Thatcher summed up her feelings, in November 1990, in a comment to a foreign dignitary she was showing out of Downing Street just as Rupert Murdoch was arriving to inform her that Sky would have
to merge with BSB. ‘Here is Mr Murdoch,’ she announced, ‘who gives us Sky News, the only unbiased news in the UK.’
47
By
then, she had been foiled in her efforts to make the BBC at least partly dependent on advertising revenue rather than the licence fee alone. Chaired by Professor Alan Peacock, the committee the
government set up to look into the matter issued a report in July 1986 recommending that the licence fee should stay. Though Thatcher’s attitude towards a national institution like the BBC
appeared too iconoclastic even for many Conservatives, Labour was moving towards the opposite extreme and pondering aloud whether it should get rid of commercial television altogether: ‘If
advertising was replaced by an expanded licence fee (perhaps moderated by direct taxation) there would be a wide range of immediate benefits,’ the shadow arts minister, Norman Buchan, assured
the Peacock committee, since it ‘would open the way for new mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness’.
48
Instead, the government
reluctantly accepted that the BBC should remain advert-free and even rejected the Peacock committee’s majority view that both Radio 1 and Radio 2 should be privatized.
It was an irony that, despite having been established to advise on the BBC’s future funding, the Peacock committee’s report ultimately had a greater effect on the complexion of ITV,
recommending that its regional franchises should be put out to competitive tender. Among the minority on the committee who dissented from the proposal was the former
Guardian
editor,
Alistair Hetherington, who warned that ‘it would be difficult to choose between a company with a long and good record of programming and one with no track record in television but plenty of
money’.
49
For Labour, Norman Buchan went from the specific to the philosophical, contending that civilization ‘cannot be left in the
hands of the profit makers’.
50
To free-marketeers, however, the mysterious fashion in which the IBA decided which regional companies should
retain or lose their ITV franchises was ripe for change. Here, they came across opposition that was so determined it even included prominent profit-makers. With endorsement from popular
entertainers, including Rowan Atkinson and Esther Rantzen, the Campaign for Quality Television was launched with the intention of ensuring that there should be a regulatory quality threshold,
rather than the
franchise being awarded to the highest bidder in a blind auction. To this, the government made a modest concession, with the Broadcasting Act 1990 permitting
the highest bid to be blocked if, ‘in exceptional circumstances’, the quality offered was perceived to be unacceptably low. When the auction was held in 1991, a number of bidders were
duly disqualified by this stipulation, but even Thatcher was among those unhappy at some of the winners and losers, writing to Bruce Gyngell, TV-am’s chairman, that she was
‘heartbroken’ that his company had lost its franchise, especially since ‘I am only too painfully aware that I was responsible for the legislation.’
51
The longer-term consequences of the act were an unprecedented spate of mergers and consolidations of regional stations, to the extent that the merger of Carlton and
Granada in 2004 brought all the regions of England and Wales under one parent company (in 1990 there had still been eleven separate companies). Thames was among the once mighty station
franchise-holders that duly carved out a future as independent production companies, vying to have their programmes commissioned, though even in this role Thames found itself subsumed into a
pan-European media conglomerate. Thatcher may have hoped that the enhanced competition would be felt most profoundly by the BBC. Yet the arrival of Sky, followed by new digital channels and the
internet, proved to have far more transformative consequences for the nation’s main commercial channel, where consolidation appeared the only solution to the pressures of globalized
capitalism. Having commanded 70 per cent of the audience in 1980, ITV’s share had fallen below 20 per cent thirty years later.
You Have Been Watching
How was British culture in the eighties shaped and reflected by television? There was much to repel those who identified the spirit of the age as superficial, consumerist and
unserious. As if to confirm such prejudices,
The Price Is Right
became popular by unapologetically embracing all three attributes. With a near-delirious studio audience roaring on
contestants invited by the presenter Leslie Crowther to ‘Come on Down!’ the show had the audacity to offer prizes for demonstrating no particular skill beyond an ability to guess the
price of consumer durables. Avarice was its own reward. Yet what at the time looked like a vulgar celebration of materialism and the workings of the free market, assumes an altogether gentler
complexion when viewed from the perspective of a quarter-century later. The evident excitement of
The Price Is Right
’s contestants at scooping the prize of a portable colour television
or an exercise-bike suggested how little their lives were dominated by the sort of material possessions taken for granted by scoffing critics of more affluent means. In 1988 – four years
after Central Television launched
The
Price Is Right
– the IBA issued new regulations that raised the maximum that could be offered on game shows to an average
of £1,750 per show.
52
Whoever wanted to be a millionaire was not going to get rich quick by being an eighties game-show contestant.
