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Critical Gas

May 132013

On Saturday I had a go at a widely reviled piece of television anti-criticism from the Guardian‘s Sam Wollaston. It was venting more than anything else, but a lot of people seemed to agree. I thought that would be an end to it but, like a neural 10 O’Clock Live, the debate about what TV criticism is keeps being recommissioned in my mind for no readily apparent reason. So here’s some more of it.

Landing the TV hack’s plum role and then flagrantly taking the piss is nothing new. Richard Ingrams did the first anti-critic stint for the Spectator in 1980s. Armed with only a malfunctioning black-and-white portable and a dogged refusal to accept the medium’s legitimacy on any terms, he delighted reactionaries with his un-reviews, doing for last night’s Antiques Roadshow what Hunter S Thompson did for the Mint 400 desert motorbike race, with a robust ruby port instead of mescalin. His apotheosis was a review of a documentary solely via what he could make out of the muffled soundtrack emanating from the telly in the room next door to him in a Welsh motel. He made his point, but once he’d made it, it stayed made. This sort of thing wasn’t a going concern.

Very much a going concern today is the live blog. Brought into the TV sphere four years ago by the Guardian to cover The Apprentice, this as-it-happens rolling wall of first-person point and ponder has been hailed as the internet’s own, unique critical format. It certainly gets the page impressions in, but its other merits are harder to spot.

It mimics the way “ordinary folk” discuss telly on the net, of course, so that off-putting air of superiority that we’re told hangs over conventional TV criticism is dispersed from the start. But it’s expected that ordinary folk will choose the Guardian‘s blog over those of other ordinary folk, and the imprimatur of the trained journalist must be that deciding factor. That person you see making dodgy fat jokes, being distracted by the cat and overdoing the Lidl Sancerre isn’t some line manager thinking of pulling a sickie tomorrow, but one of Fleet Street’s finest. Therefore their half-formed thoughts, though they may be indistinguishable from the line manager’s, are inherently more worthy of your attention, just because. It’s an exercise in pulling rank.

The live blog’s chief and only virtue is instantaneousness. (I’ll admit I’m a little in awe of the prodigious feats of touch typing involved, leaving my Jeff-Goldblum-in-The-Fly freestyle technique for dead.) It purports to tackle modern TV on its own frenetic terms, but the live blog’s ostentatious lack of polish, and sometimes effort, belies a low opinion of its quarry that may have journeyed further than Ingrams’ Spectator stunts, but has arrived at what looks like the same supercilious motel.

Well, it’s easy to itemise the bad, but what’s a “good” TV review? It’s not easy to say for sure, and this difficulty makes defence of the bad stuff easier. Surely, the line goes, you’re not advocating some sort of quasi-academic elitist approach? TV’s a populist affair, it connects with people, so it’s only right that a critic should talk and think like your average bloke, with your average bloke’s vocab and your average bloke’s complete lack of interest in the mechanics of the 1982 ITV franchise renewal. Suddenly it’s a snobbery issue, and you need to choose sides fast. Are you an unconscionably humourless egghead mired in abstruse theory or a chucklesome man of the people launching earthy bon mots from the settee? Leavis or Butthead? It would be a cheap trick even if it was honestly meant. The smart reviewer starts wondering why he bothers.

Possibly the smartest reviewer of the lot was the Financial Times‘ TC Worsley, who built intricate 1,000-word mini-lectures around the week’s viewing in the 1960s, creating a themed critique of the medium and its future as a whole. A theatre man, Worsley was happiest when sizing up a BBC adaptation of Murder in the Cathedral, but he gave equal time and consideration to the medium’s popular heft, like the small screen career of Roy Kinnear (he rightly felt the BBC was wringing a good man dry).

Worsley wouldn’t sit right these days – TV’s far too sprawling and has too much history for a critic to get usefully hung up on its direction as a whole, and the subs would have a word about his fondness of the term “banausic”. But he was part of a television landscape that also featured Double Your Money, Opportunity Knocks and Noele Gordon’s Lunch Box. If the FT of then operated on today’s principles it would take one look at the ITV schedules and send for Arthur Mullard.

On a 1967 Late Night Line-Up, Arthur Askey blithely wondered out loud what function TV reviews performed. Unlike their film and music counterparts, they couldn’t act as barometers enabling the punter to choose whether to sample the work under examination or not, as the reviews appeared the day after the programme had gone out. And assuming the viewer’s memory worked reasonably well, who wanted an opinionated reminder of some entertainment they were (in those days) most likely never to see again? It was a dismissal comfortably nestling in the practical, down-to-Earth camp, painting the critic as an irrelevant hanger-on with pretensions to expertise.

A few days later, Observer critic George Melly refuted it thus:

“What I think to be our serious purpose is to map out the currents under the surface of the medium. To watch for exploitation, talking down, cretinisation, hidden pressures, convenient censorship, and to praise any signs of courage, imagination, or vision to the best of our ability. I believe that TV as a medium is of great importance. It has influenced almost everybody already, and it has hardly started yet. The TV critic, far and above his efforts to communicate his pleasure in this play or dislike of that documentary is, or should be, a kind of watchdog. The medium, in both senses of the word, needs watching. I thang yew!”

