‘It happened, as most good topical TV features seem to happen now, on ITV’s “This Week”’ – Daily Mirror.

Fusion thought it might be interesting to learn just how these eulogies about a “This Week” item on Santo Domingo were earned. So here programme director PETER ROBINSON tells how bullets stopped him mowing his lawn.

Emotionally, at least, it all began with a satellite called Early Bird, a tune called, ‘Hey, Look Me Over’, ‘whooping’ red Indians, a New York restaurant where the waitresses didn’t wear too much, and my lawn at home in Epsom.

Early Bird was my reason for crossing the Atlantic on April 21 – to film and make technical arrangements for Rediffusion’s first programme via the satellite. It was called ‘Tonight in America’, and was transmitted on May 3, at 6.00 p.m., New York time, 11.00 p.m. in London.

‘Hey, Look Me Over’, was the title music for the show – a catchy, exhilarating tune, chosen by Cyril Bennett, the producer.

The ‘whooping’ red Indians were what we heard every time we cut to George Ffitch, on the steps of the Capitol in Washington during rehearsals – a totally inappropriate noise, funny at first, then more jarring and frightening as we came nearer and nearer to transmission time. We were connected soundwise to a Western being screened for early evening viewers! The American Broadcasting Company who provided the technical facilities did a swell job, including laying on the OB unit in Washington at 3.00 a.m. that morning, but things go wrong in the best regulated families. So we heard George’s voice only during transmission.

The restaurant with the sexy waitresses was where we went to celebrate the successful transmission of the programme in a great wash of relief and self-congratulation. It was also the place where Russell Spurr, Bryan Fitzjones and I were asked by Cyril Bennett, sober, whether we’d like to do a film piece on Santo Domingo for ‘This Week’- transmission May 13.

My lawn in Epsom was my conscience, and my therapy for the last two weeks’ work in Washington, Philadelphia and New York, the scenes of the Early Bird programme. That programme had also contained the latest news film from the Dominican Republic – a distant nebulous place, now looming large as my lawn receded.

Tuesday, May 4 – Russell took off for San Juan, Puerto Rico, the nearest airport to Santo Domingo to which the airlines now flew. I spent the day in New York buying suitable clothing for the location and trying to obtain a film crew from ABC. In the evening Russell phoned – San Juan was lovely, big hotels, swimming pools, beaches, palm trees, but Santo Domingo didn’t sound so good. Please purchase water bottles, tin plates, knife, fork, and spoon for the crew and ourselves.

Wednesday, May 5 – Bryan and I had a long conference with Jeremy Isaacs in London about the storyline and the plans for the location. Bryan was to stay in New York and do the dull and thankless job of maintaining contact with London and San Juan (whence we would send messages and exposed film), arranging interviews if necessary in Washington, and searching out historical library film. Then Jack Busch of ABC called to say that he had a crew. It had been difficult finding one – Morgan Smith (sound), Manny Longueira (camera assistant) and Ralph Mayher (cameraman).

Thursday, May 6 – at 6.30a.m. Russell and I met the crew at the naval air base at San Juan. As well as finding out the latest news from Santo Domingo and the conditions in the city, Russell had arranged with the US marines for a flight in one of their Navy Transport DC 4s. We met in a hangar together with three press men, one of whom was Roy Perrot of The Observer, and several members of the Organisation of American States, who were to travel with us. It was a self-conscious meeting. We were all tired, breakfastless and unshaven – none more so than Mayher, who had the beard as well as the stature and visage of one Fidel Castro. He wore an American field uniform and flashes on his shoulders labelled Vietnam. Apart from Russell and I none of us knew each other, or quite what we were in for. The marine colonel, Buffkins, informed us that we were going to a city where a ‘shooting war’ was going on, did we understand? Yes, we were beginning to. Here were our travel documents, which would entitle us to pass freely in the American security zone when we got there. They were important and should be carried at all times. On the one hour and 20 minute flight I tried to get acquainted with the crew, and to explain our methods of working. Ninety per cent of our shooting would be hand held, nothing would be set up or staged, and there wouldn’t be time for the usual pleasantries of light readings and sound levels. They understood. Mayher was used to it that way, Morgan Smith less so. We had three cameras, a 400-ft Auricon (for sound filming) with shoulder pod and a 100-ft Arriflex and a Bell and Howell for silent; also a small tape recorder for wild tracks. The two cameras not in current use must be kept loaded at all times, each film roll must be slated, and I would keep rough continuity sheets. ‘All righty.’ But had we got a script? No, we hadn’t got a script, but Russell would fill them in on the situation. From 1930 to 1961, the country had been ruled by the dictator, Rafael Trujillo, who, backed by the army and the big landowners, made millions for himself and his family. He was feared, hated and eventually assassinated. Chaos reigned and the rest of the Trujillo family were thrown out. A series of stop-gap governments followed, but in 1962 democratic elections were held for the first time in 30 years and Juan Bosch won a landslide victory. Bosch, a left of centre reformer, had been exiled for 25 years – now he was President. But the vested interests which prospered under Trujillo cried ‘communism’ – a military coup and Bosch was out, exiled again to Puerto Rico. A military junta took over and, in 1963 a motor car salesman, Donal Reid Cabral, backed by the army, and principally by General Wessin y Wessin became boss. On April 25, a group of younger officers, including Colonel Caamano, rebelled. They overthrew Reid Cabral and captured Santo Domingo, the capital. On the following day the Dominican air force under orders from Wessin y Wessin bombed the military barracks and the Presidential Palace. Several civilians were killed including a six-year-old child. This more than anything else probably accounts for the hatred that the Dominican people felt for Wessin y Wessin and his junta.

The biggest airlift since Berlin brought thousands of American airborne troops into the Dominican military base at San Isidro, and from there they linked up with the seaborne marines. Already there were more American service men in the Dominican Republic than in Vietnam. We had heard President Johnson in a television broadcast while we were in New York say: ‘We support no single man, or no single group of men in the Dominican Republic. Our goal is a simple one; we’re there to save the lives of our citizens, and to save the lives of our people. What began as a popular democratic revolution moved into the hands of a band of communist conspirators.’ However, the impression of the Dominican people and of the majority of the press was different. They felt that although the Americans had undoubtedly prevented a massacre they were patently siding with Wessin and the military junta against the ‘rebels’, or the ‘Constitutionalists’ as they call themselves.

The Americans had carved a military corridor which connected San Isidro airbase (where we were to land) with the Security zone around the new diplomatic quarter on the other side of Santo Domingo. This corridor cut straight through the rebel-held part of the city and the bulk of the rebel forces were penned into about two square miles of the business quarter. Already about a thousand soldiers and civilians had been killed and another thousand wounded.

When we landed at San Isidro the evidence of what Russell had said began to confront us – planes of every type; hundreds of American troops on foot and in jeeps and many others, just flown in, dossed down in the nearby hangars. We decided to try to reach the El Embajador Hotel, about 15 miles away on the other side of Santo Domingo, where we were to be accommodated with the rest of the press and television, as soon as possible. We spoke to a young US lieutenant … there would be no transport for at least two hours … OK, we’d start filming here … how about some food and a jeep in which to get round the airbase? Grab what you can – we did.

The bus to take us to the hotel was a beat-up old vehicle with all the outward appearances of a colander – it had been shot up two days before. As we moved off, Ralph saw an American pick-up, and confirmed that it was going to the hotel, jumped into the open tray in the back and filmed all the way into and through the city. The scenes were fantastic, soldiers everywhere, every kind of equipment from artillery to field hospitals, and then more troops and the occasional tank or armoured car on the shanty town street corners … the poor Dominicans trying to lead some sort of day-to-day existence, and children playing with the spent shells of yesterday’s sniping. At the hotel, the scene was equally bizarre. Surrounded by soldiers and guns, refugees, with their children and odd belongings, shacked down on the patio and in the central lobby. We went to the reception desk … there were no rooms. On to the military press office just down the corridor. We explained who we were. Yes, we could have one room for the five of us and our equipment … they would try to find others. They needn’t have bothered, Russell was in his element. Familiar faces appeared everywhere, old press friends from Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia … he’d been around the trouble spots of the world. Within half an hour he’d got promises of four more rooms by nightfall … requisitioned half a hundredweight of American ‘C’ rations and, since everyone else was drinking the hotel swimming pool, six Coca Colas – there’d be more later. As well as being an admirable quartermaster, Russell had also made his contacts to get filled in on the story on the ground. He set off into the city, and the crew and I filmed scenes in and around the hotel, ending with a military press briefing, one portion of which sounded ominous: ‘This morning at approximately 10.30 Al Burke and Doug Kennedy of the Miami Herald were wounded when they were caught in the cross fire between a US and rebel outpost. They were returning to the US line from the rebel-held section of the city when the rebels commenced firing … I want to say that all members of the American press here have repeatedly risked their lives in an effort to report fully to the people of the world all facets of the political and military situation. The tragic and unfortunate wounding of these two men should point out to everyone in the world who listens to a radio, reads a newspaper, or watches television, of the outstanding job that you courageous people are doing.’

That evening, we sat in a bedroom in the semi-darkness – the electricity flickered on and off – canning up the day’s exposed film, writing continuity sheets and deciding what to do next day. Russell had made several contacts, including one in the rebel sector, who had agreed to take us to Caamano, the rebel leader. The crew did not show immediate joy at the prospect of this. What safeguards did we have? What about the two press men who’d been shot that morning? True, but many others hadn’t been shot. First we must get a car, and write ‘press’ all over it in large letters, then, when we’d got to the rebel zone, we’d drive very slowly, five miles an hour, to the place where we were to meet our contact. Once with him we’d be OK. The crew were happier, but still sceptical. Two would go, one was doubtful. OK, sleep on it. We arranged with one of the taxi-drivers outside the hotel for a fat price to have him and his car for the next three or four days.

Friday, May 7 – we met William, our driver, at 7.00 a.m. – all of us. He drove us to the edge of the rebel sector, explained how to get to our destination, got out and suggested that we drove ourselves from now on. Russell drove, we smiled and waved out of the windows at the suspicious looking civilians and scrappily uniformed rebels standing about in doorways and at street corners. After five minutes we were lost. We decided to stop, and I got out and spoke to a rebel holding an old carbine. He looked no more ferocious than any of the others we’d passed, but he never actually took his finger off the trigger. After a short conversation in pidgin-Spanish, many protestations that we were Inglese and not bloody Yankees, he ordered two youths to come with us and show us the way. Beside the building which was our rendezvous, the two boys pointed proudly to an American jeep which had been captured the day before. The three Americans who had been in it were now prisoners, they said. We were shown up and met Russell’s contact, who thankfully spoke English. After much palaver and explanation that we were from English Television and wished to present both sides of this unhappy story equally fairly, it was agreed that we should see Caamano in the afternoon. The fact that the three members of the crew were obviously not Inglese (although Ralph had now shed his conspicuous field uniform which we had persuaded him would be a sure target for every rebel rifle) proved something of a drawback to begin with. However, once it was understood that they were merely a technical crew working for English Television, all was well. We were welcomed warmly and asked what we would like to film during the remainder of the morning. First we would like to look around the rebel sector, film whatever scenes seemed interesting, and interview our English speaking contact.

The poverty of the place at the best of times was obvious and shameful. Add to that days of accumulated rubbish piled high in the middle of every street … a grotesque charred body lying on a pavement (they couldn’t bury all the dead) … battle-scarred buildings … shot-up or burnt-out vehicles standing about like so many deserted waifs … children of 14 carrying rifles (the new-found symbols of their manhood) … starving dogs and sounds of intermittent gunfire … and you have a Caribbean city under revolution. We turned a corner near the sea-front. A hail of shots surrounded us. Our contact, Hugo, was first out of the car and into a nearby building … we followed. We were greeted by our hosts with peels of laughter … there must have been a funny side to it … and, as we were soon to find out, the population had become so used to gunfire that they no longer considered it worthy of much excitement. Several times we poked our heads out of the door in an effort to see who was shooting at whom, but without much success. We decided the situation was too good to miss, and after finding a way out of the back of the building, we clambered over a wall and into a street running at right angles to the one where the firing was going on. We were protected by the buildings on our left and could see the bullets striking another building with a Red Cross flag on it about 20-30 yards away. The marines, it appeared, were firing at some rebels in the building and one had already been shot in the stomach. I decided that this was the time and place for Russell to interview Hugo. The result was unusual – Russell and Hugo in the foreground, Hugo protesting violently that he and the other rebels were not communists but Constitutionalists who only wanted free elections and a return to democratic government. In the background there were American bullets hitting the Red Cross building, and on the corner, just behind Russell and Hugo, a little cluster of rebels firing back. Every now and again another rebel would run across the street to join them, and across the way, one over-exuberant Dominican was carrying on a private war running backwards and forwards firing from behind a tree. The interview continued for about eight minutes, including two magazine changes, and then Russell also did a camera statement crouched down on the pavement beside the rebels.

In the afternoon we went to see Caamano. We had to pass six guards on the way into the dingy headquarters, and were frisked twice. We had a drink, some dreadful pink liquid, tried to collect our senses, and filmed a few minutes of the shambolic press conference which was going on. Eventually, when it had ended, we got our interview with the rebel leader – an extraordinary interview punctuated by the personal interpolations of his Minister for State, who was also acting as Caamano’s interpreter.

News travels fast in situations like this, and that night at the hotel there was much envious rumour and gossip of our scoop of an interview with a rebel under fire that morning. We were all delighted, and felt that while we had been lucky, we had got it because we had gone it alone, rather than filming with the main pack of camera crews who stayed together most of the time. The crew were as delighted as we were, but felt that we’d pressed our luck far enough. Russell and I agreed that we seemed to have covered the rebel zone and that there should be no need to return.

Saturday, May 8 – Manny, the camera assistant, went down with ‘gyppy tummy’. Russell went off to arrange interviews with the American Ambassador and the head of the local Peace Corps. I took Ralph and Morgan filming along the corridor and in the security zone – Junta troops, US marines and strongposts, military convoys, checkpoints, a mobile Red Cross unit. On the way back Ralph sat on the bonnet of the car hand-holding the Auricon, for a 10-minute tracking shot through the centre of the town.

We met Russell at the American Embassy. The Ambassador was unfortunately engaged. OK, we’d do the Peace Force. Robert Satin, the local head, had set up his HQ at a school two miles away. He’d be delighted to talk to us, but some other time. He was on his way to the rebel zone to relieve three captured American service men. Could we go, we asked? Yes, but only three could fit in the car. It was decided that Russell, Ralph and myself would go, taking Morgan Smith’s sound gear and leaving him to guard the remaining equipment with the driver. Satin, a romantic Pimpernel figure in a large Spanish straw hat and yellow cape to make him easily distinguishable, was the only man in Santo Domingo whom both sides trusted, and who could, therefore, undertake a mission of this kind. An American himself, it would be fair to say that he was not entirely uncritical of the American position in Santo Domingo. We were soon with the rebels, but not until our papers had been checked and our purpose explained would they lead us to the prisoners. On the way, as we walked through one of the rebel-held streets, one of the leaders tried to explain the rebel cause to Russell in Spanish. Satin interpreted, and we filmed as we went. The rebels here were so courteous and obviously sincere that one could not feel other than sympathetic towards them. Perhaps my early West Indian upbringing – I lived in Trinidad till I was 14 – made for a certain affinity.

The three prisoners, two petty officers and one private would say little to us, understandably. They gave us their names and confirmed that they had been well treated. The atmosphere between them and their captors was friendly, and one of the rebels complained that the only trouble they’d had was that the little fat petty officer ate too much. We stayed there at Cuccaraca 20, the name of the rebel headquarters, for about three hours, while they tried vainly to contact their main headquarters for permission to release the prisoners to Satin. The lines were blocked, no communication was possible. We suggested sending a runner, it was only two miles away. That would mean their man crossing the security zone, a risk they were not prepared to take. Could we do it for them? ‘No’, they said, it was too risky, and it was getting dark. We should really return to the security zone at once. The prisoners would have to wait for their release until the next day. As we were filming a final camera statement outside Cuccaraca 20, a rebel arrived to say that a junta 50mm machine gun was trained on the street where we were, and that a large number of rebels were ready to return fire from a building just across the street … we really should go. We did, but after 20 minutes’ driving we still could not get out of the rebel zone, barred everywhere by road blocks. Eventually we came full circle, and the members of Cuccaraca 20 undid a road block to let us out. That really was our last visit to the rebel zone, but not the end of the excitement for the day. As we neared the American Embassy, we ran into some sniping, which caused Satin to take to a side street. At the Embassy, American troops were active, kneeling behind trees, and taking up positions of advantage. It seemed mild compared to the events of the last two days. I sat on the Embassy steps investigating a blistered toe. A medical orderly insisted on disinfecting and bandaging it. The humour of the situation did not strike him.

That night, Russell and I took stock of what we had, and decided that next day he would film the re-arranged interview with the American Ambassador, and an opening camera statement on the border between the security zone and the rebel zone. I would catch the morning plane to San Juan and thence home to London to help identify and assemble the film. Russell would catch the evening plane, film an interview with Juan Busch, the ex-president, in Puerto Rico and then follow on to London too.

Sunday, May 9 – I missed my plane, the arrangements for transportation to the airport had been changed. When Russell returned to the hotel, having completed his filming, not without further incident (during his camera statement firing had again broken out, but he’d completed it nonetheless, and so filmed what must be the most unusual camera statement on record) we agreed that we would all take the evening plane. Back in our luxurious hotel in San Juan that evening, a bath, clean clothes, and a good meal at last in the penthouse restaurant from which there is a view of the whole city.

Monday, May 10 – 7.00a.m. call. ‘Breakfast is nerved by the swimming pool.’ What am I going back to London for?

3.00 p.m. – ABC New York – where all the in negative film was processed before shipment to London – ‘It’s good quality, you’ve got a humdinger’.

6.00 p.m. – a drink and a chat with Bryan FitzJones. ‘New York’s been in the nineties, Jeremy wants me to stay here till tomorrow. I’ve booked your flight, a BOAC VC 10, take off Kennedy Airport 9.30 tonight.’

Tuesday, May 11 – 9.45 a.m. – landed London Airport. I still had a wife – or perhaps she still had a husband.

11.00 a.m. – back at the mill (TVH) … rushes at 3.00, everyone delighted, but feel flat.

Wednesday, May 12 – more rushes – rough cut – script conference – rough cut. Jeremy and I left Peter Mills and Roy Jordan, the editors, to it at 3.00 a.m. on Thursday – transmission day. They worked all night.

Thursday, May 13 – 8.00 a.m. See another rough cut. Russell back … discussion … another cut … Jeremy asks Cyril Bennett for an extra five minutes on the running time … OK, 31′ 30″ it is. Finalise picture, Russell writing commentary … recording commentary … laying tracks … dubbing … Freddie Slade has to do it without rehearsal, take first time. Somehow the him gets on the air with five seconds to spare. Thirty-one minutes later we’re on the Hollywood Crawl – roller caption in American jargon – and that’s where it all began.

Saturday, May 15: I still have a lawn – I’m mowing it – a friend calls. ‘How’s the telly?’

‘Fine.’

‘What are you working on?’

‘This Week.’

‘That’s on a Thursday, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do the rest of the week?’

The post Bullets stopped him mowing lawn appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The backbone of competitive television is the dramatic series. Study the TAM ratings (and the BBC equivalent if you can manage to microfilm it during an under-cover visit to Television Centre!) and you will find this to be incontestable.

Such ‘hero figures’ as Lockhart, Crane, Maigret, Dixon, Cork, Steed, Barlow, Burke, Kildare, Casey, Perry Mason and the Prestons have large and devoted audiences of their own. The first seven on the list are ‘tape heroes’, the remainder belong on film. The members of the former group are exclusively British, the latter dyed-in-the-wool Americans. The distinction is important and to be borne in mind.

Popular taste in ‘hero figures’ tends to change as time goes by. Not so many years ago cowboys and sheriffs had a virtual monopoly of the field: today their place has largely been taken by doctors, lawyers and increasingly eccentric minions of the law.

The reason for the popularity of dramatic series is perhaps too obvious to mention here. Their programmes, 60 minutes weekly, are ‘escapist’ and ‘action packed’. Familiarity with them breeds loyalty to the hero, to his personal methods and mannerisms, an advantage not shared by the hero of the single separate play.

From the beginning our Independent Television. following perhaps the American lead, spiced its programme pattern generously with dramatic series. Some years later the BBC ‘got the message’ – with striking results in the competitive battle.

A large proportion of series on both channels here are still American in origin. The same picture can be found in many other territories: the flowery waterways of the Far East resound nightly to the ever-successful pleading of Perry Mason and the burst of gunfire from the Sherman ranch.

The reasons for this are very easily explained. The American series, recorded exclusively on film with cinematic technique, offers fast, often spectacular entertainment, appealing to the eye as well as to the ear. Here is escapism par excellence – for the Tired Business Man and the Exhausted Coolie alike. Settings are native to a continent with scenery ranging from the Puerto Rican slums of New York to the steaming swamps of the Everglades, from Alaskan snow to the Painted Desert, a continent whose inhabitants still indulge in the sort of violent crimes and adventures that would be quite out of the question in our own sceptred isle.

There is also the little matter of costume. For a century and a half we British have been a small, crowded, orderly people condemned, as far as the male at least is concerned, to a more or less standard style of dress, i.e. the three-piece suit topped by a bowler, a boater, homberg or a cloth cap. We have Highland dress alone to match against the feathers and wampum, holsters and ten-gallon hats, and the furs of the frozen North.

Picture and story values apart, however, the outstanding advantage of the American series is its easy availability and comparative cheapness in the overseas market. The production of a television film of any real quality is an expensive business. The £20,000 [£330,000 in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] that it costs in this country cannot easily be recouped – not, that is, unless the producer achieves that rarest of successes, a sale to the U.S.A. As against this it is usually possible to acquire the British rights in a top-class American film for a few thousand pounds. Such films have already recovered their costs in the home market and Britain forms part of the international Tom Tiddler’s ground from which their producers are picking up so much gold.

It is no good pretending that we can do without filmed series. We need them, not only for their quality and availability, but in order that organisations with ever-strained studio facilities can occasionally ‘call it a day’ and leave the job to the chap in charge of telecine! One can imagine the harassed controller of BBC 2 sometimes wishing that his quota of foreign film material might be a little larger.

So much for the filmed series. We may admire it, we certainly make use of it, but it is really none of our business over here. We are first and foremost ‘television men’ working in television studios upon live production with electronic cameras and the skill and techniques that have grown up with them. The film is not ‘true television’, it is merely a form of ‘home movies’, no different in essence from the old feature films that we occasionally take off the shelves. The only ‘true’ television is live television which, as far as drama and light entertainment are concerned, has virtually disappeared from the transatlantic screen. It is a challenge to writer, director, actor and cameraman among many others to work more excitingly, more immediately and less expensively than the film maker. Of the 20 top-rating drama series broadcast weekly in this country are produced ‘live’, most of them continuously on VTR, two of them ‘live direct’, that is to say that they reach the audience as they are being performed.

Like others no doubt the writer has had the satisfying experience of showing British drama shows to visiting American pundits who simply could not believe that what they were seeing was ‘live’ (at the thought that it might be ‘live direct’ their imaginations boggled as they re-filled their glasses!).

Let us hope that we may be allowed to keep it this way. ‘Live’ drama may not, in general, have the gloss of its filmed counterpart: by way of compensation, however, it has an impact and an urgency that are peculiarly its own. Should it ever be entirely replaced by film there would vanish a hundred special skills which have made it an exciting entertainment form (even an art form) of its own. The planning and realisation of weekly drama series constitutes the toughest job in all ‘true’ television production. Tough because it implies the operation of an ‘assembly line’ from which is to be produced, with a maximum of six days rehearsal, a weekly drama of 60 minutes duration (as compared with the occasional 75-minute play which on the average can claim a rehearsal period of at least 14 days). Tough because from the point of view of the script editor and his team of writers it demands an incessant creativity without the freedom to branch away from a story formula and a set of characters.

And finally tough because if it should cease to figure in the Top Twenty it will be considered to have been a more or less regrettable ‘flop’. The series, once launched and established, runs the risk of being regarded as a valuable old ‘work horse’ never to be ‘put out to grass’. It receives little continuing publicity or critical interest from the Press. The boffins who distribute the budget tend to take it for granted: a request for additional finance may be received with a sense of outrage comparable to that experienced by Mr Bumble when Oliver Twist had the impertinence to ask for more.

Any such parsimony in the provision of money or facilities is not only from the policy point of view short-sighted, it further constitutes an injustice to the devoted production team involved. From the team’s point of view to be looked upon as a ‘backbone’ is a doubtful distinction. Who bothers about a backbone until it slips a disc?

The post Tape or live heroes? appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Associated-Rediffusion has made several brave attempts to find a successful technique for putting a symphony concert on the television screen, but so far has not succeeded to its satisfaction. The best attempt I remember was Cyril Coke’s in which he devoted the first half to the rehearsal and the second to the actual performance of Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’ by the Hallé. I remember this as an interesting and rewarding experience and by being intrigued by the musicians’ transformation from slacks and sweaters to their soup and fish.

It was with this memory in mind that I eagerly accepted an invitation to visit the Royal Festival Hall for the London Symphony Orchestra’s final rehearsal for the night’s concert.

The vast auditorium, dark, hushed in a reverent silence, contained only a handful of shadowy figures as I crept in and oozed into a seat. The stage, brilliantly lit, seemed filled by the orchestra which was already at work. The conductor, I knew, was Pierre Monteux. Short, stocky in a workmanlike grey cotton jacket, with his dark curling hair and surprising white walrus moustache, he is the principal conductor of the L.S.O. He is acknowledged, moreover, as the doyen of all conductors, being in his 88th year. Despite his age and long years with the baton, he seemed as vigorous and fiery as any young man. There is a story that when he was offered a contract with the L.S.O. in 1961 he insisted it should be a long-term one and I believe it lasts until he is 100!

Ignoring the score, Monteux, his small expressive hands gently coaxing, began guiding the orchestra through what I thought I recognised as Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’. This work had obviously been well rehearsed before with the result that only short bursts of it were played. ‘The last ten bars again, please.’ All too soon Monteux closed the score at which he had only looked to count the bars and that was that.

In the pause that followed, I realised with a jerk that I was not going to sit there and enjoy a jolly free concert. In fact, I was not going to hear a work from beginning to end. The orchestra, being composed of individual virtuosos who can read a score at sight, was only there to give the programme its final finishing touches and subtleties as required by the conductor. Nevertheless, it would be fascinating to be behind the scenes as it were.

While a shuffling of scores went on 1 gazed round at the other listeners. Two earnest young men sat, one in front of me and one way at the back, with score on lap and ballpoints at the ready. A young woman sat on the edge of her seat, her hands clasped as if in supplication beneath her chin – very intense. Behind me I saw a small girl all in blue. Blue jersey, blue skirt, blue tights and legs that stuck out straight before her, her sandalled feet turned up. As she sucked what appeared to be an ice lolly, I saw an open violin case beside her. One did not need an A level G.C.E. to guess her Dad was in the orchestra. She sat quietly, her round blue eyes fixed on the stage.

The student in front of me (an American incidentally) kindly gave me the concert items. It was not the ‘Eroica’, but I felt a bit smug to find that it was Beethoven’s ‘The Creatures of Prometheus’ from which the composer had lifted the theme for the last movement of the ‘Eroica’. To follow was the Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D.

Now Monteux tapped his baton and every bow was at the ready. I was looking forward to the Brahms and my thoughts wandered to a terrace in Sussex where I had last heard it on an appropriately hot afternoon. But in no time came that tap-tap again. Monteux, who had been leaning over the violins, swung round to the cellos behind him. He had heard a wrong note through the back of his head.

‘Non, Non,’ he said, ‘B naturelie! It goes oom-pah-pah-paah.’

Thus singing he led the players into the Allegretto. In fact he sang for the greater part of the rehearsal. Occasionally he varied OOM-Pah-PAH with Ta-Ta-Te-TEE. At one point he emphasised the singing tone of the violins by laying his baton across his left arm as though playing the instrument himself. Come to think of it, this was not so odd since he was a violinist at the age of six before becoming a conductor at 12.

The beauty of the fragments so far played of what is sometimes referred to as Brahms’ ‘Pastoral’, had soothed me into a trance. All too soon the soft, high trumpet notes of the first movement returned to warn us that the finale was at hand. And that was that.

The L.S.O. now prepared for the pièce de resistance, Berlioz’s ‘Symphonic Fantastique’. There was much tuning of strings and a viola player carefully laid a clean square-folded handkerchief under his chin. As Monteux raised his baton the concentration was so intense it was almost concrete. You could have leaned on it.

A Largo, sad and gentle, proclaimed the theme and we listeners sat back to be moved and excited by this masterpiece. Phenomenal that Berlioz, was only 27 when he composed it and only nine years before had never heard any music other than his local folk melodies. The story in the Symphony of a young musician who, in despair due to unrequited love, takes to opium, ends on the scaffold and descends to the torments of Hell, is musically something to make your spine chill and tingle. It is, I later learned, one of the works most dear to Monteux, whose understanding of his compatriot composer is said to be unrivalled.

Behind me, the small girl had now peeled a banana and was nibbling the fruit while the starfish of its skin hung round her hand.

Monteux made short work of the first movement. With a shower of chromatics, shimmering sweeps on the harp, and sustained soarings of the violins, we sped into the waltz. This, too, ended all too soon. The cor anglais began its melancholy solo starting the third movement and then was echoed by an oboe off stage.

Monteux tapped for silence and the oboeist popped his head surprisingly round a curtain at the side of the auditorium close by the stage.

‘A leetle louder, please’ said Monteux. ‘The pooblic here (sweeping his arm over the auditorium) will not hear you so far away. Come a leetle closer (the oboeist moved until he was a bulge in the curtain) and now louder – ta-ta-ta-tee-TEE.’

Beautiful as the third movement is, I was impatient for the poignant March to the Scaffold. Inevitably one waits for the crash of the orchestra as it brings down the guillotine and snaps off the theme played so wistfully on the clarinet. I was not to hear it. There was a light touch on my arm.

‘Would you take me to the toilet, please?’ asked the small girl in blue.

Hand in hand we climbed the long flight of stall’s and, thank heaven, in the lobby outside found the ‘Ladies’. She assured me she could manage by herself and all was achieved satisfactorily.

Now that I saw her in the light I realised what an attractive child she was. Her fair but not golden hair waved to her head like a helmet and her eyes were of a striking blue.

‘What’s your name and how old are you?’

I enquired.

‘I’m Joanna and I’m five. What’s your name and how old are you?’

‘I’m Sally,’ I replied nothing daunted, ‘and I’m ninety’.

‘Oh,’ she answered in complete acceptance. We started back to our seats and on the way I learned that her Daddy was in the orchestra; she had a little sister called Tina; she was learning the piano; she often came to rehearsals but never to the concert at night; and wasn’t it a pity I had no little girls or boys of my own.

Joanna returned to her seat and busied herself with paper and pencil.

By this time Monteux and the L.S.O. were going hammer and tongs at the ‘Nightmare of the Witches’ Sabbath’. In the midst of a really menacing section the conductor stopped.

‘A leetle more on the snarl, please. Anngrrrr’ he illustrated with gritted teeth and the orchestra laughed. ‘He is among the beasts now. Better you should be too loud than no one should hear you. Again.’

Now a trombone (I think) tore off a series of snarls so fierce as to frighten the wits out of anyone. The finale got into its stride with trumpets braying, fiddles ‘sawing away regardless’, the drums and timpani going double forte and everyone doing his utmost to a tempestuous finish.

It was all over. Spectators and players burst into applause, shouting ‘bravo’ to the conductor. He modestly bowed and thanked the gentlemen of the orchestra.

As I was about to leave, there was another touch on my arm. I turned to meet the orchestra leader, Erich Gruenberg, in his gay red pullover.

“Thank you for taking care of my little girl’ he said.

‘It was a pleasure’ I answered. ‘She is very charming.’

