SIR PHILIP WARTER, chairman of ABPC [Associated British Picture Corporation], announced last week plans and policy for the corporation’s commercial television subsidiary company which will operate as programme contractors for week-end programmes from the Midlands and North.

The capital is increased to £500,000 [£10.5m today, allowing for inflation – Ed] and the ITA has been told that ABPC is prepared to put in further loan capital of the same amount from its own resources. Allowance has been made for up to 10 per cent. of the first half-million to be put up by leading provincial newspapers.

“We do not believe that TV is in any way going to replace the kinema,” said Sir Philip. “We are entering the television field because we believe that 28 years of catering for the public fit us for fulfilling the function of programme contractors in the new medium.”

He added that the corporation regarded the television venture as a regional and not a London operation. It was not concerned, he said, with making a profit in the first year, but was concerned that the prestige won as the result of 28 years of presenting entertainment to the public should be continued in its television programmes.

“The whole of our kinema operation is based on family business, and TV is essentially a form of family entertainment,” he said.

‘No Feature Film’

Sir Philip said he would encourage programmes of the “Current Release” type run by the BBC. There was not, however, any thought of televising feature pictures. The arrangements would not affect those the corporation has with CEA [Cinema Exhibitors’ Association].

When dealing with films programmes as contractors, said Sir Philip, ABPC films would not be favoured. Playing time would be open to all the film industry.

As reported in Kine, last week, Mr. Howard Thomas was named as managing director of the new television company. His colleagues on the board are the same directors as those of ABPC.

Mr. Thomas said operations would begin from Pathé House, and the London Pathé studios would be used for programmes which would have to originate in London.

Although no staff had yet been signed up, the plan would be to draw the best available men from journalism, advertising and other professions – but there would be no poaching from the BBC.

The company’s first programmes will be early next year from the Lichfield transmitter. The Manchester station is expected to open in summer, and Yorkshire at the end of the year.

The post Sir Philip Gives ABPC’s TV Plans and Policy appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

We know, though, that we have to avoid slumping into a rut by merely continuing our existing programmes. The challenge is to find new ideas and programmes that will eventually replace even the most successful of our current productions. As you will know well enough from your own experience, a successful programme is rarely a flash in the pan, but generally the result of painful and painstaking work over months and sometimes years. So the task is to maintain and improve our present productions and yet simultaneously create new programmes.

The new Network Programming plan continues the situation whereby the four major companies provide the bulk of the national programmes. The change is that ABC will contribute a higher percentage of the weekend programmes and will strengthen its position on the network.

First of all we shall make more ARMCHAIR THEATRES. Instead of alternating the Sunday plays fortnightly with ATV we shall produce two out of three.

THE AVENGERS will be “rested” until the end of the year: (It is physically impossible to produce a first-class programme every week and many preparatory months have to be spent on scripts and putting a good number of shows “in the bag”). Yet we have THE AVENGERS slot to fill on the network and that means one or perhaps two new one-hour programme series to get into shape. We piloted SCANDAL, then decided not to proceed with it. Now we are launching a new series called THE PROTECTORS. Intensive work is taking place on other subjects and probably we shall be making pilots of new series ideas at Didsbury.

ABC was already well established as a force in Drama, as we were in Religion. Our latest breakthrough has been on Light Entertainment, and it is heartening to see BRIAN TESLER’s work reaping its rewards. THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS has climbed over JUKE BOX JURY to the very top and everyone will have been pleased to see this show chosen as Britain’s ITV entry for the Montreux Festival.

Then BIG NIGHT OUT has continued to improve and it was a proud night for PHILIP JONES when “B.N.O.” swarmed over the weekend barriers and became a London weekday Top Ten show. Then this summer we shall have another ABC variety show on the network, replacing the Palladium show on Sunday nights. This will be BLACKPOOL NIGHT OUT, our biggest effort yet in Light Entertainment.

TEMPO has also come up well and on page 43 of its official handbook “ITV 1964” the Authority describes this as “the major constant feature dealing specifically with the Arts.”

Our Religious programmes have brought us high prestige and we have made a good start in Adult Education.

In colour, too, ABC has pioneered the French SECAM system, and throughout Europe ABC is regarded as the leader of colour television in ITV.

This sounds a complacent piece but it is not intended to be written in such a vein. This is an assessment of where we have reached, and a reminder of how hard we shall have to work to continue the progress of the past year, our biggest year ever.

At ABC, we have the resources, the people, the ideas, the experience, the initiative — on to the 7-day week!

The post Three year diary appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

‘Undeniably the Pilkington Committee has been brutal in its criticisms, so brutal in fact that the Government, sensing that the BBC could not be so white nor ITV so black as Pilkington asserted, had rejected its main recommendations.’

Only a few weeks before Lord Hill took up office the Postmaster-General had declared his intention of opening a second Independent Television service:

‘If all goes well and there are suitable companies willing to offer their services to the ITA, the Government would certainly hope during the autumn of 1965 to authorise the physical build-up of the second programme, starting in the areas of big population.’

On this premise, the Authority extended its programme contracts by another three years, until 1967. Beyond that, said Lord Hill significantly, ‘Present companies and new companies are to apply for any area they choose. All bets are off and there will be a fair field for all.’

On their tenth birthday the ITV contractors were given a package which was unwelcome but not unexpected; the imposition of a Government levy on advertisement revenue, to curb the excessively high profits the companies had been enjoying. But there was also a consolation prize from the Prime Minister; at the celebration dinner in the Guildhall, when he recalled the controversy which had surrounded the inauguration of Independent Television, Mr Wilson paid this tribute:

‘Today, ten years later, on one thing all of us here tonight can agree. Independent Television has become part of our national anatomy. More than that, it has become part of our social system and part of our national way of life.’

By this time ITV was indeed a fixture, with an audience of fifteen million homes, reaching eighty-one per cent of the population.

The companies were paying the Authority £8,000,000 annually in rentals and £22,000,000 in levy out of a net income of £75,000,000. Within ABPC, ABC Television had grown taller in stature than its parent.

In spite of forebodings in the boardroom, ABC Television in its first full financial year had made a small profit for its owners. Thereafter it had contributed increasingly to the total profits, rapidly overtaking then passing the combined earnings of the cinemas, studios, productions, catering, and bowling centres. The trading profits of the group in 1963 totalled £4,035,987, of which ABC Television contributed £2,622,562. A year later ABC Television’s profits had grown to £3,337,185 and the Corporation’s profit had swollen to £5,246,439, while profits from the cinema side had shrunk to £1,982,256. Rewards came to us all in time and at the end of 1964 I was at last elected to the parent board of ABPC. The only financial effect of this was that I was invited to buy 730 shares in the company, at the market price.

The overall scene was changing. Val Parnell, in his seventies, had retired to the South of France. Lew Grade was the undisputed king in full control of the ATV empire. Lance-Bombardier Louis Grade, Royal Signal Corps, as the identity bracelet on his wrist proclaimed; dancer and Charleston champion; theatrical agent and Deputy Managing Director of ATV, had reached the summit and was now at his tycoon peak. ATV had become a one-man concern, even with its 1,700 staff and electronic studio in Elstree and skyscraper in Birmingham. Though there was a succession of personal assistants, assistant managing directors and deputy managing directors, the job of number two at ATV never seemed to be a permanent one.

As Lew expanded his activities, with tremendous energy and courage, developing his other business of providing popular filmed series for the American market, taking over Pye records and assuming control of the theatre side of the business, he took on the tasks of three men. Now he had the big office high in Cumberland House to himself, sitting in the corner where Val Parnell used to be, backed by the handsome bookcase with the English classics in beautiful bindings (though the ones I occasionally took out contained no pages). Lew installed his own king-size desk, full of locked drawers crammed with costing sheets and contracts. In one drawer he kept a wad of unpaid invoices with which he would confront me and I would claim we were being overcharged. In the middle of the desk between us would be a large old-fashioned hand telephone; my occasional assertion that this was bugged was a guaranteed way of making Lew lose his temper. There were times when I thought he was going to explode with anger or excitement, but I learned how to calm him down. His method of pacifying me was to offer me one of those titan cigars, which I never accepted, although if I had kept them all I could have opened a cigar kiosk at the Hilton. Usually we met at the beginning of the day and Lew’s secretary would produce a steaming bowl of coffee with sweet biscuits, which was the boss’s breakfast. A light eater and a teetotaller Lew still had trouble with his chubby waistline and when he did lose some weight he liked to demonstrate that his trousers were getting too slack for him. Tea was another of his social occasions and once he said to me on the telephone with delight: ‘Who do you think is coming to tea with me? Bette Davis!’ The eternal theatrical agent, he was still bedazzled by star names, glittering or otherwise. Our conversations were mostly arguments about money and the buying or selling of programmes. His repertoire was as varied as a cinema organist’s, and he could pull out all the stops – sentimental, threatening, pleading, admiring. His best act was when he would go down on his knees and fling out his arms, one hand still gripping the cigar.

Lew’s birthday was on Christmas Day, and in fact most of the family had their birthdays on noteworthy days of the calendar. Lew’s brother, Bernard Delfont (now Lord Delfont), once explained to me the reason for this. When the family emigrated from Russia and came to East London there was some confusion about their birth certificates. Their mother, Mrs Isaac Winogradsky, could remember only the years when her boys were borm but not the actual dates, because of the Gregorian calendar, and this left them scope to select their own birthday. As the firstborn. Lew exercised his option to choose December 25.

