Researchers into the early days of TV for women want to know what you were watching in years gone by
woman watching tv in 50s
Early television for women was in fact quite riveting.
There is a woman in Derbyshire, now in her 60s, who has fond memories of watching boxing on television. It isn't that she was particularly excited by the sight of two men trying to rearrange each other's faces. That aspect she found rather distasteful, even when screened in bloodless black and white. "What she really liked was that it was one of very few experiences that she could share with her father," says Hazel Collie, a PhD student from De Montford University in Leicester. Collie is asking women aged 40 to 95 for their personal memories of watching "the box" as part of a three-year project called A History of Television for Women in Britain: 1947-1989. The dates cover the period when TV resumed after the war to the coming of satellite broadcasting.
Some respondents have talked passionately about being riveted by early screenings of Panorama. Others recall the excitement of pop music invading screens that had hitherto hosted only big bands and crooners. "For women now in their late 60s and early 70s it was The Six-Five Special and for those now in their late 50s and early 60s it was Ready Steady Go," says Collie. "One woman remembers trying to record Top of the Pops on a reel-to-reel tape recorder by getting her brother to hold the microphone near the screen.
"As women grew older, had jobs and children, it's obvious that they didn't usually get their first choice when it came to family viewing," Collie goes on. "They could also be described as 'distracted consumers', half-watching while doing other things, such as ironing or cleaning."
Her interviewees so far have been women from all parts of the country who responded to advertisements in Saga Magazine and Woman's Weekly. Collie is also keen to hear from Education Guardian readers who are in the age bracket. A public discussion on the subject is to be staged in Leicester next month. Boxing, Panorama and Top of the Pops may well feature, but there is more likely to be a focus on programmes specifically aimed at a female audience. There are also likely to be screenings of dramas made in the early 1960s, such as Compact, which was set in a women's magazine, or The Rag Trade, a comedy focusing on bolshie working-class women in a clothing factory.
"We want to show the roots of contemporary programming," says Dr Rachel Moseley, who is leading the project at the department of film and television studies at Warwick University. "These early programmes undermine the assumption that married women were nearly all housewives back in the 1950s and 60s. The issue of trying to balance work and home life is often perceived as 'post-feminist', but these programmes suggest that it goes back a lot further."
Serious programming for women goes back further still, at least to the early 1950s. In 1951, the BBC put out Women's Viewpoint, which Moseley's colleague Dr Helen Wheatley describes as "basically a precursor for Loose Women [ITV's current chat show]". Without the emphasis on celebrity gossip and trivia? "Yes, there was less pressure to rake in audiences in those days and Women's Viewpoint fitted in with the Reithian idea of the BBC being an improving force. Space was made in the midday schedules for a group of public women to discuss the issues of the day. It's a mistake to think that daytime television was invented in the 80s."
Moseley and Wheatley are keen to undermine current assumptions. "Early television for women was much more varied, innovative and imaginative than we could have predicted and, in fact, has a lot in common with today's formats," says Moseley.
Television ownership expanded markedly with the Queen's coronation in 1953, which was also the year that Doreen Stephens arrived at Broadcasting House as editor of BBC television's women's programmes. She remained in post until 1964. "Yet she's not mentioned in any of the main histories of the BBC," Moseley says.
To set the record straight, the project's research fellow, Dr Mary Irwin, has written a paper on Stephens, describing how her zeal to inform women often brought her into conflict in a male-dominated corporation. Irwin found internal BBC memos suggesting that the controller of television programmes, Cecil McGivern, gave Stephens a particularly rough ride. He once grumbled about the unnecessary amount of gynaecological detail in a programme about childbirth.
Irwin writes: "The virtual absence of Stephens from historical records means that, until this point, any concentrated analysis of the early history of the development of television programmes for women is to all intents and purposes non-existent."
Three years ago, Moseley and Wheatley wrote an article for the television section of the Cinema Journal, asking Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? "In order to make convincing arguments about contemporary women's programming," they argued, "television scholars need to be able to see where the address, format, representations and concerns of 'the new' originate and how they have developed. We need, in other words, to pay attention to 'the old' of television as well as 'the new'."
The article may have helped to secure them a grant of £397,880 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And it's definitely part of their remit to write a document for the industry on the need to be aware of the history of women's television, and to preserve what has survived.
woman watching tv in 50s
Early television for women was in fact quite riveting.
