It is early 1959. Morale in schools section is at a low ebb. There has been no official head of schools for nine months. No one quite knows what his responsibilities are. Quality of programmes varies from magnificent to atrocious. Above all, many of us in the section have the impression that no one in high places really cares.

In fact, the impression was mistaken. A great deal was going on at that time behind the scenes to improve matters – including offering the post of head of schools to Enid Love, in charge of schools television at the BBC.

Some people may have been anxious at the prospect of a woman as boss; all of us were slightly afraid that she might bring too many stuffy Corporation methods from the Other Place.

And then suddenly one afternoon, when a lot of us were more than usually depressed, Enid Love was shown in and introduced to us.

‘Oh yes, Martin Worth’ she said, ‘I did enjoy your programmes on “Twelfth Night”.’ To Randal Beattie: ‘You produced those wonderful films on the “Dordogne”, didn’t you?’ And so on to each member of the section.

The effect was instantaneous. Here was someone not only from outside, but from the rival camp, who not only knew who each of us was as soon as we were introduced, but who had seen and considered our work; and this at a time when one could have met many people in Television House, where we’d all worked for nearly two years, who even if they knew we were in schools would have had little idea what we did there.

Did she mean those pleasant compliments when she met us? I don’t suppose so. But the ability to say the right thing at the right time in the right way is one of Enid’s strongest assets; and it showed us then that she knew how isolated some of us felt.

This understanding of our problems endeared her to us immediately. She had, in fact, been watching our programmes from the very beginning, even before she knew she might one day be in charge of them. So she was thoroughly familiar with everything we were trying to do.

She was also a fully qualified television director who’d produced many programmes from the box and so appreciated directors’ needs and problems. As the executive head of schools TV at the BBC, she had been taking part in just the same crusade as we had. And as a former teacher with years of experience in state schools, and with wide knowledge of and contacts in the educational world, she knew more about what was needed than anyone else.

In other words, she was, in both education and in television, a professional. And that is just what schools needed – and appreciated. This is no place to outline Enid’s achievements at A-R. Enough to say that she turned what was once the company’s problem child into a sturdy, growing youngster who just had to be taken seriously by everyone – not only in Television House (everyone knows what we do now), but in the schools themselves, in the press, and in the educational world at large.

She pioneered programmes for primary schools, introducing ‘The World Around Us’ and making it the enormously successful series that it is. Still ahead of the BBC, she introduced the first schools modern language series, ‘Chez, les Dupre’, whose success in the classroom was soon followed by its success with evening viewers and audiences in many countries overseas.

In her three and a half years at A-R the number of schools taking our programmes went up from hundreds to thousands, and it wasn’t long before other ITV companies were clamouring to join the educational TV venture that A-R had started. It was largely thanks to Enid that the tremendous problems of networking schools programmes produced by different companies, each with their own educational advisers, were overcome. And having achieved so much, Enid decided to leave.

This is in some ways typical of her. More than once she has taken on a most difficult job, tackled it successfully and then looked round for another field to operate in. Way back in 1944, after teaching in various state schools under the most difficult wartime conditions, she became head of a girls’ grammar school at Wokingham. The new Education Act had just been passed: the very role of the school was in question. With the war still on, most of the school premises were scattered through the town and conditions were discouraging, to say the least.

But as soon as she’d made it a properly organised school and increased its pupils from 150 to 400, she left to do something quite different – as an education officer for the BBC.

It was an exciting new challenge, and she thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity it gave her to travel to every kind of school and see for herself how the new Education Act was working. In 1951 she was persuaded by a colleague to apply for the post of assistant head of schools broadcasting at the BBC — sound only in those days — and though she was so cynical about her chances that she let someone else fill in her application form, she did, in fact, get the job.

Now, after 13 years in Schools broadcasting — radio, BBC TV, then A-R, all very different — she has left to meet another new challenge as head of a vast comprehensive school at Sydenham.

Her energy and dynamism need no further comment. But her success is also due to her ability to get what she wants from the most unpromising quarters – whether, as sometimes at A-R, let’s face it, she was after more money, more time or simply more camera rehearsal for a particular programme. How did she do it? By a mixture of professional knowledge that impressed everyone, by subtle diplomacy and tact, by hard bargaining and sheer feminine charm.

Yet what we remember her most for in schools is her friendliness and her consideration for everyone’s views. This was almost a weakness: for there were times when, to my mind at least, an autocratic decision on her part would have saved hours of unnecessary discussion. At the same time, you always knew where you were with her: she is never devious, never in any degree double-faced. Candid, open, easy to talk to and immensely sympathetic, she is for me at least one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked for.

There is a possibility that, subject to the approval of her successor when appointed, she will return to assist us as a member of the Educational Advisory Committee. But even if this does not materialise, Enid will always be around. Whatever new job she undertakes, she’s not the sort of person with whom one loses touch.

The post Profile: Enid Love appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘Tell us how other departments work.’ This was one of the most frequently recurring pleas in the answers to the quiz sent to sta ff with the last edition of Fusion. Various departments have had articles in Fusion from time to time and in this article by CAROLE SAMUELS it is the turn of the people who work on features.

First, however, we should set the scene.

The programme department is headed by Lord Windlesham as chief programme executive.

With him there are Ray Dicks as programme production executive, Cyril Francis as programme planning executive and Geoffrey Whitaker as senior technical executive. They are joined on the programme board by Guthrie Moir (executive producer, group 1, religious programmes, schools broadcasts and educative programmes), Eric Maschwitz and Ray Dicks (executive producers, group 2, scripted series), Elkan Allan (executive producer, Group 3, entertainment and quiz programmes and outside broadcasts), Cyril Bennett (executive producer, group 4, features and children’s programmes) and Antony Kearey (executive producer, group 5, plays).

All have their hustles and bustles; all have their own complicated organisations. Cyril Bennett and his merry men were almost unanimous on one point … ‘you’re attempting the impossible trying to explain us.’ The impossible starts on the sixth floor of Television House. It extends to any part of the world where there is a feature or news.

People in features have to move fast … for though some programmes can take three months to make, others may have to be produced within a matter of hours. Because there is so much to do, so fast, the demarcation lines between one person’s job and another’s tend to become blurred. But there is an overall plan.

Cyril Bennett is head of features, a section containing more than 50 people. It includes producers, directors and their PA’s, researchers, reporters, a programme secretary (Gillian Morphew, the only one in the company) secretaries, shorthand typists and advisors, besides interviewers and writers who work when required.

Aged 36, Cyril Bennett has a job which demands the combined qualities of a newspaper editor, executive producer and impresario. A suggestion for a feature may come from him or his staff. It is put up for the programme board’s approval, with an estimated budget. If it is approved, work on production can begin. ‘My job is to put the right elements together – say, the right director with the right scriptwriter, the right reporter and the right researcher,’ he says, ‘then to try and make sure that the production reaches a satisfactory standard from the company’s point of view.

‘Features’ people accept one thing – if a show is lousy on the night, it’s my telephone that rings at home, and the general manager or David Windlesham expects me to have the answers. Understand that fact and you understand exactly what I’m responsible for.

‘I have discussions with directors and writers at various stages of production because, although we are working within an established story frame-work, we are dealing with changing situations and we have to be flexible in our ideas. ‘We’re dealing with reality and we don’t govern the situation: it governs us.’ Cyril Bennett began his career as a messenger-boy with the Evening Standard, then went on to a local newspaper, the Bedfordshire Times. He came to Rediffusion in 1955, as a script-writer on ‘This Week’ after spending five years with Odhams as a show business writer on Illustrated, John Bull and Picturegoer. Before that he was lobby correspondent for a group of Commonwealth newspapers.

He is married to a former photographic model, Shirley Berry, and has a three-year-old daughter, Rachel. The Bennett family, and their bulldog puppy, live in Montagu Square, W.1. ‘It’s 15 minutes from the office – as far as I can commute,’ he says.

Cyril Bennett is in charge of all the programmes put out by features. This includes major documentaries which are produced every few weeks; Intertel programmes, feature series, special ‘crash’ programmes, and current affairs programmes like ‘This Week’ which is run almost as a section within a section by its producer Jeremy Isaacs.

He is also executive producer of children’s programmes, a newly-acquired position. ‘But here I have an ideas function rather than an administrative one,’ he says. He meets regularly with John Rhodes, head of children’s section, to discuss policy, or the running of a particular series.

In features, creative staff are relieved of as many hampering administrative jobs as possible. Under Cyril, the section is split into four divisions, each with its own chief and his staff: technical, administrative, research and production. Peter Morley, 39, the assistant head of features, is available as technical consultant. He advises, for instance, whether it would be better to use 35 mm. or 16 mm. cameras on a specific programme and supervises trainee directors.

He is also a programme director, and deputy chairman of the Guild of Television Producers and Directors. Last year he and Cyril Bennett jointly won the Guild’s Merit Award for the best factual series with ‘This Week’.

Peter Morley started his career as a rewind boy in the projection box of the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road. He stayed there two years, then spent five years in the army during the war. Afterwards, he tried to get into documentary film making and found that the only way was to go back into the projection room and work up from there. He graduated next to the cutting rooms, and eventually became a film editor with the Film Producers’ Guild, for whom he also wrote and directed documentaries.

In January, 1956, he came to Rediffusion as a director. His first feature was a half-hour documentary called ‘Fan Fever’. ‘It showed the fan-worship for Dickie Valentine, and was an eye-opener in those days,’ he says.

His first major documentary was about trade unionism and was called ‘United We Stand’. Others he directed – with Cyril Bennett as scriptwriter and Reg Courtney-Browne as researcher – were ‘Tyranny – the Years of Adolf Hitler’, ‘Israel Rises’ and ‘The Two Faces of Japan’. More recently, he directed ‘Black Marries White – The Last Barrier’, a documentary on mixed marriages. He has also directed an Intertel programme – ‘The Heartbeat of France’ – and the only full-length opera yet screened by an Independent Television company, Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’. For more than two years he co-produced ‘This Week’.

Peter Morley is married to Jane Tillett, a senior PA with Rediffusion. They first met in 1957 when she worked with him on outside broadcasts before he joined the features section. The Morleys live in Canonbury, and Peter is a do-it-yourself enthusiast.

Eric Martin, as manager, features, is the section’s administrative or organisation man and is helped by an assistant, John M. Phillips. He explains: ‘While features people are making programmes, they sometimes have to deal with all sorts of awkward people – like vigilant secretaries, trigger-happy guards and resentful citizens. They must be ready to go off at short notice to places ranging from Bermondsey to Borneo. They’re not the sort of people who like restrictions or regimentation, and my job is to see to that side of things, and also to make sure they act within the bounds which the company considers reasonable.’

He has to control expenditure and schedules, and his work starts on a feature as soon as the idea has been approved and scheduled for transmission. ‘Cyril decides then whether we are going to use one of our own writers or someone outside the company,’ he says. ‘If it’s an outside writer, I must contract him for the programme.’

When a draft script has been written he draws up a rough schedule of operations. For instance, if the location for the feature is somewhere abroad, the schedule will give approximate dates and times on which individual members of the unit will leave and return to base, and their movements in between. It will show when equipment is to be sent out and brought back, and so on.

An approximate budget is then submitted to Lord Windlesham – with the help of Rediffusion’s costing department – and if agreement to proceed is given, a more minutely detailed schedule is prepared over the next few weeks. It is drawn up after discussion with the director and his team on the best way to complete the project on a reasonable budget. The new schedule lists everything from the cost of fares and insurance to the amount of excess baggage allowed for each person.

Eric Martin uses all Rediffusion’s facilities to make the arrangements necessary for a unit going on location – booking plane tickets, reserving accommodation and so on. ‘The support we get from other sections is fantastic,’ he says. ‘We do at times ask for the impossible – and strangely enough, we get it.’ During production, Eric Martin’s job is to keep an eye on the budget and see that any unexpected expenditure is authorised through his office. Afterwards he is concerned with ‘mopping up’ operations, which mostly consist of settling payments. ‘Without Eric Martin, features would come to a full stop in a week,’ says Cyril Bennett.

His very varied career before coming into television, says 40-year-old Eric Martin, has given him plenty of experience to draw on. His first job lasted a week. He mended 200 punctures for a bicycle firm – then left. A succession of jobs followed: accounts man at a garage, progress chaser in a factory, five years in the army – including one spent in the Middle East driving tanks and armoured cars, then, via a factory costing office, he went to Shepperton Studios. There he worked on production costs for British Lion films, including ‘Richard III’.

In 1955 he came to Rediffusion, where he spent a year with Future Productions Ltd, six months with costing and three and a half years as manager of the film section before joining features, where he has worked for three years.

He is married and lives with his wife, Mollie, and two children in Walton-on-Thames. His hobbies include driving, reading and doing handyman jobs about the house.

Reg Courtney-Browne, chief research editor, used to be a professional musician. He is responsible generally for programme research facilities for the section, and co-ordination of the work of the researchers. He also carries out ‘trouble-shooting’ work for Cyril Bennett.

He has built up an intricate filing system so that he can find the most unlikely information if he is asked for it. His assistant Jean Bleach works in a special features library, which contains details of all features which have been made or imported by the company, and a host of miscellaneous information besides.

Unlike Eric Martin, who is always planning foreign travel for others but only occasionally goes away himself, Reg Courtney-Browne never knows when he will have to leave his office work behind and go off to some foreign location.

He was programme organiser for ‘One Man’s Hunger’, a Rediffusion project to help the Freedom from Hunger campaign; and did the research and co-scripting for ‘The Unwanted’ a major documentary to mark World Refugee Year.

Reg joined Rediffusion in 1958 as a researcher in the production team then headed by Peter Morley, with Cyril Bennett as scriptwriter. Countries he has visited on location with the company include Germany, France, Austria, Poland, Jordan, Israel, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and the USA. He also travelled a great deal before joining Rediffusion although not with the airline company where he had his first job, as a trainee, and which he left within a few months.

It was after this that he became a professional musician, playing saxophone and clarinet with a dance-band for five or six years. He continued playing even when he took up freelance journalism. At the beginning of World War Two he joined the army as a private and left as a major after having served in Europe, India, China, Burma, and – with the British Indian Division – in Japan.

He took up freelance journalism again after the war. Based in Japan, where he lived for 12 years, his area was the Far East.

Reg speaks fluent Japanese and French. He lives with his Japanese wife, Sakaye, and their 11-year-old daughter Sandra, in Eltham, Kent.

He is a keen photographer and has also had two books published, both about the Far East: ‘Dragon Recumbent’, a non-fiction work, and ‘Tiapans are People’, a novel.

For space reasons, it’s not possible to write about every features producer, so 31-year-old Jeremy Isaacs, producer of ‘This Week’, was chosen as being representative.

He came to Rediffusion in August, 1963, from Granada, where he had been producing ‘What the Papers Say’, ‘All Our Yesterdays’ and special current affairs programmes. ‘I’m delighted now to be dealing with the news of today – not the news of last week or the last decade,’ he says.

After graduating from Oxford – where he read Latin and Greek Language and Literature, and Ancient History and Philosophy – he went into the army. He was demobbed at the age of 25, and was unemployed for five months, trying to break into journalism or broadcasting. Then he joined Granada as a researcher on current affairs programmes and stayed with the company for six years. He gets a lot of ideas for ‘This Week’ stories while in the bath or travelling by underground.

Jeremy Isaacs is Scottish-born. His South African wife, Tamara, used to be a production secretary with the BBC in Manchester. The Isaacs live near Turnham Green and have two children, John Daniel, nearly four, and Katharine, nearly two.

Finally there are the reporters who work on ‘This Week’ … Bryan Magee, Paul Johnson, Russell Spurr, James Cameron, George Ffitch and Desmond Wilcox. Again, it is impossible for space reasons to write them up individually, so Fusion picked on the one who happened to be in the office at the time of preparation.

He is 33-year-old Desmond Wilcox who writes science-fiction for publication, and poetry to let off steam.

Desmond Wilcox joined Rediffusion in 1960, after 10 years in Fleet Street as a reporter and foreign correspondent. ‘Reporting isn’t as glamorous as it seems,’ he says. ‘A lot of people think that when you go abroad to work, you’re really taking a holiday. When you get back they ask if you enjoyed yourself. Actually, you hardly see anything of the country. You start shooting at eight in the morning and knock off at about ten at night. If you happen to finish a day’s work in time to get back to the hotel for a bath and dinner, you think yourself lucky.’

After preparatory work with a researcher, the reporter probably visits or telephones all the people he wants to interview, and gets their opinions on the story. Then he writes his own script. If you just reeled off your questions from someone else’s script you’d be doing the job of an actor – not a reporter,’ he says. With the script written, the reporter can discuss with the director how the story can be handled visually for the best effect. Even before entering journalism, he led an adventurous life. Desmond Wilcox left Cheltenham College at the age of 14 and went to the Outward Bound Sea School. Then he served on one of the last square riggers, the Pamir, and in tramp steamers as a deck hand. His first job in journalism was as a reporter on a local weekly. Before joining the Daily Mirror, Desmond spent two years in the Parachute Regiment. He is married to journalist Patricia Wilcox and has a five-year-old daughter, Cassandra, and three-year-old twins, Adam and Claire.

These then are some of the people in features.This is how they work. Another article could be written on how they were all tied down sufficiently long to be interviewed … about all the interruptions which punctuated each interview … ‘how quickly can I get to Rome?’ … ‘how can I hire a film crew in Malta?’ … ‘where can I find out how many 40-year-old grandmothers there are in Great Britain?’ But that’s life in features.

The post Passport to features appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Outstanding contributions to the company’s programmes were recognised last month by the award of four £1,000 [about £16,500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] Golden Star Awards. The awards were made by the board of directors from names nominated by the staff and recommended to the board by a preliminary selection committee. The award winners were:

Assistant head of engineering Basil Bultitude for his creative engineering contribution to programmes, particularly ‘The General Election’ on March 31 and April 1, 1966.

Programme director Charles Squires, M.B.E., for his direction of ‘Warship Eagle’, transmitted on July 13, 1966.

Author Paul Jones for his play ‘My Friend Corby’, transmitted as one of ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ series on May 9, 1966. (Paul Jones died on October 30 so the award was presented to his widow.)

Actor Ian Hendry for the regularly high standard of his performance in the leading role in ‘The Informer’ series transmitted between August 1 and September 19, 1966.

Another award made last month went to Grahame Turner from the Guild of Television Producers and Directors for his work as one of the two executive producers on the television coverage of the World Cup. In addition, Alastair Burnet won the Richard Dimbleby Award for his work on a number of programmes including the Rediffusion productions of ‘This Week’, ‘Pay and Prices – the Crunch’ and ‘Division’.

BASIL BULTITUDE was born in October 1927 in Bangor, C. Down, N. Ireland. In 1943 he joined the BBC as a trainee engineer working in sound control in Belfast, Glasgow and Broadcasting House, London, and eventually became senior maintenance engineer at Aldenham. He was transferred to the BBC Television Service at Alexandra Palace in 1949 where he worked in vision control, telecine and maintenance. From there he went to Lime Grove, was promoted to assistant to superintendent engineer, BBC Television Service, and spent two years engaged in the design of the Television Centre.

In 1958 he joined Rediffusion Television as assistant head of engineering and still holds that post. He has acted as co-ordinating engineer for ITV on such programmes as Princess Margaret’s Wedding, the general election and the State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill and as the ITV engineering representative to the BBC/ITV World Cup Consortium.

He is married with two children.

CHARLES RICHARD SQUIRES, M.B.E. Born February 13, 1928. Joined the film cutting room of the Crown Film Unit in 1942. Served in the Royal Navy for two years as a telegraphist. Left Navy in 1948 and returned to the film industry. Worked as first assistant editor, assembly editor and film editor at Shepperton, Denham and Pinewood Studios.

Joined Rediffusion Television in November, 1955 as a film editor. Main productions he worked on were the major documentaries: ‘Tyranny’, ‘Israel Rises’, ‘Two Faces of Japan’, ‘The Quiet War’, ‘One Man’s Hunger’ and ‘Watch on the Mekong’. Also produced the ‘Take Four’ film and music items.

Appointed programme director in 1965. Directed such documentaries as ‘Beat City’, ‘Airport’ and ‘The Grafters’, ‘Paradise Street’, ‘Walk Down Any Street’ and ‘H.M.S. Eagle’. Awarded M.B.E. in Queen’s Birthday Honours List, 1965.

Married with two children, a son aged 15, and a daughter aged 12.

PAUL JONES was born in Hampstead on September 28, 1921. As a freelance writer he produced scripts for the BBC and also the West End. He wrote television plays exclusively for Rediffusion from 1958. They included ‘Fate and Mr. Browne’, ‘The Problem of Girlfriends’, ‘The Two-Seater Bachelor Days’ and ‘A Couple of Dry Martinis’.

An actor before he became a playwright, Paul Jones had his first play ‘Birthday Honours’ produced at the Criterion Theatre in the West End in 1953. Of his work Maurice Wiggin, television critic of The Sunday Times, commented in 1964: ‘He never wrote a dull play yet’.

Paul Jones died on October 30, 1966. He left a widow and one son.

IAN HENDRY was born in Ipswich, Suffolk on January 13, 1931. He started his career in auctioneering and estate management but at the age of 22 turned to acting and trained for three years at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

His first professional engagements were in repertory at Hornchurch and Worthing. Later he played at Oxford where he took part in Anouilh’s ‘Dinner with the Family’ which transferred to the West End. He played in such films as ‘Simon and Laura’, ‘The Secret Place’, ‘Room at the Top’ and ‘Live Now, Pay Later’. Since then he has appeared in ‘Girl in the Headlines’, ‘This is my Street’, ‘The Beauty Jungle’, ‘Repulsion’, ‘The Hill’ and ‘Casino Royale’.

I lis first lead in a television series was in i960 when he appeared in ‘Police Surgeon’, playing Dr. Geoffrey Brent, a character which in 1961 was developed into Dr. David Keel, one of the leading parts in ‘The Avengers’, which he also played.

He is married to actress Janet Munro and they have a daughter.

GUILD OF TELEVISION PRODUCERS AND DIRECTORS AWARD

Grahame Turner born September 1927 in Westminster, he joined the BBC as control room engineer in 1944 and in 1948 was transferred to BBC Television. Later he joined BBC outside broadcasts at their Wembley headquarters. As a cameraman with the BBC be covered a wide range of O.B.’s from the ‘Coronation’ to the ‘Cup Final’.

At the start of Independent Television in 1955 he joined Rediffusion Television as senior cameraman, outside broadcasts. In 1958 be became a programme director and directed a wide variety of programmes including Sir Winston Churchill’s State Funeral and major sporting events such as The Derby and Wimbledon. In 1964 be was appointed producer for the ITV coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo and in 1967 was appointed Senior producer for Rediffusion’s outside broadcasts. He and Alan Chivers of the BBC were joint executive producers on the World Cup.

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

Most actors and actresses are afraid of being typecast. People who produce their programmes do not have the same worries. Fusion thought it might be interesting to explore the situation a little further. Perhaps there is more in typecasting than meets the eye? It will be appreciated that the author, JULIA HELPS, has researched her imagination as well as facts. We would, therefore, categorically state that the results should not be identified with any particular member of the staff. Should any member of the company think that they refer to him/her, then it really is pure coincidence.

THE EXCITABLE DIRECTOR

A product of a major public school and of Oxbridge, he tended always to mix with the intellectual crowd. On leaving University, didn’t know what to do and went into fashion designing, making contact with an atmosphere of flurry and expressionism. Mated into television when it started in a desire to be ‘one up’ on all his friends. Artistic, imaginative, and esoteric, he was soon involved in directing. The mystery is how he turns out such great productions while never having been seen to have the production fully rehearsed. Recognisable by his short, quick footsteps.

THE ENTHUSIASTIC WRITER

May be seen flitting round Television House all and every day, either to see if there is another instalment of ‘The Hidden Crane’ to be written or to see how much his last episode of ‘Double Your Paradise’ has been cut. Very publicity minded, he attends all press conferences – in the hope of picking up new ideas. Although a prolific writer, very little of his material is original. He carries a typewriter round with him and a brief-case containing a note-book and sharp pencils, with which he takes down notes in shorthand. (He has developed a neat trick of using his brief-case on his knee as a desk while standing up.) His notes and observations may well be included in his next (43rd) novel.

THE GLOOMY P.A.

Well-educated, intelligent, she often wears glasses and is usually a University graduate. Bored with industry, she drifted into television with a view to becoming a director. As her ideals become more remote, her face grows longer and her watches seem to tick slower. She finds it hard to believe that a programme can come out on time or that people could be faintly interested in how lesbianism caused the downfall of the Roman Empire (with or without Sophia Loren). As each programme her director directs wins new laurels, she predicts that he is finished and soon she will be looking for a new job.

THE EBULLIENT PRODUCTION EXECUTIVE

Once a professor of economics, he found life too dull and came into independent television as soon as it started, rising rapidly. His alert brain, always full of new and unusual ideas (not always practical) makes him n welcome member at any committee meeting. His mannerism of running his hand through his hair before any startling idea, has been copied by young up-and-coming executive producers. Full of life, his office chair is rarely sat in – he prefers to prowl round it, and is more likely to be found anywhere in the building, or, failing that, at Wembley. He spends his weekends and holidays motor racing in vintage Bentleys when he is not catching butterflies.

THE HARASSED PRESS OFFICE WORKER

Easily recognisable from the fact that he never walks, but always runs, and has one shoulder higher than the other due to answering phones all day and writing at the same time. At lunchtime can be found propping up a bar, reminiscing about the good old days as a reporter. He missed his calling, which was obviously to be a politician – for he knows how to evade questions politely. He is friendly with all the regular press boys, but is inclined to get his celebrities mixed up owing to having met too many of them. Has a fund of anecdotes – all unprintable.

THE DAZED FOURTH FLOOR EXECUTIVE

An ex-Army or R.A.F. officer, he likes to have everything on paper and filed in folders of varying urgency. He has never quite understood what the letters TAM stand for, but believes it is something like Television and Mathematics, for a large set of figures always come in with these reports, accompanied by nice graphs. Having accepted the wireless and the phonograph, he cannot quite see why people want pictures to look at. He intends to retire at the age of 65 to the day and write his memoirs of the war (he did not like or agree with either Churchill or ‘Monty’). He also plans a witty look at television, which promises to be very, very interesting.

THE ERUDITE TV REPORTER

A tall, sombre man, he has an Honours degree plus a published award-winning thesis in classical Creek on the chemical composition of Michelangelo’s early statues. He scorns the everyday routine reporting of earthquakes, national leaders, political upheavals, or thefts of Goya paintings and is happiest when covering ecclesiastical conferences, teachers’ congresses and archeological discoveries. While covering national news, he is inclined to quote in the vulgate, which to those intelligent enough to follow, is extremely witty. He originally made his name by advertising detergents in Greek on BBC 2.

THE FABULOUS CASTING DIRECTOR

She was brought up in the theatre and considers that she has lowered herself to television, but ‘After all, darlings, we must eat cake’. On Christian-name terms with most of the leading Hollywood and West End stars, she maintains she knew most of them before they were well known – probably true. Having tried at one time nearly all aspects of the stage, she admits that at the age of 38, she found herself not suited to the life as the draughts gave her lumbago. She is perennially 39.

THE SQUARE-EYED TELEVISION CRITIC

An acknowledged intellectual, his favourite programmes are ‘Coronation Street’ and ‘Take Your Pick’, though he admits to watching ‘Monitor’ and ‘Panorama’ once a year. Having served as a tea boy at Dagenham and a telegram boy for the G.P.O., he wanted a sedentary job and applied to the Daily Gurgle for the post of television critic. He watches every programme that is transmitted, having four sets in his study, the fourth one in anticipation of a second commercial channel. His phone is within reach of his easy chair, as is a drink cabinet and his crits are sharp, pointed and witty – if you can appreciate his unusual sense of humour.

The post Typecasting appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

These six happy faces (well, Lynda on the left maybe thought it looked more sophisticated not to smile) belong to the girls in the duplicating section at Television House.

They are the ones in the room on the first floor who push through batches of scripts, schedules, memos and other paper work for the whole building. Five Gestetners and one photographic machine help to turn out the work.

‘We use thousands of reams of paper every week,’ says Alma Darby (centre with spectacles) who is in charge of the section. ‘When there’s work to be done we all get cracking on it. We’re a jolly good team.’ Anyone who has seen them work together can tell that … and to watch them whiz around the table collating pages is quite an experience.

Proof that the girls all get on well together is the fact that in the six years she has been in charge, Mrs. Darby has lost only four girls from her staff: three of them got married and left to have babies, and one went to Canada to marry.

Mrs. Darby has been with Rediffusion for 11 years, from its beginning. She joined the duplicating section as an operator, on the recommendation of her daughter who was then a secretary with the company.

‘I’ll miss the place when I retire at Christmas,’ she says, ’but I’ll enjoy spending more time with my two little grand-daughters. ‘The nicest thing about Rediffusion is the friendliness and the freedom. If you’re conscientious and do your work, no one breathes down your neck.’

Life can move at a terrific pace, as happened on the night Churchill died.

‘Three of us worked on until nearly 2 a.m. getting out camera scripts for the funeral transmission,’ the girls recall.

Another long stint came on Election Day, when the section worked on the scripts for ITN; and there often have to be one or two girls in Room 135 on Bank Holidays.

Recent excitement has been caused in the section by the wedding of 22-year-old Anne Chappel (lower right), which was attended by all her colleagues. She gave up the maiden name of Joyce, but not her claim to be related to James Joyce: ‘He was my great-uncle, and my father lived with him for a while. He doesn’t talk about him much.’

Maureen Wood (third from left, above) is the daughter of Rediffusion security officer Albert Wood. Her great hobby is drawing, and she sketches and colours religious figures to be used by Frances Casemore (second from left, above) at Sunday School. Frances, aged 19, has been teaching at Elim Evangelistic Church, Thornton Heath, for two years. She is ‘mad about clothes’ and says she spends all her money on them. ‘I’m the only free one in the section – the others are all married, engaged or going steady,’ she says. ‘I don’t intend to change that yet.’ Lynda French, at 18 the baby of the section, is also keen on fashion – unusual shoes in particular. She keeps house at Thornton Heath for her 22-year-old brother.

Marion Crawley (top right) also lives at Thornton Heath and attends prayer meetings and Bible study classes at the same church as Frances. Until last year she belonged to the London Crusader Choir, of which Ronald Cooper in Rediffusion’s stationery department, is the organist. Now her time is taken up with her architect boyfriend, and she also spends free hours on her hobby of photography.

The post A collation of duplicators appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘I had to take some scripts and captions down to an OB unit’ says Paula Westbury. ‘I was sitting on the bus minding my own business when a mother and her daughter of about 18 behind me started talking about an article in that morning’s Daily Telegraph. It was about being a PA. “I think I’d rather like to be a PA – it sounds a nice job,” commented the girl. ‘No,” replied the mother immediately, “you don’t know what they did to get there”.’

Well, whatever they might do to get there, Fusion thought it might be interesting to find out some of the things which happen to them once they are there. This article by Julia Helps is based on a random series of interviews with the production assistants of Rediffusion Television.

Drawings by Maureen Roffey.

Scene: a continental nightclub after a hard day’s filming …

One member of the team quietly asks Marjorie Graham up to his room for champagne later that night – champagne which he has on ice in the bath. ‘He was showing off a little, so I decided to teach him a lesson by accepting.’ Later, as planned, she knocks at his bedroom door, clutching her toothmug. ‘He welcomed me. Then he saw the rest of the unit behind me, carrying their toothmugs. I must say, the champagne was excellent.’

Scene: Television House …

Marjorie is told she is going to Vatican City and that the team will probably meet the Pope. Cyril Bennett, then head of features, warns her to get a ‘Vatican Dress’. ‘I searched London for a dark, demure dress, and finally came up with the very thing,’ she recalls. ‘‘It was navy-blue cotton with a high neck and buttons down the front and it had a belt and long sleeves’ She returns to the features office wearing it and terribly pleased with herself. There is now no time to change it before leaving England. Faces fall. ‘Your Vatican dress,’ gasps Cyril, ‘it’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.’

Scene: The American deep South …

Marjorie discovers that the State is dry. No liquor can be bought. The American unit insists that they have to have a drink,. The nearest place to get one is in the next State. A wealthy student who has attached himself to the unit helpfully offers to drive 200 miles in his Thunderbird to get some. Marjorie insists on going with him. They return some hours later with cases of whisky and beer. ‘The only reason I had gone was because I was sure he would forget the beer. I needed it to wash my hair.’

Scene: St Benedicts Abbey, Ealing …

Ruth Tester is told there are strict laws about exactly how far into the Abbey a woman can go. ‘They said punishment for the monks would be excommunication. I didn’t want to get all those kind monks excommunicated and I was so worried that I might overstep the mark. The crunch came, though, when I had to spend 6d to spend a penny. I had to take a 6d bus ride to Ealing Broadway.’

Scene: The South of France for ‘Riviera Police’ …

At the weekend part of the unit decides to go to a nearby island for a day’s water-skiing. ‘I went along for the ride,’ says non-swimmer Erika Klausner. ‘Seven of us piled into a little fibre-glass boat.’ Then the Mistral blows up. The boat starts shipping water badly. ‘Someone later said I looked a bit scared,’ says Erika. ‘A bit scared – I was nearly hysterical.’ Luckily they are near where H.M.S. Carisford is anchored on a goodwill visit. ‘They rescued four of us and fed us food and drinks in the wardroom – very much needed.’

Scene: Agadir for ‘Crane’ …

‘Another thing that happened to emphasise the point that salt water never brings me good luck,’ she continues, ‘took place in Agadir just after the earthquake.’ All are transferring from a small fibreglass boat (again) to a yacht. There is a moment when each is poised between both boats – rather like a minor Colossus of Rhodes. There is a swell and one larger wave than usual rolls along. ‘I lifted one foot from the little boat and put it down again – straight onto a rowlock. It went right through my foot.’ Erika is rushed to a clinic where nobody speaks English, though the doctor knows some French. Everyone smiles sweetly and carries her into the operating theatre. The doctor smiles again, picks up a needle and just sews up the gaping wound without an anaesthetic. ‘None of that stiff British reserve for me – I yelled the place down.’ Ruefully she adds: ‘The pay-off came when somebody said – not at all nastily – “and we’ve lost an afternoon’s filming”.’

Scene: Eastbourne …

‘The Story of John Logie Baird’ is being filmed. Somebody decides that a shot of seagulls swooping down is needed. Naturally no seagulls are to be seen. Vicki Miller is sent to buy some raw fish. ‘I sliced them up, then ran along the front, throwing bits of fish behind me. Hundreds of seagulls appeared. I had to run faster and faster until I was flat out, as the seagulls were really dive-bombing me. I don’t know when I’ve been so scared or when I have run so fast.’

Scene: The men’s Turkish baths in Jermyn Street for a live ‘ Here and Now’ …

‘Being a coward, I asked for a female vision mixer,’ says Nona Richards, ‘but I didn’t get one, so I was the only woman there. In a quiet moment, Geoffrey Hughes, director, leaps out of the scanner for a quick bath. ‘He left me in charge of his shirt.’ Tim Brinton, the commentator, is supposed to strip off and dive into the water at the end of his piece. All goes according to plan.

‘The shot that went out was fine – but you should have seen the pictures on the other cameras. It was incredibly funny.’

Scene: A ‘Here and Now’ from a dog sanctuary in Surrey …

Myra Hersh recalls: ‘Neither Daphne Shadwell, my director, or I had done an OB before. Our first problem was how to get into the scanner. Both of us were in tight skirts and high-heeled shoes. The one and only step was about two-foot high. The crew thought it was a great joke. Finally someone brought a box.’ Just before the recording, a terrific thunderstorm breaks. Both Myra and Daphne are terrified of thunder. ‘There we were, trying to do the programme and hide under something at the same time. It wasn’t our day.’

Scene: Canada for an Intertel …

Mary Horwood and researcher Stacey Waddy want to get back to the hotel to see the rushes of that day’s filming. It is the day of the East Coast power cut. They try buses, tubes, trams and even hitching. ‘We were so worried about being late for the rushes.’ They walk in pitch darkness through the lampless streets of Toronto. Finally they get to the hotel. ‘It hadn’t dawned on either of us during our frantic dashes that the power cut would stop the rushes being shown as well.’

