THE HISTORY OF TV FOR WOMEN

By Dr Rachel Moseley, Department of Film and Television Studies

It's tempting to think that television aimed at women in the post-war period was all about curtain-making and getting food on the table for hubby, but a joint research project between the University of Warwick and De Montfort University has uncovered a much more nuanced story. Focusing on the period 1947-1989, the study celebrates the achievements of TV heroes such as Doreen Stephens, who fought to make programmes that reflected women's lives at a time of great social change.

Loose Women, Sex and the City, Mad Men. All contemporary television programmes which speak to issues relevant to women’s lives in the 21st century, often focusing on the difficulty of combining relationships, family and work. Not such new concerns, as it turns out. Our three-year, AHRC-funded research project, A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989 is showing that television for women in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s dealt with just these issues, often in very similar formats, long before it might be imagined that this complex nexus of concerns was on the agenda.

The project is running between Warwick and De Montfort Universities from 2010 to 2013, and aims to explore and document the history of television produced for a female audience in Britain, from the re-start of regular television broadcasting in Britain after World War II in 1947, to the end of exclusively terrestrial broadcasting in 1989. We are looking at both the programmes that were made and the production contexts from which they emerged, but also at the experiences of the women who have watched this programming.

In broad terms, the Warwick team are exploring the programmes and production culture of this period, watching programmes that remain available to view and reconstructing those that do not using paper archives such as the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC) at Caversham, Reading. Here, we can consult programme files, memos between personnel, shooting scripts, studio floor plans, properties lists and so on, to gain a sense of what the progamme-as–broadcast looked and sounded like.

Researching the history of programming produced by Independent Television since its arrival in 1955 is quite a different matter. A regionally-structured television system, there was no central archive created for Independent Television. The written records of the various franchises are dispersed or non-existent, and any audio-visual archives that remain are often in commercial archives, making it difficult and expensive to find and consult primary texts. What remains of the Independent Television Commission’s paper archive is held at the British Film Institute, but is in no way comparable to the wealth of data available for BBC programming and production history at Caversham.

The reasons for the lack of available programming from the early period are numerous, but are related partly to technology: video tape was not in use in the UK until the late 1950s; tele-cine recording of live broadcasting (which almost all television was, before the advent of video) was expensive and reserved for those programmes which could be re-used or sold on. ‘Women’s Television’ did not come into these categories, and it was not until later in our period of research that the BBC instituted a policy of recording one or two episodes of every kind of television they produced for ‘posterity’. Locating our object of study, then, is challenging, but we have already been able to rethink commonly held assumptions about women’s culture in the 1950s as a result of our research.

Researching the history of programming produced by Independent Television since its arrival in 1955 is quite a different matter.

While the focus of much BBC television addressed to women was, indeed, domestic (afternoon ‘magazine’ programming which advised on flower-arranging, curtain-making, or how to make the most of your food rations in the immediate post-war period), there were also programmes which recognised that women’s interests reached beyond their immediate domestic sphere and encompassed arts and politics. Women’s Viewpoint (1951) was a panel discussion programme, debating issues relevant to women’s lives. There was also acknowledgement in the programming of this period that some women viewers were working women who also managed a home and there were key personnel who fought to give the realities of women’s lives a space on television. Doreen Stephens, first editor of BBC Women’s Programmes, was one such figure.

The other side of our project is located at De Montfort, where the team are conducting an audience study, interviewing a generationally and nationally-dispersed group of British women about their memories of watching the television that they perceived as having been ‘for them’. Sometimes, this is not quite the same thing as ‘women’s television’… sport and music television are looming large in ways we could not have anticipated! These women have been reached through adverts in local and national publications and their accounts of watching ‘their’ television are intimately bound up with their personal narratives, demonstrating how closely television is woven into the fabric of everyday life. These accounts are enabling us to adjust our initial hypotheses about what ‘Women’s Television’ might constitute; this was a key aspect of our research design. We wanted to make sure that our archival research was informed by the women’s accounts, and that the questions we asked were informed by our research, thus producing a nuanced and interdisciplinary history which could begin the work of filling a significant gap in histories of British broadcasting.

It might come as a surprise to learn that, despite perhaps 45 years of feminism in the academy, the history of women’s television is one that remains to be written

It might come as a surprise to learn that, despite perhaps 45 years of feminism in the academy, the history of women’s television is one that remains to be written; the central histories of British Broadcasting exclude both reference to the many programmes made specifically to address a female audience across the history of British television, as well as to the contributions of many key female creative personnel except those who are already widely-known, such as Grace Wyndham-Goldie.

One such woman was Doreen Stephens; the BBC’s first ‘Editor, Women’s Programmes’, Stephens was a working mother, who had studied sociology and who stood as the Liberal Candidate for Hackney in 1945. She fought hard to make women’s programming relevant to the lives of her viewers, encountering significant resistance from her seniors in the process. The files at Caversham contain memos that document this struggle, in particular Stephens’ run-ins with Cecil McGivern, then Controller of Television. McGivern repeatedly criticised women’s programming for not being as exciting or as well-made as children’s, for example, accusations to which Stephens would respond on the basis of low budget, poor equipment and irregular scheduling.

One of her original programmes, Family Affairs (1955), was an afternoon series tackling pregnancy, childbirth and parenting. On one occasion, McGivern sent a memo to Stephens commenting that the broadcast he had seen had a tone that was ‘set from the beginning by the discussion of stitches’ and that while he understood that pregnancy was important in women’s lives, asked ‘did it have to be SO obstetrical [sic]?’! The work of our colleague Mary Irwin has revealed the important role that Doreen Stephens, virtually absent from existing histories of British television, played in the development of women’s televisual culture in this country.

The contribution of Hazel Adair, co-writer of Crossroads (1964) but also creator of ITV’s first daily soap Sixpenny Corner (1955) as well as Compact (1962) (set in a magazine office) and writer of Emergency Ward 10 (1957), to British and world television culture is also yet to be fully recognised.

This is a project with a clear feminist agenda; our aim is to begin to write the history of women’s programming in this country across a period of great social and cultural change (the reorganisation of family life in the postwar period, the growth of consumer culture, the women’s and civil rights movements) and to explore the meanings that women viewers have made of their television culture, as well as to historicise work on contemporary women’s programmes. Follow us and contribute your own memories on our Facebook page, Twitter feed @TVforWomen, our blog or via our website.

Dr Rachel Moseley and Dr Helen Wheatley (Investigators), and Dr Mary Irwin (Post-doctoral Research Fellow) are at the University of Warwick; Dr Helen Wood (investigator) and Hazel Collie (Doctoral Researcher) are at De Montfort University.

Rachel Moseley is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Author of Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn (Manchester, 2002), she has written on questions of gender in popular film and television, including work on lifestyle and teen programming. She is Principal Investigator on ‘A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989’ and is currently researching the representation of Cornwall in film, television, art and literature.