Recently I have noticed there has been a revival in old Television programmes being translated to the Theatre. Shows like Birds of a Feather and Rising Damp are being re-hashed and are touring the country with either the original cast members or a new set of actors where previous lead actors may not be available or have passed away. It was after seeing Lesley Joseph on some talk show promoting this and talking about Birds of a Feather and how, at its peak, it was drawing in up to 18m viewers, it dawned on me just how much television has changed.
18m people! Only major sports and news events (or royal events)could hope of getting those sort of viewing figures now and the reason for that is simply – choice. In the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and even for some of the 90’s on the whole you had 4 channels to choose from when settling down to watch the TV and two of those channels (BBC2 and Channel 4) were considered alternative. So really when most people sat down to watch TV they had 1 choice to make, was it BBC1 or was it ITV? Thus, for say, comedy programmes you would see enormous TV ratings for shows like Hi-De-Hi, Last of the Summer Wine and Birds of a Feather. The reality is that none of these shows are actually that funny, in fact some of them weren’t funny at all but if it was a choice between Last of the Summer Wine or Highway or Hi-Di-Hi or World in Action then there was only going to be one winner. To put it bluntly, we were forced to watch something because there was really scant or no other choices.
So you may think that my point to all this is that we are now better off and the advent of extra channels is the best thing that ever happened. Well not quite…
You see, I think that what has happened is quite sad, Television as a social event has died. When I was growing up in the mid to late eighties, every Friday night without fail my Mum and Dad and I would sit down and watch “The Golden Girls”. I don’t remember it particularly funny, I was too young to understand some of the racier episodes and half of the time I probably wasn’t even watching, pre-occupied with my Panini sticker books, but I have some very fond memories of it. I have the same memories of Cagney and Lacey and Howards Way. I also remember sitting down with my parents and my Grandma to watch The A-Team, CHIPS and the Price is Right on a Saturday night. It was just what we did.
This simply wouldn’t happen nowadays (save for maybe X-Factor or The Voice), in the modern family, the parents would watch the TV downstairs and the kids would be either watching something different on another TV or downloading whatever they wanted to watch on their laptops or mobile devices. They probably wouldn’t even be watching something that was on “now”, rather watching on a catch up service or using something like Netflix. Whichever it is the likelihood of the whole family sitting down and watching the same programme is low and what is more the likelihood of going to work and everyone talking about the same programme they watched last night is low. The social aspect of it is almost disappeared. You hear people time and time again saying “Did you see xxxx last night” to which invariably the answer is no or I have sky plussed it. In the 1986 if you had asked someone if they had seen Den give Angie her divorce papers you had a 50% chance of the other person saying “yes”.
The argument is that more choice equals better quality. Well there is no doubt that we don’t see the likes of Birds of a Feather anymore, a show like that would nowadays last a series and then be binned like most comedies are nowadays. What has happened though is that we have seen an influx of programmes from abroad. Whereas before this might have been Neighbours or Home and Away it is now The Soprano’s, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire. Shows of such size, style and overall brilliance were certainly not a feature of the 80’s but if they had been shown in the 80’s I don’t believe they would have got 20m viewers because they are aimed at a certain viewer, they are controversial and not made for everyone. That is where we have seen the big win with Satellite/Cable TV. You can now find a programme that you actually want to watch. You want crime, there is a channel for it, you want music there is a channel for it, you want Birds of a Feather there is a channel for it, you want Red Hot mums, there is a channel for it, in fact there is a channel for everything. Literally. There is so much on offer now that if you have 30 minutes spare you can spend the entire time looking through the options. You have the full range of television from the ridiculously low budget independent channels which look like they are being filmed on a mobile phone through to channels like Sky Atlantic where you can see TV programmes with budgets of over a £1m an episode and I believe you can find pleasure in both. I am as happy watching a cheap cooking show on Good Food as I am stumbling across an old episode of Porridge on Gold.
The thing is TV is like everything else in that we all have different tastes, comedy for example is a very subjective thing and I use The Office as an example of this. For me, it is the funniest thing ever written but to many it is not funny and a lot of people don’t get what the joke is. So to think that in the 80’s and 90’s we had 20m people tuning in to watch an old man sliding down a hill in a bath seems absurd, surely all those people couldn’t have found that funny! Likewise, watching those A-Team and CHIPS episodes now leaves me asking the question “Did my 70 year old Grandmother really find Mr T entertaining?????”.
Christmas is probably the most obvious example of how TV has changed. Christmas TV used to be the jewel in the networks crowns. As a child of the 80’s and a teen of the 90’s the one thing you could be sure of was at Christmas there would be good TV, whether it was a blockbuster film or a TV special (usually Only Fools and Horses). For people of my generation every year you hear them say “Christmas TV this year is rubbish” but think about why? We don’t have comedies that everyone watches like we used to so it is unlikely we will get specials and most of the blockbuster films already sit in peoples DVD collections or have been watched on Lovefilm or Netflix. The reality though is that there is loads of good stuff on over Christmas but not on the conventional terrestrial channels, you have to trawl through over 100 channels to find it. A classic Christmas comedy on GOLD, a James Bond on ITV3 a Morcombe and Wise on BBC2, a cheesy Christmas Film on Channel 5 or a Delia Smith Christmas Cookery programme on UK Food. Its all there and more you just have to find it and then most probably, sit on your own and watch it whilst your partner listens to “Last Christmas” on MTV Classic in the other room.
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