In the agency business Lew and Leslie Grade were in direct competition with Bernard but any real rivalries must have dissolved when they all met at week-ends in the matriarchal home in Wimbledon. Illness reduced Leslie’s activities but there were many healthy differences of opinion between Lew and Bernard. Lew became essentially a television man and Bernard a man of the theatre, but they both had burning ambitions to get into the film business. When EMI finally absorbed the Grade and Delfont agencies Bernard became Chairman of the group’s film production and theatre interests and therefore got in first. Some years later, when Lew became disenchanted with the declining profits of Independent Television he, too, went into feature films, with a blast of trumpets and lavish press receptions. Lew, to me, had always been ITV’s Sam Goldwyn and now he was following exactly in the steps of the film mogul. I used to say that at his television press conferences Lew usually doubled the figure he first thought of; but when he went into films his multiples grew more expansive and we began to read about budgets of fifty million dollars.

In some ways, too, Lord Grade probably was missing the early triumphs and setbacks of ITV, which never ceased to be a stimulant. We still worked in close collaboration on industrial affairs, and always sat together at the monthly meetings with the other companies and with the Authority. As we both gradually hannded over the direct control of programmes to our own able executives and as we yielded our seats of power at the Independent Television Companies’ Association Council meetings and the Standing Consultative Committee gatherings at Brompton Road, some of the zest for television probably faded in both of us.

Even while he had still been concentrating on television, Lew as a one-man operator diversified his activities with his regular trips to the United States to sell programmes, as well as controlling the other ATV activities. This lessening of attention to the ATV franchise in Birmingham and London gave us our chance to move in and ABC Television was able to concentrate on its single objective of improving our strength within the network.

As we analysed our strengths and weaknesses we tried to see ourselves as the Authority saw us. We wanted to prove that we had the potential for a bigger contract and for weekday television. We had the staff, the executives and the programmes, as well as the studios, notably Teddington, which had become the most advanced television engineering centre in Britain outside the BBC. The experiments with colour in the studio had given the staff exceptional experience, well in advance of the Government giving the signal for ITV and BBC to transmit colour.

The era of black and white television was coming to an end. So was the original pattern of ITV. Changes were on the way and new pieces had to be fitted in to the jigsaw.

Lord Hill was now put in command of the Authority. No longer was the Director-General totally in control, gently guiding his Chairman. Those of us who had worked at the BBC knew well how the course of the Corporation had fluctuated over the years as the controls changed hands between Directors-General and Chairmen. Now, after more than a decade of subtle steersmanship there was a new and powerful hand at the ITV wheel: by joining all the committees (although not always in the capacity of Chairman) and spending four mornings of every week with the Authority at Brompton Road, Lord Hill became as fully informed as his Director-General.

The companies all realised that changes were in progress and we speculated as to where the axe might fall. It was obvious that the deadline for announcing any changes in contractors would have to be decided before the Authority’s year ended in July, 1967. Therefore no-one was surprised when Lord Hill chose the end of February to reveal his hand. He explained that a fifth major networking company would be introduced, in Yorkshire, and would be allocated a seven-day week as well as the existing Lancashire and Midlands stations. London could continue to be split, but on a slightly different basis, with the lucrative Friday evening added to the Saturday-Sunday contract. The London weekday contract would thus be reduced by its most remunerative evening of the week. This new arrangement, a genuine attempt to divide the three central areas fairly and evenly between five companies would eliminate the North and Midlands weekend contract.

Applications were invited for all the fifteen contracts and we were reminded of Lord Hill’s statement in 1963 – ‘a fair field for all’. Now, in 1967, the Authority intended ‘to select companies for the award of new contracts, and not merely to consider the renewal of contracts’. This, I knew, was ABC Television’s opportunity to become a London programme contractor. We would apply for the London Weekend contract, bringing with it the additional Friday evening revenue which would help to subsidise our expansion into weekday programming. We had the least to lose, perhaps the most to gain.

The post Contracts and criticism appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Ten years ago [1967], the economics of one-hour drama series was that the production cost per episode of a series on videotape like The Avengers or Callan, with two weeks in rehearsal followed by two days in the television studios, was £10,000 ‘above the line’ plus another £10,000 for studio costs and overheads. ‘Above-the-line’ means the actual cash expenditure on actors, writers, sets and costumes. In television, artists’ and writers’ fees are based on a single performance in the United Kingdom, with additional payments for repeats and for overseas sales.

A similar script, produced in a film studio at the normal average series rate of five minutes a day, would take two weeks of full studio usage, plus the consequent cost of editing and dubbing music and sound effects. Such film costs averaged £40,000 for a one-hour episode, but this included world rights on actors’ performances and writers’ scripts. The ITV network would pay £20,000 for two transmissions of these films, so the producer would still need to collect another £20,000 from world sales to recover his costs. Earnings on this scale were almost impossible to achieve unless the series was sold to America, either through a network or syndicated to a few hundred individual stations. Only ATV and ABC ever succeeded in breaking into the American networks, although years later the BBC managed to get one or two of its costume play series and documentaries transmitted. Partly because of my contention that a filmed series of The Avengers would bring a year’s work to Elstree studio stages the Board of ABPC finally agreed to let me spend the million pounds on twenty-six one-hour programmes in black-and-white film.

Julian Wintle was a feature film producer with a reputation for producing consistent films of quality on a commercial basis, and we had already gone through a trial run in making The Human Jungle, a series he brought to ABC. Wintle’s particular skill was in the editing of film and his post-production touches could provide the gloss and glamour The Avengers demanded. I put all the elements of a successful television series at his disposal; producers, directors, script editors, writers, designers, and cast, and to all this he added his own skills, aided by his production supervisor Albert Fennell.

Honor Blackman seemed almost irreplaceable until we came across another actress who was both beautiful and accomplished. Having lost our Cathy Gale to James Bond the script editors invented a new character, Emma Peel. The name was coined by a press officer on the ABC series, Marie Donaldson, based on: ‘Man appeal – m. appeal – Emma Peel! See?’

Wintle and I scrutinised all the rushes and the rough cuts of the first three episodes. They were depressing. The actress was not right for the part. The three episodes were not good enough. I had to make a bitter decision. At a cost of the £120,000 already spent, I had to halt production and find a replacement.

Everyone connected with The Avengers and Drama Department came up with suggestions for a new ‘Emma Peel’ and we made screen tests of a dozen young actresses. Many were promising, yet not sufficiently outstanding. Then Dodo Watts, our casting director, asked me to look at an actress she had cast for an Armchair Theatre comedy. The play had just been recorded but not transmitted, and we played it back on closed circuit. The actress was a member of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company and she was attractive, intelligent, combative and had a fine sense of comedy. She came to Elstree studios for a film test and (for this was vital) to play a scene opposite Pat Macnee. The chemistry worked – they were perfectly partnered. Diana Rigg was signed up on a long-term contract to play the part.

Our overseas sales were then being handled by Bob Norris, a Californian who, as a consequence of marrying an English girl, settled in Britain. Although interest had been aroused in the States, in spite of the rather fuzzy telerecordings of earlier videotaped episodes, there was no sign of a sale to any of the three major US networks. With half the filmed series completed, and half a million pounds spent, the situation began to look desperate. Norris and I flew to New York to tackle the network bosses.

It was the worst week of my television life. Every day we would set forth from the Gotham Hotel with our cans of film, our charts and statistics, and plod around Manhattan, talking to executives and screening episodes to potential buyers. Every evening we would slump back into our chairs in the hotel and hope for the telephone to ring.

Both NBC and CBS continued to show interest but we encountered the inbuilt antipathy to British accents and lack of pace which the British film industry has rarely been able to overcome. Again, we discovered, the programme buyers in top jobs at the network were cautious and unadventurous, because their livelihood depends upon successful decisions and they were judged by results at the end of every season. The “mortality-rate’ of such American network executives has always been alarming.

Then I had a stroke of good fortune. I had known for many years the president of the ABC network, Leonard Goldenson, who had come into television from the film world of Paramount and on several occasions he had visited our company, ABPC, in London. An anglophile, he appreciated the quality of British production in films, theatre and television, and he was most helpful and encouraging. However, sometimes nothing can be more fatal than a boost from the boss, and a recommendation or even an instruction from the front office can be the kiss of death to a hopeful performer or producer. Luckily, Tom Moore, the ABC programme executive, had screened several episodes of The Avengers with increasing interest, and this confirmation of his own judgment proved to be timely.

By Friday morning, our last day in New York, Norris and I found ourselves with two final hurdles to overcome. The films were in black-and-white and the networks were insisting that all series should now be filmed in colour. We talked our way out of this on the thin excuse that The Avengers would have the distinction of being the last TV series sold to America in monochrome. One remaining hope had been to get the series into the network schedule during the summer months, when the regular programme series were off the air. Otherwise the only chance was that our series could be a replacement for one of the other new series which collapsed in the early months of a new season.
ABC said they might be willing to take the first thirteen programmes on this basis in black-and-white. If by some miracle the series succeeded and they wanted more, then we would have to go into colour for the second thirteen. The other difficulty was the ‘unknown’ girl who was starring in the series. Now that a sale was within sight flocks of ABC executives came to screenings of the episodes to inspect the product they might be handling in their respective departments. They all thought her very good, but she was completely unknown. They had never heard of her. She was not even a British star! What the series needed, they were certain, was a bright young American starlet in the part of Emma Peel.

I refused. The essence of The Avengers was its Englishness. That was the quality which basically appealed to them and I insisted it would also be a reason for winning a new audience; something totally unlike any American series. We held on, and Diana Rigg stayed in, to become a television star in the United States as well as throughout the world. Long after, Diana was besieged by all three American networks to appear in a series of her own, built around her, at her own price. Ultimately the vehicle designed for her followed a typical American pattern and could indeed have been played by an American actress, but it failed to be a series of which Diana Rigg could be proud.

