Morning and afternoon delights...

Nothing to do all day? Now you can just watch the telly... ITV announces the commencement of daytime programming, October 1972.

The beginnings of daytime television...

This morning, at about 9.25am, I sat down to watch an episode of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray – on DVD, of course – it’s a very long time since Stingray last featured in the television schedules (fourteen years and four months to be exact). This always happens around this time of year on any notably sunny morning, the fine weather serving to rekindle memories of summer holiday repeats in the early 1970s. For several years, Stingray was a staple of these early morning schedules, with episodes appearing in 1973, ’74 and ’76, then again in 1982 and 1987. Although other Gerry Anderson titles were shown in similar slots (including Captain Scarlet and Fireball XL5), it’s Stingray that I’ve always associated most strongly with these daytime broadcasts. Despite its underwater setting, Stingray episodes often had a bright, sunlit appearance (exemplified by the generic shots of Marineville, which was almost always depicted against a blue, summery sky). I think the association was in place for me as early as 1965 when, during a period of notably fine weather that lasted into the early autumn, I remember being bought a wooden jigsaw depicting Stingray’s Marineville headquarters. The blue sky may have been a painted backdrop, but to me it might as well have been the real thing. Stingray, and summer skies... a lifelong, pavlovian association was beginning to form...

1976 was a memorably fine summer and once again, our local ITV station ATV chose to schedule morning repeats of Stingray, beginning, somewhat frustratingly, about two weeks prior to the end of term. Unlike earlier repeat runs, where two episodes had been shown per week, the 1976 repeats were limited to a single broadcast, on Thursday mornings, typically at around 11am. Naturally, my brother and myself made sure to watch every episode, preserving audio recordings of their soundtracks (the audio also preserved the temporary breakdown of the episode Set Sail For Adventure which ground to a halt during the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates [yes, that Simon Bates] to extemporise pointlessly for about twenty seconds while the fault was fixed).

* * *

The whole phenomenon of watching old television during the summer holidays is familiar to many, especially anyone of the right age during the 1970s, which is when the whole thing got started. It was ITV who took the initiative, when in October 1972, after five years of unsuccessful representations to various governments, the network finally got its way, and a new schedule of daytime programmes was introduced. For those like me who remembered the classics of the 1960s, this provided the opportunity to miss countless episodes of Danger Man, Strange Report and so on, which were broadcast on weekday afternoons when I was at school. During term time, the morning schedules were set aside for educational broadcasts, but when these ended for the holidays, a new slot became vacant, and it was here, in the ATV region, that repeats of Stingray and Captain Scarlet began to figure from July 1973.

The BBC had made some attempts to do likewise in 1972, with the classic serial The Flashing Blade featuring on school holiday mornings, but the schedule was piecemeal, and aside from sports coverage, the service tended to close down again at around 11am. A similar situation prevailed in 1973, with daily episodes of The Adventures of Tintin, followed by a factual half hour item and closedown at 11am. A similar line-up would continue through the 1970s, with incremental increases in the amount of children’s programming being broadcast, although the mid-morning closedown remained a staple (most likely retained as a scheduled maintenance block for transmitter engineers). By this time, ITV was running a complete daytime schedule, the likes of which would not be seen on the rival station for several years.

Of course, the extended broadcasting hours were more than a mere excuse to show afternoon repeats, and ITV threw a not inconsiderable budget into providing new series, tailor-made for the daytime audience, which a TVTimes article identified as ‘the housewife, the child, the shiftworker, the pensioner, the sick or disabled.’ New soaps were commissioned, including the perennial Emmerdale Farm, alongside now forgotten offerings like Harriet’s Back in Town, a story centered on a recently-divorced woman played by Pauline Yates (perhaps best known for her role as the wife of Reginald Perrin). There were new quiz programmes including Mr. and Mrs. and, a few years later, television’s first serious delve into its own archives with the nostalgia gameshow Those Wonderful TV Times. There was a much-trumpeted lunchtime news bulletin, pitched as a daytime equivalent of New at Ten; and there were brand new programmes for the very young, an audience whom ITV had traditionally left in the capable hands of their rival’s Watch With Mother. Both Pipkins and Rainbow made their debut during ITV’s first week of daytime television in October 1972, and would remain staples of the lunchtime schedule for the forseeable future. 

