How to be in public: the case of an early television show

Abstract

The process of image management, whether of celebrities or non-celebrities, involves attention to several different registers of communication at once. The act of appearing on television has always presented difficulties for ordinary people in managing these different ‘framings’ of their spontaneous behaviour. This is vividly demonstrated by the first ever Double Your Money programme on the newly opened British commercial channel ITN in 1955. The different performance styles that people employed, along with the key role of the presenter Hughie Green, are here examined in detail. The problems of historical TV research using programmes that were ‘temporarily meaningful’ are also discussed along with other examinations of this archival programme.

Keywords:

• television
• framing
• performance
• Goffman
• popular culture
• ordinary people
• Double Your Money
• celebrity

Notes

1. Even an activity as esoteric as the academic Research Evaluation Framework in the UK demands ‘narratives of impact’.

2. It is difficult to tell whether the show was transmitted live and telerecorded for later analysis, or was filmed before a live audience and transmitted later. The awkwardness of the initial film insert argues for live transmission; the insertion of a couple of shots of the audience, referred to later in this article, argues for a programme filmed for later transmission as the risks of live transmission were deemed too great. Either is possible, and the result is that a copy exists today. It was retransmitted on BBC4 on 27 March 2005 as part of a decade-by-decade survey of British TV.

3. Significantly, Goffman then goes on to discuss an example drawn from a popular TV genre: the example of a professional wrestler on TV who is clearly play-acting but in a spontaneous performance of what grunts and cries should be uttered in his current role.

4. This was a good sum of money as the weekly old age pension for a married couple was £3 and 5 shillings (£3.25).

5. Green’s novels feature finely observed dialogue, especially Caught (1942) and Loving (1945). Carter’s last novel Wise Children (1991) features the particular idiolects of the London working class in the first half of the twentieth century, based on her south London grandmother’s way of speaking.

6. A BBC4 dramatisation of his life (Hughie Green, Most Sincerely 2008) brought out this aspect clearly, along with his affairs and the common impression that he was a ‘deeply unpleasant man’ of pronounced right-wing views. However, his populism had some unpredictable outcomes, including his insistence, against his producers, on including black performers on his talent show Opportunity Knocks (1964–1978), on the grounds that his audience would naturally include black people.

7. Monica Rose died in 1994. An obituary from The Independent newspaper can be found online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-monica-rose-1393288.html. This claims that, despite reaching only the same level of the competition as the Wallings (£8), Green kept her talking for 18 minutes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Ellis

John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Visible Fictions (Routledge, 1984), Seeing Things (I.B. Tauris, 2000) and Documentary: Witness and Self-revelation (Routledge, 2012). Between 1982 and 1999 he was a TV producer with Large Door Productions. He currently runs the European Research Council-funded ADAPT project on the history of TV technologies.