• This is Rediffusion’s last day as an independent broadcaster. The company would maintain hopes of returning – they sought to take control of Thames as part of EMI’s takeover of the Associated British Picture Corporation in the 1970s and were approached by the Independent Television Authority to see if they would take over management of London Weekend when that company spectacularly failed in the late 1960s. But their share of the profits of 49% of Thames came close to equalling what they’d made from 100% of Rediffusion London; it became clear that this investment was worth far more to shareholders than running an ITV company on their own.
• There had never been a substantial change in ITV’s organisation before – the contract round in 1964 had produced no changes other than confirming TWW’s takeover of the bankrupt Teledu Cymru. The changes in 1968 were massive, to viewers and staff alike. ITV had presented itself as a thing of permanence, a solid undertaking with deep roots, a BBC. And no company more so than Rediffusion – to the point that Bernard Sendall, the official biographer of ITV, said “ITV without Rediffusion was unthinkable”. In retrospect, it’s amazing that the ITA, in order to accommodate what was in effect David Frost’s star-studded vanity project, were prepared to sacrifice Rediffusion’s weekday contract in order to fit London Weekend into the ITV jigsaw. And yet here we are.
• The contract changes officially happened at midnight on Monday 29 into Tuesday 30. Yorkshire Television and Granada, both seeking a fresh start at the beginning of the week, came to an agreement for YTV to buy that day off Granada in the east of the Pennines. Rediffusion, no doubt still smarting at how badly they had been treated over the contract changes, had no intention of giving up a penny of the advertising revenue by doing the same with Thames. Hence we get one single odd day of Rediffusion and the bizarre thought of a Yorkshire Television ident going out after two Rediffusion junctions.
• The same was not true at YTV – their evening was devoted to themselves, so no Rediffusion ident appeared on TV screens in Leeds.
• As can be seen, Rediffusion was dragged kicking and screaming off the air. The staff and management alike were heavily demoralised by the contract changes, with the board of directors quietly lobbying politicians and the great and the good in gentleman’s clubs across London, while the staff held protests, wore badges and put up posters denouncing the Independent Television Authority and the loss of their happy workplace.
• This edition of the TVTimes must be unique for having four regional contractors appearing in its pages: ATV London on Saturday and Sunday, Rediffusion on Monday, Thames on Tuesday through to 7pm on Friday, and London Weekend’s first evening tucked into the inside back page.

• Whilst ABC and ATV London had run special programmes to say goodbye to their regions, Rediffusion’s last night is almost entirely a celebration of their contribution to television and society, starting at 4.35pm with a repeat of an interpretive dance version of James Thurber’s Many Moons, which had been showered with awards on its first showing.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set at 7pm is a special version aimed at a more adult audience, again showing how innovative and un-stuffy the staid and stuffy Rediffusion could be. The show survived the changeover to Thames, with Daphne Shadwell and the Rediffusion children’s department moving over intact. DNAYS was the precursor to the (not for children) Monty Python’s Flying Circus from 1969, as can be seen from the cast and writing credits – Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin joining John Cleese (of Rediffusion’s At Last The 1948 Show), Graham Chapman (also an alumni of 1948) and Terry Gilliam over on BBC-1.
• DNAYS had won the Prix Jeunesse award in Munich in 1968, as the listing boasts. Daphne Shadwell would continue her career with Thames as a director, producer and executive.
• Granada and Rediffusion had divided up the ITV current affairs slots between them, with World in Action on Mondays and This Week on Thursdays. In order to get one final edition of This Week in under their own banner (it would transfer to Thames with the staff of the current affairs department), we get a ‘special’ today. For 13 years, Rediffusion had always done documentaries, current affairs and social investigations far above the amount they were contractually required to produce. Tonight, their last night, is no exception.
• The war in Biafra, a secessionist region of Nigeria, was awful, as civil wars always are. It was accompanied by terrorism across the region and a famine that affected all of Nigeria but was particularly devastating in Biafra itself. This was the first widespread ‘television famine’ – those in India had occurred before television had a global reach, whilst those in China were beyond an iron curtain that shut bulky film and video cameras out – and this half hour documentary had a similar effect on 1968 audiences as Michael Buerk’s report from Ethiopia for the BBC would have sixteen years later, with the creation of Médecins Sans Frontières paralleling that of Live Aid.
• This Week producer Phillip Whitehead would go on to be Labour MP for Derby North from 1970-1983, then a Labour MEP from 1994 until his death in 2005.
• In between the two current affairs strands, Yorkshire’s big contribution to the network, the hour long play Daddy Kiss it Better airs. This shows again how odd the stray Rediffusion Monday is. Whilst Granada and ATV were celebrating starting their 7-day contracts and YTV was celebrating its launch, Rediffusion were mourning their death. For the majority of people in the UK, Monday was the big relaunch day. In London, that would have to wait until tomorrow.

