Entertaining television: The BBC and popular television culture in the 1950s

By Su Holmes

Entertaining television challenges the idea that the BBC in the 1950s was elitist and ‘staid’, upholding Reithian values in a paternalistic, even patronising way. By focusing on a number of (often controversial) programme case studies – such as the soap opera, the quiz/ game show, the ‘problem’ show and programmes dealing with celebrity culture - Su Holmes demonstrates how BBC television surprisingly explored popular interests and desires. She also uncovers a number of remarkable connections with programmes and topics at the forefront of television today, ranging from talk shows, 'Reality TV', even to our contemporary obsession with celebrity.

The book is iconclastic, percipient and grounded in archival research, and will be of use to anyone studying television history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526101600

Book preview

Introduction

In 1955, the Producer of the BBC’s fictional serial The Grove Family (1954–57) made the following comment about the programme’s billing in the Radio Times:

I understand . . . that . . . [the] word popular was deleted from our billing. This may be policy, but I thought we were fighting against Commercial [television] and that some of our ideas may be changed. It’s a small point, but you may wish to take it up.¹

He received a scribbled reply from Ronald Waldman, the Head of Light Entertainment, which reads: I suppose the theory is that it’s for the viewers to decide . . . whether the family is popular!! This show proves all!.²

The same year, the BBC were discussing the idea of producing a problem or counselling programme for television. The Head of Talks, Leonard Miall, explained:

[I] saw and listened to a large number of them when I was in America. They make compelling listening. But it is listening of an eavesdropping variety and it puts the listener or viewer into the position of a spiritual Peeping Tom. I hope we shall not go in for them. I know we would draw an enormous audience if we did.³

These examples explicitly address questions of the popular, and invoke some of the different meanings associated with this term. For example, in exploring definitions of popular culture, Raymond Williams notes various possible interpretations, ranging from inferior kinds of work, culture which is well liked by the people, work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people, to culture which is made by the people (1983: 237). The first three definitions circle around the BBC examples. In both of the cases above, popular television is seen as something largely decided by viewers (well-liked by the people), and in this respect, it has a quantitative dimension. In relation to The Grove Family, it is understood that viewers will make the programme popular simply by watching it. This may also be the case with the problem programme, but here we see how the popular, not coincidentally equated with America, is explicitly conceived as an inferior kind of work, and something to be deplored. The idea of attracting an enormous audience, particularly with programming which might provide questionable pleasures and desires, is seen as undermining the cultural mission of public service. Significantly, both of these exchanges take place in 1955, the year that saw the advent of commercial television in Britain and the end of the BBC’s monopoly. This certainly ushered in much political, institutional and cultural debate about the status of popular television, and how the BBC was to situate itself in relation to this terrain.

These case studies immediately bring into view the unique and often difficult relationship between public service and the popular, and both programmes are seen as having an uneasy relationship with the BBC’s identity. But at the same time, they are nevertheless very much part of its television service. There is no evidence to suggest that the BBC don’t want The Grove Family to be popular: the exchange simply indicates that they don’t wish to shout about it, and thus risk being seen as deliberately setting out to win favour with the people (Williams, 1983: 237). While the discussion of the problem show might point toward a blanket suppression of the popular, the BBC did in fact produce such a programme and only four months later, Is This Your Problem? (1955–57) went on air. These programmes represented negotiations with the popular, and this is what Entertaining Television is all about. It explores BBC television’s relations with popular programme culture in the 1950s, ranging from the soap opera, the quiz/game show, the problem show, to television’s circulation of celebrity culture. Commercial television (ITV) is clearly integral to the context from which these programmes emerged, but the focus is on the BBC.

The BBC and popular television in the 1950s (Surely you mean ITV?)

