How Auntie lost her way
Yes, Strictly and Bake Off are a joy. But as it turns 80, a top writer says BBC TV’s become formulaic and must recapture its glory years of entertaining AND informing to survive
WE LIVE in an age of apparently dazzling technological progress. Time, we are always being told, has speeded up. We have different attitudes and expectations from our predecessors; we demand different kinds of entertainment; we even watch television in different ways.
In some respects, the story of the BBC since November 2, 1936, the day it introduced television to Britain, reflects that sense of change.
The new television service opened at 3pm prompt, but not with pop stars and celebrity dancers, as would surely be the case today. Instead, it began with speeches by the Postmaster General, the Chairman of the BBC and the Conservative peer Lord Selsdon, who had chaired the government committee that recommended introducing TV to Britain.
To modern eyes, what followed that day in 1936 looks almost painfully primitive, as well as touchingly innocent.
At the time, the tiny handful of people who watched the first half-hour live variety show would have seen nothing wrong with the politically incorrect listing of ‘Buck and Bubbles’, described by the Radio Times as ‘a coloured pair … who dance, play the piano, sing and cross-chat’. Nor would anyone have objected to the Lai Founs, an ‘Oriental juggling act’ who specialised in plate-spinning.
The reality, though, is that nobody even noticed. Back in 1936, TV ownership was virtually nonexistent. Even the BBC’s fiercely moralistic founder, John Reith — who said its task was to inform, educate and entertain — thought TV was a trivial irrelevance compared with radio.
‘To Alexandra Palace for the television opening,’ he wrote laconically in his diary that evening. ‘I have declined to be televised or take part.’
Even ten years later, on November 2, 1946, the audience was tiny. After a break during the War, the BBC had started showing programmes again earlier that year.
But they reached only an estimated 25,000 people in the London area. If you lived in the Midlands, the North, Scotland and Wales, BBC television had nothing for you. (Not much change there, you may well think.)
Perhaps surprisingly, though, the listings on the day in 1946 are more familiar than you might expect. A rugby match between Harlequins and Bristol, some songs, some cabaret, a film, weightlifting, and a quiz: it hardly sounds like spine-tingling entertainment, but it definitely beats an evening these days watching Channel Five.
Ten years later, however, the landscape had changed completely.
BY 1956, the television age had begun in earnest. ITV had been launched a year earlier, and the BBC was already frantically racing to catch up with its younger, flashier and more populist rival. By now no fewer than five million homes nationwide had television sets, with numbers having been boosted by the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 and the unprecedented consumer boom of the mid-Fifties.
Even at this early stage, however, cultural snobs, especially on the high-minded Left, were sneering at both television and its audience.
‘The idiot’s lantern’, they called it, claiming that it was merely a plot to brainwash Britain into supine passivity, while doctors reportedly diagnosed children with ‘TV Neck’, ‘TV Crouch’ and ‘TV Stutter’.
All nonsense, of course. Just take a look at the programmes from November 2, 1956, that so infuriated the Guardian-readers of their day. Yes, there was plenty of fun, not least in the shape of the much-loved Wilfred Pickles, a professional Lancastrian who had become a radio celebrity in the war and delighted millions with his catchphrase: ‘And to all in the North, good neet!’
Yet what followed could hardly have been more impressive.
First came young David Attenborough, travelling across Indonesia in search of extraordinary wildlife, then the sixth of 13 instalments of Dickens’s David Copperfield, whose cast included familiar actors such as the young Robert Hardy and Bernard Cribbins — like Attenborough himself, still going strong.
The fact that the evening ended with a programme about the life of Jesus, though, tells us something about the way that Britain has changed. Today it would be almost unimaginable for the BBC to put out something like that in a relatively prominent slot.
No doubt today’s BBC executives would want the self-promoting atheist Richard Dawkins to present it, and they would probably then screen a life of Mohammed the next day to make up for it, in the name of ‘diversity’.
Still, the shows for 1956 provide a perfect illustration of the wonder of television at its best. Most of the millions watching would have had absolutely no idea what Indonesia looked like, and quite a few would never have read a word of Dickens.
Yet now, thanks to the marvels of the ‘idiot box’, as the snobs called it, the world flooded into their living room. Television genuinely transformed people’s cultural lives and widened their horizons. No wonder than ten years later, in 1966, set ownership was virtually universal.
By then, the BBC’s formula was well established, a blend of entertainment, news, drama and music that has changed less than you might expect over the years.
Even our fondness for American imports is nothing new. Viewers on November 2, 1966 had to suffer an episode of the terrible Dick Van Dyke Show, while ten years after that, audiences were treated to an audience with the Osmonds, the action series Gemini Man (an abject adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man) and the sight of Telly Savalas’s gleaming pate in Kojak.
The following years show surprisingly little change from the overall formula. The Two Ronnies, Howards’ Way, Noel’s House Party, Holby City: they all come and go, but the general feel remains much the same. Indeed, if the schedules for 1986, 1996, 2006 and 2016 are remarkable for anything, it is for their fidelity to the tried and tested formula.
The only genuine innovation has been reality TV, which first appears in our listings in the 2006 schedule in the form of Super Vets. Personally, I can’t stand this low-rent format which casts supposedly real people in increasingly lurid situations — but since it’s cheap, it is no wonder that TV executives love it.
By and large, though, it is striking how little the BBC’s recipe has changed. Just look at what’s on tonight. The One Show is a typical magazine show, the successor to Pebble Mill or Tonight.
Watchdog has been going since 1980. The Missing is classic BBC One drama fare, A Question Of Sport started, incredibly, in 1968, and Film 2016 is merely the latest incarnation of the classic Barry Norman series that began in 1972 — though not in the same class as it used to be.
If anything, then, the BBC is probably guilty of excessive conservatism rather than too much innovation. Even so, two things have very clearly been lost since the BBC’s peak in the Sixties and Seventies.
In those days, the BBC was perfectly happy to show one-off plays and dramas by serious, often controversial writers such as Dennis Potter. But as the listings show, such dramas are now virtually extinct. In the deranged pursuit of ratings, the BBC has simply lost interest in them, and our culture is much the poorer for it.
THE other great loss has been the occasional moments of high seriousness that marked BBC One’s output in its glory years. Yes, they always had the likes of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and The Two Ronnies, but there were also classical concerts, religious programmes and proper current affairs shows, not the risible, gimmicky rubbish that passes for current affairs today.
Eighty years after it first began broadcasting TV to the nation, the BBC still revels in its nickname ‘Auntie’. But Auntie used to enlighten and instruct us, as well as making us laugh.
And if the BBC genuinely wants to remain the broadcaster to the nation for the next 80 years, then I think it needs to recapture some of the sense of wonder that made it so successful in the decades after World War II.
After all, a corporation that could bring us both Charles Dickens and Wilfred Pickles, both Softly, Softly and Play For Today was genuinely something to be proud of.
But one whose mainstream offerings are Strictly Come Dancing and The Great British Bake Off — compulsive viewing though they are — is in serious danger of losing sight of its founding mission. The BBC’s great skill has always been to combine genuine populism with gloriously elevating cultural enlightenment. But if we lose the latter, then we really will be left watching an idiot’s lantern.