THE heart of the World of Sport doesn’t beat. It ticks relentlessly.

Tick-tick. It’s the first sound heard by three typists, four sub-editors, two pools advisers, eight results men, three editorial executives, 40 sound, lighting, camera, studio, props and make-up staff when they arrive at Teddington Studios at 8.30 every Saturday morning.

Tick-tick, tick-tick. That’s the sound of the enemy – the small black clock with white figures on the studio wall. It reaches a pounding, panic-stricken peak at around 4.40 p.m. And stops at 5.15 p.m.

But for eight hours 45 minutes every Saturday, that clock is the god of World of Sport.

Morning. Staff arrive quickly, without fuss. No time to chat. There’s equipment to check. Telepronters, soon to chatter their frantic messages; scripts to recheck; schedules to go over.

First tea of the day. Steaming. Good. One tea lady makes 25 gallons [~114 litres – Ed] of tea every Saturday for the World of Sport team.

Control room. One long desk. Six monitor sets.

Sports editor John Bromley, tall, rather pale, intense, sits in the middle seat. Assistants Ian Marshall and Olympic runner Adrian Metcalfe flank him. Already they’re checking on outside broadcast teams. John Rickman at horse racing… Freddie Trueman on a roving commission… Bill Fallowfield at Rugby League… Kent Walton at wrestling.

Late instructions for all of them. Last minute link with cricket correspondent Ian Wooldridge in South Africa.

The line’s faulty. Needs attention. Are the telephonists on the switchboard happy? Everything OK with the 16-man O.B. teams?

No troubles. Not at the moment. Anchor-man Eamonn Andrews arrives.

Teleprinters start tapping mid-morning messages. A game off here… a team change somewhere else. Each message carefully scrutinised; weighed up for news potential and rushed to Andrews.

No time for lunch. Just tea. It’s nearing zero hour. 12.50 p.m.— when World of Sport booms across your screens.

Strangely, no outward excitement. A sense of calm. Of expectancy. Of relief. Who was it that said waiting was the worst part of war? Countdown … three, two, one … IN. Perfectly synchronised. The face of Eamonn Andrews appears on the two centre monitors in the Control Boom.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, bang on 12.50 p.m. The war is on. The enemy is the clock.

First film report. Bromley waves his hands in the air as the flashover from studio to film seems to be seconds out. Sighs with immense relief as it flicks on in perfect time.

Pictures from Catterick racing appear on the two monitors on the right. John Rickman tuning in. Teleprinters going. Everyone has a job. News flashes from Bloemfontein to Birmingham are plonking into the in-tray.

Over to Catterick. First race. John Rickman selects his tip. Editorial racing man Ian Marshall duly notes. Eamonn Andrews, off screen, gets a few facial flicks with a powder puff from a make-up girl.

In comes the result of the first race. Jubilation in the Control Room. John Rickman tipped the winner. Eamonn does a double-handed “thumbs up” across the studio floor. Tick-tick. Everything going fine.

The soccer programme has kicked off. Flash. Denis Law has scored. That’s quick. And worth a mention. Skilfully, Eamonn’s voice is superimposed over snooker with the news. Another quick score message. Passed to Eamonn.

Panic, panic, panic. That last score … it was a Combination League score, not first team stuff. Frantic waving of arms in the Control Room, trying to attract Eamonn’s attention through the window. A messenger boy gallops away at full throttle with the correction.

“Now steady down, lads,” shouts Bromley. But is he just reassuring himself?

Executive producer Geoffrey Gilbert sails into the scene from his studio control box in the gallery. Declares that things are going smoothly.

Back again comes racing. John Rickman back on the screen, weighing up the next race’s prospects. “Tell ’em about your first race winner, Rickers,” implores John Bromley. (Nicknames are rife: Rickers, Bromers, Matters. I swiftly became Lanners!)

“OK, OK, Eamonn can do it,” said Geoffrey Gilbert. “Not to worry, lad. It’ll all work out.”

Tick-tick, tick-tick. Trouble. The 2.45 p.m. race starts 13 minutes late. Big trouble. Timing thrown out. The odd minute is allowed for. Thirteen minutes is a lifetime.

Schedule running late. Urgent readjustments. Cut Jimmy Hill interview. Get back snooker.

Soccer results coming in. Results “king” Dave Richmond collates the mass of teleprinter messages thumping on to his desk. All around a cacophony of clattering, typing, shouting. This is full stretch.

Yet on the studio floor, complete calm.

Wrestling over. Eamonn Andrews sums up the headlines. Into result sequence. Result reader Martin Locke is allowed exactly four minutes 40 seconds to cover all six leagues. He takes his time, standing casually before a mike, reading from a monitor in the studio. Ian Marshall does the same for the racing round-up.

All eyes on the clock. Tick-tick. tick-tick. No longer a menace. Eamonn signs off. Bang, theme music. Bang, advert for toothpaste.

John Bromley strides out of the Control Room, thanking everyone loudly. The clattering has stopped; plenty of chatter. Eamonn Andrews sits back, pours himself coffee from a couple of thermos jugs.

The news room is tidied and emptied within five minutes. One Saturday’s war is over. Next Saturday’s starts at 5.31 p.m. that same evening.

But at least you don’t hear the tick of the clock any more.

The post What makes World of Sport tick? appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

A BISHOP and a Member of Parliament discussing marriage; the history of a pre-Conquest church; information about pilgrimages to Lourdes. These are some of the things viewers will see in ABC’s religious programme, Living Your Life, during the next few weeks.

A wide diversity of subjects to include under the heading religion. But this will be an informal, informative, hard-hitting and sometimes controversial TV programme. It reaches a greater public; it brings religion into the lives of non-churchgoers.

Man behind the programme is 31-year-old Tom Singleton. His qualification for producing this series is that he studied theology at school, was active in the Methodist church and a member of the YMCA.