The BBC has dominated the writing of British television history, and work on ITV has only more recently come to the fore (Holland, 2006, Thumim, 2004). Cathy Johnson and Rob Turnock’s illuminating collection ITV Cultures opens by explaining that:

ITV has not been readily understood as a producer of quality programming, instead being popularly associated with lowbrow quiz and game shows, light entertainment and action adventure series . . . This is in contrast to the broader tendency to associate those programmes that have received serious academic and critical attention with the BBC. (2005: 3)

As Johnson and Turnock note, this also constructs a false opposition between public service and commercial values: ITV was set up as an extension of the public service concept from the start, itself a measure of the degree to which Reithian values still pervaded broadcasting, and . . . of a more general distrust of unfettered money-making (Crisell, 2001: 90). But this opposition also has implications for how the BBC is perceived. If ITV has not been taken seriously enough, the BBC is sometimes taken too seriously. For many, the title of this book might appear to be a contradiction in terms. Conventional narratives suggest that some of the genres and topics considered here – soap opera, quiz/game shows or an appetite for celebrity culture – were more the province of commercial television. The BBC is not perceived as the producer of popular television at all in the 1950s, whether in terms of cultural values or audience ratings.

In discussing perceptions of the BBC versus ITV in the 1950s, Janet Thumim has argued that each institution was summarised . . . in popular discourse, by epithets thought to characterise their intentions and performance: hence the BBC was ‘stuffy’, ‘paternalist’, ‘priggish’, whilst ITV was ‘vulgar’, ‘brash’, ‘slick’ (2004: 27). As her use of the past tense implies, Thumim locates this popular discourse as circulating at the time. This claim is not in itself problematic, but it is difficult to separate it from the extent to which a substantial myth has grown up, based on a picture of the energetic . . . showbiz visionaries [of ITV] elbowing aside the complacent bureaucrats of the BBC (Black, 1972: 109). Like all myths, this opposition contains elements of truth, but it is also the product of a number of common sense assumptions which require revisitation (Johnson and Turnock, 2005: 4).

The discussion so far can be seen as interrogating what Jason Jacobs calls the relationship between the macro-overview of broadcasting history and the more local analyses of specific genres or texts (2000: 9). In focusing on the institutional history of the BBC, interventions such as Asa Briggs’s The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (volumes 1–5) have offered an influential model of such a macro-overview, although the scope of his work did not include an analysis of the programmes themselves. Since the increasing interest in television history in the early 1990s, scholars have attempted to combine these perspectives (e.g. Corner, 1991, Jacobs, 2000, Sydney-Smith, 2002, Thumim, 2002a, 2002b, Thumim, 2004, Holmes, 2005a). But the institutional narratives preceded the archival interest in programme forms, and they are often invoked as a backdrop to contextualise studies of programmes, genres and audiences. This is in many ways a practical necessity, and this book clearly draws on this approach. But more than simply contributing detail, programme studies also offer the opportunity to complicate or challenge wider institutional narratives.

This is not to homogenise the idea of institutional studies. Such studies vary in their focus and approach, and range across official histories (Briggs, 1965, 1979, 1995, Sendall, 1982), inside perspectives offered by television personnel (Thomas, 1977, Wyndham-Goldie, 1977), to studies which, while aiming to document an institutional history, include a greater focus on the programmes themselves, and the social and cultural contexts from which they emerged (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991). The point is not that institutional studies have necessarily fixed the BBC’s historical identity in particular ways. Rather, it is important to consider how such evidence is used to frame and analyse programme case studies. Despite the increasingly self-reflexive attitude to television historiography which is now exhibited by television historians (see Corner, 2003, Bignell, 2005a, 2005b), the potentially complex relationship at work between institutional and programme histories would benefit from more debate.

Much of the pleasure in researching this book came from the element of surprise – whether this emerged from the discovery of policy decisions, representations in scripts and on screen, or from the existing traces of audience reception. Jacobs has usefully emphasised the importance of allowing for chance and exploration in one’s approach, as we have to be alive to the contingent opportunities that the archive may hide (2006: 18). At the same time, it is important to qualify this emphasis on the unexpected. Researching the BBC programmes and genres examined here offered less the experience of sweeping away existing perceptions of BBC television in the 1950s than the sense of looking in two directions at once. As the programmes mentioned at the start of this introduction might hint, case studies could confirm and challenge historical assumptions simultaneously. It is precisely this contradictory dialectic which the book aims to capture.

