This New Noise (6 page)

Ask those involved in these moments of creative blooming, and they will often tell you much the same thing: ‘management’ was discreet and enabling; artists were free to experiment; commissioning was not mired in lengthy bureaucracy; the stakes were relatively low and ambition high; failure was an option. Some argue that those conditions are in much shorter supply now. The often-expressed tension between ‘creatives’ and ‘managers’ has always been there. Matheson wrote, ‘There is a constant pull between the claims of administration and creation. Under what conditions shall the creative worker serve? Ideally he needs quiet, freedom from routine, time in which to lie fallow after a big piece of work, time to go to and fro seeking inspiration. Such behaviour may seem another name for idling to the rigid administrator.’

Sir David Attenborough’s career has spanned both creative work and administration. He was the second controller of BBC2 – which launched in 1964 – from 1965 to 1969. At the beginning, only a handful of people had the new sets capable of receiving the service, and at first it was available only in the south-east. We talked in his new library, built onto the house in Richmond where he has lived since the 1950s: a galleried, top-lit space with a grand
piano in its centre (Haydn sonatas on the stand) and set about with African sculptures and his collection of modern British studio ceramics. The walls were lined with thousands of art books, all neatly arranged by type from Aegean art to Indian sculpture. The natural history library, presumably yet more vast, was elsewhere.

The principle behind BBC2 was that it should not be higher brow than the BBC, but distinct from it. ‘The idea that you could do it by height of brow was nonsense. I mean there are plenty of people who like string quartets and plenty of people who like football, and plenty of people who like both, and so just to put on chamber music opposite football was irrelevant,’ he said. At the same time, ‘it felt very free, creatively free, because you couldn’t use the normal statistics, because the audience was changing all the time, because the coverage [of the transmitters] was changing all the time. I mean it was a doddle of a job. I was shielded from the pressures that BBC1 was taking.’ He added, ‘Occasionally I get nice compliments for inventing
Civilisation
[Sir Kenneth Clark’s series on Western art]. They say, “How brave.” It wasn’t in the least brave. It was just that I thought it was a good idea. And there was nobody with a big stick saying, “Naughty, naughty, you didn’t get 3 million viewers, you only got 2.5 [million].” And that was why it was the dream job, running BBC2. A paradisiacal job.’

Civilisation
had endured as a classic series, he argued, because of its great writing, and the power of Clark as an intellect and a communicator. Attenborough despaired of some of its successors. He picked out as typical a
programme that had been aired just before we met:
Apples, Pears and Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting.
‘It had a typical crappy kind of sense of “Oh we can’t have a mandarin point of view, so what you will do is to get 10 different people, we’ll interview them and then we’ll just sling little slices of it together.” And so there’s no thesis, there’s no continuity, there’s no central thought … it was exasperating, empty-headed. The trouble is that we live in a populist culture where we can’t accept that there’s anybody who actually knows more about things than you do.’ Broadcasting, he said, ‘should be the cream of thinkers in society who have been given by the BBC a platform on which they may speak. But the BBC doesn’t believe that now.’

The young David Attenborough, behind the camera

An early programme on BBC2, commissioned by Attenborough’s predecessor, Michael Peacock, was
The Great War
. Marking fifty years since the war began, it mixed archive footage with testimony from survivors, and was the first of the great blockbuster history series on television – the progenitor of Jeremy Isaacs’s classic series for Thames,
The World at War.
The idea for it came from producers Antony Jay and Alasdair Milne, the buccaneering youngsters who had been making a splash with
Tonight
, the early-evening current affairs show. At first the notion was simply to find a way of showing archive footage held by the Imperial War Museum. But the young guns decided to treat
The Great War
as if they were putting together
Tonight
– ‘approaching the world today with a popular voice’, in the words of historian and producer Taylor Downing.