The arrival of a full daytime programme schedule, as opposed to the earlier model of schools, sport and closedowns was indeed a watershed moment in British television, the first paviour on the way towards today’s style of broadcasting. Daytime programming has long been taken as read, across all networks, and broadcasters now largely continue to show programmes through the night. Children now have their own dedicated channels, leaving the main networks clear to show cookery and DIY programmes in their morning and afternoon schedules where once old series and films held sway. Such vintage items have, however, recently found a new home in the form of vintage TV and film channel Talking Pictures TV, whose archaic nomenclature belies the fact that its programme schedule is comprised largely of items from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The surfeit of television channels is a situation that is unlikely to endure. With downloads fast becoming the preferred form of delivery for television programming, the traditional schedule is likely to disappear within the next decade, leaving viewers to browse menus of material available on demand at any time. The most hopeful outcome of this will be to drive out today’s plethora of largely superfluous channels broadcasting low-quality cheaply acquired material to notional audiences who probably aren’t even watching. The present broadcasting model needs slimming down: less than one hundred specialist channels would suffice to cater for the majority of viewers, and the instant availability of downloads obviates the need for so many different iterations of Sky Movies, to take just one example. Shopping channels will struggle to survive – indeed, it’s a wonder that in the age of online shopping any still exist.

Twenty years from now, the very idea of a programme schedule will seem as quaint as the 1950s Interlude does to modern viewers; and those summer broadcasts of the 1970s, when daytime television was strange and new will be almost unimaginable. Like summers themselves, their time was fleeting, but the memory – and their legacy – endures.

Nostalgia and reality

Now: lovely, quaint nostalgia. Then: dull bloody normality. (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Imagine you had a time machine, and could select any era to visit. Top of the list would surely be the sixties. Who wouldn’t want to witness first-hand the decade that produced the Beatles, and so many other pop cultural icons, not only in the arena of music, but in film, television, art, literature, you name it. Quite apart from being witness to such epoch-making endeavours would be the ineffably strange experience of witnessing life on the streets as it was lived: the cars, the clothes, the sights long since vanished from the urban landscape. How cool is that? Very. But only to the modern observer. 

Living in the 1960s, or for that matter, the 70s was, in many important respects, cooler than inhabiting the modern world. People were less selfish, not as rude, in less of a hurry, less obsessed with possessions (materialism was certainly a fact of life, but in a form so scaled-back as to be almost unrecognisable by contemporary standards). But here comes the point: back then, it didn’t feel cool to be surrounded by so much good design. It just felt like the norm. Exactly like now, in other words.

Check out any old newsreel film of the 60s, and you’ll see exactly what life was like. But at the same time, you won’t. Because you’re viewing it through the filter of intervening years, coloured by the knowledge of what’s changed, and how modern life is different. Those lovely old cars didn’t look lovely to us at the time: they were just the unremarkable baseline of what everyday life looked like.

I didn’t think very much of British cars during the 1960s. Many of them epitomised a kind of dreary suburbanism, class-conscious in their use of design features, many of which had been scaled-down from more expensive, desirable models, American cars even. The humble Ford Anglia, in its circa 1960 incarnation, took its inward-raking rear window from the far more stylish American Lincoln Continental. But as cars went, the Anglia was stuffily middle-class, a real middle-management machine. Back in the days when Anglias were pretty well ubiquitous on Britain’s roads, I hardly gave them a second look. My perceptions had been skewed by the knowledge that far cooler cars were available, mostly from toy shops, but also via the medium of television.

For Anglia, 1959-68 model. Typical suburban car, typical suburban driveway. Not cool, just very, very ordinary.

Most of my toy cars were American models, like the Ford Thunderbird or Cadillac Eldorado. Some of these late 50s and early 60s American models took their atom-age styling cues from outer space, but in Britain, car makers knew that the nation’s motorists weren’t that adventurous. In any event, the average American saloon was far too big for British roads. Instead, we got scaled-down, ‘suburbanised’ versions of American styles where chrome and fins were certainly present, but in a much more restrained manner. Although I was entirely unaware of the thinking behind the look of a car like Ford’s Zephyr or Zodiac, I found them more aesthetically pleasing than, say, the pipe-and-slippers styling of the Morris Minor, which in its ‘half-timbered’ estate form vaguely resembled a typical mock-tudor suburban villa. To me, the ‘Moggie Minor’ was a ludicrous car, the kind of car your elderly relatives might drive. Equally unsatisfactory was the Austin/Morris 1100, whose styling straddled a deeply uncomfortable line between tradition and modernity. I still hate it, yet at the time it felt so typically British in appearance that its silhouette became the standard shape used to represent cars on the new generation of roadsigns, phased in from the mid-60 onwards (and still in use today).

Old film of Britain’s roads looks to us today like a cavalcade of motoring nostalgia. Back then, it was mere traffic. Noisy, dirty, mostly unlovely, something you wouldn’t take a second look at, unless an E-Type Jag happened by. That’s the difference between how things were and how they seem in retrospect. Nostagia makes us see what was once dreary normality as though it were the creation of some retro-stylist production designer on a period movie. And what holds good for cars also holds good for clothes: even more so, in fact.

