The cover line for the Observer Magazine of 8 June 1975, ‘Is British TV the best in the world?’, is an argument by omission; TV everywhere else is terrible, therefore our TV is great. To this end, Peter Batty spent nine months watching TV from around the world ‘from cable television in a Japanese hospital to Dutch programmes produced by obscure minority groups’.
Was TV a force for good, he wondered? Television came very late to Apartheid South Africa – it was finally introduced in 1976 when ‘South Africans will be able to view for five hours a night, with programmes in English and Afrikaans on alternate evenings.’ Batty claims that ‘liberal circles in the country have high hopes that television will bring the black and white communities together,’ but notes – with colossal understatement – that ‘the experience of Israel is not encouraging’.
Though Britain had the world’s first public service (in 1936), the TV explosion, Batty concedes, started in the US. Every year, he says, the Hollywood factories ‘churn out the Cannons, the Kojaks and the Columbos, today’s equivalent of the old B-movies, to help fill the screens of not only the 70m sets in the US, but the 300m in use elsewhere in the world.’
Australia was considered one of the most lucrative markets. ‘Australians can watch TV for 17 hours a day,’ writes Batty, marvelling at their almost Olympian abilities, ‘but the quality hardly matches the quantity. According to wags in Sydney, “Australia has not so much had 18 years of television as the same year 18 times.”’
Only Japan, he says, offered more television than Australia, even though it is ‘full of quiz shows, soap operas, and popular music programmes, all very bland and reminiscent of British television in the late 1950s’. Just a few years later, Clive James on Television would regularly poke fun at the extremity of Japanese game shows, notably Endurance.
