OWED TO THE CONCRETE DOUGHNUT

“Television Centre, the landmark west London home of BBC television and news, has gone on the market…”

We all knew the day was coming, it had been telegraphed nearly four years ago, but it still came as a bit of a jolt to the system to find that the BBC Television Centre at London W12 8QT (its address one of the more remembered bits of a kind of poetry from  my youth)  and its long extinct but oh-so-familiar “Swap Shop” telephone number, 01-811-8055, has finally been put on the market.

The aim of this sale is to “maximise the site’s value to the BBC and licence fee payers”, by which I’m sure they are referring to monetary value and not the more unquantifiable cultural value that that nation of  licence fee payers might think it has, or the emotional value that we have invested into that place that has to a large extent shaped the lives and experiences of all of us over the last fifty or so years.

So many of the nation’s collective memories have been beamed out of that beloved concrete doughnut over the past half century, so much engineering innovation, so many hours of entertainment and so many serious keystones of both broadcasting and the kinds of social events that helped to form a lot of our idea of nationhood and nationality that it seems almost wasteful to even consider turning the place over to some property developer to turn it into flats or offices or a theme park. It’s like some smug, shiny-suited hyper-rich git is going to grin one of those oily, self-satisfied grins and void his bowels all over our memories, for the sake of making himself a few extra quid that he doesn’t really need.

“With high investor demand for commercial property in London and a shortage of landmark sites as distinctive as Television Centre, we anticipate strong competition for both conventional and innovative proposals” as they put it. Well, lah-di-dah! We all know what that kind of flummery really means. Someone somewhere is going to get shafted, and someone else is going to make a killing, and someday soon after it no longer has TVC, it will be decreed that the BBC needs a purpose-built home that it can no longer afford to buy, and the beginning of its final dissolution will have begun.

Some institutions need a solid, visible presence to remind us of how much they matter. We wouldn’t knock down Buckingham House and build a car park and stick Liz and Phil in a prefab in Wolverhampton because we respect the institution and the important place that the position holds in our national and cultural identity. So it should be with Television Centre, for many years the cultural hub of our ideas of nationhood. We are a nation that can recite the “Parrot Sketch” en masse if necessary, we all know what we all mean when we say that “I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it”, and we all understand the subtlety of a simple phrase like “Four Candles” or “I have a cunning plan” or “It’s goodnight from me, and it’s goodnight from him”, all of which were lovingly crafted and gifted to the nation from within those hallowed walls.

So many images from my own life, sitting curled up with the family in our own home but yet somehow connected to the world around us. They are spinning through my mind just now: Percy Thrower’s “Italian Sunken Garden”; The great big doors of the Blue Peter studio letting in the marching bands during the last show before Christmas with that advent crown threatening to burn the whole lot down; The ghosts of Morecambe and Wise Christmas Shows past; Roy Castle’s “Record Breakers” tap dancing around the statue of Helios; A giant kitten stamping on Michael Aspel…

Why is it that we will think that a Victorian era building must be preserved at all costs, but any architecture that’s less than 100 years old seems to be considered too contemporary to care about. We do this a lot. Sweep away the near past then lament its passing when it’s too late to do anything about it. Sometimes the word “iconic” is thrown around far too glibly, but some places are iconic and should be recognised as such.

Because this was a factory of dreams, a place people dreamed of visiting, some even of working in. Many of those brilliant memories we all share only came into being because someone in that concrete doughnut gave someone else with a dream a chance, and that dreamer might very well only have carried that dream because they one day wanted to make that dream come true in that precious jewel in the history of broadcasting. “Jim” might very well have “fixed it” for a few kids each week, but the things that were done in that place fixed a lot more lives than that.

Hearing those weasel words, wrapped up in the tin foil of “management-speak” with all the creative zeal of an accountancy textbook just makes me a little bit sad, and a little bit angry at the same time. These days we don’t seem to have much left to be proud of as a nation, not least because sometimes our history does tend to come back and bite us, but the things that were done in that building were something special and did, for a short time, truly provide us with a television service that was the envy of the world. It’s strange. I don’t often get all that angry. Irritated - yes, grumpy - certainly, but out and out angry, very rarely, but those grey words, so blithely and soullessly slithered out, those are the kind of things that might just make me very angry indeed.

To quote Peter Finch in Network “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it any more”. Except, of course, it’s inevitable that I will, and I know I will, and I hate the fact that I will. It feels like there’s nothing I can do to stop it, except to tell you how I feel today, which probably doesn’t matter much to you one way or the other.

After all, this is a building I’ve never been to (and now probably never will), but its place in my heart is assured. A tiny shrine to mark somewhere that nurtured the creative endeavour, and encouraged creative people to do the best they could, sometimes against ridiculous odds. Amongst those impossible odds lay some of the very good reasons why a purpose-built building was needed in the first place, reasons just as valid as those that meant we needed Broadcasting House (another fondly regarded edifice) a generation earlier. Strangely, I have been to Broadcasting House, back in the days of my misplaced youthful ambitions, but it came to nothing, as these things so often did with me.

Like so many other things (Aah! Sing it Joni), “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…” I know it’s hardly a paradise, and I’m sure many people who suffered some stressful days working there would be quite happy to see the back of it, but what the bean-counters never seem to ever quite grasp is that some things truly are more than the sum of their parts. I’m sure a lot of people would think it’s “just a building” and, as an example of 1960s “Early Maniac” Architecture, possibly not even that beautiful a building either, but for me, some parts of that building are so familiar it’s like I lived there, but then, I suppose, a part of me did live there for quite a while…