‘I know. That is perhaps why I was a bit alarmed when I saw you take her out of the hall.’

‘You saw? In the middle of the Symphony?’ I was astounded. I couldn’t believe that anything could have broken that concentration.

‘Oh yes. However I didn’t worry. The bass player gave me a sign that it was all right.’ The bass player too. Evidently he knew Joanna’s shortcomings better than her father. As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that all 80 members of the L.S.O. witnessed my exit with Joanna.

She now approached me with two pieces of paper.

‘Look’, she said, ‘I did these for you’.

I thanked her and admired some youthful drawings and a sheet of writing that told me the numbers from 1 to 20 and that each member of her family by name was OUT.

I left the Royal Festival Hall wishing with all my heart that somehow someone could find the formula that would bring these fine players and the enjoyment I had experienced to our millions of viewers.

The post Oom-pah-PAH and Joanna appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

One of the cynical legends from the Hollywood stables concerns a script-writer whose midnight oil burned for a serious drama about the Air Force: when his film was finished he missed the premiere because it was now a musical called ‘Up Periscope’. Recalling this I was not surprised when Robert Everett revealed to us that an elaborate outside broadcast, planned around an aircraft-carrier would now be re-cast as an Army show, a battle to be fought on the hills of Wiltshire. To all of us who worked on it the programme was simply ‘Robert’s War’. For transmission it became ‘Battle at Chalkdown’.

It was to be a highly complex technical operation, both for us and for the Army which was to provide two forces, ‘attackers’ and ‘enemy’, to deploy tanks, artillery and infantry in such ways that a ‘battle’ could be started and finished over the entire ground, and to a given time. In short, a military operation had to be conducted to specifications laid down by a television company. That it was done is a remarkable tribute to the liaison which developed during weeks of planning between soldiers and television technicians. The ‘built’ OB is always a headache because all its component parts must be precisely planned. You cannot plan a Cup Final because 22 footballers were never intended to play on cues.

The problem for Chalkdown was to plan a battle in such a way that its essential components could be covered by eight television camera positions. This seemed straightforward enough, in theory, until we saw what had to be covered.

Robert Everett, Grahame Turner, who directed, and I went down to Warminster to watch a 40-minute all arms tactics wing demonstration set up by the School of Infantry. The cast involved an armoured squadron of Centurion tanks, a company of infantry in armoured personnel carriers, artillery, antitank guns, blank and live ammunition. There was a lot of noise and smoke.

Grahame and I agreed that the terrain presented camera problems. Could the Army shift the whole operation about a mile down the way and handle a similar demonstration in roughly 264 minutes? It is interesting to observe the face of a man who is trying not to say ** ****.

The Army agreed to shift the terrain and we started measuring ground. It is interesting to walk over muddy, tank-chewed ground and measure estimated timings.

On the basis of the sequence of events we had seen happen in a demonstration I put up a timed-in-the-mind draft script with pictures attached. The idea was to give us all an impression of what we would see and for approximately how long over any given part of the battle. At this stage the School of Infantry, in the person of Colonel Wallace, noted our requests, had a think, and agreed. This called for a second batch of pictures and a lot of consultation with Grahame Turner. And there was a snag. In order to get the kind of close-up effect of tanks and turrets and guns and machine-gunners and explosions and artillery and more tanks and turrets and so on … we had run out of cameras.

Somewhere along the line Robert Everett suggested that a central area, covered by two cameras, could be created, in which the necessary inserts could be achieved. The idea was this: to take main action on the battle itself, but to take close-up action on what came to be known as an ‘FX Circus’. The ‘Circus’ was to contain all those closeups which could not be adequately handled in long shot or medium shot.

This involved special problems for the Army. They meant, for instance, that a certain tank under radio instruction would have to start moving from position X towards position Y at pre-fixed times which would coincide with the action required by the script. All this had to be rehearsed over ground which became increasingly choppy.

On first try-out the Major commanding the squadron of tanks reported that the operation would run 40 minutes. Colonel Wallace suggested that it would run about 264 minutes. This caused a situation.

Unbeknown to the Army, who were now working things out in language we could never transmit, our situation in London was rendered delicate by a re-timing determined by network considerations. Rumour had it that we were going to run about 35 minutes and not 264.

On this basis I drove a mean average between what we might want and what the Army said it could do, and settled, temporarily, for the 264-minute version which tank major said would run to 40. It looked as if we might average out.

Unbeknown to us tank major had been doing some dawn-work on the Wiltshire hills and was soon able to report that his original estimate of 40 minutes would now, and he could prove it, because he did, work out well at an overall timing of 21 minutes.

At this stage Grahame and I began to have misgivings about the programme’s timing. Here, both Army and Associated-Rediffusion Ltd now engaged in a para-military device known as compromise. Every sequence was re-examined; many were re-timed and rehearsed again.

Came the dawn. We were all ready. The last of many conferences was over. In perfect light Grahame tried a ‘take’.

The tanks moved, the explosions began, the smoke drifted. It was an adequate rehearsal, and no one was satisfied. All agreed to go again next day and hope for weather. When we woke it was raining. A sea of mud, cables embedded in mud, men dressed in mud, teacups full of mud.

On the basis of the last under-run we repaired for lunch to Imber Court, a derelict mansion dripping with echoes of ‘Journey’s End’, where beer was served with strange pies. Colonel Wallace passed a weary hand across a weary sandwich. Orders were recast – for the ‘FX circus’, for the voices off, for the artillery, for the tanks.

Just before the final ‘take’ the sun came out and condensation started on some lenses. I heard Grahame say something in the scanner but decided to forget exactly what it was.

The tanks moved, the explosions began (some special ‘bangs’ had been reserved for the final take). Grahame gave his instructions to cameras. Working just ahead of him our army controller gave his instructions. Bren gunners fired on cue. Explosions went off on cue. Enemy soldiers ‘died’ on cue. (One soldier rushed up to a camera position and asked, ‘what shot are we on next?’) Chalkdown was finally taken, with the assistance of some 60 soaked technicians and seven punctures.

Someone asked me why we had made a programme which actually suggested that the Army is pretty good. I have to admit that as I was wet through at the time and in no state to justify the existence of the Armed Services, I rushed to a Wombat, took careful aim, and fired.

The post The day TV ran the army appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

THE notice on the wall at Casablanca police station was in bold, black Arabic. From above a “rogues’ gallery” picture of a hunted criminal glared the Moroccan equivalent of WANTED.

Mr. Henry Federer, senior designer of the Crane series (Mondays), knew this was the kind of minute detail he had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to record.

He focused his camera on the poster, knowing that he might need a Moroccan “wanted” notice once filming moved back to London.

No sooner had Mr. Federer clicked the shutter than an inquisitive Moroccan policeman tapped him on the shoulder. Four hours later he finally managed to convince the authorities that he was really quite harmless.

This escapade, one of many, was necessary. For Crane‘s Moorish atmosphere and its accuracy is part and parcel of the success of the series.

Mr. Federer, a genial Austrian, has taken 3,000 pictures in Morocco, which now form a kind of Moroccan reference library—a huge pictorial aid to memory.

He photographed Moroccan life in detail. His camera recorded the inside of houses, the shape of arches, the style in furniture, the patterns on tiles.

“It was difficult,” recalled Henry “because the Moroccan, although tremendously hospitable, would rarely invite you to his home. I just had to go into houses, shoot a picture and apologise for coming to the wrong address.”

The Moroccan instinctive mistrust of the camera was also an obstacle. “One day I tried to photograph some women who were queueing for milk,” said Henry.

“I turned away from them while I adjusted my camera. But when I turned round to shoot all of them had quietly slipped away. It was quite uncanny.”

The result of this photographic safari was a wealth of accurate detail on which Mr. Federer can draw when he is designing the sets at Wembley studios.

A good example of his camera technique are the mosaic floors. A genuine Moroccan pattern square is copied from one of Mr. Federer’s photographs. The pattern is cut into a paint roller. Then the mosaic is painted into the floor of the set with the pattern squares repeating themselves.

In the bazaars, Mr. Federer played the national Moroccan sport — bartering — to get props like camel saddles, colourful pottery, bead curtains and crazy metal pots and pans.

But surprisingly enough most of the Moroccan atmosphere of Crane could be caught with genuine Moorish props hired from one of four firms in this country.

Property master Mr. David Lusby told me: “I reckon we could do the Kasbah from Putney.”

Very little on the Crane set has to be made specially. Said David: “When Cleopatra was being made at Pinewood, Moroccan props suddenly became terribly scarce. Today it is the reverse. A lot of the stuff used in Lawrence of Arabia has come into Britain.”

The biggest headache for the property buyers is trying to match for studio takes items used during location in Morocco.

One of the most difficult during the Crane series was trying to find a left-hand drive 1954 black Ford Mercury. Buyer Mr. Len Fraser told me: “It was just impossible. We couldn’t get one anywhere.

“Then one day I was driving along and I saw a green lefthand-drive Ford Mercury in front of me. I tailed it for three miles.

“It turned out to be a 1955 model. I could hardly believe my luck. All we had to do was to take it to the studio and paint it black.”

Many of the traditional costumes for Crane were specially brought back from Morocco. But when a garment has to be made, details come from Mr. Federer’s photographs or from the Moroccan Embassy library.

As Mr. Ernest Hewitt of costume design said: “We take tremendous care to see that costumes are accurate in every possible detail.”

When the series first went out a VIP delegation from the Moroccan Embassy visited Wembley to make sure that there were no gaffes. They went away satisfied.

A Moroccan Embassy spokesman told me: “We have been surprised and pleased with Crane’s accuracy when dealing with details of Moroccan life. It’s a good show.”

The post Wanted for Crane appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘The tension was built up ingeniously with the suspense evenly distributed amongst the various subjects so that one remained entirely in the dark until the end.’

The Times on ‘Someone We Know’.

‘It is difficult after all these years of television plays to imagine anything more amateur than last night’s TV Playhouse production of “Someone We Know” … nothing rang true … It came as no surprise when Thomas Harris came out as the murderer.’

Daily Mail

‘Pleas send us two of your free photo bookie and address from your Company, because we wanted to join your Company. Try to write our names on your Company book.

‘We will send you monkey skin, parrot feathers and old stamps.’

Letter from two schoolboys in Ghana.

‘Whilst reading my paper this morning something set me thinking. It is the everlasting brickbats thrown at the programmes televised by commercial television. As a humble housewife may I give some praise for the many, many evenings of pleasure afforded to me on television. I am not a TV Zombie, because some shows I do dislike, but I realise that everyone has his own taste.

‘We have only had a television now for less than a year but I shall always be grateful for the many hours of pleasure it has given me, in an otherwise rather drab life.

‘Good luck to you and all who make it possible.’

Letter front an Eltham viewer.

GALA

‘As compilations of bits and pieces of culture go, this was a distinctly superior compilation.’

Philip Purser, News Chronicle.

‘As a job of offering culture to the mass audience without appearing to use force, Associated-Rediffusion’s Gala, a concert programme by leading international artists, deserves encouragement.’

Peter Black, Daily Mail.

‘My mind boggles at the thought of what ITV must have paid out to get together last night’s amazing array of international talent for Gala, the first programme in a new musical series … I had to settle for that discredited old adjective “fabulous”.’

Phil Diack, Daily Herald.

‘I am eighty years old and practically an invalid. I find the ITV programmes so varied. They certainly make my life (I live alone) 100 per cent more interesting.

‘I love the African series and the television games, “Green”, “Miles” and others, the plays and films. But please don’t have too much sport, education and such. The BBC have that in abundance and it makes me tired. Your programmes arc so right and friendly. I speak not only for myself, but many who visit me.’

Letter from Mr A. M. Wilce, Bridgwater, Somerset.

‘All the same, I believe the common man has a perfect right to enjoy himself in his own way. If superior persons dislike his tastes (and they do), then they must lump it.

‘More than that: they had better stop going on and on and on with their wailings against TV. For they have become a bore.

‘The fact is that most people, grown-ups and kids alike, watch the telly, on the whole, for fun.

‘They want to be entertained. It does not corrupt them, or debase them either. Nor do they take it as solemnly as the superior persons suppose.

‘For the common man with all his limitations, has a large supply of horse-sense. So has his wife. And they are perfectly capable of taking care of their own kids.’

Charles Curran, Empire News.

The post They Say… December 1959 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘I read in the national Press that Val Parnell and ATV are against Associated-Rediffusion’s suggestion to the ITA that the third network, if and when it comes off, be a cultural one.

‘The reason suggested for this was that AR-TV is frightened of opposition. How can it be when it made more money than any other commercial TV company last year? It has fought through and triumphed against the opposition to date. So why should a commendable suggestion to support a cultural network, sharing the costs with other companies, be interpreted as a case of “nerves”?’

Letter from a Swansea viewer.

‘Sir Ian Jacob, BBC Director-General, said in London yesterday any new television wave-band should be shared by the BBC and ITA. Both organizations should be allowed to transmit two services, giving viewers a choice of four programmes.

‘Each of us could start a new service, but it has to be something new and not a duplication of what is going on in the present services.’

Daily Telegraph – June 10, 1959

‘Both ITA and BBC should be provided with an additional service solely for educational programmes (I use the word “educational” in its broadest sense) and specialized programmes with minority appeal. Such services would make it possible to provide more programmes for minorities, covering for example opera, ballet, and classical music, apart from which there might well be distinct commercial advantages in helping to make these specialized activities financially more self-supporting. We should be willing to participate in such a service, notwithstanding that it would have to be subsidized by our existing service.’

John Spencer Wills, company chairman, Nov. 25, 1958.

‘The Age of Juliet’. . . was fascinating to watch and a great exercise for our wits.’

Nancy Spain, Daily Express.

‘Ones fears for ‘The Age of Juliet’ adapted from the French on Independent Television last night, were only too well founded.’

L.L., Daily Telegraph.

‘This is the first time I have ever commented publicly about a televised programme, but I feel I must tell you how much I appreciated, enjoyed and admired your initiative in flying over so promptly the filmed interview with Lord Montgomery by Morrow and Colinwood. In particular did I appreciate the value of this following the criticisms which appeared in the British Press by people who obviously had not seen the film, but quoted excerpts of the interview, which gave erroneous impressions.

‘It was really excellent, but if there is a next time with another interview with Lord Montgomery by two such first-class interviewers, please do try and make it earlier in the evening, as I feel many people probably missed this beneficial programme by going to bed. I like to think the advertisers would understand – !

My very sincere congratulations.’

Letter from a Beaconsfield viewer.

‘May I slap you on the back for “Motoring Club”? I do not drive, never owned a car, but you set me thinking. The whole fifteen minutes was fascinating and the script very understandable. More power to your elbow!’

Letter from a Twickenham viewer.

‘My little boy of five has been very ill since before Christmas. During his long stay home from school we bought a TV set. Believe me, the different programmes have done more to buck him up than any doctor ever could. He is not only interested in the programmes but asks no end of questions about the studios and cameras, etc. I feel that I would just like to thank you all for unknowingly giving my son a great deal of entertainment during his illness and convalescence.’

Letter from Chelmsford viewer.

‘My husband and I look forward to seeing Jim’s Inn. We both think that Jim’s Inn is the best Advertising Magazine on television. Let us hope we will be seeing Jim’s Inn for many more weeks to come.

Postcard from Fulham viewer.

The post They Say… November 1959 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The tenth series of ‘No Hiding Place’ with Raymond Francis in his role as Lockhart and newcomer Sean Caffrey as his sergeant is now being screened. It also has a new producer. What does it feel like to be put into the producer’s chair? How does one get a series such as this on the air? What are the problems? michael currer-briggs, the new producer, tells his story…

One day, just before Christmas, I was asked to write this article. ‘What is wanted?’ I asked. ‘Oh! something about your first series as producer,’ they said, ‘the personal point of view – a thinking piece – anecdotal – comedy – the theory and problem of taking over a long-established series and becoming a producer.’ Well, I thought I’d better oblige and so I started to think. To me this is a painful process. But I have been trying to be a producer for some months now so I should have something to say. At the time of going to press we have only just begun production and I have still got weeks of rehearsals, reactions, ratings, directors, designers, writers and artists ahead of me. There will be problems, some of which will no doubt be furry, four-footed and with fangs. There will be plenty of ‘final analyses’ and ‘critical appraisals’ and all those heart thumping terrors with which to cope. So, accepting that all this is still to come, I will now formulate my feelings and experiences as far as they go.

In the summer, while I was the other side of the Iron Curtain working for the BBC and hitting the high spots of Glasgow, I somehow felt that change was in the air. Sure enough one day I had a call from Television House. ‘We’ve got something very, very interesting we want you to do,’ they said. Well, of course my curiosity got going at double speed. ‘Producing the next series of “No Hiding Place”,’ they said. ‘Good for you and good for us.’ Well, I didn’t think long about it and I calmed down fairly soon, accepted it whole-heartedly and took the plunge.

‘Scripts,’ they said on day one. ‘Must get them in as soon as possible and you’re lucky you’ve got plenty of time. The budget’s fixed and your directors are fixed and your script editor’s fixed and the series is fixed and the new sergeant is fixed and you’re very lucky.’ They said that several times just so I wouldn’t forget.

Well, I suppose some would say I should have started by unfixing something. I should have been all difficult and talked about my creative integrity, but I decided not to – maybe I’ll prove myself to have been a fool not to have unfixed a bit, but I didn’t. I’d thought all about that on day one minus one, so it didn’t have the effect of fixing me all that much, especially as there were a hell of a lot of other things left to do. Every picture has to have a frame – old oak, heavy gold, stark modern simplicity – and I felt the frame they’d fixed for me was pretty good and plenty large and that I had so much to learn that I’d do myself a damage if I banged about trying to get a different shape or style for it.

And so we started. The first big thing was learning the series from a different point of view. ‘No Hiding Place’ is a common property to all of us. Experience on the series is part of a man’s life in Rediffusion Television. But I had to see it from an entirely new angle – the producer’s angle – and I had to ask myself a lot of questions. What could I bring to the series? What would be expected of me? What really is a producer’s function? What were his qualifications supposed to be – his attributes – his experience? Well, no one really told me very much about this and I could see I’d have to try and spring fully fledged as it were from the head of Jove.

I thought of all the producers who had produced me – the ones who were never called producers in the old days when they were heads of their section and the ones who had sprung up overnight and had acquired the title perhaps before they were dry behind the ears. Everyone according to his own experience and I to mine. I could only think of it all in terms of what I would like a producer to be and try to become that. Probably my ideas were very, very much too limited -in fact I’m sure so now after only a few weeks at it. The job involves much more than I ever imagined and even at the end of 15 episodes I know there’ll be a massive amount for me still to learn. All things to all men is a ridiculous impossibility. But it’s not far from what is demanded. Good with ideas, vivid with inspiration, profound with knowledge and experience, capable of communicating, but above all (and the one chief aim I am trying to keep before me) is the ability to make a climate in which everyone can give of their best. They should not only satisfy the audience and give it more than what is wanted and expected, but they should also satisfy the management and themselves. All seems to funnel down from above to a producer and then fan out from him to a collection of writers, directors and artists for whom the same process is being repeated. A storm of creative energy is at the heart of each episode and each one must not only be related to the others but must also be treated as if it were the only show on earth.

The writer comes first. Alun Falconer as script editor fights for his writers, trying to get the best from them and for them. Stories came and went by the dozen and a few remain in memory as a laugh. There was the one where Lockhart was supposed to have high jinks with a gay widow who hid her diamonds and kept them in the fridge while she claimed insurance as a result of a supposed theft. But she’d made one mistake and chose for her Hiding Place a certain product wrapped in a wrinkled paper. But Lockhart knew all and solved the case because, as the title told, he could tell Stork from Butter. A bright young spark sent that one in and in all fairness I honestly believe he didn’t realise that he was completely doomed to failure.

So we ploughed on and the scripts started to come in. The consultants, Amos Gibson and Colin Holder, consulted, and sometimes we were elated, sometimes depressed. Re-writes came next to get the first drafts into line with the series as a whole. There were the dangers and problems of how to avoid spoiling a good idea, how to make a weak script stronger and so on. We had a script that was promising but this and that needed doing. Conferences followed, re-writes came in. We all thought we had a disaster on our hands. On that day Alun talked about his technique, it saved my life to hear him.

‘It’s like sailing,’ he said, ‘tacking against the wind. You have to push an author to get him to change his course and off he goes right over to the other side of the river. He nearly crashes into the opposite bank and you have to be over there to push him off again. Then he shoots back to the other side. But each time he tacks he gets nearer and nearer until he gets on course and the script comes into line. You’ve got to blow just the right amount and sometimes it takes a lot of wind.’ Soon after this another script came in. That was a big worry and Alun blew quite a gentle breeze. I thought he’d gone mad, become an early Christian and was being far too kind. But the result was miraculous – straight on to course in one go. I wish they were all like that.

And so we had something to produce and all the internal processing began. Will our revered chief approve? Who shall direct? What will he say? Will it be number one? Must have a good one to start – can we bring it in within budget? What about filming, casting, designing? Bang, bang and we were off and I found another chain of reactions, some new, some expected but all vitally fresh.

This is where the directors come in. They are the next step towards exposure. They add, they give actuality, they transmit. God help a producer who doesn’t get on with them. To me the heart of this new job is seeing them for the first time. Before, when I was directing myself, I was blinkered. I never saw another director working. I was always alongside. I was in parallel at the best of times, behind or ahead most of the time, never face to face. I know already I want to direct again in the future because I can now much more clearly understand that unless a producer and a director mutually see each other’s problems as their own, they will never be united. If this principle isn’t applied in every television relationship, nothing can happen successfully, smoothly or with integrity.

There is and must be a friction and it must cause heat. Fire is needed to create but it can also destroy. I am beginning to understand that really it is best for a producer to be seen and not heard. Even his own personal ‘OOMs’ [“Official Office Memoranda” – Captain Brownrigg’s way of communicating with staff – Ed] give rise to a large range of reactions. His function must be to reconcile, balance, give form and he must live with the constant hope that his suggestions might inspire – and not be disturbed when they are rejected.

It is far better to have a good idea left untasted than to force it to be swallowed and then to see it sink undigested like a lump of solid dough to the bottom of a dyspeptic stomach. But if a producer has a reward, it is to see his suggestions chewed over and transformed into something new, fresh, vital and appropriate. Something which will need no defending, because it exists as it should and will reach the screen in a way in which even the sleepiest viewer will respond to, perhaps without even knowing why.

As a wise man once said of a producer – he must have a love-hate relationship with anyone with whom he works. He must be willing to help always but above all he must respect a man’s self-respect. A producer is with a series for the entire run but on each episode the director is the creative chief. The same applies to every relationship a producer has with every creative technician. His editor comes first, then the director and through (and only through) the latter, the rest of the company of each production.

The one real link with his old job as a director is the producer’s relations with his stars. He has to keep them happy with good scripts, good publicity, good everything. They are the ones who take the ultimate exposure and get the final praise and blame. Raymond Francis has done it all before but Sean Caffrey is taking his first plunge. We wish them both all the best of luck. At the time of writing this I haven’t got any further. I’m not going to crystal gaze into the future – it’s too dangerous. By the time this gets to the great Fusion public, they’ll know whether I’ve been able to do anything to actualise my aim. They must be the judges.

The post No Hiding Place for a producer appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Rediffusion Television’s production of ‘The Caretaker’ earlier this year won an International Emmy award for the best entertainment programme made outside the United States. In this article director marc miller talks about the problems of production. Obvious congratulations are due to Harold Pinter for writing it, Marc Miller for directing it, Peter Willes for producing it, and Roy,Dotrice, Ian McShane and John Rees for acting in it. Congratulations are also due to all those who had a hand in the production and their names are listed at the end of the article.

Making ‘The Caretaker’ into a television play created one or two unusual problems the solution of which added, I think, to the production’s effectiveness.

I felt that we should make no concessions towards accepted studio practice; that the play should only be broken where Pinter had originally made scenes end; that the actors must only work in one area; and that I should be able to shoot from every side of the room.

Designer Fred Pusey solved the last two problems brilliantly by splitting the four walls of the room into six trucks and putting the whole set on a 2 ft high rostrum. This created some problems concerning camera movement but it gave the cast a working area quite independent of the machinery. This independence added to the confidence of their work as they did not have to compete for floor space with pedestals, etc. Bill Lee, lighting supervisor, saw the designer’s rough plan and quietly pointed out that he could not light a 360 degree area but he would do his best to illuminate it. Bill’s concept of lighting and illumination is his own affair, but I have made a point of asking for the illumination technique several times since ‘The Caretaker’. Jeff Shepherd (senior cameraman) and Alan Evans (sound balancer) gave a qualified blessing to the early plans and the play was ready to start rehearsal.

To lessen the break caused by moving from the rehearsal room to the studio, Fred Pusey set up the entire rostrum area in the room, filling the spare space with junk to build into the play as it was needed. Michael Baldwin, costume design, arrived on the first day with cases full of old clothes which were sorted out to provide Roy Dotrice with his rags and John Rees with his doubtful, mid-forties pin-stripe suit. Ian McShane elected to provide his own wardrobe.

From here on, at the start of each day, ‘Pet’ Wilcox, stage manager, and Michael Mollan, assistant stage manager, had a full props setting job to do while Roy Dotrice and John Rees had to change into full costume. In this way each day’s work was done in the conditions of a final dress run and the transition to the studio was a natural extension of the rehearsal.

Rehearsals were watched at every stage by practically everyone who was to be concerned in the studio operation. This resulted in a complete understanding of exactly what we were trying to achieve.

All of which should indicate the sort of total unity and teamwork that backed the production. Perhaps the point could be more emphatically made by saying that the play, which ran for 92 minutes, was recorded in one take. Further the whole period of the recording had an incredible ‘first night’ feeling that I have never experienced to that extent before or since.

It is unnecessary to talk more about the play and the performances. They were seen and judged. Pinter is a great writer and Dotrice is a great actor. But these talents could not have fused without the teamwork and dedication of all concerned.

Those involved are listed below. There is no significance in the order.

Designer: Fred Pusey; production assistant; Anne Taylor; stage manager: Pet Wilcox; assistant stage manager: Michael Mollan; costume design: Michael Baldwin; casting director: Muriel Cole; senior cameraman: Jeff Shepherd; camera crew: Colin Hopkins, Sid Turrell, Peter Wickstead, Peter Bond, Andrew Vale, David Taylor, Vernon Layton; sound balancer: Alan Evans; grams operator: Tim Jaggard; sound crew: Mac McLoughlin, John Hoare, Fred Varley, Don Hawkins, Tom McIntyre; lighting director: Bill Lee; electrician chargehand: Bob Burns; console operators: Alf Lilley, Harold Titmus, Mike Sutton; vision mixer: Kaye Stromqvist; make-up: Mary McDonough, Lilia Lennox; senior engineer, control: Peter Hart; assistant engineers: Ray Nicholson, Brian Aylard; floor manager: Eric Cooper; assistant floor manager: Nigel Warwick; setting assistant: Pat Benson.

The post The Caretaker wins Emmy appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Producer/director Peter Morley, scriptwriter John Terraine and a unit have visited Ceylon, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Burma and India with Lord Mountbatten to film him at the many locations which played a vital part during his time as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, the last Viceroy of India and the first Governor General of the new independent India. Photographs by MALCOLM AIRD.

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

‘My wife and I would very much like to get tickets to see one of your programmes as we are trying to be in London for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on a second honeymoon. When we got married the only way we could get the family car for our honeymoon was to take my mother and family along, which consisted of a pet monkey and seven children. Most of our honeymoon was spent looking after the seven children and chasing the monkey who was always getting loose. We do hope if we can make it that the second honeymoon will be less eventful than the first.’

Letter addressed to ‘Commercial TV London, England’, from Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A.

‘A massive slice of ham was cut off by Associated-Rediffusion last night in the play “Family on Trial’’.’

Nancy Spain, Daily Express

‘“Family on Trial” was one of the most worthwhile ITV plays I have seen for a long time.’

Phil Diack, Daily Herald

‘Your programme is a very good one. I like it very much. I enjoy the music page best. Will you have some more animals because I like animals. I enjoy your programmes because there is a lot of variety in them. The programme is not too long. That is why I like it.’

Edenbridge, Kent, viewer, aged 9, on ‘Lucky Dip’.

‘I would be very interested to know who are the twelve most popular BBC television actresses considered by the BBC, in order of popularity and, also, I wondered if you could tell me if there is a new panel game to take the place of “What’s My Line?” If so when is it due to start.’

South Devon viewer’s letter addressed to Associated-Rediffusion – one of the few which we couldn’t answer

‘Surely the oddest thing about television is the fear, prejudice and open hostility which it seems to arouse. There is a widespread feeling among educated and responsible people that it is something more than a new means of communication; that it is a sinister influence undermining educational standards and social life.

‘I believe this to be nonsense, and I am certain that the same things were said about the printing press and other inventions in their nursery days.’

L. Marsland Gander, Daily Telegraph

‘As a member of Associated-Rediffusion’s Educational Advisory Council and a headmaster who has been using television programmes for schools since their inception in 1957, I was interested in your readers’ letters on schools TV.

‘It was reassuring to see that most of them agreed with the policy adopted in this country; namely, that at present television programmes for schools should be supplementary to the work of the teacher and make no attempt to replace him.

‘There is no danger of standardization, because teachers receive sufficient advance information – by means of Teachers’ Notes – to enable them to select and use programmes according to the particular needs of each class.

‘I, too, am “cool” about the closed-circuit “master-teacher” technique sometimes used in America. In this country the teaching profession still has a big job to do in making fuller use of the existing service and helping the two broadcasting organizations to produce the best possible programmes for schools.

Letter to News Chronicle from Fielden Hughes, Wimbledon

‘I should like, now that our bookings have temporarily come to an end, to thank you all for your most valued support and co-operation.

‘There is no doubt at all that this particular department is still fired with the old “pioneering” spirit, and the manner in which you nurse such a diverse range of peculiar products in each programme fills me with admiration.’

Letter from an advertising agency to advertising magazines.

‘Despite the slight discrepancies, Cyril Coke’s production extracted every ounce of entertainment from a smooth plot and a neat, if not witty, dialogue.’

Neville Randall – Daily Sketch, on ‘Skyline for Two’

‘By handling the main idea respectfully and playing down the marginal incidents, the director, Mr Cyril Coke, made something stilted and humourless of the whole.’

The Times

‘We have had our TV set for four months now and after looking in at your programmes almost every evening I thought I would like to thank you for such good entertainment. One hears people criticise television but I can only think they must be very hard to please. We have three young children so can very rarely go out of an evening. We think the children’s programmes are very good, our children will never miss any of them. Please thank everyone concerned for giving us such good viewing in such a friendly way.

Letter from Thornton Heath, Surrey, viewer

‘When I grow up I would like to be the mother of eleven athletic boys. Then I could start a football team of my own and sell them to Gateshead, because they need some help.’

Letter from 12-year-old Blaydon-on-Tyne viewer.

‘I would like to make a suggestion about the programmes when you get the extra viewing time. Is it possible to have a record programme similar to the one Joan Edwards used to introduce in the early days of commercial TV? There have also been some really good shows that could bear a repeat. How nice it would be to see the “Father Knows Best”, “Sir Lancelot” and other series we enjoyed so much over again.

‘I must be one of your most devoted TV viewers as I am handicapped and I pass many a happy hour watching TV. So you see I for one would welcome the extra hours of TV.

Letter from Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, viewer

‘Having viewed television both here and in Canada I have come to the conclusion that your network cannot be surpassed and I must thank you for the fine plays that we, the viewers, appreciate.’

Letter from viewer in Hyde Park Gate

‘As a play it held me just about as closely as an animated story in an American magazine and, oh, so seldom animated.’

Nancy Spain, Daily Express, reviewing ‘ The Winner’

‘“The Winner”, directed by David Boisseau, turned out to be one of the smoothest plays of the year.’

