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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editor

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

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

‘as sparks among stubble…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He ‘retired’ again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A third man’s view

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

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

‘What are these cats doing in the building?’

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

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

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

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

‘That’s XY, sir. He’s had pneumonia.’

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

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

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

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

There was a fearful row. The subject hardly matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His guest said nothing: he was Sir Francis Drake.

Peter Hunt

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

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

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

His farewell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THAT was a decade that was. That was a decade that was…

Oh, put the emphasis where you like. The fact remains that all of us who were there on the night when Rediffusion and ITV first flickered on to the screen are now 10 – no, 11 – years older.

I’ve changed. How about you?

Rediffusion has certainly altered. For a start it is no longer ‘Associated’.

Incidentally, dear editor, it would be interesting to find out just how many people at present on the pay-roll were with the company on Night One (still known to some as the night they invented champagne).

The answer is 252 – Editor.

From my own memory book I recall Sally Sutherland, Red Lyle, Dennis Atherton, Richard Hawkins, and the late Hugh Finlay – all part of the Press Office over the years.

Where the nostalgia really hit me was at the ITA’s white-tie Guildhall banquet when 10 glorious years and all that were celebrated.

It might have been the wine and brandy but sitting there under the stony stare of Gog and Magog I suddenly realised that 10 years (and part of a hair line) had vanished since I was in almost the same seat for ITV’s curtain-up.

The instant reaction was to check for ‘old familiar faces’ along the tables around me. Of 40 or so TV ‘professionals’ within range only four, perhaps five, had been there back in ’55.

Now I know how Greybeard felt. If my memory is right was Lord Hill, now ITA chairman, at that September 22, 1955, dinner as Postmaster-General?

And at that time didn’t ABC TV consist of just Howard Thomas and a secretary?

Before quitting that particular celebration I wonder if the champagne would have flowed so freely had it been known that within one year Rediffusion would be over £3 million down?

By the way, hasn’t that been perhaps the most important change of all – turning those colossal losses of the early years into a profit?

As a privileged spectator seeing much of the game from close quarters it seems to me that Rediffusion’s development has been in three stages.

The first, naturally, was that somewhat daffy unreal period when the newly recruited army worked excitedly to get the company on the air and keep it there.

Forgive me if there is an overlap for so many shows have been crammed into the decade, but those were the days of Gordon Harker and ‘Sixpenny Corner’. Of Ralph Reader’s ‘Chance Of A Lifetime’.

The weekly sports magazine. The Granville Melodramas. And of Sgt ‘I Only Want The Facts, Mam’ Webb and ‘Dragnet’.

Wasn’t there a freakish series called ‘You’ve Never Seen This’? Book reviews in the morning. Sheila Matthews as Friday’s Girl. Wasn’t this, too, the Jack Hylton variety era… the names which occur being Arthur Askey, Tony Hancock (he once did a one-man show in an emergency), Rosalina Neri, Bryan Michie, Ivor Emmanuel, the Crazy Gang and the Water Rats?

Roland Gillett was the programme controller, Lloyd Williams was on the production staff, and the whole period was like the froth on top of a pint.

The second stage was marked by the appointment of Paul Adorian as managing director and John McMillan as programme controller.

Now the workaday face and output of the company was being established. On went the old originals in ‘Take Your Pick’ and ‘Double Your Money’.

But morning TV disappeared. Much of the early pioneering excitement went with it. And the staff settled down to a more orderly existence.

Schools programmes started – remember Enid Love? Was it in this spell or even earlier that we had those Michael Ingrams’ series? How about those Goonish shows like ‘A Show Called Fred’, ‘Son of Fred’, and ‘Idiots’ Weekly’? Not only Sellers, but Milligan, too.

The work of putting in the foundations went on continuously.

‘Cool For Cats’ caught popular fancy and brought Joan Kemp-Welch’s name to the forefront. ‘This Week’ was going strong. Somewhere around this point Cyril Bennett and Elkan Allan began contributing to the company’s fortunes.

Peter Cotes is one more name I associate with this sector of Rediffusion’s fortune. And was I alone in liking America’s ‘Johnny Staccato’ jazz-thriller series?

I went down the Thames on one Rediffusion birthday party – and across to Paris for another. That was the day that George Sanders, then working on a special programme called ‘Women In Love’, helped to play host. Although only a voyage down the Seine, Captain Tom Brownrigg was also on hand.

So we had ‘No Hiding Place’ and ‘Intertel’, ‘Wagon Train’ and ‘Rawhide’. But where was Tig Roe? Whither Alan Morris? Goodbye Kingsway Corner.

Out went advertising magazines. Out went ‘Jim’s Inn’ – after setting the standard for all shows of this type. But in came the many successful Pinter plays.

The most successful, of course, being ‘The Lover’, with Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant. It must have won almost every award possible… actor, actress, author and director. Surely Rediffusion’s most successful production in all those 11 years?