The Price Is Right
was a clone of an American prime-time show and a continuing debate throughout the period concerned the extent to which the presumed superiority of British television
was being threatened by American imports and their perceived lowbrow values. British quality was measured by the artistry of its television dramas, especially literary adaptations, though
transatlantic differences were no less stark in the social milieux depicted by rival soap operas. Two American soaps proved especially popular:
Dallas
(1978–91) and
Dynasty
(1982–91). In November 1980, twenty-one million Britons watched to find out who had shot
Dallas
’s anti-hero, J. R. Ewing, in an episode that was heavily reported not only in the
tabloid press but even on the BBC’s nine o’clock news. What
Dallas
and
Dynasty
shared was an escapist glimpse into the lives of the super-wealthy. In contrast, the British
soaps continued to inhabit the environment of more ordinary communities. This remained the case not only for ITV’s long-established
Coronation Street
,
Emmerdale Farm
and
Crossroads
(the latter discontinued in 1988), but also for the decade’s two newcomers. Where Channel 4’s Merseyside-based
Brookside
differed from the established British
soaps was that it tackled contentious and even political subjects which they had tended to avoid, such as unemployment, strike action, domestic violence, homosexuality and Aids. Three years later,
BBC 1 finally decided that it also needed to attract the mass audience that a successful soap would offer and launched
EastEnders
, which by the end of 1985 was attracting an audience of
twenty-two million. The mansions and power-dressing paraded in
Dynasty
were nowhere to be seen in
EastEnders
, though both soaps placed family relationships at the heart of their
stories. Rather, for
EastEnders
, as for
Coronation Street
, the traditional ‘local’ was where much of the social interaction took place and the London-based series
essentially continued with the format of its Salford equivalent – although a little grittier in that the character of ‘Dirty Den’ Watts, a pub landlord of compelling menace, was
played by an actor, Leslie Grantham, who had served time for murder. More than half the UK’s population watched the Christmas 1986 episode in which he served his on-screen wife with divorce
papers.
Two months before this kitchen-sink
coup de théâtre
, the BBC bought in from Australia a new lunchtime soap called
Neighbours
. Set in a classless, unpretentiously
comfortable Melbourne suburb, it was distinct from the socially stratified habitats of the British and American alternatives, appealing especially to young people (the pop stars Kylie Minogue and
Jason Donovan first became famous in it) and to those attracted by its sunny and generally
optimistic outlook.
Neighbours
exemplified a trend in the eighties whereby
Australian cultural exports became as natural a part of British television scheduling as American ones. In 1989, ITV felt it needed an Australian soap of its own and bought
Home and Away
.
Among the performers who benefited from the new appetite for all things Antipodean was the comedian Paul Hogan – first through his own television show on Channel 4 and subsequently through
the film
Crocodile Dundee
, while his promotion of Castlemaine XXXX coincided with a pronounced boom in British sales of Australian lager alongside those of Australian wine.
Britain’s most influential Australian (albeit a US citizen for business reasons after 1985) still found little to his liking. In delivering the MacTaggart lecture at the 1989 Edinburgh
Television Festival, Rupert Murdoch revelled in the opportunity to portray himself as the country’s emancipator from a stultifying form of cultural imperialism that the BBC and ITV/Channel 4
sustained under the guise of the reputed world-class quality of their programme-making. ‘In the values that it exudes, British television has been an integral part of the British
disease,’ the media proprietor claimed. Obsessed with class, most drama was ‘run by the costume department’ and ‘the socially mobile are portrayed as uncaring, businessmen
as crooks, money-making is to be despised . . . To the British establishment with its dislike of moneymaking and its notion that public service is the preserve of paternalists,’ he laid down
the challenge ‘that anybody who within the law of the land provides a service that the public wants at a price they can afford is providing a public service’. Murdoch, of course, had
his own Sky network to promote and an interest in disparaging the old guard it sought to displace. Yet he had identified a deep-seated prejudice that pervaded British, but not American or
Australian, television. With the exception of
Howard’s Way
(a BBC drama serial about a man who invested his redundancy pay in his own yacht-building company), it was noticeable that
the output of the four terrestrial channels replicated the decade’s serious theatre, cinema and literature in depicting negatively entrepreneurs and the socially mobile.