Richard Sear, Daily Mirror

‘Why must such delectable programmes as “Private Secretary”, “Dick and the Duchess”, and “African Patrol” be screened at such unreasonable time as 6.10 p.m.? They are fresh and amusing and such a change from the eternal westerns. At 6.10 p.m. housewives like myself are cooking dinner with one hand and putting the youngsters to bed with the other. It makes me hopping mad to have to miss them, just catching a glimpse in passing. Surely programmes such as “This Week” or “What the Papers Say” could be switched to this time instead. After all, although these programmes are interesting, I do not think it would seriously upset anyone to miss them.’

Letter from Leyton viewer

The post They Say… August 1959 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘I believe you are the right person I should write to on the following matter. It concerns the film entitled ‘Christmas in Cyprus’, which as you know was made out here largely under the direction of Peter Hunt, and shown over your network on Christmas Day in England.

‘You have very kindly sent us a 35 mm copy of the film and this has been seen by a large number of the security forces in Cyprus. I would like you to know what a very good impression indeed this film has made; it does not overstate the case and it shows very vividly the part played by the Security Forces. I am sure that it has been a big factor in raising the morale of the soldiers.

‘I would, therefore, like to thank you very much for all the trouble taken in preparing this film and for your kindness in letting us have a copy.’

Letter to Captain Brownrigg from Major-General Kenneth Darling, Director of Operations in Cyprus.

‘It is so very nice of you to reply to my letters. I expect you think it is quite mad for a happily-married mother to be writing after photos of TV heroes. But at least it proves what a good job you are all doing. Keep it up!’

Jean Swain, Coventry (Viewer’s letter to programme correspondence).

‘Congratulations and thanks for these very fine programmes. Daniel Farson’s interview with (R.C.) Fr. Christie; “The Killing of the King” – First Class!!!’

Edward O’Hara, Yorks. (Viewer’s postcard).

EXPRESS LIFT

‘Yet for all the fortune he has made in Associated-Television he is still a man of the people. His humour is lusty. His manners are adequate, but not impeccable. When he goes up to his close-carpeted suite in Television House he will still pat the lift boy on the back and know his Christian name.’

Extract from Daily Express story on Mr Lew Grade. We have been asked to deny reports that as a result lift boys are now going to be employed.

‘I would like you to know how much I appreciated your “Hallé at Work” programme. I thought the sound was handled particularly well.’

Viewer’s ‘phone call to Night Duty Officer.
Director: Cyril Coke; sound balancer, Tony Couch.

‘The lady in the programme should be shown off a bit more because she is good looking.’

A 14-year-old boy’s comments on Muriel Young’s appearance in ‘Lucky Dip’.

‘As it turned out we were given a production which can truly be called distinguished. Ronald Marriott directed with the deftest blending of sensitivity and passion, and the acting was good down to the humblest member of the 40-strong cast.’

Denis Thomas, Daily Mail on ‘The Killing of The King’.

‘Please forgive this rather long letter, I know you are busy, but being a strong supporter of commercial TV long before it became a reality, I feel I must let you know my observations of the viewing public.

‘I am an insurance agent and have to call on people in their homes and as my pet subject is TV I know you would be pleased to know that 90 per cent of the people who have a choice of programmes choose ITV. But the biggest let down is the much vaunted ‘‘Play of the Week”’.

‘In contrast, “Film of the Week” is very popular and the general opinion is a film is better than the average play…. So take less notice of M.P.s and enemies of ITV, many of whom haven’t a TV set.’

Letter from Tooting viewer.

‘Being a young housewife whose main pleasures are derived from a three-year-old son and a one-year-old TV set, you may be sure that my choice in programmes is confirmed to those which give the highest degree of entertainment.

‘Therefore, although I have never in all my days written to any personality (not even in my film-struck teenage days) I felt that I must write to you on a superb programme “Look In” which has only one fault – it is too short! Hoping you will continue indefinitely to give myself and others so much pleasure for many a Tuesday evening to come.’

Letter to Michael Ingrams from Mrs Lois D. Morris, Middlesex.

‘Why not have a separate channel for kids. That would suit everybody and please all of us. If that fails, the other alternative rests with the parents. Why do they allow the kids to sit up? They seem to be allowed to do as they please. That is why there is so much delinquency about.’

Letter from Redhill, Surrey, viewer complaining about ‘Mark Saber’ being taken out of the early evening because of the large number of children viewing.

‘I like “Lucky Dip” because you get so many personalities.

I have never written to “Lucky Dip” before because today was the first time I have seen it.’

Young Isle of Wight viewer.

‘Usually the show succeeds: it has some of the drive and guts of Fleet Street, and is not afraid of being brash now and again. I think most viewers would welcome a quarter of an hour’s extension here.

Henry Turton, Punch, on ‘This Week’.

“This Week” turned from men to rabbits and gave us one of those cleverly-cut interviews with children which grip the heart.’

Colin Frame, The Star.
Director: Sheila Gregg; interviewer: Michael Nelson; scriptwriter: Colin Willock.

‘… the people who put on television entertainment have a sense of responsibility appropriate to those who pour shows nightly into the home, where children may be watching. After inquiry into current stage plays I reject with scorn all complaints about TV violence and puerility.’

L. Marsland Gander, Daily Telegraph.

‘I want to hand a belated pat on the back to Associated-Rediffusion…. Associated-Rediffusion was the first company to transmit commercial television programmes in Britain and it has been well aware of its responsibilities in the field of culture from the start. One of its first acts was to place the Hallé Orchestra under long-term contract and for nearly five years it has featured this orchestra in televised performances and on the concert platform. AR-TV also embarked on the ambitious scheme for staging classical plays at the Saville Theatre and, after short runs, transferring them to the television screen. The company is now offering more life drama than any other programme contractor.

The half-hour news feature programme, ‘This Week”, has been maintained in a peak-hour time every week since January, 1956. AR-TV also introduced the first regular television broadcast for schools ever seen in Great Britain, but the Beaverbrooks and the Mayhews prefer to forget about the good things and think only of the Westerns, the variety shows and the advertisements.

‘The Beaverbrook Press has backed many losers in its time but its campaign against television may well turn out to be its biggest failure.’

Ernest Kay, Time and Tide.

With all these faults the play still had some highly entertaining moments. Gladys Young (Aunt Ben) was a delight, and the meetings of the Irish M.P.’s full of life. Costumes and camera work excelled.’

Dick Sear, Daily Mirror, on ‘Parnell’, Play of the Week.
Director: David Boisseau; Costumes designed by Ernest Hewitt; Cameras manned by Vic Gardiner, Jeff Sheppard and the rest of crew 1.

Illustrations by Geraldine Spence

The post They Say… April 1959 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

When Associated-Rediffusion first began to transmit in 1955 it was David’s challenge to the Goliath BBC. I think we all ought to remember that now, when, after a few near misses, the pebble has hit the complacent monster. We are all too apt to forget the impudent, and as it seemed, imprudent courage of the first assault.

The worst thing about metaphors is that they don’t mix as well as gin and French, and so I don’t want to pursue this David and Goliath business too closely. A-R TV isn’t so small and the BBC isn’t dead. Let me state my first interest in this effusion – apart from the money. It is to consider what part the TV critic has played in television.

In my opinion the influence of the TV critic has been valuable in providing entertainment for readers and publicity for individuals or organizations. It has been entirely negligible in its effect on the general spin of the wheel.

Now to my second point on which I can expand more. What is the function of the newspaper television critic? What is he trying to do? There is vast misunderstanding about this among television producers and planners, in fact among all those people on the other side of the fence. I find it exceedingly curious that this should be so. They understand well enough their own problem which is to entertain the public while at the same time maintaining as much artistic integrity as time space circumstances will allow. The critic is in the same boat.

When it comes to understanding the problem of the newspaper critic the average television man betrays an abysmal ignorance. This is evident in every reference made to reporters and newspapers in TV drama. Playwrights do not seem to know the first thing about newspaper technique and the producers even less. This applies to all TV organizations, not merely A-R.

The average TV producer, confused about the methods of the newspaper reporter, is equally at sea about the function of the critic. He thinks of Ruskin, Hazlitt, Shaw, and St John Ervine, failing to realize that none of these giants made his reputation within the framework of a modern newspaper. Newspapers exist, oddly enough, to propagate news. Anything that appears is the livelier for an admixture of topicality. A first night is news; the plot of a play not yet seen by any but the first-night audience is also news.

That is the big snag with television. At a first showing a TV play has been seen by ten thousand full houses. It may never be seen again. Has a notice about it any place in a paper that lives and dies on the day’s news? Yes, it can have if treated on the basis of a football match; the result is known but readers want to know the expert’s opinion and to re-live the thrills. But it is secondary to real news; if an economic blizzard came and newspapers were cut down, television criticism would probably be one of the first things to go.

Many people seem to think that there is some sharply defined dividing line between news and criticism in newspapers. This is not so. The function of a critic – and let me make it clear that I am speaking only of the newspaper type, not the lesser breeds without the law – is to entertain his readers, tell them something that they do not already know, while at the same time being constructive and generous. Style helps, but haste to catch editions, the telephone and the torture of a thousand cuts, or death on the stone, do not.

Some wounded television characters think there is no such thing as a good critic, only different degrees of bad ones. Personally I agree with Shaw that the golden rule is there are no golden rules. And I think Ruskin’s reminder that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless, such as peacocks, ought to be applied to all TV critiques and critics. Or maybe, just to complete this piece of literary exhibitionism, Hazlitt was right when he said that the art of pleasing consists in being pleased, whatever that may mean.

Perhaps one other thing ought to be said about TV critics. They have inherited the traditions of sound radio which from the start was not only mixed up with news but also with gossip writing and a certain amount of Press antipathy to a formidable new competitor. Luckily, in these more civilized times all is sweetness and light between the Press and ITV. All? Well, nearly all. That’s the best way I can express it.

Leonard Marsland Gander

The post They Say… Leonard Marsland Gander appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

How would you take it if I said that Associated-Rediffusion was the most BBC-like of all the programme contractors? As a compliment or as an insult? I suspect that some of you would take it one way and some the other, and if this suspicion is well-founded, then surely it tells us something interesting about Associated-Rediffusion.

I do say it, and I mean it as a compliment. The BBC have their funny little ways, and I, for one, have not been exactly bashful in pointing out what have seemed to be their errors of judgment. But, somewhere, submerged beneath the attitudinizing and the patronage and the rather pathetic intermittent yearning to be all things to all men, there is a solid stratum of nineteenth-century progressiveness and its invariable concomitant, integrity.

The BBC’s earnest wish to improve our shining hour is, to me, the permanently splendid thing about it, the British miracle; a fundamentally benevolent institutional integrity which survives the indifference of its beneficiaries, the variable quality of its servants, the derision and malevolence of its enemies. Some of this unquenchable nineteenth-century belief in the perfectibility of mankind and the entire rightness of ‘improvement’ rubbed off on to Associated-Rediffusion. I get a strong impression of it – not least when I talk to people who pride themselves on being free from it. Several of the veteran programme companies have their streak of nervous quasi-didacticism. Uneasily they slip in a few things plainly designed to ‘improve’, rather like a pickpocket slipping a contrite farthing into the collection box.

But whereas Granada are pickled in old-fashioned North Country radicalism diluted by modern scepticism, and ATV find it difficult to dissociate merit from money, Associated-Rediffusion are still without a characteristic corporate posture, and give an impression of benevolent amorphousness which suggests a rather deep-seated case of committee-ism.

This is common knowledge, perhaps. But is it a bad thing? I think not. Vagueness is itself a characteristic, and it can even be a useful and a healthy one. I do not belong to the school of cultural neo-fascists who scream for a dictator to impose his will on the organization (any organization). God forbid that a cult of Caesarism should encourage ‘strong men’ and their inevitable sycophants. I do not subscribe to the cult of the ‘strong man’, which is disturbingly widespread. The fuhrer principle is abominable wherever it is met, and the most disturbing of all current manifestations of defeatism is this pitiful urge to be marshalled, the almost pathological desire to conform. It is indistinguishable from the death wish.

Associated-Rediffusion gives the impression of being a civil organization, in which the individual voice is given a hearing. This is so very much preferable to the para-military set-up, dominated by one will, that I freely forgive a certain lack of definition, a touch of fuzziness, which can sometimes be discerned in the end-product. Time is on the side of Associated-Rediffusion. Over the long haul the inherent reasonableness of Associated-Rediffusion’s way of doing things will prevail, when we have become a little tired of the power-dominated approach, which makes a clearer-cut, stronger short-term impact, but of which one tires so soon. At least, I hope that this will be so.

Whatever the shortcomings of this almost metaphysical approach to the mechanics of corporate responsibility, in terms of day-by-day programme output Associated-Rediffusion holds its own pretty well. Your school programmes are, to my mind, uniformly good, and when you turn schoolmaster in the evening you rarely put a foot wrong. Most, if not all of your features, are informed by a spirit of pure reasonableness worthy of the BBC at its best: responsible television-making on the conscientious or above-navel level.

‘This Week’ is somehow permanently one pace behind ‘Panorama’ – not at all because you just can’t do it, but simply (I think) because ‘This Week’ tries so desperately hard, as if over-conscious of its massive rival, and just misses the calm certitude which comes of relaxing. Your drama is in the same boat as everybody else’s – that is to say, always on the lookout for capable writing, of which it finds its fair share if not a bit more – and in the weird twilight region of light entertainment you just about hold your own. Associated-Rediffusion television always reminds me of the London Evening News. No one would call that a boulevardier’s paper. It lacks that shine of smartness.

But it goes into a great many homes precisely because it is somehow homely, the product of slightly but not conspicuously above-average minds and spirits. It is essentially suburban. It reflects the average householder’s outlook quite faithfully. It can be corny but it is always comfortable. In fact, it is comfortably corny. It gives you the illusion of being in the swim, but you never feel out of your depth.

There is nothing contemptible about this. The avantgarde is very important, but not all-important. An organization devoted to mass-communications need not be ashamed if it acts as a sort of filter, straining off what is palatable to the average palate. Averageness is a fact of life, as inescapable as straight hair, and as blameless. So long as you remember that practically everyone aspires, and keep on the right side of complacency, I don’t think you will go far wrong.

Maurice Wiggin

The post They Say… Maurice Wiggin appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

An outsider looks at A-R … for a start, that fusion introduction makes me sound like Colin Wilson. So let’s state here and now that I’ve no intention of being horse-whipped. Still that Outsider tag is probably justified, since this article arose out of a lunch date I had with your editor. I was sounding off about A-R in the approved John Osborne AYM manner when he pulled me up.

‘Don’t waste it on an audience of one’, he said, ‘put it on paper and tell the whole company.’ Let’s get one point straight. When you’re an outsider looking in it always seems easy to do the other chap’s job. But let the theorizing end and the practical business begin and the snags queue up. We can all be Stanley Matthews until the ball’s at our feet.

My newspaper work brings me in touch regularly with four ITV companies – each of which is taking on a distinctive personality. To my mind A-R is the least easily identifiable of the Big Four.

Think of ATV and the picture is of show business, variety, gimmicks, professionalism, the big drum, visiting Americans and Val Parnell. Turn to Granada and you sec Sidney Bernstein ruling the roost and hatching out a lot of good ideas and programmes, with here and there a bad egg in the entertainment basket.

ABC conjures up fast-talking Howard Thomas, a mixture of good and indifferent shows, and a general air of slow but steady progress.

Which leaves A-R. How do you sum up the company? It gives no impression of onemanship. Who is the single individual who can be cornered and asked for a quick answer to the 64,000 dollar question? This is important to everybody writing about TV because when key questions are being asked we look for an answer today. Tomorrow or later on is useless. And by answer I don’t mean a diplomatically phrased ‘it could well be that…’ or ‘when the consideration arises A-R will take due notice’ piece of nonsense.

Of course there are times when A-R prefers to play it strong and silent. However, when facts are getting out and questions being asked then let us please have a quick and definite answer. That way A-R will get a better Press than by letting limited information and guesswork produce half a story.

TEAM SPIRIT?

Does the same team spirit and enthusiasm exist inside A-R that is found in your competitors?

This isn’t a matter of individual outlook. Some of the nicest people to be met in TV nestle under A-R’s wing. But collectively does the vitality and urgency which marked those invigorating early days of Channel Nine still exist?

Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that the spirit is there and kept for private consumption rather than the public gaze. I hope it is so.

For my money you’ve slowed down. Some of the fun seems to have gone from life – which is surprising to an outsider when TV is so obviously one of the most alive-o industries with thousands of lookers-on-and-in only too keen to break into it.

Ignoring the financial side of things A-R snatched the viewing plum when it landed the London Monday-to-Friday contract.

But what unique contribution has the Company made to the service? Whatever your answer, here is a further question – has that contribution been as important as you expected?

I’ve been disappointed. A-R as one of the pioneering companies had to pay the penalty for the many and expected mistakes. It seems you stockpiled too much and these ‘canned’ shows played too big a role in your programme schedules. If you’re loading schedules with film it doesn’t leave much space for the live products of your staff.

So the impression gained from the screen was that A-R was more interested in the ready made product than in do-it-yourself shows. This impression remains. I’d like to sec A-R come out with a lot more live shows devised and mounted by the staff.

They couldn’t all be winners but a fair proportion might ring the bell.

HOLBORN AT EIGHT?

It is in variety that I believe A-R needs a boost. Where is your Palladium show or ‘Chelsea At Eight’? Where are your Maria Callas’s or Bob Hope’s?

From time-to-time you get the celebrity names but usually it is left to ATV or Granada to scoop the pool.

Where’s your comedy rival to ‘The Army Game’? I’m not forgetting those Top Ten quizzes ‘Double Your Money’ and ‘Take Your Pick’. A-R screens them, yet can hardly claim credit for either.

I’d like to see better scripting in variety, better productions, less tclcrccording, more showmanship and, well – glitter.

You’ve had your successes with offbeat shows like ‘Fred’, ‘Son of Fred’, etc. – but they are no longer around. More’s the pity.

Drama has hit the heights. I remember Pete Murray in ‘The Last Enemy’ … some of the Ted Willis plays. Lately, the impact has seemed less strong.

I don’t put that forward as a necessarily correct view. However, it’s mine. I realize that A-R’s drama maintains a good standard and it’s not easy finding unusual stories popular with the mass.

In documentaries and features A-R has been seen at its best. Here you have had intelligent, first-class programmes which other companies must have envied and which assaulted the BBC where it thought itself unchallengeable.

You found an outstanding interviewer-reporter in Michael Ingrams, screened two talked about and enjoyed ‘Look Out’ and ‘Look In’ series and promptly forgot about him.

I’m not forgetting those major documentaries of Russia and America – both highly praised but using him once every six months or so seems a waste.

I’d also like to mention Caryl Doncaster, Dan Farson and Nick Barker. They’ve all added to A-R’s reputation.

Do you recall the documentary that the Company did on fan fever? I still remember it and I’d like to know why A-R hasn’t turned out many more like it.

Can I pay a well-earned tribute next to weatherman Laurie West? It’s not the easiest of jobs telling viewers why it was wet yesterday, was wet today and it’s going to be wet tomorrow.

I like Mr West’s friendly personality, his commonsense and understandable explanations about deep depressions and the like, and I’m sure the majority of viewers prefer his performance to that of the BBC’s weather team.

But let’s take a look at the programmes which follow him in a typical week this summer. On Mondays the London viewer gets two Granada shows and one from ATV.

A-R’s contribution? The ‘My Wife and I’ series, the American originated ‘Wagon Train’, ‘Murder Bag’ and ‘Undercurrent’ – I’m leaving out advertising magazines. That’s a reasonable bunch. Three live shows and one film.

Tuesdays it’s not so good a story. Two live shows from Granada and two more from ATV. A-R chips in with youth-club show ‘Who Knows?’, Bob Cummings and Late, very Late Extra.

Better on Wednesdays – two from Granada and three from A-R. A play, a quiz and musical variety.

Thursdays? Equally good. Two from Granada and the rest from A-R. These are ‘Cool for Cats’, ‘San Francisco Beat’, ‘This Week’, a ‘Jack Hylton Half-hour’ and ‘Palais Party’. Finally, Friday. Three from ATV, one from Granada, and ‘Gun Law’, ‘Turnabout’ and a Jack Hylton show out of the home stable.

Where is the highlight to the A-R week? Where are the shows that are adding something lasting to the development of TV?

Maybe I’m being too critical? A-R is pleasing millions of viewers with the existing schedules. I believe it could please many more and give fresh incentive to the staff by working on new shows and ideas.

However, until you strike your own path and present many more live programmes I don’t think A-R will increase its stature.

Jogging along in the middle of the road with a passable but not exceptional collection of shows makes for an easy life.

Personally, I’d like to see the resources of writers, designers, directors and the rest tapped much more frequently.

Does it matter that some ideas might fall by the wayside? Much more likely is that half-a-dozen shows will emerge which are worth staying home for.

Do I qualify for that horsewhipping?

The post They Say… James Green appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Q. – Kindly state your name and occupation.

A. – Peter Black, television critic Daily Mail. Began journalism on Letchworth Citizen, 1937-39. Film and theatre critic, Brighton Evening Argus 1946-9. Theatre critic Brighton Herald 1949-52.

Q. – If you had to describe your opinion of Associated Rediffusion in one word, what would it be?

A. – Wellmeaning.

Q. – Perhaps you’d better take some more words.

A. – None of the programme companies has better intentions. But with A-R there is a damaging tendency to mistake the intention for the deed. My impression is that programmes are mounted in a quick rush of enthusiasm, before the difficulties and weaknesses have been cured. Too many go off at half-cock, and contain obvious misjudgments that should have been spotted earlier. My impression is of too many executives shouting brisk decisions down dictaphones. But I know it is a false one.

Q. – How do you account for it, then?

A. – Probably it’s the nature of A-R’s organization. When you think of the other companies you think of one man in each: Sidney Bernstein, Val Parnell, Howard Thomas. When you think of the BBC you think of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the MCC, the Foreign Office and the Polytechnic. When you think of A-R you think of a Board of businessmen directors.

Q. – Is that bad?

A. – Of course not. But it could lead to some oddities.

Q. – Name some.

A. – Light entertainment, for one. It seems to me an extraordinary decision to buy most of it from an outside organization.

Q. – Why?

A. – Because you lose at once full control over it. You have to take what you’re given. And you’re given shows like ‘The Lady Ratlings’.

Q. – Would it surprise you to know that ‘The Lady Ratlings’ figure in the Top Ten?

A. – No.

Q. – Continue.

A. – Because your own output is small you have nothing to replace shows that ought to be taken off. Do you remember ‘Highland Fling’?

Q. – Yes…

A. – And the department’s authority suffers. The last Lyon series, in my opinion, was frankly not good enough, and they should have been told so. Yet when A-R’s own men back shows, they have done some fine things. They gave Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan their chance and TV comedy received an entirely new twist.

Q. – How about being constructive – what would you do?

A. – Look for a man who would forget about the spectaculars, the running-about dancing, the acrobats and conjurors, and find something that would extend the range of light entertainment. His job would be to create programmes that were recognizably an A-R contribution, just as ‘Chelsea at Eight’ carries Bernstein’s bold signature.

Q. – You’re saying, in effect, that the more responsibility a department has, the better it functions?

A. – Of course. Look at A-R’s programmes for schools. Here a sense of responsibility is at its keenest. The result is that these programmes are the best thing A-R does.

Q. – Don’t forget that it’s easier for schools TV. The audience is around the same age, and at that age differences in taste are negligible.

A. – I was just going to say that. We must remember, too, that television is at its most interesting when it is frankly teaching. Only fools think that it mustn’t teach. The new term’s series on music is one of the best things of its kind that I’ve seen. I wish we were lucky enough to have it in the evening schedules.

Q. – Say something about drama.

A. – All TV drama has had a stroke of luck. It’s now been proved that audiences will take almost any subject, no matter how serious, if it’s in play form – unless it’s in poetry, fancy dress, introduces ghosts or plays tricks with time. All the drama departments are fruitfully exploiting this popularity, and none more than Norman Marshall and his team. There is a steady trickle of good, new writing coming out of A-R.

Q. – What do you call good writing?

A. – Plays that are about our own people in our own time. But I don’t mean comedies in which lazy writers try to catch atmosphere by sticking a bottle of tomato sauce on the table and talking about a ‘caff’. Jack Pulham’s ‘You Can’t Have Everything’ was an example. It was topical, grown-up drama, full of suspense though nobody got shot; and the actors and production fell on it like hungry men on a good meal.

Q. – What about features?

A. – I’m glad you asked that. All ITV features have suffered to a varied extent from ratings fever, a malady caused by too much exposure to the graphs supplied by TAM. Symptoms are, in the beginning, a rush of words to the head, a preference for the close-up and a tendency to talk loudly and to confuse fidgety cutting with speed. During the crisis the sufferer has the obsession that if a features programme slows down for a split second an executive will jump in and kill it.

Q. – The cure?

A. – Two. The short-term remedy is to move features away from peak time periods. This gives devisers, producers and performers a better target to aim at, allays their morbid fear of an inferior TAM rating, and restores their self-confidence. Hence programmes like Bronowski’s ‘New Horizons’, Wolf Mankowitz’s ‘Conflict’, and Dan Farson’s ‘People in Trouble’, all of them outstanding current affairs series.

Q. – And the other? How about ‘This Week’, for example?

A. – ‘This Week’ found the long-term cure. For months it gave you the impression of trying not to break into a run, like a man hurrying down a dark alley who sees behind him the shadow of the upraised cosh. Then, about six months ago, it seemed to acquire confidence in itself. It was as though it had realized that its position, as ITV’s only weekly serious feature to get a peak time, was more secure than it had thought. This sense of feeling necessary is of great value. Because of it ‘This Week’ is not only a key programme, it behaves like one.

Q. – How do you see the future of ITV, and A-R’s share in it?

A. – There is no doubt whatever but that ITV will become less frivolous. For one thing it can afford to – the undertaking is enormously profitable. For another, the market will change. Advertising and programming follow each other, and in ITV’s first two years we had cheap, mass-selling commodities being advertised around mass-market entertainment. Advertisers will now want to catch the smaller, particular markets, and programmes will match them. They’ve wooed the Smiths: now they’ll go after the Smythes.

This will suit A-R down to the ground. I suspect that its heart has never really been in ‘The Lady Ratlings’.

The post They Say… Peter Black appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

At the start it is necessary, I think, to say this: there are TV critics whose sole job is criticism from off the screen; there are others whose work incorporates in addition the duties of “TV Correspondent”. The latter types, of whom I am one, inevitably bring to their viewing a great deal of inside knowledge about the organisations and people behind the programmes. As with most circumstances in life this can be an advantage or not. It can breed prejudices in criticism; or it can rear understanding of what is involved in TV programming.

But because of this, when I am asked what I think of A-R I cannot honestly attempt an assessment based on screen output alone. I know a great deal more about A-R than meets the viewer’s eye. You inside can lament this, or be glad about it. It’s just a fact nobody can now change. Hence inevitably I recall those first impressions gained when A-R opened its doors to the newspapermen. I think most of us, reared on the BBC beat, expected the commercialism of independent TV to avoid the development of glossy offices occupied by legions of suave and arty young men and luscious young women, all chattering intellectual snobbism about “the medium”. But not a bit of it; A-R handed us this same story all over again!

The old stock BBC jokes about admin types running the decks, with the able-bodied producers and creative types battened down in the hold, all came up again. A-R looked more precious than it was. It could never have survived if it had lived up to its original chi-chi attitudes.

Even discounting these things as weaknesses of human organisation, the Fleet Street hunch that a lot of people had been appointed for no precise programme jobs inevitably sharpened the screen critic’s teeth. Unfortunately, the screen output to start with did nothing to remove this hunch.

But much which caused our early amusement with A-R has been sensibly and efficiently cleaned up. It is rapidly putting away childish things. But as it grows up there is one thing I keep seeking in A-R but still do not find. This is its own distinctive flavour; its one, main, undeniable contribution to TV. I think it undeniable that the other companies of the first four in ITV have developed a kind of “brand” quality. A-R’s screen output inevitably ranges through all and no degrees of quality and achievement. It has done some very fine programmes; some atrociously bad ones; and kept up a middling standard of competent TV entertainment and interest bravely. But what has it developed as nobody else has developed? Where is its major impact?

It is my belief that A-R has so far missed the one big opportunity in commercial TV which all other companies have missed, but which A-R is peculiarly suited to taking and using well. This is the extension beyond what the BBC has done in documentary programming, using outside broadcasting as well as studio and film.

The next leap-forward in TV documentary has got to tailor outside broadcasting techniques into the others. I know the BBC is aware of this, and is making steps; but A-R could have gone ahead by now, and got a lead. You can be justly proud of Dan Farson’s programmes. “This Week” is painfully erratic, always raising hopes of out-doing “Panorama” but taking so long to find the way.

But all these ventures, often stirring and good, arc set in too narrow a vision of TV documentary. The tools of the game arc not being used; the field of programme subjects is not really being extended. It is here, I think, that A-R could really make a major and lasting contribution. “USSR Now” was a peak—but one which by its nature must stand alone as an occasional triumph.

On the light entertainment side it seems to me that A-R has at times touched the exciting verge of new uses of TV in comedy work. The Tommy Cooper series promised this; the Alfred Marks series has established a good, solid and worthwhile new-kind melange of light entertainment. But where is the new A-R comedy-writing team?

A great deal of publicity was originally devoted to creating glamour stars for A-R. Two or three young actresses were treated to the build-up works. Where are they now? With my most gallant regrets to them, I have to say that their names do not today electrify the populace.

Of course the “TV star” business has been overdone. Indeed I believe “TV stardom” as such to be possible only by absolute exclusivity to one programme company. To-day the most popular TV performers swap channels regularly; and there is a free market for bookers. This is a good thing. But if A-R wants to breed “stars” of its very own, it can only be done by keeping its pets strictly to itself; the public will then know that it must shop at A-R to see its idols. Personally, I don’t think this is worth the trouble—and probably A-R has come to the same conclusion.

I have left to last the programme department which has received most of the glossy publicity, and let’s admit it, most of the chi-chi talk—drama. I happen to believe that TV plays are over-publicised and surrounded by a great deal of window dressing which matters not at all. All viewers like a good story. A competent play will always be popular. Drama experiment is worthy and useful, but Joe Public rarely recognises it.

A-R’s plays seem to me to oscillate between the very fine and the competent time-passers every bit as much as do the BBC’s. In fact, in TV, whoever is producing it, I doubt whether drama can ever be anything more than this.

There is always the chance that some TV company will find a new play with a new actor or actress in it, which will not merely cause us TV critics to rave, but will set the whole world of drama afire. That will be the day — and some day it will happen.

Kenneth Bailey

The post They Say… Kenneth Bailey appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Friday, November 22. At 17 minutes, 32 seconds past seven o’clock the first news flash about the shooting of President Kennedy was transmitted. At 19.40.30 the President’s death was reported as a fact. Normal programmes were abandoned.

This is how four members of the staff recall that evening:

‘We were having a drink in the club when someone telephoned to say that Kennedy had been shot. Less than an hour later we had got the go-ahead for a special programme – and two hours, 40 minutes after that we were on the air…’

‘There were about six people up in features when I went off to the TV Ball at the Dorchester with the news. When I got back there must have been dozens – and every phone was in use…

‘Studio 9 was bare – but all sorts of people turned up and offered to help. We didn’t have a complete crew but someone phoned Wembley and every available person was diverted to Television House…

‘A switchboard operator returned of her own accord because she guessed how busy it was going to be. Pretty well everyone in features section either phoned in or came back to the office from pubs, clubs and homes…’

This is how the general manager saw it:

‘Associated-Rediffusion, as the “Nominated Contractor” of the Network, recast the whole evening’s programmes, dropped many advertisements, put on a special “This Week” and behaved with great responsibility. My thanks are due to all those members of the staff who, of their own volition, returned to the office or the studios so that this emergency could be met.’

This is how James Green, television correspondent of the Evening News saw it:

Now that the senseless tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination is moving slowly into perspective, it is pertinent to consider how well or how badly British TV acquitted itself.

