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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This means war

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

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

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

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

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

The Grenadier Guards depart for Suez

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

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound and Vision

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

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

Television March

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

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

In vision

Leslie Mitchell on British Movietone News

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

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

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

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

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

➔ FROM TRANSDIFFUSION

The post Forward march appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Over the years, Transdiffusion has amassed a great deal of knowledge, reports, facts, deductions and recordings concerning Independent Television daily start-up routines.

Start-up routines were the rituals occurring at least once daily through which the Authority ‘handed over’ control of its television transmitters in different parts of the country to the franchise holders for the region.

In the early days of broadcasting, when television enthusiasts were likely to make up the entire audience rather than just a small minority, the record of these start-ups was in the form of audio recordings, often captured with a microphone held up to the television loudspeaker.

These recordings are backed up by still photographs and, of course, memories. The Transdiffusion Broadcasting System you are now watching is living proof of this, with the largest known private archive of this type of material.

However, if we go back to the very earliest days, predating even the majority of what we would now call television enthusiasts, documentary evidence is even more scarce, and memories less reliable.

A case in point is the way in which Associated-Rediffusion started its daily transmissions.

A recording in the Transdiffusion Archives, taken from a one-off acetate disc labeled “Opening Day”, provides the audio for the start-up sequence that occurred on 22 September 1955. The opening night, shared with the London weekend contractor at the time, “ABC” (which quickly became ATV), began with speeches and stirring music, and continued with a variety gala and some quite highbrow programming.

Of the potential viewers of the time, some, of course, were watching the “other channel”. Others couldn’t watch Band III because they had yet to install the additional aerial and a down-converter or new dual-band TV set. Yet more were listening to the fire that consumed Grace Archer over on BBC radio. In total, less than half of those who could even receive the broadcast watched it.

But those who were watching the earliest moments of Associated-Rediffusion saw and heard an impressive opening. A simple tuning signal was followed by a piece of music: an orchestral arrangement of the traditional tune, The British Grenadiers.

The sprightly three-minute piece progressed through numerous key-changes and passages of light and shade, culminating in a majestic re-statement of the theme and a triumphant close.

This piece of music was used every day for almost a year. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, however, it seems that Grenadiers was thought a little too militaristic and A-R cast around for something else to use as the station’s opening music.

They chose a bright, symphonic march by that master of the light music march, Eric Coates, called Music Everywhere, which had been written in 1948.

Subtitled “Rediffusion March”, Music Everywhere was the perfect choice until something could be written specially to take its place. That happened several months later when the unknown composer “S Bates” – almost certainly incorrectly rumoured to be Associated-Rediffusion’s musical advisor Sir John Barbirolli – completed the piece that came into use in 1957.

Meanwhile, back in September 1955, the “Grenadiers” was followed by a dramatic pause. Then the dulcet tones of former BBC Television and Movietone News announcer Leslie Mitchell announced, “This Is London”, followed by a short fanfare by Charles Williams: Fanfare Number 1 from Five Fanfares. The whole story is told elsewhere, in the History section of this site.

Although evidence for the visuals that accompanied the known audio track is unfortunately scant, we can tell a great deal by running likely images together with the audio and seeing how they fit.

With a compendium of available knowledge on the structure and requirements of start-up sequences that evolved later, we can make some very good educated guesses, helped where available by memories and documentation, as to what the viewers of 1955 would have seen on their screens as the music played.

Although the pieces used in 1955 by A-R were not specially commissioned as was later the case, it would still have been possible to time transitions in the visuals to occur at salient points in the music.

There is no doubt that, with experimentation, some of these juxtapositions fall into place in a most convincing manner, rather like finding two pieces of Neolithic pottery on an archaeological dig and, on cleaning them, finding that they fit together perfectly. Trying such juxtapositions and playing them to people who might have their memories triggered as a result can be a useful technique in reconstructing events like this.

Once it was believed that this start-up was used on opening day only, and on subsequent days omitted the “This Is London”. Apart from anything else, the format, surely, was a little over the top, even for those days. “This Is London”?

Apart from the occasional DX viewer, only people in London could watch the broadcasts from the ITA’s new transmitting tower on Beulah Hill, Norwood, just down the road from the BBC’s Crystal Palace tower in South London. The ITA called it their “Croydon” transmitter (though it was strictly not quite in Croydon) but Associated-Rediffusion, more concerned with the great city in which their audience lived and breathed than technical accuracy, always called it “London”.