And so the importance of
The Great War
was that it gave voice to the everyday veterans of the conflict. An advert in the
Radio Times,
asking for contributors, resulted in about 30,000 responses. The researcher, Julia Cave, ‘returned from her holiday barely able to get in through the door of her office’, said Downing. General Montgomery (in the First World War a junior officer) wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
offering to be interviewed, but the producers were not interested in the man who later commanded the Eighth Army. This was not to be a parade of famous names. Despite its shortcomings (it had little time for women and the manner in which it failed to distinguish archive footage from feature film sequences would be deemed unacceptable today), it was intensely true to the possibilities of television as a form. It gave voice to
ordinary people, captured evanescent human experience. It was ahead of academia, which had yet to embrace oral history. It showed that television could act as a nation’s generous and reflective memory bank, drawing in the breath of lived lives and projecting them back into ordinary homes. Its title sequence might have come from a Bergman film: a cross is bleakly silhouetted against a grey sky; then the camera pans down to the base of a trench, where a corpse lies, horribly contorted. This against an intense score by Wilfred Josephs. The ambition was both epic and deeply humane.

That’s Life!
mixed campaigning journalism with lighter items. (From left) Michael Groth, Bill Buckly, Esther Rantzen, Gavin Campbell (top), Doc Cox (bottom), Joanna Monro.

At its best, the important thing about the BBC has always been its cultural heterogeneity; the fact that it is a cheerful gallimaufry of the high and the low, the serious and the silly. Television has been the perfect medium for reflecting what BBC documentary-maker Adam Curtis called, when we met at New Broadcasting House, ‘the libertarian revolution that’s happened in this country: the breaking down of cultural barriers, the breaking down of social barriers. The mixture that the BBC invented – trash shows, and posh, clever, high-end shows – has been appropriate to its time.’

As a young man, he was a researcher on the popular consumer programme
That’s Life!
under Esther Rantzen, which mixed campaigning investigative journalism with joke items on talking dogs and curiously shaped vegetables. Now he is known for highly wrought political documentaries, such as
Pandora’s Box
(1992) and
The Power of Nightmares
(2004) – which he said he made cheaply by ‘swimming between the cracks’: improvising, borrowing and making do within the ‘chaotic’ structures of the BBC. But he uses what he learned from Rantzen: she taught him, he said somewhat self-deprecatingly, the ‘tricks of trash journalism. I took them and bolted them on to high-end meta-tosh.’

His fellow researcher was the youthful Peter Bazalgette, who ended up as chair of the UK arm of Endemol Productions, and who made 1990s lifestyle shows such as
Changing Rooms
and
Ground Force
. He also used Rantzen’s tricks.
‘There is an alchemy’, said Bazalgette, ‘whereby you take factual information, which has some connection, umbilical or tangential, to public service, and you make it entertaining. How do you make it entertaining? You inject humanity and narrative. That’s what I learned from her.’ His shows were like old-fashioned instructional DIY or cookery shows – but with fun and story attached, just as
That’s Life!
mingled humour with reporting on serious issues.

The television later made by Bazalgette and Curtis could hardly, on the surface, be more different, and yet their work, each in its own way, is the product of a superlatively televisual miscegenation. The point, Melvyn Bragg told me, is that the BBC has historically recognised the voracious and various appetites within each of us. ‘Everyone watched
Morecambe and Wise,
and
The Billy Cotton Band Show.
And because it was on television you could, as it were, watch it in secret.’ By everyone, he meant intellectuals and highbrows, too. ‘There it was, an insignificant object in the corner of a room; you could switch it on like an electric light, enjoy
Morecambe and Wise
without your friends knowing. Or, on the other hand, you could enjoy watching Elgar without your friends knowing.’ This is the BBC: the avant-garde and the crowd-pleasing, the brash and the brilliant and the beautiful all together, many streams flowing into the same wide ocean.

In the end, it goes back to the sculpture of the sower. We could all tell our own stories about the moment we heard or saw something on the BBC that changed us: whether you were the oddball suburban kid who saw Ziggy Stardust on
Top of the Pops
and knew you weren’t
alone in the world; or whether you were like me, seeing Wagner’s
Ring
on TV as a child and drawn into a mysterious, seductive world of gods and magic and warrior women.