The moment of crisis could not have happened at a worse time for the two British networks. Almost to a man, the policy-making, programme-planning executives of both the BBC and the ITV companies were arriving at the Dorchester Hotel for the annual ball of the Guild of TV Producers and Directors.

Some 70 of the guests left at once for their respective offices and studios. Every telephone at the hotel was in demand and calls were even being made from the kitchens.

(Incidentally, what bad luck the organisers of this TV Awards ball do suffer: one year a clash with the Suez invasion, other times marred by the Lewisham train disaster, start of a newspaper strike, and the heaviest fog of the year.)

The Kennedy news presented British TV with the biggest surprise crisis it has handled in many years. Suez. Hungary. These involved major actions and quick thinking, but nothing compared with the impact of a bullet at Dallas.

The fact that so much of the ‘top brass’ was travelling to the ball accounts for the uncertain manner in which both networks handled the opening moments of the disaster. But within a few hours reasoned decisions were being taken.

The ‘breakthrough’, which must have struck all who looked to Associated-Rediffusion, ITN, and ATV for up-to-the-minute information and pictures, was in the way that published programmes were thrown out as situation demanded. Various ‘specials’ were hurriedly assembled and screened morning, afternoon, or evening as they became available.

Most of the pictures arrived through a pooling arrangement. The American networks providing material which was beamed on to London via the ‘Relay’ satellite. ‘Relay’ (and I’m told it will no longer be working by the end of the year) was able to pass pictures three times a day and ‘passes’ of around 30 minutes each were possible.

From Britain the American material was sent right across Europe, not only over Eurovision, but also the Iron Curtain’s equivalent, Intervision.

As a critic I viewed as many as possible of the emergency shows screened by ITV and BBC. I was left with a definite impression. First, beyond any doubt, Mr Geoffrey Cox and his team at ITN proved more than capable of meeting the challenge of the BBC’s news division. This is not to say that the BBC fell below their usual standards. Nor is it my intention to belittle their achievements.

The second is that, and I wish I could explain this better, somehow – before your very eyes ITV grew up, came of age, matured, found developing dignity. In the past, if you will accept a personal opinion, I think that the inclination has been to turn auto- matically to the BBC in times of emergency. It was as though the BBC spoke as the voice of the nation. Now that, I suggest, is what has been altered. As a result of ITV’s excellent public face during the four or five days of crisis, much has been done to remove that prejudice which favoured the BBC.

The British public, which likes to take its time, is correspondingly much closer to the day when it will accept ITV’s voice as nationally authoritative in days of trouble.

Not that the BBC were second-rate. What I believe is that the events in November have established as fact that they must now bear comparison with a challenger of powerful stature and increased responsibility.

It was also interesting to see the various ITV companies working together so smoothly and acting fast in disrupting normally inviolable programme schedules and advertising.

Summing up, Independent Television’s brand image has been considerably enhanced and a claim that the BBC are no longer monopolists of broadcasting in critical times can fairly be made.

The pity is that something similar in the way of emergency did not arise while the Pilkington Committee were in session. It would surely have had immense influence.

The post The assassination and TV appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

An acorn of an idea can grow into an oak covering many hours of TV programming. Anybody can have an idea at any time. The hard part is to translate it into something which can be put into a TV studio and transmitted: to unite into a team all the dozens of people involved. On these pages, Fusion has taken two highly contrasting subjects… an educative series based, of course, on facts and a scripted entertainment series based on vivid imaginations. Two contrasting people write in their own way about each. The first article is by executive producer STELLA RICHMAN (ATV’s ‘Love Story’, Rediffusion’s ‘The Hidden Truth’, ‘Blackmail’ and ‘The Informer’ which is to come this autumn). She allows her imagination full fling by putting down her ideal conditions for the production of a series. The second article is by executive producer GUTHRIE MOIR (Towards 2000′, ‘Design for Living’, ‘Royalist and Roundhead’). He sticks to the facts which led to the present 13-week series on the Civil War.

Cultivate under blue skies

The truth about television is that, apart from the actual title and perhaps original idea, no successful series ever belonged to one person alone. An idea is only something in a person’s head. Success or failure depends on the execution of that idea and, in the making of a series, dozens are involved, all of whom contribute.

It is, however, vital that the development of the basic idea is carried out as thoroughly as possible before the series reaches the studio. If we
lived in an ideal world, I would dream of something like the following happening…

First, Cyril Bennett as director of programmes would have to give his blessing to an IDEA – just a germ confined to two sheets of paper. I should then put someone else behind my desk. Preferably he would be someone with a heart of steel and an ability to add, someone who is con-man proof. Then I would collect people like Peter Collinson (producer), John Whitney (editor), Reuben Ship (writer) and Ian Hendry (actor) and go off on a yacht, preferably to the Greek islands. Oh yes, there would either have to be a tape recorder, or a super-type James Bond girl complete with an electric typewriter. We should then live on full pay for about six weeks, talking and thinking about our idea.

Ian Hendry is the only type of actor who would be allowed on this working jaunt, because he not only thinks like an actor, but is also one of the few actors I’ve ever known who can think in terms of a whole idea, not just his own character.

After six weeks, I should return to Cyril Bennett with a most beautifully typed working document, not, repeat, not format, for that is far too rigid. This working document would outline the character who would dominate the series, the background, six complete story lines, the supporting characters and the general development of the series. Perhaps there would be a little on how the producer intended it to go in terms of techniques. The whole lot would be tied up in beautiful ribbon and bound in leather (not too expensive).

After Cyril Bennett had read it and if he was in between crises, I am sure his good sense would prevail and he would join us on our yacht. There the clear air, the blue sea and the bluer sky would add to his already highly-developed critical faculties. He would go through the whole document with us, adding bits here and asking us to lose something there. After giving us some more money, he would return to Kingsway, happy and confident that we were going to bring home the bacon – eventually.

Our two writers would then start work on one script each from two of the six story-lines. The producer and I would then start thinking about the casting, the other writers (only two) we should approach. It might then be necessary for he and I to return to London to start planning the production and to talk to writers and actors and directors. Six weeks later, the two sun-tanned writers would return to London with their two scripts.

They would hand them over and beat a hasty retreat. Only after the producer and I had had them revised after much discussion with the writers would we give them to Cyril B. These scripts would show the leading characters and any other permanent characters, plus whatever permanent sets would be used throughout the series. They would get certain attitudes and behaviour across which had come out of our discussions. One of these would then be chosen as the pilot. By this I mean not the opening episode, but the one we should use as an exercise for the rest of the series – it would be slotted in around episode 5 or 6. While the producer (wearing his director’s hat) set up this episode for a production date six weeks later, the two other writers would be given the first two scripts to read. They would then be asked to a ‘talking out’ session and invited to submit three complete story lines each, but not a script yet. The story editor would be working with the producer on the pilot. Six weeks later we should have taped our first show. This would be nearly five months from the day we were given the go-ahead. At that point, this pilot would be shown to Cyril B., the other directors who were to follow the producer, the four writers and the leading characters. The camera crew, film camera man and editor and any other technician who worked on the show would be asked to come and see it probably a few non-contributors like secretaries and night-watch- men, would be asked too. Then a few of us would see it again for analytical purposes. After that, the real writing operation would start. Changes might be made to the second script before it would be given to a director. Four writers would now be working on 12 accepted storylines. Each would have three months to write and revise three scripts. Production of the series would start approximately three months after we had seen the pilot. All 13 scripts would have gone through to a second draft.

Involvement of regular characters would have been worked out to allow the maximum rehearsal schedule possible while still recording weekly. The story editor would stay with us until the last show had been recorded. We should work with a team of four directors only. Each director would have his three scripts before starting. And so, roughly 32 weeks after the idea had been passed, production on a major series would start. For eight months, a creative team would have been paid to think and there would have been no results to see for maybe a year.

Too much time and money? I don’t think so. An unrealistic dream? I hope not. Anyway, like most of us working in television, I am still a child at heart and believe that dreams always come true.

Stella Richman

Fertilise with facts

The idea for the series came to me as I was visiting Boscobel House in Shropshire, where the young King Charles II hid after Worcester. Admiring the venerable oak in the grounds – descendant of the original in which the monarch hid – one halcyon spring day more than a year ago, I resolved to try to transmit to a wider audience some of the magic of these battles long ago and of our nation’s tortured conscience. The original oak was pulled apart by eager Restoration souvenir hunters and vandals the Age of Reason had them too – and its successor is fenced around to deter their twentieth century counterparts. The Boscobel Oak, as portrayed on a contemporary coin, has been adopted as a symbol for the television series among the screen titles and on the supporting literature. It even features on a special ‘Royalist and Roundhead’ series tie which will be presented to participants and distributed to a wider public.

Rediffusion possesses a small dedicated team of adult educationists: two directors Graham Watts and John Rhodes – the editor – Peter Hunt, and three researchers, Helen Littledale, Edward Hayward and Simon Buxton, the last two history graduates. The team is completed by Frank Jessup, head of the extra mural department at Oxford University, who compiled a special source book for the series Background to the Civil War (Pergamon Press, 12s. 6d.).

Working against the clock is the greatest nightmare for most adult education television producers. They and their schools programmes colleagues are the odd men out in an industry which prides itself on living intensely in the present and in putting out important special programmes at a few hours’ notice. They alone have to plan their programmes’ contents and set their presenters to work on draft scripts as much as six months to a year ahead of transmission if they are to relate their supporting literature effectively to the programmes and encourage serious viewers to creative follow-up work, without which even the best programmes remain just so many arrows fired into the air. Some months of research followed last autumn in the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and obscure local museums and sites of battles up and down the country. This produced the plan to interpret the period through its great representative figures like Clarendon, who spanned in his life of astonishing political and literary activity the whole period, and more, Coke and Eliot, Pym and Hampden, Strafford and Archbishop Laud, Charles I, Cromwell, Prince Rupert and Fairfax, the poets Milton and Marvell, Lilburne the pamphleteer, Hobbes and Sir Henry Vane, Charles II. University dons, including Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper of Oxford and Professor John Hale of Warwick, were consulted and contracted to write outlines.

Purely didactic programmes, particularly if they take the form of straight lectures on television, fit uncomfortably into an evening’s viewing in which entertainment predominates, and can deter even intelligent viewers who are not ready or in the mood for profound concentration. All speakers were requested, therefore, in conceiving their outline scripts, to try to assemble their material in a way that would lend itself to visual and dramatic treatment. Dons, like bishops, are accustomed to addressing their audiences from above and as a result many of them find difficulty in adapting their customary lecture-room techniques to the needs of television, where an effectively personal and relaxed manner wins viewers and its opposite repels.

All the outline scripts, setting out the gist of what was to be contained in each programme, had reached Television House by the end of January to be mulled over by all the creative members of the team. The presenters were then individually visited in their separate universities by the editor on the scripts, by researchers for guidance on illustration, and the director for timing, style and rehearsal. Dramatic sequences were discussed and agreed as were the use of actors to read speeches, poems and letters. It was commonly agreed that no dialogue should be invented and no imaginary scenes – every word spoken in the dramatic sequences had to be authentic, culled from the records of the period. By the middle of March, some of the earlier scripts were ready for recording. The session in the studios lasted the best part of a day for the presenter, with additional days of rehearsal, of course, for the actors.

One difficulty was found common to almost all the scripts. Each expert tended to presuppose in his audience a greater fundamental knowledge of the seventeenth-century background than could be counted on. After reading one or two programmes, it was decided that a special introductory programme to set the scene must be added. The programme started with the dramatic scene on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, Henry Soskin playing Charles I, not forgetting the stammer. Cromwell appeared twice, portrayed by Patrick Wymark, who said he had always wanted to try that part. Ludovic Kennedy, a professional historian himself, though of a different century, put the questions that the average viewer would need answering to get the most out of the rest of the series to Dr. Maurice Cranston. In the end not all the programmes were recorded in the studios. For Professor Trevor-Roper’s programme on Charles I, the whole team flew up to Chiefswood, his vacation retreat near Melrose in the Scottish borders.

It is difficult to assess the comparative value of adult education on television. Adult education programmes have only been regularly seen for the last three years. It is too soon yet, therefore, for completely satisfactory methods of audience research and assessment to have been established. Without much more detailed research, feed-back of audience reaction and follow up methods, such as are envisaged in the Prime Minister’s ‘University of the Air’ project, producers can never be absolutely confident that their programmes are giving their audience exactly what they want. All that can be claimed now with certainty is that the audience for series like ‘Royalist and Roundhead’ constitute incontestably the largest adult education classes in the country. A television series can present a string of experts of national repute in a way that no local class or group could hope to. Producers of such series have a two-fold responsibility and it is sometimes difficult to reconcile the two parts. While it is legitimate to assume some basic knowledge of the subject matter and equally some will to learn in the viewer, as an educationist himself the producer is keenly conscious of the chance always open on the television screen, of catching and drawing and keeping the more general viewer almost unawares or in spite of himself. The dilemma with all education programmes remains how to satisfy the minority of serious searchers after new knowledge without alienating the majority of viewers, without whom national television networks could not exist.

Guthrie Moir

Drawings by Brian Morris

The post Acorns to Oaks appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

If I thought that Good Taste in TV was a difficult subject to tackle, I can tell you I just didn’t know what I was talking about… this one is a real stinker! I’ve trudged the length and breadth of TV House, questioning the weak and the strong, burning up the wires between here and Wembley and have ended with a bulk of statements either too libellous to print or too technical to understand, but despite this, I managed to salvage a few serious opinions and at least one so unnerving, so night-marish, as to shake the knees of the most hardbitten TV Mogul. George Orwell’s Big Brother concept is about as lethal as Brer Rabbit, compared with our lot under the iron heel of mass TV. As one overwrought PA put it ‘There won’t be any Big Brother, just a world of people with pin heads and enormous eyes’.

Michael Ingrams has very definite ideas. He visualizes round-the-clock viewing, with the screen hanging on the wall like a picture; a vast number of channels, an automatically timed telerecording system in the home, so that any householder can go out for a whole day and still be able to play back any particular programme in his own good time, with library companies doing flourishing business in Teletapes. There will be worldwide TV links, and complete evenings or even days will be given over to integrated, planned-in-the-round programmes from one particular country (so you can watch out for a whole evening of Kabuki from Japan, or corn on the cob from just anywhere). He feels there might well be a strong cultural renaissance, because ‘coin in the slot’ viewing will enable small specializing managements to profitably give minority viewers the chance to see the non-pop type programmes, such as ballet, Greek tragedies and documentaries. Apparently we must expect sponsorship in TV, but through the back door – recorded programmes from the States will be beamed direct or via ‘pirate’ Continental masts and this inevitably will lead to a cry of unfair competition from the British counterparts, who will demand more say in the actual content of the programmes. Sports promoters please note, climb on the wagon now, give up this petty carping about TV affecting the Gate, or you are likely to find it very cold outside. For by 1984, opines Ingrams, all major sports will be run and owned by TV promoters, so that we shall have the A-R Rattlers playing in the World TV League against the Moscow State Moonrakers.

Next I visited the seat of Engineering to get Bill Cheevers’ more technical views. There was much that sailed over my head like one of Wordsworth’s clouds, but I’ll give you the gist of what I think he said. We shall certainly have colour 3-D TV, and multi-channels. We can expect a tremendous revolution in equipment, the miniature camera, weighing 4 to 5 lb. [1.8 to 2.3kg], which naturally allows for greater mobility. This increased mobility will allow us to get farther afield with our ‘Remotes’ teams, and open up unexplored vistas, a fixed centre for channelling programmes to viewers will probably be of relative unimportance. With the establishing of space stations, we should get excellent TV reception for nationwide hookups, and intimate looks at the moon may well be part of our daily viewing diet. We must expect a lot more automation and a great improvement in presentation. At the moment we are still too tied to the camera techniques of the film industry, a live show still looks as if it had been edited, by the film method of cutting from one camera to another, and the multi-camera method must be developed. Asked if everything would be pre-recorded, he gave me a very definite negative. The actuality programme must remain, because it holds more impact than the prerecorded, which often loses its bite by striving for perfection. Because of the speeding up in the tempo of life, he thinks an hour will then be the maximum length of a programme. Once again we have the picture frame screen and the ‘coin box’ viewing, and the quality of the programme content improving … the rest I must leave to your technical imaginations, … because this is where I have to opt out.

Another technical advance, culled from Wembley, that I vaguely understood was that programmes would be recorded on nylon thread, of course in 3-D colour, but this time projected onto a wide home screen … There will be interplanetary news and sports programmes, linked by Space stations…. Dave Vigo pointed out that with the advent of colour, the whole concept of set design, wardrobe and make-up would have to be revised, but that we would still have les girls … other comments made by those-who-shall-be-nameless varied from ‘Palais Party will still be with us, but Lou Preager will have a beard’ … to … ‘It will still break down just the same’ … and … ‘There will still be scheduled Amendments’ …!

I met Harry Hart in the Editor’s office, so he didn’t really stand a chance, with us both gazing at him earnestly, but he was game to the last and came up with one or two off-beat ideas. He naturally accepted 3-D colour, picture-frame screens and limitless channels, but he thought that instead of a ‘coin in the slot’ scheme, you would dial some central depot, and ask them to punch up on your screen your choice of programme, in fact, specialized viewing on each channel. Whereas light entertainment and drama would be pre-recorded and shown at some later date, reportage would be recorded as transmitted. Television will be used for traffic control, and Secretaries will have to hide their bosses under the desk, while saying they are out, because our phones will be equipped in glorious television. The art of reading and writing will virtually disappear, as the TV will be used as a visual dictaphone, so presumably we shall have to transmit our innermost thoughts to our nearest and dearest, visually; I feel it’s all going to be rather exhausting … imagine writing a visual love letter…. Apparently life will be so hectic, that all viewing will be done whilst travelling, or having a bath, there just wont be any other time for it … and get this … all advertising will be subliminal … so look out for the modern version of the pin and the wax image.

I asked Caryl Doncaster for her ideas on 1984 viewing. Newspapers in printed form will disappear, and will be replaced by a system whereby any viewer at any time can punch up the news, which will be recorded direct on to the individual screen. By then she hopes that the TV Acts will be modified to allow for a definite editorial line to be taken on everything that affects us. (I myself envisage that the Press Barons of today may well be superseded by the Visual Press Baron, and all Conservatives will automatically tune in to the Visual Times, and so through every political colour, to the Communists who will view the Daily Worker.) By the way, she thinks that cinemas will just become car parks!

The whole system of education is almost certain to be revolutionized and the standard will become exceptionally high; the best brains in the country and the world being channelled to schools on closed circuits, controlled by the Ministry of Education. The role of the present-day teacher will be reduced to that of a governess or nursemaid, present merely to keep order while the TV lesson is in progress. Sound radio will be a thing of the past, as extinct as the dodo.

And now I come to the last and most horrific suggestion of all; I may have caught Elkan Allan in an unconscious moment and I am still unable to decide whether to take him seriously or not, but he gave me these ideas with a completely dead-pan expression. He once read a Science-Fiction story by Ray Bradbury, in which everything was completely dominated by TV, there was an actual TV room, with all four walls a TV screen, so that they stood as if on the set, and the programme companies sent each viewer a script so they could take part in the programme themselves. Just think of all those hammy Hamlets and overblown Ophelias gesticulating in that nightmare room. As if this isn’t enough, Elkan added a few choice thoughts of his own. There will be no newspapers or books and each room will have a picture-frame TV to churn out the appropriate programme, so that in the kitchen there will always be a cooking demonstration in progress, done slowly enough for the mesmerized housewife to follow instructions while cooking the Sunday lunch. The nursery will have a perpetual game going on, and the bedroom a sleep-inducing theme … ye Gods, ‘The Day of the Triffids’ was never like this.

The post Television in 1984 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

At first sight it did not look a very difficult task to find out what people working in TV considered to be good taste in TV, but when I began my tour of TV House, braving the intricacies of PBX, wasting the time of a long-suffering TV Times writer — having a cosy lunch with a member of the Advertising Dept. — maddening (I am sure) harassed secretaries, overworked members of Prg. Correspondence and kindly producers, and being over-awed by a Head of Depts.’ office, well, then I began to realise that I had probably bitten off more than I could chew. For it seems that good taste is almost impossible to define; being a negative quality; nobody watching a good play, dance, or documentary says — “by jove, that was in good taste” — but the moment something offends their personal susceptibility, for taste is after all personal, then they are vocal enough. So it’s bad taste you’re going to read about, and below I give you the opinions of all those I talked to.

I found their thoughts both fascinating and contradictory, one producer put it to me that good taste and good showmanship made uneasy bed-fellows; another, that good taste was too bound up with safety, and the criterion of truly appalling taste was when a programme made you feel uncomfortable, without any sense of guilt, whereas if a programme gave you a sneaking suspicion that your attitude was of the ostrich with head in sand variety, then the subject matter, whether it is homosexuality, prostitution, the H-bomb, or the needling of a politician in the Robin Day manner, is almost certainly permissible bad taste, as it forces you to stop and think about your responsibilities as a citizen, a responsibility it is often more comfortable to ignore.

My friends in PBX objected to some of the dance presentations, which they found too suggestive, and this was as true of ballets as of the modern dances. What interested me particularly was that if they had seen the same thing in a theatre or cinema, they wouldn’t have minded. It was the “intimacy in the home” of TV, which makes this kind of thing offensive. I had the same complaint about the interminable and suggestive apache dances we are subjected to, from the Advertising section.

Back to PBX. Quite a number of comperes come under fire as indulging in orgies of bad taste, being personality pushers with little thought to spare for the programme they compere, and many commit the cardinal sin of talking down to the viewers, something any intelligent person resents.

Quiz programmes also brought a baleful look to the eye of my beholders, on the same grounds of being an insult to the thinking viewer. High on the black list is the spurious type of chumminess of the — What is your name?—Mary Jones.—May I call you Mary? — type of dialogue, and the imbecility of the questions, which would be an insult to the intelligence of a child of six, but by answering them, any adult can win that all-steel kitchen unit, the magnificent chromium plated little family car, with the two spare wheels and extra roomy boot, or that three-piece bedroom suite in light polished oak, picked out with raised facings in darker oak. Who but a Dr. Schweitzer could resist the lure of such glittering rewards for so little brain fag?

Again they object to the often humiliating forfeits competitors are asked to perform, for the supposed amusement of the studio audience and the viewer at home. The sad part is, that they very often do cause immoderate mirth — it is the man slipping on a banana skin mentality which is encouraged in this type of show.

In the Ad-Mag outfit I found a very definite feeling of antipathy towards the Amateur Talent Programmes with their larger-than-life comperes introducing some very amateur amateurs. All those would-be Beverly Sisters [sic] in over-fussy frocks, net nylon mittens and diamanté clips and slides; those raucous Lonnie Donnegans, where only the shirt is similar, the heavy footed Fred Astaires, and those sordid xylophone players whose only talent is to play the damn thing with their feet, can surely only be an embarrassment to their relations and a discomfort to everyone else, even the over-optimistic band leader or hardboiled talent scout — or so think Ad-Mags. By the same token one Head of Dept, felt that a vulgar joke told by an incompetent amateur can only be in the worst of taste, whilst the same joke told by a highly skilled professional will almost surely succeed in being extremely funny.

All those I questioned recoiled visibly when I mentioned the “personal tribute to a living person” epics. All that gooey mass of sugary sentiment, with the well-known personality in well chosen tears, while dear old Nanny Plumwood or dear old Mr. Satherwaite, who taught them to skip, hover above them in badly chosen clothes, produces nothing but a strong feeling of nausea in the stomachs of my viewers.

The mothers among our staff thought it very bad taste to show scenes of viciousness and violence to the young, although one did disagree, saying that it was Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot and the good sheriff of so-and-so city, who caught the imagination of a child and I must admit that among the children I mix with there is always a Robin Hood to pin me to the tree with his mighty bow or a rangy Davy Crockett to shoot me stone dead … come to think of it, excellent as these characters may be, you’re still dead, whether killed by a goody or a baddy! My TV Times writer gave me a long and thoughtful lecture on the evils of the “Top Ten/Twenty Favourites cult”. He explained that the public taste is very malleable and is manipulated quite unscrupulously by the song pluggcrs of Tin Pan Alley, who naturally find it a great deal easier to discover a mass of mediocre songwriters and singers, than it is to discover good ones. So out go the mediocre songs and music, week after week, and down goes public taste.

Everyone I spoke to disliked watching people in obvious mental distress, whose relations perhaps, had been lost in a spectacular disaster, or who might be connected with a much publicised and very unsavoury happening. In both eases, they felt that apart from the person actually appearing, it might quite well cause infinite and unnecessary suffering to someone the other side of the screen. It is a point of view one can’t ignore. On the other hand we want to hear what these people have to say and it is only a matter of presentation.

Well, there you have it. I wonder what you think. Should we have such impeccable programmes, such self-effacing good taste, that none could possibly take exception? What a ghastly thought. Henry VIII was in shocking bad taste, but what a man, how he lived and how he enjoyed life, high and low, and how many treasures he left for posterity to savour and admire. How sad it is to think that many TV Programmes, however brilliant, will never go down to posterity.

The post What is good TV taste? appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

In this and the following columns are the answers to a questionnaire sent out to a group of features directors. The head of features, Peter Hunt, says:

A long time ago, in 1955, a founder member of the programme department said: ‘the word “documentary” makes me think of cranes and things….’ Hence ‘Feature’, which is determined by Chambers as a programme ‘that reconstructs dramatically the life of a prominent person, or an important event, or gives a dramatic picture of an employment or activity.’

I have taken Chambers as a reasonable platform for framing these questions.

Which is worth most: a personality talking at you or over relevant pictures of what he is talking about?

John Frankau: This must depend on the subject, envisaged audience and the personality. There is room for both, and a combination of the two.

John Phillips: I favour him talking over relevant pictures every time. Television already consists of quite enough faces on the screen, any opportunity or reason to cut away to something else must be seized with both hands.

Peter Morley: The question is the answer – whichever is worth more, you hold on the screen. If you are putting across the character of a person you must see the face. If this person is talking about ‘things’ you must show these ‘things’. The test is relevance.

Geoffrey Hughes: Both. The personality must first be established. Then it is a question of whether the pictures of what he is talking about are stronger and more relevant than his ‘personality’ or his interest as a man.

Sheila Gregg: It is impossible to answer this question. If the programme is about people it is probably better to see their faces, especially if they are good characters, and also that you may try to judge their sincerity from the emotions on their faces. But if the subject is more important than the people, obviously you should see the relevant pictures.

Can the dramatised feature do anything our current forms cannot do?

Geoffrey Hughes: Yes, it can put over an emotional state of mind in a way that our present feature programmes cannot. And emotional states of mind are as much part of people’s reactions to the real world as they are to (say) drama.

Sheila Gregg: Yes, I think so, as there are always subjects which are extremely difficult to bring to life in a non-dramatic form. On the other hand, as soon as dramatisation and actors are brought in, the authenticity of the whole thing is weakened, and I think people might find it difficult to distinguish between dramatised documentary and straightforward drama.

John Frankau: Yes, the dramatised feature can do something in addition to our current forms. Apart from more easily catching the attention of most sections of the public by presenting facts in a more digestible way, often they can be more succinct and possibly more accurate than programmes which use a few individuals putting forward their own isolated views. As a form of entertainment they should not be neglected.

John Phillips: Yes, by attracting the viewer who switches over or off whenever he feels he is being talked ‘at’.

Peter Morley: A dramatised documentary produces an atmosphere of the theatre – a performance which can make some feature subjects more palatable to a mass audience. It can in many cases simplify a diffused collection of facts by making these facts fit the story, and not the story fit the facts. But this theatrical atmosphere is the weakness of the dramatised documentary, reducing its authenticity and credibility, and therefore its viewer identification.

How should the features personalities we need in the future be found and trained?

Sheila Gregg: It takes a long time to train a television interviewer, and the only real training he can get is to work on actual programmes over a considerable period. I think the essentials for a television interviewer are: intelligence, good general knowledge and a certain experience of life. An interviewer should also be able to ask questions because he genuinely wants to find out for himself, and because he is interested in people and ideas, not simply because the questions have been written in a script.

John Frankau: There is no golden rule. They may be found almost anywhere it’s possible to find the combination of an interesting personality and an enquiring mind. The particular type of mind required might be most easily found in the world of journalism. As well as experience, the only training should be that of theatrical professionalism.

John Phillips: By the same methods that are used to get the right people for any skilled trade or profession – lengthy and patient search for suitable types, imparting of expert advice and knowledge based on experience, encouragement of expansion of personality and ideas.

Peter Morley: I haven’t the faintest idea.

Geoffrey Hughes: I believe they should first be significant in their own right. If we look for people who are immediately available and unemployed, they are likely also to be unemployable – or, in short, no-goods. So, having been snatched from their jobs (and properly paid) they can only be trained by practice – and production.

Why are features necessary?

John Phillips: Assuming the basic premise that television is necessary and presumably we all do that, then surely features are necessary because they exploit most fully television’s greatest accomplishment (that of projecting sound and vision simultaneously to millions of people) to the common good by making them aware of themselves and the world they live in.

Peter Morley: They are not necessary. They are highly desirable. The entertainment pattern of a television network would be incomplete without them. Feature programmes satisfy a thirst for knowledge which all viewers think they have or would like to think they have. The feature is not always considered as ‘entertainment’ but I believe that the successful feature must be as entertaining as any other programme.

Geoffrey Hughes: They aren’t necessary. Features should only be put on if they are entertaining. But I believe that they can be entertaining, as a genuine interest in current affairs does exist. It is up to us to exploit it.

Sheila Gregg: Apart from entertainment, I think television has a duty to inform people (in as entertaining a way as possible). Anyway features are the thing that television can do better than any other medium.

John Frankau: They are a valuable form of entertainment and as such must take their place in this, the entertainment business. Unlike other programmes, they can survey topical subjects at short notice, floodlight social or world events and sometimes peep through keyholes.

Should features set out to influence public opinion?

Peter Morley: If you set out to influence, you distort. But if you set out to inform you can’t help but influence.

Geoffrey Hughes: No. We re not allowed to by the Television Act anyway; and I don’t agree with the missionary attitude formerly adopted by the BBC under Lord Reith. We can and should, however, stimulate people to think for themselves.

Sheila Gregg: They should not necessarily set out to influence public opinion. Some programmes merely inform (and in that way they may help people to make up their own minds). However, there are some subjects – Apartheid is an obvious example – on which we should take sides and try to influence opinion, although I think we should give a fair hearing to both sides.

John Frankau: No, but in either presenting facts or a point of view, it would be unlikely that some of the audience would remain uninfluenced.

John Phillips: No – they should set out to inform accurately and fairmindedly so that public opinion may be responsible and enlightened.

Summary

Peter Hunt: ‘I make no comment. I merely take relevant refuge in this pregnant extract from Shepherd Mead’s brilliant text book – ‘How To Get Rich In TV Without Really Trying’.

‘We can’t use the script’, he said, his voice vibrating by force of habit.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Not dramatic enough?’

‘It isn’t – me,’ he said. ‘I take a universal point of view.’

‘There is no such thing’, I said, ‘as a universal point of view. You are for this or you are against it – you cannot be universal about it.’

‘I must see both sides of every question.’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if you take both sides of every question you will be a skyrocket that is shooting off at both ends. You will make a lot of fizz-fire and go no place.

‘So the way it worked out, I was the one who went someplace. Out on my ear.’

The post A matter of opinion: Features appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

As things now stand at the time of going to press, Government policy is to broadcast colour transmissions using a 625-line standard, to be radiated by the BBC on an Ultra High Frequency in Bands IV and V.

This decision will effectively preclude the 47,000,000 viewers who normally watch the Independent Television channels from receiving colour transmissions on their normal channels and means that the programmes will reach the minimum audience at the maximum, indeed astronomical, cost.

These questions and answers by general manager, john mcmillan attempt to discuss a possible alternative in terms comprehensible to the non-technical reader.