There were elements of disdain for those ‘on the make’ even in the decade’s comedy. Harry Enfield created the character of an unpleasant plasterer, whose cash-in-hand
employment ensured that he had ‘loadsamoney’ and who invited the less fortunate to ‘look at my wad!’ The comedian got the idea from observing Tottenham Hotspur fans holding
aloft £10 notes to taunt the supporters of visiting teams from the depressed north. Thanks to Enfield’s popularizing of the expression, during 1988 ‘loadsamoney’ became a
catchphrase to describe a far broader range of southerners who were doing well out of the economic boom, and was even briefly taken up by Neil Kinnock as a term to indict Thatcherism – though
accusing the Tories of helping ordinary people to get rich quick was a questionable vote-winning
strategy. A somewhat more generous view of the small businessman was offered
by the BBC comedy
Only Fools and Horses
, which, in terms of viewing figures, became the most successful sitcom in British history. Beginning in 1981 and continuing throughout the decade, it
was set on a Peckham housing estate, where the essentially warm-hearted market-trader, ‘Del Boy’ Trotter, continues to reassure his younger brother that ‘this time next year
we’ll be millionaires’ – even though, in reality, Trotter’s Independent Traders deals in little beyond selling faulty or stolen goods to gullible punters. A similar
portrayal of the small businessman as an, albeit endearing, minor con-man was Arthur Daley in Thames Television’s hit comedy
Minder
. In dress and tone, Daley actually resembled a
post-war spiv (appropriately, since he was played by George Cole, the ‘Flash Harry’ spiv of the 1950s St Trinian’s films), for whom the eighties offered renewed opportunities to
pursue ‘a nice little earner’. Daley imagined this made him an entrepreneur, whereas actually he was, like Del Boy, engaged in little more than conceiving scams or offloading
‘hot’ merchandise.
Only Fools and Horses
and
Minder
gently mocked small businessmen with big ideas because their interpretation of the free market owed much to the black
market, while the portrayals of Arthur Daley and Del Boy were affectionate partly because their rags-to-riches schemes usually backfired. An honest and successful nouveau-riche businessman
ultimately coming to the aid of an ‘old-money’ establishment widow provided the plot of
To the Manor Born
, a sitcom that ran from 1979 to 1981, but this owed more to the outgoing
decade in which it was conceived, when the 83 per cent top rate of income tax and 75 per cent death duties almost made the wealthy into victims capable of attracting an audience’s sympathy.
As the eighties gathered momentum and making money became identified with the tenets of Thatcherism, upward social mobility came to be portrayed as a route not to salvation but, at the very least,
to self-delusion.
Murdoch’s assessment of British broadcasting bias may have contained some truth, but his suggestion that he offered a brighter, more democratic, alternative did not go unchallenged. A
large portion of Sky1’s output consisted of American imports and to an establishment (though not anti-Murdoch) figure like Sir William Rees-Mogg, ‘international market forces’,
while generally much preferable to national monopoly, ‘tend to break down national culture’, threatening a ‘McDonald’s culture in which television provides the international
fast food of the mind’.
53
This was putting it strongly since only the most superficial viewing of, say,
The Simpsons
– which
Murdoch’s Sky brought to British audiences in 1989 – could have mistaken it for unintelligent or culturally indistinct. Yet the equation of American imports with undemanding content
remained a popular perception nonetheless. The other issue was that the impressive back-catalogue of English literature meant
that, unless adaptations were to stop, British
television’s costume departments were going to be kept busy. Backward-looking they may have been, but literary adaptations continued to provide many of the most critically acclaimed
programmes, a reality that inevitably made those who disparaged them look more like philistines than prosecutors of a cultural critique. For the BBC, Alan Plater adapted two of Anthony
Trollope’s novels as
The Barchester Chronicles
(1982) and four years later crafted
Fortunes of War
from the novels of Olivia Manning, starring two promising young actors,
Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. Yet the successful literary adaptation was by no means the preserve of the BBC. Granada Television scored a critical and commercial hit with its version of Paul
Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’,
The Jewel in the Crown
(1984), which, while set in the last years of British imperial power, was hardly a glorification of it. Granada’s
greatest triumph, however, had come three years previously with its eleven-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
. Directed by Charles Sturridge,
Brideshead
represented a watershed in British television drama not for its aristocratic subject matter, but for bringing to the small screen the superior filming techniques and production values of the big
screen. Despite the availability of videotape in the 1970s, the legacy of live broadcast drama meant that interior scenes were still shot on over-lit studio sets.
Brideshead
let in the
natural light of real locations, ensuring that television drama never looked as amateur and ‘stagey’ again. These developments were put to good use in another of the decade’s
popular genres, the adaptation of crime novels. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple was given a new lease of life by the BBC in 1984 and ITV did likewise for Hercule Poirot five years later.
Dispensing with the old-fashioned costumes but retaining the historic backdrop of Oxford, ITV’s run of
Inspector Morse
, which began in 1987, took Colin Dexter’s creation not just
to fifteen million viewers in the UK but to seventy-five million in the rest of the world, while attracting scriptwriters of the stamp of Anthony Minghella, Julian Mitchell and Charles Wood.