Sir Richard Eyre, the former artistic director of the National Theatre, sometime BBC TV director and ex-BBC governor, remembers how important television was to him, growing up in Dorset in the 1950s. We met while he was rehearsing
The Pajama Game
in a church hall in Kensington in the summer of 2014. As I walked through the room to greet him, swarms of leotarded actors surged past, taking a break from the song-and-dance number they’d just hoofed through. ‘We didn’t have art galleries, didn’t go to the theatre, didn’t go to the cinema,’ he told me. ‘The books in the house were mostly military history. So the BBC was my education.
As You Like It
with Vanessa Redgrave was completely transformative; so was
Monitor
with Huw Wheldon … This was art that I hadn’t dreamed existed. It was absolutely contagious and it changed my life. And it wouldn’t have happened without the existence of the BBC.’

Dennis Potter had a similar story to tell when he addressed the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1993. The wireless of his childhood was like a totem or fetish: ‘a whorled, fluted and beknobbed oblong which could allow anyone to feel like Joan of Arc’. He went on: ‘I would not dispute for one wayward whistle or crackle that the BBC of my childhood was not paternalistic and often stuffily pompous. It saw itself in an almost priestly role. But at a crucial period of my life it threw open the “magic casement” on great sources of mind-scape at a time when
books were hard to come by, and when I had never stepped into a theatre or even a concert hall, and would have been scared to do so even if given the chance.’

Matheson recalled that ‘during the exceptionally severe frosts of 1929’ she asked one of her talkers to read from Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando
– ‘the romantic chapter describing the great frost in Elizabethan London’. Some months later, the talker was being chauffeured by a ‘young mechanic’ in ‘a large manufacturing town’. The mechanic said, ‘I listened to your reading from a book about the frozen Thames. When you finished I was so excited I went out into the night and walked and walked, I don’t know where. I would give anything to have that book.’ The seed was sown.

On the night of 23 February 1950 the evening's television schedule began with the usual announcement of the programme. There would be films, including an American slapstick with Charley Chase; and, as customary, the 9 p.m. news delivered in sound only. But this was an exceptional evening: the night of the general election, with Clement Attlee's huge 1945 majority contested by Winston Churchill. The turnout that day was an immense 83.9 per cent. ‘We shall be giving results', intoned the announcer, ‘as they come in from 10.45 to round about one o'clock in the morning. They will be shown on charts, diagrams and maps with commentaries by R. B. McCallum of Pembroke College, Oxford, and David Butler of Nuffield – who made a special study of the 1945 election. And Chester Wilmot. We shall also go over to Trafalgar Square, where results will be flashed up on a large screen and where there will be commentary by Richard Dimbleby … And now, to open the programme, we have a film showing the latest types of British aircraft which were on show at Farnborough in September …'

Both television studios at Alexandra Palace were ready to go after a flurry of preparations and a blizzard of paperwork: in one there were 12-foot-tall maps on the walls, as well as a library ladder on wheels, a pointer, and sticks of
charcoal; in the other, there was a chart laid out like a cricket scoreboard, another resembling a thermometer, and a board showing a ‘list of personalities
IN
and
OUT
, according to the swiftly shuttling memos. The programme was due to continue well past the normal 10.30 p.m. close-down, despite dark prophecies from the engineering staff that ‘you'll blow up the transmitters'. In the event, the engineer in charge settled for warning his team that though there would be late catering facilities, ‘staff may find it an advantage if they produce a Thermos flask'.

Sitting in a row at oak desks were the anchorman, Australian former war reporter Wilmot, and the two election experts: McCallum, the political historian who coined the term ‘psephology' (the study of votes cast); and his young protégé David Butler, then an Oxford postgraduate in his twenties, who was later one of the co-inventors of the ‘swingometer' and who provided TV commentaries on the next nine elections, until 1979. Neither had appeared on the small screen before. In 2014, Butler, then ninety, remembered that ‘by the end of that two days of the election, I'd spent more time in front of the cameras than I'd ever spent in front of the screen'. McCallum had told the producer that he ‘knew nothing about television'. He began his spiel by explaining that ‘this is more or less a normal election' – which was in itself, after the exceptional circumstances of the war, a novelty. ‘The parliament just dissolved has lasted nearly its full legal time of five years. In 1945, we had a parliament ten years old, prolonged by statute throughout the war. It was the longest parliament which had sat in this country since the reign of Charles II
… Now we have had years of the regular cut-and-thrust of government and opposition. The public is ready for the election, and had been ready for months past.'

