Armchair Nation Read Free

meeting of anti-Mary Whitehouse viewers in the Cosmo pub, Bloomsbury. The Cosmo Group against censorship, announced a few days later on the
Guardian
women’s page, soon had a membership of 500, including clergymen, housewives, a general and ‘one or two Wing Commanders’ – the RAF, according to Fox, being especially anti-Whitehouse. Letters of support poured in from ‘villages and places like Guernsey, with one anguished cry from Neath’. In the country, Fox argued, television played a greater part in people’s lives and they were fiercely opposed to censorship. 12
    Tynan probably meant to create a reaction. He claimed he had only used an old English word as it came up in the conversation, and to have edited himself would have been patronising to the viewer. Since he wasn’t really answering the question, this seems disingenuous. Robert Robinson thought he had ‘grabbed at notoriety like a child’, and the author Kingsley Amis felt he was ‘just showing off’. 13 The BBC issued a qualified apology, pointing out that the word had been used on live TV in a serious discussion, and the controversy died a quick and natural death with no one losing their job over it.

    A year before Tynan’s use of the F-word, John Krish had made an affecting film documentary,
I Think They Call Him John
, which followed a widowed ex-miner living alone in a new London high-rise flat. The film shows him silently pottering round one Sunday, feeding his budgie, cooking two sausages and a potato for lunch, staring out of the window. Then, towards the end, as dusk descends on the flats, John switches on the television and his face is mirrored in the screen as hesits down on a hard-backed chair and waits for the sound, which comes on in the middle of an ad break: ‘For whiteness that
shows
, she can depend on
Persil
.’ After the break comes Beat the Clock, the section of
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
in which couples could win washing machines and fridges for playing silly games like bursting balloons with needles attached to their noses. John unwraps a boiled sweet and pops it in his mouth. ‘I
knew
you were an Ada!’ cries the instantly familiar voice of Bruce Forsyth, through audience laughter. ‘As soon as you walked on there, I said, that’s an Ada … Oh we do have fun! You have sixty seconds to do this little bit of nonsense, starting from … hold on, hold on, Ada, if you’re going to make a farce of the whole thing …’ John takes out an ironing board and glumly irons a shirt for no one in particular while the programme carries on, his one-sided encounter with Bruce Forsyth being his only human interaction that day.
    Despite its veneer of fly-on-the-wall authenticity, the film was actually a set-up: a public service documentary made on behalf of the Samaritans, with Krish calling out careful instructions to his subject. And yet it still seems to me to convey something important and often unspoken about watching television. The elderly widower in Krish’s film had the most minimal relationship possible with Bruce Forsyth; he happened to be in the same room when Forsyth was on the television, which happened to be switched on. The TV audience is a momentary collective like this, an insubstantial gathering across millions of living rooms which anyone can join by making the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set.
    But collective memories of watching TV tend to home in instead on those moments, such as Tynan’s use of the F-word, when viewers took offence or were otherwise angered, excited or rapt by television. Indeed, the only continuous record of viewers’ responses deals precisely with these reactions. The BBC was the first television company to begin logging viewers’ calls in a ‘duty log’, not always enthusiastically. ‘We must deal with telephone enquiries,’ said the BBC’s Chief Television Liaison