Television was the dominant cultural form in Britain for at least half a century, dictating and reflecting both the national conversation and the cultural imagination. As such, there are various ready-made arguments about its place in our lives (and our living rooms). To cultural pessimists or to Mary Whitehouse, television is nothing more than a mindless distraction, making us all lewd, immoral, or stupid. But Rob Young, author of The Magic Box, argues that television became the form for intelligent subversion, dissenting ideas, and the development of a new British folklore.

Young’s survey of British film and broadcast television is vast, ‘a huge cross-genre feast’ of almost two hundred works, including dystopian and apocalyptic speculative drama, folk horror films, Christmas ghost stories, sumptuous costume dramas, and rural nature documentaries. From this broad canon of TV, ‘persistent themes’ begin to emerge, namely ‘tensions between the past and the present; fractures and injustices in society; magical and occult notions; and presences and buried memories released from the earth.’ Young’s preoccupation with the supernatural and horror owes much to Mark Fisher, particularly 2016’s The Weird and the Eerie, which is duly acknowledged. But Young also manages to extend Fisher’s arguments to produce an account of British television that is both convincing and original, if at times too nostalgic for the 1970s.

Over the course of his research—hundreds of hours of viewing over a period of ten years—Young has unearthed a wealth of surprising examples. Early on he discusses the film It Happened Here (1964), begun in 1956 as an amateur project by teenagers Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, portraying an alternative history in which the Nazis had successfully invaded Britain. Set in 1944, the British Union of Fascists are in government, and apolitical Irish nurse Pauline (played by real-life Irish nurse Pauline Murray) is caught in the conflict between the fascists and the British partisans.

But rather than an inspiring tale of British resistance, It Happened Here is instead a film about complicity and collaboration: ‘The invading Reich seduces rather than crushes its victim.’ Like many of the now-forgotten programmes and films of the 1950s and 1960s, It Happened Here challenged the mores and attitudes of a nation still feeling smugly triumphant after winning the war. As one of the anti-fascists tells Pauline: ‘We’ve all got a bit of it in us. And it doesn’t take much to bring it to the surface.’

It wasn’t just alternative history which challenged the comfortable assumptions of postwar Britain. Young also argues that much of the sci-fi television of the 1960s, such as the BBC’s cult favourite ‘Quatermass’ series developed by Nigel Kneale, offered similarly sophisticated political critiques. The idea of an innate fascistic impulse lying beneath ‘the surface’ of British life was represented by the alien spaceship buried deep underground in the third serial, Quatermass and the Pit (1958-9). Once excavated, the ship awakens an ancient instinct in the population, causing those nearby to begin ‘a riotous killing spree’, murdering anybody the aliens have deemed ‘impure’.

This kind of fiction is not without its flaws – Young writes that this climax represents ‘the kind of mass hypnosis that occurred among Hitler’s supporters in Nazi Germany’, but such an analogy risks downplaying the real agency of the Nazis and their collaborators. However, the emphases on the ‘dormant violence’ underlying British society, the fragility of our social contract, and ‘the warning that no nation is immune from the fascistic impulse’ remain compelling.

Another of Kneale’s notable BBC television plays was The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968). This ‘lost classic’ portrays a dystopian ‘soft fascism of leisure and pornography’ in which couples ‘compete’ against each other live on camera while the producers monitor audience feedback in real time. The TV station, which has a ‘cool the audience, cool the world’ philosophy, is run by an ‘educated elite conscious of the populist processes at work.’ Even as early as 1968, Kneale himself had been ‘disturbed by the hypnotic power of mass entertainment’, and the play duly reflects this. Hilariously, Young writes that Mary Whitehouse had tried to prevent the show from being made based on the title alone: ‘If she had taken the trouble to read [the script], she might have realised that Kneale’s position […] was not so far from her own.’

The ‘educated elite’ of Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics is a thinly-veiled parody of the BBC itself, an organisation which has historically been patrician, patriarchal, and paternalistic in equal measure. But, crucially, the BBC did give Kneale’s work the greenlight. Similarly, the BBC’s Play for Today series, which ran from 1970 to 1984, ‘exposed a broad spectrum of viewers to a host of new ideas and scenarios featuring the young, the working class, the underprivileged and the compromised, as well as the elderly and the educated.’ The Play for Today ‘made few concessions to populism, acted as a hothouse for emerging auteur directors and covered a bewildering range of subjects, from nuclear attack to social realism, wyrd English mythos, and Borstal brutalism.’

Young concludes by reaffirming the importance of the BBC as a publicly-owned broadcaster, partly in response to the Conservatives’ proposals to scrap the licence fee after the 2019 election. Young argues that such changes ‘would remove a vital backbone of British cultural life.’ While many of the works discussed in The Magic Box were produced by commercial enterprises such as Hammer Films, ITV, or Channel 4, the most interesting by far are those made by the BBC, who had the financial security of the licence fee. Despite the BBC’s many flaws, Young argues that these peculiar and subversive works ‘would never have made it past the proposal stage in a meeting with the commissioning editors of a global streaming service. Too quirky, too local, too slow, too dry, too difficult, too weird.’

The Magic Box portrays television as a form for experiment, inquiry and ambiguity, a stage for the working-out of values rather than their prescription or proscription. It is for this reason that a plural and democratic state broadcaster is crucial.