The technology of the subject is such that any discussion of colour must additionally cover the frequency bands to be used for transmission and the line standard. These things are closely connected.

1 There is much talk regarding the relative quality of 625 and 405-line television pictures. What determines the quality of a picture?

The quality of a television picture is fundamentally determined by the amount of ‘information’ transmitted, and received. More ‘information’ – better pictures.

The ‘information’ in its turn is limited by the frequency bandwidth of the video signal. More bandwidth – better pictures.

The line standard adopted affects the bandwidth. More lines – more bandwidth.

The more bandwidth used, the fewer transmitters can be accommodated in a particular slice of the available frequency spectrum allocated to television broadcasting.

2 What line standards are in actual use today?

In order of theoretical ‘goodness’ and somewhat simplified, they are as follows:

3 We seem to be right at the bottom of the league table. Surely a change to a ‘better’ standard is most desirable?

Not so. It so happens that the British Standard as specified by Messrs. Schoenberg and Blumlein of EMI some 36 years ago was a singularly good choice in all respects. It is a fact that it is possible to transmit enough information to give a first class picture on a 3 Mc/s video bandwidth.

4 What about the actual line structure? Does not 405 lines give a coarse-grained picture?

Viewed at the proper viewing distance, the line structure of any standard is virtually invisible.

5 So you think 405 lines is an adequate standard?

Yes. If a 405-line receiver has a good aerial and is properly tuned it gives a very good picture. Above all things, a 405 lines system is already in being and gives excellent coverage with the minimum number of transmitters.

6 Why did the Government of the time elect to move to a 625-line standard?

Largely due to a desire to operate on a common European Standard and so facilitate interchange of programmes.

This was a nice idea rather than a useful practical facility. It is no longer a nice idea because Europe has now decided on two different methods for colour.

7 BBC 2 transmission is often heavily criticised. What are the facts?

Of the frequency bands available under international agreement for TV broadcasting two Bands. I and III are VHF and two Bands, IV and V are UHF.

The transmission and reception characteristics are quite different.

On VHF the BBC attains 99.5 per cent coverage of the country with 30 main stations and 62 major fill-in stations.

Similar figures for 97 per cent coverage by the ITA are 32 main stations and 30 fill-in stations. For UHF and an estimated coverage of 95 per cent some 64 main stations and 250 major fill-in stations are required.

To extend this to 97 per cent a further 1,000 minor fill-in stations are estimated to be necessary. Further extension to a higher coverage figure is considered to be economically impractical.

At 97 per cent coverage over 1,500,000 people will be without television on UHF due to local screening difficulties.

Present official policy is to abandon the present economic Bands I and III and move all television broadcasting to Bands IV and V. Surely a most unsound scheme requiring a huge increase in cost for an inferior result.

8 If the VHF bands are so effective and economical, why does the Government not convert them to 625 lines?

Because the additional Channel bandwidth required for 625 lines (8 Mc/s) restricts the number of transmitters which can be accommodated in the space available to a level which would not give the high percentage national coverage deemed to be necessary for mass viewing.

9 So if we are to adopt 625 lines for colour we will positively have to go to UHF and accept the costs and consequences?

Yes. However, it must be re-emphasised that on all counts reception in lay hands is much worse on these bands. They have never been a real success in any country (USA, UK. Germany).

10 Is there any way out of this?

There is indeed. We could transmit colour on 405 lines on the existing VHF channels and forget about Bands IV and V except for additional programme services if, indeed, this country feels it can afford them.

11 Are there any technical difficulties?

None at all. On the contrary, certain features of the 405 lines transmission characteristic (positive modulation, amplitude modulated sound) are peculiarly suited to the transmission of colour. This is by far the cheapest, quickest, and most efficient way of getting colour TV off to a flying start with an immense potential audience on both BBC and ITV channels.

12 It is being said that the compatible picture in monochrome is inferior on 405 lines. Is this true?

Practically speaking, no. All things are. however, relative. It is true that compared with 625 lines the black-and-white compatible picture is, technically, slightly inferior as indeed is the case in normal black-and-white transmissions.

This, however, is a third order effect and would quite certainly not be noticed by the normal viewer.

All compatible black-and-white pictures from a colour channel are slightly inferior to those from a monochrome channel.

This is the inevitable price of introducing colour. It is of no practical importance.

13 Is it true that this country will not be able to sell colour receivers overseas unless we adopt 625 lines UHF standards for Great Britain?

That allegation is false. A receiver designed and originally manufactured for VHF 405-line colour and UHF 625-line black-and-white can be produced at minor additional expense in the factory for any other system. Our export prices would still be competitive. Incidentally, one of the main arguments some years ago for the adoption of a UHF 625-line black-and-white standard in this country was the same export argument. It was adopted for BBC 2 but there is no evidence of large export results.

14 If the existing BBC 1 and ITV VHF networks were converted to colour as you suggest what would happen to BBC 2?

It would stay in black-and-white … at least for the time being. Thus viewers would have two reliable colour programmes and one black-and-white instead of the present plan which provides for one unreliable colour service and two black-and-white.

The post The case for 405 line VHF colour appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘Three Roads to Rome’ was the composite title of three separate plays, starring Deborah Kerr and with a glittering cast including Celia Johnson, Isobel Dean, Anthony Newlands, Jeremy Brett and Alan Cuthbertson.

Associated-Rediffusion provided the full technical facilities of Studio 5, and the whole of its production resources for the 525-line video tape recording. It was soon obvious that the entire 14,000 square feet of floor would be required to house the biggest sets since ‘An Arabian Night’, including a full-sized ‘practical’ carousel in an Italian market square.

Ronald Marriott, aided and abetted by his P.A., Helen the Best, became thinner but wiser as director, while the Americans sent a colourful quartet of producers to assist him. In order of meeting they were:

enter (at ceiling height) briskly: John B. Green (Executive Network Producer) quickly known as ‘Big John’. This could be because he was at least nine feet high and came from Texas. (Why doces he never stand still? Is the weight too much for the floor for more than a minute? ‘Hush dear, he’s thinking!’)

enter (legato con moto) ‘Beau’ Goldman (bow-tied associate producer and musical adviser): ‘Say, Beau, have you met Steve Race? He will write your music.’

exit Both (Control Room left) together with scripts, stop watches, blank music sheets, frowns and a brace of P.A.s.

enter (quietly, politely, inquiringly) Arthur Penn, legendary film, Broadway and television producer and other half of COE PENN production partnership. He is small, tweedy, bespectacled, but with an air of intent. ‘You say we can have eight cameras, all on two-shot? – That’s just fine!’

exit — with Ronald Marriott to floor, in a hurry.

enter – Bold Fred (Coe), fresh from Paris and preceded by his ‘you-name it — he’s done it and at the moment he’s television adviser to the President and they don’t come any bigger than KING SIZE’ – reputation. ‘Good morning’ (formal introductions) and, quick exit to his private viewing room (with telephone to gallery) calling over his shoulder: ‘Arthur, I want to talk to you about the lighting, and another thing, that scene where we are’ … A pause, quiet descends, the gallery settles and from the studio the pleasantly Welsh voice of floor manager Eric Cooper calls for quiet. Fred Pusey’s delightful Forum and Rome hotel balcony set appears on camera 1.

The cultured American voices (how beautifully Deborah and Celia have slipped into character) engage in the opening dialogue of ‘Roman Fever’ – the first play.

It is Monday morning. Vic Gardiner’s five cameras cluster above, below and all around the hotel balcony balustrade, sections of which are being continuously moved, just in case one of the five cameras can get a better two-shot, or maybe a small trench for the crane would give … a … better …

Before we had finished in the studio some four days later we had all learned a great deal about American production techniques. Quickly we found how to live with and interpret their methods and techniques to their satisfaction, while at the same time bringing our own individualism to the finished product.

Did I say finished?

The V.T.R. Room at Wembley looked like a first feature cutting room with a world premiere brought forward a month. From this do-it-yourself drama kit, Jim Runkle’s recording team, Harry Baker in charge of V.T.R. and Theo Duka in charge of tele-recording sound, worked like beavers to cut together a rough working copy from the dozens of ‘takes’ and bits of tape in order that the producers could have some idea of the production as a whole on the following day. (Perhaps even a timing.)

This was done on Friday and Saturday while Steve Race, with copious notes, a buzzing head and the prospect of a heavy week-end was charged to write the incidental music by Monday morning’s 9 o’clock band call. The American technique for major productions is to record the music and any effects required, post-sync sound, as in feature films. This was an innovation in live television production as far as we were concerned and considerable knitting of facilities was required to achieve it. It was, as far as I know, the first time that the techniques of live television, film sound and video tape had all been combined in this way.

On Monday morning, we assembled in Studio 5 to view the final cut working copy and to record the musical backgrounds required at intervals throughout the 90-minute production. Tony Bristow kept a firm hand and his urbane disposition visible throughout and the session was successfully concluded just as the last over-coated musician left the studio.

With, it seemed, an ever-increasing kit of parts, we ascended on the Tuesday morning to the dubbing theatre at Television House where George Willows and his crew bade us welcome, while Freddy Slade sharpened his chinagraph and his wits for the master mix. Sound tracks wild and sound tracks sync were combined to sound track master and while a fascinating series of numbers flashed by on the projection screen, the V.T.R. picture from Wembley appeared, as if by magic on cue from the dubbing mixer. (Sheer fantasy this!) Tracks were moved, cut, laid, wiped, stretched, blooped, padded, blanked and generally administered by ace cutter, John Butler, who was able to remove ‘dead air’ not by a fan, but by moving music tracks to cover dialogue pauses.

The prospect of replacing the theatre carpet was causing George Willows some alarm (Why can’t John B. Green sit down?). Ronald Marriott was down to his last set of finger nails and now had pins and needles in both legs. Faces various, looked in, paled, and left rapidly; but by Wednesday afternoon, it looked as if we had won. Thursday saw the happy wedding of track master sound, to track V.T.R. vision, while Friday morning saw the first-off replay of the entire production to most of the principals and cast.

The quality of all aspects of the production were the subject of very considerable praise from the Americans and the occasion for not inconsiderable sighs of relief from us. The impeccable lighting of Bob Gray gave Don Furness, in charge of racks, the opportunity to produce some of Studio 5’s finest pictures. During the production it was fascinating to see how the expert make-up, under the direction of Mary McDonough, coped with the changes in age and character of Deborah Kerr, who although rarely off the set for more than a few minutes at a time gave a shining example of patience and sweetness which charmed everybody. Her casual asides during the inevitable moments of tension reduced the floor to near hysteria on several occasions.

Much of the great success of this operation was due to the enormous co-operation given by everybody and the mustering of Associated-Rediffusion’s production facilities under the supervision of programme coordinator, Lloyd Williams. A complicated operation? Expensive? Time-consuming? Yes, possibly all three. But for first-class quality and guaranteed results on a national network where these factors count above all, come to Associated-Rediffusion, as ABC did.

The post Stars and wipes appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Above: Tinkers at the side of a road in County Mayo. Taken from specially-shot film from the Introductory programme to “The Playboy of the Western World”.

Television programmes for schools will be made available in the areas indicated below. Please send any comments on the programmes or requests for further information to the Education Office (Schools Information) at the appropriate address.

Television programmes for schools will be made available in the areas indicated below. Please send any comments on the programmes or requests for further information to the Education Office (Schools Information) at the appropriate address.

1 London Region. Channel 9.
Associated-Rediffusion Ltd., Television House, Kingsway, London, W.C.2

2 Midland Region. Channel 8.
Associated Television Ltd. (ATV), 150 Edmund Street, Birmingham, 3

3 Northern Region. Channels 9 and 10.
Granada TV Network Ltd., Manchester, 3

4 Central Scotland Region. Channel 10.
Scottish Television Ltd. (STV), Theatre Royal, Glasgow

5 South Wales and the West of England Region. Channel 10.
TWW Ltd., Pontcanna Studios, Cardiff; and Television Centre, Bristol

6 Central Southern Region. Channel 11.
and South East Region. Channel 10.
Southern Television Ltd., Northam, Southampton

7 North East Region. Channel 8.
Tyne Tees Television Ltd. (TTT), The Television Centre,
City Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

8 East Anglia Region. Channel 11.
Anglia Television Ltd., Anglia House, Norwich

9 Northern Ireland Region. Channel 9.
Ulster Television Ltd., Havelock House, Ormeau Road, Belfast

10 South West Region. Channels 9 and 12.
Westward Television Ltd., Derry’s Cross, Plymouth

11 North East Scotland Region. Channels 9 and 12.
Grampian Television Ltd., Queen’s Cross, Aberdeen

12 Channel Islands Region. Channel 9.
Channel Television, The Television Centre,
Rouge Bouillon, St. Helier, Jersey

To obtain additional copies of Booklets—

Please pass this to your Headmaster or Headmistress,
who has been supplied with an order form giving details of prices for this and other publications:

To the Headmaster/Headmistress:

PLEASE OBTAIN FROM THE INDEPENDENT TELEVISION COMPANY FOR OUR AREA (ADDRESS OVERLEAF)

Drama
She Stoops to Conquer
and
The Playboy of the Western World

Number of additional copies of booklet required………………………

Name of Staff Member………………………………………………………………………………………………

Note to the Headmaster or Headmistress :—

Please do not send this form on to your local Independent Television Company, but transfer all requests for extra booklets to the special order form which has been sent to you, and which lists the titles and prices.

Independent Television for Schools Spring Term 1964

Drama Age range 13 and over

“SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER”

Drama in the eighteenth century

The eighteenth century was the age of elegance and formality, Style was all-important and this is apparent in architecture, clothes and behaviour. At this time particularly, drama mirrored the age, and to understand the drama one must appreciate the society which gave rise to it. The tragedy was barren and uninspired, relying for plot and characters on classical legend, but the comedy of manners drew on the social gaiety of the town for satire and burlesque. Even then the authors relied mostly on stock situations to provide the framework of their plays. The most commonly recognised were the husband and wife who were perpetually quarrelling, the hero or heroine in disguise and the lovers outwitting parental opposition, . all of which appear in Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’.

As in all eighteenth century comedy, the plot is complicated with at least two stories being interwoven, and mistakes and misunderstandings following fast on each other. It is aptly sub-titled ‘The Mistakes of a Night’. The humour, however, is derived from a variety of sources. The basic plot of the gallants being tricked into thinking their host’s house is an inn and the resulting complications of mistaken identity are age-old subjects for amusement at the expense of the unfortunate victims. In fact the whole play is a series of comic situations but the humour also lies in characterisation and speech. The characters appear humorous when they try to ape those in another class, e.g., the servants from the farm trying to be dignified butlers and footmen, and Mrs. Hardcastle unsuccessfully copying the manners of the town, a joke which reminds us of ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ by Molière, on whose work much of the eighteenth century comedy was based.

The stilted and formal quality of the language provides one of the greatest barriers to a modern audience. The eloquent oaths, ‘Egad’ and ‘Zounds’, and the meticulously balanced sentence, which is so intrinsically a part of an age dominated by the influence of the rhetorical Dr. Johnson, strike strangely on the modern ear.

Modern children may also find it hard to accept the difficulties and indecision of the four lovers, who seem to be so strongly swayed in their choice by a much greater concern for money and social status than is generally acceptable today. But, at this time when young gentlemen were not trained for any specific occupation, much did depend on being married to someone of suitable wealth and position, meeting with family approval, and it was quite usual for the parents to choose a partner for their children. This did not mean, however, that they had no say in the matter. After all Mr. Hardcastle tells Kate:

‘Depend upon it child, I’ll never control your choice.’

Finally the very costume dictates a much greater formality of movement than we are accustomed to. Elegance of dress was not then the prerogative of the ladies but was equally shared by the gentlemen, as is illustrated by the scene in which Marlow and Hastings discuss their wardrobe. When the lace cuffs hung down over the fingers, a delicate flick of the wrist before taking snuff was essential to move it out of the way, and so mannerisms were born. The tight-fitting stocking, also, was such a feature of the gentleman’s dress, that he automatically stood to show off the legs to the greatest advantage. A lady too, in a full skirted boned gown could not possibly rest her hands at her sides, but must clasp them daintily at the level of her waist. So these artificial and stilted movements often originated from restrictions of dress, and were later elaborated into affected mannerisms.

Another major factor to dictate the style of the play and playing was of course the shape of the stage. Today the proscenium arch is an accepted part of the theatre, but early in the eighteenth century it had only just been introduced and there was a large apron stage before it, with two doors on each side of the actors to make their exits and entrances. Shortly after the turn of the century, the fashion was to transform the doors nearest the audience into boxes and build two more doors behind the proscenium arch. As a result the apron stage was also considerably diminished in size, until by the time Goldsmith was writing, the stage looked more like the picture frame that is regarded as traditional theatre today, and productions were correspondingly more formal and picturesque than they had been hitherto. The best position for the actor to be seen and heard was right down on the apron stage and this accounts for so much of every play being written in duologue form. One actor would exit as another entered, so that most of the action comprised two people well down stage.

This picture of eighteenth century staging is far removed from the small television screen and ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ has been adapted to meet this new medium, particularly in the last act when a slight rearrangement of the scenes makes the passage of time more convincing. The children may well find that the nearness of the action on the screen overcomes the barriers created by the mannerisms and courtesies of another age.

This television production of “She Stoops to Conquer” was first broadcast to schools in the summer term, 1960.

(Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774; ‘She Stoops to Conquer’, written 1773).

“THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD”

The characters and story of the ‘Playboy of the Western World’ are so essentially Irish that no production of it can be presented to children without some explanation and information.

In appreciating Synge’s works, it is a help to know something of the country-side of the west coast of Ireland. In Connemara and the Isles of Aran, which fascinated Synge so much, the country is barren and rocky. The great, grey boulders stick up out of the thin soil, leaving only small patches of heather and gorse between. Where there are a few yards of soil cleared of the rock, it has been cultivated to produce a little hay. The land is networked by the stone walls which make such a patchwork of the scenery, and the lanes are brilliantly fringed by the rich, wild fuschia. It is a land of great beauty, but in Synge’s time it was barren and poverty-stricken. Many of the young people still go to America or England to earn a living and send something back to those at home.

A little further north in Mayo, where the ‘Playboy of the Western World’ is set, the land is a little less bleak. On the coast, there are still the great cliffs that stand up against the rough, Atlantic breakers and when the tide is low, long stretches of hard, golden sand where seaweed lies thick and brown to be gathered like a harvest by the local people. The country is still divided by stone walls and dotted with the small freshly-whitewashed, thatched cottages, each with its guard of animals, the goat, the donkey, the sheep and the dog. The land is green and soft, and there are hayfields, though much of the ground is uncultivated, terraced and scarred by the peat bogs, shining black and wet. The roads wind across the wide, open land, broken only by the great stacks of peat at the side, waiting to dry out and be taken to the cottages for the winter.

It is against this atmosphere of a beautiful, proud land where the living is hard, that Synge sets his play. It caused a riot in the theatre when it was first produced. Synge was accused of praising murder and showing the peasants as rough, violent people. In fact, in our more hardened age, tempered by familiarity with the drama of the kitchen sink and crime, the violence would hardly shock. Synge does show the people as romantics, eager to glamourise a situation and embellish it. The gift for story-telling is a well-known characteristic of the Irish – ‘to kiss the Blarney Stone’ is a commonplace expression – and Synge shows how the village folk, whose only excitement is the funeral wake of a neighbour and the prospect of Pegeen’s marriage, seize on the tale the stranger tells of how he murdered his father, and make a romantic hero out of him. To them it is another exciting fairy-tale, like the stories they make up about the Widow Quinn, but when it almost becomes a reality before their eyes, they are horrified. They do not really approve of murder and Christy is nearly hounded to death when his actions threaten to involve them. At the end of the play, it is Christy who has changed, grown in stature, so that he dominates his father as they start out together in a new relationship, leaving the village behind them to sink back into its twilight existence when the excitement has died.

(John Millington Synge, 1871-1909; ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, written 1907).

PROGRAMME ONE
The Eighteenth Century
January 14 at 2.59
January 15 at 3.21

The background to ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ and the world in which Oliver Goldsmith was writing are not familiar to most children. Although a knowledge of eighteenth century life is not essential to the enjoyment of the comedy, it does provide a deeper understanding and is a fascinating study in itself. This programme will briefly attempt to show something of the graciousness and elegance of the architecture, furniture and costume of the time and also some of its disadvantages; the bad state of the roads, which made travel so difficult, and the vast differences between life in the town and the country. Since some illustrations will be taken from pictures by Hogarth and Rowlandson, teachers may like to introduce the work of these artists to the classes as preparation.

PROGRAMME TWO
She Stoops to Conquer
Part One
January 21 at 2.59
January 22 at 3.21

Part 1 will conclude with Marlow and Kate coming face to face for the first time, as they are introduced by Hastings.

PROGRAMME THREE
She Stoops to Conquer
Part Two
January 28 at 2.59
January 29 at 3.21

Part 2 will conclude when Mr. Hardcastle surprises Marlow making love to Kate in the belief that she is the barmaid.

PROGRAMME FOUR
She Stoops to Conquer
Part Three
February 4 at 2.59
February 5 at 3.21

Since the scene is of such dramatic importance, this episode will go back to the moment when Marlow first sees Kate in her simple dress and mistakes her for a barmaid. It will finish with Tony Lumpkin promising to save Constance and arranging to meet Hastings in the garden later on.

PROGRAMME FIVE
She Stoops to Conquer
Part Four
February 11 at 2.59
February 12 at 3.21

This week’s episode concludes the play. In order to adapt the material satisfactorily for television, a slight adjustment in the sequence of events has been made in the final act of the play.

PROGRAMME SIX
Background—An Introduction to the Ireland of J. M. Synge
February 18 at 2.59
February 19 at 3.21

When Synge wrote ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, he was describing the country and the people he had met on the west coast of Ireland. The land there is very beautiful, wild and rugged, rocky and bleak, and provides only a poor living for the folk who live there. They must rely on the meagre harvest they can gather, and on fishing in the dangerous waters. At the turn of this century, they had little contact with the outside world. When their sons went to England or America they went for good. Their entertainment and pleasure was what they could provide for themselves: dancing, singing, racing and above all story-telling. Little wonder then that any visitor from strange parts or any unusual happening was an event to be marvelled at and romanticised.

This programme will illustrate the background to the play and the story of its first production in Dublin which almost caused a riot.

PROGRAMME SIX
Background
Half-term repeat of last week’s programme
February 25 at 2.59
February 26 at 3.21

PROGRAMME SEVEN
The Playboy of the Western World
Part One
March 3 at 2.59
March 4 at 3.21

An evening in the autumn.
Into the quiet village life of a remote corner of Mayo, comes a stranger, Christy Mahon, who claims to have killed his father. The village folk regard him as a great hero, particularly the two ladies who vie for his attention, the Widow Quinn and the beautiful barmaid Pegeen Mike.

GLOSSARY
wake: Watching over corpse before burial, usually accompanied by lamentations and merrymaking.
peelers: Police.
whist: ‘Be quiet!’ or ‘Shut up!’
stooks of the dead women: Name given to dangerous cliffs where many fishermen had lost their lives.
boers: Dutch South-Africans.
i riz the loy: ‘I raised the spade’
loy: A large spade.
drouthy: Thirsty.
streelen: Wanderer.
streeler: Wanderer.
da: Dad.
shebeen: A country pub not too particular about serving drinks outside normal licencing hours.
blather: Talk.

PROGRAMME EIGHT
The Playboy of the Western World
Part Two
March 10 at 2.59
March 11 at 3.21

The next morning.

All the village flock to see Christy and bring him presents. He becomes very fond of Pegeen but while they are out his father arrives, and is sent away by the Widow Quinn. She now has a hold over Christy. She is the only one who knows the truth of his ‘murder’.

GLOSSARY
frish frash: Leavings or Dregs.
mitch off: Run off.
curragh: Crude home-made boat of canvas.
boreen: A winding road.

PROGRAMME NINE
The Playboy of the Western World
Part Three
March 17 at 2.59
March 18 at 3.21

Later the same day.

Christy wins all the races at the local sports and is the hero of the day until his father returns. The villages are disgusted with him when they learn that he did not murder his father, and he is laughed to scorn, so Christy decides to earn their respect and Pegeen’s love by murder again, but this time it does not have the same effect.

Cast Lists

She Stoops to Conquer

Marlow .. .. Paul Daneman
Mr. Hardcastle .. .. George Woodbridge
Mrs. Hardcastle .. .. Margaret Courtenay
Kate Hardcastle .. .. Jane Downs
Hastings .. .. Tristram Jellinek
Constance Neville .. .. Jocelyn James
Tony Lumpkin .. .. Patrick Newell
Sir Charles Marlow .. .. Kynaston Reeves
Landlord .. .. Reginald Marsh
Diggory .. .. John Cater
Pimple .. .. Vivian Pickles

The Playboy of the Western World

Christy Mahon .. .. James Caffrey
Pegeen Mike .. .. Eileen Colgan
Widow Quinn .. .. Peggy Marshall
Shawn Keogh .. .. Tony Doyle
Michael James .. .. Joe Lynch
Old Mahon .. .. Brian O’Higgins
Philly Cullen .. .. Desmond Perry
Jimmy Farrell .. .. Chris Gannon
Sarah .. .. Kate Binchy
Susan .. .. Colette Dunn
Nelly .. .. Maggie FitzGerald

Above: Paul Daneman as Marlow and Jane Downs as Kate Hardcastle in a scene from “She Stoops to Conquer”.

The post Schools drama 1964 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The year 1966 started with political praise being heaped on the head of ‘This Week’ when the programme celebrated its 10th anniversary on January 6. A publication to mark the event carried messages of goodwill from the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Liberals. Later that night a programme title ventured into the realm of the astrologer with what at that time seemed an amazingly rash prediction… The World Cup – England to Win?’ Then on January 31 the first of a new series called ‘The Rat Catchers’ started to win predictably high ratings.

In between, however, had come the death of a member of the board of directors – Sir Bracewell Smith, a former Lord Mayor of London, chairman of Wembley Stadium and an honorary vice-president of the Football Association. February brought yet another award to the company when ‘Children of Revolution’, the Intertel production on young people growing up in Czechoslovakia, won a Silver Dove from the International Catholic Organisation for Radio and Television (UNDA) at the sixth Monte Carlo International Television Festival. Another award came the next month when Hughie Green and Michael Miles received a joint special award from the Variety Club of Great Britain at the Show Business lunch on March 8 for the continuing popularity of their programmes.

March 31 once again saw Studio 9 as the hub of the ITV network when everybody went into action to cover the General Election.

Mr Wilson was given ‘A View from the Bridge’ shortly after on April 4 with the transmission of Arthur Miller’s play. Meanwhile the ITA announced that its present three-year contracts with the programme companies would be extended until the end of July, 1968, as no decision had been taken on whether to extend the ITV service.

A flurry which was to extend for quite a few weeks hit the Wembley studios when the first of the colour ‘Hippodrome’ series went on the floor on April 19.

In the business world, company chairman John Spencer Wills became the chairman of The British Electric Traction Co. Ltd, on April 21, following the death of Harley Drayton.

On May 9 the first of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ series was transmitted. Pride, gluttony, sloth, avarice, lust, envy and wrath subsequently achieved the distinction of all getting into TAM’s Top Ten.

Three days later the first of the adult education series ‘Royalist and Roundhead’ was screened. While not hitting the Top Ten, it rose high in the opinion of educationalists.

May also saw the drama section of the club take over Studio 9 to stage ‘Ring Round the Moon’ and achieve high audience ratings. Meanwhile Fusion made its own dent in the award stakes by receiving a certificate of merit in the British Association of Industrial Editors’ contest, a top award of excellence in the International Council of Industrial Editors’ competition and the Block and Anderson Cup from the British Direct Mail and Advertising Association.

The International Television Federation – Intertel – reached the fifth anniversary of its foundation on June 14. Behind it were 34 programmes and a coveted 1965 Peabody Award for making ‘the first continuing contribution towards international understanding through television.’

Also in June came an award for ‘Stage One Contest – Caroline’. This children’s programme won the Munich Prix Jeunesse.

The Mountbatten series also made news in June when it was announced that this exclusive story of the life and times of Lord Mount-batten would be made in colour.

July started with the news that the first episode of the ‘Hippodrome’ series on July 5 had gone straight to the top of Neilsen coast-to-coast ratings when screened by CBS in colour.

This was the month of the World Cup which England won on July 30 and which stretched the joint resources of BBC and ITV in providing coverage for the world. Rediffusion contributed its share of equipment and executives.

The day after the final at Wembley historians gathered at Television House for a conference with ‘History on TV’ as its theme.

August 1 brought the first programme in ‘The Informer’ series which regularly knocked on the doors of the Top Ten during its run.

The month was shadowed by the death of Bernard Rickatson-Hatt on August 7. He had been on the board of the company since July, 1958. A former Guards officer, he had been editor-in-chief of Reuters, adviser to the governor of the Bank of England and to the Bank of London and South America on public relations.

In September came two club events. On the 10th there was the annual sunlit sports day for the children of club members at Shepperton and on the 17th the football team took part in the TV Cup knock-out competition. For the second year running the Rediffusion XI lost to Scottish, the eventual winners.

On September 21 it was announced that Sir Richard Thompson was joining the board. A former M.P., he has held various government appointments.

A conference for educationalists was held at Wembley on September 22 at which, for the first time, teachers were allowed to produce their own programmes in a television studio. September 26 saw the start of the new autumn schedules with 15 new programme presentations, the sequel being six out of TAM’s Top Ten for the week. As part of this schedule the first production of the new Rediffusion Films Ltd was transmitted on September 28 – ‘Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn’ with James Mason and Jill Bennett. The Frost Programme’ series also started later that night.

Appointments in features came in October. First there was the announcement of the appointment of Barry Westwood as producer of the networked Thursday edition of ‘This Week’. Then, on October 27, it was announced that James Butler had been appointed head of features from November 1.

During October and November, three joint Rediffusion/Talent Association productions under David Susskind passed through Wembley to be recorded in black-and-white and colour for America.

On November 8, it was announced that the present series of ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ would end on December 23.

On November 11, the announcement came that managing director Paul Adorian had been appointed managing director of Rediffusion Ltd. John Spencer Wills, chairman of both companies, relinquished his managing directorship following his appointment as chairman of The British Electric Traction Co. Ltd upon the death of Harley Drayton.

The annual general meeting of the company was held at Wembley on November 28 and at it, the winners of the 1965-66 Golden Stars were presented with their awards. Independent Television presented ‘A Royal Gala’ before the Duke of Edinburgh at the Palladium on November 29 in aid of the CTBF and the Bowles Rocks Trust.

From December 7-16, an exhibition of the work of graphic designers was held at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries.

Finally – and still to come – is ‘The Royal Palaces of Britain’, the joint Independent Television and BBC production on December 25.

The post Tele marks of 1966 appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

I’ve been terrified by the Underground and confused by the traffic but NEVER have I been so bewildered as I was at Television House.

All because of Rediffusion’s Don’t Say A Word.

We have a lot of things in Australia. We have koalas and kangaroos, we have wallabies and wombats, big cities, man-eating sharks, first-class tennis players and cricket teams, and we have television.

But we have nothing quite like Don’t Say A Word.

When I arrived at the studio, the room was crammed with people — all talking. I couldn’t see one familiar face.

Thanks to the friendly, and helpful, publicity girl at my elbow most of the faces were given names. “That’s the director, Daphne Shadwell, and the tall man over there is the show’s host, Ronan O’Casey.

“The dark lass talking now is Libby Morris, she was in the stage play ‘Come Blow Your Horn.’ The girl who has just come in is Una Stubbs and the blonde lass over there on the couch is Jill Browne — she’s in Emergency—Ward 10. That’s Glen Mason sitting next to her.” As long as no one moved too quickly I was able to work out who was who.

Harry Fowler’s face was familiar because The Army Game was screened on Australian TV.

He did, however, look different. He was nursing an extra-large “SSSHH Gonk” (adult toys which do nothing and are the current craze). He explained that the Gonk was to be used on the programme and I believed him. I was willing to believe anything.

