A curate’s cornucopia

All of which should mean that the debate about whether British television ever enjoyed that famous ‘Golden Age’ is settled at last. Yes, it did, and Clive James was there to record it. Certainly, the sort of swaggering confidence that the British television of the 1970s had in its own worth — and in its own viewers — has long gone. Yet before we get carried away with the always-enjoyable business of lamenting lost glories, The Crystal Bucket does contain some other reminders too.

In the introduction, written in 1981, we discover that, if the 1970s was a Golden Age, it was one dominated by the debate about a lost Golden Age. ‘Many people,’ says James, ‘were thrilled by the 1960s and disappointed by the 1970s.’ In fact, ‘television continued to be roughly what it had been before — i.e., a curate’s cornucopia’. The same phrase wouldn’t be out of place today, when even the most raddled nostalgia-addict would be hard-pressed to deny the claims for TV greatness of such 21st-century series as, among others, Iran and the West, QI, Early Doors, Life on Mars, Planet Earth, Bleak House, The Office, Shameless, The Thick of It, The Power of Nightmares and Cranford.

The book also makes it wincingly obvious that what the anti-Golden Age camp always says is true, too: in the Seventies there was an awful lot of rubbish amid the good stuff. Admittedly, today’s audience might have to wait a while for the next all-star production of Chekhov on BBC1 — or for Pinter’s return to ITV. On the other hand, we’re equally unlikely to see anything as bad as Golden Gala, a variety show (complete with dancing girls and Noele Gordon from Crossroads) that was broadcast in 1978 to mark 50 years of women’s suffrage. Or The Little and Largest Show on Earth — about which James rightly points out that ‘[Syd] Little is not pretending to be just standing there. He is just standing there.’

But there’s perhaps something else, too. If you’re honest, would the average Spectator reader prefer to be settling down tonight to watch Helen Mirren in a couple of hours of uncompromising Greek tragedy or in Prime Suspect? A challenging new TV production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (‘stunningly dull’ — Clive James) rather than Harry Hill’s TV Burp? Of course, it’s tempting to think that this is television’s fault too; that it’s created the taste by which it’s now enjoyed: a much lower one than 30 years ago. And yet, mightn’t the terrible truth be that these days we do indeed get the television we deserve — and possibly even want?