The post It happened like this… appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

With shouts of ‘Have a nice holiday – enjoy yourselves’ ringing in our ears, eight members of a unit of nine gathered at London airport. Needless to say the non-arrival was H. [Hughie – Ed] Green, who seems to have a special clause in his contract that guarantees late arrival.

With collective suggestions from the unit ranging from ‘we can always post sync’ and ‘we can do the reverses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ the unit passed through the appropriate gate on its way to the aircraft. H. Green arrived eventually at the airport and, with Ken Wyatt as a ministering angel, was rushed through the booking-in formalities and arrived breathless but unabashed, to be greeted with various coarse comments by the unit. Perhaps with Berlin in mind and the possibility that BOAC might be talked into letting Green into the sharp end of the aircraft, there was an immediate rush to the insurance counter.

During our journey to India, the unit were given a long ‘multi-coloured’ iced cake suitably inscribed ‘Double Your Money’ and garnished with £ signs. Not knowing where to put the cake, and not wishing to be told, it was decided to let the steward cut it up and distribute it to all the passengers on the aircraft. In this way, we disposed of the cake and ensured that any noxious contents planted in this delicacy by critics of the programme got a good distribution. This, of course, is known as audience participation.

Another thing that came to light on this trip was an aversion that Hughie Green has to people sleeping on aircraft. If any member of the unit managed to drop off, this sufferer from insomnia would shake them and enrol them into his club. If you tried to persist in sleeping, not only were you woken up again, but you were sat next to, and engaged in conversation.

Fourteen hours later, the unit arrived in New Delhi, and was conducted to a large baroque edifice which was the hotel. Armies of porters descended on the luggage and under the maternal supervision of our unit manager, the fracas was stopped from being a riot and transformed to the comparative quiet of say, the ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ studio. But, dear reader, the weekend didn’t begin here, it ended in calamity when, on ordering beer (purely on medical grounds, of course, as the water is suspect) a gaily ‘turbaned’ gentleman giving an impression of Peter Sellers said: ‘Very sorry, dry day, no drink.’ Even H.G. was speechless.

Other memories of the trip after this great shock are rather confused, but some of course do still stick in the mind.

There were the strange antics of director and quiz master in front of the Taj Mahal which confused a large percentage of the local population when the first contestant failed his first question after being brought all the way from London.

It was with little regret that eight members boarded their plane to leave India, even though they were wondering what the next contestant would be like and whether their own personal stomach upsets would be settled by New Zealand.

We would like to point out that after our arrival in North Island, N.Z., the fact that it rained and floods covered most of the island had nothing whatsoever to do with our new contestant coming from Manchester. We would also like to point out that the national disaster referred to by the Prime Minister during our stay was these self-same floods, and had nothing to do with the programme or the unit.

A rather odd incident concerned the kangaroo that appeared in the show in Australia. It was quite definitely male, but was confused by being named Mabel. Still, that’s show business.

Other events included buying tailored shoes in Hong Kong. There were four fittings and still they were completed in less than 24 hours. There was the rudeness and slowness of the American customs at Honolulu and the rain that fell in Antigua against all local knowledge but which was attributed by the unit to our contestant. There was Green turning blue during the filming at Niagara where the temperature was 18 degrees Fahrenheit while two days previously we had been filming in a temperature of 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

These and many others were memorable incidents but the facts are that the unit flew 39,500 miles, filmed in five countries and recorded in Canadian and Australian studios three one-hour tapes in 28 days.

The post Around the world in 28 days appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The post ‘Fusion’ covers appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The mere suggestion that I should look back in memory over the nine and a half years I have spent with A-R was enough to make my mind blank. When the days, weeks, months and years fly by as they seem to do in television, how does one recall the vital moments? I can’t. Through the mist of time, some things emerge slowly, most of them quite insignificant and ephemeral – probably of no interest to anyone. But it is of such inconsequences that life is made up. So I shall rattle on and hope that moments will generate in a way of their own.

It is always well to begin at the beginning, so I will recall my first day at Stratton House where the first 60 members of A-R were then housed. I entered with trepidation for as far as I knew I was entering a world of strangers. The office I was given contained a desk, a fire escape and nothing else. ‘A chair? So sorry all the chairs were used for a meeting in the Board Room along there. Help yourself.’ I wandered into a sea of chairs where two men were on the same errand as myself. They turned and in a flash we were all hugging one another with joy and relief. Weston Drury, head of casting, with whom I had been associated in the thirties at Elstree Studios and Ernest Gartside, one of the kindest production managers in films, were newcomers like myself.

The early days at Television House can never be forgotten by any of us veterans. The noise of the pneumatic drills thundering on the office walls, the barrow loads of cement trundling up and down the passages and the showers of dust are now all part of the history of ITV. I was reminded lately, on finding a second toilet roll, a box of tissues and a waste bin in the Ladies (but still no light over the mirror!), of those desperate days before the plumbing was completed when, penny clutched in hand, we rushed along Kingsway to the Holborn Tube, or blushingly offered a pink pass in a nearby building where hospitality was available.

Those, indeed, were the days of pioneering. The electricity failed? Magically, we were all issued with hurricane lamps until normal service was resumed. The heating system died on us? Every office had its convector heater. At last the time came when the girls no longer got their 10s. [50p in decimal, about £22 in today’s money allowing for inflation] a month hairdressing allowance and the men could no longer send one suit a month to the cleaners. We were on the air.

Of September 22, 1955 I remember only the first night nerves and wild excitement that possessed us all. This was it! Everyone was at concert pitch and the Mayfair Hotel, from whence came part of the programme, was littered with cables and cameras.

Below ground level at the foot of a short staircase, the ‘control room’ had ingeniously been installed. Never before or since, I wager, has there been such a glamorous control room. In the seat of office sat the director (Kenneth Carter) with his PA, Norma, and his vision mixer and crew. All were in full evening dress – white ties and plunging necklines!

A grand party was held later in the ballroom which was crowded with showbiz celebrities and distinguished guests. My lot was to dash round with photographer Dick Dawson to see how many we could capture for stills. My feet ache at the mere thought of it.

From this time on, my memories are like a mosaic, vari-coloured and of all sizes and shapes. Some are mere fragments such as the turkey that wouldn’t go in the oven. Dionne Lucas, Cordon-Bleu chef, was to demonstrate how to cook a Christmas dinner and a kindly gas cooker company loaned a newer-than-modern stove. Alas, it took all our united efforts, much butter and almost a shoehorn to get the bird in. Our chagrin on knowing that this noble turkey, which we had seen basted with brandy, was to be given away was only tempered by the fact that the WVS took it for an Old People’s Home.

The visitor that wasn’t there – that was on the day that George Cansdale put his head round my door and asked if he could leave a friend with me while he parked his car. ‘Sure’, said I and he opened the door wide and nothing came in. Then I saw standing and looking minute in the doorway – a lion cub a few months old. Actually it was a lioness, so little she was still spotted. She wrinkled her nose in a mighty snarl and out came a tiny ‘Mee-oo’.

A particularly vivid and pale yellow piece of mosaic I recall was in the Club, then rather new to us and catered for by Fullers. The only food they could cook on the spot was an omelette and my guest, taking his on a very hot plate, jerked his hand back so suddenly that the omelette became airborne. It sailed in a graceful parabola across the room and landed on someone’s empty plate. He couldn’t have done it if he’d tried.

Do you remember ‘Gala’ – the first one for which Maria Callas did not arrive for the rehearsal? My feelings on being told to go to Hackney Empire for her eventual recording on the very Saturday that I was due to collect my new bubble car were far from charitable. But oh! when that voice soared up to the roof of the old music hall, all was forgiven. Moreover, bless her, she whisked off to catch a plane and I got to Raymond Way’s in time.

The bubble car, of course, has since then provided Television House with many a giggle. The most famous story is of the day a policeman summoned me to the reception desk to inform me that, according to witnesses (and thank heaven they were there) a Rolls Royce, turning in Drury Lane, had got its bumper caught under mine and all unbeknowingly had towed the bubble away. The driver discovered the appendage in the Aldwych, and no doubt madly embarrassed, had hopped out, freed the bumpers and abandoned the bubble to its fate on a pedestrian crossing. How I miss our good friend Albert who took care of 596WML in Drury Lane until it was made one-way and metered. Now the poor little thing languishes in odd gaps in Bloomsbury and since Christmas has had its right winker light side-swiped six times.

Who could forget that wonderful third year anniversary when we sailed down the river with so many television personalities on board that ITV would have gone out of business if the boat had sunk? The spluttering fireworks before the floodlit lower spelling out A-R (in full of course), the wonderful entertainment and dancing on the deck, the glamour of the Thames on a perfect autumn night as we drifted down to the illuminated Cutty Sark? These are pleasant memories.

And how about those revues so splendidly worked for by the ARTS? I am still blushing over my photographic disasters at the dress rehearsals. So elated was I at being asked to take pictures for Fusion, that I made the mistake of not trusting my gear but on two occasions borrowed electronic flash equipment with dire results. The first one had not been properly charged and I ran out of light before the first interval and for the second I was loaned the very latest thing which developed a short, and packed up in like manner. Doing my best by low key stage lighting, I managed to produce a collection of murky prints as seen through a glass darkly.

During the last nine and a half years there have been many merry meetings and many sad partings. My deepest grief was, of course, the death of Hugh Findlay, an old friend before he joined A-R and a colleague that many have missed as much as I.

And now, all my dear kind friends that I shall miss so much, I must bid you adieu. Before I go, let me counsel the young not to apprehend the passing of the years. The longer you live, the more you live and the more you live, the more memories you can store up. I wouldn’t swap mine to be 30 years younger. So once again adieu, as away I go – ‘I’ve got a lot of living to do!’

The post Thanks for the memory…. appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

When a delivery van draws up at the goods entrance of Television House, clerk Harry Boatman swings into action, opens the doors, checks in the goods, signs for them, enters them neatly in his log, informs the appropriate department and makes sure nothing gets lost until they are safely taken away to their destination.

There is a touch of military precision about the whole procedure which dates back to the days when Harry Boatman used to be a ‘regular’ in the Army – just after the start of this century. In fact, he joined the Royal Regiment of Artillery, R.H. & R.F.A., in 1905 at the age of 20, though his military career came to an abrupt end one day in October, 1914, at Strazelle [Strazeele, in northern France near the Belgian border – Ed] where he was wounded in action. Shrapnel had torn through his body and – while he was bandaged up to stop the flow of blood – a shell burst under the shield of a gun close by, ripping off the majority of his fingers as well as part of his right car.

Totally disabled, he was discharged from the Army after a spell in hospital and almost immediately joined the Civil Service as messenger and caretaker, serving among others such distinguished establishments as No. 10 Downing Street and The Treasury.

He retired from the Civil Service in 1950, aged 65, after 35 years, but only a few years later he was back at work, first with the NAAFI Bakeries and then, since 1956, with Associated-Rediffusion. At 77 he is probably the oldest member on the permanent staff of the company, and he is certainly one of the happiest. Married, with two sons and two daughters and he is not sure how many grandchildren, he lives with his wife in Merton.

Like most soldiers he treasures his memories and is justly proud of his gleaming row of medals, one of which (the DCM for distinguished conduct in the field) brings him a steady 6d. [2½p in decimal, 46p in today’s money, allowing for inflation] a day for life. He has also been awarded the BEM, and the Imperial Service Medal besides other service medals.

But Harry Boatman does not dwell in the past – he has his feet firmly planted in the present, enjoys his job and takes to it with the kind of enthusiasm that puts many a blasé youngster to shame. Maybe he only has a couple of fingers left to write with but his log book is immaculate and he would never dream of leaving his post unless there was someone to relieve him. For one thing, a driver might get into trouble for parking – which is now no longer allowed outside Television House.

Harry is a remarkably fit man. His secret? He firmly believes that there is nothing which ages a man more than the knowledge that he is no longer needed and since he is still very much in demand he feels on top of the world. Besides, being concerned in such a new and exciting 20th century venture as television, obviously helps to keep him young and active. I wondered what his wife thought of his extended working life. Would she not prefer to have him at home. ‘I am a nuisance at home’, he said with a twinkle in his eye, “my wife is glad to have me out of the way.’

Inevitably I had to enquire when he thought he would finally retire.

It was quite a joke to him.

‘When I die,’ he said without hesitation.

However, I can confidently predict that there won’t be a vacancy at the Associated-Rediffusion goods entrance in Television House for a long time to come.

The post Goods inwards looks outwards appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

At first sight it would appear to be impossible to connect a death at Broadcasting House, fires in a yard on which Studio 5 now stands, the battle of El Wisket Ridge, two fair-sized boilers and some pumps in Studio 1 at Wembley.

The clue as to how all these things can be linked lies in the name of Jack Elkins who has been making things connect at Wembley ever since 1934, apart from the war years when he was himself connected – to the Army.

Jack Elkins was born in Wales 44 years ago this month (October). George Elkins, his father, came from Nottingham and had gone to Wales to work in a power station at a mine. His mother was a Londoner.

Perhaps that is why his parents decided to move to London when the slump hit the Welsh coal mines in 1928. Jack and his three brothers, moved into a new home where the back gate led out onto fields. They were brought up within reach of the fresh, green countryside. The house was in Kenton and Jack Elkins and his wife still live there but his three children have farther to go for the countryside. As Jack grew up so did the houses – all around them.

Back in 1928 Jack’s father found work at what were then the Wembley film studios on the site now occupied by our studios. One by one the sons left school and one by one they, too, found work at Wembley. Jack was the youngest of the family and the time arrived when he, not unnaturally, joined his father and brothers there as well.

One by one the Elkins have left Wembley. Jack’s father retired from the boiler-room in 1947. He died a few years ago at the age of 82. Fred, who was an electrician at Wembley, is now a lighting charge-hand at the Merton Park film studios. Four years ago Bert also left his job as a set storekeeper to join a film studio. Today he is a camera grip operator at Ealing. Finally, two years ago Alf left the boiler room to work in another boiler house belonging to H.M. Stationery Office.

Only Jack remains, constantly to pop up in all parts of the premises where his job as charge-hand plant supervisor carries him. But back in 1934, when he first arrived, his job only carried him as far as the banks of glass batteries used for the sound equipment – six columns with four dozen batteries in each column.

This is where the first of the apparently unrelated items in the opening paragraph of this article comes into the picture – literally. For ‘A Death at Broadcasting House’ is the film which Jack Elkins remembers most from those early days. The cast included an actor by the name of Val Gielgud.

Wembley belonged to Associated Sound Films when Jack Elkins first arrived. Then it was acquired by British Talking Pictures who developed into Twentieth Century Fox. They used the studios to turn out quota pictures – one, or more, a month.

‘We were kept pretty busy’, says Jack in a characteristic understatement. ‘The interesting thing about those days was the fact that when we arrived in the morning we never knew when we were going home – that day or the next.’

Another interesting feature was the colossal waste of timber. They had an excellent system for clearing a studio of sets at the end of filming. Quick as it undoubtedly was, this method would hardly be considered today despite its attractive, basic simplicity. The idea was for a man to go round with a hammer and knock the supports away from the scenery. (Perhaps this was how the term ‘strike sets’ was derived?) Anyway the result was that the sets crashed down in a twinkling.

The method of disposal after this was also remarkably simple. The shattered remnants were piled up in the yard on which Studio 5 now stands and when the heap became unmanageable it was set on fire. Think of the amount of storage space which could be saved if the same system was adopted today.

Back in 1939, however, another sort of fire blazed up. Jack Elkins left Wembley to join the Rifle Brigade, serving in North Africa with the 9th and 2nd Battalions. ‘We went backwards and forwards across the Western Desert a couple of times’, is his phlegmatic summing up of the war out there. Tobruk, he recalls, was ‘a bit of a shambles’ when he last saw it.

It also appears that life was ’pretty warm’ when his battalion became involved in the Battle of El Wisket Ridge. ‘The infantry took the ridge. Then we were placed up there with anti-tank guns, blankets, ammunition and food. The idea was that we should hold it for three days.’

But they only stayed one day. During it the German tanks attacked continuously despite the fact that 50-55 of them were put out of action by the anti-tank guns. During that day also, his group used up all the ammunition which was supposed to last for three days. At the end of it they were told to disable their guns and make their own way back.

An indication of how ‘warm’ it was can be gathered from the fact that the battalion’s colonel was awarded the V.C.

Back at base Jack Elkins was asked if he could ride a horse. Upon giving a negative reply he was transferred to the Mounted Military Police.

For his remaining 18 months in North Africa Jack Elkins and his horse patrolled army food and lorry dumps. Then, in 1945, after four-and-a-half years out there, he was shipped home and demobbed. Back he went to the boilerhouse at Wembley.

The Wembley studios had meanwhile been doing their bit to win the war by turning out training and other films for the Army Kinema Unit. They, too, were demobbed back into the hands of Twentieth Century Fox and were let out to different film makers in the next few years.

Then, five years ago last January, Jack Elkins, his boilers and the studios were taken over by Associated-Rediffusion. Jack Elkins and the studios (with the addition of grey hair to the former and sundry alterations to the latter) are still with us but the old boilers have gone.

They had been working ever since 1929 (when what are now Studios 1 and 2 were being constructed) and Jack Elkins had been making them function for a good proportion of that time. Two years ago they were replaced by two smooth, shining, almost silent, new boilers. Each one measures 10 ft. by 7 ft. and each has an evaporation of 4,000 steam pounds per hour to provide heat for the radiators and hot water for the buildings. When it is really cold in the winter they have to be fed with 2,700 gallons of fuel a week. In the summer they tick over happily on 200 gallons a week.

‘I wasn’t sorry to see the old ones go. They gave a little bit of trouble occasionally’, says Jack with a slight smile which left the impression that the trouble was more than slight on more than one occasion but that Jack Elkins was equal to his boilers.

There was one day, however, when he was almost beaten – before the new boilers were installed. As he was approaching the boiler-house he heard what sounded like a terrific explosion. He rushed into the building expecting smoke and fury. He was wrong. A hurried inspection revealed that all was apparently well. It was – until they started pumping up oil into the gravity feed tank. The ‘oil’ turned out to be water which had seeped through to the tank under the floor and in through a burst pump connection. The explosion he had heard was the sound of the tank leaving its base and hitting the floor.

That’s about the only time Jack Elkins has come near to hitting the roof – either literally or metaphorically. Normally everything is spick and span as it should be with the man who is also responsible for the eight women day-cleaners, the five male night-cleaners, the one toilet cleaner and one general labourer who come under his domain, not forgetting the two plant attendants who assist him in the boiler-room and around the building on any plumbing job which might turn up. These jobs can vary from alterations to equipment to finding wedding rings down a sink. They also include the ‘practicals’ on a production such as laying on gas or water.

‘They come in cycles. During the summer people mostly seem to want rain, and in winter they want fires and cooking facilities’, says a man who is obviously accustomed to every sort of strange request.

And that brings us to the last of the items in the list in the first paragraph.

‘Excuse me Jack, they say they need some pumps in Studio 1’, says a visitor to the boiler-house.

‘Left it a bit late haven’t they’, says Jack. ‘All right, I’11 come and have a look’.

They got their pumps but then if Jack Elkins has anything to do with it they generally do get what they want.

The post The man who keeps Wembley warm appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

This is Joan Kemp-Welch’s story. Born Wimbledon 1916. Educated Roedean. Started stage career at 17. Winner of the award of the Guild of Television Producers and Directors for the best producer of light entertainment in 1958. Lively. Determined. Energetic.

Enter room 519, Television House – ‘won’t keep you a moment’, says Joan as she races through a 1959 Show programme with a visitor. ‘I think it’s going to be great’, she ends… ‘all right, thanks very much for coming in to see me, good-bye, see you soon’. Advance to chair in front of desk. Start interview.

‘I always wanted to go on to the stage. But as there was no money to pay for the training, I decided to take up a scholarship I had won to train to be a teacher. Meanwhile I was a member of the amateur society at the “Q” Theatre. Somebody fell ill and I took over the part of a maid. They offered me a year’s contract on the strength of it’. (Aside to her P.A.: ‘Here’s that memo you were asking about’).

‘Just before the war I decided I wanted to produce so I went along to Harry Hanson. I always remember him telling me: “We have enough trouble in the theatre without women producers”. At the beginning of the war I was playing the juvenile lead in “Ladies in Retirement”. That lasted two years. Meanwhile I did two films, one was opposite Bob Montgomery and in the second I was Anna Neagle’s mother in the Amy Johnson film. She has never let me forget that.’

(The phone rings – ‘Miss Joan Kemp-Welch has a visitor at the moment, she will ring you back when she is free’, says her P.A., Gerry Burke.)

Back to Joan: ‘The war brought directors into short supply. I went to Penge for a week to produce for Harry Hanson and I stayed for a month. I have never stopped producing since then. Next I went to Buxton for six months and then on to Colchester for a year-and-a-half. Two of the people I directed there were Dora Bryan (it was her second job) and Paul Rogers.’

(A visitor bursts in to get her to sign some travellers’ cheques. Exit visitor. Back to Joan.)

‘After that came a tour of India and Italy and the end of the war. I went to Scotland to produce for the Wilson Barrett company. I was asked to take over for three weeks from Clare Harris, and I stayed for three years. It was great fun. I produced musicals with a company of sixty artists. We stayed three weeks at each theatre in the circuit at Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh.’

‘Jacqueline Mackenzie was one of the people working in the wardrobe department. I gave her her first break.’ (The phone rings: ‘Of course you can see me in five minutes,’ she says. The phone is put back. The interview goes on.)

‘We did a series of revues which got fantastic notices. Peter Moffatt wrote the revues – he also selected the music for “Rush Hour” and he is working for me on the “1959 Show”.’

‘Before I left Scotland I was asked to do a panto at Blackpool. This was my first real contact with the variety stars. Olga Gwynne was the principal girl and Dave Morris was the comic. Another panto followed at Aberdeen in which Jackie Hunter starred and Dick Emery played the dame’. (Again the phone rings: ‘Oh, you know that sketch, well I want to have a word with you about it. I’ve cast the match girl.’ It doesn’t make sense but it works – the caller goes).

‘Yes and what year were you at Aberdeen’, you prompt her. ‘I’m so sorry I’m absolutely terrible with dates. Never could remember them’, she replies.

‘Incidentally I had any number of letters of congratulation from friends in Aberdeen and Scotland after winning that award. I was very touched. It is heart warming that they still remember me.’

(Again the phone rings: ‘Certainly, I remember I’ve got an appointment to see you at twelve’). Back to her story…

‘Then I came to Town. I went to Bromley where I produced every third play for J. Arthur Rank, who owned the theatre. Meanwhile I put on a panto written by Peter Moffatt. It was “Goldilocks” and it was an enormous success. Tony Bateman of “Cool for Cats” was the dame – it was his first chance – and Duggie Squire was the bear – he did the choreography of “Cool for Cats”.’

‘During this time I did a lot of Sunday shows for the Repertory Players – twelve in all. They included “Serious Charge” with Nigel Stock, “Shadow of the Vine” with Eric Portman and “Annabella” which we televised last autumn.’

(A letter has to be signed. The ink has run out – ‘We never have things like that. There is never the time to go to the stationery department’, she half apologizes.)

‘Next came “Miss Hargreaves” with Margaret Rutherford at the Royal Court. After that there was “Desire Under the Elms” at Hampstead. Then there was “The Vicious Circle” at the Watergate with Faith Brook and Hugh Burden. It had wonderful notices and it meant I had two shows running at once.’

‘Lloyd Williams came to see “Desire Under the Elms” and asked me to go into television. I had never been inside a television studio in my life. I told him this but he said “never mind we are running training courses”.’

‘Then he came to see “The Vicious Circle” and asked me if I had made up my mind. I took the plunge. It was a bit of a gamble as I had made a success in one medium. It was rather a lot to hope I could do the same in another one.’ (This is said in the most modest way possible before the phone again interrupts… ‘Certainly you can go ahead and arrange that’, she says.)

I did five weeks training and then I was thrown into the first regular transmission put out by Associated-Rediffusion on the day after opening. It was called “How to make a Frame for Flowers” with Elsa Court and was in the women’s programme. I did seven programmes a week for women for three months. We did a twenty-minute revue in a studio the size of a pocket handkerchief’

‘Then I had 10 days off during which I directed and produced “Dead on Nine” at the Westminster Theatre. It ran for a year. Later I had another fortnight off to do “Albertine by Moonlight”. It was a ghastly failure and came off after three nights. The critics hated it.’

‘The funny thing is that although my entire life has been spent doing drama the only play I have done here was “The Blood is Strong”. I have got into musicals and stayed there. And I have enjoyed doing them.’ There is no doubt that she means just that.

‘Among the programmes I have done for Associated-Rediffusion are the Lester Ferguson series, the “Dickie Valentine Story” for our first anniversary, “Cool for Cats” and “Answer Please”.’

‘Gerry Burke has been my P.A. ever since we first met on my first musical – “Palais Party” with Lou Preager. We have put on an average of one programme a week ever since we have been together. How I could manage without her I do not know.’

‘The award was for a year’s work and during that year I did three months of “Cool for Cats”, a Christmas Eve show, eight weeks of “Rush Hour”, six weeks of “Free and Easy” with Dickie Valentine and one of the anniversary “Women in Love” playlets.’

‘Now we are doing the 1959 show with the same team who helped me to win that award. As I said when they gave it to me, I feel that the award belongs as much to those who have worked on my programmes as to me. I really mean that.’

‘When you have that amount of enthusiasm backing you up you cannot fail to succeed.’

The post The Joan Kemp-Welch story appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Bill was young and like many young men he had a keen sense of adventure; a desire to travel. Northern Ireland where he was born and brought up at the beginning of this century held few attractions for him. His Irish father and Scottish mother had not stood in the way of his elder brother when similar thoughts had passed through his mind … when, like many others at that time, his hopes had focused on a new land with new chances – Canada.

And so Bill’s brother sailed away. Bill was not long in joining him in Canada. There he soon found work. First he helped to make chocolate sweets. Then he worked in a Toronto biscuit factory. Bill might have become a prosperous Canadian but in Europe at that time factories in Germany were turning out arms not biscuits.

German troops were marching. War was declared and Bill, like many others who had sought fresh chances in new lands, decided that patriotism was a call he had to answer. He threw up his job, returned to England and volunteered. His brother clung to their newly-found country but also answered the call. He joined the Canadian Ambulance Service.

Soon, by some strange coincidence, the two brothers found themselves near to each other again in France. Bill, instead of packing biscuits into boxes, spent his time packing shells into gun barrels on the Somme not far from Ypres.

Five 100-lb shells screamed off towards the German lines a minute. The Germans replied and instead of 10 men manning each gun there were, more often than not, only four. But still the guns were fired. And still the German shells burst around them. Twice Bill had to be sent home with shell-shock. Twice he went back.

Then an offensive started against the Italians. They retreated and Bill was sent with the 29th Division in a bid to stop the advance. He helped to see that a fair proportion of shells were sent in the right direction before he, too, was injured. Ironically it was not a piece of shrapnel which pierced his leg, nor a stray bullet. A gun fell from its carriage on to him. And that was Blighty and the end of the war for Bill. Like thousands of others he had done his bit.

And so, in 1918, he was demobbed. Canada was a long way away. Bill’s brother went back. But perhaps the shellshock, the dreary days of hospital, had blunted Bill’s enthusiasm for a new country and a new life. Like thousands of others he did not find the transition from the Army to civilian life an easy one. He rejoined the Army.

As an experienced gunner they sent him to Shoeburyness, the Royal Artillery experimental depot. They made him a wine waiter to the 150 officers. He learnt a lot about wine and served many V.I.P.s when they came to see new weapons tested.

And there he met the girl who was to become his wife. She was governess to an Army officer’s children. In her younger days she had been an actress, once appearing as the principal boy in a Leeds pantomime. After their marriage Bill decided to leave the Army. They moved to Southend and Bill became a traveller to a firm which made umbrellas and walking-sticks. He tramped around Westcliff and Southend seeking orders. But his firm was a small one and not very prosperous. One morning Bill found himself out of a job. Luck was with him, however, for a dockers’ strike was on.

The same afternoon he was back in a job – working on the lighters unloading cargo from liners anchored oft Southend.

But that did not last long and soon Bill found new work – doing a milk round in Camden Town. Times were bad. He was forced to sack the boy who helped him. The boy retaliated by stealing the milk which Bill had left on the doorsteps. His pony had a long journey each day and dashed for his stable as soon as the last milk had been delivered. Perhaps there is a, by now, elderly policeman who remembers that pony’s attempt to knock him down in Trafalgar Square.

Bill began to prosper by taking over poor milk rounds, working them up into good ones and selling them. He soon knew Brixton, Victoria and Pimlico extremely well. Then he decided to stay put for a while and took over a dairy in Dorset Road, Clapham. He built it up until a bigger firm bought him up. Then the United Dairies bought up the firm which had taken him over.

Bill worked for United Dairies for a number of years – 400 customers a day, 3,500 stairs to climb each round. He became district manager – seven shops and 16 rounds: 12 shops, 43 rounds.

Then German troops marched into Poland. Bill’s world crumbled around him again much as it had done 15 years earlier and much as it did for thousands of others.

He returned to a milk round, this time in Kensington. Twice his home was blitzed. Once his wife was buried in the wreckage. Twice blast shattered his windows.

Meanwhile his brother’s son had followed their example in the First World War and joined the Canadian Army. Outside Rome Bill’s nephew won the M.C. for gallantry. He died there.

Back in England fate played another trick on Bill. In the First World War a gun had fallen on him. Shortly after the Second World War a crate of milk fell and split open his stomach. Bill still carries the scars. After that he was not quite so good at lifting things. He had to leave his job.

Just over three years ago Bill got another job – with Associated-Rediffusion.

You’ve probably seen him many times and he’s probably smiled at you and said ‘Good morning’ many times. For Bill, now white-haired, always has a cheery smile, much as he did for housewives on their doorsteps in days gone by.

Bill enjoys life as a labourer in Television House, shifting goods and furniture, restocking toilets with towels, soap and toilet rolls, clearing out wastepaper.

He thinks you all are wonderful people. ‘I do honestly believe that. Everybody is so considerate, patient and tolerant. I’m grateful to all I come in contact with.’

It was nice meeting you, too, Bill Shaw.

But Bill nearly always has a companion on his work around Television House, as most of you will know.

He is another Bill – Bill Farrell. Grey-haired and broad faced, this Bill also enjoys working here. For him, too, life here is quite a contrast to previous days.

Many are the times that his hands have been stained red by the Rowley Red Clay from Staffordshire. For Bill Farrell spent 35 years working for the Royal Doulton Potteries at Lambeth as a plaster model maker and a mould maker.

From his moulds were cast the terra-cotta façades for many of the buildings in London. Thousands of Scotch whisky flagons have also passed through his hands – he helped make them, not drink the contents.

Beer is his drink. During the war he was holding a pint of bitter in the ‘Prince of Wales’, Stockwell, when the place was hit by a bomb. Sixty people were in the pub at the time. Six got out alive. That’s about the only pint of bitter Bill Farrell has never finished.

Another time in the war he was going down to the cellar during a raid when a bomb dropped near by. The cellar door came away in his hands.

But that sort of thing does not happen around Television House these days. ‘It’s a change working here, wandering around the building all day, after 35 years shut up in one room at the pottery.’

Bill Shaw and Bill Farrell may not have the most glamorous of jobs in television but it is interesting to reflect that they are probably one of the best-known pairs of people in Television House.

The post Feature billing for a pair of Bills appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The cutting above is a reproduction of a personal advertisement on page one of The Times on October 10, 1921. The ambitious 17-year-old responsible had carefully picked his words to create the biggest impact from the 15s. [75p in decimal, £30 in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] investment in himself.

Today The Times prints – without charge – parts of the speeches made by the leader that youngster has grown into. The shrewd, successful, 55-year-old business and financial expert responsible for those speeches selects the ideas which his judgement tells him will succeed just as carefully as he picked the words for that advertisement. Today, however, the loss could be millions of pounds not 15s.

The advertiser in The Times in 1921 and the man quoted in that paper today is John Spencer Wills, president of the B.E.T. Federation Ltd, deputy chairman and managing director of the British Electric Traction Co. Ltd, chairman of Associated-Rediffusion Ltd, chairman and/or director of various omnibus companies in the B.E.T. group, past president of the Institute of Transport, deputy chairman of the Monotype Corporation Ltd, … an abbreviated list occupies three column inches in Who’s Who.

He did not waste his 15s. in 1921 nor has it been his habit to waste either words or money since then. He has used both to work for him better than most who were born in the early 1900’s.

During the First World War he attended first a preparatory school in Shropshire and then the Merchant Taylors’ School, London. John Spencer Wills played the usual games without distinguishing himself at any of them, although, significantly perhaps, he did like steeple-chasing more than other forms of exercise. He admits that he found rugger a little frightening. No doubt some of his contemporaries who played the game with gay abandon would today find his responsibilities positively petrifying.

The lanky youngster might have continued in this fashion had not fate intervened. He outgrew his heart and was ordered by the doctors to give up games. The academic side of his activities flourished. Mathematics and science were the subjects he enjoyed most and was, therefore, the best at. We shall see that later on in life he was to find another favourite subject – work.

Here at Merchant Taylors’ he came under the influence of the first of two outstanding men who were to make a great impact on his early years. This man was Dr J. A. Nairn, the headmaster at the time. The scholarly authority and penetrating judgement of this doctor of divinity, who had been appointed headmaster at 26, made a lasting impression on the schoolboy. Their friendship did not end when the youngster left school in 1921. Upon Dr Nairn’s retirement five years later the Lord Chancellor (an Old Merchant Taylor incidentally) appointed him to the living of Stubbings, near Maidenhead. There Dr Nairn christened the younger son of John Spencer Wills, 20 years after his pupil left the school.

The year 1921 was not a good one in which to start a career. Jobs were hard to find. People were beginning to talk about The Slump. The tall, slim youth decided to advertise in The Times and thereby established an important principle he has followed throughout his career. He believed that more satisfactory results could be achieved from people approaching him rather than the other wayround. He still does.

And his faith was justified for among the replies was one from a Mr Emile Garcke who wrote, in his own hand, saying he wanted ‘an educated young gentleman with a view to making him my private secretary’. It did not take John Spencer Wills long to find out that Mr Garcke was head of the executive of B.E.T. An interview resulted in the following letter from Mr Garcke:

Ditton House,
Near Maidenhead.
21st October 1921

Dear Sir,

Replying to your letter of 18th inst and call yesterday I write to say that you are appointed to the position of my personal confidential clerk at £50 p.a. [£2,100] payable monthly and in addition, you will have board and residence and washing hill at above address, free also a season ticket between Maidenhead and Paddington. The engagement will be terminable by one month’s notice on either side. When you are in London – about three days a week – you will provide your own luncheon.

I suggest you should commence your duties on November 1st and that if convenient you should go down to Maidenhead on Monday 31st, by train leaving Paddington at 6.33 p.m. I shall be on the same train and a motorcar will meet us at Maidenhead station. I enclose form of application for railway season ticket for you to fill in and return to me. I do not know whether you have a bicycle but you would find one useful as my house is 2 miles from the town.

Yours truly,

E. Garcke.

Fortunately John Spencer Wills did have a bicycle. He also had ambition and courage. Most youngsters would have accepted the offer without more thought than that it might be a useful entry to the B.E.T. But the 17-year-old boy who was about to take his first job was not satisfied with a possibility. He wanted a certainty, and so he made it a condition of his acceptance that he would be taken into the B.E.T. organisation proper after two years. Even before embarking upon his career he had laid down the first of many conditions to follow; already he had his eye on the main chance.

Mr Garcke was the second man to have a very big influence on the rapidly maturing youth. A tireless, painstaking worker, he had founded the B.E.T. empire and was responsible for building it up, company by company. Some of his qualities were undoubtedly passed on to his confidential clerk.

John Spencer Wills lived at Mr Garcke’s home in Maidenhead, travelling up to London most days. Much of his time was spent assisting Mr Garcke in his hobby – philosophy. For hour after hour he pored over books in the London Library, picking out extracts on philosophical subjects. More hard labour went into the compilation of a special file of triads needed for the book Mr Garcke was writing. Today this privately published book, Individual Understanding, is a treasured possession of John Spencer Wills.

But the young clerk acquired more than a knowledge of philosophy from Mr Garcke. He also learnt something about bee-keeping. The old man took it up as part of his philosophical study. And such was Mr Garcke’s ability to grasp a new subject that he was lecturing to the Beekeepers’ Association within a year.