Sinking gratefully into a chair, I sat back to watch what I thought was a normal TV panel game. The kind where viewers send in questions and panel members answer them. You know how wrong I was, I didn’t… at the time.

When everyone had finished kissing everyone else and saying hullo to everyone else and yelling across the room at everyone else (it was pretty shattering) Daphne Shadwell said they would have a run-through “to refresh our memories.”

In case you haven’t seen it, the game is a modern-day version of charades. It’s speeded up somewhat by a form of “shorthand,” which covers various categories, common words and hints.

Harry Fowler (minus Gonk) stood up first. He read a small piece of paper Ronan O’Casey (he’s the tall, slim man with steel-grey hair and a Canadian accent) held out to him, paused, scratched his head, frowned (none of which had anything to do with his mime), beamed, and broke into a wild dance which would have done justice to a tribal war dance in full swing.

The panel started yelling suggestions. Harry made a good imitation of a man being set upon by birds or insects by waving his hand madly above his head. The panel yelled some more. Harry staggered round the floor as if he’d lost his senses.

I decided he was portraying a bird which had had one too many.

Libby Morris yelled: “Helicopter, mad, mad, mad, mad whirl!”

“Helicopter, of course,” I thought, “how simple, how easy… how on earth did they guess it?”

When Una Stubbs’ turn came I was so fascinated watching her delicate hand movements and facial expressions I completely forgot even to think about the mime. Una’s movements were punctuated with high-pitched squeaks, but she moved beautifully (not surprising, I found out later she’s a dancer) and the panel had no difficulty in guessing her sentence.

I didn’t guess it… I was still wondering why Harry’s hands, waving above his head, hadn’t made me think of a helicopter.

By the time Glen Mason’s turn came to portray “they crossed a mouse with an elephant and got a huge rat that never forgot” I was thoroughly enjoying myself. But although I could almost work it out myself, the panel beat me to it every time.

“They are amazing,” the pretty, dark-haired assistant agreed later when I mentioned the panel’s speed, “so much so that people sometimes think the game’s rigged — but it’s not.”

I can vouch for that. Anyway, anyone who was going to “rig” a programme would import a real helicopter. Besides I was sitting not 3ft. from Ronan O’Casey and no one had a chance of seeing those cards. But the panel is so quick, I suspect a sixth sense lurking somewhere.

At the end of the afternoon I left feeling: “Well, it’s all right for them but it’s too hard for me, or anyone like me, ever to work out quickly.”

I went back the following day to see a guest panellist introduced to the game. He’d never played it before, and had seen it only once — it took him two mimes before he was yelling along with the others. Correctly, too.

I sat through Una Stubbs’s “if two witches were watching two watches which witch was watching which watch?” and Harry’s “the romantic ghost who was tall, dark and haunt-some,” then my moment of triumph arrived. I guessed “the sick duck who called for a quack doctor.” At which stage I left. No sense in pushing your luck.

I have only one thing to ask — if you’re going to send The Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers and Dusty Springfield to Australia… couldn’t you send Don’t Say A Word too?

No need to bother about the helicopter, though!

The post The show that left me speechless appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

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

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

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

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

The phenomenon about those early days of Ready, Steady, Go!, was not the teenagers who enjoyed it, but the adults. They, used to write and telephone in their hundreds: protesting, inquiring, congratulating. If there was one word to describe their reaction, it was bafflement. They simply couldn’t believe their eyes.

RSG! quickly became half a musical programme, half a weekly documentary. It was the first pop programme to show teenagers as they really were, acne and all. The reason for its early runaway success (one week it had a rating in the sixties, easily a record for the slot) was that it happened at a time when teenagers were more curious, more inventive, more interesting, more clanish, and more independent than ever before. Their clothes, their dancing and their music all showed this. And the outside world looked on bewildered, as explorers at a complex initiation/fertility rite.

Pre-RSG! was pre-jerk, pre-Rolling Stones, and pre-Carnaby Street. I remember the first night I went out hunting for audience dancers, going into a club and realising with a shock that they weren’t doing the twist. The Rolling Stones I knew about already – I had been at the Richmond Jazz Festival earlier in the year when a handful of people watched the supposed main attraction, Acker Bilk, while simultaneously police and officials tried desperately to control an audience of thousands crammed into the Stones marquee. The new fashions were there for anybody to see – provided they looked at teenagers, not film stars.

These three elements became the mixture which exploded every Friday evening, forcing themselves into national thinking. In its early stages, the teenage attitude represented a genuine popular folk movement, confined not by class but by age. At its best, it was a rejection of commercialism and paternalism; even at its worst it had the flavour of home-made bread.

The criticisms made at the time by adults now sound absurd. ‘It isn’t music’. ‘All that long, dirty hair’. ‘They don’t even dance together’. ‘I can’t tell one song from another’. ‘I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one’. In most cases, the opposite of the criticisms was the truth.

For the first time this century Britain had popular music of its own – derived, it is true, from urban American blues, but still incomparably better than the sentimental product of Denmark Street (remember Where Will The Baby’s Dimple Be?). While the standard of musicianship was lower than that of the best session players, at it was it was themselves who were playing. As for the hair, criticism would have been better directed against dandyism than dirt. And does anybody still seriously suggest that the traditional lot are as expressive as Sandie Serjeant?

More disciplined, yes; more creative, no. It was probably this aspect that most riled adults – that teenagers could happily and successfully get along without the authority of anyone older. Elkan Allan, who as executive producer devised and master-minded the programme, enthusiastically endorsed this. Apart from myself, who was regarded as somewhere between an elderly brother and a youngish uncle, everybody on the production team had to be more or less in their teens. What’s more they had to work as a team and keep control of the programme’s content. What matter if Cathy McGowan fluffed her lines: to a teenager she was was one of Us, not Them. Meanwhile Vicki Wickham, who started on the programme as my secretary and became the editor, gradually developed into a kind of conscience for the pop world. Earlier than anyone, she identified the coloured source of the best of current pop, and held this up as the example which every record producer had to match.

Stories of the Beatles’ retirement were published the same week as the announcement of the end of Ready, Steady, Go! The coincidence should signify something. The end of an era, perhaps. More likely, it’s just that the novelty has worn off. Teenagers don’t dance, dress or sing less interestingly than they did in 1963. But the adults have joined the game.

The post Ready, Steady, Goes appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

A rumble of thunder down the Fourth Floor corridor and a flash of lightning from Room 410. The Oracle had spoken. There was to be a second series of ‘The Rat Catchers’. Feigning nonchalance, I reeled off some possible foreign locations – Dubrovnik? Tripoli? Vienna? Amsterdam? Greece?

To my surprise there was no choked gasp of monetary apprehension. I opened my eyes. The Oracle was smiling. ‘Grand’ it said. It was just a year ago.

Authors were commissioned for the series – Victor Canning, Jeremy Paul, Stanley Miller and Raymond Bowers – and the surveys of the location areas began. Dubrovnik in January with a perishing wind, heavy rain and even snow was still compelling. The attractions of Vienna beat a blustery March, but a lot of imagination was required in Amsterdam in wet February. Even Greece, though sunny, was only just emerging from winter and there was still plenty of snow on the mountains. The Kingdom of Libya didn’t seem to want to be bothered about us very much so we switched those stories to Madeira. The Portuguese are much more efficient – and nicer.

I was very happy to get the same directors for the second series – Bill Hitchcock, James Ormerod and Don Gale together with the excellent Peter Lang behind the film camera. So on May 9, our unit arrived in Vienna, where Jeremy Paul had set his stories. And Bill Hitchcock says:

‘Romantic Vienna! The lilt of the waltz, the play of sunlight dappling the shady parks; the gay chatter of tourists as they ride in the colourful horse-drawn carriages, taking them past magnificent buildings standing proud in their history. A beautiful picture.

‘Our picture was quite different – at least on the first morning of shooting. We squelched about in thick mud, in a dark, dark wood, with a steady drizzle trickling down our necks, as we filmed Gerry Flood and Glyn Owen approaching a gloomy, forbidding and crumbling old mansion. That’s show-business!

‘Later, Vienna smiled for us – and maybe because of the sharp contrast with that sad first day, the subsequent pleasures of this truly elegant city are even sharper in our memories.

‘As the song says, “Take me back to Vienna” – any time!’

On May 15 we flew from Vienna to Dubrovnik. That is some of us flew, while others were stuck for the night in Zagreb. Ever seen 96 people try to get into 69 seats in a Caravelle? At night? We have. It can’t be done. Funny thing about Zagreb – each time I’ve been there I’ve never yet flown in and out without some awful crisis, which always ends up with me spending the night there – this time with no luggage whatever. You just cannot get a good shave with an Agfa Silette.

By a miracle all the equipment reached Dubrovnik, which was sunny and glorious, and on May 16 James Ormerod started to tear through a mountain of filming. James’ memories include:

‘The staggering efforts of the unit, Peter Lang, Tony, Keith and Vic, in getting through such an enormous amount of work in so short a time. And Helen, toiling away at all hours, and falling asleep over dinner.

‘Dubrovnik, rugged, ancient, and very proud. The faces of her people hard, romantic, beautiful, moulded by their violent history. The immense strength of those magnificent walls. Echoing voices, no juke boxes, no telly, no traffic. Simply the murmur of people talking, or at night singing in the cafes or strolling down the one main street, lantern lit and shining with the polish of a million footsteps. And the wine, the lovely Zilavka. I’d like to go back to Dubrovnik.’

Then came the long hop to Madeira. A Convair from Dubrovnik to Rome. Enough time in Rome to hurl some Austrian and Yugoslav small change into the Trevi Fountain and then into a Boeing 707 bound for Lisbon. Here we met up with the artists for Victor Canning’s stories. A Constellation lifted us way out into the Atlantic and we were treated to the excitement of a pretty ‘hairy’ landing on Madeira’s six-foot runway. Don Gale and Sylvia were there to meet us. They looked all fresh and calm.

Don’s memories of Madeira include:

‘The arrival of the unit when half the peasant populace of Madeira were indulging themselves in their favourite pastime “Let’s see if the plane lands”. The approach was so death defying that the peasants ran for cover and the unit to the bar… after they had kissed the ground as a thanksgiving.

‘Setting up to film the hi-jacking of a lorry on a mountain road and having to move everything further and further up the mountain as the cloud and mist formed and came up finally to engulf us.

‘Directing local extras, whose best friend had definitely not told them, in the heat of the midday sun. What with their lack of knowledge of English and our lack of enthusiasm to go near them, directing had to be imparted by long distance mime.’

This completed the filming for the first eight episodes so we returned to London where arrangements were well under way for the recording of the first programme on June 16. Near the end of August – six recorded programmes later – we were all off again on the final burst of foreign filming to cover the last five episodes. This time it was Holland and Greece.

While I went ahead with the advance party to Corfu, James Ormerod and his unit flew to Amsterdam about which James remarks: ‘Very flat Amsterdam. None of the climbing and hauling up of equipment we had in Dubrovnik. The surprising courtesy of our Dutch colleagues. Work on location starts at seven and goes on till sunset, but whatever the time, as long as there was work to be done, they joined in cheerfully and without any prompting.

‘Then the herring stalls. The succulent raw fish, deftly filleted, dipped in chopped onion. And the greatest delicacy of all – smoked eel. Unforgettable – except for Dubrovnik, and the lovely Zilavka.’

On September 1 the unit and all the artists arrived in Corfu for the Greek filming. It was sunny and hot – stinking hot – in fact the day temperature in the shade never fell below the 90’s during the whole time we were filming – except for the days of the gale, about which more later – and in some places, like the mountains and at the Acropolis, it must have been nearer 100 degrees. Despite great care we still suffered casualties from the heat.

The schedule for Greece was very, very tight and the terrain was tough so that at the end of our first day’s filming I found myself exactly half a day behind schedule. And we’d only just started. But we were now in the land of Hercules and this time we had Nick Hague and Jan Smith as well, so we caught up the slack and, on September 5 we were all aboard the 6 a.m. ferry to the mainland to go on that breath-taking, bumpy, hair-pin drive 160 miles through the Pindus mountains to the Meteora, right in the middle of Greece, where ancient monasteries are perched on the pinnacles of extraordinary rock formations.

Two days of very energetic, very hot filming and then we had the 230 miles drive down to Athens to board the motor yacht lllyris which we had chartered and which was intended to transport us serenely as we slept to the glorious island of Andros for two days filming. But it didn’t work out that way. Half-way through the drive to Athens the Gods deserted us and we ran into a torrential near-hurricane. ‘Oh yes, two-day gales can happen in Greece at this time of year.’ Now they tell us!

At Piraeus wet, tired and bedraggled we were told we could not sail till the early hours. So we downed our Kwells and hoped for the best. By 10 the next morning we were anchored in a bay sheltering from the gale with nothing in view except a forbidding shore line sporting a factory and a rather large slag heap. It was too dangerous to make for Andros. Already some ships had been sunk in the night. What should have been our filming day slowly ticked by, cheered up only by some mad games of poker and a sort of desperate hilarity.

I thought to myself ‘Coke – this time you’ve gone too far. You’ve got all the artists, crew and equipment stuck on a boat in the Aegean and there is nothing you can do about it. Black disaster lies ahead. The Oracle and the Little Queen of all the Rushes will be very displeased.’

But that night, after 14 hours at anchor, we made a rough crossing to the island of Poros which was sheltered. The gale dropped and at 6 a.m. it was clearly going to be a glorious day. We went ashore at 7 a.m. and, 12 hours later, we finally wrapped up the last shot, having completed two days filming in one. Once again my magnificent team of Spartans had caught up on our elusive schedule. Back to Piraeus for filming at the harbour, and then on to Athens where filming included some dramatic scenes at the Acropolis and, suddenly – 20,000 feet of film and 270 set-ups after we had started at Corfu – it was all over.

And the memories? Laughter – lots of it. Work – even more. The toughness of the unit -fantastic. Greek ouzo and retzina wine – the happy dusty little tavemas – the enchanting people – and how we all gradually fell under the spell of that magic country. And over it all – literally – that great, hot, gleaming, glorious sun.

The post Coke’s tour appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

‘“Mr. ‘Aitch” has existed since the year dot. I want to put him in a specific period of time, as he really is.’

Harry H. Corbett means what he says. And that means serious dedication, in time and energy, to finding the comedy of today, in today’s terms.

‘I’ve always been an actor on my own,’ says Harry H. Corbett. ‘It’s my job to forecast the way I think comedy will develop in the next few years. If “Mr. Aitch” is not a success, I won’t have been right. But, basically, I know I’m right about it. Domestic comedy will go because it has to. The family – as I was brought up to understand it – is in the process of breaking up. In my era it was a terrible fight to get away from the family. Less so now. And as I have to face more new facts about living, so I want the public to face up to the facts, too.’

The perfectionist in Harry H. Corbett compels him to criticise his latest television creation. ‘Out of the first seven “Mr. Aitch” stories,’ he says, ‘I think 50 per cent of what happened has been good. I don’t take notice of the reviews of the show and the only really valid “outside” comments I’ve had about it come from show-business writers. They say: “It’s bloody interesting, Harry, but it hasn’t come off yet. It’s not a failure – far from it – there are important seeds in it.” And I feel the same. “Mr. Aitch” is a developing feature, someone I’m coming more and more to terms with.’

Harry H. Corbett does not write his own material. ‘I get close to what I want, a feeling, without completely being able to describe it in words. The scriptwriters are the bridge between what I feel and what, eventually, I say. Which means that I’ve got to appreciate their sense of humour, too, and say lines sometimes that I, personally, don’t think work. Humour is a contributive thing, an amalgamation – with a single object in mind, unless you’re doing a one-man chat-up show. But people don’t really believe in them. To be believable, comedy has got to be enacted – before your very eyes – in a dramatic context. And the only way I “rewrite” lines is in action, when I’m involved in the production.’

Harry H. Corbett is convinced that television is going through a ‘writers’ era’. ‘The satire boys started it all,’ he says. ‘It didn’t matter what people looked like because what they said made them instantly recognisable characters. So now, sheer acting characterisation matters less and less as people begin to concentrate on what is being said. Theatricality is going – television seems to deal less and less with acting, as such – and comedy scriptwriters’ words can be read in their own right, and be very funny. Consequently, what is said in a series like “Mr. Aitch” becomes a platform for certain conceptions of living. I am trying to become an interpreter of the comedy problems of today.’

Taking on this role brings its difficulties, privately and publicly. ‘By nature, I’m a desperately serious person. Privately, perhaps I can be unconsciously funny, otherwise I’d have to polish my “lines” and wait for the right moment to say them. It’s how you tell a funny story privately that makes it a public item of humour. Privately, I feel that I’m odd – I don’t know why – but the best way I can put it is that I have a perverse sense of humour.

‘I’m aware of the wicked sickness in mankind, the overwhelming ailments of mankind which produce a numbness and then an embarrassed laugh. So seriousness is often outrageously funny – must the pompous man always be pricked? I feel that unconsciously, on the private level and consciously, on the public level. What we’ve got to get over are elements of sickness when we try to deal with certain issues. For example, it’s sick to have a go at coloured people all the time – you know, the camera suddenly zooms close-up on the only negro in a band – there must be other ways of approaching it.’

During the run of ‘Mr. Aitch’, Harry H. Corbett goes home at the end of each day to spend the evening alone. ‘I wouldn’t go 50 miles away in a fog during the show. I like television – the whole thing – and I’ll watch it until there’s nothing to watch. Of course, I can’t forget the idea of comedy and two of my favourite shows are “Dick Van Dyke” and “Bilko”, both American. I seem to be able to predict most English comedy programmes – though Morecambe and Wise, and “Till Death Us Do Part” are very good – but the Americans put a certain unpredictable fire in their comedy language. I think you have to go back to Restoration comedies to find the same quality in England. “Steptoe” had the language thing to a degree. And “Mr. Aitch” is getting it more and more.’

Harry H. Corbett gives the life-span of ‘Mr. Aitch’ some four years. ‘Not only on television. I remember I didn’t want to rush out of “Steptoe”, but comedy series inevitably turn cannibal and feed off themselves. When a show has eaten enough of itself, then, I think, it’s time to turn to something new. I’ve got “Mr. Aitch” pretty well planned in my own mind, but I wasn’t prepared, as it were, for the extension of four more programmes in the present series. I now know I’ve got to go on that bit longer and by selection and balance continue the essential momentum of the show.’

Harry H. Corbett turned to go, the script of his next programme in his hand. ‘What I want when I’m working is a private quiet. Ideally, I’d like to be alone in a soundproof room.’

The post The serious side of comedy appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

If you think it can be difficult getting a taxi in London you should try Moscow. There are plenty of them about all right, with little green lights lit up indicating they’re free – but for some reason or other they don’t like stopping. Straight past, time and again – I think it must be a national game trying to get one to stop. And then when you’re lucky and do manage to get one how do you tell him where to go? On one occasion I wanted to get to the National Hotel, couldn’t get myself understood so ended up at the Metropole Hotel which the driver knew, and walked the half-mile to the National. Trolleys, trams and the Metro are much the easiest and cheapest way of getting round Moscow – a single fare of five kopeks (about 5d. [about 2p in decimal, 40p in 2018 allowing for inflation]) takes you near or far on all the systems. The Metro is amazing – apart from being a quick, clean and efficient means of transport, it also rates as one of the architectural and artistic achievements of the capital. Each station is decorated by Sculpture; paintings, friezes or mosaics, each with a theme of a different republic in the Soviet Union. Some of them are lit by chandeliers, and the general effect is much more of a ballroom than a tube station.

Again, though the language is a major difficulty, French, Spanish and German, which are usually sufficient to make oneself understood in most countries, just do not rate in Russia. However after three trips on this ‘Double Your Money’ venture I can now recognise ‘РЕСТОРАН’ as restaurant.

This inability to take part in or begin to understand conversation was the biggest difficulty we faced in Moscow, particularly on the recording. Originally Soviet Television had hoped to provide at the least, a vision mixer and senior cameraman who spoke English. As it turned out not one did, and Peter Croft had to relay all his instructions through our interpreter, Val Mazarkin, to the Russian director, who then spoke to the vision mixer, cameramen and sound. It was a good job we weren’t trying to do RSG!

Peter Croft was directing and when he came out of the OB scanner after more than two hours of recording I think he’ll forgive me if I say he had lost a little of his usual superb imperturbability. The scanner had very little ventilation and he was absolutely soaked through and looking rather limp. If ever we’ve earned our money that was the day.

I was in the hall doing my usual job of pushing on the contestants and liaising with Hughie – made even more difficult this time because apparently they have no floor managers in Soviet TV. The hall was absolutely packed with an incredibly enthusiastic audience of English-speaking Soviets – and an army of local newspapermen and photographers who throughout the show were darting hither and thither flashing off pictures, interviewing contestants as soon as they came off stage, and generally adding to what was already an unusual scene for us.

I seemed to spend most of my time trying to keep photographers out of shot, and hushing up the quizzing of the contestants by the press – all this while Hughie gallantly soldiered on. Even he looked somewhat frayed when it was all over.

What impressed me most was the excitement and enthusiasm of the audience. To them the show was unusual, different and original and they really got carried away by the competitive spirit. After the first contestant decided to stop at £8 – winning a camera – the whole hall burst into cheers and a young man, presumably a friend of his, rushed on to the stage, hugged him and pumped his hand in congratulation and then equally quickly rushed off the stage back into the audience, past a very bewildered Hughie Green who for once was struck speechless by this moving sight.

This kind of excitement continued with all the contestants. We recorded 14 in all, taking more than two-and-a-half hours, though we did have a short break in the middle for the audience, and ourselves, to take a breather. Whatever the reaction in England to the shows, we certainly made an impression in Moscow. I don’t think anyone who was there in that crowded hall in the House of Friendship that day will ever forget it.

It was an incredible experience and a very human one – because underneath all the language problems and differences in culture it certainly proved to me that people are the same the world over. When first suggested ‘Double Your Money’ in Moscow seemed a fantastic and unbelievable idea. But we did it, and with the greatest co-operation on the Soviet side.

The post Double Your Money in Moscow appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

How do TV commercials arrive on the screen? Fusion asked Mather & Crowther, the company’s advertising agency. This article by MAURICE SMELT, a creative group director at Mather & Crowther, where he has been for the last six years, is the result. Mathers have such a streak of Trappism that they never say anything about themselves if they can avoid it, keeping their advertising strictly for their clients. What follows is therefore one man speaking for himself, and Mather & Crowther will neither confirm nor deny that his viewpoint reflects any official viewpoint that Mather & Crowther would ever publish as their own, if they could ever bring themselves to publish it.

Please note the accurate, sad, fatalistic passive up there in the title. How television commercials get made. Not How we make television commercials – which would imply a universe full of free will where man was always master of his fate. Still less How to make television commercials – which would not only be presumptuous but superfluous. Good advice on the subject is offered all too freely, except by one or two consultants who actually charge for it. No – the fact is that in far too many cases, commercials just get made.

The most conspicuous fact about television commercials is how awful they are as a general rule. And yet nobody wants them to be awful. The writer puts pen to paper with good intentions. The producer, the actor, the man at the piano, the client, all do their best. Even the ITCA are presumably on the side of the angels. Why such a gap, then, between what everyone wants to happen and what does happen? Is there some special intractability about commercials that confounds the cunning of their makers?

Well, it may be that commercials do begin with handicaps that are peculiarly their own. If it isn’t pretentious to call them an art it is certainly true to call them a unique form of art. Rules that apply to making programme material hardly apply to commercials at all. Whereas programme companies somehow have to fill hours and weeks and years, world without end, the advertiser, with thirty seconds only for his sales pitch, has every problem except killing time. In press advertising we do at least work to the same scale as the editor, in pages and half-pages and whole columns. In the ocean of television we are spots indeed. The point is not merely philosophical, because it has meant that since commercial television began, the advertising industry has had to discover what could and could not be done in mini-segments of time, with little that it could usefully plunder from motion pictures and television.

Then again, it is very hard to buy first-rate artists for commercials. Voices over, yes. Screen appearances, no. (What, never? Well, hardly ever.) ‘Face fatigue’ is the excuse that the actors’ agents give – by which they mean that stars will lose their public following if their faces come out in TV spots.

Still, handicaps like that should not be crippling. After all, they only are handicaps – problems which one should be able to put one’s mind to and solve. In fact they obviously are soluble, and every so often a good commercial comes along to prove it. So what goes wrong, when it does go wrong, which is most times?

What goes wrong is everything, every little thing, piecemeal. Watch Monday’s Newcomers (every Monday, 10 a.m., Channel Nine, when the past week’s new commercials go on air for the benefit of the trade) and it is easy to see how mediocrity wins its war of attrition. Somewhere down the all-too-long line someone has toned down a racy phrase, someone else has pushed in a cliche punchline (‘… at your stockist NOW!’) … and daintified the actresses … and prettified the sets … and picked the mushier of two musical backings. We all know the suburban kitchens that are too opulent and too clean; quiverfuls of winsome children; their mummies (aged about 22, irreproachably genteel); women who get out of bed every morning with immaculate hair-dos; uxorious husbands; the whole, horrible galère – forever smiling, cheerful, and odious. And then there are the voices that bully you, or suck up to you, or suddenly come over all sincere and comforting, as if the dog had just died.

All this tediousness comes from nothing wickeder than a lot of sensible people trying not to be rash, meaning well, and always – at every decision – choosing the safer of two courses. How seldom one sees a commercial that failed because vision went haywire and genius ran amuck. How often one sees failures of dullness and committee-thinking. It is the old story of the committee that sat down to design a horse, and came up with a camel. Only it’s worse. Like a fish designed in committee that ends as a fishcake, the bad television commercial is inoffensive, shapeless, and dead.

That’s what happens when commercials get made. For a commercial to survive the death by a thousand cuts requires the man in charge (whoever he is) to stick to his guns, his script and his intentions with quite ruthless determination. Otherwise this, roughly, is what could happen to a commercial conceived on a Friday 13th.

1. An agency copywriter writes an outline of a script and discusses it with
2. An agency television-producer. Granted that both have talent, they devise a first-draft script that is plain, pithy, relevant, and unordinary.
3. They submit it to some creative overlord, who may make some tactful, euphemistic revisions, because perhaps the first draft was a little too plain, not to say plain-spoken.
4. The script then goes to agency executives. Suggestions; counter-suggestions. Slight changes get written in. Statesman-like compromise.
5. The revised script (now turned into storyboard, or videotape, or 16 mm with or without sound) is presented to client. Pause. Agency sit with bated breath. Breath unbates, when client proposes two tiny changes, ever so tentatively. Agency demurs, ever so faintly.
6. Casting session on closed circuit. Those present include writer, producer, creative head, executive, client, minions and myrmidons. Everyone has a voting paper. Any actor whose features are irregular, foreign, or otherwise unsafe, is told that we’ll ring him.
7. Pre-production conference. Actor can’t manage his lines, changes them slightly. Director from production company changes lines slightly.
8. Script goes to the ITCA, who change the lines slightly.
9. On the floor. Take 1. Not quite. Take 2, 5, 8, 19, 23, cut. OK, that’s it, print.
10. Rushes, rough cuts. Sequence of shots slightly altered from the camera script for editing reasons.
11. Double-head screening for the client. Agency bates its breath … ‘Could we dub another voice on to that first man? … Oh, does that mean we have to redub all the actors? … Very well, redub-a-dub-dub.’
12. Panic.
13. Bulk prints rushed to stations in penalty time, almost injury time.

It seems you can’t win – not if you believe in reason, in give-and-take and the courtesies of debate…

And yet, somehow, we do manage to win – quite regularly – at Mather & Crowther. Not always, not often enough to encourage complacency, but yet oftener than you could account for on coincidence. One could quote Player’s (since ‘People love…’), Eggs (since Bernard Miles), Shell (since Bing Crosby), Cream (the little cat), and Schweppes (Schhh… You-Know-Who). Perhaps we have a little talisman somewhere that enables us to beat the average a little bit, in a game which otherwise seems to be ruled by random. Certainly we have some guides to scripting which everyone is supposed to adhere to. Such as:

1. When the commercials come up, your viewer instantly switches his mind off; therefore reactivate him, make him switch on again, by opening dramatically.
2. Never close a commercial with a boring old pack shot and price.
3. Every commercial must contain some singular, odd, gee-whiz thing that will stick in memory when all else is forgotten.
4. This mnemonic – which we call the selling fix – must be not merely relevant to the product but central to its use. Otherwise people will only remember an extraneous oddity and they will completely forget the product.
5. Ideally the whole structure of the commercial should lead to placing this ‘fix’ in the very last frames, so that the whole advertisement ends surprisingly, delightfully, and powerfully. No dying falls.
6. If you can demonstrate, do so. One in the eye is worth 10 in the ear.
7. If you can set up a familiar problem that people recognise as their own, and solve it right before their eyes, and prove that you have solved it – do so.
8. Keep sequences simple. Preserve the unities. A commercial must never become complex – it is not a motion picture.
9. 120 words a minute is ample.
10. Notwithstanding the difficulty, go for the top talent. They can only turn you down. Among those who have not turned us down have been Bing Crosby, Jack Hulbert, Sammy Davis Jr., Bernard Miles, Joan Littlewood – and the top of the Pops.
11. On no account use harsh, injunctive, bullying commentaries. A commercial is an advertisement, and all advertisements are on the side of the public and have the public’s needs in mind.
12. Don’t be greedy. Don’t say one thing in titling and another on the sound track. Words and pictures must always agree.

Those are most of the Mather & Crowther rules, and we think they are good rules. They never made a good commercial yet, any more than you can make sonnets just by knowing rhyme schemes. But they do at least discipline creative energies, and concentrate thought so that the committee procedures within the agency begin with a strong measure of consensus. Beyond that, I think that we owe such success as we have enjoyed to the unrelenting, ferocious highhandedness of one or two people who have the energy to pick up the progress of a television commercial at every stage of its filtration through committees, and put back the vitamins that were there in the original script. This makes life a little bit hard sometimes for those of us who are reasonable, used to give-and-take, polite in our discourse. But if you want a good commercial more often than just sometimes, that may be the only way to do it. Or at least it’s better than democracy.

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THIS week, Ready, Steady, Go! — Britain’s most popular pop show — moves from its crowded, informal niche in Television House, Kingsway, to the suburban, wide open spaces of Wembley Studios.

The jam-packed atmosphere of a Mod cellar-club has gone. Replacing it — slicker presentation, more glitter.

Gone, too, the tried-and-trusted record pantomime of most television disc shows. Defying tradition, Ready Steady Goes Live!

Why the changes?

Elkan Allan, executive producer of the show and head of Rediffusion’s light entertainment, said, “Ready, Steady, Go! started to go sour on us six months ago.

“The standard of dancing. The clothes teenagers wore. Every factor had fallen away from its former high point. Something had to be done to reignite interest.” Elkan decided to cut disc miming from the show. Teenagers had written to say they felt it gave a false impression. Nevertheless, a brave decision.

A decision that set Tin Pan Alley and show business generally a-buzz; a decision that will cost money.

It means a 50 per cent increase on the shows weekly budget: for extra musicians, backing singers, and arrangements. Plus a hefty outlay for new electronic equipment.

Producer Francis Hitching positively gloated as he described it: “More than £10,000 has been spent on the most up-to- date apparatus,” he said. “The studio will be littered with echo chambers, limiters, compressors, equalisers… It should be the most advanced sound technique ever used in a television studio.

“We don’t claim to produce an authentic ‘record’ sound. What viewers will see and hear is comparable to a live stage performance… with all its accompanying excitement.”

New sound. New studio, too. More space for dancers. No more elbow-to-elbow jostling. Now there’s room for 250, exhibiting all the intricacies of the latest dance crazes without space restriction.

Room for artists to breathe. To move about without dodging camera booms. Or wires. Or clusters of fans.

One thing Ready Steady Goes Live! must capture is atmosphere. Their old home, however cramped, did have an informal feel about it. The new studio must try to acquire this spirit.

