WHY BRITISH TELEVISION HAS NEVER BEEN THE BEST IN THE WORLD

So how am I qualified to write about this subject? I’ve been watching British television for over 40 years. I was watching when black and white TV was the only thing on offer, two channels were all you got and broadcasting hours were severely limited. I was watching before live signals were bounced by satellite across the Atlantic. I was watching as a teenager during the swinging sixties and when we first walked on the moon. I saw the introduction of colour television and remember the first broadcasts by BBC2 and Channel 4. I saw the sterility and nihilism of the Thatcher years play themselves out reflected in the greed and stupidity of a generation gone rotten. I’m watching now. And I remember it well.

It is easy to dismiss British TV of the fifties. The total broadcast output of the only two available channels seldom got as high as 12 hours each per day. Either you saw a blank screen for huge parts of the day and most of the night or you saw the austerity of post-war Britain reflected in stilted class dramas, patronising newscasters and so-called variety shows which reflected the lowest common denominator in the already beginning to homogenise Trans-Atlantic entertainment business. Television reflected neither the vigour of the working classes nor the best of high culture. It was bland, boring and dull, dull, dull. A high point of fifties TV was live drama but elsewhere it was a desert. Even today one of the most fondly remembered features of the time was the potter’s wheel that was used to fill in gaps between broadcasts or in the event of technical failure. That says it all.

In the 1960s the anodyne pop music that my mother used to listen to gave way to the rawer sounds of the early Beatles. Suddenly there was an explosion of black music and everyone was starting to listen to R and B, Tamla Motown and soul music. Discotheques appeared for the first time in Britain. By the end of the decade the hippy revolution had even reached us and England was swinging. The TV continued to be a desert. If you liked pop music then you had Top of the Pops or Ready, Steady, Go. RSG was an excellent programme but it happened once a week on a Friday. You couldn’t record it because it was well before videos appeared. Otherwise pop music consisted of the blander end of the pop world prostituting their talents on the ubiquitous variety show. I admit there were a few other music shows around but if you added up the total broadcast hours of youth TV it would not exceed 2 to 3 hours per week.

What those with selective memories associate with the 60s are great TV shows like "The Prisoner" and "The Avengers". But for every great show there were a hundred crap ones. Wooden police dramas, yet more variety shows and dreary patronising arts shows being pushed by establishment names. For every "Steptoe and Son" there were a hundred sitcoms so weedy, so unfunny, so sexist, racist and downright embarrassing that very few survived and those that did are still awful. I cannot believe I am the only person in the UK who thinks Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Are You Being Served and on and on and on never were funny and it is baffling why anyone can still think they were or are funny.

There was football of course. Not to mention cricket, rugby, darts, golf and catching toe clippings in a fishing net. And the 60’s were the glory days for British football too. One problem, I, like the majority of people in the country, do not like football or any other televised sport. I can just about see why someone would get pleasure out of attending a live sporting event but I have never ever ever wanted to see football on TV. Not then, not during the intervening years, not ever. It’s cheap television and that’s all.

In the 70s and 80s we gradually got more channels and longer broadcasting hours. We also got more poor shows. Often the imported American shows were much better than anything we ever produced. In their day Starsky and Hutch and Hill Street Blues were both excellent shows. We got more crap variety shows, more soaps, more unfunny sitcoms, more boring sports, more talking heads telling us how good dead white male culture was for us all. And everyone is so complacent about this drivel that has saturated the airwaves for so long that the terrestrial broadcasters still, STILL push the same old stuff. Any time of day or night I can choose from 4 or 5 channels broadcasting an homogenised diet of sport, soaps, alleged drama, sitcoms, Culture (but only if you accept the definition of a self-elected, pompous, out-of-touch elite). And this is supposed to be the best in the world? God help us.

It would of course be helpful if I stated what I would like to see as an alternative. Well I always wanted to see films. I have been in love with films for as long as I can remember. In some ways TV has served me well in that it has always screened many films from the 30s, 40s and 50s. But beyond the 50s trouble began to brew. TV has insisted on butchering films to suit its own narrow horizons. Hardly anything from the 60s onwards has escaped the censor’s scissors. Language is bleeped, cut or re-recorded, scenes are chopped out, scenes are rearranged. Films are panned and scanned, stuffed full of adverts, interrupted by News at Ten and shown at 3AM on a Wednesday with no advance publicity. TV companies have never respected the interests of film viewers. Films are just another commodity to be sliced and diced and tamed for the small screen. I would still like to see lots of popular music, interesting documentaries, political programmes that aren’t intimidated by governments and home secretaries, art, science, experimentation.

At least I can get some of what I want these days. With satellite TV I can watch films without interruption and with a minimum of censorship. I can watch MTV 24 hours a day if I want. I can see documentaries and old TV programmes that I find funny. If I stick to satellite I can also avoid all sports because they are corralled on their own channels. Good luck to all the sports fans too – I’m glad they can get what they want. Satellite TV is not perfect but at least it really does play to the market and it does give real choice to viewers.

Britain in the late 1990’s is a very disturbing place to live. It has some of the most stringent censorship in the Western world and I am sure that there is a connection between this and the diseased view that British terrestrial TV is the best in the world. It stems from the British belief in a cultural and intellectual elite. An elite who set the agenda not only for what is acceptable as culture but what the rest of us can actually see. It is a deeply ingrained class attitude and gives everyone else the status of feeble-minded, uncultured, misguided, wrong-headed plebs.

Well here is one pleb who wants to stand up and be counted. British TV has always been rubbish. British TV is class-ridden, snobbish, censored, namby-pamby pap unsuitable for adult consumption. It differs in no way from TV in other parts of the world and the few good things that do come out of it do so by accident and subterfuge, not by design. I can’t wait for the day that the Internet and other technologies finish the job they have started and destroy British TV. Putting it out of its own misery is really the best, the only thing, that can be done for it.

Home | Reviews | Reputations | Contact the Lizard