That’ll do for me, I think. Now, what’s the deal with Greg Wallace’s nostrils?

Derision Before Midnight

May 112013

It’s long been a sport in some quarters to bemoan the declining standards of the Guardian‘s TV criticism. In fact it’s become so ingrained over the last few years it’s become a cliché, just another feature on the internet’s sprawling landscape of meta-journalistic complaint. Then, yesterday, this was published, and even the most far gone cynics looked up in bewilderment.

Let’s not muck about – this isn’t TV criticism. It’s barely even writing. As a fragment of an All Bar One conversation between two Basingstoke lettings agents fallen on hard times it might have a chance, but the comments beneath asking why such toxic bilge is emitting from a once-great organ, which to be fair accompany just about everything digitally published, carry more weight than usual. The piece would look like a strange mistake in any newspaper outside of the Star, but its presence in the Guardian is particularly sad, as that paper and its Sunday sister have, for decades, been the driving force of intelligent writing about television.

Mention TV criticism and Clive James’ ten years on the Observer are almost instantly invoked. It’s often said that today’s hacks have read James and learned precisely the wrong lessons from him – picking up on the glib comedy riffing and ignoring the acres of detailed and serious attention he paid to every detail of a sprawling medium. This is true, but although he took them to new heights of technical achievement and popularity, he wasn’t the only begetter of modern TV reviewing many people (though never James himself) claim him to be.

James’ Observer predecessor was the redoubtable George Melly. An intelligent man with a vast hinterland of esoteric expertise under his hat and a sense of humour to match the finest of TV’s comedians, Melly embodied the perfect TV critic. His sustained praise of John Hopkins’ ground-breaking drama Talking to a Stranger as “the first authentic TV masterpiece” has become part of television folklore, but he was, like any good TV reviewer, equally attentive to the small stuff, turning in a detailed appraisal of the BBC’s bizarre children’s programme Zokko!, and dissecting the many youth-oriented programmes of the late ’60s with fair and knowledgeable aplomb.

The playful side of criticism was fully exploited in the Guardian by a defector from the freshly-Murdochised Sun, Nancy Banks-Smith. Her speciality was seriousness posing as frivolity, and a knack for the carefree deployment of the acid observation. (She memorably summed up the young Pauline Quirke as “a Janet Street-Porter whose horizontal hold has gone”.) She was also the first to play games in a TV column, though the games always had a point. The piecemeal oddness of afternoon television in the early ’70s led her to try and picture the daytime audience, as seen by the main channels. Thus, on the evidence of the programmes offered, she surmised the Beeb saw them as either “vastly fat or vaguely Asian”, while ITV “has the same point of view as my greengrocer who puts on every price ticket ‘Look Mum!’” Nancy Banks-Smith proved you can hit the nail on the head just as effectively with a playful tap as a sledgehammer blow.

As the 1970s progressed, the TV critic rose in stature to match those of the established arts. When Clive James took sabbaticals, his replacements included both Kingsley and Martin Amis. (It’s hard to imagine the current crop being replaced by a Will Self while “away”, or even a Tony Parsons.) Following James’ departure, the standard was maintained by Julian Barnes, who kept a close eye on both drama and documentary (and pursuing a slightly OTT vendetta against Ron Pickering) with a wit just as sharp as, if slightly less abundant than, James’s. The TV critic’s role was established as a notable position, for fine writers, which could lead to great things – the late 1980s saw the arrival of an eager young critic by the name of Alan Rusbridger.

Even before this Golden Age, the names were illustrious. In the 1940s, when TV reviews were usually confined to a little 100-word postscript from “Our Radio Critic”, the Observer enlisted film writer CA Lejeune for small screen duty, dropping elegant bombs on the shoddy likes of Cyril Fletcher’s Magpie Masquerade. (“I noticed the cameras kept as far away from the show as possible, and I don’t wonder.”)

Maurice Richardson is less of a household name, but in his time cut a dash on Fleet Street – a bibulous, pugilistic dilettante whose attention flitted from crime (he wrote the first notable book on the Moors Murders) to surreal whimsy (his bizarre novel The Exploits of Engelbrecht). He could easily have treated his late-’50s Observer TV assignments with dandyish disdain, but instead took the medium as seriously as it warranted, pursuing the developing language of TV drama with great interest, while still giving respectful consideration to the roundly-mocked new game shows, and slightly less respectful consideration to the similarly vilified new commercials. (“In advertising I have been meditating on the three petrols. Why are Esso advertisements so desperately depressing?”) He’s also often accredited with the invention of the TV terms “idiot’s lantern” and “the box”.

You’ll note, in that last snippet, the first knockings of that semi-ironic tone by which the highbrow critic lets TV’s shallow end into the same purview as its Reithian backbone. To an extent, this is necessary if you’re to cover TV’s entire output – to pretend This Is Your Life works on the same level as Civilisation would be mad – but it’s frighteningly easy to let the satirical tail wag the dog, and descend into a dreary mix of cynicism, sarcasm and (as demonstrated by Mr Wollaston) something beneath even that: a sort of undignified, posturing spite.