In an effort to do just this, an R.S.G. Club will be formed. About two thousand teenagers will be selected as dancer-members… and work in a rota to appear on the new show.

New sound. New studio. Almost new compere. Until now, 20-year-old Cathy McGowan has been a sort of perky Girl Friday on the programme. Now she will be in charge.

Nervous at the prospect? Certainly. But bubbling over at the prospect of the show’s new image.

Enthusiastically she explained the R.S.G. Club. “The girls will look smashing and all the boys will be so good-looking you won’t believe it,” she said. “And they will ALL wear the very latest clothes.

“If they don’t arrive at the studio looking smart and up-to-the-minute, they won’t be allowed on the show and they will lose their club membership. We want to return to the style of the early days, when teenagers bought a special with-it outfit just because they were appearing on the show.”

Will the actual pop quality of the show change? Yes, it should improve. Lined up to appear on the new show are Gerry and the Pacemakers, Georgie Fame, The Animals and The Rolling Stones.

All-important musical direction for the first month will be handled by Johnny Spence, who has arranged backings on hits for artists like Matt Monro and P. J. Proby.

How do stars feel about Ready Steady Goes Live!? Particularly about the new feature that affects them — the miming ban?

Dionne Warwick and Cliff Bennett are in Friday’s show. Said Dionne: “I’m quite happy to do live performances. This is the way we work back in the States and it suits me fine.” And Cliff Bennett: “Much prefer to sing live. It creates much more atmosphere in the studio and this makes for a better programme.”

Will there really be a big difference in the new show?

Last word from Elkan Allan. His ideas sparked the show off originally. He’s behind the big new moves.

“Change?” he said. “Certainly. It will be far more exciting!”

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A couple of years ago something quite unexpected happened in France. A few young men who had never made films before (or indeed had never even been in studios before) began to make films that proved to be of extraordinary artistic and technical assurance. Films like Chabrol’s ‘Les Cousins’ and Truffaut’s ‘Quatre Cent Coups’ made with borrowed resources (sometimes with the director’s own money), showed a freshness and vitality which the cinema had long been lacking.

The ‘Nouvelle Vague’, the New Wave, was with us. Any young man, it seemed, could make a better film than the old-established professionals. A lot of other young men had a try, sometimes with disastrous results. But the tonic effect began to be felt in other countries, in Italy by directors like Fellini and Antonioni, in Spain, in Germany, even in Russia, even in Britain, where films like Karel Reisz’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and Jack Clayton’s ‘Room at the Top’ reflect the world trend.

In our theatre something similar is happening. Never has the London stage possessed such a crop of young playwrights (and producers), working with such a variety of imagination and skill as Bolt, Wesker, Pinter, Osborne, Mortimer, Simpson, Delaney, Behan and Bart.

But what about television? Has our medium felt any impact from this urgent and aggressive movement? Let us look at the output of the companies.

The BBC has been televising plays since 1936. Originally, through lack of material, they had no choice but to photograph stage plays in stage-like sets. In 25 years they should surely have nurtured enough writers to create plays especially for the visual concepts of television. They certainly have a very large script department. But in 1960, the BBC drama department’s two major scries were the pretentiously titled ‘Twentieth Century Theatre’, which was nothing more than a number of revivals of old stage-plays played in their theatrical context, and ‘An Age of Kings’, a Shakespearian ‘play-cycle’ which though in itself worth doing, was neither new nor television. The result was that new television writers had a thin showing on the BBC.

Granada, too, appeared to hanker after revivals. Someone discovered the ‘Manchester School’, a number of entertaining plays written about 1910 for Annie Horniman’s Theatre, and these (admittedly expertly adapted) turned up regularly last year. Granada did, however, also give us well-produced modern works by Giraudoux, Dorothy Parker, Philip Callow and Alexander Baron.

Anglia, I am afraid, have tended to produce plays that have already been successful in the theatre, a policy which was previously followed by H. M. Tennent (for ATV), but Tennent’s have recently put on an encouraging number of new television plays and now ATV themselves have started ‘Theatre 61’ with, so far, a high standard of original writing.

ABC’s ‘Armchair Theatre’, with its mass, Sunday-relaxed audience has consistently produced original plays, but often the stories have been hangovers from the awful second-features we used to see in the cinema.

So if you were a new writer of visual imagination who believed he had something dynamic and new to say in television, where would you go from there? Your first play, for better or worse, is written, in an envelope waiting to be addressed. To whom… or to which company should you send it?

Do you know, it mightn’t be a bad idea to send it to Associated-Rediffusion. (Never has a commercial taken so long to get to its point.) For we have a very good record for encouraging and producing new writers. Indeed, there are now very definite signs of a breakthrough in television drama – a breakthrough, to use a Horrocks’ phrase, that links up with what is happening in films and the theatre, and is spearheaded by plays like ‘The Break-Up’ by John Hall, ‘Moment of Milo’ by John O’Toole, ‘Owen Stephens’ by Philip Broadley, ‘The Pot Carriers’ by Mike Watts – new plays by new writers in new settings, breaking free of television’s favourite venue, the cuppa tea in the working-class kitchen, new works of imagination written for an audience that has mainly not visited a live theatre.

People are often so stupefied by the sheer weight of television output, day after day, night after night, that they fail to understand the impact of the few really big successes in television. In Great Britain, in one night, more people will see an average TV play than will ever see the most highly publicised top box-office film. More people will see an average TV play than have seen ‘The Mousetrap’ in its record-breaking nine years’ run in the theatre. Never let us forget the size of our audience and our influence over them.

If we just wanted ratings, we could still put on an old stage thriller or a West End farce and play for safety. On the other hand, some of our new plays have had surprising successes. Standards of direction and production are being raised to match those of the theatre and film. The financial rewards for television writers are being improved.

From being the Cinderella with the big audience, television could become the best of the three mediums, the most original, the most thoughtful, even the most entertaining. The next ‘nouvelle vague’ could start here. It would be very exciting….

The post Where is TV’s ‘Nouvelle vague’? appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The programme does — as it sets out to do — cover every aspect of life among the limelights and the shaded lights. Plays, opera, ballet, actors, playwrights, critics and the audience and the scene-shifters will have their part.

Even “spot news” affecting the theatre as such comes within the magic web that is being woven each week by Norman Marshall, Head of Drama for Associated-Rediffusion, Director Peter Morley and the programme deviser, Henry Kendall.

☆ ★ ☆

Just how lively and widespread is the scope of On Stage I have been learning on a backstage tour of observation with this team. And to pinpoint their determination on topicality whenever the opportunity presents itself, take the spirited discussion over the threat to the St. James’s Theatre in London.

I “sat in” with Peter Moriey and the camera and lighting crew for a whole morning session at the home of Sir Lewis Casson and Dame Sybil Thorndike.

We spent a day in the St. James’s Theatre rehearsing and shooting a specially edited version of the thriller It’s the Geography that Counts starring John Gregson — possibly the last play the theatre will put on.

This sense of immediacy in the approach of On Stage was clearly brought out at the first conference on the programme.

Peter Morley suggested doing something on Oh! My Papa!, which arrived in London only this month.

It was agreed that the show should be got into the studio as quickly as possible so that Ludovic Kennedy could interview the cast and a slice of the show could be introduced into the programme. As a result of fast work on these decisions, viewers will have a front seat for Oh! My Papa! in the July 31 On Stage.

That first conference continued roughly on these lines :

Norman Marshall: Now what about Stratford? I’d like to do the full half-hour on that — give it the full treatment… investigate the commercialism of Shakespeare’s name… talk to the Americans about it… do a real documentary.

Peter Morley: Fine. There’s Covent Garden opera, too. Money troubles there all the time…

While this went on the phone was ringing frequently. Peter Brook, producer of Titus Andronicus, was on one line… someone from the London County Council on another about defending themselves over the sale of St. James’s Theatre…

Norman Marshall’s secretary made arrangements for him to spend a weekend of investigation at Stratford… there was talk of getting Sir John Gielgud to audition some young, aspiring actors before the mike and cameras… suggestions for getting the author of a play attacking Christianity to argue with a senior Churchman.

☆ ★ ☆

Out of all the talk, suggestions and counter-ideas evolved schemes for a whole series of programmes. These included puppet theatres, temperament in actors, training animals for the stage, what goes on in famous drama schools, club theatres — and a host of other plans.

In a series as flexible as On Stage has to be — ringing the changes from live broadcasts, filmed interviews and studio presentations — every man in the unit is continually looking ahead. And none more so than cameraman Harry Hart and sound-mixer Stan Clark. I went out with them in a unit car crammed with equipment. As we drove to our location they were considering the lighting probabilities, the outside noises that so easily wreck the best-laid plans of any production team. AH such possibilities have to be anticipated, emergencies tackled.

One member of the outfit particularly will have to be on his toes — Ludovic Kennedy, the newscaster of Independent Television News who is both compere and interviewer of On Stage and who links the various items in each programme.

With a programme of this kind, topicality is an insistent demand, and preparation is but a short step to action. Cameras, sound equipment, lights, miles of cable have to be transported and installed in theatres, people’s homes — upstairs and downstairs — wherever film has to be taken.

And, remember, a whole day’s exacting work of this nature can result in only about eight minutes’ viewing.

It was like this at the St. James’s Theatre — and at the ticket agency in the second programme. It will be like it at every rush job that is tackled: ceaselessly demanding activity on top of imaginative ideas provocatively presented.

Besides these purely production problems, of course. On Stage must be constantly alive to material for programmes, finding people who are prepared to speak authoritatively and at short notice on matters of the moment.

With these and other aspects of his task in mind, I asked Norman Marshall how long the series would run. Said he:”Providing we’re on the ball every inch of the way, there is no reason why On Stage should not become as permanent as This Week — as urgent, as topical, as entertaining.”

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Ray Dicks and I did, in fact, reach the deck of H.M.S. Victorious at Portsmouth to investigate the possibilities; but the ship was snatched away and sent to the Far East because, they said, global strategy comes before telly. In any case, to mount a seafaring O.B. would involve some 20 tons of assorted hardware and 40 bodies. So we abandoned the idea and bent our minds to film with all its obvious advantages for such a project. Again, the Admiralty made encouraging noises and it was arranged that the general manager, Ray Dicks and I would be flown to Malta and translated to H.M.S. Eagle at sea while she was working up her new air squadrons. Eagle had just completed some modernisation costing a cool £30,000,000. All mod. cons. They told me: ‘you will be amazed’.

Unhappily, our general manager couldn’t go but Ray Dicks and I set out for Malta. Just like the man said, we were met on arrival by a naval pilot, a truck and an aeroplane. Somewhat to my dismay the aircraft was not a helicopter but a Gannet; a large, pregnant, hideous machine stripped of its gadgetry and roughly converted to courier duties.

In a cosy 87 degrees, we stuft’ed ourselves into flying clothing; into overalls and mae west and dinghy and crash-hat and radio.

It all took time.

‘If you get an order to bale out’, a polite and patient sailor told me, ‘just roll over the side clear of the aerials, dwell a pause and pull the rip-cord. When you enter the sea, the dinghy should inflate. If it doesn’t you should…’ And off we went, at 50 feet over the Mediterranean so that a parachute would have been of academic interest. Eagle was 20 miles out, paddling along majestically into wind while one of the young gentlemen practised decklandings in a Vixen. I studied the situation and listened to the R/T. Evidently, the Vixen was being gauche and we would have to wait. ‘That was a bolter’, announced the radio – in other words, the pilot had misjudged his approach and opened the taps to miss the angled deck. This, I felt, was exactly where I came in, years ago. I was always kept hanging about the ship while something unsatisfactory went on below.

Then we were invited to land. Hook, wheels, flaps; all the vital things. We went into the arrester wires (better than discs) at 100 knots and came to rest neatly abreast the island. An elegant flight of steps was offered and we were greeted by the commander, wearing a telescope as is proper when receiving visitors however dubious their origin. We were taken up to the compass platform to meet the captain. We had come aboard.

They looked after us magnificently. The domestic arrangements were a revelation to me. The wardroom was run like an efficient hotel and the cast included a hall porter and a head butler – in bell-bottoms; very rare. Everything worked, including the elaborate air-conditioning. This astonished me. In my day, H.M. ships couldn’t produce a glass of cold water without a major crisis below stairs. The telephone in my cabin said to dial 999 if I was in any way unhappy. A deferential steward arrived to discuss my dress for dinner. Ray and I were O.K. for dress by courtesy of Rediffusion’s wardrobe who had equipped us with white tuxedos, ex ‘Crane’, perhaps, but natty and much admired, we thought.

Our host officer took us up to the island to watch the afternoon’s flying, and then we were bidden to take drinks with the commander before being introduced to the wardroom. Our lives had been programmed and it was never a dull moment. We were shown everything, from the radar to die prop shafts.

For sheer visual impact, apart from the noise and the people, it would be hard to beat the effect of a Buccaneer coming on to the deck at night and swooping into the wires at 150 m.p.h. The ship had to hustle to get enough wind down the runway. A Buccaneer weighs 23 tons and cost a million pounds sterling. When I was a practitioner in these matters, I trundled to the deck at a stately 90 knots or so. I am glad I flew when I did and not in one of Eagle‘s sophisticated electronic monsters. It is all done by computer, they said. If a transistor doesn’t fancy its programme, something regrettable can happen – and fast.

Eagle carries, as a peacetime outfit, the strike Buccaneers (of nuclear capability) a squadron of Vixen fighters, a squadron of radar Gannets, a squadron of anti-sub-marine choppers and a flight of Scimitars to cope with the prodigious thirst of the Buccaneers. Altogether, she is a complex thing; 44,000 tons, 2,500 men to support a floating airfield 800 feet long. Indeed, the price of Admiralty and of keeping the Queen’s peace.

It seemed to me that fair comment upon the whole arrangement was made by an elderly artificer whom we encountered in the lower steering compartment. No longer is this ship steered, albeit remotely, by one of those old-fashioned, simple devices called a wheel. No; a sailor lolled in a swivel armchair and steered to within ¼ of a degree with a joystick. The artificer took me aside ‘You know, Sir, this lot really worries me…’ I knew exactly what he meant.

When we were due to leave the ship they told us calmly that we would be launched by catapult. It has been a long time since I did this interesting trick; and the first time ever for Ray Dicks. So we climbed laboriously into all our clobber and signed one of those forms which blames it all on you if anything goes awry. The ship was downwind and, as we taxied on to the catapult, I had a good view of the sea; very blue, wet and deep. The steam catapult is inexorable. I put my head against the pad and clutched the cockpit sides. I thought about insurance, and then the turbo props screamed up to peak revs and off we went. From nothing to 100 knots in 100 feet; an acceleration of three times 32 feet per second per second – or something.

Back ashore we sorted ourselves out and went off to visit Rediffusion, Malta. The next day we left for England. Our Comet had a thrombosis in its hydraulics so that we festered for four hours in Naples. Then Miss Gracie Fields joined us and eventually we took off for London. We arrived late, tired, cross and in torrential rain. We were home from the sea.

And another thing; we are indeed going to make a programme, on film, about H.M.S. Eagle. Charles Squires will direct and, no doubt, give his own peculiar flavour to the story of this most extraordinary ship.

The post Back to see appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

From Television Annual 1957, published by Odhams

The pundits sometimes forget this simple fact, that viewing is not compulsory, like school or clocking in at the factory. Viewing is voluntary and experience has shown that when the screen adopts a school-mastering demeanour the set is switched off, or over. I for one am against those programmes, which are based on the idea of the man behind the desk who looks at you in a benign sort of way (often at the wrong camera), and talks and talks about what he feels ought to interest you. A lot of this is done – not, I’m happy to say, by ITV; and there is one word for it: it is a bore.

When a treatment bores it does not teach. When a treatment entertains it does teach automatically, because the mind is in the best possible condition for receiving ideas. The political parties have arrived at this obvious conclusion very quickly. Today the political messages in their party broadcasts have not changed, but their presentation has. They aim to please, on the principle that the wrapper sells the goods.

In television, the cult of personality is a very important factor in the twin objects of entertainment and instruction. The man, for instance, who likes classical music will listen to it in any case. But if the conductor is as vivid a personality as Sir John Barbirolli and the presentation of the orchestra is entertaining, the chances are that converts will be made – slowly but surely. They begin by looking for the wrong reasons (just as a child begins to write by following lines) and end by listening and viewing for the right ones.

What I like about the ITV approach is that the stress is on entertainment first. In This Week, for instance, we aim to give even the most serious item “presentation” value – the way it is filmed, the sound effects, the music, the bite in the questions – and we consider all this just as carefully as actual content.

The same is true of the series called Look in on London, which is about the people who give us a service: dustmen and firemen, charladies and fluffers. There is nothing so entertaining as the so-called ordinary man showing us the ins and outs of his so-called ordinary job. I learned a great deal, by accident – by proxy if you like – from the little film on dustmen, without the aid of a single chart, blackboard or professor. The kind of work and approach represented by the professorial attitude had been done before this film got to the screen: research, script, “presentation” – that was the order.

What so often goes wrong is that the first phase in the venture, research, looks as if it is being done on the screen. It’s like the man who goes up on to a platform to make a speech and holds in his hands and works from the first rough draft of his notes. He might just as well sit down because we all know he is going to be a bore.

I know I am laying myself open to all kinds of charges in the future, but I’m prepared to say that this is not the ITV approach. All our programmes that are about events of the week or about people with problems are designed to entertain. For instance, there’s the new series called People Are Talking, which is about the kind of problems that affect us all – income tax, gambling, drinking, sex – and all done without any schoolroom equipment. But the facts and the points of view are there just the same.

We take the not very revolutionary view that the approach to the man on the other side of the cathode-ray tube must alter according to the time of day. In the morning, when you read your newspaper, the mind is fresh; it can take a barrage of dry facts, which it will absorb. At night, however, the situation is entirely different. We’re all a bit tired – and yet the world keeps on turning; news and views still keep pouring in. But if they are presented “straight” the tired mind sets up a resistance.

The answer, if we aim to put over a point of view, lies in one word: presentation; and we would like to think that we are getting close to the secret of it. Can ITV educate? Answer: it already does.

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It is almost impossible to write about German television. That may seem a funny way to start an article about this subject but it happens to be true because there is no television in Germany as we know it in this country.

The fact is that Germany has not yet established television as a medium of communication, for it almost wholly relies on precedents of techniques and organisation as established by the theatre and film industries.

A good illustration of this is that £45,000 was spent recently on a television production of ‘Hamlet’. But the whole thing was shot in a film studio by a film director using film equipment. The result, in my opinion, was that it was neither a good film nor was it suitable for television.

A similar thing happened with a production of ‘Under Milk Wood’. In this case it was directed by a stage director and presented from the point of view of the stage. It is not surprising that both productions, therefore, made very dull television.

I should say that the greatest drawback in German television is the lack of fully trained personnel and their unwillingness to learn the arts of television, relying wholly on the tricks of the trade from films and the theatre.

A typical drama production team which is together from the start of rehearsals, consists of a director, assistant director, a script girl (not a production assistant), a floor manager and an assistant. There is also a director, supervisor and manager of production. Each of these last three is concerned with the management side and is not involved with the artistic result.

Despite this large crew you are still lucky if you can record a play in the studio in five and a half days. Some of the existing networks take even longer – up to two weeks in the studio for one production.

The main reason for this is that the staff have never been properly trained for television so they are not of much help to the director and even the directors very rarely plot cameras until they are actually in the studio.

The result is that during my time in Munich I did not see one production which could compare favourably either technically or artistically with anything we do in this country.

The programmes now being transmitted have a smack of pre-war television days about them even though the money spent on each production is at least twice that of our own budget for a similar programme.

All of which may sound as if I returned a little dejected.

I forgot to mention that the two plays I produced were for a station that never was – the company concerned has not yet got permission to broadcast.

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Next week, with the Thursday programme at its peak, they are to hand over to a new producer, Jeremy Isaacs, so that Bennett, a former national newspaper journalist, can devote all his time to his appointment as head of an ITV company’s feature department, and Morley can concentrate on the production of special documentaries.

Tall, dark-haired Morley, who began his working life in the projection box of a West End cinema, lit a cigar as we talked in his office six floors above London’s busy Kingsway. There was a two-hour delay on the phone to Moscow, no impending Cabinet crisis, and the cigar smelled good.

“These have been two exciting years for us,” he said. “During our ‘reign,’ This Week has visited every continent and has had as guests, world leaders in politics, industry, commerce and royalty.

“We’ve spotlighted race riots in America’s Deep South, troop trouble in Minden, rocket bases in Cuba and conditions under Communism in Poland.

“We’ve had interviews with Mr. Nehru, the Shah of Iran, the Prime Minister, and every member of the Cabinet. And we’ve put out a 45-minute programme with Prince Philip on his tour of America. Without doubt, this was the highlight in our two years with This Week.”

Another programme which brought praise for the Bennett-Morley partnership from both critics and viewers, was one taking the lid off the unemployment position in Hartlepool and the North East.

“This was the first time the public had really been made aware of the poverty and hard times in that area. The programme had a tremendous impact,” said Morley.

“But” he added, “when one has to produce a topical current afFairs programme once a week, one steps unavoidably on a number of toes.

“We had an altercation with the War Office following our coverage of the British troop skirmishes in the German town of Minden. And we were not too popular with the Polish Embassy after our pro gramme on conditions in their country under the Hammer and Sickle.”

Another programme which raised the prestige of This Week was one pin-pointing violence on TV. Naked City, one of ITV’s own programmes came in for criticism. And no punches were pulled.

In recent weeks, This Week scooped Fleet Street with a revealing pre-arrest interview with Dr. Stephen Ward, the society osteopath and friend of Christine Keeler. The following morning, the world’s top newspapers carried the interview on their front pages. A fitting retirement compliment to Bennett and Morley.

Past successes notched by the partnership include Tyranny (the years of Adolf Hitler), Heartbeat of France, Two Faces of Japan — which has been shown by every television network outside the Iron Curtain — and their famous documentary about British trade unionism called United We Stand.

Peter Morley also directed the only full length opera ever to be shown on independent television, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.

But both of them are justly proud of the part they have played in raising the prestige of independent television in the field of current affairs. They leave This Week in a position of strength and influence.

The post Last week… THIS WEEK… next week appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

A Royal occasion? An assassination scare? Visit from an astronaut?

No, the cause is Associated-Rediffusion’s new series starting on Friday, Ready, Steady, Go!, which will bring pop and film stars to Television House, in Kingsway, London.

And the fan-control precautions will be taken as a result of a paragraph in TV Times John Gough column a few weeks ago, asking if any teenagers wished to attend a trial run of the show.

Requests for tickets came in from all over the country!

Ready, Steady, Go! is a “pop-pourri” of records and films, packed with exciting, unconventional ideas. An audience of 200 young people will kick off their weekend watching and listening to and appearing with their favourite stars.

The programme presents problems for the administration staff of Television House, for Ready, Steady, Go! has fan action on three separate fronts. And in this, Associated-Rediffusion are bringing to light entertainment a production policy they have perfected covering big national events — cameras will be at three different spots.

• In the studio, Keith Fordyce will introduce and interview personalities before an audience of 150 that will completely surround him
• In the lobby, David Gell will introduce youngsters who will be dancing to the music of the show, relayed on monitor sets.
• And outside Television House, scores of fans will throng to watch proceedings in the lobby and perhaps catch a glimpse of their idols arriving or leaving.

Said director Bill Turner: “We want to capture the immediacy, the pace of modern show business. And we want to be informal and have an audience that will participate actively.

“The audience will have a chance to meet performers, get an autograph, maybe even dance with them.

“For instance, David Gell will ask individuals for their Top Fifty pop requests which we will play at once. He’ll ask why they like it and if they’ve bought it.

“There’s an amateur disc jockey spot. Another member of the audience will take all the Top Fifty records home, play them and return the following week with the record he or she considers best. We will try to discover exactly what appeal that particular record has.

“Three audience members will be blindfolded each week and asked to identify a pop record and artist as we superimpose the name of the record and artist on a monitor set.”

Ready, Steady, Go! will be staged in the heart of London at 7 p.m. so it will give stars a chance to drop in between matinees and evening performances.

Besides music and film clips, Keith and David have a quick-fire, American-style news-spot, bringing all the latest information from the world of show business.

Keith told me: “We shall try to keep pace with teenage trends by working on the Top Fifty records. That chart is the barometer of teenage musical taste. But it’s not only youngsters we’re aiming to please. I firmly believe all the family enjoy pop music in some form or other.”

Canadian David Gell’s main task is selecting and interviewing members of the audience.

He told me: “There will be no special way of selection. I shall rely on my own judgment to pick fans who appear lively and bright. Hair styles, jewels or flashy clothes won’t attract me.

“My main problem will be disentangling the microphone lead from all the legs around me!”

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What about the unknown laws? Science itself is still seeking the true answers to many questions.

People who know more about the spiritual world than I say I am psychic. I prefer to keep an open mind. But a few strange things have happened to me.

Last Boxing night I arrived home about midnight. Going to my bedroom I became aware of a perfume in the passage… a strong, sweet smell, unlike anything I have known.

An ordinary scent would have got weaker. But this remained very strong — and moved about. It moved round the passage and went into my bedroom. I followed. I had the feeling it was looking round my room… searching… seeking.

I went round the flat trying to find an answer for the scent. Perhaps it was a vase of flowers, a cake of soap, a bottle of after-shave lotion… But nothing smelled like this.

It remained in my room for several minutes.

Then, as quickly as it had come the scent disappeared. And I was left with the feeling that ‘somebody’ had come to see me. Someone gentle, harmless and extremely kind.

That was not the first time I had experienced the world one step beyond the ordinary. One night last year I awoke to see a faint red light hovering above my bed.

It was like a long tube, similar to a one-bar electric fire.

The light quivered back and forth, and I heard a strange humming sound.

At first I was afraid… but a remarkable feeling of peace came over me. Within seconds I was asleep again.

A few years ago the landlord of a pub I used to visit showed me round his flat behind the pub. I was shown into a large bedroom.

Suddenly a cold feeling enveloped me. Not like the coldness of winter or lack of heating. A vibrating, enshrouding coldness seemed to play round my body. I told the landlord and not until then did he say that the room was supposed to be haunted.

Was this chance or make-believe? I’m not keen on trying to imagine experiences like this. They are far too disturbing.

In the summer of 1928 a friend of mine dreamed that her dead mother asked her: “Did you know Ellen Terry was dead?” The following morning she spoke of the dream to her husband. They laughed about it.

Then she opened the morning paper which announced the death of Ellen Terry. She died the day before and my friend knew nothing about it before going to bed.

Most of us have had strange experiences of one kind or another. Are they imagination? I don’t think so.

What do you think? I should be interested to know.

And here is the story of today’s One Step Beyond:

Haunted by a recurring dream, a man becomes obsessed by the face that keeps appearing in his dream. The face is that of a seaman who approaches the dreamer with a knife.

There is the sound of creaking timber, like a ship at sea.

The haunted dreamer gives up his work and spends his time hanging around the Liverpool docks in the hope of recognising the face. One day he gets drunk and wakes up on a Spanish ship. And one of the seamen has that face…

This true story happened in Liverpool in the 1880’s.

Derry Quinn, who scripted the programme, said: “I believe the original incident was studied by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was interested in psychical research. It is one of the strangest, most haunting psychic stories that has ever appeared.

“The story develops along classical lines. It is a tragedy of human destiny. A man tries to avoid his fate and by trying to avoid it he brings it about!”

Quinn added: “Of the 35 TV film scripts I have written this one is undoubtedly my favourite. I’ve got it out and re-read it several times. If I’m not careful I shall find myself haunted by a script!”

The post On the scent of a ghost appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

No more will third-form schoolboys who have mastered the mysteries of nitro-glycerine and matches be able to chuckle at TV’s version of a safe-blowing job.

At least, as far as No Hiding Place is concerned. A new look is coming to TV’s top ‘get your man’ series.

It’s all due to criminal consultant Colin Holder. For £25 a week, 27-year-old Colin, an ex-criminal himself, will be combing the scripts to make sure the TV criminal sticks to the letter of criminal law.

Consultants aren’t new to No Hiding Place. George Kelly, an ex-Detective Inspector with the Flying Squad, has been advising on the police side of the picture for some time.

There’s definite art in the use of phrases like casing a joint, haggling with a fence, stashing the cash, and avoiding the fuzz (police).

Not, of course, that I would know. But being of sterling character. I appreciate how the No Hiding Place script writers can slip on the finer points.

Said script editor Louis Marks: “We are looking deeper into the criminal character of our plots. For example, the first of the new series deals with the problems of a released prisoner. Colin can give us invaluable help in analysing the other side of the law.”

He continued: “No Hiding Place has already achieved top popularity as it stands.

“But this realism business is a trend we intend to concentrate on. And that’s where our experts come in. We are under no pressure from the police about the programme’s contents.”

Louis is well aware that a lot of people like No Hiding Place exactly as it is now.

“People write in saying how much they like the programme. Then they add that something happened to a relation or friend the other week which might convert into a good story.

“But to be absolutely frank, they are mostly unsuitable. Often, they arrive more as fan mail than anything else.

“We genuinely appreciate this sort of interest. But believe it or not we don’t have any difficulty finding new story lines — even after seven years.”

Louis, who was previously in charge of scripts for the Deadline Midnight series, will bring a new aspect of realism to the programme.

But No Hiding Place fans needn’t worry. The old firm of Detective Sergeants Perryman and Russell (Michael McStay and Johnny Briggs) will still be there — still complaining about the “old man.” Nothing can stop Lockhart!

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Someone once defined politics as the art of the possible. Someone else said that it is not an exact science.

They might have been talking about my job. Whatever theories or principles a politician may have, he will nearly always end up doing what is possible rather than what, ideally, he would like to do. If he is a good politician, he will combine theory and practice to reach a reasonable compromise. If he is not, he will soon lose sight of his principles and live from day to day, hopefully, until finally he comes unstuck.

From Fusion 31, published August 1963

It is much the same with my job. I don’t have to tell you that making television programmes is a complex business. You have to combine technical resources, technique, and temperament. Or, to put it less grandly, electronics, know-how and people. The first is immensely complicated, the second takes years to acquire and the third are not gentle folk doing simple, undemanding jobs, but hardened professionals who won’t take no for an answer. Just look at them:

Writers, producers, directors, designers, casting directors, camera and sound crews, production assistants, vision mixers, lighting supervisors, make-up artists, wardrobe mistresses, floor managers, stage managers, film crews, researchers, setting assistants, painters, carpenters, electricians, graphic designers, and so on.

Not to mention the solid phalanx of engineers. Or the administrators.

All, at their best, skilled, dedicated and determined to fight to the death with guile, low cunning, obstinacy, charm and every trick in the book – short of brainwashing and physical violence – to achieve their ends.

It is part of my job to see that the skills and talents of these individualists are able to combine to produce the programmes asked for by the Controller of Programmes.

Of course, the job would be half way to easy if there was no more to it than giving them all they want. Unfortunately this is seldom, if ever, possible. Even a major prestige production has to observe some limitations.

So we have to work to a Schedule, which is fitted together, like a complicated and unwieldy jigsaw, by the schedules officer and his staff, acting on information received from a number of (usually) reliable sources.

The main source of information is the production planning meeting, which is held fortnightly in Dressing Room 26 at Wembley Studios. I am chairman and in attendance are the schedules officer, the supervisors and heads of the production sections, engineers, and the directors and designers of the productions to be discussed. The floor plans and designs for these productions are examined, technical requirements worked out and agreed, and a time schedule laid down. Series and serials are dealt with as a whole, not each episode separately. Special Features programmes, with their emphasis on filming, which usually takes place overseas, are excluded because they involve studio staff marginally, if at all.

