Somehow I managed to stagger through reading this in the latest “Round The Archives" podcast from Lisa and Andrew (available at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta040-episode-40) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...
PODCAST ARTICLE 20 (FOR EPISODE 40) – 1979
I’ve been struggling to come up
with anything original to say about television in 1979… Let’s see what’s on
telly…
BBC1… Well, there’s nothing new I
can say about THAT…
BBC2… Everyone’s got an opinion
on THAT…
ITV… I believe there’s a new
QUATERMASS serial… Oh…
WE ARE SORRY THAT PROGRAMMES HAVE
BEEN INTERRUPTED. THERE IS AN INDUSTRIAL DISPUTE. TRANSMISSIONS WILL START
AGAIN AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
In the multi-channel, multi-media
twenty-first century, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine the three-channel
world in which I grew up, just as it’s difficult for me to imagine the
one-channel world of a decade before I popped into being, or even that lost
world without television in which gathering around pianos for sing-songs were
the home-entertainment option of choice.
And yet, in the second half of
1979, even the relative riches of those three channels were curtailed by the
arrival of a long-running daily transmission on ITV called “The Strike”.
To the casual viewer, the plot
was relatively straightforward, with one of several varieties of plain blue
caption cards bearing the minimal information of the ongoing story, pretty much
24 hours a day, seven days a week, for ten weeks…
Now, I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s
quite a commitment to minimalist broadcasting even during those relatively rich
times where experimental arts programmes could still make it to air even during
primetime.
And, of course, it did mean that
programmes on the other channels did benefit hugely from drawing in the viewers
who were less than taken with such fayre, and preferred the familiar cocktail
of 3, 2, 1 and CORONATION STREET to fill their evening hours.
During those ten, long, ITV-less
weeks, DOCTOR WHO gained record viewing figures for the story CITY OF DEATH, and
new shows like SHOESTRING and TO THE MANOR BORN became the huge, popular,
well-remembered hits that they were, which they might not otherwise have done,
simply because, well, there was nothing else on and video cassette recorders
still hadn’t come down enough in price to become the ubiquitous household items
they would in in the next decade.
Although, even though these were
still times in which television was simply not a twenty-four hour service, and
test cards and test cricket could fill several hundred daytime hours when you
were a bored schoolkid during the holidays, and a full one third of potential
programming was simply unavailable, you do actually find yourself wondering
whether the BBC could have put out any old rubbish in the evenings and still got
eighteen million viewers.
And, of course, at that time, ITV
had on its shelves quite a few shows just aching to be broadcast during that
profitable Autumn season. Apart from that prestigious new QUATERMASS serial
from Euston Films starring Sir John Mills, other drama shows like new SAPPHIRE
& STEEL stories, and the BUDGIE sequel CHARLES ENDELL ESQUIRE, and MINDER
were waiting to be launched onto an unsuspecting public, alongside light
entertainment programmes like 3, 2, 1 and ONLY WHEN I LAUGH.
Some series survived the delay in
transmission. Other suffered badly from it, got sneaked out eventually in a
much reshuffled schedule, and never gained the audiences that they might have
expected or hoped for.
The strike itself came about for
several reasons, not least that striking was pretty much the in-thing at the
end of the seventies, especially at the latter end of the Callaghan government
– you’ll have heard about or even remember that whole “Winter of Discontent”
thing - before incoming Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pretty much gutted the
unions over the next few years.
Some people, of course, maintain
that’s a good thing, especially when they can’t get to work because of
Industrial Action, but, even in such times as we live in nowadays, what other
power does an ordinary worker have other than to withdraw their labour, the one
thing that they have that has value to their oppressors?
Still, we’re not going to focus
here on the rights and wrongs of Union Action, merely to observe quite what was
going on in the latter half of 1979 when one third of our telly got taken away
from us.
