Armchair Nation by Joe Moran

Author:Joe Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2013-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

While Morecambe and Wise were performing their Christmas shows for the BBC, television had yet to acquire a reliable collective memory. Archiving was erratic. Even when shows began to be video-recorded in the late 1950s, the tapes were as expensive as a small car and so engineers routinely wiped and reused them. Peter Cook pleaded in vain for his 1960s comedy series, Not Only … But Also, to be preserved, even offering to pay for the tapes and the storage costs. Despite this, the BBC taped over the series, an act criticised by Cook’s co-star Dudley Moore when he appeared on Parkinson. The 1970s, too, saw much wiping of old black-and-white shows because it was thought viewers who had recently paid for a colour TV licence would never want to see them again. The ITV channels took even less care of their old programmes, being unwilling to pay to store or insure them. The critic T. C. Worsley rightly called television ‘the ephemeral art’.66

Those who took television seriously as an art form fretted often about its impermanence. Dennis Potter still felt a sense of paralysing anticlimax as the end credits rolled on each of his television plays, even though he knew more people had watched them than would have seen Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in its entire West End run. ‘The pictures flow on easy as tapwater,’ he wrote. ‘A play which has taken months to write, characters who have leapt up gibbering in your mind when you are trying to sleep, ideas which have simmered feverishly in your blood like a virus – all used up, all at once, all gone.’ In his often dyspeptic television reviews in the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, Potter returned to the same theme: the TV was becoming nothing more than a domestic appliance for passing the time, ‘a box that can be plugged into the same socket as a hairdryer or a coffee perculator’.67 In an age before archiving, he worried about the fragile connection between writer and viewer, desperately wanting television to be a more enduring medium to justify the effort he put into his work.

Before the domestication of the video recorder, there was an industry of records and books based on television programmes, especially comedy – probably because, if shared humour does affirm membership of a group as Bergson claimed, that group may want something more concrete to hold on to than the fading memory of laughter. The first Monty Python film, And Now for Something Completely Different … (1971), was a compilation of re-shot television highlights, aimed at the American market, but it did better business in the UK because viewers wanted to see their favourite sketches again. On their first theatre tour in 1971, the team noted that audiences preferred what they knew to new material, and greeted sketches recycled from television with applause after their first few lines, like rock fans cheering the opening bars of a song. Comedy fans accumulated cultural capital among their peers by knowing routines off by heart, as did troubadours before the arrival of the printing press.

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