Most TV hopefuls want to be an ANNOUNCER.

What is it that makes an announcer’s job look so glamorous. A job which means 100 per cent concentration for 12 hours non-stop each day? Perhaps it’s because the announcer must be a friendly man, acceptable in every one of over two million households.

The announcer is the permanent link between home and studio. Programmes and performers may change by the hour, but the announcer is present the whole time, making anything up to 40 or more appearances every day. These frequent appearances make a firm impact on the mind of the viewer.

The announcer becomes easily recognisable in the the street, on the bus, or in the pub, and he cannot walk across the road without being spotted. Heads will turn and he will overhear the remarks – “Ooh, look, that’s John Edmunds. You know, the announcer on the telly.”

Perhaps it is that little bit of egoism present in every human being that tempts young people to hanker after the announcer’s job.

“For, believe me, life ceases to become normal once you are an announcer,” says John. Sometimes, he has to slip away from a side door in the studio to escape the attentions of fans, some of whom can be quite fanatical, at times.

Not for him the hotel rooms in the city centre – he would be an obvious target for the fans on each week end lie in wait inside Birmingham hotels, hoping to catch a glimpse of their favourites and to get their autographs. John spends his week-ends in very homely and comfortable digs in Erdington, with “the most charming landlady imaginable.”

You see, John is a friendly and sociable chap who likes to meet people away from the glare of the studio lights. He is a homely type – and that is one of the most essential qualities of an announcer. If the station announcer is not a friendly visitor to the viewers’ home, then the station is switched off.

What other qualifications? A pleasant voice? Naturally – but not necessarily a donnish voice, and certainly not an affected one. It must be a voice acceptable to the Black Country, to Shropshire, to the happy, homely Lancastrian and the shrewd and dour Yorkshireman.

What language qualifications are desirable? Well, French is most useful (John Edmunds was a French master before joining ABC Television); Italian is handy, and so is German. If you know a little Greek, Polish, Swahili or Urdu, so much the better.

Does acting experience help? Definitely. Although the announcer must, at all times be of a friendly and happy disposition, there are occasions where acting ability can help him. John Edmunds was recently suffering from extremely painful tooth abcess [sic]. All of the dentists were closed and he faced a ten-hour stint of duty on Sunday. Make-up department, with their pots of magic creams, smoothed out the ‘pain lines’ in his wrinkled forehead, softened down the swelling lump on his face, and brought some colour to his ashen cheeks, but only his acting ability could produce the smiling, happy, trouble free announcer that Sunday.

The announcer must be prepared to speak ad lib at a moment’s notice. There may be a few minutes – or just a few seconds – in hand before the next programme comes on. He must be prepared to speak intelligently and unharried without a script, to millions of viewers, making making up his words as he goes along. His announcement must finish dead on the second, and it must be conclusive.

He cannot break off in the middle of a sentence because the merciless studio clock has beaten him to it. All this he must assess as he goes along – and that’s not easy, particularly when the controller has called him up on the studio ‘talk back’ and told him that he has ‘one minute thirteen seconds to fill, starting in five seconds time!’

Butterflies In The Stomach

What is it like to sit in the announcer’s chair? Very, very lonely. At the other end of that camera facing him are millions of viewers – his friends, but in the studio he is all alone with nobody at his side, not even a cameraman, for the camera is operated by remote control in the adjoining control room.

Once he embarks on his announcements, he is out on his own, speaking in a small studio, with a cluster of monitor sets, clock, cue lights, microphones and cameras just three feet away from him and facing into the glare of the studio lights. And he knows that seven million people are listening, he hopes, to his every word.

“Butterflies?” says John, “my stomach breeds them at the beginning of each working day. But as you go through that day, hour by hour, there comes a time soon when those butterflies have settled down to sleep, and you become completely relaxed. Up to this point you have been acting with all the ability at your command, to appear relaxed, comfortable and easy.”

So there is is. Our announcer must be pleasant looking and have a pleasant speaking voice. He must have a friendly approach to the job. He must be a linguist, and preferably have had acting experience. Oh, and he must be able to control breeding butterflies.