John Spencer Wills learnt how to mount the tongues of bees on slides and how to file Mr Garcke’s investigations under a complicated system of classification of the sciences. He was shown the importance of attention to detail at an early stage in his career.

But possibly more important still was the fact that his position gave him a valuable insight into the work of a man at the peak of his power. This glimpse from the top right at the start must have acted as a considerable spur to his ambition.

Perhaps Mr. Garcke, too, realised that his clerk could not be held back for after one, not two, years, John Spencer Wills was transferred to the B.E.T.’s Secretaries office.

He worked at the headquarters in Kingsway as an assistant secretary to a number of bus companies and lived in the suburbs in a dingy, none-too-comfortable bed-sitting-room at Palmers Green. Such was the start for a man who now lives in a house in Kensington during the week and on his own Sussex farm at the weekends. He recalls those days with an amused shudder.

Already he was making sure that it would not be his lot for long. For two and a half years most of his spare time was occupied in study. He passed the Intermediate and then the Final examination of the Incorporated Secretaries Association (now merged with the Chartered Institute of Secretaries).

Soon he realised that acting as a company secretary was not going to result in quick promotion. So he decided to go into the field; to get a job working in the provinces with one of those bus companies.

At last a chance came; B.E.T. acquired a new company in Hull. John Spencer Wills applied to go there and was appointed its secretary and accountant at a salary of £260 a year [£12,500]. Now he had both a bedroom and a sitting-room in his digs.

But before he took up his new job he was sent to the Eastern Counties Road Car Co. Ltd, for a three-week course of intensive training.

And so he arrived in Hull armed with ambition, drive and a little book full of notes on how to run a bus company. And in Hull he had a big shock. There was no proper office, hardly any staff and not even a reliable ticket system. John Spencer Wills rolled up his sleeves.

The situation might have been designed for him to achieve the greatest possible impact. He created order from the chaos and within a very short time was appointed the company’s general manager. At 22 the young man from headquarters had made a very big mark.

It is difficult to estimate the importance of the effect the next four years had on him. His chairman left him to get on with running the company’s affairs. If he wanted to put up the fares or anything else he did it. For four years he laid a very solid foundation to the company which had become the East Yorkshire Motor Services Ltd. Today he chuckles as he recalls those years. It was great fun for a youngster to have such power.

But the slump had arrived and it was not so much fun to have married men with two or more children coming to him and begging to be taken on as a clerk at 35s. a week [£1.75 in decimal, £90].

Ask him why he stuck with buses and he will become slightly annoyed. In those days there was no chance to wander from pasture to pasture, finding the most tasteful grass. People were delighted to keep what they had got. As a man with the power to hire and fire their plight was brought home to him in no uncertain fashion. He interviewed a steady procession of working men, their elbows sticking out of their coats, their families lacking clothes and food. Despite this he liked bus work.

In Hull it resulted in his being involved in something else which must have had a big effect on the formation of his character. This was a running fight with Hull Corporation who operated a rival bus service.

The young general manager found himself far from the calm, well-mannered, orderliness of the Kingsway headquarters of B.E.T. He had wanted to go out into the field but he had not realised that it would be a battle-field.

He found himself in head-on conflict with the chairman of Hull’s watch committee which was then responsible for licensing bus services in the city. The educated, well-brought-up, man from the South was faced by a self-made stoker, a Socialist by conviction and a blunt, forthright Yorkshireman by birth. Any attempt at reasoned argument was met with a stoker’s sledgehammer vocabulary. John Spencer Wills did the only thing possible – he learnt to talk the same way back.

The only snag was that the watch committee’s chairman was deaf, relying on a hearing box with earphones to listen to the young man’s retorts. The stoker adopted the only effective counter he knew to his opponent’s cogent arguments – he switched the hearing box off.

The watch committee and its chairman soon made up their minds about their attitude to the rival company’s general manager. Without putting it too strongly, they hated his guts.

But already John Spencer Wills had attracted attention from those in London. At the age of 26 he was asked to return and become a director with B.E.T. Five days after he had accepted this invitation, the corporation, not knowing of the move, surrendered. They sent a deputation to ask him to take over the management of the corporation’s bus service. It is interesting to reflect what would have happened had that deputation arrived five days earlier.

Now, however, John Spencer Wills had his feet firmly on the B.E.T. ladder. He describes his progress up that ladder over the next 20-odd years as steady, progressive plodding. This plodding carried him through the chairmanship of more than half the bus companies in the group.

But it did not carry him either so high or so fast as another facet of his earlier life which has more than a little bearing on his character. For six years, from 1933 to 1939, he held a pilot’s licence.

He took up flying when he was 28 for two reasons. First, he wanted to prove to himself that he could do it. Secondly, he thought that B.E.T., with its vast public transport interests, would expand into aviation. Until 1942 he was in fact managing director of British and Foreign Aviation Ltd and chairman of a number of aviation companies. The war, however, knocked things sideways.

He might have been a good pilot but he was a very bad navigator. Once when flying back to London from the cast he became lost and landed in the middle of a housing estate to find out where he was. The only way out was to take off smack between two houses. Today he smiles when recalling the incident and admits that he might have been killed.

More of the dare-devil in his make-up is revealed when he recalls watching the Boat Race by flying round in circles a few hundred feet above it. He also remembers taking up a girl to show her the sights of London from the air. (There was no restriction on low-flying in those days.) She was sick into her handkerchief and tossed it overboard. The slipstream caught it and smacked it back across the pilot’s goggles. John Spencer Wills is probably the only man alive today to have flown blind a couple of hundred feet above London. The girl, grand-daughter of Mr Emile Garcke, is his wife.

That was a lighter incident in his career. A more important event, which demanded just as sure a grip on the controls, was the grim battle over the 1945 Labour Government’s bid to nationalise the bus companies. Already B.E.T. had lost its electricity and gas undertakings to nationalisation. Now it was threatened with the loss of its interest in public transport.

Two big companies – Tillings and the Scottish group – sold out to the Government. But B.E.T. stuck to its belief that nationalisation was against the interests of the public, its stockholders and its staff. The fight was strenuous. Perhaps it reminded John Spencer Wills of his earlier battle against Hull Corporation; perhaps he used some of the techniques he learnt then. Nobody will dispute that he played a very important role in the anti-nationalisation campaign.

It was around this time that he was approached by Mr Allan Miller, then the controller of Broadcast Relay Services (later to become Rediffusion), with offers for him to become the managing director of the company. Each offer was more attractive than its predecessor. Each was refused. Allan Miller was not the sort of man to take ‘no’ for an answer. Nor was John Spencer Wills the sort of man to shift from the position he had taken up. It looked like stalemate but eventually a solution was found. The B.E.T. group, faced with big losses from nationalisation, took over Rediffusion and John Spencer Wills became chairman of it as well as managing director. The belief of John Spencer Wills in people approaching him had again been borne out.

Meanwhile the threat to nationalise buses had been halted so B.E.T. was left with its bus companies and Rediffusion. A few years later it was only natural that Rediffusion, with its television systems in Bermuda and Montreal already operating, should be among those to apply for a contract when it was decided to set up Independent Television in this country.

Once more John Spencer Wills and his fellow directors were called upon to make a coolly calculated decision. After many hours of anxious thought and deliberation, in which he played no small part, the decision was taken. Associated-Rediffusion was formed.

The story of the company’s early days, with the losses growing and growing, is well known. Not so well known arc the talks, worries and decisions which bespattered those troublesome times. Associated Newspapers withdrew. B.E.T. and Rediffusion took over their interests.

Behind it all were men who had considered every factor and decided to stick it out. John Spencer Wills carried more than his share of the responsibility and worry.

Now Associated-Rediffusion is under attack for the amount of money it makes and some of the programmes it transmits. As chairman he has little time for these attacks. He is not ashamed of making a profit nor is he ashamed of the programmes transmitted. But he does get annoyed at what he describes as ‘high falutin’, carping criticism’.

He thinks that the desire for entertainment and escapism are not far separated and he is not afraid to admit that, in common with a great many other people, he likes Westerns. John Spencer Wills makes no bones about the fact that he is proud to be chairman of Associated-Rediffusion and has been heard to describe the staff at Television House and Wembley as ‘a damn good lot’.

He genuinely believes in alternative and not competitive programmes. While admitting that this would be in Associated-Rediffusion’s interest, he is convinced that it would also be in the interest of the public to have a real, alternative television service.

He is also adamant about the value of people talking things over round a table. John Spencer Wills does not aim to set himself up (or anybody else) as a dictator in Associated-Rediffusion or any other company. ‘We’ve not got any and we certainly are not going to have any either.’

His own policy is not to interfere unnecessarily. He describes his role at B.E.T. as that of ‘Cabinet maker’ – to appoint the chairman and directors of the many companies within the group.

Many characteristics have combined to help carry him up the B.E.T. ladder. You will have gained a good idea of some of them from the preceding pages.

Mr W. T. James, who has also climbed high in the B.E.T. organisation, has known and worked with him for 27 years. He sums these characteristics up as follows:

A tremendous capacity for work, backed by a keen, perceptive brain. A forceful, analytical mind, logical in argument and quick to find a weakness in a case or document. This makes him a tough man with whom to negotiate. A virile imagination takes him a jump ahead of most people. He has the ability to issue the right orders and to make sure they are carried out. While not tolerating fools gladly he is a fair-minded, not ruthless, man.

Today John Spencer Wills has a not inconsiderable private fortune. Like others in a similar position he would be much better off financially if he avoided our high taxation and went to live in Bermuda or the West Indies. Why doesn’t he? Ask him and you will get a simple answer which also accounts for a great deal of his success. ‘I enjoy my work.’

Much as he attributes his success simply to this enjoyment of his work, so his chief hobby is simple. It is complete idleness. Walking and shooting are other occupations. Most weekends will find him out walking around the 2,000 acres, largely woodland, he owns in Sussex. Each weekday he compromises by walking from his house, through Kensington Gardens, to his office at Stratton House.

Dairy farming interests him as well. He lives on one farm near Battle and lets another five farms to tenants. He enjoys novels, good or bad, and likes to go to the theatre to see a serious drama.

Happily married to a lady who is well-known in the B.E.T. organisation for her charm and frequent attendance at functions all over the country, he has two sons. Colin, aged 22, is articled to a chartered accountant. Nicholas, aged 18, is now in Australia acting as a jackaroo on a sheep station before going up to Cambridge in October.

John Spencer Wills has no need to use the advertisement columns of The Times today. If he did he would certainly require more than the 17 words in which he described his qualifications in 1921. Then he had ambitions but no influence. Today he has achieved many of his objectives and acquired a lot of influence in the process. But the impression remains that he has some ambitions still to fulfil.

Sir John Spencer Wills (10 August 1904–28 October 1991) was chairman of Associated-Rediffusion.

The post Profile of John Spencer Wills appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Let me explain from the beginning for those who do not know – Rae Knight, the programme editor of ‘Close Up’ is female, although one would never guess this from her daily post which invariably is addressed to ‘Mr Knight’ or ‘Rae Knight, Esq.’

Rae, I soon learnt, spends most of her time viewing miles and miles of film – ‘I sometimes feel more like a pit pony,’ she says, ‘just, coming up for occasional glimpses of daylight.’ But Rae has not always lived in the dark.

After reading English and History at Oxford for eight months, she had to come down owing to the death of her mother. Rae wanted a job, so she cut out three advertisements from a newspaper – one for a librarian, one to work in an insurance office and one to train as a dentist’s anaesthetist – and applied for them. She was accepted by all three and as she was equally unqualified for each, plumped for the one to train as a dentist’s anaesthetist. She loathed that and gave it up for modelling. However, dress modelling was obviously not Rae’s vocation either – ‘I wanted to laugh whenever I was meant to have a serious face’ – so after a brief spell working in various offices and even for a short time in a chocolate shop, she took a job as a factory hand.

After three weeks working the machines that make bread machines, the output per man (and one woman) must have dropped. Rae was taken off the machines for causing too great a distraction and put on to the administrative side of the factory. There she concentrated on the safety, health and general welfare of the workers.

Rae’s administrative capabilities were widened with marriage and one icy March day found her planting 22,000 cabbages on a small-holding in Kent. As many cabbage planters before her must have found, it is not the most lucrative occupation, so the benefits of an outdoor life were relinquished for a job with the BBC.

During two years there, Rae graduated from working in the film library to becoming a researcher on ‘Tonight’ and there her days of viewing film began. How did the transition to Associated-Rediffusion come about? ‘I just fell into it,’ replies Rae, ‘through someone I met at a party.’

Now, three years later, she is still viewing film, but with rather more fringe benefits. When she first began, the film industry was inclined to look down upon the television world. To be allowed snippets from new films meant constant telephoning and letterwriting to the film companies. Now, they welcome television publicity and Rae is inundated with pamphlets, photographs and invitations to film previews. Recently she was invited to Hollywood for the premier of ‘It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world’, although there is not much hope of being able to accept that. She did go to Southern Spain for the filming of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Many other people also went to Spain in various capacities for that film, and as sleeping accommodation became scarcer, it was arranged that members of some crews should share rooms for the night. Rae, owing to the usual mistake with her name, found she was expected to double up with a strange cameraman, until she found other accommodation.

On another occasion, Rae had arranged an interview with Hugh O’Brien where he was staying in Eaton Terrace. When she arrived, the butler showed her in but left her for a few minutes while consulting Hugh O’Brien. Strains of conversation floated out: ‘…but I’ve got this chap from TV coming…’ When it was at last established that ‘this chap from TV’ and Rae Knight were one and the same person, she was shown in. Hugh O’Brien was obviously pleasantly surprised. Other trips abroad include a visit to Rome to see Charlton Heston when he was making ‘El Cid’; Paris twice – once for ‘Goodbye Again’ to see Françoise Sagan, Yves Montand, Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Perkins, and again for ‘Waltz of the Toreadors’. Rae went to Cannes for the film festival, Madrid for ‘55 Days at Peking’ and even to Munich. That was for the filming of‘The Great Escape’ with John Sturgess and it was on that occasion that Rae gave her first television interview.

Interviewer Nick Barker was meant to be appearing and it had been arranged that he should follow Rae out with a film crew. When there was no sign of either, there was a major panic: Rae rang London to suggest dropping the interview. Instead she became the interviewer and was filmed by a German film crew, which she hired there.

If one day your young daughter should say to you: ‘I want to work in a chocolate shop when I grow up’, don’t despair – just think to what it could lead.

The post Profile on Rae Knight appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The following article has been written by ROLLO GAMBLE and is about some of the incidents which hare brightened his days as a director.

I remember making a film for the Army in India called ‘Hold Your Fire’ (until you see the whites of their eyes) – this entailed among other elaborate details, a platoon of Gurkhas dressed up in Japanese uniforms (their resemblance to the Japanese is remarkable), crossing a river and being ambushed. The river I chose was only about three feet deep and 25 yards wide in the jungle near Dehra Dun. The Gurkhas were most co-operative, for when the sun started sinking below the fringe of the trees and our cameraman shouted for lights, a Gurkha would shin up and remove the obscuring branches with his kookri [more usually spelt ‘kukri’ in English, a curved knife – Ed]. Their technique filled us with admiration – they would sit on the end of the branch and hack it at a point nearer the trunk – we would shout warnings, but these were never heeded. Sometimes they were 200 feet from the ground then, with a wonderful sense of timing as the branch cracked, they would grab part of the main tree and remain aloft hanging by an arm, roaring with laughter. We siting a rope across the river and lined the bottom with small explosives to be electrically operated by the sappers. At the word ‘action’ the Gurkha ‘Japs’ emerged from the jungle and started crossing the river holding the rope and squatting to make the water seem deeper.

Then on cue orders were given for the Indian Army ambush to go into action and the explosives were detonated in the river. To avoid the explosions the actors had been told to keep strictly to the rope. However, a few decided to act the part of dying more realistically. They flung themselves away from the rope and were carried down by the stream. It was too late to stop the explosives. At the end I had half a dozen casualties, one of whom, sadly, died – a piece of metal from a detonator easing had penetrated his anus. Every reasonable precaution had been taken and the film showed exactly what had happened, so we were all exonerated at the Court of Enquiry – however, I vowed I would never have anything to do with filming again.

Of course I did.

One of the most frightening experiences was making a film on mountain climbing at Banff Springs in the Rockies. The commentary and dialogue was in French since the television film was intended for the French-Canadian population. I had two Swiss guides to assist me, Bruno Engler and Walter Lippman (not of course, the doyen of American political commentators).

The pay-off was the successful arrival on the pinnacle of the tyro, a young French Canadian called Gil La Roche. We chose one of the minor peaks and were duly roped together by the Swiss guides. The cameraman had an auricon [16mm sound-on-film motion picture camera] in a rucksack strapped to his back. In another a clueless electrician carried the battery — upside down, so that the acid ran out and ruined a suede jacket lent him by Bruno Engler. We also carried with us a large, round, empty biscuit tin.

When reaching a well-climbed summit, it is the custom among mountaineers to sign a book which is kept inside a tin ensconced in a cairn of stones, thus proving that they have been there. Though this peak was steep enough, it was not considered by genuine mountaineers to be worthy of a cairn of its own — so we provided the tin and book and were prepared to build a cairn.

I was fat and extremely out of condition in those days — so I had more or less to be dragged to the top by the guides and the rest of the crew. On the way we filmed Gil La Roche suspended over various vertiginous chasms. One was particularly terrifying. There were two pillars bending towards each other. The gap between their tops could not have been more than 3 ft. 6 in. but the drop between was at least 2,000 feet, a mere step but what a step and a step we all had to take to reach the top.

All preparations were made for the pay-off scene when Bruno had to come in on cue with the book. But Bruno, brilliantly agile mountaineer and splendid ad lib. actor, was no good at coming in on a cue. After 17 takes tempers were frayed. Exasperated beyond endurance he shouted ‘Merde’ and punted the biscuit tin high into the air. In dismay we watched it bump down the rocky slope, plunge over the precipice, to hear it no more as it dropped thousands of feet into the valley.

French-Canadians are volatile — there are plenty of Gallic elements left in their genes. This could have started a fight, which in that precarious situation could have been dangerous. Since I was the only Englishman there, and everything is blamed upon the director anyway, it could have been especially dangerous for me. If I had not exercised tact I would no doubt have been forced to follow the biscuit tin. Luckily someone saw the funny side and all ended in laughter. Our dilemma was solved by rewriting the script. To everyone’s astonishment we won a certificate from the Canadian Government – for the best television film in French Canadian made on top of a mountain by a foreign director over 45.

Talking about prizes, I remember an extremely active year, sometime ago now, when I had collaborated with Daniel Farson. We were sent letters telling us we had been short-listed for a prize at the Television Ball. In fact several people told us (on the ‘very highest authority’) that we had a very good chance and we were advised to attend. Dan and I both loathe functions of that sort. However, for my part, vanity prevailed, I got quite excited and went off to Moss Bros for the necessary clothes. Somehow, at enormous cost, we got two returned tickets at the last minute and turned up at the Ball.

We were shown to a table already occupied by rather a sinister group of middle-aged and were received, as we introduced ourselves and sat down, extremely coldly.

Opposite me sat a stout man with an ill-fitting wig, which he adjusted from time to time. Next to him a pretty, but stern woman of 45 or so smoked from a long cigarette holder. She gave me not the flicker of a smile of welcome and I quickly realised that one of her eyes, which did not move, was glass. To add to my embarrassment, I remember, something very hard kept grating me. I began to suspect that the lady sitting next to me was rubbing my shin with a metal brace attached to her leg. There were also curious squeaks coming from under the table. I was forced to drop my napkin only to discover it was the leg of the table I hail been trying to avoid and the squeaks were coming from a sort of metal fastener the lady wore on her brogues. As I rose again to my seat, she looked at me severely and said she had been ‘observing my work of late’. Whether this was intended as praise or blame it was impossible to tell. I can never forget the unfriendly stare of those eyes around that table; if there was a relenting gleam it was in only one and that was the glass eye.

Eventually the silence was broken, a few names were dropped – a very tall, very thin man, with a finely pencilled moustache winked at me evilly — the word ‘corporation’ figured from time to time – and then, sickeningly, it dawned on me that we had blundered into the case-hardened cadre of the BBC.

Alas. They have all seceded now, some to rest forever, some to retirement with the O.B.E. and others to commercial television – for the young have taken over.

Very soon the speeches began and it became apparent we had not won a prize. The lady with the brogues bent over and whispered: ‘Better luck next time – I like your shows – jolly good live.’ ‘Not live – filmed’, I hissed. With that she turned her back and I slunk away. Dan had of course made his escape long before and I joined him at the bar, horribly disappointed. So much for prizes.

If I suffer from folie de grandeur it is only in my dreams.

I am John Huston and I am getting a long shot composed of Canyons, Kraals and 40,000 cattle. My assistants are my PA, the clapper boy (a part often doubled by me) and two or three Africans who don’t speak a word of English. We are all shouting and beating reflectors to get the cattle to stampede in the right direction. The Indians on horseback (my dream is very mixed up) who are supposed to do this only create chaos. Eventually it happens, the cattle stampede – straight at the camera and we are all immolated under pounding hooves. I then wake up with a pounding heart to meagre reality – sweating and disgruntled.

One sometimes has moments of vicarious grandeur – when one visits the houses of the great to obtain interviews. Usually, of course, one is admitted by appointment through the tradesman’s entrance. The butler who lets one in, invariably expects a large tip – and who should blame him, for the disruption of the household regime will be appalling.

There is the preliminary discussion with the VIP involved. He or she will always ask: ‘How much time does it take, how much machinery will you bring and will it make a mess, etc.’

If one has any sense, one always asks for twice as much time, describes the machinery as gigantic and dangerous and the mess disgusting. Luckily for TV most people are so vain they will put up with anything, for a chance to appear – and if one can get out fairly cleanly, it is gratifying to hear one’s victim say: ‘That wasn’t so bad after all’.

An exception to this was our visit to Barbara Cartland’s country mansion. I had been received graciously in her boudoir where she was putting the final touches to her make-up. When she asked the usual questions I exaggerated everything according to plan and told her it was unlikely we could be finished before lunch time. ‘Then we’ll all have a jolly lunch together afterwards’, she added with her immense charm.

I did not reckon with the wiring of Camfield Place. During a shot there was an appalling flash, all the lights went out and we were told the cooking stove had fused. Miss Cartland, though she must have cursed us, seemed unruffled – imperiously she summoned a man from the electricity board. We lunched off cold cuts and vitamin pills and got home shattered, exhausted and filled with admiration long past midnight. That was an ill-fated story – the programme was transmitted out of sync on its first showing and it has taken me about three years to explain to Barbara Cartland what happened.

Another occasion nearly ended in a far more sinister tragedy.

With enormous difficulty we had got permission to film an actual wedding. It wasn’t so much the church service we were interested in as the wedding breakfast, which was to take place, at lunchtime, in the Dog and Fox in Wimbledon. We had two crews, one to handle the orange blossom, confetti and all that in the morning, and the other to set up in the D. & F. for the breakfast.

The breakfast, I may say, consisted of champagne, soup, turkey, gaufrettes trifle and wedding cake. I suppose there must have been places laid for 250. At any rate it was a vast area to light and we had to hire a special generator. The crew spent the whole morning trying to start the infernal thing without success. We had our camera set, the toastmaster in his special and stentorian voice was already announcing the guests – the bride, groom, mothers and fathers were all lined up to receive – but there were no illuminations and it was useless to ‘Roll’. We were all in despair, the electrician was going mad. In a paroxysm of temper he seized a hammer and clouted the generator, intending to smash it.

It started.

The lights went up and we filmed, surf-riding on a wave of elation. But sudden transitions from despair to relief in circumstances of that sort can be dangerous. The electrician was so pleased with himself that he drained all available glasses (there were hundreds) and was seen staggering about among the lights. The baby of the bride’s sister was crawling on the carpet and was just saved from instant death as someone caught a falling 2-K inches from its head. This had the effect of sobering everybody up.

But I digress – I was talking about celebrities. I once asked the Duke of Marlborough if I could film at Blenheim. He told me of a BBC crew which had been there (with Dimbleby I think) when the sound assistant pushed his fish-pole through the face of a Holbein portrait. The Duke had the canvas sewn up by a picture restorer and apparently there is nothing to be seen of the damage – accidents happen in the best regulated societies.

With this by way of warning he gave us permission to film – I’ve always regretted that we never did. The project was cancelled.

I am reminded of a great house in Smith Square, its reception rooms walled with impressionist paintings – part of the valuable Courtauld collection – and the home of the then Home Secretary.

Mr [Rab] Butler received us with his famous sophisticated charm. We had admired the pictures and punctually were all set to go. ‘Cut, I’m sorry’, called the sound engineer. There was a strange buzzing in his cans, some electronic fault we supposed. The delay was appalling, for Mr Butler is one of those politicians who is genuinely very busy. I left the engineer, his screwdriver poking about in the entrails of the tape recorder, to make my apologies. A half-hour had gone by attempting small talk, when I noticed clustered over the microphone a swarm of flies. It was obviously the fly mating season and this was the cause of the noise. We shook the mike and fanned it, but it must have been very sticky because the flies returned every time – the only answer was to get a flit gun [a hand-pumped insecticide sprayer]. After searching the house, Mr Butler produced a very rusty flit gun from his basement. I was photographed applying the flit and this photograph made the national dailies with the caption, ‘The Home Secretary gets a flitting’. I expected to be clapped into gaol, as was the Good Soldier Schweik, who remarked in a pub in Prague as he observed a portrait of his Excellency, that flies had settled on the Archduke Ferdinand.

Now from the homes of the famous to the homeless.

Without warning I was flying towards Latin America, my mission to film the 150th anniversary of the Argentine’s liberation from Spain. Large sums of money were concealed about my person – I had to find and finance cameras, crews, film and the rest. Our contact was an American beachcomber, called Rossiter. He met me in Buenos Aires, sweating with moral disintegration – no cameras were available, only a Kodak, designed for amateurs with an automatic light meter – automatic in that it was unnecessary to set the stop. The cameraman, Pepe le Moko, only had to point, focus and squirt. We were doing this at a vast, ominous, military parade, when the news of the Chilean earthquake broke. Two hundred miles of coast had dropped three metres, a great fissure in the Pacific sea-bed had collapsed causing a tidal wave and destruction never before experienced.

Michael Ingrams and I were again in the air, our Lufthansa plane soaring over the Andes and circling endlessly the aerodrome at Santiago de Chile.

The American hotel block stands in a square opposite a Ruritanian Palace – the manoeuvres of the President’s guard causing us macabre amusement as we watched from our 17th storey suite. In the foyer of the hotel highly organised American aid airmen and WACS [US Women’s Army Corps] swarmed, with a scrum of international journalists at the bar.

Our aim, therefore, was to get to the scene of destruction as early as possible. We found a camera somewhere and a cameraman, Orlando Furioso. At 4 a.m. the next morning we were on an aerodrome in the office of the American commandant asking him to let us fly 1,000 miles south in a Globemaster. The Americans with their wonderful sense of international charity had sent a fleet of these transport planes with cargoes of medical supplies, blankets, etc. There is a wide shelf behind the pilot’s cabin. Here we lay, given cocoa and cigarettes by gum-chewing airmen resembling Hollywood extras. Michael and I were in lounge suits (his Savile Row) and had urban and effeminate footwear. We had left our bowler hats and umbrellas in the Santiago hotel.

The Chileans complain they cannot have an interesting sex life because the country is so long and narrow, they all have to stand in queues. However, it’s a marvellous country to fly down. At dawn the snow-capped peaks of the Andes are rose and the range is dotted with volcanoes in semi-eruption. The lumbering plane throbbed along. Asking Orlando Furioso for pictures of passing mountains, we discovered to our horror he had no idea how to operate the camera, let alone speak English. Having read a few ‘do-it-yourself’ pamphlets on both photography and Spanish, I was able to give him rudimentary instructions. Calculating the exposure, since this camera had no built-in meter, sent the three of us into committee every few minutes.

The plane settled, a fat turkey, at a place called Puerto Mont, or Puerto Meurt – (Port of death?) if it had been called Puerto Merde it would have been more fitting.

Shivering with cold, we trudged across the aerodrome in six inches of mud, our suits and pansy shoes suffering. In the drizzle, Michael, suave and diplomatic, persuaded the Chilean Army to lend us a jeep.

It was as if the fields and woods of Kent had been shattered and rent. Huge slices had been carved out of the road. The railway line had been whipped like a child’s skipping rope and broken up in hummocks. Hillsides had slipped into the valleys, a rich man losing in three minutes his 40,000 acre ranch as it slid cowboys, crops and stock into Lake Rinnehue [sic – Riñihue].

We reached the pathetic, broken town. Resigned figures were picking in the ruins. The boulevard, a dual carriageway along the embankment had sunk into the river, the lamp-posts and trees sticking regularly through the water. Orlando filmed soup kitchens organised by nuns, relief camps, bodies collected from ruined homes, and funerals slowly processing away.

In the hotel, cracked, still standing, but disembowelled, there was a room for us. There was no electric light, no lavatory working, no water, only wine, which somehow had survived in large quantities.

In the back an electric fan, not revolving, swayed from the ceiling. Seeing it, I remarked that it must be very draughty to move such a heavy object – not at all, I was told it was the building which was swaying, for tremors are felt for weeks after a severe earthquake.

To light us to bed we were allowed one candle. Every half-hour or so the building shook and we could hear deep in the earth, a steady thrumming. We wanted to film Michael during an earth tremor in the hotel bedroom, on the site writing his report.

So we used the candle for a key light (about six inches from his nose) and Orlando persuaded the landlady, who reluctantly let us have another candle for a filler. We ran the camera at its lowest speed, wide open. Michael did the action in the slowest of slow motion and lo-and-behold the shot came out and was used in our story on ‘This Week’. The next day I was invited into a crippled house. The old couple, their faces browned like worn ivory, lined with suffering and stoicism, insisted on giving me a glass of their local liqueur. We could not talk. I filmed them in their hopeless and dimly lit kitchen and parted in tears. A rusty old taxi took us to the aerodrome. There the ever kindly Americans squeezed us into a Globemaster, already overloaded with heart-rending refugees, and flew us back to Santiago.

After this the rest of the story filmed in Santiago was as stale as margarine is to butter. The anti-climax was intense and led us to all kinds of extremes of relaxation. However, that is a story for St Peter at the Gates of Heaven.

The post Digressions of a director appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘It’s lucky I wrote my biography in 1959,’ said Eric Maschwitz. ‘Now I can use it as a reference book whenever I want to remember something.’

He added: ‘You know, the one fact that I needed recently that wasn’t in it was the date of my second marriage. Neither my wife nor I could remember it, and in the end we had to prise her wedding ring off and look at the inscription. Now we’ve found out the date, we can celebrate it.’

At 65, Eric Maschwitz, executive producer special projects, is endearingly mild, humorous and vague. His eye for a pretty girl is as keen as ever it was when he ‘launched’ Jean Carson in ‘Love from Judy’, the West End musical. His career, which appears to have been as undisciplined as a Mongolian lamb rug and as colourful as a Persian carpet, has provided him with an unending stream of amusing stories. He sheds anecdotes among his listeners as easily as other people scatter crumbs to pigeons.

He is the writer of several musicals and more than 300 lyrics, including ‘These Foolish Things’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. (‘I feel a great joy whenever I hear them being played at the thought that they’re still earning me money,’ he says). As director of variety for BBC sound, he originated ‘In Town Tonight’, still going strong. In Hollywood he wrote the screen version of ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips’. In his five years as head of BBC television’s light entertainment from 1958, he started up ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’, ‘Juke Box Jury’, ‘Compact’, ‘Steptoe’ and many other series.

Joining Rediffusion in 1963 ‘at the request of my old friend John McMillan’, his first production was ‘Our Man at St. Mark’s’.

Later he brought Stella Richman into the company and with Cyril Coke devised ‘The Rat Catchers’.

Moreover, this brief outline mentions nothing of his exciting wartime career – during which a certain Major John McMillan was under his command – nor of his two marriages, the first to comedy star Hermione Gingold.

With a man like this, where does one begin when asked, as I have been by the editor of Fusion, to write a ‘short profile’?

In fact, I began by reading Eric’s autobiography, published in 1959, and called ‘No Chip on my Shoulder’. It is a fascinating book crammed with well-known names, entertaining stories and, incidentally, too many exclamation marks!

It seemed that the best way to give readers an idea of the adventures in Eric’s life would be to print – with his permission – some extracts from the book, along with a potted biography. Born in Birmingham, Eric went to Repton School with a classical scholarship, then to Caius College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages. At Repton he wrote his first lyrics for a school operetta and at Cambridge he became a ‘leading lady’, playing Vittoria Corombona in ‘The White Divel’ for the Marlowe Society.

After this he tried several careers-journalist, novelist, repertory actor, peanut vendor in a french travelling circus, waiter in a French café, and principal of a correspondence course in short-story writing. During this time – he packed a lot into five years – he married Hermione Gingold.

When he was literally down to his last pair of shoes – dancing shoes – Eric joined the BBC at Savoy Hill, where for six months his job as assistant director of outside broadcasting brought him in £300 a year [£15,500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed]. Specialisation seems to have been unheard of then and he mucked in on everything from writing to broadcasting himself.

From this, he became editor of the ‘Radio Times’, one of his assistants being Val Gielgud. In his seven years as editor he found time to take up writing for radio drama, beginning with an adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s novel ‘Carnival’, for which, in spite of many revivals, he never received a penny extra.

Soon after this he was introduced to George Posford, a jazz enthusiast who had graduated from the Royal College of Music, and together they wrote ‘Good Night, Vienna’, for the radio. Film rights were bought by Herbert Wilcox for a mere £200 [£12,000], and it was made into one of the first ‘talkies’ in this country, with Jack Buchanan and Anna Neagle starring.

In 1933, Eric Maschwitz was offered the post of variety director for the BBC with the job of doubling the output of ‘light’ programmes. ‘In Town Tonight’ was thought up by him as a means for filling one of the ‘peak’ hours – 6.30 pm on Saturday.

‘With a little fast talking I got the title accepted by the planners, though I had in truth only the sketchiest notion as to what form the feature would eventually take,’ he recalls. ‘There was no script until on the morning of the first performance I sat down at the typewriter and hastily thought up “the roar of London’s traffic” and the flower-girl murmuring “sweet violets”to be interrupted by the stentorian shout of “Stop”.’

The words for ‘These Foolish Things’ were written one Sunday morning when Eric, pyjama-clad, unshaven and suffering from lack of rest, was sipping coffee and vodka.

By lunchtime the words had been dictated over the telephone to Jack Strachey, and that evening a melody had been composed.

‘I was, I must shyly confess, bitterly disappointed in it,’ reveals Eric. ‘Nor did Jack care for the title; he wanted to call the song “These Little Things”.’

Surprisingly, the song aroused no special interest. ‘No publisher would oblige (even the firm of Keith Prowse, to which I was under contract at the time, gladly gave me a letter releasing it). We put it into a West End revue; still it failed to set the musical Thames on fire.’ However, one day Leslie Hutchinson (‘Hutch’), the West Indian singer, found the manuscript on top of Eric’s office piano, played it, liked it and recorded it. The song was an immediate success, and so was Eric. He was interviewed in New York, in his column Walter Winchell reproduced the lyrics in full, and ‘the pretty ladies with whom I danced wanted alas! no more of me than that I should breathe those lyrics into their shell-like ears!’ The song has earned Eric altogether more than £30,000 [£480,000], he estimates.

Two amusing tales from his days as variety director point up Eric’s inventiveness. Asked to be the commentator for the arrival of Amy Johnson, on her return from her recordbreaking flight to Australia, Eric was faced with 40 empty minutes, because the aeroplane was delayed. ‘I filled up the time by giving the listeners a Short History of Flying, taken from a sixpenny booklet which somebody had thoughtfully purchased from the airport bookstall!’

On the night of the Jubilee Ball from the Albert Hall, the BBC had ‘elected to broadcast the first half-hour of just the sort of occasion at which the majority of the guests arrive late’. When Eric got to the hall it was completely empty, except for the orchestra. He could find no trace of the OB official who was supposed to be in charge. So, with the broadcast ‘hooked up’ to all parts of the Empire, something had to be done. ‘As the red light began to blink, I gathered together the waiters who had been hanging around the edges of the floor and made them waltz with each other so that we might have at least the sound of dancing feet.’ The orchestra played and Eric drew upon his considerable imagination to describe a vivid scene of princes, potentates and famous beauties arriving at the ball.