• There’s no local news programme on Rediffusion – they felt the area was perfectly well served for local news by the ITN national news – so the News at Ten is followed by a visit to Commander Laurie West, their resident weatherman.
• Associated-Rediffusion’s original staff had been drawn from the regular armed forces by semi-legendary founding General Manager Captain Thomas Brownrigg CBE DSO RN (Rtd) as he believed the discipline instilled by fighting in World War II and doing post-war National Service was something that a louche profession like television needed. Amongst his recruits was former navy commander Laurie West, who, holidays and sickness apart, presented every weather forecast on Rediffusion for 13 years. He makes three appearances today, after the two ITN bulletins and as part of the closedown around midnight. His contract was not carried forward by Thames, to the dismay of many viewers.
• The military links for Rediffusion didn’t end with the staff roster. Television House had spent the previous decade or so as the headquarters of the Air Ministry and thus the Royal Air Force and the Meteorological Office (which had been part of the RAF). The building was known then as Adastral House – the RAF symbol being an adastral, the name then attaching itself to the Rediffusion star logo – and was famous to two generations of listeners from it’s mention in each BBC radio weather bulletin, where they would end with “the temperature on the Air Ministry roof at XX o’clock was XX°F”.
• Half Hour Story at 10.30 was one of Rediffusion’s biggest exports. The series, at 25 minutes a show, was ideal for smaller commercial stations who didn’t want or couldn’t afford hour-long shows in their schedules. It didn’t move over to Thames, but Thames optioned the rights to repeat it, complete with Rediffusion front and endcaps.
• The producer of Half Hour Story was Stella Richman. She was one of the people who had horrified Lord Hill of Luton at the contract negotiations a year earlier by coming in for interview to discuss drama for Rediffusion, then popping up again later the same day doing the same job at the London Television Consortium (later LWT). For some reason, Hill blamed Rediffusion for their staff playing for both teams, but it worked out well for Richman, who became director of programmes at London Weekend and commissioned Upstairs, Downstairs before being fired on the personal orders of incoming (and soon outgoing) major shareholder Rupert Murdoch.
• Rediffusion and its ultimate parent company British Electric Traction were mid-century patrician Conservative to the very core. The boards of BET subsidiaries were always filled with Conservative Party members (and usually one representative from the Trades Union Congress) and they believed that running a business meant caring for their workers – current and retired – and society. BET gave millions of pounds to charities, encouraged its staff to do voluntary work and tried to put something back into the world they were working with – a very Macmillan-era Conservative view of capitalism needing a layer of paternalism that was only really driven out of the party in the late 1970s. One of Rediffusion Television’s way of meeting these societal goals was to open its airwaves to marginalised people and organisations who weren’t talked to or about in the hide-bound 1950s and 60s. Documentary crews had looked into whether homosexuality should be decriminalised, recreational drug use should be legalised, and blind and deaf children educated with ‘mainstream’ children; they encouraged people to talk about cancer at a time when people never mentioned the word out of fear and would shun someone diagnosed with the disease; and most of all they made a point of repeatedly looking at how the country treated our less abled citizens and above all children. The programme at 11pm, despite being titled with a word we no longer use, was made with Rediffusion providing its facilities for free to staff who volunteered to work on it without pay; it was shown without advertisements, so Rediffusion ensured they made no money from the hard work of the staff; and it shone a bright light upon a subject that people then had preferred to ignore despite its prevalence – cerebral palsy. As the final in-the-can Rediffusion production to go out on the company’s last ever night, there can be no finer example of what Rediffusion stood for.
• When Thames took over the London weekday contract, they noted that that audience approval was higher and ratings went up compared to Rediffusion. But the audience weren’t completely satisfied with the new Thames, as it dropped three things they liked: Crossroads, Peyton Place and Laurie West. Whilst Commander West was not to return, the howls of protest about the sudden end of Crossroads were picked up and amplified by the tabloids, whilst the big papers were stoutly displeased to have lost Peyton Place 400 episodes into a 500+ arc. After six months of any Thames news story or review in the papers having a paragraph shoved in it about the absence of one or the other of the two soaps, they returned; Peyton Place picked up where it left off, whilst Crossroads ran six months late for a couple of years compared to the rest of the country before they synchronised by having Noelle Gordon make a visit to the Thames continuity studio to fill viewers in on what they were about to miss.
• Peyton Place was not networked, with each ITV company starting with episode 1 on a different date and running out of sync across the network. Granada never showed the original run, waiting until much later to pick up the twice-weekly soap, running it five days a week in the afternoon in the 1970s. The show was even more popular in the United States where it originated, with superstar Dorothy Malone soon overshadowed by the two careers it launched: Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow.
• This last day ends with the Last Programme. The epilogue, an ITV standard (outside of Granada) since 1955, had always been called Last Programme on Rediffusion. Tonight it has a double meaning.