The time – 15.18.09, or nine seconds past eighteen minutes past three. John Edmunds prepares to read an announcement, coming up in 12 seconds time. On the left is the studio monitor which he can switch on to see the actual programme, or himself as the camera sees him. On the front of his desk are his cue lights, red on the left, green on the right. The red light flashing means stand by, and “steady green” means go ahead. The studio clock, known unpopularly [sic] as “That Thing” is surmounted by the small, but all important Announcer’s Camera, which can be moved up and down or sideways by remote control from the COntrol Room, the windows of which can be seen in this picture. On the right of his desk by the arm of his chair can be seen the switch controls for the picture monitor and his microphone, which he switches on and off himself. All this equipment is within three feet of him as he makes his announcements.

Commentary

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Associated-Rediffusion on weekdays in London was stiff and formal. ATV London on weekends was bright and friendly. The difference between the two was clear.

Granada on weekdays in the North was austere and gaunt. ABC on weekends was cosmopolitan and laid back. The difference, again, was clear.

But what to do in the Midlands? ATV’s weekday bright and friendly is not an antonym for cosmopolitan and laid back. Defining the difference between the two was much harder.

ABC Midlands worked hard on this, using different camera angles and studio layouts to that of ATV Midlands for presentation – despite the two both coming from the same room and using the same facilities at the Alpha studios in Aston.

ATV favoured putting the announcer in a fairly tight close-up, little more than head and shoulders, against a plain background with a fixed camera.

ABC had to try to be different. The presentation studio at Alpha was unusually large – not huge by any means, but bigger than the average. That allowed for some freedom for Geoffrey Lugg and the others in ABC’s presentation department. They added a full set – on casters so it could be installed on Saturday mornings and easily removed on Sunday nights – and moved the camera back to present more of the announcer’s body. A low, comfortable chair encouraged the announcer to relax and lean back into the continuity set, compared to the close-up over a desk format of ATV that forced announcers to lean forwards.

This style of presentation was sufficiently different from that of ATV Midlands to stand out – although ABC’s Howard Thomas remained frustrated that he couldn’t compete on image with his weekday rivals in Birmingham – and also different enough to be used in the north during the day until about 1960 (and on Sunday mornings until 1964) for cheaper joint continuity, without diluting the difference between Granada and ABC.

The set itself was flexible, thanks to dotting the shelves with ornaments. Seasonal differences were easy to introduce – fresh flowers in a vase in the spring, more books and fewer knick-knacks in the autumn – and easy to decorate for Christmas and other special occasions.

Of note was the unusual use of the colour version of the ABC triangle logo on the wall – ABC was gone 18 months before colour came to ITV – and, in this picture, a copy of TVWorld, the ABC-ATV jointly owned listings magazine, waiting for the announcer to use to improvise to fill time between programmes.

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Three clocks, in fact. Geoffrey describes the clock face, telling us about the hands, the numerals and the mechanism – but he mentions no logo on the clock. From his description, this is the clock in question.

That clock coincides with Kif and Alan’s memories of the clock itself, with the proviso that neither of them can remember if the grey was at the top or the bottom – Geoffrey doesn’t specify. But what Kif and Alan both remember is the ABC shield to one side of the clock face. This isn’t described by Geoffrey, but then he’s answering a question (“will you describe the first ABC clock?”) literally: it didn’t occur to us to ask if he could describe the frame the clock was set in!

Combining Geoffrey’s clock face with Kif and Alan’s logo recollection produces this clock.

But here Alan has a conflicting memory: he is sure he saw the same clock but without the words “ABC Television” written in the shield device. Kif also has a vague memory of this. What they couldn’t explain was why this would happen, and both therefore doubted the result. Here’s that clock.

Transdiffusion has done further research into this to try to track down why two clocks would exist with such a strange difference. The answer turns out to be “Clock Spots”.

Advertising on early ITV was expensive: there was little room for it – six minutes in each hour, with a mere 7 hours on air each day – creating a supply and demand imbalance. The Independent Television Authority (ITA) and the government, via the General Post Office, were keen that local businesses, regional brands (very common at the time) and medium-sized companies should get access to the airwaves at a price they could afford.

One solution was “admags”, regular 15 minute programmes with a presenter looking at products and services available in the region, sometimes chatting with the manufacturer or shopkeeper themselves, which cut the expense of producing an advertisement to almost nothing and allowed local companies in.