There is a woman in Derbyshire, now in her 60s, who has fond memories of watching boxing on television. It isn't that she was particularly excited by the sight of two men trying to rearrange each other's faces. That aspect she found rather distasteful, even when screened in bloodless black and white. "What she really liked was that it was one of very few experiences that she could share with her father," says Hazel Collie, a PhD student from De Montford University in Leicester. Collie is asking women aged 40 to 95 for their personal memories of watching "the box" as part of a three-year project called A History of Television for Women in Britain: 1947-1989. The dates cover the period when TV resumed after the war to the coming of satellite broadcasting.
Some respondents have talked passionately about being riveted by early screenings of Panorama. Others recall the excitement of pop music invading screens that had hitherto hosted only big bands and crooners. "For women now in their late 60s and early 70s it was The Six-Five Special and for those now in their late 50s and early 60s it was Ready Steady Go," says Collie. "One woman remembers trying to record Top of the Pops on a reel-to-reel tape recorder by getting her brother to hold the microphone near the screen.
"As women grew older, had jobs and children, it's obvious that they didn't usually get their first choice when it came to family viewing," Collie goes on. "They could also be described as 'distracted consumers', half-watching while doing other things, such as ironing or cleaning."
Her interviewees so far have been women from all parts of the country who responded to advertisements in Saga Magazine and Woman's Weekly. Collie is also keen to hear from Education Guardian readers who are in the age bracket. A public discussion on the subject is to be staged in Leicester next month. Boxing, Panorama and Top of the Pops may well feature, but there is more likely to be a focus on programmes specifically aimed at a female audience. There are also likely to be screenings of dramas made in the early 1960s, such as Compact, which was set in a women's magazine, or The Rag Trade, a comedy focusing on bolshie working-class women in a clothing factory.
"We want to show the roots of contemporary programming," says Dr Rachel Moseley, who is leading the project at the department of film and television studies at Warwick University. "These early programmes undermine the assumption that married women were nearly all housewives back in the 1950s and 60s. The issue of trying to balance work and home life is often perceived as 'post-feminist', but these programmes suggest that it goes back a lot further."
Serious programming for women goes back further still, at least to the early 1950s. In 1951, the BBC put out Women's Viewpoint, which Moseley's colleague Dr Helen Wheatley describes as "basically a precursor for Loose Women [ITV's current chat show]". Without the emphasis on celebrity gossip and trivia? "Yes, there was less pressure to rake in audiences in those days and Women's Viewpoint fitted in with the Reithian idea of the BBC being an improving force. Space was made in the midday schedules for a group of public women to discuss the issues of the day. It's a mistake to think that daytime television was invented in the 80s."
Moseley and Wheatley are keen to undermine current assumptions. "Early television for women was much more varied, innovative and imaginative than we could have predicted and, in fact, has a lot in common with today's formats," says Moseley.
Television ownership expanded markedly with the Queen's coronation in 1953, which was also the year that Doreen Stephens arrived at Broadcasting House as editor of BBC television's women's programmes. She remained in post until 1964. "Yet she's not mentioned in any of the main histories of the BBC," Moseley says.
To set the record straight, the project's research fellow, Dr Mary Irwin, has written a paper on Stephens, describing how her zeal to inform women often brought her into conflict in a male-dominated corporation. Irwin found internal BBC memos suggesting that the controller of television programmes, Cecil McGivern, gave Stephens a particularly rough ride. He once grumbled about the unnecessary amount of gynaecological detail in a programme about childbirth.
Irwin writes: "The virtual absence of Stephens from historical records means that, until this point, any concentrated analysis of the early history of the development of television programmes for women is to all intents and purposes non-existent."
Three years ago, Moseley and Wheatley wrote an article for the television section of the Cinema Journal, asking Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? "In order to make convincing arguments about contemporary women's programming," they argued, "television scholars need to be able to see where the address, format, representations and concerns of 'the new' originate and how they have developed. We need, in other words, to pay attention to 'the old' of television as well as 'the new'."
The article may have helped to secure them a grant of £397,880 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And it's definitely part of their remit to write a document for the industry on the need to be aware of the history of women's television, and to preserve what has survived.
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