Television studies and television history: connecting past and present

The study of drama once dominated the writing of British television history, particularly that associated with the Golden Age of the 1960s. This also reflected the rather masculine, middle-class bias which had structured the development of British television historiography. There are now signs of change, with studies of popular fiction (Sydney-Smith, 2002, Thumim, 2004), current affairs (Holland, 2006), magazine programming (Thumim, 2004), cinema programmes (Holmes, 2005a), cookery shows (Moseley, 2006) and natural history programming (Wheatley, 2006) all emerging from archival research. Furthermore, one of the earliest interventions in the study of British television programme cultures, Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, edited by John Corner and published in 1991, actually marked a clear break with the emphasis on serious drama some time ago, moving across popular comedy, sport, teenage music programmes and television celebrity. Popular Television in Britain also encompassed the BBC and ITV, and as its title would suggest, we do not necessarily find in it the polarised construction of the two channels which this introduction has outlined.

Yet the possibilities offered by Corner’s book were not always taken up, and if they were, they took some time to take hold in British television historiography. In 2002, and in introducing her Beyond Dixon of Dock Green: The Early British Police Drama, Susan Sydney-Smith (2002) still saw fit to comment that the historical emphasis on the single play, as well as the prevailing framework of art and authorship, had left popular fiction, and a far wider spectrum of non-fiction programming, somewhat ignored. This reflects the extent to which, although television studies may have increasingly embraced the popular, it has occupied an uneasy place in the writing of British television history. Particularly when compared to the American context, there has to date been little written about the ‘beginnings’ of popular generic forms in Britain (Sydney-Smith, 2002: 2). This idea of beginnings is intended to be reflected in the title of this book. Entertaining Television not only focuses attention on a particular aspect of the BBC’s remit: it also pivots on the sense that the idea of television itself was still being entertained.

The privileging of drama has not simply lead to a neglect of a wider range of programming: it has also had significant implications for how the aesthetic development of British television has been understood. Jacobs observes how television drama is typically foregrounded, rightly or wrongly, as emblematic of the aesthetic state of the medium as a whole (Jacobs, cited in Sydney-Smith, 2002: 6). What the close-up meant in debates about 1950s television drama does not necessarily indicate the meanings it carried in relation to other spheres of programming. With regard to television drama, the intimacy of the close-up might have been praised for its affinity with a penetrating microscope (Jacobs, 2000: 122), but this same shot positively repulsed critics when it came to television’s treatment of famous faces in the 1950s. With respect to programmes such as This is Your Life or Face to Face (Chapter 5), critics were horrified at the sight of famous people crying on television. In fact, one critic was appalled that the traditionally introvert British nation appeared to welcome the chance of crying in public, weeping before an audience, or discussing their emotions, religion and sex-life within sight and earshot of 12 million neighbours.⁴

This description may seem familiar to the contemporary viewer – perhaps curiously evocative of talk shows or celebrity Reality TV. If so, this connection is pertinent to the historical intervention this book seeks to make. The fact that the popular has an ambiguous role in British television history reflects on, while also contributing to, a degree of separation between television studies and television history. In his article Finding data, reading patterns, telling stories: issues in the historiography of television, Corner rightly highlights how a question of importance is:

the way in which historical writing. . . relates to the relevant area of contemporary study. How does television history relate to television studies? What connection does it make with the guiding theories and concepts, what impact does it seek to have not only on non-historical research but also on pedagogy? (2003: 276)

While television history and television studies are clearly intersecting spheres, there is still a tendency to turn to television history if we want to know something about the past. In comparison, contemporary, and often popular, examples are used to explore key concepts and debates which are relevant to television as an object of study. In other words, it is possible to suggest that television history could have more impact on non-historical research [and] . . . pedagogy (ibid) than it currently does. In this regard, the case studies here aim to explicitly contribute to knowledge about the function and construction of television genre (Chapters 1–3), the role of ordinary people as performers (Chapters 3, 4 and 5), and conceptual approaches to television fame (Chapter 5).