He has, however, no doctrinaire outlook. “I think that is perhaps a good thing,” he said, explaining that subjects were chosen to appeal to every denomination.

Certainly Tom Singleton is not biased. He has had programmes devoted to Roman Catholic interests — Douglas Hyde, ex Communist turned Roman Catholic, was interviewed. He gave extra time to a Methodist programme when German pastor Martin Niemoller was speaking in Manchester.

On another programme he got four young Church of England clerics to discuss their training. He has gone outside the Church to discuss moral problems of young people in industry.

Tom Singleton is a man with a fund of new ideas, inquisitive about religion and sympathetic towards human problems. These, allied to his knowledge of television, are the reasons why he handles his programmes in such an interesting way. He was born in Old Trafford, Manchester, near the famous cricket ground. At 18 he joined the Army. Broadcasting came into his life when, with the Indian Army, he began taking part in Forces programmes.

Five years later he was demobilised – but be carried on Forces broadcasting as a civil servant. Later he joined the British Forces Network in Germany, after which he was appointed Programmes Officer for the Forces Network in the Middle East.

Lively, broadminded Singleton left this post to join ABC just before the Midlands opening. Living Your Life is not his only work for the company — he is also Head of Presentation.

He is married and has two young children. He writes books and plays. He wrote The Gloves, a play which starred Dennis Price and Betty McDowall on television.

One of his plans is to show the changing face of church architecture. This begins on February 9 when, in the first programme about the parish church, ABC cameras go to Wootton Wawen, between Birmingham and Stratford-on-Avon, to study the pre-Conquest church of St Peter’s. The earliest record goes back to AD 723.

The late George Gilbert Scott described St Peter’s as “an epitome in stone of the English Church and Nation.”

Tom Singleton told me: “We will not concentrate on individual churches after this programme, but will describe different facets in the architecture of other beautiful churches in the North and Midlands.”

The post New plans for ‘Living Your Life’ appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

LET’S start with an indisputable fact. The play, be it live, filmed or telerecorded, is among the most popular items on the television agenda.

Let’s take the second fact, deemed indisputable by many an expert — that with ITV’s expansion and the increase in transmission hours, the supply of first-rate TV drama must eventually dry up.

That’s why the situation isn’t being left to look after itself. All the programme companies are on the look-out for new writers of talent and promise. And one of the biggest pieces of bait to tempt professional writers to write especially for television comes from ABC TV.

They announce a competition for plays, promise big money prizes for three winning plays, production, if the standard of the work is high enough, and possible contracts for some of the entrants.

There is no shortage of submitted plays. Something like 150 arrive at ABC TV every week. Mainly they are the work of enthusiastic amateurs. Drama Supervisor Dennis Vance admits:

“Many of them are unreadable. Then we get oldies that have been going the rounds for years — some I recognise from my BBC days. Not more than 20 a week come from professional writers. Not more than 10 a week are good enough to be read by me.”

Read by Vance — that means good enough to get through a couple of readings by the script department, for Vance could never cope with all the scripts, and supervise the non-stop activities of the drama department. And produce plays himself.

Drama is Vance’s life blood. And it’s the speciality of the company he works for. They want writers; they have signed producers — “Best production team in the country,” claims Vance. They are building a stable of young actors, and they have planned a big programme for the “Armchair Theatre” series in the near future.

Ann Todd is to star in The Lady of the Camellias in February. The same month Eugene O’Neill’s classic, Emperor Jones, with an all-coloured cast, vies with offerings from Italy, A Gust of Wind by Forzano, and Australia, The Night of the Ding Dong by Ralph Peterson, for Sunday night attention.

Raymond Massey comes from America in March to star in his own play, The Hanging Judge. The She-Wolves, by French authors Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (of The Fiends fame), is down for production the same month.

Beautiful American Kim Stanley arrived in London a few weeks back, to star in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She made her name with a TV play written by Horton Foote, The Travelling Lady. And it’s that “namemaker” that ABC have offered her for her first TV appearance in England.

But before we get to these, on January 26 there’s Tragedy in a Temporary Town, which was written by Reginald Rose and stars Janet Munro. Rose, like his contemporary Paddy Chayevsky, made headlines when his TV plays were turned into film hits, so any new play by him is something of an event.

The use of young players like Janet Munro is part and parcel of Vance’s starbuilding policy. So is the offer of exclusive contracts to a selected few artists.

Blonde, lovely Mary Peach, who has the female lead in The Master Builder on Sunday (January 19) got the first. Canadian Neil McCallum the second. Four more are still unclaimed, waiting for the right artists.

What qualities are needed? “Personal magnetism that is transmittable; talent; pleasant and attractive appearance,” says Vance. For them, as for McCallum and Peach, there will be seven-year contracts; plays especially written; release for stage and film work that ABC believes will further their careers and which they wish to do.

The reason for the offer? The company wishes to ensure a supply of stars, as well as new plays — which leads right back to the competition.

Plays may be submitted by any professional writer — with the emphasis on the word professional — who has not yet had work produced on TV. A short list will be prepared for a panel consisting of critics, a famous TV playwright and a leading TV actor and actress, from which the winning three entries will be chosen.

The settings must be contemporary, certainly not straying before the post-war period. And what is being sought is not necessarily a man with a good TV technique but one who can produce a good story.

“If we find the right writers,” Vance adds a parting titbit, “we would be prepared to offer five-year contracts for a play a year.”

The post Prizes for playwrights, contracts for players appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

WELL-KNOWN music-hall figures will get equal prominence with youngsters who have only just burst into the world of entertainment in ABC’s new fortnightly variety series, which starts next Saturday.

Say ABC: “We are out to provide variety — in the true sense of the word. And that means bringing along artists capable of satisfying the demands of all age groups.”

