The Trueman Show
Space Time Visualiser: 6th July 1977
Today, the Space Time Visualiser travels back to the controversial first episode of BBC-2′s Brass Tacks.
This is an awfully difficult programme to write about; the seriousness of its subject scarcely allowing for the usual line in facetiousness you can resort to when reviewing creaky bits of old television. Far easier, as Martin in Brimstone and Treacle put it, “to switch over or off for some calmer air”.
Not such a difficult option when you consider the schedules of 6 July 1977. Bob Monkhouse and Dickie Henderson teamed up for I’m Bob, He’s Dickie on ITV, stethoscopes were unleashed for Carry on Doctor on BBC1 and BBC2 screened the ‘Springtime’ episode of M*A*S*H, where Klinger gets married over ham radio. Light drama came in the form of a Sweeney repeat and Alan Plater’s sublimely funny Middlemen, and for those who like their Plater – and who doesn’t? – there was a rerun of his modernised Chaucer series Trinity Tales over on BBC2. BBC Birmingham scored a hat trick with an episode of Shelagh Delaney’s rare work for the small screen, The House that Jack Built, on BBC1 at 10.25pm. Evidence for some, perhaps, that television did used to be better.
In other respects, it was on a decline. Expressions like ‘tabloid television’, ‘sensationalism’ and criticisms of giving an undue voice to the ill-informed were all levelled against the first ever episode of the long running Brass Tacks, which aired from 8.10pm on BBC2. The theme tonight was as serious as they come – ‘Freedom for Myra Hindley?’ – and whereas the presentation style might give first impressions of sobriety and intellectual rigour, the format proved problematic: an open studio, a bank of phone-lines and researchers à la Crimewatch, fidgety hand-held cameras and many tables of guests dotted around, including one – Myra’s sister – whose face is somehow blacked out regardless of the camera angle. As Peter Fiddick witheringly put it in the Guardian, an over-manned panel of ten people “messed about with capital punishment and vengeance as though they were discussing the betting averages.” The Listener went further, describing it as “a formula incapable of producing sustained and serious debate.”
The opening question hits a very sore point for those who remember the horrific crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Some, such as myself, are simply too young and that’s where a whole layer of other baggage gets in the way, most obviously in the re-appropriation of Hindley’s police photo as iconography within popular culture: the Pulp parody in Chris Morris’s Brass Eye, or Marcus Harvey’s much discussed 1995 painting Myra. There’s almost an enforced distancing from the terrible reality of what the killers did. Now that Hindley and Lord Longford, her main advocate for parole, are both dead, there’s a real world detachment too. We can perhaps focus on this programme’s methods, and speak less of the moral or legal arguments debated within.
Naturally, you could say that it’s forever the job of a current affairs magazine to get the headlines and spark public debate, but in the first episode of an entirely new strand it feels unseemly and smacks of desperation to leap upon such a provocative subject as the Moors Murders. It’s the earliest example I can call to mind of a programme not simply ‘bedding in’ by gaining a reputation through graft. Certainly, there’s something highly uncompromising about Brass Tacks’ opening shot, where we zoom in on a mug shot as Hindley’s fresh statement is read out expressing a wish to be considered for parole: “only public opinion keeps me in prison”.
And that’s really the crux of the programme; what place public opinion in deciding on her being considered for parole? Lord Longford’s reputation was damaged severely by his association with the Hindley case, a saga best explored in Longford, Peter Morgan’s 2006 play for Channel 4. He was convinced of her reformed character, and others like inmate Janie Jones and journalist Ian Fowler here chime in with similar sentiments. Ann West, mother of one of the victims, dismisses Longford as a ‘misguided do-gooder’, as she falls in with a total of three representatives from the National Campaign for Law and Order and the Chief Superintendent who worked on the case, Arthur Benfield. None have direct knowledge of Hindley’s present situation at Durham Prison, nor her claimed ‘good character’ during her eleven years of incarceration, and it is this impasse which dooms the discussion to circularity.
As series editor, David Filkin had an excellent reputation from his time on Man Alive (he’d go on to Tomorrow’s World, Body Matters and Q.E.D.) and Brian Trueman was a sober presenter. By modern terms – and here I’m thinking of the rehearsed clashes on Question Time or the career-controversialists on The Moral Maze – there’s a remarkable lack of cross-talk in Brass Tacks, with each voice generally remaining uninterrupted by host and panel, until, that is, the bad tempered final ten minutes. The series’ modus operandi according to the Radio Times blurb was to give voice to “the local grassroots facts and feelings” behind the news, so the phone-in element is understandable to an extent. In practice, however, all this seems to result in are two extraordinary and unhelpful moments which have nothing much to do with the general public. The first is when presenter Brian Trueman receives a call from the father of victim John Kilbride.
Trueman is cool enough but rather lost, and how does Mr Kilbride’s contribution further matters exactly? Throughout the live broadcast, Longford manages polite irritation but this finally gives way to anger when he learns of an opinion poll gathered by the production team ahead of broadcast. “You’ve broken faith with me.”
What if anything is this telling us about ‘tabloid television’ in the late-Seventies, and how far is it simply a case of a weary Longford losing his cool if not the argument? Shortly after broadcast, The Guardian’s Michael Davie identified the problem as an “unawareness of the reactions or natures of ordinary people”, which may be harsh until you consider how the Lord interacts with the former nun in the above clip. On learning that she too has met Hindley, is it really credible that his first question in front of a large viewing audience should be “did you like her?” It speaks volumes for how hopeless his cause would become.
