“Terry Jones tried to eat the studio’s pet goldfish!” The small village TV station that became a smash hit in the 1990s | television

‘WRooster hat-up! These were the words that ended the first broadcast on the smallest television station in the world. Hours earlier, four local young men had been persuaded to serve as live-in presenters at a Sunday school in a quiet village. Despite the dead air and awkward line, it was the poor quality of transmission that caused the stars – Michelle Hornby (31), Jonathan Brown (27), James Warburton (25) and Deborah Cocking (21) – to apologize and cut off the opening broadcast. But Cocking, who didn’t realize they were still on the air, got past the censors and summed up the evening’s atmosphere perfectly: chaotic, amateurish, and relentlessly British.

This was the ‘TV Village’ – a first-of-its-kind social experiment in 1990 which saw the village of Waddington in Lancashire ‘watch, make and become’ television. For a short period in the early 1990s, the Ribble Valley was worth a fortune, with Granada Television shipping £3 million worth of high-end TV equipment to the rural hills of north-west England. Hidden cameras have been installed in villagers’ living rooms to record their viewing habits day and night. Meanwhile, Channel 4 filmed the whole thing for a six-part documentary series. The point of all this was to monitor people’s reaction when the number of channels jumped from four to 30 – offering everything from sports and movies to porn, with villagers having access to terrestrial, cable and satellite channels, including channels from Europe and the United States.

But one new channel has caught the village’s attention more than any other: Waddington Village TV. Granada felt that local programming and local TV stations would be the future, so it gave the villagers a station they could control to see how popular it was. With dedicated broadcasters and sets assembled with old sofas and duct tape, the DIY station became an eclectic outlet, broadcasting self-scripted television series, horoscope readings and magic tricks. Think corny stock music and thick Lancashire accents. However, without the use of musical instruments, makeup, or professional technicians, WVTV was a smash hit, capturing 95% of its available audience, technically making it the best-performing station in the world. When Coronation Street fell from its pedestal, Granada knew something had happened.

“The villagers all loved it, because they could see themselves, see their families, see the vicar,” Cocking says from his seat at the Lower Back Inn in Waddington. According to Cocking, Granada did not anticipate the channel’s success: “When they first started filming us, they actually said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it probably won’t even air.'”

None of the four team members wanted to be presenters, but the village with a population of about 400 had a small group of willing participants. Brown volunteered to help handle the cameras, but instead found himself in front of them.

Most of WVTV’s programming ideas came from the Waddington Four. Students from the then Lancashire Polytechnic were commissioned to produce the performances which were recorded in front of a live audience. There were the priest’s thoughts for the day, classes on keeping fit and a cooking program by the butcher’s wife Barbara. “In a small community, you run out of things you can do an advantage in,” Cocking admits. “But when you think about it, Barbara probably came before Nigella Lawson.”

“We weren’t journalists,” Brown says. “We still had to live in the village when the TV actors left.”

This lack of formal training has upset presenters several times. Hornby recalls being reprimanded by a producer for ruining “continuity” after getting a pass; Terry Jones of Monty Python fame tried to eat the studio’s pet goldfish during an interview; The entire production was jeopardized when a Weetabix box that was used as a prop to hold the scripts was accidentally moved out of view of the camera, potentially breaching advertising rules. Many people involved with the station remember that the broadcast was interrupted, only to discover that a sheep had chewed through the cable wires.

The Waddington children were also restricted, with three hours every Saturday being devoted to programs prepared for and by the young villagers. Jilly Chervonka, who was a teacher at the time, helped gather a group of children to write and act in shows – often without any form of parental approval. She remembers one episode in which young men robbed the Waddington Post Office and followed her into a car she was supposed to drive.

Despite the missteps and low budget, the presenters were a smash hit with locals, WVTV made news around the world, and 21-year-old Cocking even received fan letters. But the coverage was not without arrogance.

“There was a lot of condescension, these ‘immigrants from the north’ — which was absolute nonsense,” says Louise Fitzwalter, editor of The Television Village.

“Everyone loved it,” she continues. “People from all over the world were climbing on the roofs of their houses and turning their antennas to reach the village canal instead of Coronation Street. Granada said to me: ‘What have you done?! Our flagship program!

The production side of the experiment was a huge undertaking, with engineers, researchers, producers and camera operators living in Waddington for two months in the lead-up to the experiment. Fitzwalter says they thought it would be “a wonderful, very interesting and very heartwarming thing” to convince global manufacturers of the latest technology – from widescreen TVs to Sky – to send their prototypes to a remote village in Granada Land. Although the cables were hidden in the stream that ran through the village’s award-winning landscape, the majestic, air-decorated command center in the car park of the Higher Pack pub had Cocking’s mother exclaiming: “If Nana came back to life now, she would think the space rockets had landed!”

Naturally, the parish council wanted to keep an eye on things, as did the Independent Broadcasting Corporation once they discovered what was happening. “We created a channel without asking anyone if we could,” Fitzwalter laughs. The Village Channel even ran advertisements for local businesses, but allegedly had to return the money after the IBA caught fire.

Just before launch, legal tangles over copyright threatened to kill the entire project. Until Alistair Much, Granada’s company secretary, said, according to Fitzwalter: “Oh, let them sue.”

Fortunately for Granada, there were no complaints at all, and the porn channel did not spark outrage. “We were hurt by that,” says Mark Gorton, the trial’s second director. “We went around the models, and basically said that if people are going crazy over obscenity, it’s not Granada’s fault.”

“At the last minute of launch night, we bottled it and left it out of the box. Only to be greeted by a delegation of villagers who reached the end and demanded to play it.”

Gorton notes that TV Village was a precursor to the flood of social experiment shows we see today: “We treated it as an investigation. It was pre-reality TV, so the way it was made was more like an observational documentary. We put cameras in people’s homes and filmed people watching TV. Gogglebox did it brilliantly, but we just allowed people to be human. The rules of reality TV didn’t exist.” “We were the original Gogglebox!” Brown adds proudly. This televised Wild West is best summed up by Gorton’s memory of two hours of one villager watching television wordlessly before falling asleep until the ten o’clock news.

Despite WVTV’s influence, none of the villagers were paid for their participation – not even the four stars who did shifts every day of the week. Hornby talks about having to juggle her presenting responsibilities with two young children, and her brother Brown still feels frustrated after it’s all over: “The TV people are gone, it’s all shut down, and it’s over – over.” Warburton, who now owns the Lower Buck pub, prefers not to discuss the project at all.

The main results of the experiment were that viewers loved sports and movies, which pleased Sky, which provided these channels. But what’s even more surprising is that people love the programming created by the people around them. There was a strong feeling that hyper-local entertainment was the future of entertainment.

Thirty-five years later, the experiment proved correct. But instead of glamorous local production studios, today’s hyperlocal programming is pumped out through accounts on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. History has shown that WVTV is one of the earliest examples of user-generated content, before everyone could record and publish whatever they wanted.

“What’s happened over 35 years is that anyone can do a TV show,” Gorton says. “And we’ve learned that anyone can be good — and can be great — at it.”

The trial was launched in March, and by late April, the cable had been recovered from the Waddington River and the cameras had been packed. Brown and Cocking had ambitions to enter the world of television professionally, but life seemed to have other plans. Today, many of Waddington’s young people have no idea what happened in 1990, when for a few months it seemed like there were more cameras than people – when the village was full of talk about satellites, antennas and invisible waves from space. A number of those involved have since died. The only permanent reminder of the experience is an easily missed wood-encased silver plaque next to the war memorial that reads: WADDINGTON The Television Village.