“The ‘pop’ music fans will be well looked after; but at the same time we shall balance the bill by introducing some of the older stars about whom there is a nostalgic appeal for many of our viewers.”

There will be a good example of this determination to cater for varying tastes in the second programmes of the series, on October 5.

George Formby, who has been drawing in record seaside crowds during his summer tour of the coast, will be making one of his rare TV appearances.

And in direct contrast will be the Charles McDevitt skiffle group, which in the last few months has had a swift rise to top billing in a successful provincial tour.

An interesting point about this show is that the McDevitt group will use it as an opportunity to introduce their new singer, recruited to replace Nancy Whisky, who is now a star in her own right.

To meet the demands of teenage viewers ABC is arranging to include skiffle groups or “pop” singers in every programme in the new series. Among skifflers booked are Lonnie Donegan, Johnny Duncan and Terry Dene.

Shirley Abicair and her zither will be in the first programme, and other singers lined up include Edna Savage, Eve Boswell, Michael Holliday, Jimmy Young and Garry Miller.

On the laughter side there are some popular comedians to follow Albert Modley (who is in the first show) and George Formby. Ted Lune, the lanky lad with the thin face and wide, staring eyes is one. Then there is pudgy Reg Dixon and that ever-young veteran of show business, Jimmy Clitheroe.

This is the first time ABC has originated its own professional variety show, although the company has presented many semi-professional acts in its long-running Bid for Fame.

To launch the series, ABC have signed up Arthur Lane, an experienced light entertainment producer.

The shows will come from the Manchester studios, where they will be able to take advantage of such aids to unorthodox presentation as a revolving stage with a 30ft diameter, and a giant bow fronted lift, 46ft long and 12ft wide, which can sink 4ft 6in below the studio floor.

Another unorthodox feature will be the way in which artists will be introduced. None of the shows will have the usual type of compere.

Instead, a novel substitute has been devised about which Arthur Lane and his team are keeping a discreet silence.

All I can say is that a group of dancers — four men, but only one girl — are this week rehearsing some unusual routines by which they hope to weave a thread of continuity between the acts.

Or, as ABC put it: “As far as presentation is concerned we are trying out a new and completely individual style.”

The post And now – star variety from ABC appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Sunday’s Communion service, from Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral will be ITV’s most ambitious church broadcast. Two ABC outside broadcast units will televise the service, and special equipment never before used will illuminate the vast cathedral. Seven cameras will take viewers round the cathedral, the origins of which are described by the man who has made it his life’s work

I DON’T think I realised when I decided to enter for the competition to design Liverpool Cathedral in 1901 that it would affect my whole life. It was a small beginning, just a blank sheet of paper, a well-sharpened pencil, and the need a vision for what I knew I wanted to do.

I was living with my family in a flat overlooking London’s Battersea Park. My father, an architect, had died while I was still at school, and I was articled to a church architect, Mr Temple Moore.

The terms of my articles said I must not undertake any outside work without permission so I sought the permission of Mr Moore. “It will be good experience you, my boy.” he said. A truer word was never spoken. I have been working on the cathedral ever since, and I shall never see it finished.

Architects, of course, employ different techniques. Broadly speaking. I like to try several lines before I make my choice. But once I have an idea I like on my blank sheet of paper, the task becomes a joy.

That is, just how it was with Liverpool Cathedral. The only hardship for me, once I had got started, was going to bed.

When I was doing my drawings for the competition, I used to leave the office on the early side and get there in the morning a little late. I went to bed around 1 am.

After I had won the competition — I was then 22 – Mr Moore asked: “However did you find the time to do such wonderful drawings?” I told him about my late and early finish at the office. I don’t think he minded.

Now I am 78 and there is nearly another quarter of the cathedral to be completed. Since winning the competition, I have never looked back. I never had to struggle with “early beginnings.” The cathedral gave me a flying start in life.

Because of my youth and inexperience on the business side, the executive committee responsible for building the cathedral appointed me a joint architect with Mr G. F. Bodley, one of their advisory architects.

The design went through three stages: the first was my competition design; the second was that design much modified by Bodley; and the third came after 1907, when Mr Bodley died and I was left in sole charge of the building. I then redesigned it.

At that time we did not have what is called now “contemporary architecture.” We used past styles. There was the Gothic style, which emphasises the perpendicular lines of a building, and the classic, such as St Paul’s, which emphasises the horizontal.

I preferred the Gothic because its vertical lines appear to disappear into the skies where we believe, I never can quite understand why, Heaven lies. Hell is down below. I felt that for a church, this vertical style has much more of a religious inspiration than the classic.

Drawing the plans in small scale was only a part of my work for the cathedral. It is no good saying to the builders, stonemasons and other craftsmen: “There are the plans Get on with it.”

I have drawn in full scale every line of that cathedral. I have had the drawing paper on my office floor, crawling over it, drawing mouldings to full scale. I have done plans of every piece of intricate masonry.

Sometimes I have expected the craftsmen to come back to me with scores of questions. But they have not done so, and am delighted to record my admiration for the craftsmen who have worked on the cathedral.

They are the finest in the world. I am sometimes astounded how they have done such intricate work so that everything falls perfectly into line.

Naturally, Liverpool Cathedral is my own child. I love it all, for I have watched it grow, stone by stone. And I think my favourite interior view is looking up at the central vault from the central space.

It was in the central space that I once met a woman sightseer who, not knowing who I was, murmured: “I do think it extraordinary that the architect of this building could have so big a thing in so small a brain.” In a quiet way I was rather flattered.

During the war. when mercifully the cathedral was spared any serious structural damage, we had some old stonemasons continuing with the work.

In my life I have designed hundreds of buildings: Waterloo Bridge, Battersea Power Station, the re-building of the House of Commons, the restoration of London’s Guildhall … and the public telephone kiosk – though I didn’t choose its beastly red colour.