Back we came to London, with thirteen episodes sold, to try to convert the remaining episodes to colour, even though we would have to go above budget. Weeks of waiting went by, until the first Nielsen Research audience ratings were telephoned to us. Then came the cable when ABC took up the options for the second thirteen and, with the series already leaping into popularity, an option for another twenty-six in colour. The Avengers developed into a cult in the United States and even today when I go to New York repeats are still running in the small hours.

A happy moment was when the contracts were signed and we announced the sale to the United States, forecasting how many millions of dollars the series was going to bring to Britain. The Evening Standard headlined this as the biggest television deal ever made with the United States. Within an hour of publication a furious Lew Grade was on the telephone to me yelling that it wasn’t the biggest deal. His were always the biggest deals! In fact The Avengers ultimately earned ten million dollars overseas and revenue is still coming in.

The most pleasing aspect to me was that we had produced the series to British standards and not to American requirements. This has always been the difference in attitudes towards overseas sales between Lew Grade and myself. He has always preferred to run two business operations: his ATV franchise in the Midlands, and then his other output of programmes designed specifically for the American market. Sometimes I have jokingly reminded him that he should be concentrating on Birmingham, England, rather than Birmingham, Alabama. My policy for the two companies I started was, first, to satisfy the British audience. If in accomplishing that we could achieve international standards of quality we should be able to sell such programmes overseas. This seems to be the BBC policy, as well, and I think that our moderate success in the United States with programmes of quality has done much to maintain the high reputation of British drama and documentaries in America. Our policy has certainly been justified in the important market of Australia where British television programmes, primarily BBC and our own, have overtaken American products.

The American networks remain a difficult target and at the time of writing Sir Lew appears to have given them up, too, and instead has turned to producing feature films for the cinemas. The gamble of making television film series for the American market has become enormous. The production cost of The Avengers (and I presume The Saint too) rose from £40,000 to £60,000 per episode. Today [1977] it would cost more than £80,000 to produce an Avengers of comparative quality. To make the required minimum series of twenty-six would cost two million pounds, a venture few would contemplate with optimism. Series like The World at War were not accepted by the American networks, mainly because there is no room in their schedules for series of twenty-six one-hour documentaries; but by slogging away around the United States, city by city, our distributors sold this series to 64 individual stations in the principal cities and earned $1,500,000. The remaining outlet is the Public Broadcasting System, to which sponsors donate programmes. Payments are low but prestige is high, and it is here that American viewers have seen and acclaimed British drama series like Upstairs, Downstairs, and Thames’ Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill.

The post ‘M’ appeal appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Brian Tesler was appointed Programme Controller of ABC in October, 1962. Before the year was out Sydney Newman had resigned and joined the BBC as their head of Drama, the first ITV executive to be given such a key job in the Corporation. I was satisfied that Brian Tesler possessed executive qualities beyond his existing job, and his skilful interpretation of programme research had qualified him thoroughly for the arguments ahead with the other programme controllers in ITV’s battle against the BBC. Hugh Carleton Greene, as Director-General of the BBC, was now fighting back, determined to regain a half-share of the viewing audience. Greene’s emissary to make the approach to Newman was Kenneth Adam, who had returned to the BBC from Picture Post to succeed Cecil McGivern as Controller of Programmes. Sydney Newman told the press that the Director-General’s brief was to bring the Armchair Theatre playwrights like Alun Owen, Bill Naughton, Clive Exton and Harold Pinter into the BBC fold. Blunt as ever, Newman told the newspapermen that the BBC Drama Department was too big: ‘I want to see how we can bring it down into much tighter groups.’ With him he took some of our staff, including his script editors; others who joined him included Verity Lambert. Her first BBC assignment for Newman was to produce Dr Who; but such is the small world of television that the day came when she returned to Thames (which incorporated ABC), taking over Sydney Newman’s old job and becoming Controller of Drama.

During Sydney Newman’s four and a half years with ABC, Armchair Theatre reached the heights of British television drama although sometimes it also touched the depths of depression. The Daily Mail headlined his move with ‘BBC Signs TV “Dustbin” Man’. This was unfairly sensational but undoubtedly a play series which mirrored life at the end of the nineteen-fifties provided Sydney’s dramatists with plenty of depressing subjects.

As the percentage of realistic and gloomy plays increased I suggested to Newman that our drama schedules needed balancing with something more light-hearted and sophisticated. I reminded him of the days when MGM produced sparkling comedies tailored for their contract stars like Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy and Norma Shearer, elegantly dressed and in fashionable settings. Why couldn’t we make a series based, for instance, on The Thin Man, with characters like those made famous by William Powell and Myrna Loy? This suggestion appealed to the ever-receptive Sydney and he came back quickly with a proposal. Seeking popular new series he had coined a title, Police Surgeon, which seemed to have the elements of box office appeal. In spite of the performance of a compelling young actor, Ian Hendry, the first episodes had made little impact. We looked at a newly completed episode in which Ian Hendry acted with Patrick Macnee, an actor who had recently returned to Britain after a few years in Hollywood. In the episode Macnee’s girl friend had been murdered and the two men vowed to avenge her death.

Sydney Newman’s proposal was that we should team the two actors, Hendry again as a doctor and Macnee as a man-about-town agent. A girl was needed to match them and as we could not decide upon the most suitable of two actresses we alternated Julie Stevens, a young contract actress ABC had found in Manchester, with a former Rank starlet who had matured into an accomplished actress, Honor Blackman.

The first series of The Avengers began in January 1961. ATV’s refusal to network it gave the programme an unexpected opportunity for what could be called a provincial try-out, the method by which Charles B. Cochran used to polish his revues in Manchester before bringing them to London to confront West End critics and audiences. The first year’s run was interrupted by a long Equity strike and it was not until May 1962 that we were able to launch the series in what became the familiar format. Ian Hendry had decided that he had no wish to be type-cast in a regular series and he dropped out, although he continued to appear often for ABC in important plays. Honor Blackman’s stylish authority was exactly right for the part of Cathy Gale. Julie Stevens went off in the opposite direction, to become one of the regular presenters in a BBC children’s programme.

The Avengers unit quickly became a dedicated team, with an eager young scot, John Bryce, as producer working closely with Richard Bates as story editor. Patrick Macnee was dandified in Edwardian style, wearing braided suits and embroidered waistcoats, plus a curly bowler hat and an umbrella-swordstick. Macnee did not carry a gun but was always ready to use un-gentlemanly tactics in dealing with rough customers. Michael Whittaker and Frederick Starke designed clothes for Honor Blackman, and her man-tailored suits, high boots, leather jerkins and cat suits started fashion trends which became a trade-mark of the programme. Richard Bates (a son of the author H.E. Bates) had dozens of writers at one time or another working on the series, but the main scripts he selected came from Roger Marshall, Brian Clemens, Eric Paice and Malcolm Hulke.

Produced on videotape at Teddington studios, The Avengers became a national hit once ATV gave in and we were allotted air time in London. Overseas interest was considerable and our film company’s distributors in the United States were optimistic of its chances there. The handicap was that there was no satisfactory electronic method of transferring British 405-line television videotapes to the American standard.

The success of The Avengers was due to its appeal on two levels, first as a fast-moving thriller and, secondly, its tongue-in-cheek impudence and way-out situations which captured the more selective viewers. I tried to stimulate our Elstree film people to make a feature film of The Avengers or, at least, to put Honor Blackman under contract because of her obvious feature film appeal, but without response. Instead Harry Saltzman stepped in and signed up Honor for his James Bond series and she made an instant hit as Pussy Galore.

The post Dramas of one kind or another appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Each of the four contractors had individual problems. One of mine at ABC was how best to provide a two-day service, limited to fifteen hours of studio programmes but stretched beyond that by the permitted use of outside broadcasts and religious programmes.

Saturday was inevitably an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the BBC at its entertainment best, with no current affairs or equivalent ‘soft spots’ in their schedules. The officially limited hours of broadcasting meant that Saturday afternoons could only be filled by outside broadcasts, which entailed the provision of three to four hours’ coverage of sporting events on the calendar and called for three mobile units in the North and Midlands, reinforced by ATV’s two units in London. At best we could only hope to break even with the BBC and its highly experienced mobile units scattered over many regions, and against the Corporation’s long-established contracts with sports promoters.

Nor did Saturday sport have much appeal to advertisers, whose marketing interest was mainly in women – at that time women were minority audiences for sport. To attract women viewers we eventually introduced all-in wrestling and this muscle-flexing was placed strategically at 4 p.m. to amass audiences for the studio entertainment programmes beginning at 4.30 or 5 p.m. Many other devices were tried, without much response, to entice women to the sporting afternoons, including health and slimming exercises for women, with Birmingham housewives in the studio being put through a keep-fit course by the handsome ITN newscaster, Huw Thomas. Gradually we strengthened the programme until it grew up into World of Sport with Eamonn Andrews as the central figure, who already had a considerable following on radio sports programmes.

Then began the contest for the Saturday night audience. Father had to yield the switch to the rest of the family, and my calculation was that if we could attract the battalions of teenagers before they went out on their Saturday sprees we could then hold on to mother and the rest of the family. A young producer, Jack Good, who had been working for the BBC, brought into my office a new formula for pop music, complete with drawings and a model of the elaborate set he wanted to use for a most lavish show, with bands, dancers, pop groups and singers. This was Oh Boy!, an instant hit with its intended audience, although little more than a curiosity for older viewers. Many young stars were launched on their television careers here, like Cliff Richard (twenty-five guineas was his first fee) and we followed up with other shows in this idiom. We once made the mistake of taking the casually dressed Marty Wilde and transforming him into a debonair young man with clipped hair, with a corresponding loss of audience.