Entertaining Television also aims to speak to the more contemporary agenda of television studies in other ways, as the comparisons made with Reality TV or the talk show may suggest. To be sure, even to even broach these links is to risk accusations of de-historicisation: television in the 1950s is very different, on so many levels, from television today. While we always analyse the past from the perspective of the present, and we cannot operate outside this temporal framework, Corner’s discussion of television historiography rightly argues for the need to recognise the double dangers of both an over-distanced approach (the past very much as ‘another country’) and an undue proximity (the past as . . . ‘today with oddities’) (2003: 277). These outer limits also dramatise the contradictory experience of viewing 1950s television – it can seem familiar and unfamiliar, recognisable, but strange. But I want to suggest here that being overly nervous about making connections across television history can also be disabling: we can miss opportunities to explore historical links which can be be productive and revealing. In this respect I share Corner’s view that an enriched sense of ‘then’ produces, in its differences and commonalities combined, a stronger and more imaginative sense of ‘now’ (2003: 275).

A number of the programmes examined in this book, particularly those focusing on the televisual display of celebrities and ordinary people, were discussed in terms which now seem evocative of the tabloidisation debate. Programmes ranging from the highly celebratory This is Your Life to the rather more sober remit of Is this Your Problem? were regularly referred to as reprehensible forms of peepshow television, and as inciting the morbid curiosity of the 1950s viewer. But while the debate about the tabloidisation of the medium became particularly visible within the political economy of 1980s/1990s television (see Dovey, 2000), its contours are not new (see Shattuc, 1997). Discussions about what constituted commercially driven programming, particularly at the level of aesthetics, subject matter and audience address, were prominent in 1950s Britain, not least of all because it witnessed the end of the public service monopoly and the birth of ITV.

Chapter 1 explores in more detail why and how the programmes examined here might be conceptualised as popular. But it is important to state that all were classified by the BBC as outside the purview of serious programming (which is positively intelligent in nature).⁵ All occupied a relationship with seriality, many emerged through relations with America, and all were seen by critics, and sometimes by the BBC, as linked to the Corporation’s attempt to compete with ITV. The programmes all garnered large audiences (sometimes spectacularly so), and this contributed to their derided and/or controversial status (Chapters 3–5).

If the programmes discussed in this book can be seen as having an uneasy relationship with public service, this is illuminated by Jerome Bourdon’s (2004) article, Old and new ghosts: public service television and the popular – a history. Bourdon identifies what he calls the six major ghosts to dramatise the often difficult relationship between public service television and popular appeal. As he explains:

Why ghosts? From the start, massive (popular) pleasure was triggered by programmes that did not fit the educative and cultural ideals of public service. As a consequence, the popular has been regularly denied. But, as the manifestations of the popular were too many and too powerful, they were just like ghosts whose existence was denied, but whose presence was strongly felt. Public service television had no choice but to find compromises between its commitment to be primarily an instrument of education or culture and the necessity of adapting itself to the popular. (2004: 284)

Bourdon lists peepshow television, parading the exhibition of suffering and encouraging voyeurism, as ghost number six (2004: 298). While he suggests that popular factual programming, in the form of talk shows and Reality TV, represents the most recent embodiment of the popular to challenge public service ideals, my discussion above suggests that it is indeed fitting to see this challenge as a ghost – with resonant historical precursors in television’s early years. In fact, the topics/genres covered in this book fortuitously mirror the ghosts that Bourdon sets out, whether taking in game shows, stars, seriality, numbers (ratings), America or voyeurism (2004: 284). Implicitly or explicitly, the programmes explored operate at the axis of some, or all, of these categories, and in this respect they can be seen to add weight to Bourdon’s wider thesis here. In summarising his argument, Liesbet van Zoonen suggests that this history demonstrates the repetitive failure of public broadcasting in Europe to come to terms with the popular and to develop a constructive incorporation of the popular as part of its mission (van Zoonen, 2004: 274). Yet while the quotation from Bourdon suggests that the popular has been regularly denied, it also pivots on the idea of a negotiation with the popular which, as The Grove Family and the problem show have already made clear, is very different to refusal or suppression. If following the logic of the latter route, they wouldn’t have existed at all. But a wealth of archival material attests to the fact that they did.

