Olden Days Telly

The Disney+ series Rivals almost brings back the 'golden era' of TV

I started working in the television industry in 1982, which I now understand was the beginning of boom time for the medium of television. In the USA and Europe, technological advances like satellite and cable, plus lots of free market deregulation meant that small production companies and regional broadcasters could become media behemoths in just a few years.

Genuinely embarrassing. The first TV shows I ever appeared in. This was broadcast on the newly launched Channel 4 in 1982, I’m to dork on the right.

I didn’t understand that at the time, and to be honest I wasn’t interested. In 1982 the TV industry was a closed book from my standpoint, my first experience (captured in the picture above) was very negative. I was in a political comedy group, the way the producers tried to portray us on this terrible show was the absolute opposite of everything we stood for and were trying to do.

It was a brutal business at the best of times, in the UK the free market Thatcherite boom attracted a lot of very puffed up alpha males who thought what they were doing was important.

I’d kind of forgotten all about it until a few friends begged us to watch ‘Rivals,’ a new rather cheesy drama series currently playing on Disney plus. It’s based on one of those dreadful fat books you used to see in airports, written by Dame Jilly Cooper. Okay, she wasn’t a dame when she wrote Rivals, that came later, but she’s hugely popular writer, having shifted over 11 million books in the UK alone, plus all her works are in multiple languages around the world.

Rivals is set in the 1980’s, with the music, cars and fashion very accurately portrayed. Having started my career in that period, I have to say I found the rather shallow stereotypical characters less convincing. Not the actors, they’re all great and clearly having a whale of a time wearing the weird fashions of the period.

It’s also mainly set in the Cotswolds, which is where I have been living fore the past 33 years and where Dame Jilly has lived most of her life. But just to get a bit snotty, I live in the real Cotswolds, the northern part, up on the escarpment, not the low flatlands around Cirencester, or even worse, around Chipping Norton where disgraced former Prime Minister Cameron and Mr J Clarkson live.

People down there say they live in the Cotswolds, nonsense, they might live near the Cotswolds, but in reality they merely live in Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire. Don’t sneer, these things are critically important . . . . to about 12 people.

I digress, what all this Rivals hoo-haa has done is remind me of the frailty of bullish, growth oriented confidence. All the men, and it was mostly men, I met during my semi successful TV career were 100% confident that the companies they created, and the vast wealth many of them accumulated, actually meant something culturally.

It’s important to remember that this golden age of television took place before the internet, let alone streaming or social media. I think I had heard that 2 computers could talk to each other, but it wasn’t until the late 1980’s that I finally got a computer.

The single, largest and most powerful medium was television. The viewing figures for TV shows in the 1980’s and early 1990’s are unimaginable today. All advertising revenue was very firmly focussed on television so the money was pouring in for the few running the show. I knew many people who worked in TV commercials production and they were all rich. In terms of payment per hour, the most I have ever earned is from doing voice overs for TV commercials.

I won’t mention the product, but I financed a production involving 6 actors, their travel, accomodation, venue rental and all the publicity at the Edinburgh Fringe festival from 2 minutes in a voice over booth in Soho.

Once these huge companies were established, someone in my position had very limited options in terms of creating something for television. I cannot recall the days, no, years I have spent putting on a suit, going to pitch meetings, writing proposals, discussing who was a commissioning editor at which channel who might be interested in some project or other.

Again, I’m not going to mention names, but it wasn’t long before the commissioning editor I was pitching to was younger than me, and I think it fair to point out that I wasn’t an outsider in this process. I was lucky, I actually got to meet these all powerful people. I was in one of the most popular TV comedy shows on the telly, Red Dwarf, very much a 1980’s creation.

Making TV shows was incredibly expensive. The cameras we used cost more than a car, an edit suit cost the same as a lovely old farmhouse in the Cotswolds, the sound equipment was expensive and temperamental. Making a TV show required a lot of people, therefore a big budget, therefore a very wealthy broadcaster to fund it. But there were multiple very big, very wealthy broadcasters around.

And it goes without saying that this enormous focus of energy and creativity did produce some amazing shows, incredible drama series with big budgets, multiple comedy shows and a whole new generation of people entered our lives through the massive, heavy box in the corner.

(That massive, heavy box was called a television)

But, and looking back I had no idea at the time the impact this might have, I attended a conference in Los Angeles in 2000. It was about how you could put video on the internet. It was crazy, at that time 99% of people who had access to the internet were connected by incredibly slow dial up modems.

There was no way you could seriously watch anything resembling television on the internet. However big companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, were developing technologies that made creating something that could look like broadcast television possible, and at a fraction of the price.

And then, on December 15th, 2005, YouTube happened.

Jump forward to the 2020’s, and yes, loads happened in between the time of Rivals in the 1980’s and influencers with 30 million followers today. The disruption has been monumental. All those powerful, towering companies, broadcasters, flashy offices, big parties, expensive sports cars, piles of cocaine, hideous attitudes to women, they have all crumbled to dust. Watching linear TV, waiting until the broadcaster decides is the right time to watch something, all the old traditions I have trouble evcen recalling, gone.

The money from advertising, okay, there’s a bit left in television but I’d say in the low 10% of what used to be there. That money has shifted to social media big time.

Streaming video at 4k to billions of flat screen TVs, tablets, laptops and phones, something utterly unimaginable at that conference in Los Angeles in 2000. And the fact that someone like me, an old bloke who used to be on the telly (okay, we are making more Red Dwarf in 2025, so in some ways I still am) is able to create and help run a teeny tiny production company with over a million subscribers is something my nervous 1980’s self did literally not even dream of.

I do feel very lucky to have lived through this period of enormous change, if it has taught me anything, it’s that no matter how huge, rich, powerful or unpleasant you are, it’s all going to crumble and transmogrify into something else you didn’t see coming.

Not necessarily better or worse, but always, very different.