As an old but nevertheless active and practising architect, I am just a little sad that I shall never see my greatest work, Liverpool Cathedral, finished. But I have every hope that my son and partner, Richard Gilbert Scott, will.

• The cathedral was completed in 1978, but not to the additional plans drawn up by Richard Gilbert Scott – Ed

The post My vision in stone appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

IN Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and London the hunt goes on. The hunt for talent. It’s all part of ABC’s plan to present the best possible entertainers in Bid For Fame.

Auditions are given to everyone who applies. And to meet the demand, for 12 hours every day someone, somewhere, is conducting auditions.

With more than 2,000 applications before the series began, entries are still rolling in. Two hundred people are seen every week.

I went to an audition in a Birmingham hotel. Throughout the week, George Stanford, ABC senior studio manager, had patiently considered all the applicants. Out of the 200 acts he had seen, 20 had been asked to return on Friday evening to give a second performance before the critical eye of producer Eddie Kebbell.

I asked George Stanford, weary, and yet still urbane under the bright, naked light of the audition room, how he felt after so much entertainment.

He smiled, lit the umpteenth cigarette and replied: “If these people are willing to go through the ordeal of an audition, then it’s up to me to see them through. Each thinks he or she may have that indefinable something which could make him or her tomorrow’s ‘top of the bill’ star.

“Six in 100 of these acts will eventually be seen in the show. So even if they don’t come in the final placings, they’ll know they’ve enough talent to be seen by millions of viewers.”

Kebbell, who made the final choice, admitted that this was tough. He hates saying ‘No’ to youthful hopes.

“Many acts need a lot more training; lots more confidence. We tell them so. It may be hard to take, but we don’t hold out false hopes.

“This isn’t just another amateur talent show. Anyone can apply for an audition — whether semi-professional or professional. All we want is a slick, entertaining show. If a television appearance brings success to the performer, then they are happy — and so are we.”

Birmingham’s Bob Hatch, the comedian who won the finals of the last Bid For Fame series, came along to give encouragement to some of the local artists who were friends of his. He told me that his TV success had meant success in other spheres, such as sound radio.

Good comedians are hard to find. Most acts consist of singers and instrumentalists. There are “pop” singers by the score — and they all sing the hit song of the moment.

“There is a shortage of comedians and solo dancers,” said Kebbell. Two singers who did please him were Jimmy Grant and Pat Howard. They hadn’t applied for an audition but were discovered singing at a church concert on the outskirts of Birmingham. George Stanford had asked them to come along to give an audition for Kebbell.

Newcastle-born Jimmy Grant, who sang Granada in the best Mario Lanza fashion, is a carpenter. He was delighted at the thought of appearing in the show and couldn’t believe that he had been “discovered.”

Pat Howard, a housewife with an eight-month-old daughter, has a powerful voice — “She could be a second Anne Shelton,” said Kebbell.

Brenda Vickers of Loughborough and John Padbury of Oxford are clerks. They have been dancing together for only a few months.

“I’m going to suggest them for the Windmill Theatre,” said Kebbell. If he thinks there is scope for an artist in any other sphere, he is ready to pass on a recommendation.

Twenty-one-year-old Sylvia Cooper had travelled 50 miles from Nottingham. I shan’t be home until two in the morning,” she said, “but it was well worth it now I know I’ve passed my audition.”

It was nearly midnight. The week of auditions was over. For the many disappointments, there were just a few successes.

And for these happy people, the long road towards success is open.

The post Auditions – the ‘telescope’ that finds new stars appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

IN this turbulent world it is not unusual for people to be puzzled, perplexed and bewildered by many of the things that go on around them.

Information and explanation are not always easy to come by. In local and national affairs there is a growing tendency to conduct matters of public importance behind closed doors.

How often do we read of hush-hush meetings, of confidential memoranda, of documents stamped TOP SECRET, STRICTLY PRIVATE, NOT FOR PUBLICATON? It is because it believes that the public is being needlessly kept in ignorance about many things in which they may be vitally concerned that ABC has decided to sink a lot of money into a fortnightly 45-minute programme that has one aim: to take viewers behind the scenes and find out exactly what is going on.

ABC Investigates is something new to television. Nothing like so complicated a technical set-up has been devised before. Each of these programmes will require the services of something like 150 people, for each in effect, is four different productions rolled into one.

The resources of three different studios — in Manchester, Birmingham and London — will combine with a complete outside broadcast unit, which might be located anywhere in Britain.

But ABC is confident it will be money well spent. As a new development in the use of television as a means of information, the opportunity to pioneer in this field has been enthusiastically welcomed.

A particularly strong team has been set up. Simon Kester, who made his name with brilliant cross-examinations in State Your Case, gets the star job of investigator-in-chief. As programme editor, ABC has brought in George Scott, Editor of Truth. From the world of films has come ace documentary director John Rowdon, who undertakes his first ITV job as producer of the programme. Under him are four directors.

There is also a team of journalists whose job it is to comb the country and ferret out the facts that will form the basis of these programmes.

Recently, I spent a day with them, and later I went out with Simon Kester and his OB team when ABC Investigates went on the air for the first time.

Although this was a full-scale effort, however, it was not seen by home viewers. The pictures and arguments were purely an experiment to see how the programme could be presented and to test the complicated technical details.

I think viewers will like Simon Kester in his new role. As the programme got under way, I found him still as sharp and pungent, if not quite as aggressive, as we knew him in State Your Case.

His task is a formidable one. As an interrogator, he has to bring out, in the most forceful way, the opinions of people he introduces to the experts. Then he tackles the panel on behalf of the people he has been interviewing, and conducts a free-for-all in an effort to thrash out the problem down to the smallest detail.

