Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (91 page)

The radio remained in the early 1950s a mass medium capable of commanding huge loyalty. ‘Listeners welcomed back the Bentley-Nichols-Edwards team with delight, and found the new script and situations as witty, lively and irresistibly amusing as ever,’ noted the BBC’s audience-research newsletter in November 1950, with the first episode of the new series of
Take It From Here
having been heard by 38 per cent of the adult population. Not long afterwards, a staggering 57 per cent listened to
Variety Cavalcade
, a star-packed programme from the London Palladium celebrating a century of British music hall; no fewer than one in three were listening to
Educating Archie
by the end of its first series; and on Christmas Day, after 62 per cent had heard the King’s broadcast at 3 p.m., ‘roughly two out of three listeners kept their sets on and nearly all of them heard
Wilfred Pickles’ Christmas
Party
on the Light Programme’ – an eloquent tribute to the pulling power, and centrality in British popular culture, of the star of
Have
a Go!

There was also the immensely popular panel game
Twenty Questions
, each week featuring the Mystery Voice (‘and the next object is . . .’). Its regular chairman by early 1951 – by which time the programme was also running on Radio Luxembourg but with a rival line-up – was an irascible, highly knowledgeable former schoolmaster starting to make a name for himself. ‘I often wonder if Gilbert Harding
could
be as pompous & “condescending” as he sounds,’ reflected Nella Last one Monday evening in March. A fortnight later, she came back to the subject: ‘Gilbert Harding was in a less “pompous” mood – why, when I listen to that undoubtedly clever man, do I get the impression that he is a “prisoner” within himself – that he is shy, sensitive, even in his most “cutting” moods? Odd!’
²¹

Meanwhile, at 11.00 each weekday morning,
Mrs Dale’s Diary
was being listened to by some 13 per cent of adults. ‘The Dales are, without a doubt, accepted as typical of an ordinary, suburban, professional family – people who might easily be listeners’ neighbours,’ purred the BBC’s newsletter in October 1950. From the start of 1951, however, they had a rural rival. ‘What we need is a farming
Dick Barton
,’ a Lincolnshire farmer, Henry Burtt of Dowsby, had declared at a meeting in Birmingham in June 1948 of farmers and Ministry of Agriculture officials – a meeting convened by the producer of agricultural programmes for the BBC Midland Region, Godfrey Baseley, part of whose remit was to encourage small farmers to modernise their methods and thereby increase their output. Baseley took the remark to heart, and almost exactly two years later a pilot week of
The Archers
was successfully broadcast on the Midland Region. The aim, he explained in a memo soon afterwards, was to give an ‘accurate’ and ‘reassuring’ picture of country life in Ambridge, drawing ‘portraits of typical country people’ and ‘following them at work and at play and eavesdropping on the many problems of living that confront country folk in general’. Roughly 15 per cent of each programme would comprise farming advice and information, but there would be sufficient emphasis on entertainment to keep the attention of ‘the general listener, i.e. the townsman’.

On New Year’s Day 1951, ‘an everyday story of country folk’, as
The Archers
was invariably billed, began its three-month trial on the Light Programme, rather awkwardly going out only half an hour after Mrs Dale. Even in its first week, however, it attracted audiences double those of
Morning Story
, the programme it had replaced; soon afterwards it was being ‘listened to rather more by town than by country dwellers’, with as yet only 1.6 per cent of the upper middle class tuning in, as compared to 6 per cent of the working class. The turning point came at Easter, when the programme moved to the choice spot of 6.45 p.m., thereby dislodging (indeed killing off)
Dick Barton
itself; within a week it was being listened to by 10 per cent of the adult population. As with any soap, most people were hooked primarily for human-interest reasons, but almost certainly there was something else going on. ‘A gentle relic of Old England, nostalgic, generous, incorruptible and (above all) valiant’ was how the BBC publicity machine described the village of Ambridge. ‘In other words the sort of British community that the rootless townsman would like to live in and can involve himself in vicariously.’