We changed the pattern and broadened the appeal of our Saturday programme by bringing in Philip Jones to produce Thank Your Lucky Stars, a visual disc-jockey presentation, at Aston Studios, Birmingham. This ran for years and was an early launching pad for many young performers such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Gerry and the Pacemakers. Starting from here Philip eventually became our Director of Light Entertainment and perhaps the most consistently successful television producer of light shows.

The peak hours of the week for ITV were achieved on Sunday evenings, when ATV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium was followed by the only weekly play series then on British television, ABC’s Armchair Theatre and still the best remembered. Our plays began in July, 1956, with The Outsider, with Adrienne Corri, David Kossoff and Raymond Huntley, and was produced under the most adverse conditions in our newly converted ABC Didsbury theatre in Manchester. Casts were assembled and rehearsed in London, then brought by train to Manchester on Saturdays. Because the studio was occupied all day on Saturday only Sunday remained for rehearsing with cameras and sound, culminating in the live transmission at nine o’clock. Then the actors would dash to the station for the overnight sleeper back to Euston.

This chapter could be filled with the comic and sad stories of those crowded Sundays: Ted Kotcheff trying to produce an elaborate version of Emperor Jones with stage hands visibly holding up the scenery; actors being pulled out of the pub across the road to come in on their cues; the evening I stayed at home for once in Gerrards Cross to watch an Armchair Theatre production and was rung up by the General Manager, Gerry Mitchell, crying, ‘One of the actors has just died and is lying on the studio floor; what shall I do?’ and I could only answer – ‘Get him out of the picture and get on with the play.’ Somehow the other actors filled in the missing lines but the end of that play must have been even more perplexing than usual. There was the night when we had Sarah Churchill acting in The Heiress and afterwards, with a few of us in her bedroom at the Midland Hotel, she sprawled on her bed to telephone to ‘Daddy’ and bask in his vociferous praise.

The establishment of Armchair Theatre was a fine accomplishment by Dennis Vance. Not only did he choose, produce and cast the plays but he directed many himself. There was much enterprise and boldness: Gracie Fields in her first play The Old Lady Shows Her Medals; Mai Zetterling and Tyrone Power in Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Hugh Griffiths in a play commissioned from J.B.Priestley, Now Let Him Go; Ann Todd in Lady of the Camellias; Franchot Tone, Susan Strasberg and Ann Sheridan in Philip Saville’s television version of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

The post Building up ABC appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Sydney Newman flew over from Canada to have lunch with Dennis Vance and myself at the Ivy restaurant one Christmas Eve and within a few months he joined us at ABC. He built upon the foundation laid by Vance to establish Armchair Theatre as the most distinguished series in Britain’s television drama output, outwitting the BBC at one of its prime achievements, and corralling a mass public audience for Sunday night plays. In the 1959-60 season. Armchair Theatre plays were in the top ten programmes for thirty-two weeks out of thirty-seven. The dynamic and abrasive Sydney had a difficult first year in Britain because the press were suspicious at first of his flamboyant character and his firmly enunciated policy to concentrate on original writing for television. He declared that he would choose contemporary subjects, act as midwife to new writers, produce new directors, and change the course of British television drama. All this he accomplished. At subsequent press conferences the television reviewers began to turn up with their pockets bulging with their own playscripts, to be left behind for the maestro to read.

After two years of Armchair Theatre it became increasingly difficult to induce the stars we needed to travel to Manchester, particularly if they were working in the West End and had to make an overnight journey. By then, too, videotape recording was changing the whole way of television life, enabling us to record plays and reduce the hazards of live performance. Considerations like this made us decide that the time had come to transfer some of our major productions to London, with Manchester studios continuing to be the heart of our live television operation. In November 1958 I inspected the empty film studios of Warner Brothers, at Teddington, near Twickenham, in Middlesex, and recognised at once that the compact four acres of buildings would be exactly right for television conversion. Within four months the staff moved in to produce Armchair Theatre at its London base.

Already we had gained a reputation for excellence in design, mainly through the efforts of Timothy O’Brien, recruited from Rediffusion. (He became Associate Designer for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.) Awaiting Sydney Newman in our Drama Department were such capable directors as Philip Saville, George More O’Farrell, John Nelson Burton and Ted Kotcheff, the young Canadian I had taken on after he had come to England to direct one play for us.

Sydney Newman soon began to team his directors with the writers he had commissioned. Harold Pinter, Angus Wilson and Alun Owen wrote their first television plays for ABC. Clive Exton brought us his third play and became one of our earliest contract playwrights. Peter Luke and Irene Shubik learned the trade of script editors. Other names joined the roster, John Kruse, Ray Rigby, the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice.

More directors were brought in to match. Newman lured back home to Britain two directors, celebrated today, who were working respectively in Hollywood and Canada, Alan Cooke and Charles Jarrett. We had Harold Pinter acting in his own first play for television, A Night Out, with a cast including Vivien Merchant, Tom Bell and Arthur Lowe, directed by Philip Saville. This domestic satire was broadcast in May 1960 and came out top of the National Top Ten that week.

ABC’s contribution to drama was not confined to television. In those early days, television had borrowed heavily from the theatre, not only actors and directors, but many plays. Now came an opportunity to repay and plough something back in return. We had established an Arts and Sciences Awards Fund, and high on our list were financial contributions to repertory theatres in the North and Midlands. Yet I was concerned because so many of the cheques we handed over to these theatres went into bricks and mortar, paying for seating, bars, and building maintenance. Hardly anything went into the work of a repertory company itself. Therefore I worked out an entirely new scheme for the training of new regional theatre directors, with ABC subsidising the supply of young assistant directors to theatres in our regions, at the rate of six every year.

In the first year of the scheme, 1960, we attracted 190 applicants, all being interviewed by the Drama Department. The twenty most promising candidates were brought to London for the day, first to be questioned by a panel of experts, and then allocated to the theatres, whose directors and chairmen were watching all the interviews, eager to acquire the most suitable young man or woman for their theatre. The chosen six were then given a year’s experience in the theatre, learning about plays, actors, design, lighting, management and box office. No strings were attached to the appointments, and at the end of the year every trainee was free to go into the theatre, television or films. At the time of writing eighty-five trainees have passed through the scheme, which is now run on a national basis by Independent Television. Most of them stayed in the theatre and became stage directors both in Britain and overseas. Some found fame, among them Trevor Nunn as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kenneth Loach as a film director, and John Cox, opera director at Glyndebourne.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

The post The pace of drama appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

We were still experimenting with entertainment and many unpretentious new programmes were tried out, like Dickie Henderson in a new-talent show. Bid for Fame, and Number Please, with viewers telephoning Ray Ellington and his band for request tunes, but we had not yet reached the highest professional standards in producing variety shows and situation comedies. Perhaps this was why ATV were unwilling to network our light entertainment into London and why Val Parnell continued to urge me to contract out to his company the provision of our light entertainment. There was one comedy series which they flatly refused to network, simply on the grounds that they had no room for it in their London schedules. This format proved to be the predecessor of many successful sophisticated television shows and was indeed more suited to London audiences than any other region. Called After Hours it was a late-night revue, directed by Dick Lester, before he became one of Britain’s leading feature film comedy specialists. Michael Bentine headed a zany cast which included Dick Emery and Clive Dunn. It was one of the funniest shows that London has never seen.

Although ATV’s variety shows were so professional they conformed very much to proven formula; almost their only innovations were American importations, usually in the form of quiz shows. It was hardly surprising that there was restlessness among ATV’s brighter and more ambitious young producers and directors. One day I had a visit from their best variety producer, Brian Tesler, who had won his way to Oxford, been trained by the BBC and was then offered a choice of jobs, out of which he chose to join the Variety Department. He had recognised the new opportunities in ITV and had joined ATV in its early days; but now, after three years, he was ready to make a move. I think he recognised that ABC was the most willing of the programme contractors to experiment and to break new ground. I asked him how old he was.

‘Thirty,’ he replied.

‘That’s getting on, for a variety producer,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it time you settled down behind a desk, and told the others what to do? Would you like to join ABC as Supervisor of Features and Light Entertainment?’ It was Brian Tesler’s first step towards executive control and it was only a question of time and experience before he became a leader among the programme men of ITV.

Like most of those who decide to abandon the pleasures of directing programmes, Brian Tesler found it difficult to give up the studio floor and the control room, for I had insisted that the new job was so demanding that he would not be able to produce personally any of our programmes. Yet there was one production he wanted to handle, a plea with which I had sympathy, and this turned out to be his first and last for ABC. Sammy Davis Junior had never appeared on a British television programme and we managed to sign him up for his debut in Britain. Brian admired the many skills of Sammy, and this was the show he wanted to produce himself. It turned out to be a difficult production with an exacting artiste, especially when they decided to make part of the show as an outside broadcast from Battersea Park, with Sammy Davis dancing ahead of a party of cockney kids like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

After long and painful effort Sammy Davis Comes to London looked splendid on the screen, but I had the impression that by then Brian Tesler had no regrets about picking up the baton. Probably he faced such temptation again when we secured the services of Frank Sinatra for his first-ever television performance in Britain, at London’s Festival Hall, but by then he had reliable lieutenants like Philip Jones to whom he could entrust the big assignments.