Even the award to Eric of the OBE in recognition of his services to broadcasting, was not quite straightforward. For although he was in one of the first Honours Lists after the death of King George V, he did not actually receive his decoration until after the Abdication. The document starts, therefore: ‘We Edward the Eighth etc.’ At the investiture, Eric, having neglected to wear gloves, had to borrow a cotton pair ‘slightly disfigured by iron-mould’ from one of the Royal Servants. But he was elated when the King, with whom 17 years before he had made up a four at tennis a few times, remarked: ‘It seems a long time since we used to play tennis together at Cambridge!’ Returning from the Palace, Eric learned that the musical spectacular play ‘Balalaika’, which he had written and produced, had been bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for a six-figure sum. This led to an offer of a writing contract with the company, and in 1937 Eric joined the Hollywood studios at £350 a week [£20,000].

In spite of the money, the climate, and a Mexican-style bungalow in Beverly Hills, in spite of parties galore, Eric was dissatisfied. There was no work for him to do. Although he had been engaged primarily to work on the screen version of ‘Balalaika’, three other writers were assigned to it instead. (The result of their work Eric describes as ‘a piece of cheese’, but adds ‘it made a fortune’).

He decided to return to London. ‘So far the studio had paid me over $30,000 for doing almost precisely nothing; only madmen, I thought, would wish to keep me there any longer.’ But the studios, he found, liked to keep talent in reserve, and it was not so easy to escape. When he became really restless, he was asked to re-write someone else’s screen version of ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips’. This he did, enjoying the work, but trying nevertheless to complete it by the time his six months’ contract expired, and before his option could be renewed. He managed it – with a few hours to spare.

When the 1939 war came, Eric volunteered, and eventually found himself with M.I.6, working from a suite in the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool.

‘Our “cover” in the hotel was that my colleagues were interested in the production of a new revue of which I was to be the writer; to lend colour to this perhaps improbable story they gave one theatrical party after another. To add plausibility to the set-up I actually began to write a revue.’ The result was the hit show ‘New Faces’ in which Judy Campbell introduced ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ to a delighted audience.

At a later stage in the war he was appointed liaison officer between the War Office and Broadcasting House to ensure that radio programmes heard by the troops were morale-boosting.

Eric’s book tells of many of his other wartime exploits – which included a period in New York with the military staff of ‘British Security Co-ordination’ and a mission to Lisbon, as well as the production of several more musicals. He also, while in the Broadcasting Section of Army Welfare, devised a scheme for making recorded programmes in London and shipping them out to stations overseas to be heard by British troops.

This brought into existence the ORBS (Overseas Recorded Broadcasting Service) in which the Navy and the Air Force also helped.

It was while with the Psychological Warfare Branch of SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force] that Eric obtained a divorce and married Phyllis Gordon, his present wife, a girl he had known for 10 years. Eric, as a lieutenant-colonel, renewed a prewar acquaintance with John McMillan when he took charge of broadcasting for the War Office.

‘My new job was a very interesting one. With the armies as they fought their way towards Germany went three mobile radio-transmitters from which programmes were broadcast to the troops. This Field Broadcasting Unit was under the command of Major “Johnny” McMillan, a taciturn, poker-faced Australian whom I had known as a producer for commercial radio before the war. He ruled a rather turbulent assembly of broadcasters and technicians with a rod of iron.’

As part of his task of setting up a British Forces Network in Germany – it was obvious that the enemy would soon surrender and entertainment was needed for British troops who would no longer be occupied with fighting – he drove with John McMillan into Hamburg. There they requisitioned the Musikhalle, a vast concert hall, as a new headquarters. A transmitter was taken over at Norden; an entire staff of German technicians recruited; and ‘within a few days the admirable McMillan who possessed a miraculous gift for getting things done, had the German post office engineers busy linking our new station with Hamburg by land-line’. Events moved quickly and soon test programmes were being transmitted.

‘Once more in Brussels where I had gone to listen to the tests and incidentally catch up with the paper-work in my office, I was alarmed to receive a signal from Hamburg to the effect that in view of the excellent performance of the transmitter it was proposed to put a regular programme service into operation as from the next day. On learning of this the Brigadier, who had all along been a little doubtful of our enthusiasm, dictated a signal ordering Major McMillan to postpone his intentions until such time as proper consideration could be given to them. This ukase [Russian: a proclamation by the Tzar] went astray or was conveniently “lost” at the receiving end; the following morning when we tuned in as usual to the tests, we were greeted by the voice of one of our sergeant-announcers proudly proclaiming the birth of the British Forces Network in Germany! The transmission was so good and official congratulation so general that nothing more was ever heard about the missing signal.’

Eric also recalls that he enjoyed staying at ‘Johnny’s mess’. The house of a Hamburg banker, it was situated just outside Osnabruck, and ‘contained bedrooms designed, it seemed, to house Madame Pompadour’ and two Bechstein concert grand pianos. ‘My resourceful subordinate,’ this chapter of the book notes, ‘had further added to the amenities of the establishment by recruiting a first-class German chef and a head waiter who, before the war, had served at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Both cooking and service were so Lucullan that the Brigadier, upon one of his occasional visits of inspection, drew me aside with the words: “I say, don’t you think that fellow McMillan’s going a bit too far?”’ (I was amused to see that Eric has mis-spelt his present general manager’s name in every reference to him – but of course, that was in 1959, when Eric Maschwitz was still unconnected with television and able to write in his book apropos the theatre ‘And over all looms the sinister shadow of Television’!)

After the war came a revue produced on a shoestring, then ‘Carissima’ in 1948 with music by Hans May, a terrific success in spite of bad notices from the critics. While he was working on this, Val Parnell asked Eric to collaborate on a revue to be produced at the Hippodrome, ‘Starlight Roof’. In the cast was a child coloratura the then unknown Julie Andrews, who was nearly taken out of the show by the producer who called her performance ‘a circus act’.

‘Serenade’ followed, then ‘Belinda Fair’, after which Eric formed his first connection with television, writing a series of comedies called ‘Family Affairs’ for the BBC. Then there was a television version of ‘Carissima’ starring Barbara Kelly, which was ‘the most elaborate and costly musical production so far attempted by the BBC” and written in 82 scenes.

‘Zip Goes a Million’ came next, ‘Love from Judy’ (starring Jean Carson who had been admired by Eric in ‘Starlight Roof’ and ‘pushed’ into this part by him), ‘Romance in Candlelight’ and ‘Summer Song’.

In 1958 Eric was made head of light entertainment for BBC television, rejoining the BBC fold after an absence of 19 years. On his retirement at the age of 62 came the invitation to join Rediffusion, for whom he had already produced as a freelance.

‘I had provided a package deal of script, cast and music for a 26-part adventure serial called “Destination Downing Street” for only £600 [£12,300] an episode,’ he recalls. His records show that Susan Hampshire, then unknown, was paid £14 [£285] for an appearance and Stratford Johns £21 [£430]. He also remembers casting Richard Harris for 17 guineas [£17 17s, £17.85 in decimal, £365 today], and Fenella Fielding (as a belly dancer) for £23 [£470].

What of the present? Eric is working only part-time now for the company. He also produces a monthly news bulletin about ITV for circulation in Europe and the Far East.

Ahome in Marylebone he has just produced a new version of Franz Lehar’s ‘The Count of Luxembourg’ and is in the middle of revising ‘The Chocolate Soldier’, both for performance by amateur operatic societies. (He has always taken an immense interest in the amateur societies and has made many adaptations, and even written a new work, for them.)

He is looking for a composer for the new stage musical he is working on and which he won’t talk about yet. ‘The Press are all pestering me to know about it, but I’m not saying anything.’ With the agreement of the company, he is compèring a weekly record series on the radio and he is, and has been for the past 14 years, on the Council of the Performing Rights Society. (In 1962 he won the Ivor Novello Award for his services to popular music).

With such a full life, I asked him the other day, is there anything he regrets not having done?

‘I’d like to have gone into the Church or education,’ he replied. Then, turning to his secretary June Wisden, who has been with him now for six years, he said: ‘Did I ever tell you about the time when …’

Eric was off on another of his reminiscences…

⦿ Albert Eric Maschwitz OBE was born on 10 June 1901 in Birmingham and died on 27 October 1969 in Berkshire

The post The amazing Eric Maschwitz !!! appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘Associated-Rediffusion . . . Can I help you? . . . One moment please’.

A nimble hand plugs the cord firmly into one of the 500 holes, or jacks as they are called, each representing an extension and the connection is established.

Did you know that our Private Branch Exchange handles calls at the rate of 150 an hour on average?

Supervisor Dorothy Brown and a staff of 10 telephonists work in shifts from 8.30 a.m. to the end of transmission at the eight positions into which the switchboard is divided. From 8 p.m. onwards only one operator is on duty unless an unusual influx of calls is expected.

At present we are using about 65 lines but the number will be increased to more than 100 shortly which will mean less waiting for free lines and fewer engaged signals for the outside caller.

Up to 40 telegrams a day are also handled in P.B.X.

They vary greatly in destination, language, length (up to 600 words) and cost (some telegrams cost as much as £50 [£950 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed]) and as each word has to be spelled out by analogy this section of P.B.X. absorbs much time.

All routine office work connected with the running of the exchange, such as the issue of tickets for trunk calls, book keeping and checking figures with accounts department, is also done by the telephonists themselves.

The board indicators also have to be kept up to date continuously. They show where members of the staff can be contacted if out of their offices, where rehearsals are taking place and which teams are connected with them.

Many of the P.B.X. staff have been with the company since its embryonic beginnings. They will never forget those chaotic days when we first moved to Television House while the workmen still had very much the upper hand. The rusty old Air Ministry switchboard, relegated to a state of comfortable disintegration, had to be coaxed back into unaccustomed activity. This was no mean feat as some of the cords were completely useless and the rest were stiff and unmanageable.

On top of this, manual working was the rule. To the uninitiated this means that every local call had to be connected instead of members of the staff dialling their own numbers. The noise of the workmen frequently drowned the voices at the other end of the line and, as the switchboard had to be shared with ATV, a mild state of confusion was unavoidable.

To add to the telephonists’ trials and tribulations in those days, there was no internal telephone directory so it was left to their individual ingenuity and Supt. Lockhart qualities to find out where to contact the people concerned and to track them down in offices or studios, at rehearsals and committee meetings.

Those were the primitive days of hurricane lamps which had to be pumped up periodically and of walks down to Kingsway station in the interest of sanitation – the days which for some inexplicable reason, despite discomforts, none of us would have missed.

Among those who recall them in P.B.X. are:

Mrs Dorothy Brown, the supervisor, who has a son of 20 and likes to get away to her country refuge in Suffolk whenever she gets a chance. Apart from outdoor life she is very fond of opera and the ballet.

Mrs Phyllis Laycock, head telephonist, who has a boy of 15 and girl of 13 and likes to play bridge.

Mrs Ziska Branford, whose hobbies arc dancing and the theatre; Miss Barbara Knight, who loves driving and painting; Mrs Doreen Osborn, married to Ikon Osborn, one of our film camera men which accounts for her hobby: photography; Mrs Eve Tickner, who is fond of riding and Mrs Margaret Baston, mother of a 15-year-old daughter.

A very popular member of the P.B.X. staff is Pat Pullen, who lost her husband some years ago and joined the company in 1957 to help bring up her three children now aged 9, 11 and 13, and who still manages to do her own dressmaking and interior decorating.

Mrs Grace Roberts is the only grandmother in the room and a very modern one at that since she is fond of fencing and motoring.

To round off the galaxy of Associated-Rediffusion telephonists there is Winnie Perkins, mother of two teenage children, Anita Milligan who loves to watch wrestling, Pat Brazier, an ex-Queen Mary telephonist and Margaret Head who has the most appropriate hobby of all: watching TV.

Altogether they are a happy team. None of the staff has ever left for any lesser reason than to emigrate or to have babies.

The operator’s job is a thankless one for her unobtrusive efficiency is usually taken for granted while the slightest delay or – heaven forbid – a wrong connection brings her immediately into the foreground with frayed tempers and impatient criticism.

Because she does not directly contribute to any of the company’s activities the telephonist is also often placed on a somewhat lower level of importance, unfairly so, of course, since none of us could do without her and she can rightly claim to have – literally and metaphorically speaking – a hand in everything.

In addition to ordinary business calls, our P.B.X. acts as an overflow for the Duty Officer and handles many viewers’ calls, usually a comment of some sort on one of the programmes or performers, and ranging from the highest possible praise to the lowest possible abuse. Typical complaints we get from people who are apparently oblivious of the most obvious alternative at their disposal:

‘This programme was utter tripe, I demand to speak to the General Manager’. ‘My children have ruined my furniture and carpet with buckets of water and flour after seeing your slapstick comedy show!’ ‘I distinctly saw a shadow on the newscaster’s upper lip, surely he is not thinking of growing a moustache?’

Discretion, diplomacy and a good sense of humour arc high up on the list of essential requirements for all our telephonists when it comes to sorting out the constructive criticism type of complaint from the trivial, ignorant or abusive. Serious, controversial programmes generally provoke a flood of calls from viewers with strong views on the subject.

Some callers are unmistakably the worse for drink. There is a woman who rings up regularly after ‘Cool for Cats’ asking to speak to Kent Walton. There is even the occasional crank to contend with and sometimes a flood of obscene language, but our operators take it all in their stride.

Children ring up frequently to discuss some programme detail or to ask to speak to their favourite heroes such as William Tell or Robin Hood. It is not uncommon for them to sing advertising jingles to the telephone operator.

Once an obviously very young viewer asked if she could speak to Pussy Cat Willum. The operator could not get a reply from the department concerned so, rather than disappoint the child, she put on a most convincing imitation of Pussy Cat Willum much to the delight of the little girl and – I should imagine – to the astonishment of anyone unsuspectingly entering P.B.X. at the time.

What about us, I asked. How do we rate as individual subscribers in P.B.X.? Well, the telephonists’ long service record indicates that we must at least be tolerable and they had a lot of encouraging things to say about us generally but, just in case you want to brush up your ‘phone-side’ manner’, here is the expert’s idea of the perfect subscriber.

He, or she, is . . .

Considerate: He always tells P.B.X. when he moves his office, changes his extension, engages new staff.

Patient: He takes delays in his stride, taps only twice when he wants a call transferred and if he does not get an answer from the switchboard right away he does not immediately conclude that the telephonists have all conspired against him or are taking a crafty nap.

Tolerant: If he gets cut off accidentally he does not blow his top. (Incidentally, women are more temperamental than men when this happens.)

Polite: He is respectful and treats the operator as a helpmate without claiming to have a monopoly on her services. He is appreciative and does not always disguise it.

Well, what do you think your chances are to win the Associated-Rediffusion Oscar for the most considerate subscriber?

The post Nimble hands and a sense of humour appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

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Between June 19-23 [1967] five programmes were made at Expo ’67 in Canada. The people responsible were Grahame Turner (producer). Jim Pople (director), Ken Stapleton (manager), Frank Keating (editor, OB’s), Maggi Ricketts and Ruth Tester (PA’s) and the commentator was Barry Westwood. Here FRANK KEATING writes about his personal impressions of the trip.

‘Your first trip to Canada?’

‘My first trip to Canada.’

The 40-year-old had joined me, I suppose, because she was the only woman and I was the most likely of our little First Class group of four. The other two were businessmen who read nothing but the ‘Times’ Business Section in their waistcoats and do-it-twice-a-week bigtimery; I read Terry Coleman and Stan Reynolds and SOMERSET FOILED ON WET WICKET (Spinners Turn Slowly But Surely) and looked a First Class tourist – the only way to look if you’re a born Economy Class.

The crux of the thing was that she had joined me: I thus felt superior and didn’t grin and Smalltalk as I would have had I joined her. So I stared out of the window and felt superior and aloof. And, of course, she kept trying.

‘You’re going to the Expo?’ she drawled.

‘I’m going to Expo.’

‘I sure hope you like it. They say it’s wonderful, wonderful.’

‘Yes, They do, don’t they.’

‘I hope you’ll like we Canadians’ – she had underlined the ‘we’ so I knew I was in for the full colonial-family-tree bit. And I was:

‘Y’know, I’m a real Canadian, my family name is van Rensburg (or something) and we came over with the League of Empire Loyalists (or something) in seventeen (something) and landed at Lake Eyrie (or somewhere) and marched up to Quebec and left settlements on the way at (Godknowswhere) and the only people in the land were the Red Indians who we taught and civilised and…’ and on and on it droned, like the dear old VC10 itself, unfaltering and unspluttering and most boring, and I half-listened and thought of Frankie’s prettiness and neuroses and Turner’s cheerful narcissism and Minchin’s dapper smartness and Pople’s colourful wallcharts and Maggi’s efficiency and Gloucestershire’s need for two class batsmen and the Commander’s wit and our windowless office and Suzanne’s 21st and how we’re going to get five hours Expo programmes out of five days shooting with a hired crew and we must be mad. And then she said ‘Where are you staying?’ and I told her and she said it was the best – and then she gave up and said she was going to sleep now and ‘Enjoy your stay in Canada. It was nice talking to you’ and she turned her back on me in her super pink suit and pale blue chiffon neckscarf and I felt discarded especially as she went to sleep so soon and she wasn’t really at all bad and that bit of skin on the nape of her neck between the bottom of her expensive Boston-type hairdo and the top of the pale-blue chiffon was dark and slightly greasy which told of some encounter between a Dutch Empire Loyalist and a little Red Indian one night between seventeen something and a generation or two ago before the van Rensburgs came good through real estate or contract-hire (or something). Why hadn’t I shown more interest in her and in fact she was really damned attractive and should I ask her to share my taxi to the hotel when we get in and should I ask her straight up to my room for a drink? And then I forgot her except for the inelegant, annoying breathing by my side and got out Barry Westwood’s Expo report and had another drink and thought that the best thing to do, especially as we couldn’t move the scanners on the site, must be to highlight just five national pavilions, but which five, and had another drink and I must ring Pip Wedge when I get in…

Pip Wedge was the first man I saw next morning. In the Expo Press Lounge – all black leather and red carpets, appropriately the last word in Press Loungery – Rediffusion’s one time Manager of Music, Light Entertainment and Quiz Shows was holding a breakfast conference to put Geoffrey Hughes to shame. Except nobody ever smiled. The same type girls were there with their long hair and clipboards, the same programme editors with their whiz-kid glasses and the same type frontmen with sloppy shoes and crumpled trousers but immaculate head-and-shoulders. Nobody smiled, nobody threw croissants and the weekly slog (‘O.K. chaps, this week, the Monaco Pavilion’) was getting them down. Pip, as executive producer of CBC’s weekly Expo programme was so evidently the Boss. Canada was doing Pip Wedge the power of good: vice versa too I shouldn’t be surprised. Soon he’s off to an even classier job in Toronto; his lovely Liz, once the ‘Take Your Pick’ hostess, thrives too, as, in other necks of these very large woods, does Harry Sloan, Jack Nixon-Browne, June Byrne and Allan Erlich.

And so to Expo proper.

One of the features of the Fair as far as broadcasters are concerned is the International Broadcasting Centre. Built and manned by the CBC, it is available to broadcasters from all over the world who wish to send people to report.

There are two main TV studios, one of 7,500 square feet and one of 2,500 square feet, both equipped for colour or black-and-white; there are two fully-equipped, three-camera colour mobile units, two black-and-white units and a one-camera colour VTR cruiser. There are also six radio studios. Cost? To bona fide broadcasters, not a cent. Below-line, that is. You bring in and pay for your own talent, sets, graphics: if you want a couple of chairs, a table, and a potted plant, these they can provide. Plus a full crew – including a director and script assistant if you don’t want to send your own. Facilities are on a first come first served basis, provided that, in the opinion of the International Broadcasting Centre people, what you want to do will in some way tell the world about Expo ’67.

All the Fun of the Fair doesn’t get within an Atlantic width of Montreal; Expo ’67 is a serious business. Very serious. Seventy nations are represented by various architectural extravagances -from America’s geosidic sky-bubble gimmick to Haiti’s snack bar, Russia’s glassy railway-terminus to Germany’s superb curvaceous tent.

Oil refinery after oil refinery, hydroelectric plant after hydro-electric plant … Progress … thrusting technological advance after thrusting technological advance – then throw in a couple of Old Masters or a few twee ‘This is how it all began’ back projections, and there, folks, is our great country; we’ve got more industry, more consumer goods, better welfare facilities than anyone, although everyone else is doing pretty good too and we’re pleased about that, and here we are at this lovely international jamboree to celebrate the North American Way of Life. And the funny thing is the Russians are celebrating just that better than anyone.

Yes. Everyone’s a Good Guy at Expo – except nobody laughs at anything but a business-lunch laugh.

But there are one or two Bad Guys, and they gloriously save the day.

The Cuban pavilion is wonderful. It is a confusingly laid out, naively designed structure showing two hand-held verité films at either end of a room (!) and then a slogan walkaround (guided by the two most gorgeous girls I’ve ever seen) of captions saying, as good as, ‘YANKS GO HOME – And by the way, once you’re there, GET STUFFED’. It’s a gorgeous honest sort of Latin ‘Yaroo, you rotters, we licked you hollow’. Great stuff.

The Red Indian pavilion, too, was super. Give the suited-settlers their due, they allowed the stand to remain – but it must still be hurting them. What the Red Indians say inside their corny, wigwam structure is ‘YOU TOOK OUR LAND FROM US’. ‘LET US HAVE OUR OWN SCHOOLS AND LANGUAGE.’ ‘WE CELEBRATED NATURE BY NOT WASTING ANY OF IT – BUT LOOK AT YOU…’ It was a peaceful but strongly-felt theme, laid out by a gentle, intelligent man who felt he was on the right side but that the battle was already lost. Meanwhile, back at the petrochemicala-go-go, there is Britain’s tattered 3D Union Jack on top of Sir Basil Spence’s ugly white concrete slabs: nightly it seems to go down in the St. Lawrence’s real red colonial sunset in as bizarre a piece of unintended symbolism as ever happened.

Inside, the British pavilion has been the most popular – and, fair’s fair (as you might say) they have tried to spotlight the idea that people, not hydro-electricity makes up a nation. It starts well with an exciting Sean Kenny effort at back-projecting our history through to the Middle Ages, then flops into the ‘Our Great Heritage’ but which is no more than large hanging captions of Drake and Newton and Shakespeare and Fred Hoyle (!) and John Osborne (!) Then comes the showpiece – a large central room which attempts to show us as we really are, but doesn’t (unless you’re possibly a commuter from Surrey who only takes the ‘Evening News’ and ‘Sunday Express’ and who did his bit in the ARP). It’s the sort of thing a COI director joined the COI for; it’s a sort of ’British Is Best – But Just Look at the Competition, old boy.’ It endeavours to show our fancies and our fads, how we’re Great because of the mixture of Gilbert and Sullivan, Eton and Wood Green Primary, Elgar and the Kinks, tea and whisky, Rachman and Peabody. Dimbleby saying ‘And now Her Majesty moves up the great steps…’ and Arlott saying ‘Thompson to Broadbent and Worcester now need 62 more runs with the new ball due after tea…’

It all depressed me, until Grahame Turner came out a couple of days later and he loved it all (and even made the Canadians smile) and I thought O.K.. it wasn’t too bad really and looked forward to some really hard work and Grahame gave me a precious palmful of ‘Brute’ [sic] (the best after-shave in the world’) and I met the 40-year-old again.

So Grahame had his after-shave and I got the girl in the end.

In Canada, Rediffusion Incorporated and its subsidiaries operate a community antenna TV service in several townships in Quebec and Ontario, and background music services throughout the Province of Quebec.

The post Expo Canada appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘The yellow submarine is like an information-cum-lost-persons-cum-marriage-cum-personnel office.’ So says Mrs Peggy Davidson, manager of production in Ray Dicks’ section about her yellow-painted office on a corner of the fourth floor – like a submarine, it has no view.

Peggy Davidson’s job is to assign teams of directors, PAs and stage managers to programmes and allocate the rehearsal rooms. It sounds simple but working with creative people sometimes presents problems and in particular the problem of personalities.

‘Some people don’t like working with others, some people work better on a certain kind of programme and some haven’t the ability to do what they want,’ says Peggy Davidson. ‘All this has to be taken into account when considering a team for a programme. When I started this job, I was very worried about matching people up, and found that all my best ideas seemed to come in the middle of the night. The answer was to keep a pencil and notepad by my bed, and when I woke up shouting “Of course – put her with him” I would jot it down immediately. I’ve still got a notebook by my bed, but it’s only used in moments of great stress.’

The manager of production’s job has changed a lot over the past four years. In 1965, Peggy Davidson had 40 staff directors and brought in perhaps a dozen freelancers for specific assignments over a year. Now there are 22 staff directors and the rest, over half, are contracted. This involves much work as there are agents to be contacted, contracts to be negotiated and fees to be arranged and the whole to be passed by the controller of production, Ray Dicks. The position of PAs has also changed during this time. All PAs are on the staff and must be kept working all the time. ‘The days of a durable partnership between a director and a PA are going to become rare,’ says Peggy Davidson.

To keep them busy PAs must now be moved from one director to another. This means matching them with a book showing what a director is doing at any time and when he will be free or available for a programme. There are also minor problems like making sure that the contract directors have offices, that PAs have stop watches and that programmes have rehearsal rooms. The number of rehearsal rooms at Television House are dwindling as they are converted into offices. Part of Peggy Davidson’s job is to find new rooms outside, which means more negotiations. This can sometimes produce unexpected complications like: ‘You can have the room all week except Thursday afternoon when we have our jumble sale’.

Theoretically, once the members of the unit are selected Peggy Davidson’s responsibility towards that programme ceases. In fact it doesn’t, because her office (known to the inmates as the Yellow Submarine and to outsiders as Ray’s Aviary) is a clearing house of information concerning the whereabouts of people, the availability of freelancers and general problems.

‘The job has developed a great deal over the past four years,’ continues Peggy Davidson. ‘I think one of the biggest changes has been the advent of producers. When I started, there were really only two – one for “No Hiding Place” and one for “This Week”. Now there seems to be one for almost every programme. It makes the job more complicated, because there is one extra channel to go through. Setting up a show used to involve the head of a section and his manager, but now there is a third person to cater for – the producer. All three have their own ideas, their own preferences and their own dislikes. Matched up with the creative ability of directors, plus the opinions of the PAs and SMs, one has an awful lot of combinations to play with.’

The job of being a director, a PA or an SM are among the most sought-after in television. Peggy Davidson sees on average three would-be SMs and a PA each week. ‘They go onto a waiting list or my files,’ she says. ‘I also see directors and arrange for Ray Dicks to interview them too. SMs are usually trained when they come, as are directors, but PAs are more often trained with Rediffusion. ‘We have a board of PAs to help select the girls – but vacancies are few and far between. They are in all three jobs.’ Peggy Davidson is an ex-PA herself. She joined Rediffusion in 1955 and after two years went to Canada. She returned in 1959, worked on ‘Hippodrome’ and the following year went into advertising. At Stella Ashley’s request she returned, for the second time, in 1962 and worked on ‘The Somerset Maugham Hour’ series. Then she took over from James Butler who had been manager of production for three months on a temporary basis. ‘It’s the longest I have ever been in one job,’ she says. ‘I love dealing with people and this job involves a great deal of it.

‘Our humorous and tragic moments come and go,’ concludes Peggy Davidson. ‘Usually they are of the moment, and are neither funny nor important by the following week. The one that does stand out in my memory though was a director announcing he would interview all the SMs before deciding which one he wanted to work with. He so floored me that I let him see four and choose his own. It’s never been done before or since.’

The post The yellow submarine’s periscope appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘When I first saw this letter with “from the Prime Minister” on the front and “10 Downing Street” on the back, my first reaction was that it would be excellent for props. So I put it in my pocket and never opened it for a couple of hours. Then I read that I had been awarded a BEM and thought someone had been to a lot of trouble to play a practical joke.’

But it was no joke. Len Fraser, production buyer, was awarded the BEM in the New Year Honours List.

Len Fraser has always been connected with show business in some way – his father sold instruments and records in Canada, where Len was born. The family moved to Glasgow when he was seven and his first steps on the stage came some five years later with Sunday school shows. ‘Something went wrong backstage. I was sent out front to pad, so I did a shuffle-dance for some seven minutes.’ Len Fraser grins: ‘It was a hit – I did it for the rest of the week.’

After leaving school, he worked at a petrol station then became a chorus boy at the Pavilion, Glasgow. ‘We were on twice nightly, singing and dancing with rehearsals every morning. I received the princely sum of 25s. a week [£1.25 in decimal – Ed] – well up on what I’d been getting before,’ he says. In the meantime, Len Fraser had joined a concert party which put on shows for charity. They would rehearse and perform in the afternoon and occasionally there would be another performance at a dinner-dance after the show.

Then came stooging in a pantomime and working up a solo act involving patter and dancing. He toured Scotland and England and made trips to Ireland. The war took him into the RAF as a LAC [leading aircraftman] and within three weeks of joining, he had organised entertainment for the camp, including the recruitment of a five-piece line-up which played dance music and jazz – one of Len’s great loves.

In 1942 he was medically discharged from the RAF and started work in a large factory. ‘After six weeks I went to the management and nagged. Finally they told me to go ahead and organise some entertainment. Yes, I could have the canteen, which was enormous, about four times the size of the Wembley one. Massive auditions. I got a five-piece group, comedians, singers, instrumentalists and dancers, and every Friday lunch-time we put on a show.’

There was also a ‘Comforts’ Fund’ with which Len Fraser was concerned. Shows were mounted for a minimum charge or a collection and the money spent on comforts for the troops.

‘After the war, I caught the first train south I could and battled to get back into the business. I was an extra in about eight films. Then came Ralph Reader’s Gang Show for 14 months. I did everything with them. At one point I had 21 costume changes in a night. I used to start off with four layers of clothing on and just strip down.’ He was band manager with Leslie Jiver Hutchinson and His All-Coloured Orchestra, which took him to Belgium and France. ‘In England I was appalled at the amount of colour-bar I met up with,’ says Len Fraser. ‘One night I had managed to get rooms for eight of the 14 members and had to appeal on stage for beds for the other six.’

Next there was a year as entertainment manager in Exmouth. This involved, among other things, running the restaurant and organising baby and beauty shows.

‘After this I was with Linnett and Dunfee, the impressarios, for five years,’ says Len Fraser. ‘It gave me my worst moment ever. Opening night with the first eight rows of the stalls packed with all the “big-wigs” of show business. On the set as the first scene faded to black, I had to whip out and put in seven period props for seven modern ones. The idea was that the light faded up again and lo! a period set – enter the star. But the stage manager switched on the lights instead of fading them up. I dropped like the proverbial duck behind a settee amidst a roar of laughter from the audience. I was clearly visible underneath and couldn’t escape. But worse was to come. The star, who couldn’t see properly without his glasses, walked straight into me and fell into the footlights. The audience was nearly hysterical.’

After Linnett and Dunfee, Len Fraser spent a short time with H. M. Tennent and then five years with Jack Hylton’s ‘Crazy Show’ as stage manager and on props. On August 20, 1955, he finished ‘Kismet’ at the old Stoll Theatre (now demolished) in Kings way. He walked across the road and on August 22 started with Associated-Rediffusion as a setting assistant. ‘I became property master the following January,’ says Len, ‘and moved into production buying in November, 1961.

‘Yes, I still do a lot of charity work, mostly for old age pensioners, prisons and the Star and Garter Homes for the disabled.

‘I always have a ball on these occasions. Sometimes, though rarely luckily, things do go wrong, like the show we did in front of some WVS girls. Two top-line Americans were coming down and bringing a girl dancer with them. All went well, I introduced her dance of the seven veils, and to my horror she started removing them one by one until she ended up in her G-string – to the joy of the ex-servicemen and the horror of the mayor, his wife and the WVS. Still, I have been back.’

He’s been back to quite a few other places, too, time and time again.

Julia Helps

Bryn Siddall, senior production buyer, adds:

‘Possibly I have worked closer to him than anyone else in the company and, during the last 12 years, he has been more than just a colleague. Anyone who was in contact with him while he was property master will remember his almost legendary devotion, not only to his own department, but to the studio in general. Len seemed to have a finger in every pie and his apparently limitless theatrical knowledge was available to anyone who needed it. Animals, musical instruments, trick effects all benefited from his interest.

‘When, four years ago, he joined the buying department, he was able to give full rein to his imagination. There is yet to be a “prop” which he has failed to track down, and he pursues the elusive with the tenacity of a Highland terrier. It seems that at last Len has found his ideal niche and with his almost insatiable curiosity, old world courtesy and dry sense of humour, he has become a favourite of our suppliers. His friends, especially those with children, find his generosity unlimited.

‘Len never mentions his work for charity, but by picking up the odd scrap here and there one can see that he gets a terrific kick out of bringing enjoyment to others. Over the years he has provided entertainment at hospitals and prisons, and all with his boundless energy. Normally one would have to read one’s own obituary to see what people really think. To judge from the amount of mail he has received after the award, Len has proved the exception.

‘He received the news of the award in his usual calm, unflappable manner, and his only comment was that so many people deserved the honour more. Possibly us, his friends and colleagues, can assure him that we disagree.’

The post Len Fraser BEM appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

In the two days we were in New York everyone who heard we were going to Philadelphia commiserated – it was sad we were to stay in such a boring, provincial town they said. Philadelphia, however, has so far not quite lived up to its reputation of total respectability and there has even been for the last 10 days an ‘Angry Arts Week Against the War in Vietnam’.

Westinghouse Broadcasting, which just to confuse the issue calls itself Group W as well, has five UHF television stations – which is in fact the maximum the Federal Communications Commission allows one company. KYW in Philadelphia where I am staying is the largest, and the others are in San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. It is the job of each of these stations to provide the local part of the total transmission – to cater to the needs, whims and peculiarities of its own city and surrounding area. And as you will have gathered each city has its own flavour as well as its own local problems.

The three major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, each provide their own affiliates with quite a large part of the station output and it is then up to the individual station to use the rest of the time to its best advantage. KYW, for instance is affiliated to NBC, and it receives about three-fifths of its programmes from NBC. The other two-fifths it can either make itself, take from other Group W stations, or buy from outside producers. All this must make KYW sound like a smaller ITV regional company, and to a certain extent this is true. But, there are two major differences: firstly KYW has six other stations to rival it (five commercial stations and an educational station) and secondly KYW transmits about 19 hours a day, of which about five hours are made by the station. To compare this with Rediffusion is fairly startling. Rediffusion produces on average between 12-13 hours of programmes a week, whereas KYW produces over 35. If you wonder how a station, with 100 people in the programme department, can produce three times as much material as Rediffusion, the answer is partly that they do not have to make plays, series or major documentaries, which are provided for them by NBC. Instead they concentrate on providing local news (three half-hour programmes a day); an hour-and-a-half light entertainment show every weekday afternoon (which is so good it is sold to 135 stations throughout the States); interviews and documentaries on local issues; and about four hours of children’s programmes at the weekend. It gives a better idea of the station if I mention a few stories and programmes I have watched being made or actually tried to help in the making.

When I arrived in Philadelphia there apparently had been rioting between negro and white children for several days in South Philadelphia High School. What too many people forgot was that the so-called rioters were only a minute fraction of the school and that on several days parents kept their children at home not as a protest but to avoid the alleged race riots. As one teacher sadly remarked – why didn’t anyone say the worst fights in the school were between the Irish and the Italians? I felt it greatly to the credit of the reporter concerned and to KYW that they filmed a mixed choir at the school and ended up a news programme with it, saying that some other things were happening at South Philadelphia High School. Not a news story as such perhaps, but the kind of comment a TV station should make over here. And the importance of intelligent, balanced news programmes is emphasised by a recent survey which found that 64 per cent of Americans used TV as their major source of news. Westinghouse Broadcasting, and in this instance KYW, is particularly anxious to cover local affairs in depth. A good example of this is the KYW plan to show 12 programmes within 11 days (varying in length from two hours to five minutes) all on the subject of why a surprisingly large proportion of the school children in Philadelphia never complete their education; why some children are marked for failure on the day they enter kindergarten. This scheme is certainly a brave and worthy one, particularly considering the limited resources available to the one man responsible for organising the whole thing.