The BBC itself remained in the early 1950s the starchiest, most paternalistic of organisations. Three weeks after the launch of
The
Archers
, it ordained that news bulletins on national radio were henceforth to be read only by men – and what was more, men (including a youngish Robert Dougall) with ‘consistent’ pronunciation, in other words devoid of a regional accent. ‘Experience has shown that a large number of people do not like the news of momentous or serious events to be read by the female voice’ was the smooth official explanation for the gender aspect. Even more typical of the BBC’s stuffiness was its continuing half-hearted attitude towards television. ‘This invasion of our homes must cause something of an upset in family life’ was how in symptomatic, authentically Auntie tones the Controller of Scottish Broadcasting, Melville Dinwiddie, would only semi-celebrate in
Radio Times
Scotland’s inclusion in March 1952 in the national television service:

Sound broadcasting as such is upsetting enough when reading and school lessons and other home tasks have to be done, but here is a more intensely absorbing demand on our leisure hours, and families in mid-Scotland will have to make a decision both about getting a receiver and about using it. At the start, viewing will take up much time because of its novelty, but discrimination is essential so that not every evening is spent in a darkened room, the chores of the house and other occupations neglected. We can get too much even of a good thing.

This genuine, high-minded concern about the possible impact of television on family well-being directly echoed fears expressed by the guardians of the nation’s spiritual health – foremost among them T. S. Eliot. ‘I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this pastime, and especially about its effect on small children,’ he wrote to
The Times
in late 1950 after a visit to America, where television was much more common. One BBC man had already had enough by then of the Corporation’s lack of dynamism in relation to the young medium. This was Norman Collins, who on his way to becoming Controller of Television had been a successful publisher and best-selling novelist (
London Belongs To Me
). In October 1950 he resigned: partly in protest against, in his words, ‘a vested interest in sound broadcasting’ being ‘allowed to stand in the way of the most adventurous development of television’, and partly because he had come to believe that British television would remain stunted until the BBC was compelled to relinquish its monopoly – a position naturally anathema to the Corporation. There was an opportunistic streak in Collins, and he now devoted his formidable energies to ending that monopoly at the earliest possible moment.
²³

In fact, this was a question already under sustained public scrutiny, in particular through the forum of a government-appointed committee (largely of the great and good, under the chairmanship of Lord Beveridge) that since the summer of 1949 had been considering the future of broadcasting. Reporting on 18 January 1951, its main conclusion was that leaving broadcasting in the hands of a single, public-service, not-for-profit provider remained overall to the public benefit, provided that the BBC made ‘steady progress towards greater decentralisation, devolution and diversity’. In effect, Beveridge accepted Lord Reith’s argument (advanced in his 1949 autobiography) that only ‘the brute force of monopoly’ could preserve the BBC’s standards, which otherwise would be dragged downwards by commercial competition.

On the day the report appeared, the
Evening Standard
solicited the views of two readers: Geoffrey Schofield (41, a chartered accountant, living in Purley, married with two daughters) and Eva Cornish-Bowden (27, married to an engineer, living in Orpington, two children). Between them they represented what was a fairly evenly divided state of public opinion:

Schofield
: At present we don’t want competition. Why? I’ll tell you. TV is an innovation now. There is no doubt it is going to have an extraordinarily important influence on national life as it progresses. Are we going to develop into a push-button nation when we turn on entertainment at will, or are we going to use this new medium as a basis for increasing and improving the average intelligence of the country?

Cornish-Bowden
: I bought a television set and I want to be either cleverly entertained or vulgarly entertained. I want to be able to pick my programmes. I feel strongly about that. I want to twiddle the switch of my set and get something I want to see. Not have something I don’t want to see pushed on to me.
²⁴

In terms of the politics, almost everyone knew that the Beveridge line would continue to hold – at least with any certainty – only as long as Labour stayed in power. On the Conservative side there were already significant elements strongly in favour of introducing a commercial rival to the BBC, and plenty of businessmen were well aware that there was serious money to be made if Britain followed the bracing American path.