My uncovering of a second start-up from the same period, as described in a previous article, prompted a reconsideration of the theory that “This Is London” was used once only.

Along with the complete Grenadiers start-up I located, labelled on my tape “A-RTV Evening Intro”, was another complete start-up sequence, labelled “A-RTV Afternoon Intro”. This featured opening music by Richard Addinsell from the movie Blithe Spirit and a female voiceover – but with the same script and the same content apart from the initial piece.

This suggested that not one but two start-ups had been used in the early days: one for the afternoon programmes starting at 5 pm and the other for the evening, beginning at 7 o’clock. Both included “This Is London”. This also presented a problem.

The General Post Office, the body in those days responsible for licensing of wireless transmissions of all kinds in the UK, and the Independent Television Authority, which had the job of administering Britain’s burgeoning commercial television network, were traditionally thought to have been quite strict with their definition of how the ritual handover of the transmitter from the Authority to the broadcaster was to be carried out.

Opening themes had to be registered with the Authority. A suitable announcement had to be made at the start of the theme. Other requirements also had to be adhered to. By the late 1950s at least, nobody would have been allowed to have two opening pieces, used at different times of day.

In those earliest, heady days of the country’s first commercial television stations, there was a little more leeway. It may be that, as in the days of radio before the BBC, the rules had yet to be written. Or, as the official history of ITV has it, the new contractors forgot, and were quickly reminded of, their status in the broadcasting hierarchy by the ITA.

Whatever happened, if the rules were written in stone on day one, they must have been ignored in the excitement of a dream of broadcasting being finally brought into reality.

You can listen in full to the startups featured in this article in Seen and Heard.

The post Undercover A-R appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

Opening Night, September 22, 1955, included three pieces of startup music:

• Variations on a theme of The British Grenadiers (Trad., probably arr. Adolf Lotter). Lotter was the principal double bass in the Beecham Philharmonic Orchestra. Preceded the announcement (by Leslie Mitchell) “This is London”, which was followed by
• Fanfare No. 1, from Five Fanfares, by Charles Williams. Preceded the main body of the announcement, which was followed by
• Excerpt from Sir Edward Elgar’s overture Cockaigne (In London Town) Op. 40, probably played by the Hallé orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, A-R’s musical director at the time.

This arrangement of startup pieces continued for about a year: Grenadiers was dropped in the summer of 1956, probably as a result of being seen as too ‘militaristic’ in view of the Suez Crisis.

For some initial period, ending no later than 1956, possibly during afternoon and/or morning broadcasts, an alternative startup was also used. This had the same structure as the above, but with a female V/O. It also replaced Grenadiers with an arrangement of Richard Addinsell’s orchestral Prelude from the music for David Lean’s 1945 movie adaptation of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. The fanfare and excerpt from Cockaigne were unchanged.

Idents from this period initially used an eleven-note phrase taken from Cockaigne and arranged for three trumpets and three trombones. This was later replaced by two trombones playing figures representing the Morse Code for the letters ‘A-R’ (“dit-dah, dit-dah-dit”), accompanied by the sound of a Morse key. This ident phrase continued to be used for some time.

From September 1956 to late 1957, the company used Eric Coates’ Music Everywhere. This piece, written in 1948, was adopted by Rediffusion some years before there was any thought of a television company, possibly when the Rediffusion name first began to be used by Broadcast Relay Services Ltd. The piece was renamed (with Coates’ permission), the Rediffusion March. It seems likely that when Grenadiers was dropped, Coates’ piece was brought into play for startup purposes temporarily until a specially-commissioned theme could be written and recorded.

Virtually nothing is known about ‘S. Bates’, who composed the resulting Associated-Rediffusion March, used by the station from early 1958 until it became Rediffusion, London in 1964. He is thought to be a member of the A-R studio orchestra.

The change of name to Rediffusion, London was accompanied by a dramatic change in on-screen style, and with it came a new musical identity, this time the famous Widespread World of Rediffusion, written by noted composer John Dankworth. (See Gavin Sutherland’s analysis of this piece on Transdiffusion. – he also notated the score shown above) There was also an accompanying ident.

Thanks to Gavin Sutherland for his assistance in preparing this article

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