The election programme went on until shutdown at 2.13 a.m., shifting between Wilmot and the experts in the studio and Dimbleby in Trafalgar Square, where there was a live results board erected courtesy of the
Daily Mail
(confusingly, it was slightly out of sync with the results coming into Alexandra Palace). There had been endless kerfuffles about how most accurately to get the checked and verified results to the television studios – in the end they were telephoned in from Broadcasting House, where they were being collated for the wireless operation. Studio hands in gym shoes ran the results between Studios A and B. They were then handwritten on caption cards by volunteers from the design department. ‘It took about forty seconds from the result being handed to the caption artist for them to put in the figures, and that was time enough for my people to use their slide rules, and then pass me a slip of paper with the result percentaged, so I could say, “A swing of such-and-such”,' remembered Butler when we met in the marbled foyer of the British Academy. His ‘people' were fellow Oxford students, hidden just off camera to his right. Behind him, artists annotated the giant map of Britain by hand – white squares for Conservative vote, black for Labour and a grey-and-white stripe for Liberal.

The stakes were high: the BBC's future was under consideration by the Beveridge Parliamentary Committee and any hint of bias would have been a disaster. A memo from
Norman Collins, head of the television service, had made it clear before the night that ‘though we are fully at liberty to analyse the results as they come through and draw such historic comparisons as may be relevant, we must scrupulously avoid anything that may be interpreted as political prophecy'. There would be no broadcasts of polling booths or counts: ‘too politically invidious'. But the night went smoothly: there were no big gaffes. Butler in particular ‘threw himself into the enterprise', remembered the programme's producer. ‘He had a prodigious memory for detail, a taste for statistics, a total lack of nervousness of television cameras and an immense constructive and practical interest in methods of presentation.' Butler remembered the night as ‘an adventure'. He added, ‘I was doing what I'd been doing in private in public and I was quite quick with responses.' The political situation itself was less clear-cut: Attlee was returned to power with a majority of only six seats, and called an election the following year, when Churchill and the Conservatives were elected.

This programme established, from a standing start, the basic recipe for election-results programmes that is still followed today – an anchor and experts in the studio providing analysis aided by now unrecognisably whizzy graphics, along with outside broadcasts. And it was very largely the work of one woman: its producer, Grace Wyndham Goldie.

The programme was created, she remembered, in the teeth of an institutional indifference verging on hostility – what Butler called ‘the obscurantist bits of Reithism that were surviving in the Beeb at that time'. Wireless still
reigned supreme at Broadcasting House. Television was something of an upstart: it ‘could be brushed aside; it was not a medium to be taken seriously', as Goldie put it in her book
Facing the Nation.
There were innumerable technical and practical objections to her plans. She was supported by Collins (who, in a memo, enthusiastically envisaged ‘some piece of apparatus like the score-board at Lord's' in the studio). But Tahu Hole, the head of news, was uncooperative and Cecil McGivern, the head of television programmes, was discouraging, arguing that the way to tackle the results was simply to interrupt the evening's programme with the occasional shot of the board in Trafalgar Square. Goldie, however, immediately realised that the election was an event made for television – that there were possibilities of a quite different order from those offered by sound, which ‘simply put on the results which came out from Reuters and the Press Association' with the gaps between announcements filled by light music.