This last position could easily have been the result when the Guardian cast about for someone to cover the inaugural year of ITV, and settled on Bernard Levin. This was the first example, in the world of TV criticism, of stunt casting – the much-feared (especially by the left) commercial channel eviscerated by the morally upright sage of the sub-clause. And indeed his verdict on the first night was a little priggish, if even-handed. (“I feel neither uplifted nor depraved by what I have seen.”)

But he was open to the vast range of programming that was on offer, from high-minded adaptations of Turgenev through to Bob Monkhouse’s game show Bury Your Hatchet. (“Even as a philosophical exercise, it is impossible for the human brain to conceive of anything worse.”) This wasn’t a straight exercise in highbrow sniping. The good lowbrow stuff was, however grudgingly, given its due. (“Mr Reg Dixon’s Light-Hearted Half Hour was pleasant enough, as light-hearted half hours go.”)

Levin ended his tour of duty as someone whose opinion of commercial television had, if not radically altered, at least been modified to grudgingly accept that nuggets of gold were there, however rare. And he was very probably the first person, when praising a 1957 Windolene commercial, to put out the notion that adverts could show more wit and invention than a lot of the programmes.

Already this piece is becoming unwieldy, and I haven’t even mentioned Jonathan Meades’ sardonic stint as a TV previewer, or the many capable hands who were never big names, such as Stanley Reynolds, Sandy Smithies, or Peter Fiddick, possibly the only critic unafraid to get into the technical side of TV. When Richard Stilgoe produced a blue screen song and dance number starring multiple versions of himself for Nationwide, poking fun at intrusive public servants, it seemed a throwaway gag to most people, but Fiddick saw it for the technical achievement it was, and the Guardian granted him an entire page to explain why.

To take the job of TV critic and then act as if you never wanted it anyway is arrogant in the extreme, but it’s also rather tragic. Television has been a national conversation for over half a century now. Yes, ratings are plummeting, channels are losing the plot, and top talent is defecting over Sky’s paywall of the Great Unwatched. But the medium that has dominated British popular culture for as long as most of us can remember hasn’t suddenly become a total irrelevance simply because The Kids Have Got iPads Now. An entire medium has quietly slipped beneath contempt.

In the early 1990s, the Sunday Telegraph, never much of a one for the box at the best of times, tried an insanely reactionary experiment. They installed AN Wilson* as their TV critic, a man without possession of a television set. His first filed report concerned his search for a TV, leading him to the local vicar’s house, but the set turned out to be on the blink, so they had a lovely chat instead. And then Wilson went home and he stopped off at Blue Boar services and he had a Coke float and it was good the end.

It was a cute conceit, but after a few weeks a proper critic was parachuted into place. Even the stuffy old colonels wanted to know whether Seaforth was any good. The Guardian may be blithely unconcerned that many of their readers are equally up in arms about their current, seemingly permanent, dismissive treatment of television by people who seem to wish they were otherwise engaged, but to be more reactionary and culturally snobbish than the Telegraph? That’s got to hurt, surely?

* – EDIT: I must admit, thinking it over again, I’m unsure on some of the details about this. It certainly happened, but the anti-critic may have been Peregrine Worsthorne, not Wilson. Still, as Henry Root would say, the point holds.

Isn’t He a Panic?

TV Talk No Responses »

Mar 272012

Media nostalgia is a strange, self-generating thing. Sometimes it seems as if you just have to make a desultory appearance on children’s television for a few months in a funny hat, wait a quarter of a century, then dine out for the rest of your life as a student union-endorsed “ledge”. A toddler’s TV gaze acts as a magnifying glass for micro-talents: the struggling actor vaguely pretending to be a bus conductor after missing out on that second callback for The Ascent of F6 suddenly increases in stature to rank alongside Jacob Bronowski, David Attenborough and Bob Wellings as a titan of the tube. Years later, clipshow comics seal them in ironic amber so opaque it’s hard to see what, if anything, was there in the first place. Fortunately the science of nostalgia has moved on in the last decade, and we can have a go at separating the wheat from the chaff.

Fred Harris – 100% whole wheat – had the ideal qualifications for a children’s presenter. A former teacher with a degree in maths and psychology, his educational chops were rock solid. He was also a performer of great versatility, especially musically, having spent a chunk of the ’60s as the drummer in a shambolic Shadows-style instrumental outfit in his native Monmouthshire – although he claimed the results were “so bad we had to change our name every week.”

His first appearance on the junior viewer’s radar was in 1973, when he co-presented lunchtime pre-school song-and-story parade Ragtime with Maggie Henderson, graduate of several musical TV reviews including the Clive James-penned late-night satirical misfire What Are You Doing After the Show? The pair crooned their way through all manner of crowd-pleasing standards from Alexander’s Ragtime Band to I Am a Mole and I Live in a Hole, and despite the retrospectively suspect inclusion of an Indian-accented wooden spoon companion called Mr Curry, the show won an SFTA award in 1974. Induction onto the Play School staff soon followed, the start of a long association with the BBC flagship in which Fred distinguished himself with a playful humour over and above the programme’s already loose-limbed avuncularity, performing esoteric numbers like Little Ted Bear From Nowhere in Particular, and securing outtake immortality with a widely screened Humpty-kicking mock tantrum over the toys’ inability to sit up straight unsupported.

