The lift door would open and out she'd clump. Blue of hair, rouged of cheeks and frumpy of dress, she would waddle down to the stairs the way only matronly women of a certain age can, go over to Mr Peacock and say "I'm sorry I was late, but I was drying my pussy" - or some such end-of-pier single entendre. A watching nation would collectively convulse itself with the sheer panto ribaldry of it all. The only thing to top Mrs Slocombe's entrance would be the uber-camp Mr Humphries shrieking "I'm free" as he simultaneously limped his wrists around, with maybe a cheeky reference to "sailors" thrown in for added canned-laughter value. It was never readily apparent that you could apply a second level of signification (in the manner of Roland Barthe's Mythologies) to Mrs Slocombe's unfortunate pussy or indeed apply a Lacanian critique to Mr Humphries's innuedo-strewn inanities, but whadda you know, the author here, Stuart Jeffries, has the intellectual effrontery to describe Are You Being Served? as "an unintentional critique of post-imperialist culture and British sexual repression".
A deconstructionist alarm bell immediately goes off in the reader's head: this Jeffries chap is clearly one of those trendy polytechnic "Media Studies" lecturers, someone who facilitates his students in considering Eastenders as a "text" to be decoded and how Noel Edmonds should be viewed as a "self-referential, post-modern icon". All very well, I'm sure, in a far-too-clever-by-half way, but Mr Jeffries should understand that some treasured icons are not to be messed with or "intellectualised". And Mrs Slocombe's pussy is one of those. However, further "decoding" of this text reveals that Jeffries is merely trying to elucidate the televisual nature of the classic British sitcom (comparing and contrasting with the American model) and he's also taking an affectionate poke at one of the programmes that filled up his adolescent viewing schedules, for what this poetically titled book is about is a joyous account of television's influences through the programmes that affected the baby-boom generation - the first demographic grouping to grow up to realise that a revolution could indeed be televised (in full Dolby stereo). Or even pre-recorded.
"The average Briton spends 11 years in front of a television set during their lifespan. And I am more average than most," begins Jeffries. Now 38, a philosophy graduate and currently a journalist with the Guardian, Jeffries writes about a life that was measured out in ad breaks. A very funny Proustian parody (the smell of a custard tart sends him back to memories of watching The Flowerpot Men) sets the tone for this breezy, intelligent yet irreverent overview of the place of television programmes in his life. Put glibly, you could say it's a Fever Pitch for Telly Addicts, but then the only thing, you sense, that Jeffries knows about Nick Hornby is that he's seen him on some TV chat shows. This, remember, is a man who can quote entire episodes of It's A Knockout.
Sport, cartoons, the news, sitcoms and soaps provide the backdrop as Jeffries provides a highly entertaining social history, in a sort of TV Times-meets-Edward-Said style of writing. Acknowledging television programmes as a "chief cultural unifier", he writes about his temps perdu in front of a box with one eye on nostalgia, one eye on social context, and both hands on the remote control. Going back to the children's programmes of his youth, he provides an illuminating Freudian analysis of the way children's TV presenters must say goodbye to young viewers at the end of their programmes - apparently it must be done in a manner that will reassure children that the presenter will be coming back. To illustrate this, he describes how the prolonged farewells of The Teletubbies (they first say goodbye to each other and then to the viewers) is of infinite comfort to young viewers. Moving on, his analysis of the cultural differences between American and British humour (best exemplified, out of chronological order, by the sunny, half-human, halfdolls of Friends vs. the dank miserabilism of a Rising Damp or Steptoe And Son) is pretty much on the button, and his extended treatise on how the once great soap Brookside has lost the plot (pun intended) is quite brilliant. He does, though, lose the philosophygraduate run of himself occasionally - going back to Are You Being Served?, he describes the Grace Brothers department store as "a metaphor for Britain in the late 1970s", which is just a bit silly - AYBS was, perhaps, a deliberate attempt to make Benny Hill look like Chekhov. He redeems himself somewhat when he writes about the "exquisite torture" he felt in watching busty beauty Miss Brahms morph into the wizened harridan of Pauline Fowler in Eastenders. And if you need telling that both characters are played by the same actress, Wendy Richard, then this probably isn't the book for you.
His argument that television neglects intellectual content in favour of visual stimulation is fairly obvious but doesn't account for the huge successes of such landmark programmes as Robert Hughes's The Shock Of The New, John Berger's Ways Of Seeing, or of The Ascent Of Man. He unfortunately then writes that "television no more robs children of exercise than reading Tolstoy does", but manages to dig himself back up by quoting from Jean Baudrillard, whose essays in the French newspaper Liberation about "Why The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" say more about the nature of the medium in one paragraph than the collected works of so many narky, middle-aged television critics.
The only vital televisual anecedote/statistic Jeffries has missed out on (surprising for such an anorak) is the one that tells you most about the British make-up. The biggest number of phone calls ever recorded in the BBC log book on a single day was back in 1989 when the station was showing live coverage of Nelson Mandela's release from prison. The thousands who rang in were not congratulating the BBC on their coverage of the momentous event, but rather complaining that the Antiques Roadshow had been put back for a few hours.
He finishes by describing how the arrival of satellite, cable and digital TV (he now has 200 channels to choose from) has brought about the end of a televisually homogenous culture - in 1977, 28 million viewers tuned in to watch the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, that will never happen again.
"In the pre-Digital era of television, TV was one of the things that structured our lives. Since the Coronation in 1953, we have been nationally unified by the programmes we watched. It gave us a fund of common memories, shared heritage and a vernacular that came out of the cathode ray tube into our living rooms and into our hearts, then out into the playgrounds, factories and offices. Nice to see you? To see you nice? . . . Digital makes television just like shopping; like Iceland or Woolworths, it is a crude attempt to meet sophisticated demands and not a very nice place to be," he writes.
As Lord Reith once said: "Good broadcasting gives people what they do not yet know they need." The same could be said of this book. So it's goodnight from him and goodnight from me.
Brian Boyd is an Irish Times journalist
