Television in the Eighties

In the final part of this series on TV through the decades, we come to the eighties. Television has matured, news is instant, the world is a smaller place, and, choice has multiplied to the point where it has changed everything.

Half the News in Half the Time

The 80's brought momentous events in the history of the world - The Berlin Wall was dismantled and Russian dominance of the Eastern bloc ended... The Tiananmen Square massacre... The Falklands War... and in each case, it was television spectacle. In the west, we saw live pictures of what happened to anti-government protestors in Tiananmen Square before people who lived a few streets away in Beijing. Although the British government delayed footage of the Falklands War being transmitted until several weeks after it was shot, the war was conducted in gruesome detail in our front rooms. When a Townsend Thoreson cross channel ferry turned turtle in the freezing waters of Zeebrugge harbour in Belgium, it was live on the TV sets of the world as it happened. We are better informed than we have ever been before.

The world has shrunk. We are part of a global family in a way that has never been seen before. As I write, TV News is swamped with pictures of terrifying floods in Mozambique. The pictures are mobilising members of the public to send money to charities who hope to help. During the 80's, Bob Geldof suggested that pop musicians (who, let's face it, are generally not listed among the 'one hundred most saintly') could persuade millions of people round the world to send money to help starving people in Ethiopia. Band Aid, and the follow-ups, USA for Africa and Live Aid, were phenomenons which could not have happened without the influence and power of worldwide television.

And, we are better informed about our world. Thanks to a generation of TV naturalists, we have more understanding of the ecosystem which sustains our lives than any previous generation. We may still pump pollutants into the atmosphere which threaten our very existence... but at least we know we're doing it. And our new-found knowledge has improved the way things are. A hundred years ago, the fumes pouring into the atmosphere of the city of London from coal fires produced deadly smogs. Ordinary fog was turned into an acidic, poisonous soup which could end the lives of anyone not strong enough to withstand the fumes. Today, public pressure has improved the atmosphere of our major cities enormously (though they're still pretty grimy. Rumour has it that once in every decade, the gods pull back the blanket of smog over Los Angeles to see if the city is still there. And if it is, they cover it up again so they don't have to look at it). The call for organically grown vegetables in the supermarkets of the western world is partly a product of our new understanding of the way the world works. We don't want to poison our world.

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