The post Tonight’s Rediffusion, London… in 1968 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Notional Date: December 1957
Announcer: Redvers Kyle
Music: Associated-Rediffusion March (Bate), used from 1957-1964

The original Associated-Rediffusion (A-R) daily opening routines had used The British Grenadiers with Cockaigne to start the main evening broadcasts from 7pm, and Blithe Spirit with Cockaigne for the morning and teatime transmissions.

The Rediffusion March (originally known as Music Everywhere) by Eric Coates was used in 1956-7 but lasted a relatively short time and soon gave way to this long remembered sequence featuring the first piece specially commissioned by the company. The earlier Rediffusion March had been re-dedicated by the composer for use originally by the Rediffusion cable concern in the late forties, as an interval signal and been borrowed by the TV operation at rather short notice in 1956.

At the time, Sir John Barbirolli was chief musical adviser to A-R, with Steve Race as the company’s Director of Music. The piece had been designed to fit the newly clarified regulator’s requirement of a pause in mid-tune to allow for the contractor’s licensing authority reference, a main section heard over a tuning signal and a grand closing verse with climactic point for company symbol to form and closing reprise over a clock face. In the early sixties this was shortened to a direct cut from tuning signal to clock. In the early years of Independent Television, these elements were highly specified and their daily conduct policed by the authority. This level of detail was thought to matter in the broadcasting environment of the day. This formulation for a start-up became a national standard for the first generation of regional ITA daily opening routines.

Someone, possibly Race, will have selected a composer, in this case the almost unknown Stanley Bate, and given instructions on the exact requirements for a functional piece, expected to be heard by viewers several times a day for some years. The title Associated-Rediffusion March would probably have been specified by the company rather than the composer. Corporate Identity was the name of the game.

The tuning signal in use here, the second ITA design, (the first having mainly been used in pre-launch tests) had two incarnations, with transmitter name originally used, and region name substituted as the number of stations on air multiplied. Only with its successor in about 1960 did the ITA develop the ‘Picasso’ tuning signal that is so well remembered today, a design ironically borrowed from an internal A-R camera setup card of 1956.

The fade to symbol for the last verse is of special interest. The brief rotation of the A-R star symbol, also known as the adastral, as part of the form up event, is for one rotation only and the trade mark remains static once complete. History has often mis recollected this feature. It was not until 1964 that the star remained in permanent movement on the logo caption. It did rotate without stopping, on the company clock however. It is worth noting that the rotation was in the opposite direction on the form up caption to the direction of rotation on the clock and indeed on the post 1964 Rediffusion London symbol. This is as obscure an observation as it is possible to make, in the history of television presentation!

