated is, of course, absolutely “in the rough” … The picture is flickering and defective, and at present only simple pictures can be sent successfully; but Edison’s first phonograph rendered that “Mary had a little lamb” in a way that only hearers who were “in the secret” could understand and yet, from that first result has developed the gramophone of today …’5

  At first, television asked a large imaginative leap of its viewers. Baird demonstrated his machine to small crowds, who looked through a cardboard viewfinder, rather as one might view a coin-operated telescope on the end of the pier. The four-by-two-inch screen displayed a quivering silhouette of simple shapes like the letter ‘H’ printed in white on black card, broadcast from a few feet away. ‘It was a little disappointing really,’ recalled Elisabeth Wood, then a schoolgirl, sixty years later, ‘because there were black lines sort of wiggling across it. And it jumped up and down. And then we all clapped rather politely but we were all rather frightened of television. We believed if they could make this film they could see into our houses.’ An eighteen-year-old South African music student, Margaret Albu, was coerced into viewing the demonstration by her mother. ‘The invention had the effect which all mechanical things have on me and gave me a feeling of bewilderment and nausea,’ said the young woman (who would later marry its inventor).6 Giving three demonstrations a day for three weeks to queues of shoppers who seemed politely interested rather than astounded, Baird came down with nervous exhaustion and spent several weeks in bed.

  But Harry Selfridge was sufficiently impressed that, on 20 February 1928, he invited Baird to open the world’s first television department at his store. The Baird ‘Televisors’, encased in mahogany cabinets and priced at £6 10s. 1d., sold sluggishly compared to the electric gramophones and self-winding watches that went on display the same day. Shoppers seemed most excited about the Photomatons, the new photo-me-booths installed at the head of the escalators in the Bargain Basement, where they queued in their hundreds, sat on stools and received, a few minutes later, a strip of photos for a shilling. But Selfridge, an early adopter of new technology, knew which was the more exciting development. ‘This is not a toy,’ he said of television. ‘It is a link between all peoples of the world.’7

  The BBC, its energies directed at the still young and growing medium of radio, was a reluctant television broadcaster. ‘The impression is of a curiously ape-like head, decapitated at the chin, swaying up and down in a streaky stream of yellowy light,’ said a BBC report of a demonstration at Baird’s tiny studio in Long Acre, Covent Garden, in September 1928. ‘I was reminded of those human shrunken heads favoured by such persons as Mr M. Hedges [the explorer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges]. Not even the collar or tie were visible, the effect being more grotesque than impressive … The faces of those leaving the show showed neither excitement or interest. Rather like a Fair crowd who had sported 6d. to see if the fat lady was really as fat as she was made out to be.’8 The Post Office engineers present were less dismissive, and asked the BBC to allow Baird to use its transmitter, conveniently located on the roof of Selfridge’s, for more tests. And so on 30 September 1929, at 11.04 a.m., after a fifteen-minute radio talk entitled ‘How I Planned My Kitchen’ by Miss Sydney M. Bushell, the BBC transmitted an experimental programme, broadcast simultaneously on radio and television.

  Images from the BBC’s first scheduled television programme travelled by landline from Baird’s studio at Long Acre, Covent Garden to the Selfridge’s transmitter, from where they were radiated on carrier waves. After speeding silently and invisibly along a diagonal line south-east, over the oblivious shoppers and pedestrians of Regent Street and the intricate alleyways of Soho, they arrived back at Long Acre, where a small crowd of invited guests watched them on a screen about an inch and a half long and half an inch wide. The Yorkshire comedian Sydney Howard delivered a comic monologue, Lulu Stanley sang ‘He’s tall, and dark, and handsome’ and Baird’s secretary, Connie King, sang ‘Mighty Like a Rose’. Each of the performers had to sit on a typist’s chair to meet the gaze of the scanning beam, with the tiny Miss King raised on a pile of telephone directories. The pictures and sound could not yet be synchronised and so each person was televised in silence and then repeated themselves in front of a microphone. Asked after the broadcast how many people had seen it, Baird guessed there were nine of his televisors dotted around London and about twenty built by intrepid amateurs from scratch: twenty-nine in all.9

  People were fascinated, in a way that we would also be were we not inured to it through habit, by this strange phenomenon, the radio wave, which could race through all intervening obstacles and show distant events at the moment they were occurring, undetectable without that magical deciphering machine, a wireless or television receiver. One of the radio wave’s great charms was that, unlike the telephone or the telegraph, it radiated to no one in particular. The earliest term for viewers was ‘lookers in’, which, like the radio term ‘listeners in’, suggested they were eavesdropping on something not meant solely for their eyes and ears.

  The word ‘broadcasting’, which radio borrowed about a hundred years ago from the farmer’s term for scattering seeds over a wide surface rather than neatly in rows, carried the same connotations of chance. Anyone with a televisor could tune in and pluck these animated images out of apparently empty space. The low frequency microwaves on which
this primitive television was broadcast travelled vast distances, even though the transmitter was weak. One day in the autumn of 1929, a young Bessarabian engineer, Boris Alperovici, sat in a darkened room in a villa in the volcanic peaks of Capri, at a workbench surrounded with radio and TV equipment. He had read about Baird’s broadcasts in a technical journal and had straightaway ordered two sets from England, one to pick up sound and the other vision. At first he could not get the sets past Italian customs because they did not recognise such a thing as television; but after much cajoling, they let them travel by boat from Naples to Capri. Alperovici assembled them in his radio workshop at the villa and waited for the tests to start. The first thing he saw, on a screen slightly bigger than a postage stamp spewing ugly red light from the cathode ray, was Gracie Fields. Twenty-three years later, Alperovici and Fields married, after Fields’s nephew had knocked on his door in Capri, where Fields had a villa, and asked if he could fix his aunt’s radio.10