There was, of course, far less
sympathy for “telly folk” than those working in heavy industry, as the Arts
(with a capital A) were still very much considered a bit of a “namby-pamby” way
for folk to earn an honest crust, and when people were spending twelve hour
shifts digging coal, or welding rivets, or making steel, you might very well
wonder what on earth these people had to complain about in their cushy little
world.
And yet, the disputes kept on
coming, with various strikes across the BBC about shifting ladders and so forth
blacking out programmes from time-to-time, and those would still go on throughout
much of the eighties.
So what was it about the 1979
strike that made it seem so significant and so memorable, apart from one of the
first generations to truly be brought up being drip-fed television on a daily
basis having memories of their favourite shows vanishing for much of the summer
holidays and long into the first term of the new school year?
It became, after all, the costliest, bitterest, and –
by some margin –the longest dispute in the history of the collection of broadcasters
known as ITV, and standing on those picket lines were several of the figures
who later became high-flying executives in the TV industry themselves.
Financial inflation in the 1970s was, quite frankly,
terrifying, and went on year after year after year. In the mid-1970s it peaked
at just under twenty-five percent, meaning that production costs for television
programmes just kept on rising and rising at a rate that budgets set the
previous year couldn’t help but fail to keep up with.
After all, as an employee, if your shopping cost a quarter
more, you were going to put in a pay claim that at least kept pace, even though
the government wanted to put in restrictions on the size of those pay claims to
break the cycle.
Across the board, ITV were, in general, making various small
fortunes during what was a golden period for them in terms of popular
programme-making, share price increases, and massive, massive profits, and
their shows were constantly doing far better in the ratings that the BBCs were,
and, in those simpler times, they were getting a lot of advertising revenue
from their customers.
Because ITV, despite what people tended to suggest, was
never a free service. Part of the purchase price of every tin of Heenz Beenz or
Nimblebread, (or whatever) went towards paying for those adverts, simply in a
way that customers simply didn’t really notice or (in some cases, eh, Grannie?)
understand.
Anyway, the more expensive everything got, the more they
could rake in and… Well, you get the picture.
And the reason you were getting that picture was that the
people making those programmes, and putting out the signals, and all of the
hundred and one things which made that happen were members of various unions
such as EETPU, ACTT and NATTKE.
Sometimes you really do need to know your ACTT from your EETPU,
so here goes.
EETPU was the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and
Plumbing Union and they kind of did all of the fiddly electronic-y things in
the studio that got stuff made and aired, and they were considered a fairly
moderate bunch.
The ACTT was the Association of Cinematograph, Television
and Allied Technicians and they were led by the militant Alan Sapper.
NATTKE was the National
Association of Theatrical, Television and Kin´e Employees, and they were the
third of this “big three” broadcasting unions involved.
In 1979, with inflation at the relatively healthy thirteen
and a bit percent, ITV offered nine-percent which got rejected.
The counter-offer from the unions was 25% to compensate its
members for the “real-world” erosion of wages during all those years of near
twenty-five percent inflation.
You get the picture – (or rather, you don’t!)
War to the death.
And so, on July the 23rd, there was a
national one-day strike by members of EETPU and NATTKE unions and all ITV
regions went dark except for two, Westward and Channel.
In the other companies, EETPU members had switched off
equipment that ACTT members refused to switch back on again and operate, and
therefore no television programmes could be made or broadcast.
These were those such times. Demarcation, and the specifics
of which people did which jobs, and “If you touch that, we’re all walking out!”
It may seem strange now, but that is how things worked, and,
to a certain extent how jobs were protected, and it could cost an absolute
fortune to have such a large and yet broadly mono-skilled workforce.
Of course, looking back now, some of those jobs might seem
ridiculous, but I don’t suppose any of us feel that way if it’s our job that
someone else is deciding might be done better and more efficiently by somebody
else.
Negotiations trundled on until the sixth of August. Only
staff at SOUTHERN TELEVISION wanted to accept late July’s fifteen percent pay
offer, and EETPU ramped up the pressure by starting a work to rule.