The A-R clock, now in the Bradford media museum, was one of the glories of early weekday ITV in the London area. It was even nicknamed Mitch after the company’s first Head of Presentation, former BBC TV announcer Leslie Mitchell, also known as the commentary voice on British Movietone News, the famous twice weekly cinema newsreel that ran on into the seventies. The florid grandeur of the image may seem absurd to modern eyes, but at the time television was a theatrical focal point of any living room and to give the company clock an iconic status seemed the obvious thing to do. The attendant mock heraldry was of course a response to the BBC coat of arms, still in occasional use by BBC TV presentation in 1955, and helped to lend A-R the gravitas and weighty image that it craved.

A-R, throughout the life of the company, made a non-stop effort to give the new commercial television channel a respectability that it believed was needed to look the BBC in the face and to prove wrong the critics who had predicted that commercial television would, by definition, be vulgar.

A-R regularly sponsored concerts, engaged leading artists and musicians of the day and took some risks with occasional heavyweight programming in peak slots, especially after 9pm. The clock very much represents this ethos and was not thought to be ‘over the top’ at the time. Britain was a very different place then, and this daily start up routine gives an almost perfect flavour of the country in the fifties. The clock had become dated by the time of its demise in 1964, but had been seen as very grand in the previous decade. The voice of the very young Redvers Kyle sounds respectful and modest, as if even the duty announcer knew his place in a deferential society.

The music is perhaps best described as a cross between mock-heraldic and a B-picture war film. It is almost a pastiche of its own genre. It was well remembered, if not necessarily liked, by those who heard it as it insisted that ITV was not a penny bazaar and would prove that commerce could equal public service when it came to respectability. This is probably the most heavyweight ITV daily start-up routine of all, almost to the point of a surprising dreariness and very much of its time. It was evidence of the A-R desire to keep up with the ‘respectability’ that was the simultaneous ethos of their main rival, BBC Television.

This article originally appeared on Transdiffusion before 2001. It has been republished in a slightly different form and with the addition of the animated Associated-Rediffusion start-up recreation by Dave Jeffery.

The post Rising star appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Notional Date: June 1967
Announcer: Redvers Kyle
Music: The Widespread World of Rediffusion (Johnny Dankworth)

The Rediffusion London daily startup routine of the mid-sixties was widely regarded by those who followed the genre as the definitive station sign-on sequence of the monochrome era, a daily screen event that helped – together with those of ABC and ATV – to set the on-screen, corporate identity standards to which other companies aspired. At that time, daily startup routines were as much a promotion of the company trademark and ethos as an engineers’ tuning feature.

Courtesy of the music as much as the graphics, from the opening fanfare to the stunning closing climax, this was the signing-on moment that wrote the rules. For presence and charisma it was never bettered in the black and white years. Confident, assured, it unmistakably stated Rediffusion’s corporate belief that they were Independent Television and that as the flagship contractor of the network – London weekdays – it was their job to captain the team, lead the pack and set the standards for ITV in the sixties, as they had in the fifties. This they did with an energy and dynamism in channel identity standards which was matched only for verve and innovation by ABC in their North & Midlands weekend contracts.

Rediffusion Television Limited, to give the company its proper corporate name, had commissioned this full orchestral piece from the jazz composer and bandleader John Dankworth as part of the company relaunch in 1964, when their operating name was shortened from the long-lived Associated-Rediffusion to the new, punchier-sounding Rediffusion, London. Their Director of Music, Steve Race requested a modern fast-paced orchestral march, with a strong percussion and a modern, sixties jazz undertone. Combining a march format with a jazz style was quite an undertaking but in going to Dankworth, Steve Race had picked the right man. This was part of a major company relaunch and needed to be both innovative and conceptual. It was replacing the rather dull traditional march used previously by A-R and in corporate identity terms needed to startle regular viewers in order to emphasise the change of name. This was a time when ITV company names had a bigger on screen profile than the letters ITV did, still used in a subsidiary role to the names of the contractors.

