No Liquid Paper No Monkees No MTV

MTV (Music Television) revolutionised both the music and television industries in the 1980’s. It also gave us lovers of music the opportunity to not just hear our favourite bands but to see them on the small screen day and night. But none of this would have happened the way it did without Bette Nesmith Graham, a little lady from Texas - see for yourselves. 

Bette wasn’t a music producer or a television channel boss, she was a housewife from Texas and more importantly she was a typist. That last fact is really the key to how MTV came about, because as a typist in 1950’s America Bette was fed up with making typing errors and being unable to correct them, so much so she went into her kitchen and came up with an answer – typewriter correction fluid, which she called “Mistake Out”.   Bette successfully created a company to sell Mistake Out, now called Liquid Paper, moving from her kitchen to a prefabricated shed in her back garden. As Liquid Paper became indispensable to typists all across America and he health was failing Bette sold her company which employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5M. Sadly Bette died the following year at the age of 56, but her legacy and story took quite a different turn.

Whilst many people reading this today or indeed people in America at that time had heard of Bette Nesmith Graham, millions of people around the world had heard of her son Mike Nesmith as one of the members of the pop group The Monkees.  Inspired by The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night U.S. TV producers decided to put together a television show in the late 1960’s about a group of four lads forming a pop group and looking to hit the big time, Hey, Hey, these were The Monkees! As a manufactured band The Monkees never quite hit the heights of The Beatles but they did enjoy a number of hits some of which still get the feet tapping some 50 years on, “Daydream Believer, Last Train to Clarksville and I’m a Believer” to name but a few. Also in 1967 the opening act playing support on their US tour was none other than Jimi Hendrix, so you cannot underestimate their pop pulling power.  By 1971 The Monkees as a TV show had run its course and so had the band, so they split up and went their separate ways to pursue solo projects.

Mike Nesmith formed a band called First National Band and had some success but with a keen interest in visuals to support music he started to produce film clips to go with pop songs. In 1977 he filmed what many see as the first custom made pop videos for his song, “Rio”. The “music video” was well received so much so he created a television show called PopClips for Nickelodeon cable network showcasing pop music promos. PopClips was made with a relatively modest budget and Nesmith was unable to experiment or be truly creative due to financial constraint. However all this changed in 1979 following the death of his mother Bette Nesmith Graham who left him a sizeable part of her estate valued at circa $50M.  Nesmith was now able to create better output which bought it to the attention of Time Warner/Amex executives who could see that the 80’s would be all about an unlimited number of cable channels and why not a dedicated music channel devoted to playing non-stop music videos. Time Warner/Amex bought PopClips from Nesmith in 1980 and in 1981 PopClips morphed into MTV and was launched as the first non-stop dedicated music television channel to the delight of millions around the world.  Nesmith went on to make music videos for the likes of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie in the 1980’s and he even won the first ever Grammy for a long form music video in 1982 for Elephant Parts.

So I guess the next time you’re bopping away to a music video at home or in a club spare a thought for Bette Nesmith Graham a housewife and typist from Texas without whom we might never have had MTV!