In a 2021 speech to the Royal Television Society, then Conservative culture, media and sport minister John Whittingdale announced that the government was widening the public service broadcasters’ remit to produce more content that was “distinctively British”. As examples, he cited Only Fools and Horses, Carry On (never actually a TV franchise) and Dad’s Army: creations of a distant era, loaded with unreconstructed stereotypes of the working class, male-female relationships and Johnny Foreigner.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the diversity of the British experience is impossible to pin down in a single broadcasting remit. Part of what defines Britain’s distinctiveness on screen is our humour (even in dire straits), our landscapes and cityscapes, and an increasing commitment to diversity and inclusiveness in cast and crew. But there’s another wild card, even harder to define and rarely in evidence on screens today. Some of the greatest and most distinctively British TV has been just plain weird.
Weirdness depends on the irruption of the unexpected and phantasmagorical into the everyday. Legendary TV is created when weirdness and innovation achieve a rare alchemical bond. In 1992, Ghostwatch generated record-breaking audience feedback thanks to its terrifying blend of documentary, live reportage and domestic haunting. The BBC flagship Doctor Who, since its debut in 1963, has been a conduit for some of the network’s weirdest and most enduring screen monsters. Its pageant of phantasmagoric creatures and neofascist Daleks, time-travelling pop-astrophysics and offhand humour has proved a winning and exportable formula, while lending the English language a whole subset of terms and expressions, from “Tardis” to “exterminate!”
British TV’s penchant for the weird is not just confined to adult shows either. Children’s television also used to nurture the stranger side of the British imagination, from the hand-knitted cosmic oddness of The Clangers to the megalithic occultism of Children of the Stones. Even shows of a less-fantastical ilk such as Brideshead Revisited and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy moved at an eerily glacial pace by today’s storytelling standards, which only enhanced the strange, aspic universes in which the aristocracy and cold war spycraft used to operate.
None of this weirdness exists for its own sake. Looking back at the TV of the 70s and 80s – a period some call the golden age of television – you find supernatural, period and realistic drama with plenty to say about the entrenched power structures and divisions in British society. Examples include Alan Clarke-directed dramas such as Made in Britain and Scum, the post-apocalypse dystopia Survivors, and Edge of Darkness, a crime/political thriller with Arthurian undertones. Savage class distinctions ran through ITV’s long-running series Upstairs, Downstairs; but 40 years later Downton Abbey class-washed the same era by portraying aristocrats and servants implausibly empathising with each other’s situations.
Downton Abbey’s massive international success has enabled a sanitised version of costume drama that perpetuates, rather than punctures, Britain’s illusions about itself. Series such as Call the Midwife, The Larkins and the reboot of All Creatures Great and Small feel like cosy gift-shop versions of the past, set in a Brexiter-fantasy Great Britain.
And then there are the programmes scheduled around them, which are symptomatic of the UK’s abject inner life and of what has gone wrong with British TV. If it’s not police dashcam footage or any amount of drooping Channel 4 sex documentaries, then it’s Homes Under the Hammer, Bargain Hunt, Antiques Roadshow, Escape to the Country, The Great British Sewing Bee. A depleted nation priced out of the housing market dreams of property, hidden treasure and ways to make do and mend.
But you can change things at the ballot box! Or at least, you can vote off disgraced politicians on I’m a Celebrity. Now surely in their death throes, reality TV shows chaotically see-saw between desultory exchanges between humans sitting around, and chipper presenters squeezing life out of scripted banter. Meanwhile the history doc bingo card includes a celebrity presenter’s “personal journey” through relevant landscapes, costume cupboards raided for reconstructed scenes, and talking heads shot against smudgy backdrops.
Material like this, formulaic to the point of parody, indicates a loss of nerve. But commissioners and programme makers would do well to remember that it’s not the easy, box-ticking, crowd-pleasing stuff that is remembered. Terrestrial, non-demand TV still exists as a portal with the potential to feed audiences with revelations and horrors in their own homes.
And that’s exactly what it did. Schedules from the 60s and 70s – the height of Britain’s TV weirdness – contained nuclear attacks, ghosts, war stories, brutal public safety films and intellectually demanding folk horror dramas such as Robin Redbreast, Penda’s Fen and Artemis 81. Their screenwriters, directors and producers belonged to a generation that had lived through a world war and a dismantled empire. The destruction on the home front had exposed them to an existential threat not experienced since the Norman invasion one thousand years earlier. But their younger viewers were growing up in a historically unprecedented peaceful and stable Europe.
The TV of the latter period was also created in an infinitely less competitive broadcasting arena than now. Britain still makes incredible stuff, such as I May Destroy You, The Gold, Small Axe, Top Boy, It’s a Sin and Happy Valley. Some of it – The English, The North Water, Detectorists, The Gallows Pole, Black Mirror, Inside No 9, Ghosts – even retains that all-important dash of the weird, affirming that now is not the time to surrender to blandness in the face of the streaming giants. The encroaching competition should be a clarion call for even stranger, mould-breaking television that’s fit to scar the minds of the next generation for life.
Rob Young is a journalist at The Wire magazine and the author of The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window