This challenge was carried off by Dankworth with with a breathtaking style and the result – The Widespread World of Rediffusion – was acclaimed, by those who took an interest in these things, as an outstanding achievement in the promotion of corporate identity on screen. The repeated syllables of the motif “Re-diffu-sion-Lo-n-don” appeared in every other line of the main theme and the sweet melody of the middle eight provided a relief into something less militaristic, before the final build up to a march climax resumed. In corporate identity terms this was a triumph for the company and boxed adverts in some of the broadsheets, explaining the 1964 change in London ITV to the viewers, all mentioned this special musical commission to be heard by London viewers several times each weekday.

This was a piece of music that almost commanded you to sit down and watch the screen (if not standing to attention as a result of the militarist undertone of the beating drums in the last verse). Though broadcast three or four times a day for several years (daytime broadcasting was not continuous at that time, with many intervals between schools and other programmes, which used the final 25 seconds of the music to mark each closedown) it was a theme that retained familiarity, without gaining contempt. It became well known to weekday television viewers in London and even had the distinction of appearing as a footnote in the Television Audience Measurement (TAM) figures, as collected by set-top meters outside the control of the specimen viewers. People were tuning in five minutes early to catch the teatime transmission at 4.30. This was the only ITV startup routine to ever appear in the TAM ratings.

In the continuity departments of other franchise holders, this corporate identity triumph was admired and at a time when these things were given a greater importance than today, even the Head of Presentation at ABC Weekend Television in the North & Midlands, Geoffrey Lugg, declared himself to be “quite taken aback at the ability of the piece to project the new modern ethos of Rediffusion London”.

The visual side of the equation was no less impressive. The Picasso tuning signal is seen here in its region name variant and the timing of the fade-to-symbol is powerful. The closing seconds over the clock counting down to the first programme is a masterpiece of tension building within this genre.

The senior Rediffusion announcer Redvers Kyle, who along with John Benson of ABC was the longest-serving ITV announcer at the time, brings an electrifying tone of voice to the authority announcement. An almost impossible mixture of gravitas and dynamism is conveyed. The purposeful slight rasp in the intonation of the word ‘Authority’ is an elocutionist’s triumph and is the crowning glory of this short, punchy statement.

The statement that they, Rediffusion, are broadcasting on The London Station of the ITA, conveys quite utterly the undercurrent ‘where else would we be?’. This is the almost perfect encapsulation of the Rediffusion company policy of the time: network leadership.

The crescendo to the climax, which leads into the start of the final musical verse, reproduced the successful ATV habit of visual transfer from tuning signal to ident, from television authority to contractor. This was at a point of tension and drama within the music – almost filmic in tone. This was the perfect embodiment of how it was felt that these things should be done at the time. The sense of drama probably seems overdone by today’s standards but in the sixties, television still had power and modernity. The independent television companies saw themselves as substantive and moral equivalents of the BBC and wanted to convey a sense of permanence. No contractor had ever been replaced (save for the bankruptcy of little Teledu Cymru) and the expectation of broadcasting in perpetuity seemed a given.

Rediffusion, as London weekday contractor, was the successful linchpin of the network. Profitable beyond the wildest dreams of its original investors and constantly spending more on serious and prestige programming than they were required to do, they could do no wrong. This was ITV’s first golden age.

This article originally appeared in a somewhat different form before 2000 in another Transdiffusion publication. It has been republished with the addition of the animated Rediffusion start-up recreation by Dave Jeffery.

The post Star turn appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Notional Date: October 1956
Announcer: Leslie Mitchell
Music: Music Everywhere (aka The Rediffusion March) (Eric Coates)

Geoffrey Lugg, Presentation Manager of ABC Television and later Head of Presentation at Thames, had joined the industry in 1955 as a trainee transmission controller for the putative ABC North & Midlands weekend contract. ABC were new to the broadcasting industry, having previously run cinemas and film studios. By the time ABC was recruiting staff, Associated-Rediffusion (AR) had been on the air for some weeks. There was a shortage of skilled technical instructors in the new industry and at the suggestion of the ITA, selected new technical recruits from ABC and Granada – both coming on air months later than AR and ATV – were seconded for six month periods to shadow various jobholders at Associated-Rediffusion. Thus it was that while on the ABC payroll, Geoffrey found himself training in the AR transmission controllers suite at Television House, in the Autumn of 1955.