It is in this part of the programme, when Kester has the opportunity of standing up to the experts himself, that he returns to the punchy, incisive questioning that in State Your Case earned him the tag of “most hated man on TV.”

I talked to the programme’s “Big Three” in the Manchester studios afterwards. Said John Rowdon: “I like to think of the programme as a round Britain electronic conference in which we can attack those aspects of English life which, in our opinion, are not wholly democratic. We shall be out to expose things which some people would much rather keep quiet.”

Added George Scott: “Editing the programme as it goes along is a fascinating opportunity for any journalist. But then, this programme will itself be like a newspaper. We shall be following the news, and the way we treat our subjects depends on the latest news.

“The subjects themselves? Things like inflation, or the common market. Do they sound dull? No subject need be dull if you treat it the right way, if you feel the air of excitement in what you are doing.

I reminded him what John Rowdon had said about exposing matters which people in authority would rather keep quiet. How would he get such people to appear in the programme if they knew they were going to be attacked?

“We shall give them an opportunity to say their piece, and, if they refuse, we shall say it for them,” said Scott. “In that case, I think they will prefer to come along and say it for themselves.”

Simon Kester left me in no doubt about his feelings on his new job. “I think it has immense possibilities,” he said, “because of the way it brings members of the public face-to-face with so-called experts and authorities.

“Why ‘so-called’ experts,” I asked.

Replied Kester: “Often a man sets himself up to be an expert, but when he’s subject to cross-examination you find he’s not so much of an expert after all.

“This is where I come in. My purpose is to interpret the questions in the minds of the public and put them to these ‘experts’ in a challenging way. They will go through a tough cross-examination.

“I feel that I shall be doing a service for the public. This is the sort of job that would give any serious-minded citizen a great thrill. In probing public affairs, I shall not be as a compere who has learnt his script but as an ordinary, inquisitive human being.”

The post ABC INVESTIGATES – with the gloves off appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

LIGHTS dim in ABC’s Didsbury studios. The electric clock points to after midnight. The stars, the extras and most of the cameramen and technicians have gone home.

One man walks alone through the main glass doors and says “Goodnight” to the red-coated commissionaire.

The Rev Eric Geddes’ Sunday has begun.

For 15 months Mr Geddes has been giving Epilogues at the end of the ABC Saturday and Sunday programmes — five minute talks on living with God’s help. His are words that have brought comfort to many viewers.

Speaking before the cameras means more work for Mr Geddes, for his task does not end when he removes his make-up. Viewers write him many letters; some to thank him for his words, others to ask for advice. Many want to see him, saying they would prefer to discuss a problem with him — a friendly stranger — than with their local priest.

But they seldom call on a Sunday. Like other pastors. Mr Geddes conducts four services at his own church — St Marks, Gorton … the church whose football club became Manchester United.

This extra television work does not mean that Mr Geddes neglects his parish or parishioners. He is always “at home” to them; he visits and helps them. Television means he works harder, longer hours than the average priest. But he does not begrudge a moment.

When Mr Geddes leaves the studio in the early hours of Sunday morning he takes with him a recording of his Epilogue, which he plays back in the book-lined drawing-room of his home. Then he gets four or five hours’ sleep before he is up again to take the early morning service at his church, five minutes’ walk from his home.

Outside, it is not a beautiful church. But the interior is pleasing. It stands among rows of tiny, grimy houses in which live, says Mr Geddes, some of the best people he has met. The area is a change for him and his wife. They moved to Manchester from a Norfolk village.

After the early service Mr Geddes goes home for a short break before Matins. He does not write his sermon; he thinks of his subject and when he reaches the pulpit he speaks from the heart.

There are usually four or five baptisms before he leaves for lunch. Then there is a children’s afternoon service to conduct before he can read the day’s news. He does this because he likes his television Epilogues to be topical. They are not scripted. Mr Geddes speaks off the cuff.

At one time he had to arrive at Didsbury early in the evening to rehearse his talk. “As I wasn’t working from a script I used to find that difficult,” he told me. “I could never be quite sure whether 1 had said something at the beginning of my talk or during the rehearsal.”

So now it is several hours after Sunday evening service that Mr Geddes makes his way to Didsbury — arriving an hour before he is due to appear, to give him time for make-up.

It is again after midnight when Mr Geddes leaves the studio after his Sunday night telecast. He has a busy week before him. I asked him whether he was nervous in front of the cameras and how he managed to think of something new and interesting to say each time. “I’m not nervous,” he replied. “And many of the things I say are related to personal experiences … the stories one can tell most vividly are of things that happen to oneself.”

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THE eyebrows shot up. “Me? Square?” Producer Jack Good spluttered indignantly at the idea. Then he added: “Well, perhaps physically. But that’s as far as it goes.”

Jack, the man who looks more like the Oxford undergraduate he once was than the TV producer he is now, was talking about ABC’s Boy Meets Girls.

He beamed and said: “You might say the show’s gone square though. Comparatively, that is.”

Comparatively, because this 28-year-old veteran of two teenage rock ‘n’ roll TV successes has a reputation for blasting the viewers almost out of their seats.

But that’s finished. The bounce of Jack’s last series, Oh Boy!, has been toned down. So much so, that some are saying that Jack is going square.

Jack explained: “It’s not true, of course. Rock ‘n’ roll is not as overwhelming as it was. But there is nothing sudden about the change.

“Popular music is tending to become more melodic and less frantic. The arrangements are sweeter and the whole atmosphere is different – like the new show.

“Oh Boy! taught me that there is no substitute for personality in entertainment. The high spots always came when an artist got something of himself across.

The attack can become just as boring as the slow, dragging pace. We shall us an occasional ‘wild’ number, but the accent is on friendliness and the programme is aimed at a wider audience.

“We are out to capture the elder brothers and sisters of the teenagers. And the mums and dads, too.