Compared to the networks and to many of their competitors, Westinghouse’s overall policy is surprisingly high-minded. While they are undoubtedly at least as profit (and loss) conscious as most firms, they also seem to have other standards which guide management. One example of this is that Donald McGannon, the president, has recently told the networks that Westinghouse will not show feature films if there is the increase in commercials which NBC threatened. McGannon also sent a list of recommended changes on the length and placing of commercials. By British standards, none of the recommendations were excessive but I have so far seen no reply from NBC or the other two networks: maybe they are using their adding machines.

The great disappointment of American television is the rarity of any surprises, any deviation from the routine. Daytime programmes on Monday, will run at the same time on Tuesday and throughout the week, and in fact throughout the greater part of the year. In the evening too there is a lack of variety. Having just looked at the plans of the networks for the coming autumn for example, out of the 85 programmes provided by NBC, CBS and ABC between 7.30-11 p.m., only about three or four are what the ITA would term ‘serious’. About a dozen of the 85 will be light entertainment; there will be six big movies in a week. All the rest will be series, with occasional big documentaries or plays thrown in. This leaves a lot of series, and is one reason Hollywood and the independent film makers are feeling happy. Another reason Hollywood is happy, is the popularity of its old movies. If you think British television has reached saturation point, beware. Last week on Philadelphia’s TV screens, the viewer was offered 117 movies …

If I seem critical of the main networks it is not because I think they are unable to make good programmes. The half-hour world news programmes done by NBC and by CBS early every evening are first rate: there are occasionally magnificent documentaries; some of the talk shows have produced sparkling discussions; and as we know well in England, the Westerns and the adventure/crime series are usually extremely competent. My main lament is, that with all this talent available there is not more variety in the programme schedules. And it seems that the Federal Communications Commission, who should so obviously be the body to inject some commonsense into the scheduling are unable to do so. In fact, the newest member of the FCC stated at a meeting which I attended that the Commission did not have any regulatory powers over the big networks -it only gives licences out to individual stations. This ludicrous position has been reached because over a long period of years the FCC has seldom dared actually to tell any station or network to do anything (or not do anything) in case it is accused of being undemocratic, of interfering with that greatest of all American sacred cows, free enterprise. The fact that ex-Governor Wallace [George Corley Wallace Jr 1919–1998, racist governor of Alabama 1963-1967, 1971-1979 and 1983-1987 – Ed], an avowed segregationalist, can draw such surprisingly large support is because he says the central government is interfering in everyone’s affairs. And it is this type of feeling that has made the FCC so wary in the past.

The situation in American TV now is that President Johnson has persuaded the majority of thinking, speaking men that money should be allocated for a ‘Public Television’ service, and hearings have been going on (shown on the educational channel here in Philadelphia) to see exactly how this should be accomplished. Almost unbelievably everyone agrees, in public at least, to the proposition that there shall be a channel devoted to the things which the commercial channels have never provided. The exact details of financing, of who exactly provides programmes, and how the stations will be linked together are still being debated but will presumably be settled. What seems to be one of the major issues has not been discussed. If the networks are as bad as almost everyone testified at the Senate hearing, then, as well as creating an extra channel, which it is quite possible that only a minority will watch, is it not just as important to encourage the three existing networks to diversify their talents over the schedules? It does seem, that in the public stampede to welcome a new channel, the fact that the net works and individual stations, such as KYW, have produced some remarkable programmes is getting overlooked. With what, by British standards, would be very minor regulatory powers, the FCC could so easily make some of these programmes more widely available, and make the diet for the ordinary viewer so much more interesting.

The post Hullo Philadelphia U.S.A. appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Designing scenery for television is a varied and sometimes exacting business. At least it is if the designer is to play a fundamental part in the production as a pictorial story teller. It is different from designing for the stage or the films because of the wide variety of programmes and the intricate, mass-production aspect of television.

Generally the work falls into three categories.

1. The realistic or documentary programme. This needs a keen and accurate sense of observation by the designer.
2. The partly imaginative, partly realistic programme. This demands scenery and pictures of a convincing character or of a certain style. The scenic designer must have a wide knowledge of historic ornaments and decorations besides contemporary decorations and construction.
3. The decorative, free-style scenic design and ornamental backgrounds for light entertainment.

The scenic designer’s task is not merely to erect something which is just impressive or pretty, sordid or delapidated. Nor is it just to construct simply a background at which the cameras can be directed.

His aim should be to plan a layout with a director and to know how the cameras are to be used on a setting. The designer must try to visualize the programme as it will appear on the screen.

He must have the enthusiastic co-operation of the lighting engineer and should know exactly where the areas of light and shade will fall. It is not enough to know whether the production is to be played in night or daytime.

So the designer is really one of a team. Together with other technicians, lighting engineers, cameramen, scenic builders and artists, graphic and costume designers, and the property buyers, he makes an important contribution to most television productions.

His aim, in short, is to present a series of planned, informative pictures making sure that they have an air of continuity to the viewers.

The post Designer: John Clements appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

On Wednesday, November 24, 1954 I walked into the offices (two rooms) of Associated-Rediffusion in Stratton House as the third member of the staff: the company secretary, Arthur Groocock, and his personal secretary, Fay Caddy, were already there. The company’s name was fixed – an accountant in Rediffusion was presented with a gold watch for having thought of it, especially the hyphen – and the Board of Directors had been chosen – the chairman from B.E.T., three directors from Rediffusion and four from Associated Newspapers. Nothing else was fixed.

I do not propose to trace the build-up of the company, nor to describe the intriguing excitement with which I entered, for me, the unknown worlds of entertainment and advertising. Suffice it to say that the company went on the air on Friday, September 22, 1955 with a crashing and most expensive programme, and will end its present Licence period on Wednesday, July 29, 1964 with, I hope, another outstanding programme: and that between these two dates, the company has been so successful financially as to become the envy of many people, and so successful programme-wise that it is the provider of the majority of live/taped hours to the network. Some call us doggedly decent; I say we are reliably good.

Most people think of a general manager as a man in command, even at times as a dictator, but in fact no one is a successful general manager unless he serves. In our case he has to serve the viewers, the staff and the shareholders. Also, of course, he has to manage.

If the viewers are not given the sort of programme they can admire and like, they will switch off or switch on to the BBC. First, therefore, the general manager must develop a programme policy which will serve the viewers. We have now evolved a programme policy over the years which, I think, meets the viewers’ needs. From 7.00 p.m. till about 10-10.45 p.m. we give programmes likely to appeal to all members of the family over the age of 17. Before 7.00 p.m. and after 10-10.45 p.m. we give programmes likely to appeal to substantial minorities. Sport in the afternoon; small children at 4.45 p.m.; older children at 5.00 p.m.; news at about 6.00 p.m.; the till 7.00 p.m. Similarly, in the late evening a more sophisticated audience is always served by at least one programme. Up till 7.00 p.m. programmes are suitable for children; between 7.00 p.m. and 9.00 p.m. they are not unsuitable for children; after 9.00 p.m. they are suitable for adults, but not always for children.

To arrive at this pattern of programming, and to make a success of individual programmes, a great deal of research is essential in order to find out the types and the sizes of minority audiences, and to find out if a particular minority audience likes the programme aimed at it. If, for instance, we transmit a programme on the lives of pop singers, and we know that a minority of three million homes in the country are interested in pop singers, then if 80 per cent of this minority of three million homes switch on and stay with the programme, we have got a successful programme; whereas, if only 40 per cent switch on or if the 80 per cent dwindles to 40 per cent, then we have a failure. The viewers must be served and, therefore, the programme must be altered or withdrawn.

We are sometimes accused of being too rigid in our programme schedules, especially by the television critics – poor chaps, they have to watch all the time – who long for a surprise. It is said that we are forced into a rigid pattern by the advertisers: this is not so. We do not lightly change a programme schedule because we feel that we should keep faith with our viewers. If the keen followers of “This Week’ switch on only to find we have substituted boxing, then they are maddened; if the followers of Hughie Green find a Cape Canaveral programme substituted, then they are saddened, whilst family men will know the result if ‘Small Time’ is pre-empted for tennis. My policy throughout has been to try and serve the viewers; the touchstone is whether or not the viewers will be satisfied by and grateful for the programmes. To make them grateful, however, it is necessary to advance a little beyond their present taste; always to improve the programme content.

Strange as it may seem to many of you, a general manager also has to serve the staff. Firstly, he must establish an organisation which is clear and workable, so that everybody knows who does what. Nothing is more frustrating than not knowing who deals with what and who can give a decision. Secondly, he has to create a staff relationship in which the staff feel that promotions or demotions are fairly done, that discipline is tempered with understanding. Nothing can engender bitterness more than a feeling that something has been decided unfairly or ruthlessly and, in this connection, the same ill feeling can be caused if the general manager allows one person to get away with something – bad time-keeping or excessive expenses – whilst his colleague has abided by the rules. Thirdly, the general manager must see that conditions under which the staff work, and the equipment that they operate are the best that can reasonably be provided. It may be the creative freedom given to the programme directors, or it may be the vision mixing panel in master control, but whatever it is, it should enable the creative staff to be creative and the servicing staff to be able to do their job efficiently.

The shareholders are certainly considered by the staff less than any other part of the company: I doubt if the majority of the staff ever give them a thought. Nevertheless, they are a most important part of the organisation. They provide the money and it was their faith which launched the company. The general manager must serve the shareholders. Therefore, he must set up and supervise an advertising sales department which will bring in the revenue; he must be attentive to the views of advertisers and their agents, since they are entitled to get good value for the money they spend with the company. The shareholders want revenue, not only to pay for the cost of our operations and to pay a dividend on their capital, but also to provide cash for improving the equipment and programmes. 625 lines standard and colour are on their way, and will need a lot of money to install. The shareholders through the board also look to the general manager to see that the money they provide is not wasted, either by bad organisation, excessive salaries or artists’ payments, or by the purchase of dud or unwanted equipment.

You will observe that there is a very fine dividing line between the object of satisfying the viewers with better programmes which might be achieved by extra expenditure, and the object of preventing the shareholders’ money being wasted. The general manager never has an easy life and very rarely does he have easy decisions to make. (‘Problems only reach the general manager when they are insoluble elsewhere’.) An example much talked about at the moment is the decision whether or not to edit tape. Editing tape might lead to improved programmes, though the improvement in my opinion will only be appreciated by a minority of professional viewers, and not by 90 per cent of our public. It would, however, be expensive and might lead, as in the U.S.A., to taped programmes being produced by film techniques which would be very expensive. This, in turn, might lead, as in the U.S.A., to 90 per cent of the programmes being made in film studios which, to my mind, would kill ITV as it now exists and substitute a home cinema. This general manager has not found it an easy decision, but he leaves the company firmly convinced that the editing of tape is not in the interests of the viewers, the staff or the shareholders.

As planned long ago, I am retiring from my job as general manager before the start of the new Licence period; firstly, because I think that after 45 years of full-time work I am entitled to take life a bit easier and, secondly, because I believe that television is a young man’s job: new ideas should be bubbling up and new techniques tried (always provided they are not to the detriment of the viewers). When you are over 60 there is a danger of thinking that old and tried ideas are necessarily the best. I shall, however, be on the board of some of our subsidiary companies, and will not, therefore, be completely out of touch.

I am delighted that John McMillan, who has so often stood in for me when I have been away, is now relieving me. The board of Associated-Rediffusion is remaining the same and they are, in my opinion, the best board in Independent Television. I am sure that Associated-Rediffusion’s second licence period will be one of continuing success. I hope to see most of the staff over the Christmas period in order to say a personal good-bye, but I would like now to thank you all for your loyal support through the years, and for never allowing your jobs to get you down. I hope, when the station clock is redesigned, it will contain the company’s motto ‘Never Baffled’.

The post The General Manager’s farewell appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Now on a six-month exchange visit to KYW-TV 3, a TV station of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company Inc. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is researcher JEREMY TAYLOR. In this article, he writes about television in America and his life there. As always in Fusion, the views expressed are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Rediffusion, London.

There is one major difference between television here and in Britain. In America the competition for advertising makes programme people become more aware of markets, ratings and sales.

Philadelphia is the fourth largest market in the USA, after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. We have three VHF stations affiliated to the three networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, an educational channel and three UHF stations.

Since the advertising rates for each station are based on the ratings it means that we get more programmes with mass appeal and comparatively little with a limited interest. There are no plays at all now on any of the networks, and increasingly each day’s viewing becomes more and more filled by feature films. Watching television here can be one film after another, and it is surprising how many ‘B’ feature films from the 1950’s are now getting their ‘Philadelphia TV Premier’. But it really is not so surprising when you remember, for example, that WFIL TV, the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, is on the air 21 hours a day.

KYW TV, the Westinghouse Station, and NBC affiliate, does three major news programmes a day – 12 noon, 6 p.m., and 11 p.m. The noon programme is local and aimed at the housewife, 6 p.m. is the major local news of the day, and 11 p.m. is local, national and international. At 6.30 p.m. there is Huntley- Brinkley, with NBC’s national and international news. So each night between 6-11.30 on any Philadelphia network channel there are at least one-and-a-half hours of news. The increase in the length of national and local news programmes to half an hour, and in some cases to an hour, has meant the virtual disappearance of the weekly background news and feature programme, since both interpretation and background reporting are now in the newscasts themselves. Additionally Westinghouse, and some other stations, have editorials twice a week after the local news. These are done by the general manager of the station on local issues. They also give time to opposing interests to the editorial. Despite the lack of regular weekly programmes the air is thick with network and local ‘specials’ on every sort of subject from comparing education in Britain and the USA, to politics in Pennsylvania.

The current fashion, this season, is what a National Educational Television programme on ‘Television in the USA’ called, ‘quiz shows for adults’ – the testing programme. This is a new concept in television which enables the viewer at home to take an active part in the programme. In the past three months we have been tested by the networks on our perception and observation, income tax returns, and politics.

You sit at home with the TV Guide, the equivalent of TV Times, and fill out your answers on a specially printed page. Before the programme national surveys are carried out and printed so as the test goes along you can tell if you are brighter than attorneys in Chicago, or stupider than New York cab drivers. At the end of the programme you count your score, compare it to the national survey figures and you can see instantly if you are an average American or not.

These programmes grow out of an American desire for, and awareness of, education. For example, the income tax test was held the night before the deadline for the returns this year. As part of the programme they showed a film of classes being held in High School on how to fill in returns. The questions put to the class were also the questions put to the viewer in one section of the test.

It was easier to answer the income tax questions because KYW Newsradio, for three weeks before income tax day, carried a series of public service announcements giving advice on how to fill up the return. But this is only a fractional part of what Newsradio does; it covers the news live for 24 hours a day non-stop for ever. Working there you feel guilty because you can never arrive to start the day, and when you leave there are always others carrying on working.

But at the present my favourite programme is ‘Batman’. This is the serialised adventures of disguised millionaire Bruce Wayne, and his ward, Robin, who dedicate their lives to fighting all criminals and wrong-doers. Their crusades against the evil ‘Joker’ and ‘Penguin’ and other terrible villains who threaten the safety of the good people of Gotham City make great adventures. The ‘Dynamic Duo’, Batman and Robin, are based on the comic strips of the early 1950’s and they have now become quite the rage here.

In the end America is the country where it matters to a psychiatrist what people write on a display typewriter outside Olivetti in Fifth Avenue. It is the country where computer engineers are now starting to move in and live with their machines complete with their pet poodles and alligators. It is the country where ‘What’s My Line?’ has been running for 17 years. And it is the country where, when the Huntley-Brinkley show went to colour, there was an increase in viewers with black and white sets.

The post RTV man’s I-view of KYW-TV3 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

If a doodle-bug had cut out two seconds earlier, perhaps Robert Taylor’s trousers would never have become covered in distemper when he was filming ‘A Yank at Oxford’.

The man who put the distemper on the trousers was in a train the doodle-bug would have hit. He is Bill Bolton, a scenic painter at Wembley, and those two events are just two episodes from a pretty varied life in show business.

Bill is a Londoner, born in Marylebone at the turn of the century. He did a four year apprenticeship before taking up the tools of a house decorator. ‘I was a member of a working man’s club at St James’,’ says Bill Bolton, ‘and we used to meet a lot of people there who made a bit more money by working at a theatre in the evening. I liked the idea of show business, so I did it too – and I have been connected with it ever since’.

‘Doing shows’ meant working behind the scenes as prop man, stage hand or flier man, depending on which was needed. The rates were 3s 9d a show, going up to 4s. ‘I worked in all the West End theatres except His Majesty’s, the Haymarket and the Opera House,’ recalls Bill with a grin. ‘I never could make them’.

One of the shows he remembers best is ‘Jill Darling’ with Francis Day and Arthur Riscoe starring and John Mills as the second lead dancer.

‘Francis Day liked jokes. Many’s the time we sat around telling her stories and sometimes she’d give us five bob for the best one of the evening. But things have changed a lot since then’. “Then’, he said waving an admonishing finger, ‘we weren’t so used to young ladies being scantily dressed. In “Jill Darling”, Miss Day had to make a couple of very swift changes, and used to brush past us on the way back to the stage very scantily clad – I was most embarrassed,’ then musingly, ‘wonder if I would be now?’

Early in the 30’s, Bill Bolton moved to films when he heard that they needed painters. ‘It was very different then from today. We’d do our day’s work, which was sometimes only a few hours, and leave. Next morning we’d queue for more work. There were days when I was so broke that I’d walk back from Elstree to Tottenham Court Road, where I lived. But I liked the atmosphere – it was varied. I preferred it to the theatre’.

Bill Bolton then worked on about 50 pictures, including several with Anna Neagle and Herbert Wilcox. ‘He was superstitious. He’d start his pictures on the Friday nearest the 13th of the month. He said it’d bring good luck! Bill smiled. ‘Before each film, he’d come round, find out who everyone was behind the scenes and shake them by the hand. And at the end of the film there was an extra little envelope waiting for us. He and Miss Neagle are two of the finest show business people’.

Errol Flynn was another of Bill’s favourites. He worked with Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle on ‘Waltz Time’, a lot of which was filmed in Barcelona. ‘Errol Flynn loved publicity of any kind, but I think half the stories printed about him weren’t true. He was a considerate man, full of jokes and fun – a great loss to the film industry’.

The unit spent the first 10 days of their 12 weeks in Barcelona without work permits, and on limited cash. ‘We had £5 a week – that’s all we were allowed to take out of England. We were very broke, and the director and stars were in the same boat.

“The Spanish people who were working with us had a different life – they had lunch of bread and fish and wine while sitting on the pavement. Meanwhile the unit went off and ate in good restaurants. I found it most embarrassing,’ frowned Bill. ‘So we requested the same facilities for them as we had – and got them too. It was tragic – some of them had never seen butter before, and wrapped it up carefully to take home to their children’.

During the war, Bill Bolton worked at Denham Studios. He was not called up because the work at the studios was considered to be of national importance. He was, however, accepted as a rear-gunner with the RAF until the studios got him exempted. Among the films he worked on was ‘In Which We Serve’. This meant building a full-scale model of the destroyer HMS Kelly. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came down to see the set, together with Lord Mountbatten. ‘It was a wonderful set and they were most impressed. The bows had to be built in another studio, she was so big,’ recalls Bill Bolton. “The difference between film and television sets is that the film ones were built to last. They might have had to stand for several months on end, whereas the television ones have shorter lives. Also the pace wasn’t so fast in films – we had more time to devote to each set’.

It was around this time that the incident of the doodle-bug took place. Every morning, the men used to go down by train to Denham for the day’s work. One day, near Sudbury, a flying bomb dropped right in front of the train. ‘We heard it come over and cut out, and we thought we’d had it,’ says Bill. ‘We jumped down on the floor and there was a proper commotion when it went off just in front of us. The line was completely blocked and houses all around were flattened.’

After the war, Bill Bolton continued working at Denham. Robert Taylor stands out among his memories of the late 40’s. ‘He was a great gambler who liked backing horses and playing dice,’ is how Bill describes him. While working on ‘A Yank at Oxford’, on Mondays, Bill used to be sent out with £60-£70 to back the ponies that used to race at Northolt Park. ‘And occasionally I used to collect winnings too!’ Taylor also liked to dice with the boys in slack moments. ‘I used to play occasion- ally sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. He used to take all our money off us from time to time then return it later.’

One of the scenes in ‘A Yank at Oxford’ required Robert Taylor to be ‘debagged’. ‘We had built a complete replica of an Oxford “quad” at Denham, recalls Bill Bolton. Then the complications set in. There was a mix-up with wardrobe and the second matching pair of trousers needed did not arrive. ‘As the stand-by painter, I was asked if I could quickly make another pair look like the original ones, so I set to work dirtying an old pair down with an air gun and distemper, then I put them under an arc lamp to dry quickly. I couldn’t guarantee exact similarity, but I’d done my best,’ says Bill. The 1,000 student extras set about the debagging and triumphantly the mocked-up trousers were thrown into the air. ‘But’ says Bill, ‘down came a shower of loose distemper – it went all over the place. It ruined Robert Taylor’s suit and the clothes of several of the students. I had visions of my cards being handed to me. But the director humorously accepted that accidents could happen and my job was safe’.

After Denham, Bill Bolton spent 18 months at Rank’s Charm School, where short films were made to give budding stars – including Diana Dors, Jimmy Edwards and Michael Pertwee – an insight into the world of cinema. When it closed in 1950, Bill went on to the Associated British Picture Corporation at Boreham Wood for five years.

“When commercial television started, I thought I’d like to try it, as I’d been in both the theatre and films. I found I did like it. It’s not the same as films, mark you. There aren’t the same personalities, though it is a similar set-up. Television’s a growing industry and when colour television does come, the sets are going to have to be produced very differently – those cameras will pick up the slightest defects and flaws’.

Bill Bolton is married and has a son called William. In what spare time he has, he is a sports fan – but I’m too old now to play’. Since 1911, he has been a firm Chelsea supporter.

‘I’ve enjoyed every minute of my work in show business. It’s a great industry,’ he sums up.

The post Scenes from a painter’s life appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

It is with a great sense of sadness that Fusion records the death of Capt. T. M. Brownrigg, general manager of this company from its start in November, 1954 until his retirement in December, 1964.

Only in the last issue did we print extracts from a letter he had written to The Times about the merger of Rediffusion Television and ABC Television. In this letter he defended the record of the company and its staff, a staff, he said, which was never baffled.

That his death should occur while the company he helped to create was, itself, facing a form of death sentence makes the event even more tragic. He would have been glad to be sure that the future of those who worked for him was secure.

That his death has to be recorded in Fusion, the magazine he launched for the staff, is also sad. He always took a keen interest in each issue but never interfered in its production. Occasionally there would be a suggestion but never an instruction. He defended the freedom which enabled it to be a magazine created by the staff for the staff.

He was proud of his motto for the staff — never baffled.

Yet near the end of his life be had to admit in his letter to The Times about the merger: ‘It is sad and I am baffled’.

Maybe the staff will continue to live up to their reputation of never being baffled. But about his death, less than four years after his retirement, they can only echo bis words and say: ‘It is sad’.

The editor

More than 300 colleagues from the Royal Navy, the world of television and Rediffusion Television attended the memorial service last month to Captain Brownrigg at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The lesson was read by Admiral Sir David Luce and the service was conducted by the Rev. Austen Williams. The address was by Robert Everett, a man who served under Capt. Brownrigg in the Royal Navy and at Rediffusion Television. His address, which was widely praised, is reproduced here.

In the lesson, from the Book of Wisdom, which Sir David Luce has read, there is that phrase:

‘as sparks among stubble…’

I do not think that, in so few words, there could be a better epitaph for our Tom Brownrigg.

I use the word our in this somewhat proprietary sense because I believe that that is how many of us here would feel about him.

As a ‘spark among stubble’ indeed because, having known him as it were in two lives, I certainly knew that spark – and I have been a small part of the stubble.

It seems to me that this church is absolutely the right place in which we should come together to remember Tom; the man and his achievements. And, therefore, to feel sad, but not to be dismayed.

For those of us from Rediffusion, St. Martin’s has been virtually our parish church to which, upon so many occasions, we have brought our cameras.

St. Martin’s is also known as the parish church of the Admiralty and, thus, the altar is flanked by the White Ensign and the Admiralty’s flag.

It is very much, then, the proper place in which to remember the man who was our so redoubtable general manager having already had a distinguished career as a sailor.

I am not going to recite a catalogue of almost unattainable virtues. Tom Brownrigg was not a great national figure – nor was he a saint. He had no desire to imitate one.

But I look back at the man I knew and served; whom I admired and greatly liked. Therefore, I grieve but I am also grateful.

I shall not embark upon a series of naval anecdotes. I would, however, recall my very first encounter with Tom when, having just been appointed to a brand new aircraft carrier under his command, my admiral commented:

‘Congratulations, with Tom Brownrigg as your captain you will have an exciting time … I would give you about a fortnight before you are sacked…’

Curiously enough, it wasn’t so, but most certainly we had an exciting time; because he was an exciting man to know and to serve.

What, then, were the qualities and characteristics which made it so? As a seaman he was a master craftsman. He could handle an awkward heap of aircraft carrier as if it were a sports car; and he did.

He was a brilliant navigator; and that is why he was Master Navigator of the Mediterranean fleet during the most crucial and precarious time in our naval history. He commanded a war-time cruiser; he was twice decorated for distinguished services. He was Director of Plans at the Admiralty and, subsequently. Chief of Staff in the Mediterranean.

Then he ‘retired’ … but, when thinking in terms of Tom Brownrigg, the word retired is almost a joke. Having ‘retired’, he became the driving force in the creation of the post-war Bracknell new town.

He became the founder general manager of Associated-Rediffusion and carried us through eight hectic years of what I would claim to be extraordinary endeavour and achievement.

He ‘retired’ again.

In the intervals of being chairman of the Berkshire council of St. John’s, on the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council – and so many other activities – I suppose that his time was his own.

When I think of Tom Brownrigg, I think of the essential qualities of leadership; of command. Of command, one demands justice. He gave it. One needs decisions; he made them. Above all, I believe that in command there must be a basic, rock-like integrity. He had it.

Tom was not an easy man. Very often, he could be downright ‘difficult’. He was not everybody’s ‘cup of tea’. Most certainly, he could be almighty ‘difficult’ with those who were found wanting. To those who might try to conceal their ignorance in waffle he applied a mind and technique like a surgeon’s scalpel. He was certainly allergic to yes-men.

He could be very tough, haughty and seemingly implacable. Yet, he would be surprisingly compassionate, even sentimental. He was absolutely loyal to trusted subordinates – whether they were right or wrong.

To some people he could be frankly alarming; yet he was a gay character. He dearly loved a party and liked nothing better than to play the host, at the centre of the stage and surrounded by people. He liked people.

He had a strong, endearing and infectious sense of humour; and the blessed capacity to laugh at himself.

In this day and age, when we seem to be set about with people of empty aims and phoney values, I think that we should mark well men like Tom; the things he thought mattered and his spark of unquenchable enthusiasm for the job to be done, to be done well, to be thoroughly finished, whatever the difficulties.

And so, here we are today; all of us for the same reason. Each of us with personal memories, and personal reactions to the man. We have come together to pay our respects; to give a farewell salute – sadly but without dismay – to the man whom we had to admire, having travelled with him just so far.

To achievement; to the memory of Tom Brownrigg; most truly and surely a very remarkable man.

A third man’s view

There are two views about him and mine is neither of them. I remember him as a professional affliction and then with personal affection. Professionally, he was very tough on me: on reflection, I care nothing about that. He fired at me, as he did at all of us. There are so many ‘Tom’ stories. Mine are no better than so many. The story about the cats is true.

There were two pug-dogs wandering about in features, which should not have been there. I got word that the GM was on his rounds. There was no place to hide the dogs and the owner resolutely refused to shove them into a filing cabinet.

‘What are these cats doing in the building?’

‘They are not cats, sir, they are pug-dogs.’

‘They must be cats. Dogs are not allowed in the building.’

Shortly afterwards I allowed the young son of a well-known personality to sit-in on a ‘This Week’. On his rounds the Captain nearly had a fit. Lacerated, in shreds I took the boy to the guest room, where orange squash can just be found. There, Captain Brownrigg made him his guest of honour. The mistake was mine. The boy was in the technical area and that was not allowed. However, he was a guest.

Later, also on ‘This Week’, a well-known journalist fell into the guest room and fell asleep during an anniversary programme. ‘Who is that?’

‘That’s XY, sir. He’s had pneumonia.’

I reckoned that was my good deed for the night by XY.

Later the familiar tinkling of glass galvanised the recumbent XY towards the Scotch. Tottering towards the Captain he intoned … ‘Are you here for the free drinks too?’

When the Captain left he turned to me and said ‘You must look after XY. Pneumonia is a terrible disease.’

For some people on ‘This Week’ he had a personal dislike amounting to incivility. There was the case of a scriptwriter who shall he called Can Can. It would be difficult to forget such a name.

There was a fearful row. The subject hardly matters.

Next morning the Captain was in the lift on his way to the invincible Fourth Floor. Can Can stood silently beside him. When both reached the fourth the Captain said, as the doors opened, ‘Good-morning, Wharburton.’

He admired efficiency. On one of his trips to America his agent so confused American time scales that he was caused to arrive for urgent appointments hours too early, which was boring, or hours too late, which was intolerable. On his return to civilisation (UK) he posed before a do-it-yourself photographic machine in an attitude of extreme ferocity, which was not difficult. The result he had sent to the agent with a note to the effect that this was what he thought about the arrangements made for him.

He admired and respected straight talk, though curves and mazes in his own conversation went unnoticed, by him. Lord Birkett once told us, at a programme planning meeting, the story of two workmen ‘who became inebriated, I am sorry to say, near Liverpool. Later, both men found themselves, I know not how, crawling late at night along some railway lines. One said – “I find these stairs (meaning the railway sleepers) very steep.” The other said – “I don’t mind the stairs being so steep but I cannot abide the bannisters being so low.”’

When Lord Birkett had gone the Captain sent for me and said: ‘What do you think the fellow was getting at?’

The notion that Birkett was merely telling us a story for its own sake, in working hours, eluded him.

One day he invited us to the theatre; his secretary, Liz, could see anything she liked. So we went to ‘Make Me An Offer’.

During an interval I asked him how he was enjoying the show. ‘Don’t tell Liz’, he said, ‘but we saw it last night.’

‘Well, why didn’t you say so? We could have seen something else.’ ‘No. This is what she wanted to see.’

His attention to detail sometimes came unstuck. On the occasion of the visit of a Prime Minister to the studios he issued one of his second-by-second calculated instructions. Only one function had been forgotten. The Prime Minister wanted to wash his hands. The Captain leapt forward to lead him out – to the ‘Ladies’.

He did not appear to be very musical. Visiting the rehearsal of a full orchestra in a serenade for strings he complained that the brass wasn’t working.

Normally meticulous when it came to rank and station, the uncouth world of show-biz sometimes defeated him. In the very early days he was discussing, at one of his superbly stage-managed cocktail parties, his appointment of a senior drama executive. He had to choose between two people, he told his guest; one was ‘Harold Hitler’ and the other was ‘Sir Francis Drake’. He had chosen Harold Hitler because Sir Francis Drake was quite unsuitable.

His guest said nothing: he was Sir Francis Drake.

Peter Hunt

Filed. This anecdote of Capt. T. M. Brownrigg is told by Neil Bramson:

‘I was once unwise enough to ask for an extra filing cabinet. Nothing happened for a day or two, then, without warning, the Captain entered himself, followed by business manager, office manager and purchasing officer. Unerringly he went to my existing filing cabinet and selected, equally unerringly, the third drawer down. Opening it, without even looking, he triumphantly produced a pair of ladies’ high-heeled shoes.

‘Deadpan he turned to the business manager: “Requisition these, Elms”, he said and walked out with a gleam in his eye.’

His farewell

Four years ago in December, 1963 an article appeared in Fusion under the heading ‘The general manager’s farewell’. In it Capt. Brownrigg revealed some of his memories and philosophies about television. This article consists of extracts from that piece.

‘On Wednesday, November 24, 1954 I walked into the offices (two rooms) of Associated-Rediffusion in Stratton House as the third member of the staff: the company secretary, Arthur Groocock, and his personal secretary, Fay Caddy, were already there. The company’s name was fixed – an accountant in Rediffusion was presented with a gold watch for having thought of it, especially the hyphen – and the Board of Directors had been chosen: the chairman from B.E.T., three directors from Rediffusion and four from Associated Newspapers (hence Associated-Rediffusion – ed.). Nothing else was fixed.

‘I do not propose to trace the build-up of the company, nor to describe the intriguing excitement with which I entered, for me, the unknown worlds of entertainment and advertising. Suffice it to say that the company went on the air on Friday, September 22, 1955 with a crashing and most expensive programme, and will end its present Licence period on Wednesday, July 29, 1964 with, I hope, another outstanding programme: and that between these two dates, the company has been so successful financially as to become the envy of many people, and so successful programme-wise that it is the provider of the majority of live/taped hours to the network. Some call us doggedly decent; I say we are reliably good.

‘Most people think of a general manager as a man in command, even at times as a dictator, but in fact no one is a successful general manager unless he serves. In our case he has to serve the viewers, the staff and the shareholders. Also, of course, he has to manage.’

About serving the staff he said: ‘Firstly, he must establish an organisation which is clear and workable, so that everybody knows who does what. Nothing is more frustrating than not knowing who deals with what and who can give a decision. Secondly, he has to create a staff relationship in which the staff feel that promotions or demotions are fairly done, that discipline is tempered with understanding. Nothing can engender bitterness more than a feeling that something has been decided unfairly or ruthlessly and, in this connection, the same ill feeling can be caused if the general manager allows one person to get away with something – bad time-keeping or excessive expenses – whilst his colleague has abided by the rules. Thirdly, the general manager must see that conditions under which the staff work, and the equipment that they operate are the best that can reasonably be provided. It may be the creative freedom given to the programme directors, or it may be the vision mixing panel in master control, but whatever it is, it should enable the creative staff to be creative and the servicing staff to be able to do their job efficiently.’

Later on he made this point: ‘You will observe that there is a very fine dividing line between the object of satisfying the viewers with better programmes which might be achieved by extra expenditure, and the object of preventing the shareholders’ money being wasted. The general manager never has an easy life and very rarely does he have easy decisions to make. (“Problems only reach the general manager when they are insoluble elsewhere”.)’

About his retirement Capt. Brownrigg wrote: ‘As planned long ago, I am retiring from my job as general manager before the start of the new Licence period; firstly, because I think that after 45 years of full-time work I am entitled to take life a bit easier and, secondly, because I believe that television is a young man’s job: new ideas should be bubbling up and new techniques tried (always provided they are not to the detriment of the viewers). When you are over 60 there is a danger of thinking that old and tried ideas are necessarily the best.’

His article ended: ‘I would like now to thank you all for your loyal support through the years, and for never allowing your jobs to get you down. I hope, when the station clock is redesigned, it will contain the company’s motto “Never Baffled”.’

With the death of Rediffusion Television that clock will now never be redesigned.

The post A very remarkable man appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Two years ago I wrote an article for Fusion under the heading ‘How many programmes?’ I ended that article by saying that it is most important that on a short-term basis everybody in the United Kingdom, wherever he may live, should be able to see the two main television programmes as soon as possible, and that, at all costs, we should avoid creating a badly planned chaos similar to that which exists in medium wave sound broadcasting.

I still believe we should aim at these two objectives. Further, I believe that if we are to succeed in avoiding technical chaos in television broadcasting, we cannot have additional programmes for another 10 years.

By international agreement the following wavebands are at present available for television broadcasting in Europe, including the United Kingdom:

(Band II – 87.5-100 mc/s – is used for VHF sound broadcasting and provides about 100 channels if used with frequency modulation).

All five channels in Band I are used to distribute one BBC television programme which is available to about 98 per cent of the population. Four of the eight available Band III channels are used to distribute the ITA programme which is available to about 95 per cent of the population. The remaining four Band III channels allocated to television are used at the moment for various communication services but are being vacated and should soon become available for television.

There has been some talk about the possible extension of Band III to give facilities for additional television channels at the expense of other communication services. Such an extension of Band III would need International agreement, the likelihood of which appears remote at present.