Many years later, when the original Transdiffusion organisation was founded in the 1960s, Geoffrey Lugg agreed to become Honorary Lifetime President of the Transdiffusion archive and was interviewed several times by a small delegation of presentation and continuity enthusiasts at his home in Teddington and again later when he moved to Camden as Thames began, when the ABC Presentation department at Teddington moved to Television House in Kingsway. Thames was building on the foundations of the old Rediffusion contract and Geoffrey in his several interviews, spoke highly of the Rediffusion presentation standards and their long record of ‘conceptual’ use of commissioned music for daily startup routines (five routines in 13 years).

Because of his association with AR in 1956, Geoffrey Lugg had a fund of stories about the internal politics of early ITV, and particularly the way in which Associated-Rediffusion ran its operation. One of the most interesting stories he told Transdiffusion was about presentation music at AR.

How do you know that a country is beginning to change? What indication is there that a nation may be beginning to turn its back on colonialism, is getting tired of Empire and that some of the establishment and people no longer have the stomach for militarism, so soon after standing alone and then jointly winning the biggest war in human history? It’s not something that can be accurately measured by the polls, or by votes in an election. But oddly, it could perhaps be glimpsed in a sudden change of on screen presentation routines and music used at the daily start of transmissions at one of the early ITV contractors.

This means war

The year is 1956, the company is Associated-Rediffusion, and the story is of how they suddenly, unplanned, switched to using an Eric Coates piece Music Everywhere.

For their first year of broadcasting, AR had been using an arrangement of a traditional piece, The British Grenadiers, as station theme for the daily 7pm start to evening transmission, with another softer piece for daytime programming. At that time, there was still a mandatory gap between daytime and evening television broadcasting – for both BBC and ITA transmissions, enforced by the General Post Office on the instruction of the Postmaster General, a member of the Cabinet. This was ostensibly so that the nation’s mothers could get their toddlers to bed without tears after children’s programmes ended at 6pm.

It had been a particular worry of the legislators who had recently authorised commercial television to be introduced in the first place that it might have a deleterious effect on children’s lives, so this stress relieving cordon sanitaire was conceived as a solution, in a culture where children’s bedtimes were still strictly enforced in middle class families – the only people, of course, who had television sets at the time.

This enabled Associated-Rediffusion to select a different station theme for daytime and for evening broadcasting and it was not until some months later with the cut back of unremunerative daytime programming for housewives that the regulators decided that one registered station theme for all daily startup routines would become the national standard.

With the use of The British Grenadiers as station theme for the 7pm start-up each weekday, AR was following the general ethos of many broadcasting signature tunes of the time – orchestral versions of military marches, with their inevitable hint of territory and triumphalism.

The Grenadier Guards depart for Suez

Into this obscure world came an intrusion from the unexpected arena of international politics, with the invasion of Egypt in the summer of 1956 by British and French troops determined to wrestle ownership of the Suez Canal back from the Egyptian government who had nationalised the Anglo-French canal owners operating company against the wishes of the shareholders.

T

here was uproar. The Americans were horrified that the old colonial ways of which they thought they had rid Europe ten years before were suddenly reasserting themselves. The population of the UK were largely against more war and more deaths so soon after the last. Cooperation between the parties in parliament came to a sudden end and scenes of bitter recrimination in both houses were reported in a divided press. The government fell out badly with the BBC when the latter agreed to give the opposition chance to state the case against the invasion. The BBC was threatened by the government of the day. Twas ever thus.

The Postmaster General suggested, off the record to the Post Office and the Post Office in turn to the ITA, that it was perhaps not appropriate or neutral for AR to be using, on a daily basis, a march whose unsung words were known to many school children from hearing them in music lessons and assemblies, a common choice for rousing primary school sing-songs. They were about a leading British regiment that was at any moment possibly to be involved in the invasion of another country. This was not so much a warning on the Post Office’s part as a piece of friendly guidance to the ITA. The whole thing was done informally – most probably by telephone – but hit home nevertheless.