This meant not working overtime, and, because telly required
a lot of overtime, broadcasting as it did at unsociable hours – well, if you
worked in television, that is, because somebody had to switch those switches as
the nation sat down to relax of an evening – so the management stepped in to
cover the absent EETPU members.
And, at THAMES TELEVISION, the ACTT membership refused to
work with those managers who were filling in for their union colleagues, which
got the ACTT Shop Steward and his deputies suspended, and because of that, the
whole of the ACTT walked out, and THAMES TELEVISION was blanked out.
A similar situation involving management-built lighting rigs
causing a health and safety risk blacked out HTV, and SOUTHERN was temporarily
blacked out due to overtime ban issues, but, in that case the ACTT members
allowed the management to step in and pictures were restored.
For a while at least.
However… heels, as they say, were being dug in. Trenches
were being dug, and a long dispute spent staring across the no mans land of
various executive car parks was becoming inevitable.
The staff of ITN walked out on August the ninth and, by
Friday the tenth, the entire ITV Network went dark – apart from CHANNEL
TELEVISION which had been struggling anyway and negotiated a deal so that it managed
to stagger through with local programming and feature films.
Early attempts at arbitration came to nothing and, playing
hardball, ITV – or, as it was then, the ITCA basically threatened to sack the
lot of them if they weren’t back by the twenty-third.
The ACTT refused to be threatened, and would not negotiate,
and so, for the next ten weeks, apart from in the Channel Islands, ITV basically
displayed local variants on that message I quoted earlier, some of which became
like old friends to households who would never watch the BBC under any
circumstances, because the rating monitoring services did mention “discernable
numbers” tuning in to that almost blank
screen and the music playing alongside it.
Perhaps it was soothing? Comforting even? Less harsh than
the radio if you wanted to do some knitting. Or maybe people simply thought if
they waited long enough the programmes would be back on eventually.
Ten weeks…! Ten flippin’ weeks!
People were still used to transmission breaks and the
potter’s wheel and perhaps – just perhaps – thought that this was a similar
thing and if they just… hung… on… they might be the first to make that telephone
call to Great Aunt Mabel saying “Telly’s Back!”
I also imagine that during this time, some people even tried
out that toffee-nosed BBC2 for the first time, just to see if there was
anything else on worth watching.
At least for a while.
There was little sign of wobbling on the side of the workers
during what is looked back upon as a fairly friendly dispute. In comparison to
the all-out warfare witnessed on the picket lines at Wapping, or at the gates
of the collieries, games of football still being played between executives and
any strikers – union strikers that is. Well, those still available to make up
teams who hadn’t taken temporary jobs in the restaurants the executives ate at,
or off painting their houses for them. LWT apparently, even used to let
strikers picket indoors on rainy days so that they wouldn’t get wet.
In late October, the pay offer was increased to
seventeen-and-a-half percent back-dated to July, with promises of more jam
tomorrow of seven-and-a-half percent in January, and fifteen percent the
following July.
Huzzah! Up the workers! Power to the people! etc.
However, as is often the case, there were caveats.
A price to be paid, concessions to be made.
Working practices would have to change, presumably of the
“anyone who wants to can shift that wretched ladder” variety, and such
ladder-shifting might be combined with lighting rigging as one person’s job
instead of two.
Electronic News Gathering was to be adopted so that the news
could become all shiny and modern and not involve old newshounds with
paper-based notepads and pencils lurking around in seedy bars trying to find
out what the hell was going on.
In the end, such things were accepted, albeit on a locally
negotiated level, and in that agreement we find the roots of our modern 24 hour
rolling news coverage where the same facts and/or opinions are bellowed at us
by freezing reporters standing in front of nondescript buildings every fifteen
minutes or so until something else happens.
Also, the unions at that time were very aware that the ITV
franchise renewals were just around the corner and, as some very familiar logos
were destined to vanish forever, they very much wanted no-redundancy clauses to
be in place so that the broadcasting jobs cake could both be had and eaten.