A parallel career in grown-up comedy began about this time as Harris joined the tightly-knit repertory company behind Andrew Marshall and David Renwick’s media assaulting Radio 4 sketch show The Burkiss Way, which employed a cheery Light Ent. mantle to smuggle all manner of Pythonesque subversive weirdness past the station controller, and as a result ended up being scheduled either around midday or midnight. The TV incarnation, End of Part One, suffered even worse treatment, cordoned off into the Sunday teatime slot, usually the domain of third-division toothless sitcoms or “heritage” children’s comedy drama. LWT programme director Michael Grade, who would make quite a few enemies out of purveyors of surrealist satire, reckoned four o’clock was “a fine time to catch a stay-at-home audience,” whatever that meant. Marshall and Renwick weren’t convinced. “If we can’t get a decent time slot,” complained Renwick, “there’s not much point going on.”

They didn’t, and two magnificent series were their lot. End of Part One‘s idiotic scheduling did, however, delight younger viewers who might otherwise have missed it. They watched Harris and company’s otherworldly intrusion into the Lord’s Afternoon enthralled over their bowls of cling peaches in heavy syrup, giddy with elated confusion on seeing Harris effortlessly switch from performing Ten Chimney Pots All In a Row (When Along Came a Fussy Old Crow) in the week to doing pitch-dark spoofs about nuclear holocaust on Sundays. The boundary between the children’s playpen and the world of grown-up irreverence was crossed. There was more to Uncle Fred than met the eye.

Still more was to come. At home, Harris brought his musical and technological interests together in true Renaissance Man style, building his own musical instruments – “everything from electrical organs to saxophones” – at his Southampton workshop. He even had a scientific take on the classics. “Many musical works work out most satisfactorily for pocket Einsteins,” he enthused to the TV Times in 1978. “Bach dovetails in perfectly. At the end of his works they should write QED.”

All this made him the ideal candidate to front a new strain of educational programming. In the mid 1970s, schools’ television, partly inspired by what Sesame Street had done for literacy, was on the lookout for fresh and funky ways to get primary school kids au fait with their times tables. When ATV launched Figure It Out in 1975, a jaunty, fast-paced amalgam of sketches, gags, characters and cartoons, Fred was the man chosen to share presentation duties with Jane Alford, helping “enthuse, amuse, motivate and stimulate” anklebiting algebraists. And when, three years later, they replaced it with the altogether weirder and more abstract Leapfrog, the one on-screen constant was, of course, Fred. The same year, he helped adults get to grips with their garage estimates in Sunday morning “sums-made-simple series” Make It Count, assisted by a six-foot calculator on loan, mysteriously, from the Royal Army Pay Corps. For over half a decade, young and old brushed up on their long division with Harris helping them carry the seven.

He was still there when calculators mutated into that first, simultaneously daunting and cuddly, wave of British home computers. The early 1980s buzzed with the frenzied clack of real ale drinkers in chunky knitwear typing strings of code into cream-coloured breeze-blocks from spiral-bound doorstop manuals and cursing under their breath. Micro Live was their Panorama, their Omnibus, their high. At the show’s sturdy centre was Ian MacNaught-Davies, a no-nonsense man of the world who’d spent the 1960s climbing up everything from the Eiffel Tower to the Old Man of Hoy. Fred, a relative latecomer, was free to cover the lighter side of silicon hobbydom, from drum machines to Deluxe Paint, although he did get in the odd round of had-bitten journalism, notably pressing Sinclair representatives on the disappointing nature of their doomed second generation Spectrum machines. He continued to be an approachably informed presence on digital matters for the rest of the decade, even getting his own show, Me and My Micro, which enabled him to indulge his potting shed enthusiast tendencies much as Bob Symes had with the world of model making a decade before.

Fred Harris’s career is, as you can see, a bugger to summarise. Perhaps this is why he’s so fondly remembered by a generation – his varied CV is that of a genuinely versatile performer, not just a keen, jobbing one. Where so many TV makeweights discharged their duties in perfunctory style as the script demanded, with Fred Harris there is (let’s use the present tense – he was still active on British Forces Broadcasting’s “broom cupboard” slot a couple of years ago) a quiet but unmistakable sense of a mischievous intelligence beyond the on-screen matters of the moment.

In a TV environment were presenters are increasingly keen to act as dumb as they assume the viewers must be, the quietly overqualified host is a cherishable commodity. Far from being alienated, children relish the presence of an independent mind between the autocue and the camera. Without making a big show of it, presenter and viewer are in cahoots. The “enthusiastic amateur” approach isn’t necessarily a recipe for stardom, just vividly enjoyable, memorable television. Kids may name their union bars after any old fool with an Equity card when they get a little older, but at the time they can spot a careerist a mile off. Even today, the phoneys and charisma dodgers seldom last long in children’s television. They just move swiftly into adult broadcasting, where folk are far more gullible.

Jan 212012

Make it Count

TV Talk No Responses »

Jan 192012

The complicity of former Play School presenter Baroness Floella Benjamin in passing the repugnant Personal Independence Payment bill in the Lords this week aroused much fury among people of a certain age. This was more than just a beloved and trusted figure from childhood television showing their less appealing side. It was another insult to a generation’s fond memories of time when TV was the shop window of a chiefly benevolent state; another nail in the already crowbar-proof coffin of municipal television.

