This sort of thing was nothing new in itself, but for the first time whimsical talking heads were added, including ‘the impressions they made on a receptive young mind’ – an Oxford undergraduate named Gyles Brandreth. The bar for retro-punditry was set from that moment.
The study of television doesn’t have to be so apologetic. Television may not be high art, but many artists have worked in it, regardless of its condemnation as unclean by the world’s cultural custodians. Samuel Beckett wrote for it. Kingsley Amis presented a pop music show on it. Carol Ann Duffy laboured in it writing cockney gags for Joe Brown’s snakes and ladders game show Square One on her way to becoming Poet Laureate.
As a vivid source of graphic reportage, television transformed our relationship with the world at large. When the Vietnam War stopped being a few fuzzy black and white images accompanied by sober paragraphs of text and became an avalanche of explicit, full-colour moving horrors, western populations seriously reconsidered the wisdom of military adventures. Dramatists, meanwhile, found a unique new medium that was more intimate than cinema, more precise than the theatre and which could pluck the hearts of millions. Worries about the creation of a world of antisocial couch ornaments were outweighed by a sense of barriers and borders vaulted by satellite, a shift in the way we looked at the world that wouldn’t happen again until the advent of the Internet.
If that arrival meant the writing was on the wall for television’s place in the media vanguard, for most it was hard to read. Prestel, the British Post Office’s pioneering online data service, was struggling by 1982. Punters predicted that staring at a load of text was so passé in the age of the image it would never catch on. ‘Prestel and The Two Ronnies … have no more in common than the Financial Times and Hammond Innes,’ reasoned Hamish McRae. ‘It would further follow that it is pointless to give people who want to watch The Two Ronnies a Prestel set that tells them the time of the trains to Newcastle.’9 Such faultless logic buoyed TV’s unassailable self-image until it was far too late, at which point panic set in.
Factual programmes in particular are acutely conscious of the Internet looking over their shoulders. Current affairs channels pride themselves as vital parts of the democratic machine, but TV could never make on-screen democracy work. In May 1982, World in Action tried to atone for the scarcity of news coming out of the Falklands Conflict with a high-tech viewer vote. This consisted of 75 homes being equipped to give instant reaction to the big questions of warfare. The set-up worked fine, but a naively honest on-screen tally of the total votes showed less than half the audience, specially wired in at great fuss, were actually bothering. Viewer participation remains largely a token gesture – and, thanks to premium rate phone lines, often the token that pays for the programme.
Before the Internet took its place as the number one scourge of decent society, television’s constant stream bred disdain. A novel takes its place in the literary canon. A film lines up in the cinematic pantheon. Television programmes just float there, then vanish. While films relate to other films at a distance, via elegant homage or the critic’s comparative whim, a TV show arrives surrounded by other shows before and after, on other channels, from other seasons. It’s an adaptation of this Danish show, a reboot of that long-forgotten space opera, or a strange amalgam of those two 1970s programmes presented by that newsreader who’s suddenly all over the place after she showed how game she was, doing that soap opera parody on a charity special. Never mind placing a programme in context, it’s an afternoon’s work just to pull the thing out of the undergrowth.
Small wonder that early critics, fearful of getting their hands dirty with this suspicious new medium, contented themselves with a few tentative pokes and prods at TV as a whole – muttering darkly about ‘admass’ and ‘diachronic flow’, and treating it with the loftiness of the anthropologist. For these early critics, TV could best be understood as the by-product of some industrial process or quaintly exotic lower culture: it was an experimental new plastic from the labs of ICI, or the campfire story of a backward tribe. Aside from the odd accidentally interesting curio, artistic judgement was hardly appropriate. The Guardian’s TV editor Peter Fiddick noted that TV’s lowly status could lead, at worst, to ‘know-nothings writing for care-nothings about stuff that [is] worth nothing.’10 That was in 1982. Things have got worse since.
So here’s an attempt to revisit and revive the history of the idiot’s lantern. A hundred programmes have been gathered to chart eighty-odd years of televisual evolution. It is, admittedly, a predominantly Anglophone, western collection. Though the Global Village has lately begun to live up to its name, TV around the world has overwhelmingly followed blueprints drawn up by British and American hands.
A crudely calibrated Hundred Greatest, a solemn Hall of Fame, would give only a fraction of the picture. This book aims to celebrate and mimic the serendipitous joy of that scheduling jumble which, in the days of restricted channel numbers, threw up dizzy juxtapositions daily: an earnest play might be followed by a big broad variety spectacular; a horror anthology that drove children behind furniture followed a sketch show that chewed the carpet. This riotous mix, now slowly disappearing as themed channels and on-demand services take over, may have downgraded TV’s importance in the eyes of aesthetes, but gave it a community feel other media lacked. No-one ever turned up at a cinema half an hour early for a screening of Three Colours: Red and got thirty minutes of Slam Dunk Ernest for their trouble.
This isn’t a book about how much ‘better’ television once was, but how much stranger it used to be – much braver, more foolhardy, unselfconscious and creatively energetic before commerce knocked those fascinating corners off its character. At its best and at its worst, television is brutally honest and charmingly deceitful, sentimentally partisan and coldly dispassionate, obscenely lavish and ludicrously cheap. Its screen bulges with obsessive perfectionists and clueless amateurs, sociopathic monsters and all-round good eggs. It can’t be contained by a neat little narrative. It’s chaos all the way down.
No countdown of the top hundred shows can do television full justice. But maybe a more varied hundred can make a better stab at exploring it: a rough guide antidote to the standard lists of well-worn greats. What follows is one such alternative trek. Overlooked gems and justly wiped follies, overcooked spectaculars and underfunded experiments are as much a part of TV history as the national treasures and stone cold classics. They can tell us just as much, and sometimes more, about the nature of television, those who crafted it and those who lapped it up. Here, then, are tales of the days when television was at the most exciting, creative stage of any medium: a cottage industry with the world at its feet.
BBC
The original TV drama series.
When the BBC asks a question, it isn’t just a question, it’s a ‘viewer participation programme’.
Grace Wyndham Goldie, Listener, 2 March 1939
IN BBC TELEVISION’S BRIEF life before the war, drama meant the theatre: simple studio productions of acknowledged classics or extracts from a show currently running in the West End. These unofficial trailers were either recreated in the studio (with as much of the theatre’s scenery as could be blagged) or occasionally and chaotically broadcast live from their home turf. Champions of theatre broadcasts claimed the presence of an audience added atmosphere and upped the actors’ game – the fact that the cameras often ended up chasing them about the stage, like a football match filmed by a bunch of drunken fans, was a small price to pay.
Visuals took a back seat at first. Early TV equipment produced low-definition pictures in murky black and
