A crudely calibrated Hundred Greatest, a solemn Hall of Fame, would give only a fraction of the picture. This book aims to celebrate and mimic the serendipitous joy of that scheduling jumble which, in the days of restricted channel numbers, threw up dizzy juxtapositions daily: an earnest play might be followed by a big broad variety spectacular; a horror anthology that drove children behind furniture followed a sketch show that chewed the carpet. This riotous mix, now slowly disappearing as themed channels and on-demand services take over, may have downgraded TV’s importance in the eyes of aesthetes, but gave it a community feel other media lacked. No-one ever turned up at a cinema half an hour early for a screening of Three Colours: Red and got thirty minutes of Slam Dunk Ernest for their trouble.
This isn’t a book about how much ‘better’ television once was, but how much stranger it used to be – much braver, more foolhardy, unselfconscious and creatively energetic before commerce knocked those fascinating corners off its character. At its best and at its worst, television is brutally honest and charmingly deceitful, sentimentally partisan and coldly dispassionate, obscenely lavish and ludicrously cheap. Its screen bulges with obsessive perfectionists and clueless amateurs, sociopathic monsters and all-round good eggs. It can’t be contained by a neat little narrative. It’s chaos all the way down.
No countdown of the top hundred shows can do television full justice. But maybe a more varied hundred can make a better stab at exploring it: a rough guide antidote to the standard lists of well-worn greats. What follows is one such alternative trek. Overlooked gems and justly wiped follies, overcooked spectaculars and underfunded experiments are as much a part of TV history as the national treasures and stone cold classics. They can tell us just as much, and sometimes more, about the nature of television, those who crafted it and those who lapped it up. Here, then, are tales of the days when television was at the most exciting, creative stage of any medium: a cottage industry with the world at its feet.
BBC
The original TV drama series.
When the BBC asks a question, it isn’t just a question, it’s a ‘viewer participation programme’.
Grace Wyndham Goldie, Listener, 2 March 1939
IN BBC TELEVISION’S BRIEF life before the war, drama meant the theatre: simple studio productions of acknowledged classics or extracts from a show currently running in the West End. These unofficial trailers were either recreated in the studio (with as much of the theatre’s scenery as could be blagged) or occasionally and chaotically broadcast live from their home turf. Champions of theatre broadcasts claimed the presence of an audience added atmosphere and upped the actors’ game – the fact that the cameras often ended up chasing them about the stage, like a football match filmed by a bunch of drunken fans, was a small price to pay.
Visuals took a back seat at first. Early TV equipment produced low-definition pictures in murky black and grimy white. Faces had to be held in tight close-up to enable recognition, and wide shots couldn’t be that wide due to the Beeb’s tiny Lime Grove studios. Sets and lighting just about did the job, and nothing more. Directors couldn’t cut between cameras – a change of shot had to be done by mixing, which could take several seconds. With all these restrictions, wrote the critic Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘the television screen is much less a stage … than a checking-board helping us listen to good talk.’11
The first step on the road to the modern drama series was taken by what critic Grace Wyndham Goldie, later to run the BBC’s current affairs department, called ‘an interesting experiment in presentation’.12 Mileson Horton had made a name for himself in the mid-1930s writing ‘Photocrime’, an immensely popular series of whodunit photo-stories starring the intrepid Inspector Holt, published in Weekly Illustrated. These bare bones procedurals, simply told and visually direct, were just what TV producers were after. Horton was hired to script a series of twenty-minute Holt adventures for the small screen.
Take a typical episode of Tele-crime, ‘The Fletcher Case’. A man’s body is found sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, with a gun in his right hand. It looks like an open-and-shut suicide case for Inspector Holt. Just as he’s about to leave the scene, the phone rings. Holt’s constable answers: it’s the victim’s niece. The victim, it turns out, was left-handed! Murder! It’s a race to the family house to stop the killer striking again. But too late! Another family member has been offed. Holt assembles the suspects and hears their stories.
After fifteen minutes of this, Holt and company fade from the screen, replaced by the gently smiling face of continuity announcer Elizabeth Cowell: ‘Well, who did do the murder? Viewers have now all the evidence necessary to detect the criminal.’ There follows a few moments’ reflective pause for the audience to flex their minds, then it’s back to the house for a rapid denouement.
The guess-the-culprit interval was an early bit of audience participation that didn’t last the pace (although it was revived for Jeremy Lloyd and Lance Percival’s 1972 panel game Whodunnit?). The rest of Tele-crime, though, set the mould for the detective series, the backbone of popular TV drama ever since.
The crime thriller, like most genres, is a self-concealing art: done well, the writing and direction are taken for granted; done badly, they’re sitting ducks. ‘In an affair of this kind,’ observed Wyndham Goldie, ‘nobody expects any depth or subtle characterisation, but the people in the story must be made just sufficiently interesting for us to care which of them is hanged.’13 Television evolves not with quantum leaps of genius, but by continuous tinkering. Tele-crime may have long vanished into thin air, but look at the foundations of any current drama series and you might just glimpse the smudgy, over-lit face of Inspector Holt.
BBC
The first celebrity chef.
THE FIRST PERSON TO sling a skillet in the studio was French restaurateur, novelist and boulevardier Xavier Marcel Boulestin. He essayed suave hob-side demonstrations wearing a double-breasted suit during the BBC’s 1930s infancy in programmes like Bee for Boulestin and Blind Man’s Buffet. However, the cult of the celebrity chef – the omnipresent gastronome as relaxed in front of the camera as at the oven door – began with Philip Harben.
Rotund, neatly bearded and rarely seen out of an apron, Harben emerged from the post-war landscape of ration coupons and meat queues to become an ever-present face on TV via his first series, the sensibly-titled Cookery. Harben rustled up austerity lobster vol-au-vents and welfare soufflés for the vicarious pleasure of families struggling on one slice of condemned corned beef a week, but few recognise just how many aspects of the twenty-first century tele-cookery landscape owe him their existence. Without Harben, we may never have witnessed these culinary devices:
THEATRICALITY – The son of film actors, Harben knew how to put his recipes, and himself, across to best effect in the muffled turmoil of early television, keeping the stream of patter going as the sheets of flame leapt from his flambé pan. ‘He stands almost alone,’ remarked an awed Reginald Pound, ‘a precision instrument of self-expression.’ 14
MERCHANDISE – Not content with putting his grinning, bearded face on jars