But what about the regional brands and medium-sized businesses? They could afford an advert but not a slot to show it; or the slot but not the advert. Their products and services were often hard to advertise in an admag, with little to be said other than to show the thing to the camera and be done with it.

These potential advertisers were covered by “Clock Spots” – seven seconds of advertising slotted into the presentation of the station, treated as a separate item rather than a full advert. The station could cut to the clock – important in the days before it was common to have an accurate timepiece in most homes – at around 20 seconds to the hour, let the clock tick for 5 seconds, then cut to a 7 second advert (or spend 7 seconds with the announcer reading the copy over the clock ticking). Coming back from the advert left 8 seconds – enough for a namecheck for the station and an announcement into the next programme. This was a television version of what Radio Eirann and Radio Luxembourg did with their timechecks – Luxembourg’s “The time now by my H Samuel Everite watch is… [jingle]…you’re right on time with Everite!” becoming famous in its own right.

But this presented the ITA with a problem: these “Clock Spots” looked like the product in question was sponsoring the station as a whole, or perhaps the next programme. This practice was illegal under the Television Act 1954 that set up ITV, and while it wasn’t happening, that it looked like it might be was damning in the ITA’s eyes.

The fix to this problem was to debrand the clock before the “Clock Spot” – that way, the clock was being sponsored, not the station. This may seem like a strange set of hoops to jump through, but Independent Television was new and unsure of its feet; opposition from the Labour party to the entire concept of commercial television, which would persist into the 1960s, threatened the abolition of ITV should Labour come to power in any forthcoming election – antagonising opposition backbenchers by even seeming to break the spirit of the Act could be the ITA signing its own death warrant.

“Clock Spots” did not last long, with the ITA and the programme companies finding they broke the flow of presentation and damaged what we would now call the “branding” of the station; additionally, the price of “Clock Spots” rose as demand grew, until they were close to the cost of a 7-second ‘voice to slide’ advert (nicknamed “chipshop corner”) in an ordinary break anyway. Admags would disappear in 1963, abolished on the orders of the Postmaster General at the time of the Pilkington Report.

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When the ABC ‘shield’ changed to the ‘triangle’ in 1959, a new startup tune was introduced: Busy Batchelor, by Associated-Rediffusion’s Redvers Kyle, who composed music as a hobby (he did not compose this tune for A-R).

It was used until Perpetuum Mobile, as also used later by Thames, was introduced in 1962.

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ABC opens on Christmas Eve 1967 with a piece of James Last (there was no requirement to display a tuning signal or other technical matter over Christmas and Easter)

ABC North’s Christmas-adorned clock in 1967. For this start-up sequence, they switched from the ident to the clock over the last verse of the James Last music

Special occasions saw ABC North using two continuity announcers – here, David Hamilton and John Duncanson. Behind them, the usual cyclorama studio wall is covered in viewer Christmas cards

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Video of John Benson announcing at the start of The Eamonn Andrews Show courtesy of TvTimes1966 on YouTube

John Benson makes the ABC North authority announcement between Perpetuum Mobile and the ABC March, used 1959-1968

The announcer’s announcer, the “herald of them all” according to Southern’s Christopher Robbie as he prepared to close that station for the final time, was John Benson. His voice was to become famous nationally thanks to its rich tones working wonderfully in a range of television quiz shows – it’s him saying “And now, from Norwich, it’s the quiz of the week!” at the start of Sale of the Century. He was ABC North’s chief announcer for many years, going freelance upon the establishment of Thames, where he was paid by the second to announce, and made a good living from it. He died in 1995.

Video of the titles of Sale of the Century courtesy of allenjeremy on YouTube

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ABC WEEKEND TELEVISION – NORTH (1956-1968)

Notional Date: June 1964
Announcers: John Benson, Jill Bechley
Music: Perpetuum Mobile (Roberts), used 1962-1968; ABC March (Bliss), used 1956-1968

At one and the same time, the ABC start-up routine manages to be both an industry standard, and a daring departure from the norm. A departure, in that the choice of two company theme tunes with the Authority announcement between did away with the need for a pause in the main theme to make the announcement. This meant the company symbol could form up with its own discrete piece of music and not be reliant upon a crescendo in the main piece.

ABC were a company very conscious of the need to promote their name and image. This they did with non-stop gusto, throughout the sixties.