Whatever the anxieties, there was little real danger of square eyes in the early 1950s. On most weekdays, the single television channel broadcast only from 3.00 to 6.00 p.m. (including
Children’s Hour
), followed by two hours of a blank screen (the so-called ‘toddler’s truce’ intended to enable mothers to get their small children to bed), followed by two or so more hours of programmes. There were also major gaps in coverage: wholly inadequate news and current affairs, few meaningful sporting transmissions and virtually no light entertainment (including comedy) as a genre in its own right.
How Do You View?
(starring Terry-Thomas as the smiling, gap-toothed, upper-class cad invariably sporting a cigarette holder) was a partial exception, but its reliance on gags and wisecracks left room for the invention of proper situation comedy. For many people, television was as yet an undiscovered pleasure. ‘The great surprise they sprang on me was they have a Television Set,’ noted Vere Hodgson after visiting friends over Easter 1951. ‘So after a lovely meal Neville just switched it on and behold we saw Picture Page. I DID enjoy it.’

That same day, Florence Speed in Brixton watched the Oxford crew sink in the Boat Race: ‘Poor things. We saw it so well on T.V.’ But four days later came a cruel blow: ‘Fred’s T.V. set has had to be taken away for repair. Something has gone wrong with it & Collins’ man said they would have to get in touch with Ekco the makers so that he could give no promise about its return.’ A keen viewer of
In the News
, Speed thus missed a memorable edition two days afterwards on 30 March. ‘It was the occasion of a serious row between A.J.P. Taylor and Michael Foot on the one side and me on the other,’ recorded W. J. Brown:

In the show we had much talk from Taylor about the West End restaurants of the rich and their Rolls Royce cars and so on – the sort of stuff I have had from Foot before. I couldn’t stand any more of it and said – ‘Taylor, you know this is the most disingenuous stuff. You and I have just come from an expensive West End restaurant. We have come in a fine Rolls Royce car. Can’t we get away from the Socialism of envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness?

‘Immediately the show ended,’ he added, ‘I was attacked with astonishing ferocity by Michael Foot who was livid with rage. He accused me of bringing in “personal matters” – though he is by far the most “personal” member of the team.’
²⁵

At least once a week, the evening’s schedule was dominated by a play, often long enough to leave little time for anything else. The concept of writing a play specifically for television was unborn, so invariably it was an adaptation – as often as not of something worthy rather than necessarily enjoyable – or the rather stilted transmission of an actual theatrical performance. One Sunday evening in the spring of 1950, the choice was Eliot’s
The Family Reunion
, which received from the BBC’s recently established Television Panel of viewers the pitiful ‘Reaction Index’ (running from 1 to 100) of 25, ‘the lowest so far recorded’. That summer, on another Sunday evening, Karel Capek’s
The Insect Play
picked up a 34, the lowest yet for any play apart from the Eliot. ‘This was a wash out – they all left me viewing on my own,’ complained one Panel member. There was little more appetite by 1951 for the difficult or challenging. ‘The play on the first Sunday evening of the New Year was Christopher Fry’s
A Phoenix Too Frequent
,’ noted the viewer-research newsletter. ‘With a Reaction Index of 44, it did not have a much warmer reception than had his earlier play,
The
Lady’s Not for Burning
, with 41.’ A typical reaction was quoted: ‘I managed to yawn my way through it.’ By comparison, a programme soon afterwards featuring Wilfred Pickles’s visit to Stratford-upon-Avon got an RI of 69, while the Mineworkers’ National Amateur Boxing Championship that spring won an 85. Still, there would be some encouragement for the Reithians when in early 1952
The Cocktail
Party
managed a 60. ‘T.S. Eliot!’ declared a Panel member. ‘Prepared for the worst but pleasantly surprised.’
²⁶