“I have never been a rock ‘n’ roll producer. I have been a producer of excitement. It’s not the music that counts, it the thrill.”

Giving viewers the thrills and excitement are some of the old favourites from Oh Boy! Among them is petite South African organist Cherry Wainer and her cousin, drummer Don Storer; sax star Red Price; the Vernons Girls from Liverpool; and Marty Wilde, the show’s compere.

Twenty-four-year-old Cherry is not worried about the soft-pedal technique “It’s quite a change of course,” she said “but I like all kinds of music and I’m enjoying every minute of it.”

Said cousin Don: “This quieter atmos phere gives us a better chance to get a number over.”

Don and Cherry – they were last in South Africa almost two years ago – both love England. “Apart from the weather,” said 30-year-old Don. “I know you are all blowing your tops about this summer you’ve just had, but really it was no better than are many winters in Durban.” Producer Good is bringing into the programme guest artists and new stars from America and the Continent.

On a recent two-and-a-half month tour of Europe he found Little Tony and His Brothers. They will be making their second in the show appearance tomorrow (September 26).

Little Tony is 18. He sings in English but he does not yet speak it fluently.

His guitar-playing brothers, Enrico, 16, and Alberto, 21, are also up against the language difficulty. But when I met them, all three were talking excitedly to British rock ‘n’ roller Terry Dene. He speaks no Italian, but he discovered that the language of rock ‘n’ roll is international.

Little Tony took to rock ‘n’ rolling a year ago and already has many discs to his credit. He has won top prizes in rock ‘n’ roll festivals, too.

When he became interested in it he took English rock ‘n’ roll records to an elderly English language teacher to learn them parrot-fashion. It has paid off handsomely.

Many people think he is Italian. But though he lives in Rome he comes from the tiny, mountain-top Republic of San Marino.

And he proudly produces his Roman identity card, which describes him as a “foreigner,” to prove it.

The friendly, family atmosphere of the show is being exploited in a glamorous way – with the 16 Vernons Girls.

The group – all are aged between 17 and 25 – has two understudies. They attend rehearsals and learn the routines so that if a girl falls ill or leaves to get married there is always a replacement available.

“The Vernons are the first group who have not been presented as girls who look alike and dress alike,” said Jack Good.

“They are a nice bunch of kids; there is nothing of the stainless-steel glitter of the ordinary show girl about them. They are happy and friendly.

“After Oh Boy! we decided that if the public knew more about them they would go for them in a big way.”

Jack has in mind chiefly viewing mothers and their sons. He would like the mothers to regard the girls as their daughters and the sons to regard them as their sisters.

Dance director Leslie Cooper said: “The girls are being featured more in the new show than they were in Oh Boy! and we think it will serve to increase their popularity.”

The girls get plenty of fan mail. And 23-year-old Margaret Stredder, who wears spectacles, gets more than any of them.

Silver-blonde Margaret has seven pairs of glasses (one for each day of the week) and a regular boy-friend.

But the boy the girls “dig” the most is 19-year-old Marty Wilde, star of the show. He has a taste for fast cars as well as fast music.

Marty, owner of a sports car, told me: “I don’t get much time for motoring these days. I’m far too busy.”

The new role of compere? Marty thinks it’s terrific. “I’m very excited about it. It’s the biggest break for me so far and I hope this new show is going to be a great success.”

Marty is not worried that the general tone-down will lose him some of his fans. “I think I shall gain 10 new fans for every one I may lose. This treatment of the programme is just what teenagers want.”

Twenty-year-old Terry Dene, who shares Marty’s interest in speed (he has a motor-cycle), agreed.

“I have been doing more ballads than rock ‘n’ roll numbers and I have found that they have gone down better,” said Terry. “I don’t think people want to be knocked out of their seats any more.

“I wouldn’t say that rock is dying, but there is a swing towards the quieter numbers.”

Quiet, sweet, friendly. That’s Boy Meets Girls. It’s not the mixture as before, but it’s the formula that should give Jack Good his hat-trick of TV hits.

The post Boy Meets Girls appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

The post Opportunity Knocks for Brenda Marsh appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Chorussed the fans –

“We love you Beatles,

Oh! yes we do.

Wherever you go,

We’ll follow you.

When you are not near us

We are blue.

Oh! Beatles, we love you”.

Within twenty-four hours of The Beatles’ triumphant return from America, the four undisputed kings of the pop-world were at Teddington rehearsing for their first ‘home again’ TV show – ABC’s “Big Night Out”.

George, Paul, John and Ringo had landed at London Airport in the cold, grey hours of Saturday morning to be greeted by the screams of 10,000 eager and delighted fans. And no less tumultuous a welcome awaited the Liverpool group when they arrived at the studios to keep their date with ABC.

Fans Gather Overnight
Beatles fans began to gather outside the studio gates hours in advance of the planned arrival of the four boys. Many hundreds of youngsters had made their way to Teddington straight after a long vigil at the airport the day before and had camped out all night in the hope of catching yet another fleeting glimpse of their idols.

“They’re Coming Up by Boat!”
ABC officials, concerned for the safety of their much mobbed star guests, had worked out an elaborate plan to dodge the mad, wild, scrambling crowd gathered around the gates. From a secret rendezvous the Beatles were taken by car to the river and transferred to a police launch for the rest of the journey to Teddington. But somehow the secret leaked out and word quickly spread among the fans, “They’re coming up by boat.”

Riverside Pandemonium
For a time then it was pandemonium. Crush barriers and commissionaires were swept aside as thousands of Beatlemaniacs rushed to throng the river bank. Harrassed [sic] but good natured ABC security guards finally managed to restore some semblance of order. But not before several over-eager teenagers had fallen into the water and been dragged back on the bank again, soaked to the skin.