It all sounds simple. A group of characters sitting round a table, planning away. Nothing to it. You wonder what all the fuss is about. But it is when you have got everything scheduled, that the trouble starts. Programmes have a way of not conforming. There are so many elements involved, so many factors which cannot be assessed or calculated accurately. So much that can go wrong. Producing programmes is a creative process, in spite of what some of those unkind critics say, and the creative process doesn’t take kindly to timetables. Scripts need to be re-written and plans re-drawn. Directors change their minds. The leading lady, having adored the script all the way through outside rehearsals, takes a turn against it, and demands changes or she’ll call her agent – and we all know what that means. Cameras break down, fuses blow and microphones go dead. Then there are what might be called Acts of God, though why the deity should be blamed for some of the things that go wrong, is beyond me.

These things are funny in the telling, and make good canteen gossip, but they can be, and often are, serious. Of course it is true that last minute changes of mind and heart are due all too frequently to bad planning, indecision, laziness or plain stupidity. But it is also true that they are often the product of many anxious hours of worry 2 and thought by talented, dedicated people who will spend sleepless nights single-mindedly trying to improve a programme. It is these latter changes that may save a show, or turn an average one into a great success They are the ones we have to try to legislate for.

Then there are the extra programmes, often ‘crash’ outside broadcasts and special feature productions from Studio 9. As a matter of fact, there is one each of these programmes being organised as I write this, on a Sunday morning. I have had one ‘phone call and doubtless there will be several more from people who are certainly not having a day of rest.

These special programmes, many of them on the great issues of the day, are enormously important to us. On our ability to do them, willingly and well, rests to a large extent our right to be called a responsible broadcasting organisation.

There are so many things one would like to do. So many people one would like to help. A director comes to me for a fourth boom. I see his point, but he can only have it at the expense of another programme. Someone else wants an extra two hours camera rehearsal. He makes out a good case, but it will mean unscheduled overtime or the rescheduling of the programme due to follow the next day in the same studio. Can this be done and, if so, will it be justified? One works out the permutations, establishes priorities and tries to do what is possible in the best interests of the programmes themselves.

You see what I mean by the art of the possible. It is endlessly fascinating of course. And certainly no exact science. Thank heavens.

Drawings by Ron Sandford

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The last time I saw President Diem in Saigon he took me aside and said – ‘What programme is this one?’ And when I said ‘This Week’ he considered the words rather carefully and came back: ‘You are lucky to be thinking of this week.’

A few weeks later he was dead. I talked with the priest in Cholon, who saw him go through the process of ‘accidental suicide’; Diem and his brother-in-law, Nhu. The two had worked their way from their palace to the Chinese quarter and the little Roman Catholic church there. I had the impression, from what I was told, that Diem knew that he had come to the end of his particular road.

Diem was dead. The street was empty. People took care not to be around. They were watching but they were not going to get involved. A Vietnamese friend of mine said: ‘You may not have thought much of him. Now wait and see what happens.’ And we have waited, and we have seen. That was my last assignment with ‘This Week’. The producer who asked me to go back to Saigon is now with the BBC; so is the reporter. There may be a moral in this somewhere, but I doubt it. There is a wonderful line from Don Ameche in Silk Stockings.

‘What is your theory?’ asks the Russian girl.

‘My theory is that there is no theory!’

This renders the approach to the world we live in empirical and I suppose that this is a fair assessment of the way we used to and indeed had to organise ourselves when ‘This Week’ started, in 1955.

There were no rules; only ‘Panorama’.

The assignment given us by the then controller, Roland Gillette, was to produce a lively half-hour (minus commercials) for January ’56. There were to be many items, some political, some social, some lighthearted. It was agreed that we would try to end with a short ‘sting’, a one minute semi-sardonic commentary on our ways of life.

Just after the kick-off we had a major accident. Our man in Paris phoned me (in what is now the canteen) to say that he had found a night-club in Paris, already made famous by Time magazine, in which French waiters were dressed as cowboys.

Later, Caryl Doncaster, then producer of all features and I viewed the ‘rushes’ in ITN. These consisted of some 40 minutes of synchronised and beautifully lit extracts from the club’s cabaret. There were girls undoing zips everywhere. It was riveting stuff and I was later to be amazed by the number of people who felt that the film had to be seen. That item was a hard night’s day.

A jolly time was had by some when we took the programme to Paris for our first Eurovision link. Stephen MacCormack, now in Mauritius, was location producer. The programme was sent out from the Palais de Chaillots, into which Stephen cheerfully imported some Bluebell girls. That caused a tableaux with the diplomats. We also learned, on the day of transmission, that the French had views about the use of commercials. This, in turn, had repercussions in our own network. As a result I as editor, was instructed to provide two separate programmes for simultaneous transmission. This turned out to be a record, if not necessarily an achievement.

There can be a lot of fun in a programme if you have to learn as you go along. When we started the staff couldn’t be assembled according to experience in television because there were limits. Some of us came from the BBC, some from films, some from Fleet Street. We had to shake down as best we could.

One transmission day Mrs Alfred Hinds sent us (through Geoffrey Hughes) a taperecording of her husband’s voice. He was currently on the run from gaol. There were no rules. We didn’t know whether we should use it or not. There were risks. Scotland Yard was interested. I consulted the one man who could give us a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It was ‘yes’ and we were plastered all over the front-pages next morning. That was the first time I met John McMillan. The rules evolved. One particularly exasperating one was the 14-day rule governing comment on things to be dealt with in the Commons. We ran into a blow-torch over this during the Suez affair. Two particularly prominent politicians had to be told that they could not discuss what they had come to discuss. One left. The other one stopped and temporised. He is, at the time of writing, Chancellor of the Exchequer. There have been embarrassing moments with politicians. One such, who has since been a prime minister (and demanded cash as soon as the programme was over) was invited to cross our red carpet into the studio, via, as was intended, one of the five star offices in Television House. I posted ‘sentries’ at both entrances. At one I eventually met the august gentleman. At another my sentry welcomed a coloured gentleman, took him upstairs to the five star area, handed him over. This was, in fact, an Egyptian journalist, destined for another item in the programme. That took some sorting.

The Prime Minister of Australia came in to see the interview we had filmed between President Nasser and Frank Owen. It was a good interview. When it was over we had the impression that the Prime Minister was about to say something fundamental – like ‘thank you’. At that point a voice in the dark said – ‘You can’t trust these politicians can you?’ When the lights went up I noticed that Mr Menzies looked amused.

I went to Athens with Elkan Allan, to interview Archbishop Makarios. Staying in the same hotel were Elizabeth Taylor and the late Mike Todd. It seemed a good idea to try something with him. We were invited to the Todd suite and bedroom in particular, where we found Miss Taylor less than dressed. Her husband was pacing the room using the dialogue from Lady C. ‘Liz,’ he said, ‘here are two English Lady C’s.’

‘Yeh!’

‘How do you do, Mrs Todd.’

‘Hih!’

Says Todd – ‘Sit down on that Lady C bed over there.’

Later that day I was on the roof of the hotel with his beautitude.

Todd comes out on the roof and says, in his not less than megaphonic voice – ‘Who is the Lady C with the hat!’

Such situations are delicate.

All this might suggest that we acted more frivolously than now seems evident. That is not so. Our brief was different. ‘This Week’ has not grown up to be 10 years old: it has grown to be different from what it was. All my ex-companions on the programme can probably top the trivial stories I have told, and they would all have to stop short of some of the truths we could all tell. I refer to Michael Ingrams, Dan Farson, Ludovic Kennedy, Richard Gould Adams, Michael Westmore, Tom Hopkinson, William Hardcastle, Jeremy Thorpe, Rollo Gamble, Cyril Bennett, Elkan Allan, Kenneth Harris, Al Capp, and so on and on. In more than 500 issues there is a lot of heat, some dust, occasionally a lot of fun.

A lot of people cut their wisdom teeth on ‘This Week’, and some got them knocked out. The programme has come a long way from the days when Spike Milligan sang ‘I’m Walking Backwards For Christmas’ and Peter Sellers did time as Professor Smith Grant Hetherington, having seen, heard and secured hairs from the Abominable Snowman. We even once tied ‘This Week’ to ‘Late Extra’, which has its own story. I wrote and spoke the commentary for the yearly report on Noisivelet and a few people spotted how we had found the country.

Serious things happened. We have, after all, been living in the latitude of great events. I think that most were faithfully recorded. So long as you don’t take yourself too seriously you stand a good chance of staying short of a rest-cure.

I remember in the studio, Dr Verwoerd and Sir Roy Welensky, Khrishna Menon and Yehudi Menuhin, Harold Macmillan and Dr Banda, Father Huddleston and so many others.

One event I remember with personal pleasure, since this is only my version of ‘things wot used t’be’ as editor and producer and executive producer and head of features, and all that. I was sent, to my utter delight, to Monte Carlo, to interview the glittery Tina Onassis. The now Duchess will excuse me if I refer to her as a ‘dish’. However, we talked of Grace Kelly and life as lived by those who want for nothing. In my pocket I had a letter from my mother saying that my father was very ill in Canada and needed comfort. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t afford the air fare to go out and was floundering for an answer when I saw someone at Nice airport whom I thought could help. This particular VIP was first on our plane and, incidentally, occupied the little room to the discomfiture of the other passengers for a very long time.

During the flight home I wrote him a note and asked if he would consider sending my father a word of encouragement, since they knew one another well. A day later I received this letter to send on –

‘My dear Commander Hunt,

I am indeed sorry to hear from your son of your illness. I hope you will accept my earnest good wishes for your recovery. I remember well the good work that you did in the War Room.

Yours sincerely,
Winston Churchill.’

I am grateful to ‘This Week’ for that opportunity. And it helped.

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It was about three years ago that I arrived on the 6th floor to work with Cyril Bennett who was producing ‘This Week’. And I was apprehensive. Until then, I had worked for Cyril Butcher in admags. ‘This Week’ meant no more to me than a paragraph in the TV Times, occasional glimpses of Brian Connell and a few bars of the Karelia Suite by Sibelius.

Down on the 2nd floor, where my days had revolved round ‘Jim’s Inn’, the world of current affairs programmes was a mystery. I didn’t know how they worked or who worked them. It wasn’t very long before I found out. Looking back, now, I remember very little about the content of the programmes when I first began. I do, however, remember that each week began quietly and ended in a blurr of running feet, harassed faces, raised voices and the latest editions of the Evenings.

I shared an office with Cyril Bennett then. It was small and airless. This had an interesting effect when it was subjected to hour-long production meetings with six chain-smoking programme makers. These meetings at first would fill me with terror because the telephone would always ring, stopping conversation and often heralding a very persuasive P.R.O. trying to sell his client’s programme idea. These ideas were always completely unsuitable for a weekly current affairs programme and their very suggestion would leave me paralysed and nearly speechless. My symptoms must have been taken to mean disinterest for when not faced with the usual barrage of reasons why his idea was hopeless, the poor man would soon ring off.

It is very easy to compare the programmes now with the programmes then – how ulcer-making it was with last minute additions on Thursdays, very little forward planning and two or three items in each half-hour. How comparatively more leisurely it is now, with two or more one-subject film programmes being shot and put together at the same time for forward dates. This means that today, studies can be made in greater depth.

All I remember about what I actually did in those days was typing and circulating the features bulletin twice a week and keeping Cyril supplied with endless cups of coffee and codeine, though I suppose I must also have done something else with my time – perhaps some of it was taken up avoiding the two wolves of the section who I had been told by my predecessor to beware of at all costs. She must have impressed me for I never got past the ‘Good morning’ stage with either of them.

Though it seems now that I worked for Cyril in that office for years, it was only four months later when he told me he had been offered Lord Windlesham’s job as head of features but that until he could find somebody else to take over, he would still produce ‘This Week’ with Peter Morley. I stayed with him as his secretary.

So we moved up to the office of head of features with fitted carpet, armchairs and space for me at the end of a Plan 7 in the next room and our double duties began.

During the next few months, Cyril spent quite a lot of his time interviewing people for the producership of ‘This Week’. I met countless interviewees at the 6th floor lifts and ferried them along to Room 601 and back again afterwards.

‘This Week’ itself seemed to have evolved slightly from less of a battle into more of a steady struggle but never did it become tedious. I cannot remember one moment of boredom for, not only was the business of being with a weekly programme time consuming, but the very fact that it was current affairs, newsy and real made it absorbing. And I was always impressed by the importance of it all, by the people we spoke to on the phone and the people we had in the studio; that Lord Montgomery was actually on the other end of the line and the Archbishop of Canterbury and so many MP’s who up till then had been only names in the papers. And I still have a very vivid memory of Stephen Ward being interviewed in one of the offices and then being hurried out the back way to avoid recognition and the police. And that Prime Ministers should also come to Studio 9…

Jeremy Isaacs arrived as producer of ‘This Week’ seven months after Cyril’s promotion. I moved over to work for him. Jeremy concentrated on racier film reports with the reporter on the story doing any commentary that was needed, obviating the necessity for the studio linkman.

The one and a half years I spent as Jeremy’s secretary I enjoyed enormously. He left more and more of the administrative side for me to do. I remember him beginning very quietly – nobody noticed him, few heard him and his presence was only felt in the department by those working closest to him. But by the time he had settled in, his voice was the most distinct in the front corridors of the 6th floor. Without moving out of his chair, he would summon the current production team into his office, vocally, and also without moving he would pick up the threads of any conversation we were having in the office next door and offer his opinions on the latest dresswear, hairstyles or whatever.

Programmewise, I was scarcely involved in the making of film stories. My job was in the initiating stages and in the commentary writing and editing. Jeremy would decide on Vietnam say, for the next week’s programme and I would check film crew availability, have the travel and hotels booked and generally see that the machine was set in motion. On the Thursday, Jeremy, or the reporter, would write the commentary and I would type it, often several times before it was either down to the length or as he wanted it. As often as not it was only by the skin of our teeth that the commentary would be recorded and dubbed on to the film in time for transmission at 9.10 p.m. Thursdays would mostly develop into a nightmare fight against time – but the nightmare was the producer’s, not mine – the feeling of not having the responsibility was elating.

And then Jeremy Isaacs left in July this year to see what impression he could make on ‘Panorama’ and ‘This Week’ fell back into the overworked lap of Cyril Bennett. At the time of writing, I am now bossless and typewriterless – both Isaacs and Bennett having decided that typing is no longer for me and I have been given some aweinspiring title like programme liaison or programme organiser, I keep forgetting what exactly, but in any case, it just means that I am doing the same job only more so. And that is almost everything to do with ‘This Week’ that is not directly the producer’s or director’s problem, from programme correspondence to chasing film rushes from overseas locations into the labs. No more commentary typing on Thursday evenings – the reporters do their own – but Thursdays often involve the meeting of journalists and Government spokesmen, escorting them to the guest room for drinks, down to the studio for transmission and back to the guest room to recover, leaving us all slightly wilted by 10 o’clock.

But of all the departments for which I have worked in Television House, this has been the most exciting, eye-opening and intriguing and ‘This Week’ itself the most rewarding. It is at the time of writing in the hands of Alasdair Milne, formerly editor of ‘Tonight’. But nothing ever changes – only the names and the faces.

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This attitude meant there was no local news service in London. But the Independent Television Authority (ITA) kept pushing for one, so Rediffusion came up with Three After Six (so named because it was originally shown at 18:03, but it later drifted to 18:08, leading Rediffusion to retcon the name into meaning Three PEOPLE After Six). This was not a conventional news programme. It wasn’t even a conventional features programme in the style of Midland Montage or About Anglia of the time. This was something very different. The TVTimes for the London region covering 28 November to 4 December 1964 (issue 474) reports.

In theory, it sounds easy – just assemble three intelligent people who take an interest in what’s going on in the world, sit them in front of the cameras and let them chat to each other for 20 minutes. No scripts to be written and learned, no elaborate rehearsals.

But spend a little time with the Three After Six team (presented by Rediffusion on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), and you’ll find that the secret of the programme’s success is a little more complicated.

The trio have to like each other enough to enjoy discussion, yet have such different personalities that they are constantly disagreeing. It’s generally agreed that the current team of Dee Wells, Alan Brien and Benny Green disagree with rare pungency and wit.

They have the same profession – journalism – in common. But their interests and backgrounds are so diverse that they can never be quite sure what the others are going to think on any particular issue.

The threesome’s alliances, as they contradict each other, are constantly shifting. And each feels differently about the show.

Dee Wells is usually the most apprehensive before they go on the air.

“It’s working without a script that’s so unnerving. You walk in that studio with nothing except those opinions and facts you’ve got inside your head,” she said.

“Some jobs get easier as you get used to the routine. This one gets worse.”

But Dee never worries that she might run out of opinions. “Certainly not. I’ll find something to say about anything. The more subjects we discuss the better.”

Alan Brien, who has been accustomed to bashing out Instant Opinion articles on his typewriter for 15 years, is not bothered by the lack of script – it enables him to deliver his views direct, without the bother of typing. But he’s more cautious than Dee. “There are some very complicated issues I’ve never thought out and wouldn’t care to offer an off-the-cuff opinion on. Steel nationalisation, for example.

“And there are some strong views I hold that I’d rather not discuss in public because it might be needlessly upsetting to people who don’t share them and who are stuck with their own attitudes, no matter what I say.

“I try to remember,” continued Alan, “that, although we are just expressing our quick opinions and are likely to have forgotten what we talked about a few days ago, some of the things we discuss have special significance to some viewers.

“I recently met a woman who took me up on my remarks about publicans who sit at the bar with the customers instead of serving behind it. I’d expressed myself forcefully and had upset her because she and her husband had just taken over a pub.

“I’d made these remarks about three months ago and had forgotten them, but they’d stuck in her mind!”

Benny Green, who finds every show an enjoyable gamble, admitted: “If I don’t know anything much about a subject I try to make a virtue of it. I’m ignorant about motoring, for example, so I say interest in cars is a waste of time – which horrifies Dee!”

“I try to be as funny as possible, to entertain viewers, but I always try to tell the truth as I see it and it doesn’t mean, when I’m treating a thing humorously, that my views are not serious.

“Once, working on a TV show from Manchester, a Frenchwoman – Ginette Spanier – laughed at everything I said. Afterwards, she told me me ‘We don’t have any comedians like you in France.’ I replied: ‘Madam, my opinions were perfectly serious.’ The she laughed some more!”

For the record, Benny was enthusiastic, Alan indifferent and Dee worried.

Although Three After Six is unscripted it still takes up a good deal of the participants’ time. Three days a week they meet for an hour at 10am and look through newspapers and magazines in search of topics. Then they meet again at five and warm up with a discussion, usually on something they daren’t discuss on the air. A typical subject: the news that ladies’ bottoms are back in fashion.

Said Benny, who was a professional dance band musician for 10 years before becoming a full-time writer five years ago: “I live at Wembley, which means that by the time I get back home in the middle of the day, I have only a couple of hours to do some writing before it’s time to set off for the Television House studio.

“But I find that having to read all the papers every day gives me ideas for articles and scripts, so I do well out of it.”

Dee came to London from New York 11 years ago because she thought living would be less expensive here. “Unfortunately, I discovered I had to get a labour permit, which wasn’t easy. But I contributed a few paragraphs to The Guardian, wrote about fashion for the London office of the New York Times and, when I’d got a few cuttings, went to the Sunday Express and told them I was what they needed.

“They said they were doing fine, didn’t need anybody. But I persisted and they gave me a job.”

Now Dee fills in the gaps between Three After Six by contributing to The Sun. While her income has increased, she has a sneaking feeling that London has become as expensive as New York.

Alan, who has a flat in town and a phone-less weekend cottage on the Thames at Cookham, Berkshire, said: “Ten o’clock is the earliest I can manage to think about work. I’ll resort to any excuse, even washing the dishes and mowing the lawn, to avoid starting work before 11.”

As he is the Sunday Telegraph’s drama critic the time of Three After Six suits him well.

“We come off the air at 6.30, just in time for a drink before dashing off to the theatre. I often need that drink: free seats most nights may sound marvellous but there are few things more painful than sitting through a bad play.

“And I invariably know when I’m in for a bad night when my wife refuses to come with me. She has an uncanny instinct for spotting boring plays!”

• Dee Wells was born in Rhode Island, USA, on 19 March 1925; she died in London, UK, on 24 June 2003
• Alan Brien was born on 12 March 1925 and died in London on 23 May 2008
• Benny Green was born in Leeds on 9 December 1927; he died in London on 22 June 1998

The post Three before six appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

From the TVTimes for week commencing 10 April 1965.

Three recent editions — dealing with different types of social deviations — were among the most stark ever seen on the British TV screen.

Yet there were only THREE complaints from viewers — and one of those was to point out that Amsterdam was not the capital of Holland as the programme had wrongly said.

But This Week has built up its reputation mainly by its skilful analysis of the news and the background to it.

I spent three days watching producer Isaacs bringing his weekly programme (Thursdays) to life. For half of the time he hardly stopped talking or moving about.

At the end of it, he was still as fresh as a spring morning. I was worn out.

The door of this dynamic man’s office is always left open so he can yell non-stop instructions to his secretary and staff as ideas cascade through his mind.

Yet this is no wild egotist getting caught up in a tangled maze of his own ideas. In conference with those who work with him, he is a great listener and most receptive to his colleagues’ ideas. He absorbs, and either accepts or discards — with rapid-fire judgment and appropriate action.

Jeremy Israel Isaacs comes from Glasgow… “and I’m as Scottish as any Glasgow Jew can be,” he said. Thirty-two years old, he lives with his South African wife Tamara and their two young children at Turnham Green, London.

How did he arrive in his present job – one of the toughest in television?

“When my National Service ended I had £100 scraped together. I’d determined, somehow. to break into either TV or journalism. But for months the only job anyone would offer me was as a soap salesman,” he said. However, I hung on and finally got a job as researcher for What the Papers Say. Later, I moved to All Our Yesterdays. I wasn’t so keen on that. I’m interested in today, not yesterday.”

Isaacs’ office is sparsely fitted, the walls are almost bare. But one of the things on the walls illustrates his feelings – or lack of them — for politicians.

It is a framed newspaper cutting, referring to This Week’s recent election coverage.

It quotes him: “If they (the politicians) want to complain, they can do it afterwards…” At the bottom, he has black pencilled, in block capitals — “THEY DID.”

Isaacs’ pet aversion is what he calls “waffle.” With his volatile make-up he is interested only in getting to the heart of a matter, cutting away all undergrowth, as ruthlessly and as rapidly as can be.

“What I won’t have in This Week,” he said, “is a room full of so-called ‘experts’ — self-styled pundits — sitting around in a semi-circle discussing the subject in hand in some vague, airy, pompous, non-committal way — i.e., waffling.

“The time is past for this form of television. The 1965 public is an enlightened public, greedy for detailed interpretations of the big news of the day. They want to see it put before them from every angle. And be left to form their own judgment.

“They don’t want to be told — they want to be shown.”

Isaacs is the first to point out that This Week is a team show. “Although I may be the man who decides what goes into the programme, I’m only one of 30 or 40 people who make it up,” he said.

At one of the most hectic-periods of the week — and believe me, it IS hectic on This Week — a young girl called to see Isaacs, by appointment. He gave her a private interview, lasting nearly half an hour.

Afterwards, he said to me, wistfully: “Such promising young people about… all mad to get into TV… there just isn’t room for all of them… I wish there was…”

The post This Week appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The political fight that surrounded the introduction of commercial television in the mid-fifties left the early contractors with a dilemma. It was essential to prove wrong the opponents of the new scheme by transmitting programmes that would appeal to all tastes and all social classes. The need to recoup initial investment, however, required a lowest common denominator approach to attract mass audiences and stem the inevitable early losses.

It was also necessary to persuade advertisers of the value of the new medium. Satisfying politicians, advertisers and two very different social classes of viewer was a daunting challenge.

The startling division then apparent in British society between what we now call ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ viewers is easily forgotten in today’s more classless society. Associated-Rediffusion found a novel way to reconcile these opposing forces.

After an initial year during which the scheduling was an unscientific jumble, they settled into a subtle viewing apartheid whereby the 8.55pm news from ITN would mark a sudden boundary between populist viewing in the early evening and more intellectually-demanding documentary and drama in the later hours. This set a trend that would continue to be followed by Rediffusion, London after the change of name, as shown by the examples on this page from 1964.

Associated-Rediffusion is now often unfairly pilloried by historians for over-reliance on quiz shows and entertainment for those of a less sophisticated palate. The truth is more complex than that, however. These early evening programmes raked in the cash that cleared the debts, underpinned the company’s success and funded a greater quantity of documentaries and heavy dramas than even the ITA required.

Television House, the headquarters of A-R in Holborn, Kingsway, was famed for its military ethos. The company, though dominated by businessmen, achieved a remarkable balance between the needs of commerce and those of show-business. The tension between these two broadcasting disciplines was never an issue at this company, whereas it was the very issue to almost ruin London Weekend some years later.

Associated-Rediffusion probably succeeded in satisfying the demands of the media elite, the politicians, and the middle-classes with their post-“watershed” schedules. Plays by Harold Pinter, the Angry Young Men of London’s West End, more commissioned programmes about Westminster from ITN than the regions took, and endless documentaries about heavyweight subjects demonstrated that A-R was indeed “the BBC with adverts”.

When the Pilkington report grumbled about the likes of ‘Double Your Money’ and ‘Take Your Pick’ dominating ITV’s weekday early evenings, A-R could only warn that this income was the source of the documentaries and plays that gave ITV its public service reputation.

And yet, A-R found itself consistently under attack in the press, in parliament and in the corridors of its regulator, the ITA.

This is happenstance – while ATV London was no better than the chattering classes of the time thought it would be, A-R was better and paid the price demanded by the British when something they create becomes the envy of the world – demanding better of it all the time.

As ever, this type of criticism is of a “don’t like the cut of his jib” style – unsubstantiated but loud.

A-R could not win. A-R drama was too highbrow, A-R popular entertainment was too lowbrow. The chattering classes demanded a constant supply of material that would please all of the people all of the time.

They got it – but never realised until it was gone.

The post Beyond the watershed appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Since 1956 Rediffusion Television has been a not inconsiderable patron of the arts, often doing good by stealth rather than with a fanfare of trumpets. Our schools broadcasting 10th anniversary week from May 8-12 this year offers a chance to mark the substantial investment the company has made in ETV since its first broadcast to schools on May 13, 1957. It has been estimated that the total expenditure on schools broadcasting alone in the last decade – not including adult education – has been more than £2 million by Rediffusion.

At first sight, it must have seemed a quixotic and even endearingly eccentric gesture for a brand new commercial television company, with no direct contractual obligation under the Television Act, 1954, to launch out in those early days into the uncharted seas of schools broadcasting. This was before even the BBC had got majestically under way. From the start, two members of Rediffusion’s top management have been especially active champions of educational television – Paul Adorian and John McMillan, the latter being responsible in February, 1962 for setting up the ITV educational secretariat now located with the I.T.C.A. in Mortimer Street. Mr Adorian has described how the general outlook of his board was mainly responsible for the policy that the programme company should provide a balanced and comprehensive output so that there should be what has been described by Sir John Wolfenden as ‘a total offering’.

The first week of Associated- Rediffusion’s schools broadcasting was recorded in the TV Times of May 10, 1957 as follows:

Monday:

‘Looking and Seeing’ introduced by Redvers Kyle ( I mention only the more familiar names of production staff);

Tuesday:

‘The Ballad Story’ education officer Alan Nicholson (after a tour with CETO he is now deputy head of the new Inner London Education Authority Television Service);

Wednesday:

‘On Leaving School’ script by Martin Worth;

Thursday:

‘A Year of Observation’ scripted and directed by John Frankhau;

Friday:

‘People Among Us’ education officer Fernau Hall.

Fernau Hall records: ‘We had a freedom then which today seems fantastic’ this feeling of freedom, of having the chance to create something really new, was one of the things which attracted me…’

Rosemary Horstman, now deputy director of the University of Leeds Television Service, was appointed assistant head of schools broadcasting at the end of December, 1956, and secretary of the then non-existent Educational Advisory Council. Both staff and council members had to be recruited in double-quick time to get the service on the air by May, 1957. There was strong resistance to the new service in some sectors of the teaching profession. Miss Horstman writes : ‘It was touch and go at first whether the LCC, then the London Education Authority, would allow their schools to view our programmes at all – Dr Briault (still a member of our Educational Advisory Council) and Sir John Wolfenden (our council’s first chairman, as the then vice-chancellor of Reading University) between them managed to tip the balance’.

Rediffusion’s Educational Advisory Council has had two subsequent chairmen ; Sir Sidney Caine, principal of the London School of Economics and now vice-chairman of the Independent Television Authority; and the council’s current chairman, Sir Ifor Evans, until last year provost of University College, London. I asked Sir Ifor to sum up his impression of five years of chairmanship. He writes: ‘What has fascinated me most has been the degree of consultation. The Advisory Council brought together by the company represents every aspect of education, and to preside over it is to realise how seriously they carry out their duties. Further, and this is most impressive, the company has produced precisely the programmes that the council indicated, and tested reaction in the schools. There must be some moral for television as a whole, for in the school area it has led to admirable results’.

There have been four heads of school broadcasting – Boris Ford was the first. My own appointment to the company as assistant controller followed and I made it a priority task to recruit a suitable schools head, which we found in the energetic person of Miss Enid Love.

Within a year of taking up her appointment with Rediffusion Miss Love was invited by Sveriges Radio to go to Stockholm to run an introductory course in educational television for Swedish teachers and producers. So one could claim that Rediffusion had ‘mothered’ the schools television service in Scandinavia. Miss Love returned to full-time teaching in 1963 as headmistress of Sydenham School and her successor, Robert McPherson, rapidly became and still is now, since his return to Scottish Television, a leading figure in European Broadcasting Union educational circles.

His successor, Edwin Whiteley came to Television House in 1965 from the deputy headship of Sandbach School, Cheshire, and has rapidly reinforced the company’s position in the complex world of educational networking and liaison between the providers. He has also been the architect of Rediffusion’s new teaching and television project. This started last November partly to help teachers to use our programmes more effectively and partly as a gesture of encouragement to the new Inner London Education Authority Television Service.

Charles Warren, in addition to being the assistant head of schools to the last two incumbents, has himself produced some of our best schools series – ‘Ways With Words’, ‘Preparing A Play’ and ‘World Around Us’. His single-minded devotion to educational television is illustrated by his regular dedication of leave to visiting ETV stations in the USA and elsewhere abroad.

Rediffusion’s schools section is a lively and idiosyncratic part of the company’s production team. It would be invidious, in a general commemorative article of this type, to single out other prominent members for mention by name. Suffice it to say that they all lead vigorous and rewarding careers and help to bridge in their own persons and ways of life the gap which is sometimes misguidedly alleged to yawn between the worlds of education and T.V. In 10 years of preoccupation with ETV, I have never myself succeeded in locating this gap, or the weak links that would be needed to occasion it, in our truly massive advisory and consultative systems.

Several members of the present section have remained in it from the start until now. Others like Alan Nicholson in Central Africa and more recently Andrew Lieven in Uganda have been able to pass on their knowledge to less advanced countries. Rediffusion can compliment itself both on maintaining through the years an extremely professional team of educationists and also on encouraging the circulation of this talent.

When the history of British ITV comes to be written, Rediffusion’s unremittingly pioneering role in schools broadcasting will seem increasingly admirable, maintained as it was even against the background of the financial losses of the first two years.

Spare a thought then for schools broadcasting on May 13, what it has achieved and which direction it should take for the future. The service it provides now each year for more than 16,000 schools in Britain is liable to be taken so much for granted that perhaps not enough thought is given nationally to the future application of educational television.

It is with this consideration in mind that the company has chosen, as part of our anniversary arrangements, to encourage the production of a background book Teaching and Television – ETV Explained. This is not a piece of propaganda or self-advertisement. It is an attempt by a team of experts to survey the total ETV situation in this country as we find it, after 10 years of work, in a detached and unbiased fashion. No such background book exists as yet in this country. It should save television educationists a great deal of breath and effort, when attempting to describe, as they are constantly called on to do, the complexities of our ETV system to overseas visitors and academics. It is also, we hope, of sufficient general interest to appeal to progressively minded parents, to teachers at every level and even to fellow members of the Rediffusion staff.

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