Instead of being handicapped by the sprawl of our widespread facilities Brian Tesler was capable of turning them to advantage. Just as he had deployed the outside broadcast units at Battersea Park he now began to recruit them for elaborate productions in venues like ABC’s big Blackpool theatre. He recognised the value of responsive North Country audiences, who came out to enjoy being entertained, and used Didsbury studios for shows needing fans out in front, like Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks, which Brian Tesler launched.

Above all, there were the new Teddington studios which were still being perfected. With Tesler and the gifted engineer, Howard Steele, we had two of the most professional young men in broadcasting working harmoniously together to design studios, select equipment and plan control rooms which were built to the most exacting standards of both producers and engineers. One of the absurdities I had encountered at the BBC had been the wide gap between programme makers and the engineers, the result of early power battles in the Corporation. At ABC I reversed this practice and the close collaboration between Tesler and Steele was the key to such integration throughout our company, with the result that Teddington studios became a showplace for the ITA.

Producers and engineers were able to tackle problems together, coming up with such innovations as the press-button panel to provide instant special effects (dissolves, wipes, mixes, geometric designs, etc.) which in the film processing laboratories used to take so long and cost so much. Again, when I asked for a method of separating speech tracks from videotape recordings so that we could dub foreign-language versions, the engineers developed the Medway system now used universally. The Teddington engineers’ greatest advance, though, was achieved in colour television, as a result of which Britain gained a world initiative in colour development. From the moment we took over and planned Teddington studios every technical operation was designed with colour in mind, even though it then seemed far away.

At one time the United States had been ahead of Britain with their NTSC system. I had been to New York to see some of the early CBS experiments, particularly the mechanical colour wheel, but ultimately RCA and NBC produced the system which all the networks adopted. BBC engineers had made many trips to the American networks and to the electronic colour laboratories at Princeton and elsewhere, and they seemed to have settled un-questioningly for this same system to be adapted to British 405-line standards.

The new generation of British television engineers was not so complacent. Our trio of Greenhead, Steele and Samson sought permission to explore alternative colour systems which were under experiment in France, Germany and Russia. As early as 1961 Teddington produced the first videotape recordings of the new French SECAM 625-lines colour television system. A month later we offered the first public demonstration of a live colour television studio, and ABC provided the colour cameras, lighting and production crews and programmes, in collaboration with GEC, and using both the American and the French systems. In March 1962 the SECAM (French) signals were networked from Teddington to Birmingham and to Manchester for compatibility trials and in June that year we were able to provide signals for the ITA’s first colour broadcast and the world’s first high-power transmissions of SECAM colour. Soon we were demonstrating the latest developments to the European Broadcasting Union and, in April 1964, we gave the Technical Sub-committee of the Government’s Television Advisory Committee (on their first ever visit to an ITV studio) a demonstration of colour conversion from one system to another.

By then we had begun to develop the German 405-line PAL colour, and in January 1966, we gave the first demonstration of the Russian NIR system.

I soon found that politics entered as much into television engineering as into everything else. The French Government was now trying to sell the merits of its SECAM colour system to the Russians and the French manufacturers asked me if Howard Steele could go to Moscow on their behalf to demonstrate what ABC had accomplished with SECAM. Shortly afterwards I received a discreet message from the Foreign Office suggesting it might be unwise for Britain to become too closely identified with any one colour process. Reluctant for ABC to be a pawn in political manoeuvres I encouraged our engineers to give equal attention to the development of the German PAL, but even without this prompting they were finding already that the PAL system was much more robust than the more delicate French SECAM.

All systems were put to the test in an historic meeting of television engineers in Oslo in May 1966 when ABC Television demonstrated the respective merits of NTSC, SECAM and PAL.

There was an overwhelming preference for the solid reliability of PAL and in the course of time the German system was adopted by Britain, then increasingly in Europe and other parts of the world. France clung doggedly to SECAM and De Gaulle eventually succeeded in selling it to Soviet Russia. The one country which could not make up its mind was Italy and after ten years of wavering the final choice looked like being PAL.

It was surprising that the other programme companies left us a clear field on this experimentation. The prestige of ABC’s engineers was further enhanced in the autumn of 1966, when Teddington staged demonstrations of 405-line VHF PAL colour television on behalf of the IT A to members of Parliament, representatives of the national and technical press, executives of the BBC and ITV, and senior staff and engineers of the GPO.

The final decision to adopt PAL for Britain was taken immediately after a live programme in this colour process had been transmitted from Teddington to the Authority’s headquarters in Brompton Road, for the benefit of the Postmaster-General and his expert advisors. Enthusiasm for colour spread throughout ABC and as the final stages of the programme contract drew to a close ABC was not only years in advance of the other companies’ engineers but the programme department had also been able to gain practical experience of the new colour requirements of lighting, design and costume.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

The post Adding colour appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

So that our drama producers would not forget the North and Midlands audience at our base, I provided their offices with Lowry prints. When we first opened ABC in Manchester I had commissioned a ‘local’ artist to paint a typical Manchester scene for us every year, and my choice was L.S. Lowry whose price then was between £150 and £200 a picture. One day he came to see his Salford painting hanging in my London office in Hanover Square. I told him that all I missed was the television aerials on the houses. At once, he took a brush from his inside pocket and painted an ITV aerial on one of the houses! It was exhibited in the Lowry exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1976.

Brian Tesler had been able to attract into ABC a new school of entertainment producers and directors, and to produce variety shows and situation comedies to match anything the BBC or ATV could offer. That rarest of all the species, writers of comedy, had also been drawn into ABC and we had more of them under contract than anyone except the BBC. With Brian Tesler’s personal reputation and his constellation of directors and writers, it became less difficult to entice the cream of that most nervous and uncertain group of all, the comedians. To move to other spheres of entertainment they needed to have exceptional confidence in the programme makers and their immediate bosses. With ABC programmes now offering a vigorous challenge to ATV’s domination of entertainment we began to bill such stars as Benny Hill, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Max Bygraves, Bob Monkhouse, Mike and Bernie Winters, and Sid James.

At last ABC Television had accumulated the strength to reject and replace ATV programmes which did not reach up to our requirements. The day came when Val Parnell and Lew Grade once again threatened to withhold the London Palladium show and I called their bluff by refreshing the Sunday night peak hour with our own variety shows from the Blackpool Hippodrome. We retained the television audience, pleased the critics, and started a new relationship, based on equality, with ATV. Nevertheless, there were times when the inter-company battles grew bitter. The heaviest blow inflicted on ABC was when ATV deliberately undermined the success of Armchair Theatre by demanding alternation on Sunday nights with a play series from their own drama department, which was already contributing plays to the weekday network. As a London contractor ATV had the power not to transmit Armchair Theatre in London, a severe hardship for us, because we could never hold on to our distinguished writers and directors if their work was to be limited to the provinces and not displayed in the great shop window which is London. Also, ABC had now created an original new drama series, in advance of its time, which ATV again refused to network to London, objecting to our incursion into the field of the drama series. For a long time The Avengers remained unnetworked but its reputation and its ratings became so compulsive that ATV was eventually forced to give in.

I criticise the weakness of the Independent Television Authority at that time for their failure to intervene, and to insist that ATV give a fair showing to network programmes of national quality. On weekdays, Granada’s deal with Rediffusion had guaranteed them a London showing for most of their programmes, though even then it took a long time to promote Coronation Street (a local programme) from Granadaland to London and the national network. I have always supported Sir Robert Fraser as the true architect of ITV and the man most responsible for its eventual success, but there were moments of weakness when he faced the London contractors. Perhaps he was too susceptible to the strong-arm tactics of Val Parnell and the beguiling persuasion of Lew Grade. He should not have permitted them to sabotage the most respected play series in Britain, Armchair Theatre, and thus reduce the power and prestige of ITV’s Sunday night.

Possibly Bob Fraser was susceptible to a change because some of the more provocative Armchair Theatre plays aroused protests in the press, at the Authority and indeed in my own boardroom. At that time the favourite derogatory phrase about Armchair Theatre was ‘kitchen sink drama’. Many of the plays I personally found unsatisfactory, irritating or unjustifiable but I have always tried to give producers the freedom they wanted. I had an arrangement with Sydney Newman that one out of every four plays should be experimental – which in effect probably meant losing audiences in the process. Often Sir Philip Warter would telephone me at home to complain about the themes and attitudes of Armchair Theatre plays, but I was usually able to claim that his opinions were directly opposite to those of the public; for the plays he liked earned poor ratings and the ones he condemned were generally our best successes.

Many times I clashed with the Authority in defence of some of the plays before they were broadcast, because we had to submit a synopsis of every play and, if required, let the Authority’s representative read a synopsis and attend rehearsals of a play. Whenever I read the script of a controversial play, I insisted on knowing the name of the director for I was well aware that if, for instance, it included a lesbian scene Director A would treat it delicately whilst Director B would emphasise the sexual overtones.

It was not surprising that some of the way-out plays did not measure up to the West End box office standards of the ATV management. Val Parnell was tolerant and made few critical strictures but Lew Grade, who watched every play, would ring me up afterwards with his own forthright comments. His expletives about bad language were usually colourful. In return, I spared no blushes about the triteness and repetitiveness of the Palladium shows. Our disputes were short-lived and when we met on the following day the rows were forgotten and we resumed our normal cheerful relationship, interrupted only by the endless arguments about how much ABC paid ATV.

When Val Parnell retired from ATV, in his seventies, there was some speculation about his successor, but Lew Grade was elected managing director with the full backing of the theatre interests and of the Mirror group. There was a further decline in Norman Collins’ influence and his role became little more than that of a highly placed public relations director. It seemed a waste of a brilliant executive who could have established a much-needed reputation for ATV in current affairs programmes, but instead the company concentrated all the more on sheer entertainment.