By the time the police launch drew alongside the landing stage shortly after 11.00 a.m., excitement was at fever pitch. The Beatles, standing in the cockpit and smiling broadly, acknowledged a roar of greeting, stepped ashore, paused for a moment for the photographers and then, with a final wave to their fans, made a dash for the safety of Studio 1.

Half-an-hour later the rehearsals for “Big Night Out” were under way and, as the boys went through their paces with programme hosts Mike and Bernie Winters, other TV cameras were recording the scene for inclusion in another ABC scoop, “The Beatles Are Back!” – a 30 minute documentary covering the first 48 hours of their return to Britain.

Split Second Timing
Produced by Lloyd Shirley and directed by Tom Clegg, “The Beatles are Back!”, which was transmitted over the National Network on Sunday night, was, in itself, a major achievement in television programming and split second timing. Researchers, writers, cameramen and production staff had worked around the clock from early on Saturday morning evolving a format, shooting material on film or video tape, marrying the two together and getting the programme on the air in time to live up to ABC’s reputation for spot-on technicality.

Said producer Lloyd Shirley, “It was a race against time and there were moments when it looked as though we couldn’t possibly make it on schedule. But we had a great team and the Beatles couldn’t have been more helpful so everything worked fine.”

It was not until hours after “The Beatles Are Back!!” had gone out over the air that George, Paul, John and Ringo finally left Teddington, their recording stint over and “Big Night Out” safely on the shelf. It had been another long and tiring day. And outside in the darkness the patient fans were still waiting.

The Beatles and all the other top Mersey groups are heading for Montreux. Not in person but on videotape – to the festival of world TV light entertainment in April.

Official Entry
ABC TV learnt this week that their special Lucky Stars show ‘The Merseybeats’ which was transmitted on the ITV Network last December, has been selected as the official Independent Television entry for the Montreux Golden Rose Award.

Golden Rose
Another accolade for the Mersey groups, Thank Your Lucky Stars, producer Philip Jones and ABC TV who are hoping to add the Golden Rose to the two Melody Maker awards for the top pop-music show won by Lucky Stars over the last two years.

ABC TV plan to give viewers across the National Network more exciting light entertainment shows, with Sunday night series ‘Blackpool – Night Out’ in the summer.

Top Performers
Starting on July 5th and continuing for 10 weeks in the Sunday Palladium slot, this will be a one-hour variety show transmitted live from ABC’s new theatre at Blackpool. As well as featuring much of the comedy and musical talent that abounds in the North today, the show will star all the top-line performers in Blackpool for the summer season.

‘Blackpool – Night Out’ will be the best evening of entertainment that ABC TV has brought viewers yet.

With the story of ABC TV’s Beatles scoop comes more news of the Company’s success in the light entertainment field. ‘Big Night Out’ – the popular variety show which viewers in the rest of the country see on Saturday nights – is to be screened on the London ITV channel on Tuesdays by Associated-Rediffusion, the weekday contractor. First London screening will be The Beatles’ home-coming show on March 3rd at 8.0 p.m.

When they heard about the deal, Mike and Bernie Winters – regular hosts and comedians on ‘Big Night Out’ – said “We are excited at the news, it’s great that the London audience will get to see the show – now everybody in the country will see The Beatles and see us too”.

Programme Tribute
A-R’s decision to take ‘Big Night Out’ is the crowning tribute to a show which has been building a great reputation for itself amongst ABC TV’s own weekend audience in the North and Midlands. The programme was devised in June 1962 with a strong regional flavour, and billing a lot of the tremendous variety talent that exists in ABC TV’s area. Today the show has won national acclaim – and even international recognition when it was sold to Australia last summer. ABC TV has even bigger plans for maintaining the show’s success – and viewers across the whole country can look forward to some very exciting Big Nights Out in the near future.

ABC’s candid cameramen capture more moments from the Great Day at Teddington. The four boys seconds before they stepped ashore, Paul McCartney smiling a greeting to his excited fans, and George Harrison and John Lennon in conversation during a break in the ‘Big Night Out’ rehearsals.

On January 19th 1963, four hesitant, rather young lads turned up nervously at the main entrance to ABC’s Teddington studios, to appear for the first time on TV in ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’. No one took any notice of them arriving. The commissionaire had their names, but to the rest of the world they were virtually unknown. On the scripts in their hands, their names appeared way down the bill.

Back in Style
Today – only a little over a year later – those same four boys returned in triumph to Teddington Studios. But this time it was through the back way, by river, because their entry to the front of the studios was barred by thousands of screaming and struggling girls who had waited, many of them all night, to catch a glimpse of their idols and the biggest rave Britain (and now the States) has known since the war . . . The Beatles.

First Producer
Waiting to welcome the boys was producer Philip Jones, who directed their debut on ABC TV last year. Phil – who has made a big name for himself in TV light entertainment with Lucky Stars, Big Night Out and ABC spectaculars starring Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee – will be directing the Beatles again tonight on their first British TV show since their return from America.

The post Beatles big TV scoop!! appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

ABC-TV

THE DEPARTMENT OF
OUTSIDE BROADCASTS PRODUCTIONS
PRESENTS

‘HOLIDAY TOWN PARADE’

1962

WITH £4,000 CASH PRIZES

FEATURING TWO FABULOUS CONTESTS!