With a two day weekend contract in the North and Midlands, they found it essential to fight back against the five day domination of Granada and ATV respectively. Their chosen method was strong and dynamic branding, and the daily opening routine set the standard for the rest of the day.

Perpetuum Mobile was composed by Michael Roberts, a member of the company staff who wrote string music as a hobby. At three minutes and three seconds it was only just long enough to cover the minimum time the tuning signal required. Accordingly, the company symbol which followed had its own music.

Perpetuum was not the first piece ABC had used. In the early years Busy Batchelor and Mr Punch had been tried, but with a major revamp of ABC style at the end of the fifties, Perpetuum was introduced and together with its later use by ABC when they became Thames, was the stalwart of the genre for almost thirty years.

Taking ABC and Thames together, this was the longest lived start-up theme in Independent Television history, and the only one to have been used in all four major regions, over time.

The symbol form up over the second piece, the ABC March, is the principal ‘tour de force’ of television ident graphics of the sixties. It makes no bones about being an icon, intending to be one, exhorting the viewer to give respect to the authority of the station and taking a declamatory tone throughout. The pulsating triangle is screen size and dominant, the serif letters neat and symmetrical beneath.

This 28 second piece was also used as a local ident from time to time, and was always the choice for lunchtime closedowns after the Sunday morning service.

The crisp and businesslike tones of John Benson are heard between the pieces, giving the standard Authority announcement. For collectors of these licensing statements this is both definitive and stylish. The wording conveys authority, the intonation and inflection is word perfect but the use of the non-standard ‘you’re tuned to’ very daring for the time, adding real character. Amongst collectors of these gems, this is considered a great example of station identification. Listen to the way he mentions ‘channels nine and ten’ giving absolute equality of status to both.

John Benson was regarded by many in the trade, as the definitive Independent Television continuity announcer of the sixties. He was with ABC for thirteen years, and went on to work for Thames thereafter.

When ABC moved to London in 1968, they took these start-up practices with them, only substituting the Thames music for the ABC March.

This approach to company identity set the standard for many other companies to follow. The ABC Midland start-up was similar, but used John Edmunds, and later Bill Steel for the recorded announcement.

ABC and ATV were each contracted to produce 22 Sunday morning services per year, with STV, Anglia, Southern and TWW producing two each. These ABC and ATV church broadcasts came from all over the country, usually from the same town as had hosted their outside broadcast vans for football matches the day before.

The churches were often outside the company areas, but this was an economical measure that made good sense. The ABC Teddington fleet could easily cover a London service, and this was never a problem for rival ATV.

It is the elegance of this start-up routine, from an age without electronic caption creation, that inspired the original Transdiffusion children, and created their interest in television presentation as a hobby. We have a lot to thank ABC for today.

This article originally appeared on Transdiffusion before 2001. It has been republished with the addition of the animated ABC start-up recreation by Dave Jeffery.

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⬆︎ ABC’s clock from 1956… probably. See our article on how we recreated this lost clock from three different descriptions.

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How was ABC to respond, in such a way as to make its presence felt? How to find a way not to be overwhelmed by the Granada or ATV identity?

The answer was to be as different as possible from their opposite numbers. With Granada being Northern, dour and serious, ABC always felt lighter, with a more cosmopolitan touch. Against ATV in the Midlands, itself a lighter station, ABC went in the opposite direction, and became more heavyweight, emphasising its Adult Education and Sunday Arts programmes in extensive trailers.

This odd dichotomy of identity worked well in both cases, though seemed slightly more successful in the North. The Midland output suffered from sharing studios with ATV, and having to work hard to look different. In the North, separate studios seemed to facilitate a quite different weekend ‘feel’ to the station. This policy was successful with advertisers and ABC was always fully booked, and its rate card was more expensive than the Granada or ATV equivalents.

How did this affect the viewer?

As an ABC viewer in the early sixties, I was always impressed by the ‘balanced weekend package’ that ABC worked to provide. There was something for everyone – arts, variety, music, nostalgia, drama, ABPC’s films, children’s programmes, news and adult education, not to mention those weekend staples of sport, religion, and the Avengers.