The beginnings of generic forms?

In aiming to contribute to knowledge about the beginnings of popular generic, it is necessary to recognise, as Sydney-Smith does, that genres they do not arrive ‘ready-made’ (2002: 5). Yet in discussing popular drama on British television at this time, Thumim has suggested that:

Within the broad field of popular drama and comedy series [genre] was relatively uncontentious: producers and viewers quickly arrived at a consensus whereby broad differentiations such as comedy, Western, gangster, crime/police were functional descriptors of programme content and address. (2004: 126)

This is quite a substantial claim, particularly when criticism has increasingly foregrounded the discursive, and thus often unstable and contingent, nature of generic categories. Building on previous approaches adopted in film studies (Neale, 1990, Altman, 1999), Jason Mittell’s Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons (2004a) has argued for the value of a discursive approach to television genre. Rather than simply approaching genre as an inherently textual element, it is important to examine how generic categories are also articulated, activated and produced by a programme’s wider intertextual framework. Given that, in researching 1950s television, the programmes themselves sometimes no longer exist, Mittell’s approach seems particularly attractive to television history, while it also offers a further methodological and epistemological perspective on the question, how can we know a text that has not survived in audiovisual form?

Based on a Foucauldian conception of discourse (frameworks of thinking which take place within wider systems of social and cultural power), Mittell’s paradigm points us toward the political function of generic categories. As he expands, we should focus on the breadth of discursive enunciations around any given instance, mapping out as many articulations of genre as possible and situating them within larger cultural contexts and relations of power (2004b: 174). The goal, then, is not to arrive at a proper definition, but to explore how genres are culturally defined, interpreted and evaluated, and this process should be recognised as far from neutral. For example, the bid to categorise quiz/game shows as give-away programmes (the critics), aims to activate very different meanings when compared to the use of the term audience-participation programme (the BBC). Furthermore, as Chapter 2 explores in relation to The Grove Family, the ambiguous currency of the term soap opera in relation to 1950s British television leads to a wider examination of the generic struggle surrounding the programme, and its intersection with discourses of public service, realism, gender and class. In summary, rather than taking their existence for granted, Mittell’s emphasis on retrieving a plurality of generic labels leads us toward thinking about how and why generic categories are conferred.

Journeying into the archives: evidence, approach and imagination

The problem of access to programme culture confronts all historical studies of television. Institutionally, technologically and culturally, early television programming was regarded as live and ephemeral, and there is almost a complete absence of audiovisual material from the period before 1955 (Jacobs, 2000: 4). The programmes examined in this book begin in or around this juncture, and the availability of audiovisual material varied considerably between case studies. Only two editions of The Grove Family exist, and other programmes, such as Is This Your Problem? or the range of BBC quiz and game shows, have not survived in audiovisual form at all. In contrast, many editions of This is Your Life have survived, in part because they were perceived as having a certain cultural, if not critical value (documenting the life of a famous person), as well as a long-term institutional value (clips from the programme have often been used in subsequent profiles of film, sport or music stars).

As television historiography has grown, scholars have increasingly turned to written sources to reconstruct programmes from the 1950s, either in conjunction with existing audiovisual sources, or as the primary textual evidence. The BBC Written Archive Centre, aptly described by Sydney-Smith as a veritable treasure trove (2002: 15), has been recognised as housing extraordinarily valuable material, ranging across production and policy memos, scripts, press cuttings and Audience Research Reports. While the use of these sources has become increasingly pivotal to the construction of British television history (and thus accepted as a valid method of historical enquiry), the internal evidence from the BBC necessarily offers a very particular perspective on programme culture. With the official written records obviously produced by the people in charge (who could in fact be quite remote from the processes of production) (Buscombe, 1980: 77), such evidence might perpetuate conceptions of the BBC’s elitist identity, thus conflicting with the project of this book.

