Joe Moran

In strict adherence to classic Reithian principles this history of British television informs, educates and entertains. It’s an exhaustively researched and scholarly work which is also very funny, mainly because it is full of odd and sometimes downright bizarre facts. In the 1930s, for instance, many people thought the TV could see them and were reluctant to undress in front of it (this may be where Orwell got the idea of the telescreen in 1984 from). When BBC and ITV simultaneously started full colour transmissions in 1969 hundreds of viewers phoned to complain that they were still receiving the programmes in black and white. They were advised to buy a colour set. The novelist Anthony Burgess, disciple of Joyce and well known for his highbrow tendencies, was a fan of Benny Hill, eulogising him as ‘one of the great artists of our age’. His friend and fellow novelist Kingsley Amis was addicted to the Lancastrian soap opera Coronation Street and would cheer his favourite bits and boo when characters he disliked came on. The poet Stephen Spender, meanwhile, preferred Neighbours and a detective series called Spender.

Moran is also a dab hand at exploding myths. Kenneth Tynan, it turns out, was not the first person to use the F-word on television. That distinction actually goes to playwright Brendan Behan who made free with the forbidden expletive not once but several times in a BBC Panorama interview with Malcolm Muggeridge nearly a full decade earlier in 1956. The only complaints received on that occasion, possibly because Behan’s delivery was impaired by alcohol, were about his Dublin accent. In 1959 Ulster Television interviewed a man whose never-ending job it was to paint the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast. The interviewer asked if it ever got boring painting the same railings year in and year out. ‘Of course it’s fucking boring’, came the reply. There were no complaints. In the light of all this Tynan seems less of a pioneer and more a Johnny-come-lately.

Those of a certain vintage, myself among them, are prone to a quaint notion that in the 1970s, with only three channels and no on-demand service (and, let’s face it, precious few other forms of home entertainment), British TV helped to bind the nation together in a way that no longer happens in our multi-channel, fragmented, watch when you feel like it age. One big happy square-eyed nation united by their love of Morecambe & Wise and Dad’s Army. Moran regards this as largely mythical as well. He points out that in the 1950s television had been accused of destroying communal life. I’m sure he’s right that all such generalisations tell us more about our current preoccupations and anxieties than the past, or television itself.

Indeed from its arrival there was no shortage of those who were convinced that television was the end of civilisation as they knew it. There were others who thought it might play a part in creating a genuinely democratic common culture that was neither highbrow or lowbrow. Armchair Nation offers overwhelming evidence that they were all wrong. Television failed to kill off any pastimes that weren’t already dying of natural causes. Far from destroying domestic life, as many feared, it was quickly absorbed into it. As for the participatory potential of TV a quick glance at shows like The X Factor, described by Moran as ‘a grotesque caricature of democracy’, should tell you all you need to know.

This informative and powerfully nostalgic book (I find there’s nothing like the titles of TV shows from decades ago to induce a Proustian rush, and this book is teeming with them) reveals television as something much less transformative or apocalyptic, yet all-pervasive and absorbing nonetheless: moving wallpaper; a way of watching the time pass; a surreal collage of the mundane and the marvellous, and the marvellously mundane; a magic box of waking dreams which soon evaporate into the ether; and a reliable cure for insomnia. As one viewer is quoted as saying: ‘It’s like opening your post. Every now and then something interesting comes along but you still forget about it two minutes later’.… (more)

Almost perfect

One of the most enjoyable books about writing that I have read. Moran practices what he preaches, in his own words, and the examples he chooses. Until he arrives at the end...

The three 'biographies' are moving and beautifully illustrative - but would be better woven elsewhere in the text. And the remaining paragraphs continue selling something this reader has already bought.

A very useful, instructive book to which I will return - without the final chapter.… (more)