Municipal television is most often associated with drama, of the socially agitated, “gritty” variety. Plays for Today like The Spongers (the endless travails of a single mother on the breadline in Silver Jubilee Land), United Kingdom (rebel northern council faces police showdown over cuts opposition) and countless others (several starring the good Baroness herself) are often cited as covering the kind of subject matter that’s no longer tackled. And indeed it isn’t, quite: social injustice and inequality are by no means absent today, but the personal is usually brought to the fore, with the political message, if there is any, left to be inferred by the viewer. A victory for dramatic subtlety in theory; too often an off-the-peg vehicle for a Moving Central Performance set in exquisitely colour-graded squalor in practice. Don’t preach, Ken, they’ll just flick over.

Blaming modern dramatists for this softening up would be missing the point. Until relatively recently, all television was steeped in communality. Before the afternoons were turned into a shiny, puce-trimmed shopping precinct by the Kilroy clan, they played host to a pegboard community college the size of a nation. The former welcomes two sorts of folk: respectable suburbia in M&S formal daywear and vinyl-shrouded cartoon proles (one group rather more warmly than the other). The latter catered for the people who sat between the two. Bob Hoskins shifted sideboards and conjugated verbs in On the Move. In Everyday Maths, Arthur English and Jack Wild discovered the perils of rounding their TV licence bill down instead of up: a chilly evening watching the big match outside Curry’s shop window. Meanwhile Floella’s colleague Fred Harris made light of grocery bills with the biggest pocket calculator known to man. (“Programme advisor: Reg Slack.”)

Between the programmes, PiFs predominated. A glance at the example above, in which Leonard Rossiter urges eternal hapless everyman Roy Kinnear to visit his town hall to see about getting an indoor toilet, will engender divergent reactions split down solid generational lines. Anyone under thirty will likely have a hard time relating them to the country they know, not so much because of a change in quality of life as a shift of media emphasis. Weekday mornings in the late 1970s were littered with programmes made by and for shop stewards, with plain envelope titles like On Union Business, Worktalk and, best of all, Educate, Agitate, Organise. For light relief, In The Making followed “the creation of a wax sculpture of the Rt. Hon. William Whitelaw MP”. They’d have died an even greater ratings death than they no doubt did at the time if Jeremy Kyle had been around, but the point is that municipal telly was constantly there, a steady civic hum to put the honk and toot of Saturday nights into context.

But that was very much then, and the modern stay-at-home audience has traded the gentle (if slightly patronising) promise of a better world via the Town Hall for the forbiddingly inane entreaties of Ocean Finance and TV’s Mr Real Lawyers. The idea of a shonky yet largely supportive state fell out of the warp and weft of television almost as prelude to the dissolution of the real thing. When times toughened once more, the lower depths of business filled the gaps as only they knew how. In afternoon ad breaks a state-sponsored squirrel once gave advice on dodging parked cars. Now in the same slots those cars are insured by an ebullient bulldog with a penchant for fiddling the books, a character out of Charles Dickens’s Animal Farm. TV’s fallen into a state, but the state’s fallen out of TV. We must ennoble Fred Harris before it’s too late.

Flat Out of Town

Adele Rose, Brookside, Byker Grove, EastEnders, Rooms, Southern, The Cedar Tree, Together, TV Talk, TVS 2 Responses »

Jan 162012

British soap operas broke new ground in the 1980s, one in particular leading the way in technological and artistic innovation. It replaced bulky studio cameras with lightweight over-the-shoulder gear, freeing up directors and actors alike to give a more dynamic, documentary feel to the drama. Most controversially of all, it confronted issues of the day head on, including the casting of openly gay characters. And it did all this at half past one on a weekday afternoon.

Daytime television, in the pre-Kilroy years, was a more inventive beast than critics, dogged by vague memories of watching endless episodes of The Cedar Tree through a Calpol haze, will allow. ITV’s various regions contributed some original drama for the afternoon slot, in between the bouts of cut-price period frippery and rural tweeness of popular memory. Thames Television’s Rooms appeared in 1974, occupying a strange territory of its own between soap and anthology. Self-contained tales unfolded thrice weekly of the variously unfortunate inhabitants of the bedsitting rooms of 35 Mafeking Terrace, West Kensington. Downbeat stuff indeed amongst the Chalmers-endorsed soufflé recipes and Mateus lampshade conversions, but it was good for two long series.

Arguably braver still was Southern’s Together, kicking off on January 24th 1980 with no small amount of hoopla for a daytime show from one of the smaller franchises. Along with Anglia, Southern always felt its lowly status outside the “Big Five” ITV regions was undeserved. This derived, in part, from the nature of its most popular networked efforts: homely rural fodder with a heavy Jack Hargreaves involvement which delighted countless viewers but enabled the urban franchises to patronise Southern as a yokel outfit. (The Express‘s William Hickey column was fond of covering any ambitious project emanating from Southampton with a blithe reference to “that bustling stationette”.) Some upscaling was clearly needed.

