Notes & Queries response: Why did whistling go out of fashion?

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In June of 1970, as the Great British electorate lined-up outside polling stations to cement their collective opinion on the Wilson Government, another public-led sea change was in the works. Guided by the silent hand of mob rule it percolated through the honeycomb of the United Kingdom's porous island culture, eventually enacting a social change that was at once both innocuous and profound.

To understand the roots of this cultural shift, we must travel further back in time to the previous year:

Up until March 1969, the three television channels operating in the UK had been broadcast across a grab-bag of named frequencies. BBC One typically went out into the world on the back of the Gray Band, though the corporation would sometimes resort to the Innell Band during wet weather. Their independent rival – ITV – broadcast on the Stenhouse frequency. BBC Two, then the new kids on the block, used the Morley Band. The Ridgewell channel (that bankrupted its co-founder Christopher Cardwell – his business partner, Michael Groombridge, fled to South Africa, and later to Australia) transmitted on Trendell – an old, emergency wartime frequency. Since the channel only lasted eight months and was barely up and running at the time of its inevitable demise, it is scarcely worth mentioning. I will leave others to lament the loss of the programmes that were produced by Ridgewell in-house, and subsequently excised from the cultural record after the BBC purchased the entire tape stock and wiped the lot for later re-use.

On the 1st April, 1969, the three surviving television channels were united on a spectrum of frequencies known as the 'Brealey Band', named after Sylvia Brealey – a prominent World War II radar technician, who had found work at the BBC following the end of hostilities. In addition to “tidying the airwaves” (as Brealey put it) the change allowed the channels to cycle their broadcasts across an array of contiguous frequencies, in response to changes in atmospheric conditions, resulting in more-reliable, higher-quality transmissions.

Despite the overall improvement that was brought about by this change, the Brealey Band had an unforeseen Achilles' heel – a jovial every man nemesis, commonly seen in tandem with a ladder, and perhaps a pail of soapy water.

“We knew almost immediately that any whistling in the vicinity of a television set receiving a transmission on the Newband Spectrum, scrambled the signal to a degree,” recalls Alan Gould, who worked alongside Brealey at her base of operations in Milton, Sussex. “It was how to break the news to the public that was the thorny problem. Ken Butterfield (the Conservative MP for the long-since defunct Devonshire constituency of Boothray) claimed it was the work of the Russians, which caused a brouhaha with Moscow. Ron Simes (the editor of The London Fairlead, who was assassinated by poison dart, while drinking at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, on Fleet Street) ended up as collateral damage.

“The BBC were hoping we would come up with a quick solution and, of course, we never did. We made some improvements but we never got the full measure of it. Sylvia had a warehouse that was filled with one or two of just about every television set that was made – both in the UK and abroad. There were men in white lab-coats, brandishing clipboards, and those mobile frequency detectors that they later tried to install in TV licence detector vans, whistling at the screens in the name of science. There was tremendous variation in loss of signal depending on what was whistled: The orchestral busywork that follows the opening to Beethoven's fifth would turn any television into a snow-globe. I remember Sylvia absolutely fuming: She said something about 'that deaf composer blinding a nation from beyond the grave.'”

In the end, there was no formal public announcement. Over time, fears of a Russian plot to sabotage transmissions of Coronation Street were replaced by a growing awareness that the actual cause of these temporary deteriorations in sound and picture quality were a standing ragtag army of visiting tradesmen – window cleaners, postmen, milkmen and so on, their cheeriness abruptly cut off by black-bordered cards, that could be purchased from the post office, propped-up in windows in front of the net curtains, warning that: 'A television is in operation on the premises'. There were threats made to those who failed to comply, and even the occasional impatient beating handed out. As the latter became more frequent, local gas boards began issuing their engineers with 'whistle guards' – a variation on a boxers' mouth-guard that prevented the wearer from pursing their lips together.

Occasional malicious attempts were made at disrupting broadcasts, such in 1977 when, up and down the country, disorganised groups of young people, out to make trouble, did their best to impede the transmission of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, resulting in over 300 arrests.

Gradually, whistling began to fade from English culture, cast-off by a strata of generations who had concluded that television represented the better form of entertainment. As Alan Gould states, the problem was never completely resolved, and only ceased to be an issue following the switchover from analogue to digital that commenced in 2008.

“Currently, whistling presents no threat to television broadcasts in the UK,” assures Keith Penstone of The British Whistling Society. “There is no reason why it can't make a comeback, or even be taught in schools as part of the musical curriculum.”

He showed my an app on his mobile phone that will convert any song into whistling and provide guidance on pitch and technique. He offered to demonstrate it for me, but I politely declined.

I hope this is of help.

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This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 16th July, 2023.

The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.