TV history just keeps on repeating itself

IT’S as if the last half-century never happened. There we were, in the spring of 1974, watching Doctor Who and the Eurovision Song Contest and here we are tonight, doing exactly the same thing. Thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and virtual reality the members of Abba look no older than when they performed Waterloo at the Brighton Dome and unveiled themselves to the world. But flicking through the Radio Times, it has to be admitted that those around them have aged less well.

The rest of BBC1’s Saturday night schedule from that month is best left to history. Let’s just say neither Jimmy Savile nor the Black and White Minstrel Show would command much of an audience today.

But Doctor Who is different. The start of the new season tonight is a global event, a science fiction franchise to rival Star Trek, commanding almost as much interest across the Atlantic as the presidential election and making just as little sense. Fifty years ago it was as parochial as Dixon of Dock Green, which followed it at 6.40. Jon Pertwee invested the Doctor with all the playfulness of Worzel Gummidge and his enemies were aliens knocked up from felt by the wardrobe department.

In fact, It’s easy to forget how deeply unfashionable the show was back then. By the time it began a 16year hiatus in 1989 it was a veritable laughing stock within the corporation and its old monsters literally museum pieces.

I remember taking a young Behrens Junior to see an exhibition of them at the National Media Museum in Bradford in which the centrepiece was a Dalek they’d presumably saved from being recycled into a tumble dryer at a scrap metal yard.

A man inside with a clothes peg on his nose was doing the voice and I decided to see how far I could wind him up before I got exterminated. I asked the Dalek where it was from and it said Skaro, the fictional planet from which it was supposedly exiled.

I nudged the disinterested sixyear-old at my side. “Did you hear that? He’s from Scarborough!” This made the Dalek very cross. “Not Scarborough – Skaro!” it said. I persevered. “Is that up the coast near Staithes? Or down at Filey?”

“It is not in your universe!” said the man inside the Dalek in an eve-of-extermination voice. I didn’t blame him; I’d have been homicidal, too, if I’d been stuffed into a galvanised dustbin and made to answer questions from passing smart alecs trying to impress their children.

I moved away and walked up some steps where it could not follow. It turned around and headed off – to the Jobcentre, I presume.

But a few years later, when Doctor Who was reinvented for the new century with computer generated monsters instead of actors in crêpe paper suits, Behrens Junior was won over and for the next several years picked over every utterance from a Dalek in the hope of finding deeper meaning. That’s what science fiction does to you.

Eurovision has also evolved with the times. Abba’s victory in 1974 was transmitted to viewers with very different expectations to those of today. The audience in Brighton came in dinner jackets and evening gowns and Katie Boyle hosted in pink satin and permed hair.

If anyone had started dancing to the music they’d have been asked to leave. It was no different eight years later when the show was staged in Harrogate.

Today’s Eurovision is less a song contest and more a festival of free expression, embraced by a new generation of young people who have never heard of Katie Boyle but who still know Abba because they’ve heard the music and seen the film with Meryl Streep and Colin Firth.

But what else from that 1974 spring still resonates? The Black and White Minstrel Show disappeared up the Swanee River without a paddle and good riddance to it. And Dixon of Dock Green went the way of every other community copper in Britain.

In the US, though, those of a certain age might feel a degree of déjà vu as they tune in tonight – for it was also half a century ago this week that their president faced his own Waterloo when the House Judiciary Committee opened hearings on whether to impeach him.

Realising the game was up, Richard Nixon jumped before he could be pushed. I was in the US that August as he left the White House lawn in a helicopter and everyone I met told me the country had learned its lesson. Never again would it elect someone so transparently dishonest as its leader.

But then came Donald Trump, a Doctor Who villain incarnate, who makes Nixon seem as benign as Walt Disney. Could it be that in politics as in culture, we haven’t evolved quite as much as we’d like to think? That’s something for the Darwinists to ponder.