One course Norman Collins and I did pursue together was the steering of ITV into adult education. Already ITV had led the way in schools television, with Rediffusion’s Managing Director Paul Adorian pioneering this new development in the use of television. The week-end contracts eliminated ABC from schools television but Norman Collins and I waged a tireless campaign to introduce adult education on Sunday mornings, when church services provided the only broadcasts. It took us many years until, with the aid of Lord Eccles, and with the support of the WEA, we won through and were granted government permission to have extra hours on Sunday mornings. I invited Asa Briggs to be ABCs advisor on adult education, but before long the Authority asked if he could take over a similar role for them on a national basis.

When we began the broadcasts, in January 1963, our first two ABC series were very basic: how to speak good English and how to write a letter, with popular titles such as You Don’t Say, and Pen to Paper. ATV’s efforts in this field took the form of elementary lessons in French. ABC went on to Clear Thinking, explaining logic, and eventually First Steps in Physics, for which we produced not only a text book but an introductory science kit. Over the years we covered many subjects and co-operated with different publishers in the issue of paperback books related to our subjects. These grew broader in their range, varying from The Law is Yours and A Plain Man’s Guide to his Money to Psychology for Everyman and Anatomy of First Aid. Some of these became bestsellers, especially Philip Harben’s The Grammar of Cookery, published by Penguin, which sold 250,000 copies.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

The post Network scrapes appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Every hour was precious to ABC on Sundays and I set out to devise a programme with religious content which would cater for the millions of young people who were at home between 6.15 and 7.00. The challenge was to make religion interesting and informative to teenagers and my mind went back to my own upbringing in Monmouthshire. My father was superintendent of the Congregational Sunday School and in addition to the ordinary services there was a free-and-easy meeting between teachers and young people described as PSA (Pleasant Sunday Afternoon).

This was to be my formula for a place and an occasion when people could meet and talk and socialise with Christian speakers. I decided to start a television youth club, with a six-piece band, singers and lively talk, including guests ranging from sportsmen and pop singers to archbishops.

First I had to convince the Authority and afterwards CRAC (Christian Religious Advisory Committee). I found the Committee particularly receptive because they had appreciated by now that commercial television had tackled religious subjects in earnest, and our professional techniques applied to the religious message were attracting audiences far outnumbering church attendances. The Authority was more hesitant, but it was decided that if I could satisfy their new member they would give their support. This was Diana Reader Harris, the headmistress of Sherborne School for Girls, no stranger to me because both my daughters had been educated at her school. After full discussion she was in complete agreement with my objectives and my proposals for producing the programmes.

The youth club had to be authentic and I engaged Penry Jones, trained in the Iona Community and running a Glasgow youth club, to join us in Manchester, and start up in March 1958 a young people’s club in the studio. For the title I lifted the description Bernard Sendall of the ITA had always used in the minutes of the SCC meetings where I had begun my campaign, Sunday Break.

The concept appealed to the clergy and we had enthusiastic support at all levels, especially from the late Cardinal Heenan, then at the new Liverpool Cathedral, who came over to our Manchester studios regularly for his chats with teenagers, always impromptu and with no subjects barred. The relaxed and carefree atmosphere of the programme, together with the frank discussions on all aspects of religion and morals, was something new in religious broadcasting and Sunday Break attracted a regular audience which has never been exceeded in size. The most memorable programme was a pop music version of the crucifixion, A Man Dies. This had been written and produced for a public performance in Bristol by a local church youth club and when I played over the sound recordings I decided to devote the whole forty-five minutes of Sunday Break to it.

As soon as we announced the decision there were outcries of protests at such blasphemy. This began in the press, spread to the House of Commons, and was echoed at the meetings of the Authority and by my own Board. Because I had read the text and heard the recordings, I was fully aware of its deep sincerity and religious mood, and felt I was on sure ground in resisting those who were criticising something they had not seen. On the Sunday morning a few hours before the 6.15 broadcast I had a complete dress rehearsal of the programme relayed to London, where the programme was viewed, in separate buildings, by the Authority and by my Board. After the closed circuit transmission Sir Robert Fraser telephoned me at Birmingham and told me with much feeling that everyone had been very moved by what they had seen and of course there could be no objection. The message from my Board too was equally heartening. Finally, A Man Dies was a remarkable success and had to be repeated. Gramophone recordings were made and sold, and we printed complete versions of the script and songs for the youth clubs and religious groups throughout Britain anxious to stage their own versions. In many ways A Man Dies was television’s predecessor of the stage and film musical versions of the story of Jesus Christ.

ABC continued to study the specialised needs of its Sunday audience. We made an interesting experiment with children’s programmes to find out reactions to series of half-hour science fiction serials. I had asked Sydney Newman if his drama department could produce these programmes for children, and their range stretched from Valley of the Monsters to Pathfinders to Venus. However, many parents, critics and ITA representatives had expressed concern to the effect that such entertainment might disturb children. As so little practical research was available I asked our children’s programme consultant, Mary Field, if she would work on this with Professor Arnold Lloyd, Head of the Department of Education at Cambridge. I remembered the infrared photograph Mary Field had taken at children’s Saturday morning film shows to capture their reactions. We decided to apply a similar method to television viewing. It was impractical to put film or television cameras into an ordinary home to record children’s normal responses, so we decided the next best method was to reconstruct a home in a studio and hope that children would behave naturally even though in a contrived situation.

With the co-operation of the Middlesex Education Authority three boys and five girls (three aged ten and five aged thirteen) were invited on a Saturday afternoon to the ABC studios at Teddington, ostensibly for a demonstration of a television camera. Whilst one group toured the premises the others were asked to wait their turn and sit in a small studio, where they could spend the time watching a recorded programme.

I quote from Sydney Newman’s observations, written for an illustrated booklet we published at the time on the experiment:

‘What a humiliating, funny, illuminating and humble-making experience this experiment on children’s reactions was for us, the makers of this programme. For about eighteen of the twenty-five minutes of the running time the thirteen-year-old test group paid no attention to the programme whatsoever! To what we thought was terrifying footage of primeval monsters trying to kill one another, a ten-year-old exclaimed, “Oh, they’re models!” However, we learnt many things.’

The footnote to this was that we were then considering a proposed programme called Dr Who. But we came to the conclusion that the Authority would never allow us to broadcast it. When Sydney Newman joined the BBC he took Dr Who with him.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

The post Breaking into Sundays appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Television came into the life of Eileen Killeen the day an ABC outside broadcast unit pulled up at the Liverpool toy factory where she works.

Picked from the thousands of girls employed at the factory, 18-year-old Eileen and five of her workmates appeared before the outside broadcast cameras in the Sing Along With Joe[1] pretty girl contest. She won her heat, passed through the section finals and semi-finals, and at the end of last season was awarded the coveted title of Miss Industry 1961.

But success didn’t go to her head. Of her £250[2] prize money, Eileen gave a donation to her church, bought refrigerators for her mother and sister, and put the rest in the bank.

She also turned down the chance of starting a new career as a model and decided to stay in Liverpool[3] doing the job she knew best.

Today, however, Eileen is being constantly reminded of the time the blue-and-grey outside broad cast vans arrived at her factory. For every day thousands of them are passing through her hands – scaled-down versions of the real thing.

Eileen is a toy inspector. She has been since she left school at the age of 15. She is the last girl at the end of a 100 ft.-long conveyor belt down which the models travel while the finishing touches are being put to them.

Her job is to make a final inspection and give them a “test run” before they are packed and sent to toyshops all over the world.

The first of two model ABC vans – a micro-wave links vehicle topped by a moveable disc-shaped aerial which beams the programme from the outside broadcast site to the studios[4] – is already being mass-produced.

The second is a model of the heart of a £36,000[5] outside broadcast unit – the mobile control room. This goes into production in the next few weeks, and with it will be a tiny TV camera and cameraman.

Putting a new model on the market is a long and involved task. Work on this outside broadcast unit started nine months ago, when photographer Warwick Bedford – who also took the pictures on this page – was asked to take colour transparencies of the vehicles in action. From these photographs. draughts men made detailed drawings and wooden models were prepared for engineers to make the die-casting tools which are now turning out zinc alloy castings at the rate of 2,000 a day.

From this stage the models have to go through more than 20 different operations and pass through hundreds of hands before they reach Eileen Killeen for final approval.

They are splashed with acid, plunged into hot and cold baths, go through nine sprayings and get plastered with tiny transfers in ABC colours[6] – all this before they are ready to start down the final conveyor belt.

Apart from Eileen, 56 other girls are employed on this last lap. It is one of the many production lines snaking through this six-acre factory.

Model vehicle bodies are being constantly fed in at the receiving end of the 2ft.-wide belt. And every few feet of the slow, 100-yd. journey they are being dexterously whipped off and replaced as one part after another is quickly fitted and revetted into position.

Said Eileen: “I cannot help thinking of the opportunities that were open to me after I won the title.

“But I have no regrets about staying in the factory.”

1. A now-lost ABC Weekend TV talent show presented by Glaswegian pianist Joe “Mr Piano” Henderson (2 May 1920–4 May 1980). ↩
2. In cash, and allowing for inflation, this is £5,150 in today’s money. The average salary for a monthly paid professional employee was £800 a year (£16,500 in today’s money) – Eileen would have been weekly paid and earned far less – and the average price of a new-build house was £2,500 (£50,000). ↩
3. Meccano Limited, Binns Road, Liverpool. The factory manufactured Meccano, Dinky Toy vehicles, Hornby Dublo trains, Bayko building blocks, Kemex chemistry sets and Elektron electrical sets. It was bought by Tri-ang in 1964, but collapsed in 1971 and was sold to Airfix. Airfix closed the factory in 1979 and themselves collapsed in 1981. The remains of the companies are now owned by Japanese toymaker Nikko. ↩
4. If you have one in your attic, it is now worth £139. ↩
5. £750,000 in today’s money. ↩
6. See right. ↩

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The Associated Broadcasting Development Company became Associated TeleVision for London weekends and Midland weekdays. Granada Theatres developed Granada Television Network for Northern weekdays. Kemsley Newspapers and Winnick Entertainment formed Kemsley-Winnick for Northern and Midland weekends.