But just as the programmes seem to simultaneously confirm and challenge existing conceptions of the BBC’s institutional identity, so the experience of using the archival material can be cast as similarly contradictory. The written evidence can offer an exciting, privileged and even intimate sense of access which sits alongside, and intersects with, the image of a remote and unfamiliar world. The same contradictory dialectic can be associated with the reconstruction of the programmes themselves. Jacobs formulated the conception of the ghost text – the term he uses to describe the reconstruction of programmes which do not exist in their original audio-visual form but . . . exist as shadows, dispersed and refracted among buried files, bad memories, a flotsam of fragments (2000: 14). This does capture the simultaneous presence yet absence of the programme in question, and when audiovisual material is absent (as is the case, for example, with Is This Your Problem?), the parameters of analysis depend as much on imagination as they do on existing traces of evidence. Nevertheless, the idea of a ghost text downplays the extent to which access to a programme through the written archives, particularly at the level of inside institutional knowledge, can be far greater than is often possible with contemporary programme studies. This is a different kind of access, certainly, but not necessarily one that is more restrictive.

This may of course be countered by the suggestion that this depends on what you want to find out. Johnson and Turnock argue that although it is possible to construct some understanding of the style, content and form of television programmes from written sources, these are no replacement for viewing the programmes themselves (2005: 5). But even when we are talking about the detail of visual style, aesthetics and audience address, this hierarchy between audiovisual and written sources is not unproblematic. Press reception has played a particularly central role in the research for this book, and Thumim describes why such evidence holds a particularly charged fascination for us today:

[Re]views at this time almost always . . . have a subtext. On the surface might be a discussion of last night’s viewing, but it was invariably a discussion pointing towards an assessment of the very existence of television, not yet [itself] taken for granted. (2004: 18; my emphasis)

Press commentary does not represent the responses of the ordinary viewer, but it does enables us to tap into some of the (often fleeting) meanings, associations and concerns which circulated around television when it was still seen as new. If we wanted to explore, for example, the meanings surrounding the use of the close-up, the programmes themselves can only tell us so much (and I discovered that even the judgement of what is close emerges in reception). From this perspective, it is also possible to suggest that the audiovisual record is not a substitute for the written resource. This is not to play down the interpretative agency of the researcher, nor to argue that the historical nature of reception makes it impossible for us to draw textual conclusions ourselves. But it does foreground the significance of thinking about how we begin to do this, and the different perspectives which available evidence may offer.

Chapter summaries

Chapter 1 focuses on the institutional context from which the programmes examined in this book emerged. While acknowledging that the concepts of both public service and the popular are difficult to define, the chapter examines how they were interpreted by the BBC, and how their relationship changed over time, moving across the early history of radio and television, up until the advent of ITV. The chapter then sets out how and why the case studies examined in the book might be categorised as popular.

Chapter 2 explores The Grove Family (BBC, 1954–57), which has secured a certain visibility in British television history due to its status as British television’s first soap opera. Precisely because soap opera is often perceived as a highly commercial genre (with its roots in American commercial radio), we are primed to expect that what is now perceived as the BBC’s first television soap is likely to be tempered by instruction and education. Adopting a discursive approach to genre (Mittell, 2004a), and drawing on new archival research into the programme, Chapter 2 revisits this categorisation with the aim of reassessing how The Grove Family has been categorised and perceived. In exploring the generic clusters through which the programme negotiated its identity (principally documentary, comedy, crime and melodrama), the chapter examines The Grove Family’s bid to address a wide audience, particularly one with an expanding class base, while exploring how this address was shaped by its complex investment in realism.

Chapter 3