So began a miniature wave of increasingly metropolitan programming, which was to culminate in The Diana Dors Show, a late-night, open-ended chat-in hosted by La Fluck in a different custom-made frock each week, plus a million pounds’ worth of jewellery. Together was rather less nakedly aspirational than that, instead offering some genuine televisual ambition. The brainchild of Adele Rose, Corrie scriptwriting mainstay and future creator of Byker Grove, it took as its manse Rutherford Court, a spanking new low-rise block of housing association flats in an overspill suburb. The cast bulged with the regulation famous names (Victor Maddern, Hilda Fenemore) and future stars (Sarah Greene, as a “flighty” 18-year-old hairdresser).

Initially, Together was shot three days before transmission, enabling topical references to Geoffrey Howe’s budget and Chris Bonnington’s Everest expedition to be subtly inserted into the dialogue, Drop the Dead Donkey style. For the second series in 1981, they made slightly cheaper but much more daunting alteration: the show went out live. Scenes had to be carefully co-ordinated, occasional pre-recorded elements played in, and fingers crossed. A solidly professional team under the aegis of Bryan Izzard managed to pull it off with only peripheral fluffing, even though the acting style, perfunctory to begin with due to the tight deadline, became even woodier as fear of live meltdown gripped the cast.

Technological ability proved, storyline controversy was introduced in March with the introduction of openly gay tenant Peter Hunt (Stephen Churchett, later the Mitchell brothers’ solicitor in EastEnders). Peter shared a flat with Trevor, who was torn his affections and those of fellow resident Charlotte, leading to a pioneering daytime depiction of homophobic abuse. Choice phrases like “nancy boy”, “bent as a three-quid note” and “shirley” were hurled around Rutherford Court’s communal areas. Southern readied the afternoon audience with some mollifying words. “Gays are now part of everyday life,” said a spokesman in the vernacular of the period, “but we are ready for a few furious phone calls.” The Daily Mirror forewarned us that “slimming housewives may find themselves choking over their Ryvita and cheese”.

As it turned out, no storm arose. Either the daytime audience was a lot less conservative than was (and indeed still is) assumed, or off-peak obscurity let the plot roll safely under the radar of mass moral offence. Rose would face sterner opposition thirteen years later with Byker Grove‘s CBBC gay kiss, but Together quietly chugged on for the rest of the series, doomed to die off along with its parent company as franchise upheavals replaced Southern with the even more starry-eyed TVS. It would be going too far to suggest that Together made the likes of Brookside and EastEnders possible, but it’s worth remembering that the acknowledged milestones in TV’s history, for all their virtues, are rarely the pioneering one-offs they’re made out to be.

Not the Minor Doc Whos

Camberwick Green, Crossroads, Dr Who, Hi-De-Hi, Nationwide, TV Talk, Z-Cars 2 Responses »

Jan 132012

The recent news of a Camberwick Green missing episode discovery is something to celebrate, particularly as it hints at the existence of a nascent Trumpton Restoration Team. For those of us who love archive television as much as we don’t love Dr Who, this sort of thing can’t help but cheer. We don’t have anything against the mighty Whovian industry, you understand, but it leaves us puzzled as to why one programme gets all the fanboy attention to the detriment of countless other, surely just as worthy, programmes. To redress this cult imbalance, here are a few suggestions for non-SF programmes which could, with a bit of capital outlay and a lot of spare time, have become serious rivals to the man in the box:

Z-Cars

Troy Kennedy Martin’s groundbreaking cop-in has to be the front runner for extended fan worship. Not only is it a bona fide milestone in British TV, it ticks all the right fannish boxes. Missing episodes and convoluted character histories are there to be traced in abundance. Weeks can be spent speculating on the precise location of Newtown. (“But surely it’s Kirkby?” “Ha! A schoolboy error! Allow me to explain…”) Best of all, the traffic of big and little stars that passed through the programme could keep a convention circuit in guests for decades. (“Bad news, Colin. Bellingham’s dropped out. But Nicholas says he might be interested if we’ll let him do ‘Grandma’s Party’ at some point… no, don’t worry, Blessed’s rock solid.”)

And the spin-offs! My word, the spin-offs. Think of the cod-academic fun to be had debating the relative merits of Softy, Softly and Softly, Softly: Task Force. As monolithic a character as DCI Barlow was, did he merit an entire series of his own? Then there are the wonderfully bonkers “true crime” programmes where Barlow and Watt re-open real historic cases as a sort of after-dinner entertainment, complete with period reconstructions. Is that canon? And if it is, what about Norman Bowler’s advert for Mac Markets? So many imponderables.

IF WET: Bergerac. If only for tax purposes.

Crossroads

Bit of a cheat to put a hardcore soap up for consideration, as they already have fan followings of their own to varying degrees (although when you get down to Albion Market, the following can be easily accommodated on a single Thorpe Park log flume). If we’re thinking practically, though, it’s not that much of a struggle to take one to the Championship soaps and give them a hefty push into fandom’s Premier League. What could fit the bill more snugly than Crossroads? Long and chequered history, guest cast to die for, and – here’s the clincher – lashings of set-wobbling camp to help ease the non-adept into the game. The threadbare bulk of Kings Oak (apostrophe or no apostrophe? Thereby hangs a thesis) imposes but does not daunt. There’s something here for everyone, especially fans of big chunky telephones looming ominously in the foreground. And move over Whovians, Crossroaders got the remake dilemma out of their system a decade ago!