Specialist programming abounded in the daytime slots, weekend programming generally starting before lunchtime, while weekday programmes started at teatime. Typically, in the early sixties daytimes, ABC had cookery, music, gardening, farming, and a highbrow cultural programme early on Sundays, with a magazine programme at teatime. These quality programmes balanced the more glitzy evening fare of films, drama and variety.

The weekday programming, hemmed in as it was between fixed points like news, Coronation Street and regional programming, was hard to vary and became predictable. With ABC at weekends, there was always something different, something special, or something unexpected. It could be “Teach Yourself Russian” from Tyne Tees on Saturday lunchtimes, “The Grammar of Cookery” on Sunday mornings or a joint production of “The Struggle for Peace”, with America’s Westinghouse for US education stations, on Sunday afternoons.

ABC offered a package of delights that made the weekend distinctive, and the weekdays with Granada or ATV predictable.

With a team of regular and friendly ‘in vision’ announcers, known on air as ‘station hosts’, and led by John Benson, John Edmunds, David Hamilton and Sheila Kennedy, ABC were never patronising, and always interesting. The contrast with the weekday companies was stark and very evident.

ABC succeeded in presenting a station personality that was quite unique in the television of the fifties and sixties.

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By this date, it was becoming clear that commercial television was a disaster. Indeed, Associated Newspapers, part of Associated-Rediffusion in London, were already making increasingly panicked moves to pull out of the company. ATV in the midlands and London were feeling the pinch and began to look for ways to extend their financing – until now supplied mainly by television and camera manufacturer Pye.

ABC’s midland operation had begun on 19 February that year and the extension into the north had been more expensive than the parent company, Associated-British Picture Corporation, had hoped.

Very soon, retrenchment became the watchword of the network. Morning programming died away. A-R backed away slightly from the ‘BBC with adverts’ ethos, moving highbrow, low audience programmes like those from the Hallé Orchestra away from peaktime and into the (comparatively) late night.

ABC was already producing a mixture of popular drama and entertainment programmes from its three sites, and the lower overheads inherent in their contract insulated them from the spiral downward. But ABPC rarely tolerated loss-making subsidiaries – especially one created for not much more than a way of promoting ABC Cinemas and ABPC films.

“Invisible earnings” was a phrase not much known outside of non-Keynesian economists and supply-side politicians at the time. Instead, 1950s capitalists saw things in terms of black and white – profit-making or non-profit-making.

Programmes meant profit, being sold to other stations in the UK and beyond, attracting advertising to the two operations and getting bums on seats, televisions bought and Band-III aerials installed.

Presentation, the forgotten linking material between one programme and another, or between a pause in programming and a resumption of the entertainment, was obviously non-profit-making.

So this is where the axe fell. More continuity came from Teddington and less from the regions. The presentation was perfunctory, plain, and likely to drop in a mention of the cinemas too for good measure.

As ITV’s fortunes began to recover, and with boom times possible round the corner, ABC’s management still thought little of presentation. Its programmes were popular, the station began to break even, then moved into profit. Who cared?

The regulator cared. The Independent Television Authority took its duty of providing quality television very seriously. An otherwise complementary annual report expressed dissatisfaction with ABC’s presentation style and content.

ABC management were horrified. Whilst the ITA had been critical about aspects of ATV, A-R and Granada, ABC had expected a good report – it was the golden boy of the regulator and had been since its inception.

The criticism was taken as a body-blow, but ABC did not react in the style we have become accustomed to in latter days. Instead, Howard Thomas, their legendary Managing Director, seemed to vow that this criticism would never be heard again. He hired a skilled presentation manager, relaunched the on-screen identity of the company (something never heard of before) and began to pump money into presentation.

In doing so, he changed the ethos at ABC forever. Suddenly, the identity of the station, its mark on its viewers minds, was to become of paramount importance. In doing so, he also solved a problem that the company was not necessarily even aware of – that of being noticed in amongst the 5-day players of A-R and Granada and the all-embracing 7-day might of ATV.

Suddenly, local viewers knew the difference between ABC and ATV in the midlands, and between ABC and Granada in the north. The advertising sales force had a recognisable brand from which to launch their hard sell. The ABC ident and chimes became synonymous nationwide with the quality programming, and the programming with the quality ident.

As the 1950s drew to a close and the exciting world of the sixties began to unfold, ABC entered its golden age.

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