Election night 1950: from left: David Butler, R. B. McCallum, and Chester Wilmot

Grace Wyndham Goldie, pioneer of TV current affairs

The day Attlee called the election, she had been lunching with Wilmot. ‘There and then we cooked up … a plan, drawing pictures on the tablecloth,' she recalled in the 1970s. Statistics, share of vote, location of constituencies, the then emergent concept of ‘swing': all of these were infinitely easier to see than to take in by ear. Added to that, the election itself was a national drama; not merely a clash between Attlee and Churchill, not just a battle between ‘two kings … fighting in the sunset' but an event containing ‘the dramatic quality of the actual. When you have events that are actually occurring and if you can see and hear them … it's the kind of drama that you get from
nothing else,' she remembered. As she wrote later, the 1950 programme was a watershed moment: ‘Producers were learning how to handle political occasions in ways which suited television without departing from the duty of the BBC to be fair, impartial and to refrain from expressing its own opinions.' There would, she predicted, be a profoundly equalising impact on British society: ‘No one, not even a Macmillan or an Attlee, a Gaitskell or an Alec Douglas-Home, a Wilson, a Heath or a Margaret Thatcher, whose whole future and that of their parties depended upon the result, knew what it would be earlier than a shepherd in the Highlands or a housewife in Islington. The privilege of the few had once again been extended to the many.'

Grace Wyndham Goldie, remembered her protégé Alasdair Milne, was ‘a small, birdlike woman with a striking finely chiselled face … a sharp questing mind and great charm'. Her physical delicacy was, to her colleagues, somewhat at odds with her character: she was articulate, persuasive, tough-minded and often intimidating: ‘more eagle than wren', remembered David Attenborough, no mean ornithologist, in his autobiography. (When we met, he used another metaphor – a ‘ferocious battleaxe'.) Butler remembered her as sometimes ‘difficult and capricious'. It was said of her, he told me, that she was ‘a woman of iron whim'. At the time of the election results programme she was forty-nine years old and had been working in television for a little less than three years. A photograph from the early 1950s shows her sitting in a studio gallery with
banks of screens behind her, a clipboard on her lap, right hand brandishing a pen. Her hair is swept up neatly, there are pearls in her ears and a brooch at her breast. She radiates a certain practical glamour: but above all the air of a seasoned, competent professional woman.

Born Grace Nisbet in 1900, she was the child of a Scottish engineer who worked on the Mallaig railway and the Aswan Dam; much of her childhood was spent in Egypt. After a year at Cheltenham Ladies' College, at the tail end of the First World War, she enrolled at the University of Bristol and completed a history degree; afterwards she went up to study philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford. She tended to divide the world into those whom she regarded as in her intellectual league, and those with a ‘dishevelled' brain. She taught history in a girls' school for a few years, and then married actor Frank Wyndham Goldie – with whom she had a deeply loving relationship until his early death in 1957. Butler remembered him as ‘a very decent, wholesome man who greatly admired Grace'. They at first lived in Liverpool, where he was a member of the company at the Playhouse and she worked reading scripts and, in the evenings, lecturing for the Workers' Educational Association to ‘unemployed miners' in the villages of Lancashire. In the 1970s she remembered the expectations that she and her highly educated female friends brought to their married life: ‘If we'd got married any career that mattered was our husband's career and I had no intention of going on in any full-time job of any kind.'

In 1934, when Frank landed a substantial part at the Criterion Theatre, they moved to London. At a dinner party
one night she turned to one of her fellow guests and ‘we argued fairly hotly … about some political goings-on in Europe about which I have no doubt I was totally ignorant but had strong views nevertheless. And after this dinner party … I had a letter asking me to lunch and it was from this man with whom I'd argued at dinner.' The man turned out to be Richard Lambert, erstwhile colleague and admirer of Hilda Matheson (who had resigned three years previously). Lambert offered her the role of radio-drama critic on the BBC's magazine the
Listener
. Discussing the nature of the job over lunch with him and Val Gielgud, the BBC's head of plays, she asked what kind of criticism they had in mind. Gielgud pulled out of his pocket something written for one of the Manchester papers by D. G. Bridson, who had gone on to become a BBC producer. ‘It was vit ri olic, it was absolutely destructive beyond belief,' she remembered. ‘And Val to my extreme astonishment said, “Now that's the sort of criticism I'd like.”'