The numeral 100 in a programme’s title rarely promises much beyond a long, sofa-marooned Saturday night of pizza, booze and dyspeptic nostalgia. A clip-show countdown is not so much a programme, more a lazy list. Equally, three pages each on 100 programmes may appear unlikely to add up to a history of television. Phil Norman’s A History of Television in 100 Programmes, nevertheless, amply justifies its title’s presumption.
The fluidity of the medium in its early decades is what strikes. Harold Pinter wrote sketches for Dick Emery, the saucy cross-dresser best known for his catchphrase “Ooh, you are awful but I like you”. Harry Worth, Emery’s shambolic primetime rival, played William Boot in an “ill-starred” adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The literary novelist Kingsley Amis wrote scripts for the crime drama Softly, Softly and in 1962 presented Kingsley Amis Goes Pop. “Quite honestly, I welcome the chance of meeting these extraordinary pop-singer people,” he began the series.
Patrick McGoohan, who had played an off-the-peg spy in Danger Man was given his head by Lew Grade at ATV to write a psychedelic fable as its Sunday night replacement. The final episode of The Prisoner, broadcast in 1968, originally compared by Anthony Burgess to Cervantes, was so obscure that McGoohan put himself in hiding “in case I got killed”. The BBC in 1964 bought from the German Democratic Republic a spooky weirdness called The Singing Ringing Tree. Norman writes that children watched it “through a glass of Lucozade darkly”. BS Johnson, the experimental novelist, penned a drama for the ITV’s schools schedule that was to have featured the suicide of a teacher, an episode tactfully removed from the script after Johnson slit his own wrists.
The strength of the book is that Norman discusses neither just his favourite shows, nor necessarily those lionised by television historians. What he likes or, at least, what he likes to write about, is perversity: programmes that have either broken the rules or prospered in a habitat — the inchoate early years, the wastelands of Sunday afternoons or Saturday mornings, children’s telly, the nightwatch — where the rules, if they existed, went unpoliced. The auteurs, such as (and never before will they have been so grouped) Anthony Newley, Alan Garner, Chris Tarrant, Pauline Quirke, Janet Street-Porter, Richard Herring and Stewart Lee, had space to fill and to fail, but they failed interestingly. The difficult genius got board and lodging. The odd masterpiece emerged.
Comedians, licensed anarchists all, were television’s original insider outlaws. As Norman observes, Ernie Kovacs, the prince of misrule of Fifties American television who one night assembled 100 dancers and animals in his studio only to demolish it, and Spike Milligan, who did much the same on lower British budgets, “pulled television apart when it had barely got itself together”. His series A Show called Fred and Son of Fred had “mock interviews with insane individuals, often called Hugh Jampton, commercials for ’Muc, the wonder deterrent’, and viewer query slot ‘idiots’ postbag’, presented in front of a projected backdrop of open sea, or a burning building. (‘Dear sir, do you know what horse won the Derby in 1936?’ ‘Yes, Mr Smith, I do.’)” Because all comedy must confound expectation, unruly, format-exploding comedians, such as Louie on FX, still prosper.
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Dramatists are another matter. Norman’s examinations of early plays make it plain that naturalism only latterly became the default setting. David Mercer’s BBC Sunday night play from 1962, A Suitable Case for Treatment, contained extracts from Battleship Potemkin and Tarzan, while integrating “black-limbo” dream scenes in which the protagonist’s mother appeared dressed as a secret policeman. In 1971, Clive Exton’s The Rainbirds satirised medicine, religion, and the class system from within the delirium of a comatose man who is reduced by surgical invention to “mooing” infancy.
By the Eighties, only Dennis Potter was allowed such reckless individuality. He died in 1994 but the single play, the unit that had been his and his contemporaries’ native currency, had predeceased him. Norman is rightly sceptical that that brilliance of long-form cable television dramas, such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, in which a writer is allowed his head for season upon season, represents a fair trade for the weekly opportunity for different writers to project their world view or inner life. Norman’s final chapter (they occur more or less chronologically) on Netflix’s House of Cards is noticeably cool in its praise.
Rather that serial’s name stands as an implied warning about the precariousness of quality television’s future. The decline of the old broadcasters, slowed but not halted by the waning craze for big-top “reality” TV, spells the end of the “cross-pollination that comes from all types of programming sharing the same transmission and production space”. Niche is the future because commercial demographics, rather than creativity, decree it.
Norman insists in his introduction that he is not arguing that television used to be better, only that it used to be much stranger. That is not entirely how his book reads. The tone slowly subsides from wide-eyed fascination to scowling resignation. Television, having found its feet, marches in the direction of conformity, good and bad, but mostly bad. He even cites Ian Katz’s editorship of Newsnight as symptomatic of television news’s “wilful decline” to “prancing trivia”.
I recommend reading the book from cover to cover but dipping in is also allowed, because stronger even than its arguments are its descriptions, often of programmes the author has had to recreate in his head from a few extant fragments. An animator by trade, Norman writes with epigrammatic wit, a lethal concision that reminds me of the prose of Peter Conrad (who wrote his own perceptive book on television in 1982), and a grasp of both industry politics and political context.
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To be hailed above all, is Norman’s eye for the particular. My favourite example may be of the “directorial flourish” unique to the unlamented soap Crossroads, broadcast in 1964 to 1988. Its episodes opened, he recalls, with prolonged close-ups “of a telephone, a half-eaten cucumber sandwich or, on one Burns night, a huge pile of sheep offal”. Towards the end, Norman asks if television is not “the biggest collection of tiny pleasures and telling details created by man”. His acerbic, acute and accurate history, its cynicism tempered by affection and humour, runs it close.
A History of Television in 100 Programmes by Phil Norman, The Friday Project, 304pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £16.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134