Band IV and Band V channels – the UHF or ultra high frequency bands – are not yet used operationally in the United Kingdom but more than 100 transmitters in Europe and the U.S.A. use channels in these bands for television broadcasting. Receivers for UHF require somewhat more expensive valves and components than VHF – Bands I and III – receivers. The additional cost is likely to be about £5-£8 [£120-£190 now, allowing for inflation] for mass-produced UHF sets. An extra UHF aerial is also required costing between £2-£6 [£48-£143]. Most manufacturers in the United Kingdom would need a year or more to get into production of UHF receivers.

The desirable improvements which prompt us to reexamine the whole of the technique of television in the United Kingdom may be summarised under the following four headings:

Better definition of picture
Greater flexibility in world television exchanges
Colour television
More channels for more programmes

The first two are inter-related. At present the United Kingdom operates on a 405-line system. If we adopted the 625-line system, programme exchanges would be possible with nearly the whole world, the main exceptions being North America and Japan (525 lines) and part of France (819 lines). Theoretically the 625-line system should give a picture with almost twice the definition of that received today in the United Kingdom. However, it must be remembered that in practice the 625-line system does not necessarily give the same improvement in quality in the home as one can get in the laboratory. This is because the higher definition system requires more careful maintenance of the transmitting and receiving equipment.

It should also be remembered when considering whether or not to adopt the 625-line system, that for the same cost in band width and at a lower capital expenditure, one could go to a 405-line colour system. Further, the adoption of 405-line colour would give a higher performance (inasmuch as colour adds to performance) while continuing to give compatible monochrome pictures at the present standard.

The addition of colour is an obvious development and would be welcome if the initial cost and the expense of maintenance can be brought down to reasonable levels.

The last point – more channels for more programmes – is an obvious requirement for a wider range and greater choice of programmes.

As things are at present it might be possible to squeeze one additional programme into Band III but this third programme would only be available to about 80 per cent of the population, mainly in thickly built-up areas, and would also limit the existing ITA programme to about 98 percent of the population, leaving about a million people with BBC programmes only.

Any additional programmes beyond the third would have to be transmitted in Band IV and V and unless these programmes are very attractive, the 80 per cent of the population who already have Band I and III receivers will not buy new sets to obtain Band IV and V facilities.

If it is thought that the required improvements in television services in the United Kingdom can be covered under the three headings of better definition, colour and more programmes, it seems quite clear that all these three are almost impossible to meet by utilising only Band I and III for television, a total of 13 channels for which sets in this country are equipped.

There are then three alternatives for future technical development:

1. That by international agreement Band III and possibly Band I can be extended to give more channels. This, however, would be a very long international operation, the success of which is doubtful. Only a relatively small addition to existing sets would be needed for reception of the extra programmes, provided the 405-line system were maintained.
2. If the extra channels under point 1 cannot be obtained, it would be necessary to use channels in Band IV and probably Band V if the three headings of better definition, colour and more programmes are to be achieved. This would necessitate new transmitters, receivers and aerials. But whether we adopt points 1 or 2 the technical effort involved in the change-over and an overlapping duplication – to enable programmes to be received on present receivers and which, therefore, would have to last for probably 10 years until they are replaced – would be so great that additional programmes would be out of the question until after the 10 years needed for this project to be completed.
3. The alternative is to develop a system where more programmes can be squeezed into the present channel space and to introduce additional programmes, colour and higher definition at the same time as such a new system is brought into use.

I think that the desirable line of development is that outlined in point 3. The way in which this development could take place is for the four vacant television channels in Band III to be used to duplicate the BBC and ITA programmes through a new system to be developed which would include colour and higher definition. The next stage would be for preparations to be made for the introduction of additional programmes to be opened in 10 years time.

If the new system to be developed allows for twice as many channels as at present, then eventually we could either have a total of six programmes with the present coverage, or four or five programmes with really 100 per cent coverage of the country.

One cannot help but observe that as our various sound and television broadcast systems have been rushed into service without sufficient planning, we have technical systems which do not result in the best utilisation of the available resources.

It is thought that rather than rush in once again with higher definition and colour developments, it would be better to start out quite deliberately for the type of development that is mentioned above.

Only after such a system is successfully developed will it be possible to provide additional programmes, higher definition and colour within the limits set by the present international channel allocations.

The Times reported on March 17 Mr Hugh Carleton Greene, Director-General of the BBC, as saying that instead of the unallocated television channels in Band III being used for a third service, they would be better employed filing the gaps in both the BBC’s and ITV’s national coverage.

He is stated to have said that this would provide television to the one per cent of the population of the United Kingdom still outside the range of any transmitter. Thus there would be no need for Parliament to make a choice between the BBC and ITV and national coverage would be completed.

The consistency of his views and those expressed in the above article is interesting. — Editor.

The post Fourth floor says… Why we cannot have more TV programmes at present appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

In December, 1954, Central Rediffusion Services Limited, the service and supply company of the Rediffusion Group, was appointed technical consultant to Associated-Rediffusion Limited and has been responsible for the planning and equipping of all Associated-Rediffusion studios and technical areas. With the completion of Studio 5 these services will cease.

No one would pretend that Wembley Studios are ideal, because the site is not large enough to contain all the service areas which modern television studios require. But one of the greatest problems facing Associated-Rediffusion when it was appointed the first programme contractor to the ITA late in 1954, was the speed necessary to equip and build studios and to train and rehearse personnel and artists.

In buying Wembley Film Studios, Central Rediffusion was at least able to make a quick start. Studio 5 is, therefore, an operational unit only – much of its scenery and services must be brought from elsewhere.

The building of Studio 5 started in December, 1958, and though the building contractors had the advantage of extremely good weather during the spring and summer of 1959, the national shortage of bricks caused a serious delay and necessitated continuous alteration to the planned progress. The final stages of testing of the studio and control apparatus have started and it is hoped that Studio 5 will be handed to Associated-Rediffusion during May so that training and rehearsals can commence.

Studio 5 is certainly the largest television studio in Europe and probably the largest ever built as a television studio. It has a floor area of 14,000 square ft [1,300m²] and a clear height to the inside of the roof structure of 40 ft [12m] with a clear height in the centre section, which houses the dividing partition, of 30 ft [9m]. Walkways are provided at the 12 ft [3.6m], 30 ft and 40 ft levels.

The whole of the building foundations and floors are divided into two sections and when the centre partition doors are lowered the studio can be used simultaneously as two studios of 6,700 square feet [622m²] each.

One of the most important features of the studio is the dual partition which is of lattice girder construction with external wind bracing on the cavity side. The acoustic slabs consist of two mild steel sheets 4 inches [10cm] apart with 3-inch [7.6cm] rock wool filling, one sheet is suspended free and connected to the main frame at the edges only. The two partitions, when lowered, are designed to provide an acoustic separation of 60 Db over the range of 50 cycles to 4.5 kilocycles.

The lifting and lowering of the doors, which weigh 25 tons each, is done by four specially designed units consisting of an electric motor coupled through a reduction gear to a wire rope drum from which the door is suspended. The doors, which are provided with several safety stops, will take about half-an-hour to raise or lower.

One of the great difficulties in television studios is providing sufficient ventilation to give cool air on the studio floor. There are separate ventilation plants for each half-studio to give seven air changes an hour, the ventilation ducts in the roof being large enough for a man to walk through. Adjustable nozzles allow the flow of fresh air to be directed. Another ventilation plant is provided for the control rooms and technical areas, and each equipment bay has its own supply, extract and filter.

Everyone knows of the problem of studio floors. In Studio 5 we have an added problem due to its giant size. The floor must be level to plus or minus ⅛ inch [3mm] At no point must it have a slope of more than 1 in 1,000. The length of the floor will change by ¾ inch [19mm] with normal temperature variation and yet no crack must appear between the two halves when the floor moves. Two special comb joints are, therefore, being fitted to the centre partition which will cause only very minor camera wobble as cameras track across these joints.

Each studio will have 340 lighting circuits fed from the lighting patch panels. These panels are next to the lighting control consoles which are arranged to be operated from a sitting position in the form of an organ console. Each studio will have 70 lighting hoist units driven by electric motors. The raising and lowering of each unit is controlled from a panel next to the lighting control rooms on the 12-foot gantry or from the studio floor by means of a wandering lead. Fifteen units can be selected and operated simultaneously and four such groups are available for selection and operation.

The control rooms, which are big enough to carry any extra apparatus required for colour transmission, are built along the northern side of the studio with the vision, sound and lighting control rooms at 12-foot level, and the camera control rooms, make-up rooms and service rooms at ground floor level.

The entire studio is being equipped with eight new E.M.I. 4½-inch [11.4cm] image Orthicon cameras and the vision system can be operated on 405, 525 and 625 line frequency. Each vision control room will have 14 21-inch [53cm] picture monitors to allow the monitoring of 10 sources in addition to transmission, off air and two previews. It will thus be possible to record programmes on film or tape which can be used overseas without further alteration. The sound equipment has been specially designed and has 26 low level channels and nine high level, divided into four groups. All controls and faders are mounted on a sloping panel of a sound console to facilitate operation.

One of the most important requirements is good communications in order to co-ordinate the team of people whose combined efforts make a television programme. The director’s talk-back system carries the director’s instructions to headphones worn by operators in the studios, and to loudspeakers in the control rooms. In rehearsal the director can speak to the studio through a public address system.

Programme sound is also distributed so that all may follow the programme and respond to sound cues when required. A separate sound balancer’s talk-back system connects the sound balancer with microphone boom operators. The director can talk to the floor manager by a radio talk-back system, thus avoiding trailing leads. The intercommunication facilities in Studio 5 are provided by a ‘Transicon’ equipment consisting of small transistorised amplifiers plugged in to rack frames, an arrangement which will ensure the rapid detection and righting of faults and contribute to the efficient working of the new studio.

During 1955 and in a space of less than 10 months all the original studios and equipment were planned and provided. It was not until 24 hours before the official opening that the first complete rehearsal was possible, and even then no commercial film inserts were available.

Studio 5 is the outcome of 12 months careful thought and 18 months building and equipping. The artists and personnel who use it will have at their hands the latest and the best. It therefore only remains for me to wish them all success.

The post Fourth floor (Carlton House) says… ‘Success to Studio 5’ appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

On being asked for a contribution to Fusion my first reaction was pride. What a splended [sic] choice had been made in asking me. Obviously I was destined to go far in Fleet Street. Peter Black would have a rival at last. Pendennis would have to look to his laurels. Lesser fry might as well fold their blotters and steal silently away. This mood did not last long.

Pride was succeeded by doubt. Perhaps I was miscast. Should I not be transferred to the Script Services Section? My doubts were resolved by the dragon ‘establishment’. It reared its ugly head and whispered in my car (just like the centre section of Floor 4). ‘By all means. Good idea, Ben. IF we have a vacancy.’ I knew we hadn’t. Another brilliant idea ruined by common sense. I felt almost as frustrated as a person whose application to be put on the authorised car users list had been refused.

It was only at this stage that the full import of the request struck me. All previous reactions were swept aside by the onset of horror. I was being asked to write ‘Fourth Floor Says’.

I cannot refute that I work on the Fourth Floor. I have a room on it – albeit in the fringe area. I have a carpet on the floor. It’s a little too big for the floor but I don’t complain of that. It makes it easier to climb up the wall in comfort. I have curtains in it. When new, they graced a Principal Officer’s room. Coming events, I say to myself in moments of depression, cast their shadows etc.

But I am not ‘of’ the Fourth Floor. Not for me the Olympian calm with which the Fourth Floor treat all questions, big or small, submitted to them. Not for me the measured and unhurried tread with which they pace from office to office along our stately corridors to arrange a ‘business lunch’.

I scurry about like a hunted rabbit trying not to be noticed too much and grateful even for the abuse that is often flung at me about the more flagrant of my errors. Definitely, I am on the Fourth Floor but not of it. Why, then, am I there at all? It’s really very simple. My staff, who are deeply shocked to learn that some people prefer Receptionists (Fusion 7), are too glamorous not to occupy a place in the company’s ‘Shop Window’. Where they are, I must be too. To such a strange chance of fortune is my Fourth Floor position due.

First I must say how grateful I am. Grateful to those who have given me an opportunity to broaden, in a nice way, my vocabulary. Let me give you a couple of examples. When I was young ‘gamma’ was the third letter of the Greek alphabet, which I mastered after great trouble and much pain. It may be still for all I know. Ancient Greek was not much talked in the Navy! Now I find that ‘gamma’ is a ratio (on a logarithmic scale of course) which technicians discuss extensively in Crew Rooms and inevitably in my room, also, on selection board days.

Grateful though I am for this particular piece of increased knowledge, ‘gamma’ has been a trifle overworked. I wish my selection board colleagues would ask what ‘lambda’ is for a change. I suppose they won’t. They’d say it wouldn’t be fair. The candidates might get muddled with Lambretta. (P.S. I have now come across a ‘lambert’. This only makes things more muddled.)

I find that no film cameraman or film camera (I can never remember which) is complete without a chap called a Grips. Previously I had only associated grips with bulldogs. The ‘double entendre’ of the last remark will only be fully appreciated by those with a naval background. Sorry! It will be appreciated by all. I forgot we commissioned H.M.S. Rediffusion on 22 September 1955. So its never too late to learn and I am grateful for having the opportunity to acquire these useful/useless pieces of information.

I must confess, however, to holding one very heretical view. I shall probably be banished to ‘The Third Floor Back’ for mentioning it. The fact that the company is an Independent Television Contractor is only of academic interest to me. I and my section would do much the same work if the company were manufacturers of tooth-paste or razor blades.

You must all have holidays, paid or unpaid. Some fall sick and want sickness benefits. You insist on buying Premium Bonds. You like to be reassured that you haven’t got tuberculosis and won’t get poliomyelitis. You give gallons of blood away free every year. Some of you enjoy (though you shouldn’t, they’re provided for your guests) smoking cigarettes provided by the company.

Others of you enjoy watching programmes at home on TV sets provided by the company. A few of you drive about in your own cars on company business provided you comply with a few simple rules devised by supermen like Vosper and myself to confound you.

The law of the land requires the company to employ a certain percentage of disabled persons. The General Manager requires me not to employ more than a certain number of people, able or disabled. Prospective employers of ex-members of the staff require references.

Building societies want to know, with your permission, a lot about some of you. Banks and estate agents want to know even more. Management want to know most. Foreign students come and go. Younger members of the staff go to Outward Bound Schools at the company’s expense. Twenty people a day want to join the company. ‘I know I’ve got something that television wants.’ I can rarely find it, but they must have the courtesy of a reply.

Some of you need recompense for disastrous accidents to your best clothes. These accidents, of course, are never your own fault. Annual salary reviews and bi-annual wages reviews cause much burning of midnight oil. Changes in union rates of pay increase my consumption of Disprin alarmingly. Theatre Ticket Lists require constant revision.

Somebody is always doing someone else’s job. Temporary Responsibility Allowance must be authorised. Every month many people complete two years’ continuous service and expect an increment to their pay without asking for it. Selection boards require to be presided over. Contracts need scrutiny. I could go on like this for hours.

These sort of things don’t just run themselves. They require a great deal of detailed work and the keeping of very accurate personal records. This is the main work of my small staff to whom I am delighted to have the opportunity of expressing, on paper, my thanks for all they do.

Glamorous as some of them are, they are very much backroom boys and girls. Publicity ignores them. They are not news. They don’t often get thanks for what they do. More often the reverse. ‘I can’t have had all that leave this year. You’ve got the records wrong. Can I see Captain Fisher?’

Of course you can. If the door’s open and nobody else has got in before you, you’re always welcome. The answer you get may not always be the answer you want but I hope it will be a fair one. If you have any problems, unconnected with Television, come and talk to me anytime.

The post Fourth floor says… ‘Come and Talk’ appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The company, in fact Independent Television as a whole, has recently been going through a bad patch with the critics in the newspapers. I think the main reason for these attacks on us is that we are successful: the BBC arc now the underdogs and therefore get the full support of the fair-minded British press, whereas when we first started in 1955 we were the ‘David’ challenging the BBC ‘Goliath’.

Recently there has been further criticism following upon the misreporting of our chairman’s remarks after the Rediffusion annual general meeting: I have already circulated to members of the staff a memorandum dated 5 August, which correctly reports the chairman’s remarks, and I wish to pick out from that memorandum the following sentence: ‘The chairman did not say that Associated-Rediffusion would reduce standards of programming rather than reduce profits.’

In fact, the management, urged by the board, is doing all it can to improve the quality of our programmes. It is only by producing high-quality programmes accepted as such by our public, that we shall achieve the ratings and the reputation necessary to persuade the advertisers to pay the comparatively high rates we are charging for their commercials.

As all of us in television know, one cannot buy quality; doubling the budget for any particular show would not make that show twice as good. Quality is a combination of many factors skilfully welded together. I would like, therefore, to run through these various factors and tell the staff what the management is doing to increase standards.

Scripts

Nearly every programme is dependent on a good idea and a good script. Many people have ideas and many of the ideas are good, but not many people can develop them into a good script. The company has been making investigations into the best method of attracting the best scripts for our use. We have placed under contract four or five good scriptwriters and pay them an annual retainer plus a fee for each accepted play. We have engaged from the film world one of the most successful scriptwriters who is under contract to produce us eight plays over two years. We have obtained from America one of the most experienced American drama writers who is engaged in teaching our British writers how to prepare the scripts which are the envy of us all. We have also reorganized our script services and increased the staff. I think there is no doubt that this policy is beginning to bear fruit.

Artists

When we commenced it was natural to assume that the best artists would be those who were most successful in the theatre, music-hall or on the screen. This is, to a certain extent, still true, but undoubtedly television is bringing out the best in many artists who are not West End or film stars.

You will have noticed that we are now regularly casting first-class actors and actresses whose plays get critical acclaim – and who are accepted with loyalty by our public. Our plays are on average seven to eight points higher in the ratings than those of other companies.

We are supporting Drama Schools and giving scholarships to students in the hopes of bringing forward new television artists. We are supporting the Wimbledon Repertory Theatre with a view to trying out new actors and actresses as well as some of our scripts.

Production Facilities

One of the surest ways of producing better quality programmes is to have the best possible production facilities. In this we have always led the other companies. We are now building Studio 5 in which we hope is incorporated every proved modern improvement. We are installing six videotape recorders and a high definition telerecording system. We are spending a great deal of money to improve the general engineering facilities, and in particular those of master control.

We are also building additional rehearsal rooms in Television House, so that rehearsals can take place in greater comfort and with greater efficiency than in the hired halls. I have no doubt that when Studio 5 is completed and the engineering facilities finalized, we shall have all the production facilities necessary for the best quality productions.

Staff

The real key, however, to a high-quality production is the staff. A bad director can ruin the best scripted play, cast with leading West End actors: a vision mixer or a maintenance engineer can by a very small error wreck the programme. The production quality of the programme is recognized, albeit subconsciously, by the public, from the standard of the camera work, the lighting, the scenery and the sound. It may take an expert to know what is wrong, but the public know there is something wrong and say ‘not a very good production’.

It has always been my aim, and that of the other principal executives, to choose the best people for every job: this is not a very easy task, since people who are sometimes the best technically are by personality often less suitable. A man who cannot work as a member of a team does not help good-quality productions even though he is technically highly competent. You will know that it has always been this company’s policy that, having selected the staff, they should stay with the Company unless they are proved incompetent, or make themselves a damned nuisance.

At times it is suggested that a more ruthless policy might lead to better quality: by this it is meant that one should have the majority of the staff on short-term contracts, and continually replace them by new blood who have proved successful elsewhere.

We, in this company, do not believe in this policy because it is firstly unfair to the staff, and secondly leads to undesirable internal competition to catch the superior’s eyes or to claim credit. However, we do, in certain sections of the company, employ men on contract, in particular every now and again we have outside directors for our plays, and some sections have researchers and scriptwriters on contract.

I am convinced that we have a better staff than any other Television Company or Corporation in the British Isles, and that with our new facilities the staff can and will produce programmes of quality which are unchallengeable.

Many of the readers of Fusion will now say ‘but what about the money’. There is a somewhat widespread feeling that an increase of budget will necessarily increase the quality of the programme. This is sometimes true, in particular in some of the light entertainment programmes and in the programmes which require film inserts, but it is by no means necessarily true. Too many people get in each other’s way and reduce the clarity of a production, too many gimmicks or too much scenery confuse the small screen and the viewers who look at it: some of our most successful productions have been produced on a very small budget.

However, the staff can rest assured that the management is not planning to cut budgets at the expense of quality. Actually, the programme budgets for the forthcoming autumn schedules are very considerably higher than the last autumn schedules, and this is not by any means entirely the result of the increased salaries or wages now paid to the staff. More is being paid for the cast, more for the scripts and more, in an indirect way, for the provision of facilities.

I confidently believe that when I write a sequel to this article in August next year, I shall be able to draw the staff’s attention to the great improvement in the quality of our programmes, and to the fact that this has now been recognized by the critics.

The post Fourth floor says… We want better quality programmes appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘I wonder if you would be good enough to write the next article in the “Fourth floor says” series for Fusion. I should require approximately 1,250 words and the deadline is…”

So began an internal memo from the editor, recently discovered (the memo, not the editor) among one of the enormous piles of paper which find their way on to my desk with such monotonous regularity. (Who was the sage who referred to the invention of the printing press – which for this purpose may be taken to include typewriters – as one of the greatest-ever booms to mankind?) While, in fairness to the editor, I am bound to say that there was a gap of some eighteen days between the date of receipt of his memo and the specified deadline, I cursed him roundly nevertheless for having imposed this chore upon me at the season of the year when all my leisure time – pause for a moment here for a burst of ironical laughter – is reserved for much-needed activity in the jungle which surrounds my country seat, situated in what – except for the jungle referred to – is generally known as the Garden of England.

(Any time readers of Fusion are in the neighbourhood, I shall be delighted to show them my wonderful display of Taraxacum Officinale, Ranunculus Bulbosus, Beilis Perennis, Rumex Obtusifolius, and the many other exotic botanical specimens which flourish in such prodigal profusion as evidence of my horticultural propensities.)

While I have written many reams of agendas, minutes, memoranda, reports and suchlike for Board Meetings, Annual General Meetings, Extraordinary General Meetings, Council Meetings, Committee Meetings and what-have-you, I have no pretensions to literary ability in the general sense. But I must confess that my fancy was somewhat tickled by the suggestion, implicit in the editor’s invitation, that there might be someone who would, of his or her own volition, be prepared to read something which I had written.

So I decided to take the plunge, accept the editor’s invitation in principle and proceed to the obvious next step, namely, the settlement of a fee for the job. I was distressed when the editor explained that he had paid all the previous contributors to the series a fee of nil, but after much skilful bargaining on my part (I ought to be in contracts section) he eventually agreed to double the fee in my case.

Honour being thus satisfied, I considered what should be my next move. One thousand, two hundred and fifty words being quite a lot for a literary tyro, I suggested that since two pages had to be filled, it would be a good idea to have a full page portrait of the contributor on one side so that only six hundred and twenty-five words approximately need be provided by me for the other. But on this he resolutely refused to co-operate. Apparently he took the view that the advantage to his readers of having to suffer only one page of my literary outpourings – substantial though that would be – would not provide anything like adequate compensation for inflicting a full-page picture of me upon them. In an aside on the subject of the proposed picture, I distinctly heard him mutter that even a Jack Emerald couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s car.

Quite clearly I was rapidly getting nowhere on this, so I concluded that there was nothing else for it – one thousand, two hundred and fifty words or thereabouts it obviously had to be. But after all, I thought, one thousand, two hundred and fifty words or thereabouts should present no problem to one who in his Third Form days regularly got one hundred lines each Thursday morning for declining to decline ‘mensa’ in the manner specified in his Latin Primer.

So I braced myself for the task. The editor shall have his one thousand, two hundred and fifty words or thereabouts -I’m more than half-way there already. The probable results are (a) that he’ll get the sack and (b) that I shall never again be asked to write for Fusion. As to (a), I offer him whichever he prefers of my sympathy or my congratulations; as to (b), I am sure this will be better for all concerned.

Following these few brief words of introduction, it is necessary to decide what this article shall be about. (I apologize for straying from the path of grammatical rectitude by ending a sentence with a preposition – but my brain is tired; writing the introduction must have exhausted me somewhat.) And since, according to my reckoning, I have only some five hundred words to go, I think a decision on this matter had better be made without more ado.

Surely I cannot do better than take a leaf out of the chief accountant’s book – what a wonderful write-up he gave the accountant’s department in Fusion 5 – and say a few words about the secretary’s department, the principal function of which is to deal with all those matters arising in the course of carrying on the business of an independent television programme company which all other departments, by reason of their ignorance, incompetence or inertia, are unable or unwilling to handle. But, on reflection, the comparatively few words that remain to me (can’t be many more than three hundred now) will certainly not enable me to do justice to the invaluable services rendered by the select few who are my departmental colleagues, let alone to the priceless part played by yours truly.

But maybe there is sufficient space left to correct one very widespread misconception as to the usefulness of a Company Secretary. I am told that the view is widely held that the Secretary performs his most useful function by writing letters in the following terms:

Dear Sir (or Madam)

I write to inform you that your salary is increased to £________ per annum with effect from 19__.

Yours faithfully, _____________ Secretary

but that his usefulness would be considerably increased if he would only ‘let himself go’ a bit more when inserting the figures following the £ sign.

This, I contend, takes too narrow a view of the functions of the secretary, though I suppose I mustn’t complain since it does suggest – albeit with motives which may be questioned as to their disinterestedness – that there may be some justification for his existence. But I certainly prefer that view to the one expressed by Lord Esher in 1807, when he said –

‘The Secretary is a mere servant. He has to do what he is told, and no person can assume that he has any authority to represent anything at all.’

With respect to the learned Lord quoted, I prefer the view of Gladstone who spoke of the company secretary as –

‘Very frequently one of the original concocters of the Company. Usually in substance the Managing Director,’ after which he added —

‘The Secretary has in fact put the directors into their office, and they have a feeling of delicacy towards him in consequence.’

(Note for Printer – Please underline this last bit.)
(Note for Fusion despatch office – Please send copies of this issue of Fusion to Associated-Rediffusion directors by registered post.)

And that, dear Editor, is that. I told you I had no pretensions to literary ability in the general sense, and I can already hear you saying ‘You’re telling me!’

The post Forth flaw sez… 1,250 words? appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

I suppose the words ‘Third Programme’ make most of us think about the BBC’s sound programme of that name. And as with sound, so in television, there is a strong chance that the third programme will be designed for the special interest of minorities, following the argument that two programmes of popular appeal are enough and the third should be used for a different purpose. This argument has more than sentiment and highbrows behind it, as most of us who are engaged in television know only too well how difficult it is to keep up the standard and supply of peak time programmes for general audiences. But, practical difficulties aside, I believe the general public are well content with two alternative programmes of general appeal, and even though they never looked at it, would tolerate the existence of a third programme appealing to special interests.

What sort of programme should it be? I think educational in its widest sense, including the Arts, but with emphasis on direct education, where it seems to me that television could be used as a powerful supplement to evening classes at schools, particularly for technical subjects which lend themselves to pictorial demonstration.

So far so good, but now we come to more difficult matters. Who would be responsible for the third programme and who would pay for it?

If the choice were to fall on the BBC. it would be said that the Corporation already has in existence or in course of construction sufficient studios to produce a third programme as well as its present one, that it could build on its experience in broadcasting for schools, and that it was appropriate for a public service such as the third programme to be provided by a public body financed by public funds.

But the public funds would have to be found, either by an increase in the fee for television licences or by some appropriation from other funds. The BBC is already expensive, its expenditure having jumped from £12½ million [£438m now, allowing for inflation] in 1951-2 to £26½ million [£655m] in 1957-8, and any further calls by the Corporation on public funds, particularly if they required an increase in licence fees would hardly be popular. Add to this the argument that the BBC is already powerful enough in controlling the whole of sound broadcasting and half of television and the balance tips against any further extension of the Corporation’s responsibility.

If not the BBC, perhaps the ITA. The Authority has no programme production facilities of its own, but that could be overcome; nor has it a production staff, but it could get one. The objections are not really the practical ones. They are matters of principle. The Authority’s function is to control independent television and it ought not to be diverted into other activities. Besides, there is the old matter of finance. If it came from public funds there would be the same objection as in the case of the BBC; alternatively any suggestion that the Authority might try to finance the programme from advertisements would be incompatible with its function as controller of television advertising practice. So I conclude that the ITA are not likely to run the third programme.

The position is slightly different if a completely new television authority were set up for the purpose, as its advertising practice could be made subject to the approval of the ITA. It is, however, most doubtful whether advertising revenue would be anything like sufficient, firstly because the audience would be extremely small compared with that for other television programmes, and secondly because it would contain a small proportion of housewives, who control purchasing power. So again there would have to be a subsidy from public funds.

Finally for consideration are the present programme contractors. Our chairman has already said that Associated-Rediffusion would be willing to participate in an educational programme (using the word ‘educational’ in its broadest sense), even if that programme required a subsidy from the company’s other activities. If other programme contractors were willing to take part on the same basis, the financial hurdle would be cleared. The programme could be produced economically, as it could share facilities and staff with the commercial programme, and we in Associated-Rediffusion have already shown in our programmes for schools that we can do the job well.

The main arguments against this would be that the service should be under public control and not dependent on commercial companies whose finances have been subject to extreme variation in the past and may be again. But it should be possible to overcome the financial drawback by sufficient guarantees being given on both sides. And there are abundant instances to show that commercial companies can and do act with just as much a sense of public responsibility as do public bodies. My personal opinion is that if a third programme is authorized, and if it takes the form I have discussed, the most logical course would be to make it the responsibility of programme contractors.

There is a saying well known in the company that the enemy, thought to be faced with three alternatives, chooses a fourth. Perhaps both Independent Television and the BBC will be given an extra channel to be used for educational purposes. But let me put forward my guess at an extra choice that has only an outside chance of being accepted. Is public opinion ready yet to follow through the success of independent television and have the BBC accept advertisements on its television programme, drop one sound programme and share with Associated-Rediffusion and other programme contractors the responsibility of providing a non-commercial educational television service?

The post Fourth floor says… Thoughts on a third programme appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The services required from the accounts department of a television programme contractor are as varied as the problems affecting all the other departments which go to make up A-R, its staff management and direction. Everyone’s actions have a financial implication and it is the job of the accounts department to express the results of these actions and their effect to the credit of the company-or otherwise – in terms of £ s. d.

The set-up required to cope with this problem had to be unique as the whole operation is a strange combination of Wardour Street, Theatreland, Fleet Street and the City of London. U.S. commercial methods could not necessarily be followed. Their system enables them to get back their operating costs from advertisers sponsoring programmes but to us sponsorship is a naughty word.

As the organization had to be built from scratch, the staff, as with staff throughout the company, had not only to be found but their training adapted to commercial television and, in our case, the adapting had to be of the ‘makey-learn’ variety: that is, it had to be done while actually carrying out the job.

The reason why we could not carry out pre-transmission training was, in the main, the tremendous concentration of everyone’s energy on the task of getting on the air. Therefore, certain services had to take a back seat. The article ‘Those Early Days’ in fusion 2 shows the extreme difficulties which resulted from this. Another form of necessary training was to convince certain artistic elements that we were not just being unnecessarily sordid in having regard to matters of money.

Nevertheless the foundations on which the department was developed have, I think, proved sound. Their design was (and there is nothing unique about this) to provide the board of directors with the necessary information about current operating losses (as they then were) which, taken in conjunction with the vast and seemingly everlasting expenditure on buildings and equipment at Kingsway and Wembley, would enable it to plan the supply of the necessary cash and to direct the operations of the company both when it stood alone and after the introduction of a networking system.

At the same time the management required as much weekly and daily information as was possible about both programme costs and other expenditure, so that these could be kept as low as was consistent with high standards and efficiency. It was known that they must exceed revenue from sales of air-time to advertisers for quite some time – which turned out to be October, 1956.

It was also obviously essential that staff, artists and other contracts should be promptly paid. The size of the problem, to cope with seventy programmes a week, was not fully gauged to begin with, as was evidenced by the delight of the artists’ and contract payments’ section when sixteen dancing girls decided to delay their appearance on the screen and to camp out in the accounts office until their contracts had been received and payment made.

Advertisement and other sales accounts had to be rendered and collected as rapidly as possible, and bills similarly settled, including the heavy commitments for the purchase of filmed and packaged programmes. With regard to sales accounts a recent quote (page 27, fusion 4) says that ‘At present the advertisement department is selling … some 120 spots a day, 600 a week, 30,000 a year. Each is a single entity … Each is also a single entity for accounting purposes which involves checking, issue of a transmission certificate, invoicing, rendering statements and collection of the cash.

To assist in controlling all payments, it was decided to classify the expenditure of the company into three types-direct, indirect, and overhead. A rough definition of these terms is that:

1. Direct expenditure, of which there are 23 main items, sub-divided into a further 130, means any expense which can be directly attributed to making a programme, such as the script, artists, wardrobe, scenery, sets, music, etc., or the cost of a film.
2. Indirect expenditure means the cost of providing the facilities to transmit the programme, ranging from studio personnel of all grades and types to the maintenance of studios and their equipment. A method has been devised for the allocation of these costs to specific programmes if required.
3. Overhead expenditure means costs incurred in the general administration of the business (other than programme department), such as the general manager’s department, that part of the business department not concerned w ith studio services (for example the running of TV House), advertisement, secretarial and accounts departments.

The first division within this department, therefore, is into cost and finance sections, direct costs being the responsibility of the former and indirect and overheads of the latter.

The basic control of direct costs is by the estimation of a programme quarter’s costs to an overall plan, the plan and the length of the ‘quarter’ being decided by the networking committee. As an adaptation of a U.S. system a cost assistant, who belongs to this department, is attached to the main programme sections, light entertainment, drama, schools and children, etc. The function of a cost assistant is to be in on all programme arrangements from the planning stage so that the cost implications of all actions can be brought to the attention of the manager of a section and, from thereon if necessary, up to the controller of programmes. Thus appropriate action can be taken at the earliest possible moment.

The constant endeavour is to produce information before an event happens so that any necessary action can be taken. To that end, the maximum use is made of estimation, without reference to any books of account. A maximum of speed tends to introduce a sacrifice of accuracy, but the estimated programme cost sheets which are available within seventy-two hours after transmission are now much less than 1 per cent out overall compared with the actual costs subsequently recorded.

Indirect and overhead expenses are controlled by means of an annual budget based on the staff and facilities estimated to be required to produce the expected hours of transmission. In common with most businesses certain items, for example the ITA fee, cannot be controlled by management so attention is concentrated upon those items which are within its control.

The annual budget is prepared by departments, and sections of departments, in association with their respective heads, who will be responsible for controlling the expenditure during day-to-day working. The actual expenditure incurred in each month is then compared with the budget for each month, split up into department and section by type of expense, so that the reasons for differences can be investigated.

Apart from this monthly comparison of actual expenditure with budget, management and the board are provided with a fortnightly operating statement. As this statement deducts from our advertisement and other revenue not only indirect and overhead expenditure but also the estimated direct costs, it is effectively a profit and loss account. It compares the estimated profit or loss for the current fortnight with the corresponding period for the previous year and the cumulative profit or loss to date for the current financial year is similarly compared with the preceding year.

All these statements ultimately build up into the company’s annual profit and loss account (which includes the operations of the TV Times) and balance sheet. Subsequently comes the agreement of the Inland Revenue’s ‘take’, as the senior partner in this, as in all businesses, with all the voluminous and complicated information and calculations required by H.M. Inspector of Taxes.

To sum up, our aim is to contribute to the prosperity, present and future, of A-R and, therefore, of all of us by the speediest possible service of all types to its staff, management and directors.

The post Fourth floor says… Off-screen credits appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

How do we stand now, those of us engaged in making programmes, at the start of the fourth year of the company’s operation as a programme contractor?

Have we lost our originality, our fire? Has complacency taken the place of ingenuity? Are we, as one journalist put it, “playing safe” with our programme pattern?

If one is to believe what some of our Press-men are writing, then in fact ITV is just coasting along picking up its millions of profit with effortless ease.

Let us examine this suggestion, and take a glance at some of the shows we have been “coasting” along with in the past few months.

Take drama for instance.

This company’s contribution to the ITV network in 1958 was forty-one plays – far in excess of any other contractor. Two-thirds of these plays were British in every sense of the word, eighteen of them being adaptations of British stage successes, and eleven of them specially commissioned TV plays by British authors. This is quite apart from the tremendously successful half-hour British series, “Murder Bag”, which has consistently appeared in the top ten ratings. “Television Playhouse” and the “Play of the Week” series have become firmly established and represent a most important and successful contribution to the ITV programme pattern.