Anyway, at the end of the 10-week dispute, the strikers
voted overwhelmingly to go back to work for what some sources claim was
effectively a forty-five per cent pay rise.
Well, you would, wouldn’t you?
Ironically, several of those who ended up becoming bigwigs
in the Television industry themselves were amongst the many manning the picket
lines during that dispute, although some just went on holiday, and others with
futures spent bean-counting at the BBC, had made sure that their careers would
be undamaged despite going out on strike.
And then the strike was all over. The BBCs last brief period
as being once again the nation’s sole broadcaster, like it had been in the old
days before 1955 was gone, and, with new franchises about to be issued, and shiny
new channels coming along, and extended broadcasting hours heaving into view
over the horizon, things really would never be the same again.
Noele Gordon as Meg Mortimer got to speak directly to camera
to let the viewers know what had been going on at CROSSROADS whilst the viewers
had been away – not a lot, presumably – and Julie Goodyear and Peter Adamson as
Bet Lynch and Len Fairclough tripped across the old cobbles of a previous
incarnation of CORONATION STREET to have a good old gossip over what had been
going on up their end.
So instead of killing off the soaps forever, they were back,
and, in one case at least, on its way to becoming the ratings behemoth that
finally kicked DOCTOR WHO to the kerb within a decade and spawned the BBC
voices to think “We’ll have some of that” with EASTENDERS before half of that
next decade had passed.
And, as ever, there is always a cost, and not just in the
revenue received by the ITV companies.
Actors and journalists – especially those working at the TV
TIMES – lost wages, and in many ways, these were the innocent bystanders who
suffered most because of this dispute.
Well, along with those of us awaiting the resolution of that
SAPPHIRE AND STEEL story set in the railway station, and all those soap opera
fans, and… Ah, you get the point.
And, perhaps weirdly, the BBC suffered too, because, well,
suddenly everyone became acutely aware that they broadcast a heck of a lot of
repeats in the late summer and early autumn, something they apparently were
completely oblivious to until someone took ITV away.
You might even suggest that the BBC had pretty much thrown
in the towel just as the Champ was being counted out in the opposite corner.
Or something.
And whatever changes were looming in the television industry
were bound to affect them, too, so, because the world unraveled so much under
James Callaghan that it allowed Margaret Thatcher to rise to power, one of her
missions was to not allow it to unravel further on her watch.
1979 was, after all, the first year of her watch, and here
she was with blank TV screens, and the strikes by the printers at the Times
newspaper group pushing that Murdoch chappie into the great Wapping experiment,
so the lady was not happy.
At. All.
Mrs Thatcher basically wanted to reduce the power of the
unions by outlawing secondary picketing - where pickets from one workplace
could stand outside (“threaten and intimidate” if you will) another workplace; bringing
an end to ‘closed shops’ – a workplace where it was compulsory to join the
union to do the job; and introducing mandatory secret ballots so that strikes
had to be properly voted upon before anyone could call “everybody out!”
The unions tried again at THAMES four years later, but found
out that THAMES could still get programmes broadcast mainly because of the new
single-operator cameras that the management could operate if necessary, and the
fact that they could grab other shows from the other regions and transmit those
instead.
The TV-AM strike four years after that was the last hurrah
of the television unions managing to attempt to shut down a TV station, and,
with TV Superstars (“Yeah!” Ratfans) crossing picket lines, and managers
stepping in and then implying that the camera operators were basically
unskilled labour, and that TV stations basically ran themselves, the unions
basically lost, and so, especially with that eighties thing of private
enterprise meaning that there were a lot more small independent programme
makers out there, the television unions never again had the strength they had
enjoyed in the sixties and seventies, and – because all these changes really
mean that it simply couldn’t happen now - 1979 was the last time ITV suffered a
national blackout because of industrial action.
And if it was, given the plethora of choice nowadays, would
anyone even notice?
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