Then a problem appeared. Maurice Winnick admitted to the ITA that he did not have the finance available to run two ITV stations. The finance had never existed, but he had hoped it would arrive. It didn’t, and the potential losses frightened Lord Kemsley’s newspaper group (later to be bought out using ITV profits by Lord Thompson of STV) away.

Winnick insisted the he could, eventually, pull together the people and talent required for a new television channel. He was wrong, and, in any case, Kenneth Clark and the ITA staff had lost faith in his consortium. But what now?

Two days in the Midlands and the same two days in the North was not a plum contract. The ITA had to fill the weekends – ITV without weekends was ridiculous, while ITV with seven-day companies in major regions would hand the network to Granada – or worse, to ATV with a national contract (Monday to Friday in the Midlands, weekends in every major region) – but who would want such a minor role?

The Associated British Picture Corporation, with their chain of ABC cinemas, had campaigned long and hard against advertising-supported television. Television took viewers away from the cinema, and advertising-supported television would take even more revenue from the company. Even when Granada Theatres decided to use the old adage ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, ABPC held out.

Then Kemsley-Winnick fell at the first hurdle. Sir Kenneth was soon on the ‘phone. Would ABPC consider taking a contract? Would you help me out of a spot? What if the contract offered large returns for little risk – two days a week in two regions? What if I promised to pay you some of the £750,000 promised by the government should ITV fail?

ABPC had no choice – a business opportunity avoided by gut feeling was one thing. A business opportunity avoided despite there being a guarantee of breaking even at the very least was another.

ABPC accepted the contracts for Midlands (Saturdays and Sundays) and Northern England (Saturdays and Sundays). ABC Television, as the new venture was to be called, had five months to prepare for broadcasting to begin in the Midlands.

This is the story of that company. The story of the only organisation to never apply for an ITV franchise, yet get one. The story of a company that produced the best drama, the most popular programmes, and the classic presentation that gave rise to Transdiffusion. ABC produced a generation of producers, presenters, directors, designers and technicians with ‘quality’ written through them.

ABC, by accident and design, created and nurtured ITV. ABC was the trendsetter whose influence we still see, hear and feel today. ABC made television that still resonates now.

ABC Your Weekend TV.

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The fear of bias in television news (and never let it be said that the British ever didn’t understand the potential power of this medium) had led many to call for no news provision or news to be provided by the ITA themselves. News from individual companies, with their multiple shareholders and shareholdings and the stated political beliefs of the newspaper investors, could not, it was felt, be trusted.

The ITA would have nothing to do with the idea of producing programmes itself, no matter what the genre. Although the Television Act cleared the way for them to control as much, or as little, of the output as they desired, Sir Kenneth Clark had a vision for the network that had his ITA as the king over the water – a guiding influence, but never seen or heard.

Thus an independent company owned by all the players on the network was created. Independent Television News (a name that purposely let you put a mental comma in any one of three places) was formed with a board drawn from the ITV companies and a representative from the ITA.

ITN began planning for a large news service modelled on that provided by the American networks. In-vision ‘newscasters’, human-interest stories, filmed inserts and hard-hitting interviews from the hardest-hitting interviewers were to be the order of the day.

This suited the ‘BBC with adverts’ mentality at Associated Rediffusion. It also suited the ‘big names, big stories’ enthusiasm at Associated TeleVision. As the network prepared for its leap northwards into Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, it suited Granada’s down-to-earth ethos as well.

It didn’t suit Associated-British. Despite being given full possession of the facts at their hurried interview, shortly after the launch of commercial television, ABC baulked at the costs involved in running a news service – a quote of 77,400GBP a year (equating to about 900,000GBP at current prices) for two bulletins a day to a total of 17 minutes plus a 5 minute newsreel if required.

Stiff letters were exchanged between the ITA and ABC, and between ABC and the board of ITN. ‘Less film, more talk’ was ABC’s suggestion, while ITN’s contribution was to immediately start to fall apart under the unexpected pressure. The ITA’s tuppenceworth was to simply point to ABC’s ambiguously worded contract with a confidence its officers didn’t actually have.

The troubles lead to an unbelievable event in ITV’s history. Robin Day, chief newscaster at ITN, had to interview Sir Kenneth Clark (head of the ITA) about the potential collapse of the company he was working for, live on one of ITN’s bulletins.

This was a breach of the very Television Act that Clark was to quote from on air. As a (nominal) civil servant, he was not allowed to appear on television to talk about television. As ever, the Act did not stand in his way, and while breaking the letter of the act, called for the companies to stand by the spirit of it.

His impassioned defence of the Act, of the ITV system and of ITN as it was constituted brought ABC into the fold. They joined the board of ITN on 1 March 1956. But as a consequence, the debacle cost the head of ITN’s first Editor-in-Chief. He walked away and stood for parliament, becoming a well-known and accomplished MP, but never forgot the affair and vowed to return to independent television later.

He was Aidan Crawley, and he would be back to haunt ABC later.

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But the new pattern of franchises advertised in 1966 by Lord Hill of Luton’s ITA to begin in the latter part of 1968 had a hurdle in them – the end of the weekday/weekend split except in London. Of all the companies who would be affected by this change, ABC was the one who would feel it most. Quite simply, its regions would cease to exist.

Howard Thomas and the board of ABC began to scout around for a new region. There was an obvious one: London weekends, the only area to keep the old split, now with the addition of the Friday evening.

The ITA required that the existing companies submitted a list showing, in order of preference, which regions they were interested in. Some were predictable, with Rediffusion choosing London weekdays or southern England. Some were knowing, like ATV ignoring London weekends in favour of a first choice of the Midlands seven days. Some were blindingly obvious – where else could Granada go?

And then there was ABC. First choice: London weekends, followed by Midlands seven-day against ATV and the new Yorkshire region. Patently, London weekends would be the reward, an example of good things coming to those who wait.

At the BBC, there were several employees who felt that the Corporation had lost its way. Proper programmes for the intelligentsia were disappearing under the onslaught of popular programming. BBC-2 was a ghetto, BBC-1 was a no-go area.

But ITV was rolling in money. London was swinging, and Rediffusion and ATV were swinging with it. All this money and no effort required. The viewers would watch anything put in front of them (they must do – have you see the Palladium show?) so why not ballet, Pinter and opera? Since these executives were crying out for more culture, it was obvious that the public were, too. And there was all that money available for the taking – ATV was making millions for two days.

David Frost, Michael Peacock and the former Editor in Chief of ITN, Aidan Crawley MP, put a consortium together, poaching BBC and Rediffusion staff, plus cultural icons from throughout the capital. Highbrow arts, highbrow drama, everything that ITV was missing.

ABC must have sniggered at this consortium at first. They knew that the weekends were a hard-fought time, that people did indeed want arts programming, but were prepared to get up early or stay up late for it. The money did not pour in, but had to be carefully harvested.

But Hill, it turns out, was easily impressed by a few famous names and some ambitious plans. ITV was successful but stale, and he planned to change this. But then he was stuck. How could the brilliantly-polished LTC – the Frost Consortium as it was inaccurately labelled in the media – and ABC be accommodated together in the new system?

LTC was clear – London weekends or nothing. ABC could slot into Yorkshire, but the creation of that new region was predicated on the idea that a local company of local talent backed with local money should step in. ABC could displace the much-loathed ATV in the Midlands. But then Hill would have to find a home for ATV – politically it was impossible to remove entirely a company with such a good export arm when the government of the day was crying out for foreign currency.

Like a cork in a sink full of water, one of the companies would bob to the top again, displaced. ATV had to be kept. Yorkshire wasn’t available to a ‘London company’. London weekends were spoken for. Granada was untouchable. Where next? What to do?

The ITA under Hill had been unhappy with Rediffusion. There was nothing major wrong with them, per se. They were a fine company with fine programmes and a fine reputation. But that was all – they had no flair, no unique selling point, that the ITA could see. And they were arrogant, strutting through ITA interviews as if the regulator didn’t matter. They didn’t listen – weren’t interested in listening – as they patently knew better than the ITA how to produce a solid television service.

The idea of replacing them must have been attractive to Hill. No more trouble, no more arrogance. But the London weekday contractor was the mainstay of the the network, the anchor of the system. Any company that replaced Rediffusion would need extremely deep pockets to build a service as solid as Rediffusion’s existing one. Londoners would immediately see a mistake had been made if a lesser company appeared. And Londoners included the politicians who ran the country and ‘owned’ the ITA.

ABC did not have the resources to immediately begin producing the schools programmes and current affairs that Rediffusion supplied to a grateful network. So Rediffusion was safe. But there was a precedent available. When the system was first formed, the ITA had been happy to merge different bidders, to change shareholdings and interests. A new franchise round, where all applicants, even those previously established, were to be under new contracts left Hill with a free hand.

What if a displaced company were to takeover the London weekday contract from Rediffusion, but keep the schools programmes and current affairs and back catalogue of the removed company. What if Rediffusion could be offered a price – a carrot – for agreeing?