Just as the TV scene was growing contentedly sedate on came ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ to give half the nation convulsions and the other half blood pressure.

Visiting the ‘RSG’ studio at TV House brought back all the din of 1955 and that drilling year when Adastral House was being converted.

By now Rediffusion was part of life. Dan Farson, always prominent in company affairs on the screen (his ‘Time Gentlemen, Please’ show was not only entered at Montreux but must have been responsible for the introduction of ‘Stars and Garters’), was a notable departure.

But phase two was drawing to a close too. On went John McMillan to general manager and in came Cyril Bennett as the new programme controller.

This is now part of the latest story… come in David Frost, Stella Richman, Benny Green, ‘Three After Six’, ‘The Rat Catchers’, and David Jacobs.

Pausing only to nod a farewell to Buddy Bregman and a friendly greeting to Europe’s favourite TV ‘uncle’ Eric Maschwitz, it scarcely seems credible that Monica Rose was hardly walking when ‘Double Your Money’ was first televised.

Yes, you’ve changed all right. Some more memory jogs… Stuart Hood, that ‘Arabian Nights’ opening for Wembley Studios, ‘Hippodrome’ in colour, the American deal with David Susskind, ‘Dial M For Music’, ‘Alfred Marks Time’, Keith Fordyce, Groucho Marx, Dickie Henderson, and on, and on.

It’s been a long time. Perhaps after all it should be that was a decade that was? What’s more Gog and Magog are still waiting.

The post That was the decade that was appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Captain Thomas Marcus Brownrigg CBE OBE DSO RN (Retired) was born on 8 July 1902 and died 9 October 1967. In between those two dates, he experienced one terrible war from a distance and one very close up, rose through the ranks of the Navy and was unceremoniously dumped, married Joyce Chiesman and had a son and a daughter, managed the creation of a town and then of commercial television – before being unceremoniously dumped again.

In the navy

Brownrigg began his naval career as a Midshipman in 1919. He progressed through the ranks in a classic manner, neither a fast riser nor condemned to remain below decks. By 1923 he was a Lieutenant; by 1942 a Captain and one of the architects of the Allied invasion of occupied Europe. He saw service on numerous ships, including pre-war stints on the flotilla leader HMS Montrose, the aircraft carrier HMS Furious, and the light cruiser HMS Cairo.

When the Second World War broke out, Brownrigg served on the battleship HMS Warspite as Navigating Officer before taking a staff position under Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham in the planning department of the Naval Expeditionary Force, preparing for D-Day. He then became commanding officer of HMS Scylla for D-Day itself, whilst also serving as Flag Captain for the Eastern Task Force during the landings, putting himself in the position of being in charge of a whole section of the naval front and also in the direct line of fire – a lesson that military leaders of the past and the future should perhaps take to heart. He finished the war in command of the Royal Navy Air Station at Rattray in Scotland, monitoring communications for the former war zone and pioneering the expansion of the navy back into the RAF’s territory.

After the war, Brownrigg served briefly on HMS Theseus before taking a series of land-based naval positions. He served as Director of Plans for the Admiralty, Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief for the Mediterranean and finally, in 1952, being briefly Naval Aide de Camp to Queen Elizabeth II, the very top of the tree for someone with the rank of Captain. He had made enemies within the Admiralty due to his idiosyncratic nature, if nothing else, and failed to progress beyond that rank. Despite his experience and thoroughly naval demeanour, he was placed on the retired list in July 1952 and shown the door.

Community relations

The government was well aware of Brownrigg’s talents, as well as his idiosyncrasies. As a correspondent of Churchill, now returned to Number 10 following the dizzying and productive rapid switch to socialism following the war, he had friends in enough high places to ensure he would not be unemployed. Thus it was that Brownrigg became General Manager of the Bracknell New Town Development Corporation.

With his experience in planning for Operation Overlord, he was considered the ideal choice for implementing the development of a New Town as envisaged by Patrick Abercrombie and Lord Reith in their eponymous reports that created the ring of often soulless and concrete-bound perpetual building sites surrounding London. By all accounts he was a successful general manager, certainly avoiding the public showdowns Beveridge had to cope with in Stevenage. But his tenure at Bracknell was limited – in less than two years, commerce came calling.

Never baffled

The experience of managing Bracknell was put to use in Brownrigg’s next post, the one where he would, war service notwithstanding, gain the most fame. The Television Act of 1954 had created the framework for commercial broadcasting in the United Kingdom. British Electric Traction’s Broadcast Relay Services subsidiary, trading as Rediffusion, and Associated Newspapers formed a joint company, Associated-Rediffusion (A-R), to bid for a commercial television contract.

