Armchair Nation Read Free Page A

Officer in the early 1950s. ‘For goodness sake, why must they ring? Why can’t they let us get on with our job of putting programmes on the air?’ 14
    When the Television Duty Office moved to the fourth floor of the new Television Centre in White City in the 1960s, the operation became more professional and less obviously irritated by its callers. While two TV sets, one tuned to BBC1 and the other to BBC2, chattered away continually in one corner, the small group of shift-working duty officers scrawled down summative points from calls, before transferring them to two typewriters, one for each channel. In the 1980s the duty log became a cut-and-paste, word processed document, until it was outsourced, at the end of the millennium, to a private company working from a Belfast call centre. All commercial TV stations are also now required by law to keep duty logs.
    Duty logs provide a complete record of what was shown on television, including any late runnings and last minute changes, so the police and lawyers regularly use them to check the alibis of suspects who say they were at home watching TV when a crime took place. Alongside the large number of calls from people who clearly phone just to talk to someone (nicknamed ‘lonely hearts’ by the duty officers) they supply a random stream of consciousness about television, although certain things – cruelty to animals, criticism of the royal family or the union flag being flown upside down – will reliably create a reaction. Most calls are simple requests for information about the name of an actor or incidental music, but there are also compliments and, of course, complaints: some sane and reasonable, others idiosyncratic and contrarian and communicated in that tone of suffocating earnestness, pained self-importance and pointless anger that will be familiar to anyone who reads internet message boards.
    Just as it would be unwise of future historians to read the anonymous comments on websites as expressions of the collective mentality of our era, it would be equally unwise of us to pore over the duty logs in search of typical viewers. Most of us are not moved to ring up a stranger to let them know what we think about what we are watching. After a few false starts, the English language settled on the word ‘watch’ to describe what people do in front of televisions. But ‘watch’, which shares its origins with ‘wake’ and conveys associations of keenly looking and keeping guard, is not always the right word todenote our relationship to the TV set. Much viewing is absent-minded or indifferent, and even the intense feelings that the TV generates are usually fleeting and soon forgotten. Television’s greater significance in our lives surely stems from its slowly accrued habits and rituals, the way it mingles with our other daily routines and comes to seem as natural as sleeping and waking.
    Britain’s single time zone and its small number of channels have meant that television, in its ways of talking to its viewers, has assumed that it represents ‘the private life of the nation state’, to use the critic John Ellis’s phrase. 15 But viewers in Lerwick or St Helier have watched television with a different eye and ear to those in London (except during the substantial part of television’s history when they were not able to watch it at all). Television has served as a distorted mirror through which to reflect on what defines the nation, and the nation’s margins. So I have tried to tell the story that follows through the voices of those who have watched television in different parts of the islands, without presuming the existence of some imagined, scattered, national community brought together in front of the set. This book is mostly about individuals in specific places, usually but not always sitting in living rooms, watching TV and reflecting on what they see.
    Yet I have also found that there is another