Even people who have never seen it claim that television in the 1960s was better than it is now.
Mark Lawson takes a fresh look at the decade's TV and explodes some long-cherished myths about the era that not only gave us Civilisation, but also The Old Man of Hoy...
Interview: Mark Lawson
BBC Four: What's the main thrust of the programme?
Mark Lawson: It examines whether or not 1960s television really was better than it is now and shows that there were very good programmes but there were also quite dreadful ones. The main conclusion it comes to is how technically backward it all was.
Even though we regard Dad's Army as a classic, it's only really when we get to the later colour editions that it stands up. The argument of the film is, I suppose, that the content of television at any stage is driven by what is technically possible.
BBC Four: In what ways did that happen in the 1960s?
ML: We discovered what we think is the first-ever reality TV show. It's from 1965 and called The Old Man of Hoy. It was a live transmission on BBC One over three nights. We keep going back to watch mountaineers climb the highest peak in Scotland. But again, and I think it's important, there was no great intellectual commitment to mountaineering. They just wanted to show off the technology. That's been a constant story throughout television - that the kit dictates everything else.
BBC Four: What's your take on the acknowledged 60s classics like Play for Today and Civilisation?
ML: Everyone says how wonderful it was in the 60s that they showed one-hour plays by Harold Pinter. It was wonderful and they are very good plays but they did that because that's really all they could do. They had to put on studio plays which were very close to theatre plays, had a few characters and one set, because that's all they could technically achieve.
| There wasn't any kind of great artistic decision to put on plays that were like theatre - as soon as they could make things that were more like films they went off and did them. Whereas a lot of people present it as an artistic failure that the single play dies out, I see it as a technical inevitability. |
 |
Civilisation: Technically lacking |
With Civilisation - it's obviously wonderful that they did it, there's amazing material in it and the book's very good but I think most people who look at the tapes wish that Kenneth Clark could have made it now when he had the availability of digital editing and the high-quality reproduction of art.
BBC Four: One of the arguments you often hear about the good old days of TV is that high-brow programmes had a lot of viewers; they weren't on niche channels like ours...
ML: Yes, brilliant work got huge audiences, but all work got huge audiences. Harold Pinter's A Night Out, a fantastic piece, was watched by 20 million people in 1961 on ITV. A newspaper journalist, who had better remain nameless, wrote a few years ago that this just shows that if TV producers had courage in what they put on then a new play by Harold Pinter at 9pm on ITV would get huge audiences.
They wouldn't of course. When A Night Out was shown there were only two channels and most people would literally watch anything because they were just excited to be watching TV. In the 1960s, television was still a novelty. At the beginning of the 60s it was also virtually all live. Something you only see now around big televised football matches is that if you're in a town 15 minutes before they start people are genuinely rushing home to watch. That happened in the 60s, for dramas particularly. Was that because they were all wonderful? No. It's because you only got one chance to see it.
BBC Four: What were the real stinkers you came across?
ML: When you draw up the charge sheet against 60s TV it's quite shocking. I went through the old Radio Times and TV Times and you don't think, "My God, I'd have never gone out because there's all this wonderful stuff on TV."
| There was a series called The Dustbinmen, which was a terrible sitcom. There's an ITV drama with Peter Egan as a London gangster called Big Breadwinner Hog which made history as the first British television programme ever pulled off air before the end of its run. |
|
Come Dancing: wiped classics |
That was to do with complaints over violence, but it was really quite bad. There's another one called Man Talk which was a BBC One programme. That's as bad as anything that's on now. The Black and White Minstrel Show - it horrifies us that it even existed. Curry and Chips - all these endless racist sitcoms, because racism was casual.
There is a fantastic quantity of rubbish but you can't see most of the programmes because they've been wiped. There's no doubt that that has inflated the reputation of 60s TV. We talk to the playwright Simon Gray in the film, who lost 10 years work to make way for early editions of Come Dancing or whatever. Now that's dreadful for him, but the advantage for the reputation of 60s TV is that a lot of the rubbish went too. We are misled by the fact that the best has survived. I genuinely believe that the quantity of brilliance and rubbish is roughly what it is now.