IF WET: Crown Court: episodic adventures in which an oversized public service wooden box looms large. And the Fulchester connection can inspire sub-Viz speculative fan comics without end.

Hi-De-Hi!

Sitcoms, with their spoilsport insistence on tightly-crafted, self-contained worlds with single figure populations, generally lack the plethora of woolly loose ends and slipshod lacunae that can feed a fandom for years without a drop of new product in sight. With Croft and Perry’s finest hour, though, there’s plenty to get your hyper-interpretative teeth into. It’s not just about the usual unseen character speculation: Joe Maplin and Miss Cathcart are A-list offstagers, but can’t hold a candle to, say, Margot Leadbetter’s positively Waugh-esque unseen social circle. No, the devil here is in the combination of backstories lightly hinted at (Ted’s quiet desperation to better himself before it’s too late, which he often suspects it already is) and extra-curricular touches that lift the characters out of their stereotypical boxes (Simon Cadell allowing himself the occasional naughty half-smile in the presence of smut, before remembering his upbringing and sadly suppressing it). And for heaven’s sake, look at the costumes! Hire a Pontin’s for the weekend and the convention will organise itself. Not to mention the potential that sexually fraught chalet neighbourhood has for the randier fanfictioneer. We’ll have to have a few words about the main character’s regeneration, mind.

IF WET: The Likely Lads. Five whole years of off-screen action to colour in for yourself! And just who was Lugless Douglas?

Nationwide

Seriously. Well all right, a bit of rule bending might be required here, but what was the ‘Wide team if not an extended, occasionally fractious, family, with Michael Barratt/Frank Bough at the head, a host of regional tykes at the foot, and Bob Wellings manfully holding the centre? The emotional dynamic is there to be grasped, don’t argue. We’re moving into the realms of speculating on behind-the-scenes events, so the usual legal caveats apply, but the Lime Grove posse’s addiction to self-mythologising, from Barratt’s ceremonial national rail tour to Stilgoe’s songs about Bernard Falk’s interview technique are ideal starting points for a faithful fanbase to take over and turn into a cottage industry or three. Costume potential might fall a tad on the beige side, although you could always go as a swingometer.

IF SNOWED IN: That’s Life! Why not replace the George Formby impersonator with the Doc Cox impersonator?

Always Ultra

Britain's Got Talent, David Frost, Jonathan King, Sally James, Stu Francis, TV Talk, Ultra Quiz, Willie Rushton, X Factor 1 Response »

Jan 092012

What we mean exactly by the phrase “reality shows” is no longer clear. Coined as Big Brother took off, the new genre (or, if you’re being fastidious, sub-genre – they’re all game shows, after all) referred to the handful of large-scale TV contests which placed the daily life of contestants centre stage, and brought questions of personality into the foreground far beyond the usual hurried courtesies exchanged over the buzzer. (“Now Adrian, a little bird tells me you’re something of a whiz on the old Rubik’s Cube?”) In recent years, however, that definition has expanded to mean just about any game show a channel considers too big to fail. Most people would consider Britain’s Got Talent a reality show, despite there being only cosmetic differences between it and Derek Hobson’s staunchly pre-reality jamboree New Faces.

Classification wrangles aside, “reality” remains one of the first words brought out in any modern debate on TV’s declining standards. It’s a convenient, universal shorthand for all that’s considered moribund about modern programming: vulgar, derivative, producer-led, manipulative, money-grubbing. And while recent turns in the fortunes of various reality flagships have suggested that this genre is a fossil fuel increasingly close to being mined out, it’s worth remembering that this debate has happened before.

In the early 1980s, the main issue was the scale of prizes. For decades the value of contestants’ remuneration on both BBC and ITV quizzes was heavily restricted, to avoid the unedifying scenes of naked greed witnessed on US game shows. The rise of the “professional” contestant, as brash and slick as the compère, alternating between theatrical concentration when asked the question and gleefully applauding themselves when they got the answer right, was something we just weren’t going to see over here. The Yanks even had a soppy-ugly word for the phenomenon: these weren’t quiz shows, they were “desire” shows. Foreign language, foreign concept. We’re made of sterner stuff.

If American techniques were off the menu, what chance had British channels of buying Ultra Quiz, a gargantuan Japanese trivia trail which began with 5,000 contestants and slowly whittled them down in a variety of increasingly cruel ways while touring the beauty spots of the Pacific over many weeks, before packing off the eventual winner with a “life-changing” lump sum? Such obstacles didn’t stop both BBC and ITV representatives sizing up the format when Nippon Television put it up for grabs at the Monte Carlo Festival in early 1982. Calculators and napkins were employed to determine the likelihood of bringing an affordable version to our shores. “Maybe we could run an in-flight quiz to Jersey or the Isle of Man,” mused a BBC buyer. “I wonder if we could interest Cross-Channel Ferries?”