AR quickly decided to change the daily music – at least for the duration of the conflict. They had to look for a replacement in something of a hurry as there was not sufficient time to commission and record a new daily theme for the station. The music used in regional ITV opening routines was registered with the Authority and could not be instantly changed at will. Thus was the ethos of independent broadcasting regulation in the fifties. In their hurried search, an inspiration occurred.

Back in the late forties, when Rediffusion/British Relay were principally in business providing wired sound services bringing clearer piped radio signals to valleys and areas with poor reception, they had been granted a special waiver by the Post Office to provide a very limited service of football commentaries on nearby matches in specified local areas, without commercials, provided by their own staff on closed circuit systems in a number of Northern and Welsh provincial towns.

This certainly did not amount to a local radio service but did signify, for the first time, the willingness of the authorities to make a tiny, non-commercial sound provision for a specific local need. The service was only possible where the football club concerned felt it would not detract from match attendance and also that there was a wired service available nearby – so relatively few places enjoyed this facility. This tiny and now forgotten niche facility was probably the first home-generated, non-BBC output in domestic services, though it was of course limited to a few wired networks and never broadcast to the mainstream radio listeners.

This was an unusual, if tiny concession at a time when the BBC had a monopoly of domestically generated sound broadcasting. The authorities had always been ambivalent about wired relay services, not strictly being broadcasting at all, and the Rediffusion company British Relay Services may have felt that this could give them a foot in the door should independent broadcasting of any kind be later authorised in the UK. The creation of non-BBC services had been debated but not acted upon by legislators for some years.

Sound and Vision

For this very minimal service of a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons in only a very few localities, Rediffusion needed to create a more distinct identity that could be distinguished from that of the BBC – and indeed Radio Luxembourg and Radio Eireann – that they generally relayed. A short unique signature tune – in those days known as an interval signal – would be required to distinguish the brief local output from the normal national fare. This was first used around 1949 on some of the company’s wired systems.

It is not clear as to whether the Eric Coates piece Music Everywhere was adopted off the shelf or whether it was specially commissioned – which seems unlikely for such limited exposure. It would be most probable that it was selected for use from a record library, where much Coates style music was available. Seven years later, when the AR Music Department was casting round for an urgent replacement to The British Grenadiers, the copyright clearance that the company already enjoyed with Music Everywhere made it an obvious choice and with the composer’s agreement (and no doubt some money changing hands!) the piece was renamed The Rediffusion March. This was not the only time Coates had agreed to a move like this – renaming an off the shelf piece for a customer.

Television March

In 1955, the BBC and ATV were both using Coates pieces as station theme tunes (the BBC Television March and Sound & Vision, the ATV march) so there was no question of this choice being from some totally new field. Coates, for a few months at least, had a total monopoly of London TV station signature tunes. This may have been a lack of imagination on the part of the companies concerned as much as being a self-perpetuating genre.

The supposedly new Rediffusion March entered use rather suddenly during the Suez Crisis in September 1956 and remained in use for more than a year. It might have been wise to have left well alone after that point but someone in the AR music department, possibly their supposed Musical Adviser John Barbirolli, or their Head of Music Steve Race, was of a notion to commission a new piece, to be specially composed for the company as a more permanent daily station theme. Stanley Bate, a lesser known composer of the time, was engaged and so his Associated-Rediffusion March replaced Coates’ Rediffusion March late in 1957. The new piece though appreciated no doubt by some, seemed like dreary “B film” music, compared to the bouncy Coates piece and not for the only time in the history of ITV daily startup music, an improvement turned out to be a dis-improvement. In hindsight, the Coates ’stop gap’ piece may be considered the more memorable work of the two. Make the judgement for yourself.

In vision

Leslie Mitchell on British Movietone News

Visually, this start up was impressive. It opens with the authoritative voice of former BBCtv announcer Leslie Mitchell, latterly installed as Head of Presentation at the fledgling Associated-Rediffusion, who was also for very many years the narrative voice on British Movietone News in cinemas. The purposeful identification, almost ex-cathedra in tone, is followed by the Coates piece, borrowed by A-R from the archive of a parent company.