What if ABC were to take the London weekdays contract, but be allowed to pick and choose the staff, talent and programming of its predecessor? If ABC was running Rediffusion’s service, a solid company would be created – but one with a renewed flair for daring and original programming.

ABC and Rediffusion were jointly offered Rediffusion’s contract, with Rediffusion given half the profits and 49% of the company. This sweetened a bitter pill for Rediffusion, but it was a slap in the face to Britain’s first commercial broadcaster.

Still, with 49% of the new station, they would have a large say in the direction it was to take, wouldn’t they?

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This was bad news for Rediffusion. The 49% of the contract granted to them by the ITA may have given them some power in a merger. But 49% of a new company was simply an investment – nothing more. The sliver of a majority that ABPC would hold in the company would be enough to control it utterly. And they did.

To start, a name had to be found. The name ABC was good. It had a history and was well known. But the television market was globalising, and that meant confusion in the minds of international buyers between ABC UK and ABC US. Additionally, ABC would continue to be a brand in its own right – the highest-earning export programmes were hived off from the new company immediately, preserving the profits for ABPC.

So a new name had to be found, plans already having been made to change the name if they won the London weekend contract. Capital Television and Tower Television were seriously considered. The London Television Consortium, busy botching plans for London weekends, had chosen the name Thames Television.

But the rationalists at LTC felt that the ethos of the new company was better served by calling it what it was: London Weekend Television. The name ‘Thames’ came free, and ABPC grabbed it with both hands.

Studios needed rationalising. Thames would have excess capacity with Teddington, Television House and Wembley all available. LWT needed studio space badly as they had not considered the need at all when applying for the contract, other than to promise to build studios when cash allowed. LWT wanted Teddington. That caused ABPC and the ITA to panic… and Rediffusion was told to give up Wembley to the new weekend contractor. The staff went to LWT too.

ABPC began picking and choosing from the Rediffusion staff. The children’s department, the current affairs department and the schools department went to Thames. The rest were waved away – the presentation department decamping to Leeds, most others going to LWT. The rest of the positions were filled by ABC staff already in place at Teddington. Thus did Thames grow.

To a point, a company is what its majority shareholder or board of directors want it to be. But in day-to-day workings, a company is the people who work there. For Thames, that meant ABC people.

Very soon, ABPC itself was gone, swallowed up by the behemoth of EMI. EMI itself would merge with Thorn. Over the coming years, shareholdings would change and Thames would at one point find its majority shareholder to be BET, of all people. Eventually, the company was listed on the stockmarket, owned by institutional investors and Thorn EMI. Now it is just a brand name used by Pearson Television.

But through all of the changes of ownership and composition, ABC remained dominant. ABC people trained their successors to be ABC people. Former staff of ABC, when asked many years later who they work for instinctively start saying ‘ABC’ before correcting themselves. Today we would call this a corporate culture. Back then, it was just ABC.

A merger was out of the question. ABC’s profits from exports were high enough that ABPC was unwilling to give up half of them for Rediffusion to take.

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He had also begun corresponding with the then Transdiffusion Children, dropping heavy hints as to what the new station’s identity would be. After the launch of Thames, he was able to explain the processes involved in creating a new identity for one of the first ITV companies.

Changes this large were decided at board level, with senior staff asked to comment and add their own ideas into the melting pot. The new company started life with the working title of ‘Associated-British Rediffusion’, a name that neither pleased nor fooled anyone involved.

For the decision on the final trading name, the board and senior officers became split. From the beginning, there were three leading choices – ‘Capital’, the name ABC had planned to use upon winning London weekends, ‘Tower’, a suggestion that appears to have originated in the Rediffusion camp, and ‘Thames’, a compromise suggestion not well-liked but too good to discard.

Capital Television, Capital Network, Capital London – Geoffrey felt that these names tripped off the tongue well and suited the planned identity of the station. There was debate over ‘Capital’ or ‘Capitol’ – the latter not then considered an Americanism as it is now.

The problem with the name, though, was a perceived lack of ‘zing’ – it was simply the obvious choice and therefore had no life of its own. Although supported by senior staff who had worked on the identity in the run up to the 1967 contract awards, support at board level died away and the name began to fall behind ‘Tower’ as a choice.

The problem with ‘Tower’ stemmed not just from its supposed Rediffusion roots. Although the name suggested many things – the Tower of London, the Post Office Tower, the towering heights of St Paul’s, Tower Bridge – it was flat. Even more so that ‘Capital’ the name was boring.

The London Television Consortium had taken an option on the name ‘Thames’ very early on. Also considered was ‘Thames Weekend Television’. However, the art-driven people behind the new weekend broadcaster felt that a ‘contrived’ name like ‘Thames’ was ‘uncool’, according to Geoffrey. Instead, they decided that they should be called what they were – London Weekend Television.

This left the new ABC-Rediffusion station with a name available that would suit its purpose and set it apart from the rival London broadcaster. While ‘London Weekend’ was identifying only with the metropolis, ‘Thames’ could identify with its viewers in the home counties and beyond – the VHF signals reaching almost to Brighton in the south. Combined with a new local news service for the area, Rediffusion having never really bothered, Thames would be the local station for everyone near to the river and its tributaries.

With the name decided, the identity of the station progressed with a pace. Despite being on the ‘losing side’ over Capital, Geoffrey helped develop the new station’s identity through its graphics.

Many early attempts were made to continue with the ABC triangle. Simply replacing the letters ‘ABC’ with ‘Thames’ was considered and almost adopted when the idea of a stylised skyline of London was proposed. The artwork proved very popular, but attempts were made to incorporate the ABC triangle even here – soon abandoned as the ident simply didn’t work.

The finalised versions of the ident were a complete break with the past, with the skyline version, without triangle, being used by Teddington and a plain ‘From Thames’ caption being used by Television House. Geoffrey insisted it was not a policy of the new company to differentiate between ex-ABC and ex-Rediffusion, but the effect was to do just that.

With everything set to roll – a new name, an impressive ident, a definite style for the station – Geoffrey got a shock on seeing the new Harlech ident. Embracing electronic music and featuring a futuristic formup, he was left feeling that Harlech had developed the classic ident while the new Thames was old-fashioned and plain.

He was wrong.

The post Designing Thames appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

ABC was operating in a challenging environment. The post war world had spawned a younger generation, with for the first time money to spend and aspirations to fulfil. A growing national wealth in the fifties reached its apogee in the swinging England of the mid-sixties, and ABC rode the crest of a wave of cultural freedom such as the British people had not known before. It is hard now to convey the optimism of those times. In an odd way, it is the nearest the British ever came to having an equivalent of “The American Dream”. The idea that with enough effort and dedication anyone could achieve anything was very strong.

Britain at the time was of course far from being a Utopia. These impressions were more apparent than real and hardship and poverty still lurked in inner city pockets. Compared with the recessions and growing wealth gap of later years though, this was a period of real growth in disposable incomes, and an ever-higher standard of living for most. Trying to ‘better yourself’, whether by enterprise or education was a shared ambition, and young people almost for the first time, strongly identified with each other as a contemporary group. Shared TV and record buying experience were the staple of young conversation. Staying in, ‘watching the telly’ had not yet become an activity for the older generation, and even family viewing was still regarded as ‘cool’ in a way that would not be accepted today.

President Kennedy, The Beatles, Harold Wilson, Cinema films in colour, pirate radio ships like Radio Caroline and Wonderful Radio London breaking the BBC’s radio near-monopoly, mini skirts, long hair for men – these were the symbols and icons of an age that felt itself the very cutting edge of modernity. Scientific developments abounded. The space race, the dash to the moon, the first heart transplants, nuclear power, and the early uses of mainframe computer power in the private sector – these all created a “can do” culture, which had not been as strong before or since. The ‘scientist’ as expert, was the priest of a more secular age and the citizen sat at home enthralled.

The Open University was debated and planned (though not yet launched). Popular science programmes allowed the public a ‘stake’ in scientific research for the first time, and even such trivia as “Green Shield (trading) Stamps” created a feeling of sharing in mutual prosperity. With cheap package holidays, working men could travel abroad, often for the first time since D-Day in 1944. The whole ethos of the sixties, was of course an escape from the privations of the Second World War, and the conformity of the mid-fifties. People wanted, and needed a release. The very creation of ITV in 1955 was the key in the door for that release. Even in serious subjects, big change was underway. Abortions, divorce, family planning, sexual law reform, even an end to hanging – these were the touchstone issues for a new generation of politically aware youth. It was the first time that politics had broadened out from the traditional emphasis on economic issues, to take in the more social (and socialistic) concerns of the youthful idealists.

True, much of the political change was lead by politicians a generation older than the youth culture referred to, but for the first time there was a feeling that the ideas were feeding up from the governed to the governing – and being acted upon. The four major ITV companies were a power in the land. Though all four concerned themselves with all programming genres (except for Granada, which solidly refused for years, to do networked variety shows) there was nevertheless a specialisation. Rediffusion, though with a weakness for the quiz show, tended to concern itself, in the later evening anyway with remarkably heavyweight programming. ATV brought the showbusiness to ITV. Granada brought the gritty realism and good documentaries.

ABC, as the smallest of the “big four” (though ironically, with a parent corporation that was bigger than ATV or Granada enjoyed at the time) set out to bring cosmopolitan taste, and a touch of real style, to its regional and provincial franchises. Whether it was in the companies extraordinarily vivid selection of programme signature tunes, the invariably startling design of programme title graphics, the widespread use of outside broadcast facilities or the very familiarity of the station hosts – it was always a company that stood out, felt different, and achieved magic in what it set out to do.

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