Modern Britain is, without doubt, the worst-dressed nation on earth. The day sportswear began to be adopted for everyday use (shopping, going to the pub, etc) was the beginning of the end for anything approaching sartorial elegance in this country, and the average Brit of 2018, regardless of age, gender or social standing is in general, a badly-dressed scruffbag. Baggy, ill-fitting rubbish abounds. Trainers, once the preserve of athletes only, are ubiquitous. And anyone donning a baseball cap without intent to step out onto the diamond in the shoes of Joe DiMaggio should be offered counselling.

As a nation, we were better tailored in the 1960s. Men, on the whole, wore a suit and tie, whether going to work or for a drink down the local. Your typical casual top (weekends in the garden or on the golf course) was either a roll-neck or a Fred Perry-style shirt with three buttons at the neck. Jeans were for students, beatniks and wannabe Rolling Stones. Nobody else would think twice of donning a pair, even as workwear. Women wore skirts, dresses, sometimes slacks (trouser suits had yet to put in an appearance). Children, meanwhile, had the choice of dressing like either a Tiny Tears doll or Just William.

People just wearing whatever they put on this morning: Birmingham street scene, circa 1959 (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Yet I would argue that, to live for a day or two as an average citizen of 1960s Britain, unburdened by modern perceptions of retro and cool, would be a mostly dismal experience, asethetically speaking. We were, then as now, generally badly-dressed. Suits rarely fitted well, and were mostly cut from cheap, unattractive cloth. Forget about what Roger Moore is wearing in your average Saint episode: the typical bloke on the street got his clothes off the peg. Having said which, made-to-measure wasn’t the exotic rarity it’s become today; but even a good quality, tailored Hepworth’s suit wasn’t likely to get you nominated as Britain’s best-dressed man. Women’s fashions were just as bad, in their own way. Again, the high-fashion styles sported by characters in film and television were a world away from the dowdy floral prints worn by your auntie or the lady next door. Cheap clothes have always looked cheap, and in an era when most people’s idea of style meant simply trying to look ‘smart’ (however that might be achieved), the net effect was, on the whole, drearily conformist. Of course to modern eyes it all looks quaint and appealingly retro, but back then, it was, once again, the norm, the baseline, something nobody noticed.

Our homes were pretty much the same. Mid-century furnishings continue to have considerable appeal, and many modern items look back to the era of Eames and Ercol, when ergonomics and stylistic restraint began to replace the excesses and fancies of earlier eras. But aside from the super-rich, very few could afford to completely restyle their homes in one fell swoop. A scenario: your typical middle-income family decides to replace their three-piece suite, circa 1965. There are bold, modern styles available, in bright colours like orange, mauve and teal green. The bold, modern suite is duly ordered and takes its place alongside a gate-leg table from the 1930s, a sideboard of similar vintage, floral curtains and carpets of a decade earlier, and a clutter of assorted table lamps, nick-nacks and God-knows-what-else, inherited or acquired over the years with no consideration of style, colour scheme, etc. The net effect is a random patchwork of decades, and this is how pretty well all ‘normal’ homes looked like for a very long time. Many still do.

Living rooms really did look like this in the 1960s... but only in furniture catalogues.

Confusing the issue still further was the fact that not all new furniture sold during the 1960s epitomised what we’d now think of as ‘classic’ mid-century styling, and traditional items still held sway. Even today, a browse around any typical furniture showroom will reveal the stolidly old-fashioned alongside the determinedly retro-futuristic.

Thus were our homes furnished in the 50s, 60s, 70s... it’s a nuance that mostly escapes the attention of production designers in film and television who tend to adhere slavishly to one-decade styling when called upon to dress a set for, say, a 1960s lounge-dining room.

My point is this: the notion of being able to live again in the 1960s or 70s may seem like an appealing nostalgia trip, but to have been there at the time was to have no perception of how aesthetically pleasing life actually was. Despite what you see online and in magazines, the tide of fashion tends to move pretty slowly, so that it takes many years for a new look to establish itself as the ‘norm.’ Seen in purely stylistic terms, the 1960s seems, in retrospect, to be an evolution destined to reach its purest form of expression in the following decade. There was, of course, no pivotal moment when, to the average observer, the sixties looked like the sixties and nothing else, much as that may appear in retrospect to have been the case. Cars from the 1950s and even earlier were still to be found on Britain’s roads, and only celebrities or the very wealthy could afford to stay abreast of ‘the latest fads and trends’, assuming they even chose to do so.

We can’t see what’s around us when we’re part of it. None of history makes any sense until it is actually history. Only then do the forms, the themes, the shifting tectonic plates of fate, coincidence and collective experience acquire meaning. Only then do we truly appreciate nostalgia for what it is... or rather, what it was.