We intend to increase our number of British TV plays in the future and encourage more writers to work exclusively for us.

And then light entertainment can claim to have made its contribution towards originality in 1958.

“The Jubilee Show” succeeded in combining music, comedy and nostalgia in a blend of the old and new, regularly rating in the top-ten, and bringing many letters of appreciation from all kinds of people.

“Rush Hour”, “East Side, West Side”, “Free and Easy” and “Hotel Imperial” all stepped out of line and gave us new ways of presentation. “Cool for Cats”, still on the air and gaining in popularity, will continue with us into the New Year. And the two original ITV quiz shows, “Take Your Pick” and “Double Your Money”, are surely the most successful of them all, and remain the most consistently highest rated quizzes. I only mention these few shows because they are company originations, which is all we are concerned with.

How about features?

Dan Farson’s “People in Trouble” scries has brought him to the front rank as a personality interviewer. “This Week”, coming up to its fourth year, is the only programme of its kind on the ITV network and remains the most informative of all programmes with a behind-the-news format. “New Horizon”, “Conquest of Space”, “Undercurrent” – which brought Gerard Fay to the fore as a new TV personality -“Out of Step” and “Keeping in Step”, “Only Yesterday”, “USSR Now” and “America Now” make an impressive line-up of programme effort and achievement. Difficult to detect any lack of fire in this section.

How about the children?

Are we relying on cowboys and Indians for our high ratings? The facts show just the opposite. Currently the most successful live children’s British serial, “The Red Dragon”, written and produced by John Rhodes, recently passed the viewing figures of “Pop-Eye”, “Fury” and “Rin Tin Tin”. Three of our recent serials were specially written by members of A-R children’s team, and in no programme section is there more zeal and dedication to their work. It is in this section that an important new method of animation “Visimotion” has been developed and is proving of great value, as seen recently in the “Alexander the Mouse” and “The Enchanted House” programmes.

Schools programmes, in their second year, have widened their horizons and with the introduction of “The Dordogne River” programme, specially filmed on location, they stepped out of the classroom to bring the reality of the lesson to the individual. The new programmes planned for the spring term are designed to further this conception of TV education. And then, of course, there are the programmes that do not fall into any particular category — the outside broadcasts, 105 of them, in addition to the Wimbledon Tennis coverage; the “Close-Up” and “Spotlight” scries; the rapidly produced tributes to personalities, such as Mike Todd, Robert Donat and Jack Buchanan, usually mounted in a few’ hours.

So perhaps this suggestion of “coasting” is merely Press talk. Why should we expect anything other than severe criticism from a medium which is more and more finding itself in conflict with Independent Television?

We are sure of our brief. Let us keep our sights high and make quite sure that the things we do are done as well as they can be.

Let us surround ourselves with the best possible talent; let us treat every programme we do as a means of finding out how to do it better next time. Good luck to all of you who contribute to the making of our programmes. Look out, 1959, here we come!

The post Floor Four says… Keep our sights high appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

A few months ago a group of distinguished speakers, taking part in the BBC Brains Trust, were asked by a viewer: ‘If the members of the team could envisage looking back a hundred years hence to life in 1958, which aspect of it would they find the most deplorable?’ The panel which was drawn, as usual, from a number of highly intelligent people from different walks of life agreed unanimously that, in their view, advertising was the most regrettable characteristic of the twentieth century. After two World Wars this seems a pretty sweeping condemnation but it is, in a sense an indication of the dislike and cynical distrust of advertising and all that it stands for that exists among the intelligentsia and those the researchers call ‘the opinion-forming groups’. The reasons for this undeserved reputation are too complex to be discussed in the scope of a short article but perhaps they are to be found in the traditional attitude of the nineteenth-century professional classes to whom trade and commerce were vaguely disreputable. There is ample evidence that this attitude still persists in a less vehement form today and there is still an immensely influential body of opinion made up, in the main, of the teaching profession, the clergy and certain of the older Trade Unionists to whom ‘advertising’ is very nearly anathema. The advertising industry itself must take a great deal of the blame for its own inadequate public relations system, for many of the largest advertisers, in exploring increasingly successful means of selling their own products, have almost entirely overlooked the side-effects of this advertising on the more thoughtful – but often misinformed – members of the public. Whether we like it or not we are, in independent television, not only entirely supported by advertising but we are also inextricably involved in the most exposed and controversial of all its manifestations. The strength and impact of television advertising, so important and effective to the advertiser, are at once the means whereby everything that happens on the screen, whether it be in a programme or a commercial, is discussed, criticized and applauded by viewers and non-viewers alike. This subjective emotional quality of television shows itself in curious ways. Nearly all advertisers, and particularly the small ones, even though their campaign may be limited to a short series of 5-second flashes, tend to talk grandiloquently of their ‘programme’. Similarly, a great many viewers associate a particularly irritating commercial not primarily with the advertiser and his product but with the contractor and his programmes.

These then, are some of the reasons for the far stricter control over advertising material exercised by the independent television programme companies than those ever enforced in the Press and other media. These safeguards, the need for which was so wisely foreseen by the originators of the Television Act, have proved on the whole entirely acceptable to advertisers, most of whom recognize the importance of controls which the intimacy and impact of television make necessary.

Since 1 May of this year, the Independent Television Companies Association has operated a centralized script and copy acceptance department through its secretariat at Television House. Before making any filmed commercial, the advertiser, through his agency, is required to send ten copies of the script – sufficient for all contractors and for record purposes – to the Secretary of the ITCA. These are routed to all companies whether the commercial concerned is destined to be shown on all stations or not. The script itself is stamped by the ITCA with a coloured label, black if it appears to be acceptable and red if doubtful, so that each company can, through its own acceptance department, make its own decisions. These are usually passed by telephone back to the ITCA who then communicate, on behalf of all their members, direct with the advertising agency. In the great majority of cases a unanimous decision is reached speedily but from time to time matters arise on which members disagree. The procedure in such cases is that the question is referred to the ITCA Copy Sub-Committee at whose meetings I represent this Company. Decisions made at this committee are reported to the Main Advertisement Committee of the programme contractors, so that we have now built up a formidable list of precedents and ‘case law’. The policy of the television companies in all these matters is based on the application of the Television Act of 1954 as published in the ITA papers of the Standing Consultative Committee and in the Principles for Television Advertising. These rules are, for the reasons I have already explained, more diverse and far-reaching than those to which other media are subject, for television is, after all, the only advertising medium to have control exercised upon it by a statutorily appointed body. Topics on which particular care has to be exercised are as varied as appeals to children which, in the opinion of the Authority, exploit ‘their natural loyalty and credulity’, ‘advertising which is inserted by a body, the objects whereof are wholly, or mainly, political’ or advertising which is directed, however remotely, ‘towards a political end’. It has not always been easy to discern the scope of these limitations from a glance at a script though a good general rule propounded by the ITA is that any advertising which is intended to promote the sale of goods and services is normally acceptable. ‘Opinion advertising’, for which the television medium would be peculiarly effective, is entirely ruled out by the Act as it stands at present.

Filmed commercials are normally required fourteen days before transmission and it is, of course, only at this stage that final clearance of the advertisement can safely be given. For example, the medical profession is rightly concerned about the use of actors in TV commercials who give the impression, from their speech, delivery and setting, of professional medical advice and it is easy to see the level to which much advertising, particularly of patent medicines, would sink were a close control not exercised on presentation. It is for this reason that when we return passed scripts to the advertising agencies we add the words ‘Script story-board accepted subject to approval of film’. This safeguard is also used to allow us if necessary, to reject a film whose nuances and emphasis are not apparent in the original treatment.

Lest it should be thought, however, that constant vigilance has to be maintained to prevent wily advertisers from deceiving the public I should, in all fairness, add that the vast majority of companies who use the television medium are acutely sensitive to the viewers’ reactions and are, indeed, as conscious as we of the damage that a major breach of the rules would cause, not only to their own reputations, but also to the value of the medium.

The growth of the field of advertising covered by television has astounded even its most fervent supporters. This year we, at Associated-Rediffusion, have been carrying up to seven hundred separate commercials a week. We have seen the revenue of independent television as a whole go from £9,500,000 [£267m now, allowing for inflation] in its first year and £25,500,000 [£685m] in its second to a present rate of expenditure of around £1,000,000 [£25m] a week. It has become the most talked-of, provocative and powerful medium ever placed in the hands of the advertiser. It is a measure of the success of the safeguards which the ITA and the programme companies have together set up and the understanding and good-will shown by advertisers and agencies in their operation that the system, with all its complex checks and balances, has remained flexible and imaginative.

The post Floor Four says… Safeguards for the viewer appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

When I was a boy, balance was a quality required in a gymnasium; when I was a young man it was required on the dance floor; since then I have been warned to take a balanced view in politics and even in war. But now Balance has taken on a new meaning and become a very important consideration in my work, for the Television Act 1954 lays down in Section 3(1) (b)

‘the programmes (broadcast by the ITA) should maintain a proper balance in their subject-matter.’

There are nearly as many interpretations of this section as there are readers. There is one school of thought which seems to think that a proper balance is necessarily achieved by including serious programmes dealing with social problems or politics – something akin to the public service programmes included in American television. Another school of thought considers that the term ‘proper balance’ is a way of defining the sort of programmes which are broadcast by the BBC on sound on the Third: these people include ballet, opera, art, literature and the more high-brow drama and music within their definition. There is a further body of opinion that considers that a ‘proper balance’ is only another way of saying that the programmes should instruct and inform as well as entertain: this view springs from the BBC’s objective which is to ‘entertain, inform and instruct’. People who hold this view think that some 70 to 80 per cent of our programmes should aim to entertain, whilst the remainder should aim to instruct and inform: the latter being spread evenly throughout transmission.

Personally I have formed a different view after reading and re-reading the whole of the Act many times. In my opinion the Act is intended to ensure that the programmes are not solely directed and planned to attract majority audiences to the exclusion of the sort of programmes which attract and are interesting to minority audiences. My definition of a balanced programme is therefore ‘a programme entertaining and interesting to a minority as opposed to a majority audience’.

A-R and other programme companies have naturally carried out a lot of research to find out the tastes of our viewers. We have found out that there is a fair size minority audience for the following subjects among others:

Racing and Show Jumping – Jazz – Ballroom Dancing – Pop Music (Disc and Rock-’n-roll) – Classical Drama – Film and Stage Gossip – Exhibitions and Displays (Air Display, Royal Tournament, Chelsea Flower Show, etc.) – Athletics and Swimming – Classical Music – Science – Art – Minority Sports (Tennis, Billiards, Bowls, Darts) – Motor Racing – Social Problems – Politics, particularly foreign politics

And there are, of course, smaller minority audiences for nearly every subject under the sun.

You will note that I have left out of my list three most important subjects: Religion, News, and Education. Religion – thinking about things of the spirit – is clearly essential to a balanced life and therefore also to a balanced programme. The News is traditionally an important facet of broadcasting and one which viewers expect to have as of right. School Broadcasts, on the other hand, are a new feature in television but one which A-R thinks will be a great influence for good in education.

These three types of programmes do not fit my definition of commanding enthusiastic minority audiences: they are of interest and use to all of us, but the term enthusiastic is inappropriate for their audiences.

People with whom I discuss this subject – or more accurately, who discuss it with me – frequently say, ‘Yes, it’s true that your programmes as a whole are properly balanced, but you banish your good programmes – by which they mean the serious programmes they like – to off-peak periods’. This line of thought springs from the false assumption that our objective is to educate the public – the BBC’s ‘instruct and inform’ formula. There is no mention in the Act of educating the public. We are required to maintain ‘a proper balance in subject-matter’ and a ‘high general standard of quality’. In my opinion that means that we should provide entertaining and interesting programmes of good quality for minority as well as majority audiences. A majority has its rights however, and one of them, I feel, is that a majority programme should be transmitted when the majority are viewing. Enthusiastic minorities must give way to the majority and adjust their viewing hours accordingly.

I represent the Company on the Weekday Programme Network Committee and on the Standing Consultative Committee – the joint committee on which the ITA and all contractors are represented. I take the following general line in the discussions in these committees:

Between 7.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. the programmes should in the main be designed to entertain the majority of our viewers, since this is the time when the majority are ready and willing to view. Supper finished and not yet time for bed.

After 10.30 p.m. programmes of interest to minority audiences should be included. Note that a programme of special interest to a minority is not an automatic switch-off to the majority who may find their interest caught.

Before 7.30 p.m. at least one hour and possibly more should be aimed specifically at a children’s audience.

The remainder of the afternoon and early evening should have programmes aimed at minority audiences (‘Racing at Lingfield,’ ‘Roving Report’, ‘Answers Please’, are examples).

There is another Section of the Act which is not easily interpreted: though not normally considered as affecting the balance of the programmes, I think it is very relevant.

I refer to Section 3 (i)(d) which says:

‘Proper proportions of recorded and other matter included in the programmes should be of British origin and British performance.’

I believe that the object of this section is also to obtain balance. Clearly it would be wrong if our programmes expounded nothing but a foreign philosophy and showed nothing but a foreign way of life. It would equally be wrong if it was too exclusively British – too insular: no one would suggest excluding Mozart, Dumas, Danny Kaye or the Milan football team because they are of foreign origin. In Art, Music and the Theatre, giving them their capital letters, we are international and try to obtain the best that the world has to offer. Similarly in Television we should try to obtain the best that the world can give us: if it is a good programme we should try to get it, irrespective of origin.

Many people comment on the number of American half-hour programmes which we broadcast. The fact is that there are many excellent American programmes greatly liked by majority audiences, whilst similar British programmes are nearly unobtainable. A-R has been trying to find a good British series for months but with the exception of‘Robin Hood’, the British film series have not been very successful.

It may be of interest that I make the amount of programme of foreign origin and performance which we have shown since 1955 as less than 7 per cent of our transmission time: statisticians on the staff may like to check that figure. Again the critic will say, ‘True enough, but you show all the American stuff in peak hours’. To which I will reply ‘Majorities have their rights and the majority like “Gun Law”, “San Francisco Beat” and “Wagon Train” very much.’ Where the majority do not like a programme, for example, “Inner Sanctum” or “Patti Page”, then it is moved either to off-peak or off-the-schedules’ (the latter costs money as programmes are paid for even if not shown).

Summing up my view: The Company’s object is to entertain and interest their audience. The programmes which the majority like should be shown at the times when the majority view. Minorities are entitled to be given programmes on which they are enthusiastic but must accept the disadvantage of less convenient viewing times. Religion, News and School Broadcasts must be included in our programme schedules as essential to a sane, balanced life. British Television, whilst being international in searching for the best from all over the world, should not propagate a foreign philosophy or outlook.

The post Floor Four says… Balance appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

How many television programmes should we have? The question is often asked but very rarely answered in a logical and considered way.

It is, indeed, a difficult question to answer. The artists and technicians employed in television obviously want as many programmes as possible because the greater the number of programmes, the greater the demand for artists and technicians, and it is thought that as a consequence their remuneration might be greater.

Those responsible for the operation of television systems do not necessarily agree. They realise how difficult it is to operate even the limited number of services which now exist because of limitations of available skill both in the artistic and technical worlds.

Again, it can be argued by those who would like to see lots of programmes that if many programmes were available the demand for personnel would increase and this would result in more people going in for television careers and the general level of skill would be likely to be raised.

Whether this is true or not, it happens to be a basic fact that all television programmes have to be paid for whether by licences, advertising or subscription systems as now proposed.

The total funds available for these purposes are limited and relate to the economy of the country as a whole. If more than one Station depending on advertising revenue operates in the same area, the available advertising funds in that area have to be shared between them. This may result in reduction of standards if ends are to be met unless, of course, numbers of programmes are kept sufficiently small so that sufficient funds are available for each programme. The same would apply if the BBC were to operate a second programme: their licence revenue would have to be shared between the two operations. In the opinion of this writer the total profits of the independent programme companies throughout the United Kingdom would not be sufficient to run a good extra programme. It is assumed that all companies are run reasonably efficiently and, therefore, the very most that would be available for any additional programme supported by advertising would be the profits of the existing companies.

People who talk light-heartedly about additional programmes should first consider the economic facts and the technical problems involved.

Plans have been prepared to fit a third television programme into Band III and, indeed, it has even been suggested that in the thickly populated areas like London, Manchester, Birmingham, etc., a total of four programmes might be provided, but this would have to be done at the expense of other areas which might be left with no programme or only one programme from Band I and Band III.

It seems basically right that before third, fourth or subsequent programmes are dealt with the existing two programmes, i.c., BBC and ITA, should be made available to 100 per cent., or nearly 100 per cent., of the population. It is not good enough to say that 98 per cent, coverage should be satisfactory, as the remaining 2 per cent. represents a million people. These people mostly live in outlying areas with difficult access to the benefits of civilisation as regards information, entertainment and education. They are the people who deserve television more than anybody else and for whom television can do the most.

Because of technical limitations of channels on which television can be transmitted only thirteen channels are available in Bands I and III, which are the two Bands allocated by international regulation for television transmission. Although there are international arguments going on between broadcasting and other communication interests for two more channels to be added to the thirteen, it is unlikely that this will happen for some years to come.

We, therefore, have to plan on the basis of what is at present available and while wishful thinking has indicated that an additional programme might be squeezed into Band III, this would have to be done at the expense of no programme or only one programme being available to a million people to whom television should be of the greatest benefit.

This docs not mean that additional programmes are not possible. Indeed, several additional programmes could be introduced by making use of Band IV or even Band V. Incidentally, transmission in these Bands in this country have shown, and practical operation of some one hundred such stations in America have clearly indicated that these Bands are quite suitable for television broadcasting. Admittedly, additional receiving cost is involved as Bands IV and V, being in the ultra high frequency bands, require additional receiving equipment and, of course, a further aerial. However, if people want three, four or more programmes in the thickly populated areas then it is right that they should pay for the receiving facilities to get such programmes rather than that people in outlying areas should have to be put to extra cost. There are further benefits in using Bands IV and V for additional programmes. Relatively inexpensive low-powered transmitters could be used and, for example, in the London area there might be three or four additional low-powered transmitters covering different parts of London with a common programme but with separate advertising for each area, and in this manner it would be possible to attract additional revenue for low-priced advertising from sources for which the present large coverage commercial television stations are too expensive.

This type of operation on Bands IV and V also opens up further possibilities. For example, many more localised urban or rural programmes relating to local social and sporting happenings and special local educational programmes could be provided.

There is a long-term development which may make it possible for additional channels on Bands I and III to become available. It is well-known that the mosaic of a television picture is completely reconstructed from scratch every twenty-fifth of a second. This is in spite of the fact that probably 90 per cent, of the information in each picture was already there in the previous picture. If, therefore, basic information from one picture to another could be “stored’’ and “repeated”, and only the new information transmitted, considerable saving in band width might be possible. If such saving should be only half of each channel, obviously the present number of channels could be doubled. There would be technical difficulties on quick fades in and fades out; however, the work in hand gives considerable promise of success. Whatever long-term improvements may come along it is most important that on a short-term basis everybody in the United Kingdom wherever he may live should be able to see the two main television programmes as soon as possible, and that at all costs we should avoid creating a badly planned chaos similar to that which exists in medium wave sound broadcasting.

The post Floor Four says… How many programmes? appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Rude Little Boy: ‘Wotchcr doing? Propping up the building?’
Debonair Gentleman with Elegantly Crossed Legs, One Hand in Trouser-Pocket, Leaning Against Wall: ‘Yes.’
R.L. Boy laughs sceptically.
D. Gentleman with E.C.L., One H. in T-P., steps away from wall.
The building collapses.

While no-one would go so far as to claim that if Guy Bloomer stepped away from Wembley Studios there would be a positive structural disaster – least of all, Guy himself – you feel that without his support the edifice might totter slightly. Beneath that deceptive appearance of nonchalance, Guy is in fact busily ensuring that the non-stop activity of the studios continues to flow smoothly, all round the clock.

But it isn’t as easy to prop up a building as it looks. Before tackling his present job (official designation: ‘Deputy Manager, Wembley Studios’) Guy accumulated a great deal of varied experience, all of which has proved useful in one way or another.

For example, as deputy manager, he has to know when to say ‘No’. He first said ‘No’ when he left Malvern College; a firm ‘No’ to the prospect of following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a solicitor. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but he knew that whatever profession he took up, it wouldn’t be legal.

Instead, he joined the Royal Navy, as an Ordinary Seaman, in 1942. After a posting to the west coast of Scotland, he was transferred to the King Alfred Training Establishment for Officers at Hove, and thence to the R.N. College at Greenwich. He spent most of the war in beach-landing parties, on combined ops and beachhead assaults – ‘Mostly along the South Coast and the Isle of Wight’, he adds. Pressed for details, he admits that he was in the D-Day landings in France and at Walcheren as well.

He was en route for the Far East when the war in Japan ended, and so turned smartly about and set to work, convoying a flotilla of captured U-boats up to the Baltic, where they were to be handed over to our Russian allies. He found our allies slightly unco-operative on an official level, but on the unofficial level he has a hazy recollection of splendid hospitality in the Russian Officers Club; there was a picture of Lenin on the wall, and vodka everywhere else.

The deputy manager of Wembley Studios has to know a lot about hospitality.

Then there was a long job in mid-Atlantic, when Guy assisted some oceanographic scientists to measure the height of waves.

(You: ‘That’s interesting. How do they measure the height of waves in mid-Atlantic?

Guy: ‘That’s what they were trying to find out’.)

At last he became a civilian again, and immediately took a long trip by trawler to Murmansk and the White Sea, as a passenger – more or less from force of habit, presumably. But he decided it was time he picked himself a career, and after twelve wasted months as a trainee in a local brewery, went to take a rehabilitation course at Bournemouth, in Business Management. This was designed as a general introduction for men who had gone straight from school into war service, to open their eyes to the devilish cunning of business procedure.

That, too, must have stood him in good stead since. Unfortunately, he took the course just too late to qualify for a Government Grant, and discovered after the first forty-eight hours of riotous reunion that he was broke. To earn some spare-time cash, he took a job in the evenings, as a very inexperienced stagehand at the Hippodrome Theatre, Boscombe.

This was a case of love at first sight. ‘I hadn’t been backstage more than ten minutes when something clicked,’ Guy admits, slightly embarrassed. ‘I mean – I knew that this was the business for me.’

Reluctantly he decided to finish his course anyway, mainly through pressure from home. ‘As soon as I announced that I had decided to go into the theatre – well, never have I received so many letters from my father in such a short space of time.’

Then followed a long spell of backstage work, during which all readers will be glad to learn that he applied for, and was granted, a NATKE union card. After spells in Bournemouth and Plymouth, he finally armed himself with some useful introductions and assaulted the West End.

His resultant success nearly killed him; he worked on the fit-up of the first Latin Quarter revue at the London Casino, and spent a hundred hours in the theatre during five days. But the show went on, and Guy survived. (Another valuable qualification for Wembley Studios.)

Soon afterwards, he decided to take a holiday in France, and wrote to every theatre in Paris (in enthusiastic, if inaccurate, French) describing himself as an assistant ‘metteur-en-scene’, and asking if it might be possible to go backstage as a visitor. Several theatres welcomed him warmly, including the Opera – a memorable experience – and the Chatelet, where they were producing a colossal extravaganza called L’Auberge du Cheval Blanc… (White Horse Inn a la Française, and equally memorable in a different way.) Everywhere he was received with flattering courtesy, and it wasn’t until later he realized that instead of describing himself as an assistant stage-manager, he had in fact announced himself as an assistant producer. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

His next important step was when he joined the International Ballet for four-and-a-half years, first as stage manager, and soon afterwards as stage director. This gave him further opportunities to travel, since the ballet toured in Italy and Spain. But when this job came to an end his travels continued.

A drink in a Chelsea pub – a casual invitation – and suddenly Guy found himself helping to refit a yacht in Majorca, then working in the crew on a series of Mediterranean cruises. The last cruise got a little out-of-hand and finished in Barbados.

This was all splendid, but Guy’s bank manager was beginning to send him curt little notes, and he realized the time had come to earn a living once more.

He travelled back to England, in an Italian ship with a passenger-list made up almost entirely of West Indian immigrants. When they reached Teneriffe, in mid-winter, a furious argument broke out, and Guy had to arbitrate ‘Yes’, he told the incredulous passengers, ‘that stuff on the mountain is snow…’

Perhaps it was the association of ideas that carried him on to his next job; shoving scenery about in the Earls Court Ice Show. However, he soon got an offer to go to Bath to stage direct the Trafalgar Pageant on the local rugger field and thence to Glyndebourne as stage manager. During his season there, he had an interview in London for a rather different kind of post, and was accepted; but he couldn’t start work immediately, as he had to go to the Edinburgh Festival with the Opera Company. He returned to London in mid-September, 1955, and managed to walk into his new role at Wembley Studios, just ten days before the first programme went on the air.

‘Look here, I’ve been talking too much…’ he breaks off apologetically. ‘Anyhow, you know the rest – I’ve been doing the same job ever since.’

After this saga, it’s rather a shock to realize that Guy has actually stayed in one place for four years. Does he ever feel restless? Does he ever get the urge to hoist scenery in Boscombe, or sails in Palma?

‘Well, I go back to Majorca every year, for a bit of sailing… But as for the theatre – well, strange as it may seem, I like television!’

So it looks as if Guy Bloomer has dropped anchor at last.

The post Track in on… Guy Bloomer …White Sea to Wembley appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The memory of this wicked juvenile triumph sends Miss Moynihan off into a paroxysm of giggles until she shakes with laughter.

It is a very recognizable laugh, and the Fifth Floor inhabitants could tell their way to Room 518 blindfold, just by following the vibrations. Vyvienne Moynihan enjoys life, and she enjoys laughing. And yet, like many people with a swift sense of humour, she is basically serious.

‘Born on 19 January, under Capricorn – the goat, dear – I won’t say which year. I lived for a while with my grandmother, in Westbourne Grove. She came from Ireland, and she disapproved of the way the local children spoke, so she wouldn’t send me to school. When I was nine years old, I met a very nice gentleman who saw me playing in the garden – I asked him to tea, and told him daddy was a chemist, and mummy often helped him, so I lived with my granny. He asked which school I went to, and I said I didn’t… but the next day I did. The nice gentleman turned out to be an LCC inspector.’

‘Of course, I hated school; I wasn’t a very nice child anyway. I had long golden ringlets in those days – so long you couldn’t tell where the ringlets ended and my bloomers began. There I was, aged nine, and I could quote any Shakespeare play by the yard – or Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth – I knew them all. Only I didn’t know my five times table.’

‘At that school, as a punishment, naughty children had to learn Latin verse; Virgil’s Aeneid, Book XII, and Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Books I to V … soon afterwards I won a scholarship for my remarkable knowledge of the classics…’

At first Vyvienne wanted to be a chemist like her father, and got her Inter.B.Sc. for chemistry, physics and maths; but she was following another passion in her spare time – the theatre. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and took herself off to see the best possible productions and performances whenever she could afford it. Plays like Norman Marshall’s production of ‘Victoria Regina’; performances like Clive Brook in ‘Cavalcade’. One day, she resolved, she would work with men like these .. as in the case of the bicycle, she finally got her own way.

Having won certificates and gold medals galore at the Guildhall, she was invited to go on to the staff, and at the outbreak of war became one of the youngest professors ever to join that august body.

But the war was on, and Vyvienne wanted to do something about it. She went to the Labour Exchange, and was asked her qualifications. Briefly she outlined them – her professorship, her experience of teaching, her spare-time work as a speech therapist at the Maida Vale hospital. The girl behind the desk listened coldly, then said – in a voice that cried out for a course of speech training – ‘Nao thenks. We want somebody that can do somethink useful.’

So Vyvienne took three years’ leave of absence from the Guildhall, and became a student A.S.M. with the West Riding Theatre.

‘I did practically every job there was – lighting, scene painting, the lot. Then I moved on to become the stage manager at the Q Theatre, with Jack de Leon, and through him I met Clive Brook. That’s how it started, really – soon I was stage director or production manager on plays like “Second Threshold”, “The Dish Ran Away”, “And So to Bed”, and “Clérembard”.’

Vyvienne’s proudest memory is of when she was producing a tour of ‘Angels in Love’, with Barbara Kelly and Henry Kendall. A serious operation sent her to hospital for six weeks, and during those weeks not a single day passed without one or another member of the cast keeping in touch with her, by letter or by telephone.

‘A different sort of memory around that time was when a very famous leading lady had a fit of temperament and locked herself in the smallest room in the theatre. I tried to climb through the window to let her out, but the window was too narrow – I got stuck, and we both missed the matinee.’

One of the few people Vyvienne had never worked with, after twelve years in the theatre, was Norman Marshall. She heard he was moving into television, and so – although at that point she knew nothing about TV and didn’t much want to – she decided this was an opportunity not to be missed. She was appointed manager of the drama department at Associated-Rediffusion, and now, after four years in the job, she prefers television to the theatre.

‘Some people say that in television there’s no chance to follow a thing through – once a play is done, it’s done. But that just isn’t so. In the theatre your contacts with people are limited – at most it’s a year, if you’re lucky – but in a year you can’t really see people develop. That’s the thing I love about television. In the long run, the teamwork is more permanent, not less.’

‘And sometimes it can surprise you. The biggest shock of my life was when we did “The Judge’s Story” – yes, Clive Brook again. I knew it was good, but I liked it so much that I was afraid other people wouldn’t. It shook me to the core when the viewers enjoyed it as much as I did.’

At week-ends Vyvienne usually goes to Brighton, to stay with her family and two old friends – a cat called Sukey, and a dog (his breed is politely referred to as ‘Chinese Wolfhound’) called Michael-Angelo.

‘Sukey’s a wonderful critic. If there’s a good programme on, he sits on top of the set with his head craned forward over the edge, watching it upside-down. His favourites are “Wagon Train”, “People in Trouble”, “This Week” and “Crime Sheet”… In that order. If there’s a show on he doesn’t care for, he turns his back, and sits with his tail hanging straight down the screen. Whenever I see Sukey’s tail across the picture I know the viewers are switching off all over the British Isles.’ But Vyvienne likes to get away from that little screen sometimes. She likes swimming, listening to music, going to the theatre or the cinema; she likes eating and drinking, she likes people. And most of all, she likes reading.

‘I settle down with a new novel, and I determine to forget all about television. Only, while I’m reading, I suddenly find I’ve been thinking subconsciously: “I wonder – would it adapt?”…’

Once again, Vyvienne starts to laugh at herself. Let’s hope she never stops.

The post Track in on… Vyvienne Moynihan …Who Manages to Laugh appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

When he says this, you suddenly see him clearly; wrapped in a toga, hawk-like and angular, with a laurel wreath over his smoothly silver hair. He tilts back his head, and regards the world across high cheekbones; slightly affronted, you might think, at what he sees.

It makes a good picture – but when he starts to talk, you realize at once that Len Fraser is not in the least like that.

‘When a situation arises, we have to be here to meet it,’ he says, with enough of a Scottish burr to banish any visions of Ancient Rome. ‘And I’m proud to boast, we’ve never let anybody down yet… Oh, we’ve skated over thin ice now and again – I’m not saying we haven’t – but so far Lady Luck has smiled on us.’

You have to take every fantastic crisis in your stride, and meet life with a relentless, down-to-earth logic, when you spend your time in Wonderland. Even Alice had to do the same.

For ‘Wonderland’ is hardly an exaggerated description of Len Fraser’s world. His office is a sort of giant telephone box, from which he gazes out like a goldfish in a bowl, at a vast and surrealist collection of objects.

Sides of papier mâché beef, bouquets of artificial flowers, sideboards and fire-irons, abstract paintings and steel engravings, oriental devil-masks – and even the rear half of a horse… This is the Property Store at Wembley.

Stretching across the desk, Len pushes aside a box marked ‘Gold Sequins’, burrows under a sheaf of prop lists (‘For our production next Monday, in addition to the articles already ordered, we shall require a set of dentist’s tools, a box of exploding cigars and an old-fashioned water-pistol’), finds an ash-tray, and stubs out his cigarette.

Then he lights another, and starts to reminisce.

‘I went into the business when I was sixteen, as a chorus boy. In some of the big Scottish shows; revues, mostly. We usually did four or five months resident in Glasgow, then maybe a tour – Dundee, Aberdeen, Belfast, Dublin – all over. I’d started as an amateur, of course, singing a bit and dancing; in local concert parties and Scout Jamborees — you know the sort of thing.’

‘Oh, no, I wasn’t born in Scotland. I’m a Canadian really; born in Chatham, Ontario. My father was a Scot, and he managed a chain of music stores out there, selling instruments and records. But I resisted the opportunity to learn the piano; I was keener on the mouth-organ! We came back to Scotland in 1922. My father had been told by the doctor that he had three months to live, and he wanted to see his old home again. …I’m happy to say he carried on for another thirty years.’

So Len went into show business, and almost at once he began to discover talents outside his song-and-dance routines. He took up drumming, and in the summer months joined a band, playing for dances and concerts at some of the big seaside hotels.

During the war, he served with the RAF for two-and-a-half years, and then, when he was invalided out, he was sent to a Midlands factory on ‘work of national importance’. But this wasn’t enough for Len and soon the factory had its own band, and the staff were entertained with lunchtime concerts. There were gigs in the neighbourhood (i.e. engagements for dances, to those readers unfamiliar with the Musicians’ Union patois) and every week-end there were variety shows in the big Midland theatres and at the army camps. So Len went on, organizing shows, drumming and dancing, until September 1945, when he tried his luck in London as a film extra.

Lady Luck smiled again and he walked on – and occasionally off – in such films as ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, ‘I See a Dark Stranger’, ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘London Town’, and of course, ‘Caesar’.

Then back to variety and another series of tours; one notable one was with Ralph Reader’s ‘Gang Show’.

‘You ask Dickie Emery when you see him – he’ll remember those days. And Cardew Robinson, and Reg Dixon – they were all in the “Gang Show”… . After that I toured with Hylda Baker, running the band, doing three dance routines, and working in the sketches too.’ (Len knows, y’know…) ‘And I followed that up with a couple of years as entertainments’ manager at Exmouth, organizing everything from the concert parties to the bathing beauty contests.’

So far Len’s theatrical experience had been on the lighter side, but soon after this he transferred to ‘the legit’, as property-master and stage-manager – first for Linnit and Dunfee, then H. M. Tennant, and also Jack Hylton.

His last job outside television was at the Stoll Theatre, with ‘Kismet’, so when A-R got into its stride, all he had to do was walk next door and get himself a job – 22 August, 1955, as a setting assistant. And on 1 January 1956, he moved into the property department, and has hardly moved out of it since.

‘We don’t make props here, like they do in the theatre,’ he explains, lighting another cigarette. ‘That would be impossible. We’re more of a supply depot, you might say. When we get the prop lists through from the directors, we go through them with the buyers – then, anything we can supply out of stock is marked off; everything else is hired. But of course, if something we hire fails to materialize on the day – it’s up to us.’ He brushes off what appears to be part of an old bicycle, and rests his elbows on the desk. ‘Here, necessity is the mother of invention. I’ve often had to go and knock up the people in the shops over the road, on nights when things haven’t turned up. I remember once, we were short of a lawn-mower, and I borrowed one from a pal of mine. He was actually cutting the grass when I rang up – but we got it all right.’

‘Of course, we can’t just use any old thing. We’ve got to be accurate. You get a Victorian sofa in a Louis drawing-room, and first thing you know, there’ll be a buzz on the ’phone. Somebody will spot it… Like when we do scenes in shops – we have to go round blocking out all the trade-names, on every tin and package and showcard in the set. Can’t go giving them all free plugs, can we?’

Sofas, showcards, soda-syphons… Len’s department is responsible for everything from a to z; from artichokes to – well, a zebra is one of the few objects they haven’t been asked for… Yet!’

‘Oh, we deal with a lot of livestock.’ He thinks back rapidly. ‘Dogs and cats, parrots, lion-cubs, monkeys, goldfish, a fourteen-foot python – and even mice. We’ve got one mouse upstairs who lives here permanently, ever since he escaped from a conjurer in one of the children’s programmes.

‘We had a goat here, too, a little while back; tethered to a bench, on a nice piece of tarpaulin, to keep the place clean and tidy. But he got loose, and ate every blessed thing he could get at – goodness knows how many paper flowers he polished off. He even ate the tarpaulin.’