Because of the extensive planning and construction involved, they approached Brownrigg to become their General Manager. He accepted and put his imprint across the entire structure and output of the company – Associated-Rediffusion was Captain Brownrigg, in the same way that ATV was Lew Grade. Yet whilst Grade came to the industry with a cap full of knowledge, Brownrigg came to the very idea of capitalism with no experience whatsoever. Contemporaries reported that he commanded A-R as though it were a battleship. His “Official Office Memoranda”, giving instructions and setting rules for everything down to the frequency of filing and the decoration on the walls, became a legend throughout ITV.

Under his leadership, the company went from having one employee (himself) to becoming Europe’s first and largest commercial television broadcaster in under a year. In that time, he supervised the conversion of the former headquarters of the Air Ministry, Adastral House, into Television House, A-R’s studios and administration headquarters, which also served as the headquarters for ITN, the TV Times and, at first, Associated TeleVision, A-R’s main rival.

At the same time, he was also actively involved in defining the station’s identity, formulating the programme plans, creating an advertising market for television, chairing ITN and negotiating industrial relations with the film and broadcasting unions. Many stories are told by old ITV hands about Brownrigg’s idiosyncrasies, especially his dominant – or domineering – manner, his name-dropping, his willingness to outrageously generalise on any subject and his requirement for very junior staff to salute him and his fellow directors. However, personal friends also point out that he had a great sense of humour and an ability to laugh at himself – many of the anecdotes about him may therefore have derived from him in the first place.

Certainly, in contemporary photographs he always has a smile playing at his lips as if half suppressed, and generally a large cigar or a glass of something strong in one hand. If a man can be judged by his photographs, then the man in those photographs is not the man that secretaries hid from in the corridors and from whom producers dreaded getting phone calls. Brownrigg’s A-R pitched itself as a formal, rigid broadcaster. In order to avoid comparison between A-R and the American networks, especially following the J Fred Muggs chimpanzee-and-Coronation footage debacle that had put the fear of vulgarity into even the most hard-hearted Tory capitalist before the Television Act was passed, Brownrigg ensured that A-R was more “British” and “Empire” in its attitudes and identity than even the BBC.

This had the desired effect; removing the accusation the commercial television would be “vulgar” or too light by being pompously and directly, even militaristically, British. Whilst the station was less so when speaking to “the housewives”, and backed away noticeably in the aftermath of the Suez disaster, it remained a company that put stuffy formality before anything else. Continuity announcers didn’t refrain from barking orders at the viewers (“At 8pm tonight, you will be watching…”) whilst other stations were being cosmopolitan or creepily friendly.

Now baffled

However, by the 1960s increased competition and a change in spending-power demographics were evident in the United Kingdom. With the planned launch of BBC-2, aimed at the young and the upper middle-class, the new pirate offshore radio stations and a rejuvenated Radio Luxembourg, the senior management of the company felt that the future lay in younger viewers. To counter the competition, they decided to relaunch the station as ‘Rediffusion, London’ and introduce new programming aimed at younger people, with a new identity designed to be less “stuffy” and more able to compete with BBC-2.

The process began with Ready Steady Go in 1963. In this new environment there was no place for Brownrigg, and he retired to Finchampstead in Berkshire at the end of 1963, although he took on a directorship of the TV Times, from which position he surveyed – and disliked – ITV’s subsequent progress. One of his last acts before his death was to condemn the Independent Television Authority for forcing Rediffusion into a (minority) partnership with ABC Weekend TV to create the new Thames Television. His letter to The Times complaining indignantly about the changes doesn’t mention Rediffusion London once – he stuck to calling the company he created ‘Associated-Rediffusion’ until the end. He didn’t live to see the birth of Thames Television.

This article is based on material from the English-language Wikipedia entry on Thomas Brownrigg and is therefore licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence. Copyright ©2006 David L Wilde. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the licence is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation Licence”.

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The Captain chose as the location the Guildhall, recently rebuilt and refurbished after having been gutted by the Luftwaffe over a decade before, and even helped choose, with connoisseur Sir Kenneth Clark, what would be offered on the menu for the accompanying banquet.

Invited guests included the Postmaster-General, Dr Charles Hill, as responsible minister, plus many in his department; other ministers in the Conservative government; the local mayors from the London boroughs; and important agents, advertisers and stars; as well as journalists and potential investors. Brownrigg also invited – in the name of the ITA – the board of governors, management and senior staff of the BBC who, to their shame declined to attend.

The BBC’s chairman, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was pressed in writing by his friend Sir Kenneth to attend, but apparently never replied. Nevertheless, Cadogan and his Director-General both attended on the night after all – Sir K’s legendary powers of persuasion having worked again. They worked so well, in fact, that the BBC almost joined the Television Contractors Association, chairing its meeting of 30 September.

At 7pm on 22 September, as the guests enjoyed pre-dinner drinks and ambled to their seats, the final countdown was underway. The transmitter, broadcasting a test card for most of the day, gave way to a tuning signal and then, at 7.14, faded to black.

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