In the end, the show was sold to brand new ITV franchise TVS. Keen to distance itself from its regional predecessor, the rural-traditional Southern, TVS was quick to align itself with the sort of south of England viewer who was more likely to own a yacht than a potting shed, and Ultra Quiz was just the sort of big, loud, network-frightening entity which could help propel them into the nation’s consciousness. A few judicious tweaks of the maximum prize fund ruling allowed for a top bounty of £10,000. (Soon afterwards, The Price is Right would similarly broach the agreed limit, but they used a different tactic: they just didn’t tell the IBA.) Glamorous locations were sussed out, planes and boats chartered, Michael Aspel, Sally James and Jonathan King hired. The game was afoot.

On the morning of Saturday 16th April, 2,000 contestants assembled on Brighton beach for the first round, a mass “yes or no” marathon designed to sort the wheat from the chaff. The wheat would then board a ferry to France, answering more questions en route, with only the winners allowed to disembark at the other end. To provide a bit of variety, Eddie Kidd and assorted military men performed impressive stunts, Russell Grant competed with a “computer boffin” to predict who would make it to the next stage, Sally James wore a jumpsuit accessorised with a Panama hat, and Jonathan King shouted encouraging things like “He’s got brain power packed in his head!”

Even the capable hands of Aspel failed to make that lot gel. As the quiz ambled from exotic location to exotic location (and, for the final, back home to Southampton), viewers dropped out faster than the contestants, and derision multiplied by the week. Even TVS controller Michael Blakstad had to admit the programme had been “quite awful”. Stuck with a costly dodo, TVS had a choice: silently bin it in favour of something nice and cheap with Fred Dinenage, or fiddle with the details and launch a second series. Stubbornly determined to prove themselves the equals of Granada and Thames, they went for the latter option.

The 1984 series of Ultra Quiz is the one most people tend to remember. Fronted by David Frost (“Hello, good evening, and a thousand welcomes!”), assisted by his TW3 compadre, the great Willie Rushton, it held together slightly more convincingly than the first incarnation, helped in no small measure by Frost’s legendary connections. (When the owners of Leeds Castle refused to host the final there, fearing the large-scale silliness might dent its image, Frost secured the use of Arundel Castle instead, mainly by dint of being the son-in-law of its owner, the Duke of Norfolk.)

Despite Frost’s mollifying assurance that the UK Ultra Quiz was “as different from the Japanese as karate is from cricket,” similarities with the cruel daftness of the original remained. On the beach at Deauville, twenty-eight contestants were buried up to their necks in sand, with balloons attached to strings held between their teeth, the release of which would constitute their answers to questions. Rushton, perhaps not the best choice of signing for a programme that relied on taking stupidity seriously, observed that the losing contestants, when they were dug out of their pit, looked positively relieved to be out of the running.

On went the circus, with a characteristic mix of jet-set glamour and Game for a Laugh buffoonery. In Paris, the remaining hopefuls were ushered into a high class perfumery, blindfolded, and asked to identify a series of increasingly rancid smells, under the watchful eye of TV production legend (and, appropriately, It’s a Knockout instigator) Major Barney Colehan. Then came Bruges, a tour of California, and back to Arundel. Ratings this time held up pretty well – touching ten million in late August, despite stiff competition from the LA Olympics on the BBC – but then they had to. With a budget of over £600,000, TVS had a lot more than their fledgling reputation riding on Ultra Quiz. So when questions of decency arose, they were ready to tackle them.

Matters came to a head in a debate at the 1984 Edinburgh Television Festival, chaired by one D Frost. Putting the case that ITV’s mania for game shows lowered standards was Jim Moir, BBC Head of Light Entertainment (the genre considered most directly threatened by the new wave). Price is Right producer William G Stewart put the case for the defence, cannily pointing out that ITV’s ratio of quizzes to LE shows was the same in ’84 as it had been in the “golden age” of ’68. More vocal still was LWT director of programmes John Birt, who unsettled the audience by insisting the anti-game show agenda was a case of middle class snobbery. “Is the BBC interested in entertaining the working class?” he demanded. The names may have changed, but today’s arguments over “reality” shows run on exactly the same lines as the “desire” show debate.

Ultra Quiz, meanwhile, plugged away for another year. Ultra Quiz ’85 heralded yet another clearout of personnel. This time the master of ceremonies was Stu Francis, who, despite having “nice legs for shorts” as one reviewer sweetly put it, was indicative of the downward turn the show’s fortunes had taken. Locations this time were very much restricted to the UK, a tour of windswept beaches and crumbling pier heads more reminiscent of the Radio 1 Roadshow than a slick globetrotting mental tournament. Gyles Brandreth, roped in to devise puzzles, wondered what he was doing with his life.

The modern reality juggernaut is run on much tighter lines than Ultra Quiz ever was, but there’s a similar weakness at their heart. The sheer scale of the programmes is forever in danger of being undercut by their inherent absurdity. It takes a great force of will to keep the ship afloat, hence the overbearing seriousness that often pervades the likes of X-Factor. By treating a random MOR singing contest as if it were a war crimes tribunal, buoyancy is achieved, but only as long as the audience are willing to provide the necessary hot air. Lose them, as Ultra Quiz quickly did, and the enterprise comes crashing down under the weight of its own triviality. Today’s craft may be capable of longer flights than the TVS model, but there’s no guarantee they won’t end in the same undignified way.