And there is the studio cat, Boxer; an impressive black-and-white tom who has made sixteen appearances (intentionally) on the screen to date, in every show from ‘Murder Bag’ to ‘The Red Grass’. Len claims that Boxer is the least temperamental of TV stars – even if he does think that ‘Cool for’ was named after him.

‘What do I do in my spare time?… Well, I’m still keen on music. Maybe you saw me let my hair down at the Christmas party, singing a couple of numbers with the band! Jazz is one of my hobbies; I’ve got a collection of jazz records – two hundred and twenty-one of them. And I watch television at week-ends. The Palladium Show’s one of my favourites; I still like variety.’

The ’phone rings; he finds it under the bric-a-brac, and has a brief conversation with Television House.

‘Yes, Frank… A settee you’ve got there, to come to us tonight?… Right – you can put it on with the next lot. The stuff we’ve got coming back now is nothing much – only about eight articles. That mahogany writing-table, a chest of drawers, and the grandfather clock – only odds and ends. No big stuff at all.’

He rings off, and tries to remember what he was saying. ‘Eh? Oh – the Palladium Show… I’m only sorry I’ve never seen a single one of our shows, either on the screen or from the floor. The next one I see will be the first.’

Let us hope that when the great moment finally arrives – if it ever does – Len will enjoy what he sees. As long as he docs not spot an Edwardian whatnot in a Regency boudoir, he probably will.

The post Track in on… Len Fraser Prop and Mainstay appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

After what he refers to as ‘a lifetime in show business’, Des McCormack has learned that you should never be surprised by the unexpected.

He learned that lesson the hard way, when (at the age of eighteen) he applied for his first job in the theatre, and was employed in a touring pantomime.

‘It was “Cinderella”,’ he reminisces, in that distinctive voice – midway between hoarse and fruity. ‘My father and mother wrote off to the manager to get me fixed up. He fixed me up all right; he wrote a letter back saying I could start my theatrical career by playing one of the flunkeys, and “looking after P…” He was crafty, you see; we thought the “P” stood for “properties” – and it did – but it stood for “ponies” as well… I still remember one train-call, doing the trip from Salford to Bridlington in a horse-box. Just me and four ponies…’

Nowadays ‘looking after P…’ can stand for ‘personnel’ or ‘props’, or practically anything from panics to panel-game-players. But Des sits back behind his desk on the first floor of Television House, and takes life as it comes, regarding every new trick of fate with a faintly astonished curl of the lip and one raised eyebrow.

If only he had followed up the flunkey role instead of the property-master, Des might have developed into a deadpan comedian in the Aldwych farce tradition; Ralph Lynn without his monocle, amalgamated with Tom Walls minus his moustache.

‘Oh, I have appeared from time to time – perforce,’ he admits dryly. ‘I once played one of the Broker’s Men in panto; and I was so ruddy awful at the first house that I wasn’t asked to go on at the second. So I stuck to being on the stage staff. It’s more regular employment – and there are enough bad actors in the world, without me.’

Just how many actors there are – good, bad or indifferent – no-one knows better than Des.

He was on tour when he was eighteen months old, accompanying his parents as they travelled the country with a musical act. It was all in the family tradition; his mother was already with the circus by the time she was eight, and grandpapa played the flute and piccolo in the pit orchestra at Bury St Edmunds, where he first looked over the footlights and saw grandmama on stage.

Des’s father was a Dublin man, who started by managing a cinema in Galway.

‘Did you ever hear of Cladaugh, in Galway? That’s where I came from really; they call it the city of the tribes – the people are supposed to be descended from survivors of the Spanish Armada. And you can still see traces of it in some of the Cladaugh girls… They have their own wedding ring; like this one I’m wearing…’ He shows it to you; two hands holding a heart between the finger-tips, surmounted by a crown. ‘I picked it up when I was over there last. They make them for the tourists now, really. Still, it’s interesting… Might make a programme out of it.’

Des has always been interested in almost everything. He has been involved and interested in every branch of show business, he claims – except sound radio and ice show.

After schooling, divided between Gloucestershire, where he lived with his aunt, and a later spell in Warrington, where his family made their home, he started work in the theatre, and has never stopped.

(Somewhere along the line, he seems to have picked up a brother called Stephen, who also went into television.)

But in Des’s early days, television was still a gleam in the eye of John Logic Baird. He toured for Prince Littler, in such shows as ‘White Horse Inn’, ‘Glamorous Night’, and ‘Careless Rapture’, as property master or carpenter.

When the war cut across his life, Des joined the Royal Armoured Corps, as a tank driver-operator. He was working in mine-sweeping tanks; Shermans fitted with chain flails that beat up the ground ahead and detonated any mines in the vicinity – and managed to pick up a leg wound in the process.

Scarred but civilian, he returned at last to the theatre as if he had never been away, and after a spell in pantomime (his first love, but this time without the ponies) at Golders Green, he joined Mrs John Christie (the late Audrey Mildmay) at Glyndebourne. He worked on their first post-war season of opera, taking Britten’s ‘Rape of Lucrece’ with Kathleen Ferrier first to Sadlers Wells and then abroad to Amsterdam and The Hague.

In 1946, the Glyndebourne Children’s Theatre sent out a touring company, playing to schools all over the country – ‘in everything from barns to cow-sheds!’ They started at Toynbee Hall, and soon had a repertoire including ‘Tobias and the Angel’, ‘She Stoops to Conquer’, ‘Abraham Lincoln’, and ‘Great Expectations’. Original producer – Mr Anthony Quayle, and a young but very experienced stage-carpenter – Mr Desmond McCormack.

This was followed by a season of melodramas at the old Bedford Theatre, Camden Town (‘Everything from “East Lynne” to “Trilby”, but not for long’) and then Des found himself stage-managing eleven shows a day, in a strange, unfamiliar medium called television, at the Birmingham Radio Exhibition. Pye were demonstrating colour television (the previous year, another unknown called Michael Westmore had been in charge, at Olympia) – and somehow the electronic theatre got into Des’s blood at last.

There were a couple of final flings in the ‘legit’ – a tour of ‘Meet Mr Callaghan’ with Derek de Marney, and a season at Canterbury Rep. – but Des and television could not be parted, and he began to work on a free-lance basis as a stage manager at Lime Grove. (One of his first programmes was a children’s serial written by an unknown author called – but come to think of it, he still is unknown, so who cares?)

‘I once appeared in a serial called “The Railway Children”, with Ronnie Marriott. We were a couple of farm yokels; I know I had on a check suit, and I just had time to throw down my stage-managing clipboard, and pick up a bowler hat, and then rush on to say my lines… Which mostly consisted of “Arrrr”, as far as I can remember. Friends who saw it said I gave a very convincing portrait of an Irish bookmaker.’

Then came 1955, and – as so often happens in this series – came the dawn. He joined A-R as a trainee floor-manager, and while still on the training course at Viking Studios was offered the job of assistant production manager at Wembley; where he stayed from 22 August 1955 to 30 December 1957 – during which time he did everything, from ensuring that the dressing-rooms were in that state in which an artist would wish to find them, to editing our distinguished forerunner, ‘The Wembley Wail’.

And now he sits, as we said earlier, behind a paper-strewn desk, as assistant studio manager (TV House), taking life as it comes.

‘We might have five crises at once… Or it might be a completely peaceful day,’ he says optimistically. ‘I might be out chasing people who haven’t turned up – or acting as general information centre for the studios – or – well, I try to be the oil that keeps the machine running.’

Setting, lighting, rehearsal rooms, tube-hours, liaison with schedules, liaison with artists – even seeing that the crews get their tea-breaks – all of these are just a part of Des’s job.

‘I’ve had three and a half years of it now, and I can’t say they’ve been uneventful; but on the other hand they’ve been so crowded with little incidents – there’s no single thing you could pick out.’

Little things… Like the time Studio 1 was flooded, when the drains went wrong just before transmission, and the actors in a Robert Tronson production had to splash around as silently as possible in inches of water, while the camera cables were dragged up out of harm’s way, and Des helped to build a barricade of sandbags to dam the rising tide.

Or that time when the Mole-Richardson camera ran amok during a rehearsal of ‘Double Your Money’, and Don Gale crashed through several rows of audience chairs, finishing up on the rostrum, and claiming that he had held focus every inch of the way.

‘You see what I mean,’ Des sighs. ‘There really aren’t any particular highlights. 1 just sit back and contemplate the shows we’ve done, and – excuse me.’

He breaks off to answer a persistent telephone, as the day’s sixth crisis breaks loose. Either the performing seals are trapped in the lift, or there’s been a camera breakdown in Studios 7 and 8, and for once Jim is Out…

But whatever Des may do, one thing is certain. He will never have time to sit back – and contemplate.

The post Track in on… Des McCormack looking after P——! appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

You almost expect her to add: ‘And open a little wider’ – but Pam Elliott’s overall is a rosy pink instead of a dental white. Reassured, you relax, and put yourself in her hands for the next ten minutes. ‘We start with a base of pan-stick all over the face,’ Pam explains briskly, setting to work at once. ‘There – now look up. We have to light the eyes underneath, to wipe out any dark shadows.’

For just over five years, Pam has been working as a television make-up artist. Ever since she was a little girl in Ealing (where she still lives) she has been interested in make-up; like most little girls, she used to practise with her mother’s powder and lipstick when she got the chance – though this was not encouraged. There was no family tradition of greasepaint; in fact, Mr. Elliott is a department head at Negretti and Zambra, the scientific instrument makers. But Pam wanted to deal with people instead of barometers, so she took a firm grasp of her mother’s lipstick – and made up her mind.

When she left school, she enrolled in the Barrett Street Technical College, taking a course in Beauty Culture and Hairdressing which lasted three years. She wasn’t so keen on the hairdressing side of it, but she couldn’t take one without the other – and now she is often grateful for that early training. ‘You see, I never had the slightest intention of going into this sort of work,’ she says. ‘Sit forward and look in the mirror.’ She stands back and surveys her handiwork critically, then picks up a powder-puff and returns to the attack.

‘I really wanted to go into a Beauty Salon,’ she continues. ‘But when I was due to leave, I found it was impossible to get that sort of job without further training – and anyway, I was too young. So they asked me if I’d like to go along to the BBC for an interview. I didn’t want the BBC job at all, but I was desperate – and I certainly didn’t want to be a hairdresser – so off I went.’

‘I had to do a couple of test make-ups; one straight, and one character. It was just a question of ageing somebody, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do – we’d never done any TV make-up at the college. I just had to guess and invent as I went along. I was so determined to avoid the trap of overdoing it that I don’t suppose I did nearly enough… Still, they must have been able to tell the difference between the character and the straight make-up, I suppose, because I heard a few days later that there was a job for me if I wanted it.’

She began as a trainee for about a year, then as a make-up assistant for another fifteen months. And right from the start, Pam worked with Mrs Barrie Hansard – now head of Associated-Rediffusion’s make-up department. ‘If it hadn’t been for Barrie, I don’t suppose I would have come to A-R; but when Barrie moved over, I moved with her. We started in July, 1955, doing dummy-run shows. On the opening night, I was working at the Mayfair Hotel; I remember my first real job for an A-R programme was to make up the American singer, Marti Stevens, who was appearing in the cabaret… ‘Shut your eyes, please.’

You blink and obey, as Pam brushes your eyebrows and darkens them slightly. ‘That’s better… I suppose the shows I’ve enjoyed working on most were the Peter Sellers series. They were certainly the heaviest from a make-up point of view, and the biggest challenge… All those plastic noses…’

Another of her favourites was Cyril Coke’s production of ‘Yellow Jack’. ‘We had to do a lot of research beforehand into the symptoms of yellow fever; a medical consultant helped and advised us, because patients look different at different stages of the disease… It was great fun’ she concludes brightly, with the real enthusiast’s gleam in her eye. ‘Oh, it’s a wonderful job. I can’t imagine wanting to do anything else. Of course, it does get a little hectic sometimes. Once, on the “Butlin” series at Clacton, when we had a real rush job to do, we actually made-up several people who weren’t appearing on the programme at all!’

‘But that wasn’t so embarrassing as an awful moment after a costume drama, when I hurried on to the floor to collect all the beards and moustaches from the actors… Well, I suppose it was a tribute to our work in a way; after all, TV make-up has to be convincing, even from a few inches away… Yes, that’s right; in the confusion, I tried to remove a moustache from one man – and he’d grown it specially for the part.’

She dabs a damp sponge over your face to take off any excessively ‘matt’ appearance.

‘You don’t want to look as if you’re made-up,’ she explains, then whisks away the overall that covers you. ‘There – that’s finished… Good luck!’ You stand up and admire the result in the mirror; pink and glowing with health, your eyes sparkling, your eyebrows beautifully brushed. And you think – ‘Is that really me?’ Well – no. Not really. It’s mostly Pam Elliott…

The post Track in on… Pam Elliott who made up her mind appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

In fact his present job, in charge of the General Office and Post Room on the second floor of Television House, probably ranks high on his list of long-term occupations, for he has been at Kingsway for over three years. Before that, he was – in his own phrase – ‘a bit of a rolling stone’.

He was born 45 years ago, in Portsmouth Military Hospital, but his boyhood was spent around Dovercourt and Harwich, learning to sail and fish, and living by, with, on and frequently in the North Sea.

When he was fifteen, he joined the Merchant Service and began to travel. For some time he worked on the Red Star line, living in Antwerp when he was ashore, and getting to know and like the Belgian way of life. ‘I picked up a certain amount of the language,’ he says, admitting disarmingly: ‘Well, the bad language, anyhow.’

His next job was on board the S.S. Belgianland, under the command of the United States Mercantile Marine – a luxury passenger-liner of 42,000 tons, with a cargo that seemed to consist largely of retired millionaires and beautiful blondes. But high life can pall after a time, and during one world tour he left the ship in North China, to spend six months working in a North Chinese coal-mine… ‘Well, I got kind of interested in the place and the people – still am, as a matter of fact – and I wanted to get to know it better.’

Between times, he returned to Harwich, and when he couldn’t get a ship, he began to take temporary jobs in various hospitals as a medical orderly.

He even had one brush with show business, when he acted as Publicity Manager for a lady fortune-teller called ‘The Hooded Woman’ who was touring East Anglia at the time. The war broke out, and Mr Short found himself attached to the Admiralty for marine salvage and degaussing; when that job was over, he returned to hospitals again, and worked for some years at the British Legion Sanatorium near Maidstone in charge of the surgical wards.

At last the rolling stone paused for a moment… Emergency operations in the small hours of the night, and shift-work all round the clock – somehow, it had lost some of its original glamour, and Mr Short decided to try the experiment of regular working-hours.

He heard of an interesting post in the General Office of the British Electric Traction Company at Stratton House, and worked there for two years; then – almost by accident – he found himself being transferred to Television House.

If moss ever does grow on this rolling stone, it will be Hertfordshire moss. Mr Short has been living in Herts for the last two and a half years, and finds that staying in one place has its compensations.

‘I watch television a good deal,’ he admits. ‘I like the serious programmes chiefly; drama, features, anything of a philosophical nature… Mind you, I won’t say I’m not partial to a ‘whodunnit’ now and again – I am. And I’m passionately fond of music; any kind of music, so long as it’s good of its kind. I’m what you might call catholic in my tastes.’

Light Entertainment doesn’t have quite such a strong appeal; for instance, it would probably be true to say that Mr Short has seen Michael Miles more frequently in the General Office than on the screen.

‘I’ll never forget that time we were sorting letters for Mr Miles’ Diamond Rush…’ His walnut face pales slightly at the recollection. ‘You know, we had one and a half million entries for that contest.’

In a single day, the total number of letters coming through Mr Short’s office may top 70,000. If you ask him how he begins to cope with this amount of mail, he shrugs calmly: ‘It’s just a question of organization; everybody knows what his job is, and gets on with it. So many start sorting, so many delivering and collecting round the floors. Apart from my assistant, Mr Pullen, I’ve got seven boys working in the office at present, aged between sixteen and nineteen. Of course, they come and go; a good many of our boys have moved on to really good jobs on the technical start. We’re rather proud of that – if there is an opportunity for a promising lad, I like to help him along if I can.’

Mr Short’s past training comes in handy; his attitude to his teen-age staff owes something to the Bos’un in charge of a bunch of ‘first-trippers’ – and an occasional reversion to hospital experience, as he watches for revealing symptoms. (‘Some of them smoke too much, and don’t get enough sleep… I have to keep an eye on them.’)

But he enjoys his work, and finds life continually interesting. ‘Being in the Post Room makes you a bit of a philosopher,’ he says. ‘Well, you’re always meeting people – and you never know what you’re going to be faced with. We get some very peculiar parcels sometimes – the other day there was a box of kippers – and once we had a bundle of dirty laundry from a viewer in Wales. She said she couldn’t get her husband’s shirts really white, so would we please pass the enclosed on to Mrs Bradshaw, and let her get on with it.’

Does this all mean that the rolling stone has settled down at last?

Mr Short nods briskly. ‘Oh, I think so.’ Then he smiles, and adds: ‘But then I always think so, every time… After all, you never know what might be round the corner!’

But at this moment, there is only one thing coming round the corner – the afternoon collection of office mail. The door opens, and a stream of boys bustle in, with their arms full of letters, packages, memos and Ooms … Mr Short takes one brief look, squares his shoulders, and sets to work again.

The post Track in on… Albert Short for general post appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

If you didn’t know him, you might imagine Tony Hulley was a tennis champion; quick, lithe, with the seamed brown face of a man who spends most of his life under a blazing sun. But Tony’s appearance would be misleading, for his sun is usually a battery of lights, and his feet are set firmly on the floor. First he danced on floors; now he manages them.

‘Well, my family were all theatre people’, he explains. ‘Grandfather composed comic operas, my father was a ’cellist – as a matter of fact he played for Pavlova – and my mother was one of George Edwarde’s Gaiety Girls’.

He even married inside the charmed circle of show business, for Mrs Tony Hulley used to be Marjorie Cormack, and they met backstage at Drury Lane during the run of ‘Careless Rapture’.

Now they live at South Harrow, and Tony has a family of three to ‘manage’, when they hold the floor – Bunty and Marian, who go to dancing lessons and are obviously destined to follow in their father’s footsteps; and David, the renegade, who is looking towards the Navy instead of the Theatre, and sees himself as a budding Lieutenant-Commander. Even so, he might still finish up at Television House…

‘Of course, I started in the theatre very young – I’d only just left school when I got my first job. In the chorus, on a tour of – let me think – “That’s A Good Girl” … It seems a long time ago. Thirty years next December’. Tony frowns faintly at the relentless speed of passing time; even tap-dancers have to give it best. Then he throws back his head and laughs – and time is forgotten. ‘Mind you, I got the sack from that job!’

‘I was understudying a small part, and the chap who played it was taken sick. It was only one line – I had to go on and serve a writ on somebody, just before the first act curtain, saying: “Mr Barrow, sir… ?” That was all…

I was dead keen; I put on a full character make-up – I even wore a hump-back – I was determined to build up the part! The trouble was, all the rest of the company collapsed, and I was fired… Still, I really stopped the show.’ This setback didn’t last long, and Tony’s career began to sound like a page from ‘Who’s Who in the Theatre’. ‘Follow Through’ – ‘Little Tommy Tucker’ – ‘White Horse Inn’ (with an up-and-coming youngster called Jimmy Hanley) – ‘Stop Press’ – ‘Why Not Tonight?’ – ‘Latin Quarter’ – ‘Paris to Piccadilly’ – and a spell as one of Mr Cochran’s Young Gentlemen in ‘Words and Music’ (together with another Young Gentleman called Cyril Butcher).

His first brush with television was as a dancer, nearly ten years ago, in a Henry Caldwell production; but the medium never really beckoned until, after working as a dance teacher for the Buddy Bradley and Joan Davis schools, Tony was rung up in July ’55 by Ted Beaumont.

Would Tony like to be an assistant floor-manager for Associated-Rediffusion? Tony decided he would. He joined the staff and after a few weeks at the Granville Theatre found himself floor-managing A-R’s first live drama production, the opening episode of ‘Sixpenny Corner’, from Viking Studios.

‘And I’ve never regretted it for a minute’, he says cheerfully. ‘Oh, yes; I suppose you do miss the live theatre – you miss the contact with the audience, you miss the warmth – and that excitement just before the overture on a big opening night… But then, in TV, you get that every night. You know the programme I enjoyed working on most? Peter Croft’s “Jubilee Show”. That had everything – the music, the audience – a real theatre atmosphere…’

His worst television memory is that famous production of ‘White Carnation’, when the play was off the air for the first eight minutes, and Cyril Coke in the gallery had to cut as he went along to make up the missing time.

‘He gave me the cuts during transmission’, Tony remembers, slightly glazed. ‘There I was, trying to tell the cast: “Now we’re cutting from shot 83 to shot 91 – that cuts your scene at the front door.” They all looked very sceptical – I suppose they thought I’d gone crazy – but they did it somehow, thank heavens… And we came out on time.’

‘In a way, I sometimes feel I’d like to be back in front of the cameras. (Actually, my ear was in front of the camera once on “Take Your Pick”, but luckily that was a tele-recording, so it was taken out.)… You know, when I retire I think I might make a come-back. I can’t imagine myself retiring, anyway – pottering round gardens – I’m not cut out for that. No, I’ve often thought I might start again as a character actor, when I’ve got a nice crop of white hair. A sort of Grand Old Man of Television.’ Tony grins, and the Grand Old Man seems a long way away.

‘But first I’d like – well, I suppose all floor-managers would like to be directors some day. I’ve got a lot to learn yet – so much technical stuff – you’re always learning in this job; but eventually I’d like to have a go. Light Entertainment; that’s what I’d like… Musicals’.

He breaks off and looks at his watch, as one or two of the girls pass him on their way into the studio. He stubs out his cigarette, and calls: ‘Five minutes, dear’.

He taps one foot absently, then slides into a soft-shoe routine with one of the girls as he disappears into the studio.

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She leaves her North London flat each morning soon after eleven, travels to Television House, works till two-thirty returns home, gets back to Kingsway just before six, puts up the metal grille at ten-thirty, and finally gets back home around eleven-fifteen. Which — when you’ve also got a husband (Alec) and a ten-year-old son (Eric) to look after — makes a pretty long day.

Holidays excepted, she’s been following this routine ever since the Rediffusion Club first opened in October, 1955; and those two-and-a-bit years have made her a genuine TV personality. How many girls in the shooting-star world of television are known exclusively by their Christian names? Sabrina may spring prominently to mind, but Betty, with a less bizarre name, can claim an even more devoted band of followers. Perhaps not one of her customers in a hundred knows her as “Mrs. Bowes” — but everyone who has ever visited the Rediffusion Club knows “Betty”.

Alec Bowes is a wine-waiter in a West End hotel; but though they are both in the catering business, they have never worked together, and they did not meet over a corkscrew. Apart from a war-time spell in the Women’s Services, Betty admits that she has spent most of her working life behind bars… Mostly theatre bars, she adds hastily. (Like “Oklahoma!” Betty spent three years at Drury Lane.) But she wouldn’t want to go back to the theatre now, or the jangle of the interval bell.

“It’s a passing trade,” she explains. “You never get to know anybody. Television’s quite different; you couldn’t call it boring, could you? The time never hangs, if you know what I mean.”

In Television House, Betty has to know people. Not always their surnames, perhaps, and probably not their jobs — but she knows a thousand faces, and can fit a Christian name to most of them. Best of all, she knows what they like to drink. Mostly it’s straightforward; the Studios come in thirsty and hot, needing beer; the Fourth Floor splice the mainbrace with something stronger; a Third Floor customer might occasionally ask for a Pimm’s Number One.

But the Fifth Floor demands — and usually gets — anything and everything.

“I think I know most drinks by now.” Betty Hashes a smile as bright as a new penny. “A ‘Cameraman’s Kick’, for instance —That started with the camera-boys from Wembley; it’s a lager-and-lime, but lots of other people besides cameramen have taken it up now.”

Then there’s the “Morley Special”, which comes from the Features Department, and is a judicious blend of martini-and-soda. This too is getting increasingly popular. Betty doesn’t get a chance to see Mr. Morley’s programmes — she says it’s an awful shame, but when would she have the time? — but she does know that the “Morley Special” gets a very high rating. “Mind you, the Design Department gave me a tough one, when they started asking for a ‘Negroni’. It’s campari, vermouth and gin —the only trouble is, it takes time, and when the bar’s crowded… Well, Michael just has to wait.” Betty wipes the bar-top in short, lightning movements until it is spotless once more, then continues:

“Of course, there are some who ask for things with funny names, just to show off if you know what I mean. A ‘Horse’s Neck’, for instance — it’s only brandy-and-ginger. Well, you might just as well say brandy-and-ginger, mightn’t you?” She sees the fashions in drink rise and fall; vodka used to be very popular, taken with tomato juice in the form of a “Bloody Mary” — but whether or not it’s because Television House feels by now it has had just about all it can take of Soviet Russia, the “Bloody Mary” is on the way out.

Betty’s own personal choice? A Scotch and dry ginger. It’s warming — and that’s another way our drinking habits reflect the passage of time. More whisky is drunk in winter; more gin in summer. For a short time after New Year’s Eve, there was a run on soft drinks, and the sale of cigarettes noticeably dropped — but most noble resolutions, Betty remembers, slipped after a couple of nights.

Thursdays are Betty’s busiest nights now, though at one time it used to be Fridays. She says it’s because of “This Week”, though she can’t explain quite why. Surely that rush of custom can’t all be due to Mr. Hunt?

For a while, light music was served in the bar, as well as refreshments. Betty was responsible for running and changing the tapes, which were amplified — perhaps too well amplified — through a small speaker hanging from the partition…. But the experiment didn’t work. As the customers pointed out: “If you can recognise the tune — it’s too loud.” The tape-machine disappeared; but Betty doesn’t mourn its passing, nor does she nurse any secret ambition to take a job in S.T.U.

“I’m very happy here,” she says. “Really I am! The only thing I hate is washing up glasses, but apart from that… Well, I wouldn’t change. It’s such a varied sort of life.” Someone raps on the bar with a half-crown, and Betty flicks a reassuring smile at him.

“You’re next, dear… She adds in an undertone: “Of course, you have to be diplomatic sometimes — well, you know how it is. You do get the odd one or two who may be a bit naughty, now and again, but most of them — they’re very nice…

She hands over the change, and moves along the bar.

“Now, then — what’ll it be?”

Same again, Betty. And please have a scotch-and-dry—on us.

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Weston Drury, casting director for Associated-Rediffusion, has a memory jogger all his own.

He has his “voices” but they are not supernatural. It is just an art acquired through the years, a part of his craft.

He conjures them up, he says, whenever he reads a script. Voices of actors and actresses playing, in his imagination, the roles on the script before him.

When the reading is complete, one of the toughest parts of the job is complete. He knows which artist is the one to play the part. From there routine takes over.

He must check on availability, confer on terms. If there is a hitch; if the person he wants is not available, he must rack a near-photographic memory to find a substitute.

“Producers come to me with their ideas,” says Weston, who is rising 60 and ruddy complexioned.

“They tell me they want Sir Laurence Olivier. I take note of their requirements but my own methods generally give me the best pointer to the right man for the right part.”

The “voices” of Weston Drury are not the be-all and end-all of his casting system. He has a file, indexed and cross-indexed, which will eventually contain 10,000 names.

Actors and actresses are split into ten categories; there are nine categories under the heading musical; six for orchestras; three for opera; seven for specialities. Everyone who appears on ITV comes under one or other of the many headings.

And everyone, it seems, wants to get into ITV.

One letter caused Mr. Drury to chuckle. It said: Dear Sir, I would like a part as a great leader of armies as, in a previous stage of my existence I was Julius Caesar. Apart from that I could also play a great politician — in another of my previous existences I was Benjamin Disraeli. And if there is nothing going in that line, could you find me a part opposite Margaret Lockwood…

Occasionally a letter turns up which shows why a casting office is sometimes known, in the business, as heartbreak house.

Like those from once-great names who beg for bit parts. One, received recently, stated frankly… “I have not done a thing for 40 weeks.”

Like letters from youngsters who have just left dramatic schools and are beginning to find that acting is only rewarding when you are working.

Always he reads each letter carefully, looking for a hint in the writing that it was sent by somebody who will make a TV star.

Lack of experience does not rule out the writer.

What does he look for?

“To be honest, I do not know. You can’t always tell from a letter — but you can sometimes. It’s easier, though, when you see the person.”

Easier — like the time a 12-year-old was sent to him.

“There was electricity in the air as soon as she started to speak. I knew I was listening to a girl who was to be the greatest discovery of my life.

“She had no real experience. I was amazed to find she didn’t even come from an acting family. She had a confidence and a way with her that prophesied great things.

“She wasn’t even pretty in those days. You wouldn’t call her an ugly duckling but she would not have won a beauty contest.

“Her film tests were wonderful. I still remember how I raved over them.”

The girl was Jean Simmons.

With Edward Black, Drury helped launch the biggest star-building campaign in British film history — when names like James Mason, Stewart Granger, Phyllis Calvert, Dennis Price, Anne Crawford and Jean Kent, became common-place.

His own career started at the age of eight, Little Drury, midget comedian, he was called then. He worked through music halls and concert parties; musical comedies and revues; produced top line variety shows; was stage director at the London Palladium; general manager at a top theatrical agency; casting director at Elstree; for Warner Brothers; Gaumont-British; J. Arthur Rank and others.

“What about discoveries since you started in ITV?” I asked.

“We are a bit young for that,” he says, “but I think we shall see big things from Anne Valery and Michael Trubshawe.”

Films and plays

HE spends hours on the telephone and, when he leaves his office in Television House he still has “homework.”

Five nights a week he goes to a film or a play. When he leaves each show he has listed, in those “unwritten files,” the performance every member of every cast has given, its type and its quality.

He was present recently at a High Court case. As he and a companion left, when the case was over, he was asked: “What did you think of the verdict?”

“Fair enough,” said Drury, “but I think the Judge was miscast. Felix Aylmer would have played the part much better.”

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1. a bennett: a top 10 programme list, 2. a bowles: a quick round of drinks, 3. a bultitude: a multitude of wires, 4. a butler’s tray: a features schedule, 5. to cadle: to subject to severe scrutiny, 6. to coke: to go away (generally abroad), 7. a cole: fifth floor inhabitant of long standing, 8. a davey: special accounts, 9. to decoke: to come back to Television House, 10. to elkan allan: to ride a bicycle, 11. to elman: to vet, 12. to everett: disappear on an OB, 13. to gee-emm: to run to the fourth floor, 14. to groocock: to prepare minutes, 15. to hoskins: to release, 16. kemp-welch: lavish, 17. a lee: a dazzling array of lights, 18. a maynard: an unlockable lock, 19. moirish: comparative of donnish, 20. to morley: to mingle with the famous, 21. paine: climbing sales, 22. willes: full of virtue or sin, 23. a wills: a large group of companies, 24. a yates: special cigarette holder.

Should these words come into wide use you might hear conversations among staff something like this… The experienced, willesed secretary was typing out a davey sheet. ‘Can’t hurry, my boss will cadle and elman them tomorrow before he gee-emms,’ she told her cole boy-friend on the phone. ‘That’s all right. I’ve still got to groocock a meeting. What about going out for a kemp-welch meal first then we’ll decoke.’

‘Hoskins the lee switches and break the door’s maynard. We must get the butler’s tray into the bennett or there will be no paine for the wills.’ He clutched his yates between his teeth and surveyed the bultitude. ‘Come and have a bowles before I tackle that lot,’ he said to his moirish companion. ‘Sorry, old man. I must everett,’ his friend declined. ‘I’ve got to morley on my elkan allan. Tomorrow I coke.’

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But none of these things seemed to happen. Instead I found myself padding down all the same old jungle tracks that I had been padding down since 1955. The outline idea of the series had been born. Now I was frantic to find really first-class writers and excellent actors. Could we be assured of adequate rehearsal time and could we get all the equipment and crews we wanted? Would enough money to do the job properly come pouring out of the cornucopia that general manager John McMillan keeps under his desk? In fact I had exactly the same longings and hysterical anxieties that I had experienced during the direction of more than 50 plays over the past ten years.

This is heresy, I thought. You are not a director any longer. You are a producer. God has said so. You must stop thinking about all those unimportant things and think only about money and not spending it. So I thought a lot about money – and frightened myself. What I needed was a yardstick, something I could rely on to guide me through these new and uncharted waters – a sort of Gamekeeper’s Lode Star.

Parallel to all this mental agony the plan went ahead – writers were commissioned. Actors were approached and everyone liked the idea. An overall shape and ‘smell’ was emerging. We began to get excited. I found myself cornering directors in corridors and selling the idea like mad. Eric Maschwitz got visibly more and more excited and cigarette ash was piling up a foot high all round him. Gerald Flood, Glyn Owen and Philip Stone were to be our stars and I could not have been happier. Things were rolling.

Then, suddenly, along came the Budget. Like one has a sudden attack of shingles, so we had a sudden attack of Budget. I realised that the figure suggested was not nearly enough – enough for a couple of ‘Small Times’ and an outdoor broadcast of a fishing contest on the Ouse perhaps; but for a series of 13 terrific stories ranging all over Europe that would pulse and throb entertainment from the screen, no. Definitely no. We’d be lucky if we managed to go on location at Bognor Regis for a Thursday afternoon, let alone filming in Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm and Ireland as the writers and I were planning. So we sent the skinny, sickly little budget figure back for a sort of rest cure with a polite note to the Doctor. After a while it came back just a little fatter and looking a tiny bit more healthy. If I took very, very great care of it, it might just have a chance. But it really did look awfully wan and pathetic lying there in its Blyton cot.

Now things were really happening. Raymond Bowers was in Madrid writing the first four stories. Paul Lee was visiting Stockholm to get the atmosphere for his three episodes while Jeremy Paul was in Lisbon sorting out his. Victor Canning, whose stories were to be set in Southern Ireland, was well under way. But I still hadn’t found my yardstick – my Lode Star. By mid-July all 13 scripts had been delivered. All the meetings and planning with our writers were now paying off. Fred Pusey, who was to be in charge of design for the series, and I went on a detailed reconnaissance to all the locations. James Ormerod accompanied us to Madrid since he was to do his own filming there while I was to take care of the filming in Lisbon and Stockholm.

Back home, a lot of behind-the-scenes work by Eric was now beginning to bear fruit and the incomparable Stella Ashley was legitimising us with studio management and scheduling. Bill Hitchcock and Don Gale were going to be able to direct the remaining stories. I was in good hands. And then suddenly we hurtled off on three weeks’ filming in Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Under Nick Hague’s expert and Machiavellian management we carved our merry way through acres of filming. But, right from the start, I was haunted, haunted by the everlasting question: how much is it all costing? Who was paying for those drinks on the aircraft? Surely we don’t n$ed all that transport? Colour film for the stills man? I hope we’re not paying all those drivers in that traffic jam that the police are engineering for us in the middle of Madrid? Who are all those people over there? Not extras I hope. (Nick: ‘Calm down, Cyril! Have a drink – an orange juice.’) ‘But Nick four guineas for 12 coffees and pastries in Stockholm?’

I was certain that all the money for the entire series would be completely spent long before we’d even got back to England. Early call after early call, late wrap-up after late wrap-up (and all costing money mind you), day after day. Thank Heaven everyone was too exhausted to spend much of the company’s money at night just eating. The sound recordist’s tummy trouble certainly saved us a lot of money on food – and I was glad to see symptoms developing in some of the more voracious members of the unit. Under budget we had to be, even if we all went home skeletons. But everyone was magnificent. Not only did we manage to achieve exactly what we had set out to do, but what was even more staggering, we actually finished well under budget. I breathed again.

One day after we had returned to England I was sitting in my office thinking about the whole project, when suddenly I realised how much I would like to direct the whole damn series myself – all 13 episodes. I felt a sneaking jealousy of Messrs. Ormerod, Hitchcock and Gale. Lucky fellows, I thought. And then it happened. I found my Producer’s Lode Star. This was the secret – for me at least, to make every effort, to get 13 fine scripts, first-class actors, ample time and money, and the feeling that I hated to part with every single story. Then to get them all polished and neatly dressed to be handed over, a little reluctantly perhaps, but with a paternal smile. As I said before, they were all going into good hands.

P.S. Oh, didn’t I tell you what the series is all about? Well, they say it’s going to start on February 1. It’s called ‘The Rat Catchers’.

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