Setting the tone

Wednesday, 4th February 2009

Nationwide tribute (BBC 4, Thursday); Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA (Channel 4); Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (BBC1, Sunday)

Nationwide began 40 years ago, and on Thursday BBC4 showed a tribute. The show ran nightly up to 1983, and was always the cheekie chappie of BBC programming. In the early 1980s I did a series of jokey sketches for them from the party conferences, and we ran an item about Denis Thatcher signing autographs for a disabled charity. ‘Good old Denis,’ I said, ‘helping legless people everywhere.’ That would be far too bland for Mock the Week or HIGNFY now, but back then we had a long discussion which ended with the line being broadcast. It seemed to be daring while being actually entirely inoffensive, which was in the Nationwide spirit.

We forget how for millions of households it defined the evening. It was after-work, after-school viewing, a beguiling blend of skateboarding ducks, beer-drinking snails, singing horses and general self-conscious mucking about, dotted with the odd serious item. All the women — Sue Lawley, Valerie Singleton — sounded more like the Queen than any of us now remember.

In 1981 a curious thing happened. Nowadays BBC executives are terrified that someone, somewhere, might be bored for a few seconds, which is why Nationwide’s successor, The One Show, is designed for goldfish with attention deficit disorder. In those days they were scared that viewers were not enlightened and improved, so David Dimbleby was brought in to make Nationwide serious. Then, during the 1983 election campaign, a geography teacher from Cirencester, Diana Gould, aggressively interrogated Margaret Thatcher about the sinking of the Belgrano. Mrs Thatcher, who loved nothing better than a good argument, rather enjoyed it until Denis persuaded her that it had been an outrage, a trap sprung by the ‘load of pinkos’ who ran the BBC. No one admitted it, but with the licence fee up for renewal, that may have been Nationwide’s death sentence. And as someone pointed out, ‘They broke the golden rule of television: you can dumb down, but you can’t dumb up.’

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