It is interesting to note some similarities with the Coates BBC Television March of the time (written in 1946) latterly in use on the opposite channel. Particularly to be noted is what almost amounts to a composers ‘signature motif’ heard when the opening lines are reprised in louder form some moments further into the score. This brief identifier is heard identically on the BBC Television March, and suggested an ‘authentication’ of the piece as part of a Coates marches canon. With ATV also using a Coates work at weekends, the composer was suddenly dominant in a growing genre.

As was becoming standard for such daily opening ceremonials, the tuning signal faded as the grand last verse of the march approached and the AR symbol formed on screen. Although the ‘adastral’ trademark star revolved on the AR clock of the period, in the ident itself this revolved only as part of the form up music and froze again thereafter. It was not until many years later that the star was shown in permanent revolution in the new 1964 idents of successor identity Rediffusion London.

The trademark caption gave way to the company clock over the last lines of the music and the formality of the era was underlined with a continuity announcement that is all information and no welcome. The ethos of ‘carrying on where we left off yesterday’ was typical of AR, who did not, in the main, waste too much time on sentimental welcomes. But this was the ethos of the time and thus not unusual. On the hour the sequence cuts to the opening caption of the first programme, identifying the company who had originated the production, not the company output on which you were watching it; a habit that was to become standard everywhere on the network for more than 30 years.

This article is based on other articles by the same author that originally appeared in a slightly different form before 2000 as well as all new material. It has been published with the addition of the animated Associated-Rediffusion start-up recreation by Dave Jeffery.

➔ FROM TRANSDIFFUSION

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Very few trademarks live on after their parent companies have ceased to exist but this symbol, used on the ‘break bumpers’ of London weekday ITV in its first thirteen years, has resisted all attempts to bury it. It was a symbol that became utterly synonymous with UK commercial television.

Indeed, it is probable that the London weekday ITV viewers of the fifties and sixties thought that this symbol was national, and seen by viewers everywhere, between each advert. It became the standard punctuation mark of product promotion in this country, even appearing in cinemas and newspapers when the subject at hand was “TV ads”.

It was not geometrically an ordinary star. The sixteen ‘prongs’ were each inclined to the right of the perpendicular, giving the logo a sense of motion even when it was still. Even though the term ‘star’ has been used over the years, the design implications were of ‘energy’ from a sun, and that in some mysterious way the device represented the very act of ‘rediffusion’ when used as verb “to rediffuse”.

In today’s more cynical world this sounds like another attempt to “read too much meaning in” but a trade mark like this needs to be seen in the context of its era. Television was new, and commercial television newer still, when this logo was first used. In an era of state authority and an age of deference, the implied meaning and mysterious nature of almost fascistic company symbols was largely taken for granted.

This sounds far fetched today, when television is no longer awe inspiring – but back in the fifties and sixties, the iconic role of network symbols was thought essential to the corporate identity needs of television companies.

What makes this symbol a classic?

This was the first ITV symbol to move continuously while being seen, although this came after some years of use in static form.

The design suggests authority. The silent rotation conveys purpose. The suggestion that the star was actually ‘diffusing’ (whatever that was supposed to mean) though palpable nonsense today, suggested to the minds of the unsophisticated viewers of the fifties and sixties that some mysterious force was at work bringing television to them.

Surveys had showed that most viewers had no idea what the word “rediffusion” actually meant – a state of affairs that was considered ideal at the time for the requirements of promoting a corporate identity. This symbol thus came to define Rediffusion, in a marriage of company name and logo, in a unified way that no other company managed.

The ident in use

Station clock ‘Mitch’ with a rotating adastral, and an ARTV front cap from the 1950s, with an adastral that was largely static.

It’s the late 1960s, and time for a swinging Rediffusion London programme, and London’s weather

If you were interested, guided tours of Rediffusion’s Wembley studios were available, and tourists were given this brochure explaining all.

The studios became London Weekend’s in 1968, were abandoned in the late 1980s, and are now home to Fountain Television, and independent production company. The ARTV foundation stone is still by the entrance.

An enhanced photograph of Television House, Kingsway, used in publicity by Rediffusion London. The backlit adastral was never this bright, but it looks good anyway.

And, taken by a Transdiffusion child in 1963 is the ARTV frontage, complete with mechanical rotating adastral on the front. Giving London the best of all Television indeed.

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