✻ TELEVISION BATHING BEAUTY QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN
✻ TELEVISION FASHION QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN

PRODUCED BY DAVID SOUTHWOOD
Compere Keith Fordyce – Interviewer Peter Lloyd

ENTRY FORM Application to participate in the 1962 contests of

ABC-TV’s ‘HOLIDAY TOWN PARADE’

I …………………………………………………….(full name) wish to be considered for inclusion in the TELEVISION CONTEST:

✻ BATHING BEAUTY QUEEN of GREAT BRITAIN
✻ FASHION QUEEN of GREAT BRITAIN

(Strike out the Contest not applicable)
(Note: If you wish to enter two contests please fill in additional entry form.)

and hereby agree that if accepted as a competitor I will abide by the undermentioned conditions:

1. I am a British subject over sixteen years of age.
2. I accept the decision of the ABC Television officials (or anybody appointed by them) as final.
3. I undertake that if accepted as a competitor and selected to enter the Resort Finals or Grand Finals of the contests I will appear on the dates required at the place chosen by ABC Television Ltd.
4. I will report for the Heat before the advertised time of starting and know that any competitor arriving after that time will be disqualified.
5. I agree to be photographed either before, during or after the Heats and or , and allow that such photographs may be used without payment with or without my name appended for any purposes desired by ABC Television Ltd.
6. If I win a Resort Final I shall not enter any heat for a subsequent Resort Final.
7. If I am selected to appear on television I shall not enter again for a period of at least ten , but I understand that this rule will be waived for the last week of the series.
8. I accept whatever method of judging shall be decided upon by the officials of ABC , who cannot enter into any correspondence on the subject.
9. In the event of the competition being of the Bathing Beauty , I agree that artificial aids will not be worn.
10. I agree that ABC Television have the right to televise me at any time during the competition and to repeat or record any such television transmission should they so desire it.
11. ABC Television shall be entitled at any time or times without prior notice to any contestant and without giving any reason therefor to cancel all or any of the heats, Resort Finals and the Grand Finals of the Contest and to refrain from televising the same or any of them. In such event I shall have no claim whatsoever against ABC other than for any prize money to which I may have become entitled in the Contest up to the date of any such cancellation.
12. I understand that I shall have no claim against ABC Television Ltd. in respect of any personal injury incurred during the course of my participation in the competition.
13. I know that no winner of any previous Grand Finals of “Holiday Town Parade” can take part.
14. I have not been employed professionally to appear on television in the United Kingdom during the past twelve months. I recognise that if at the time of the Heat or Final I have been employed professionally to appear on television in the United Kingdom Twill be disqualified.
15. I certify that I am not under contract to any organisation or person who could prevent me from appearing or attach any conditions to my appearance in the “Holiday Town Parade” programme either in a Heat or Resort Final or Grand Finals.
16. I shall at all times be responsible for any and all expenses of whatsoever nature incurred by me in connection with the Contest.
17. No Judges of this or previous Holiday Town Contests will be allowed to compete.

✻ IMPORTANT

Those selected at the qualifying heats on the Friday must be able to appear in the Television Show on the Saturday and to attend the rehearsals. If you cannot do so then do not enter.

TWO GREAT CONTESTS!

HERE’S YOUR CHANCE TO APPEAR ON TELEVISION!

✻ TELEVISION BATHING BEAUTY QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN

Girls will be selected at the qualifying heats every Friday afternoon for twelve weeks, beginning with effect from June 29th. These successful competitors will appear on the ABC Television Network in “Holiday Town Parade” for the Resort Finals for which the weekly prizes are: 1st—£25, 2nd—£20, 3rd—£15 with £10 for each runner up.

Twelve girls will qualify for the GRAND FINAL on Saturday, September 22nd for which the prizes are:

FIRST PRIZE
£1000

SECOND PRIZE
£250

THIRD PRIZE
£100

✻ TELEVISION FASHION QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN

Open to all ladies over sixteen.

Ladies will be selected at the qualifying heats every Friday afternoon for the Resort Finals which are in the ABC Television Show “Holiday Town Parade” for which the weekly prizes are: 1st—£25, 2nd—£20, 3rd—£15 with £10 for each runner up.

Twelve ladies will qualify for the GRAND FINAL on Saturday, September 22nd for which the prizes are:

FIRST PRIZE
£250

SECOND PRIZE
£150

THIRD PRIZE
£100

Either bring the completed form with you, or preferably send it in advance to the Publicity Office of the resort at which you intend to compete, from which full details of locations, times, etc. can be obtained.

Follow the fun of ABC – TV!

David Southwood
presents
the seventh year of Television Contests
in the 1962 series of
the wonderfully successful

‘HOLIDAY TOWN PARADE’

from these twelve
popular Resorts
throughout the
summer

JUNE 29th and 30th –– MORECAMBE
JULY 6th and 7th –– BLACKPOOL
JULY 13th and 14th –– PRESTATYN
JULY 20th and 21st –– COLWYN BAY
JULY 27th and 28th –– PWLLHELI
AUG. 3rd and 4th –– SOUTHPORT
AUG. 10th and 11th –– SKEGNESS
AUG. 17th and 18th –– GREAT YARMOUTH (Gorleston-on-Sea)
AUG. 24th and 25th –– FILEY
AUG. 31st and SEPT 1st –– BRIDLINGTON
SEPT. 7th and 8th –– FLEETWOOD
SEPT. 14th and 15th –– SCARBOROUGH

★ GRAND FINAL TELEVISED on SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 22nd
Location to be announced later

★ RESORT QUALIFYING HEATS each FRIDAY AFTERNOON at 3-0 p.m.
(For details of location apply at Local Information Bureau)

★ RESORT FINALS TELEVISED each SATURDAY

The post Holiday Town Parade appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

An august bunch they were and the most venerable of them said to me afterwards: “You did it wrongly. You stirred anti-clock-wise. You should always stir clockwise. I was taught that.”

“But why?” I asked. “What happens if you stir anti-clockwise?”

“It curdles.”

If this new series of mine — 13 lessons called “The Grammar of Cookery” — succeeds in releasing the craft of cooking from the bonds of voodoo, mumbo-jumbo, witchcraft and black magic, it will not have been in vain.

In cooking, things happen for the physical reasons that make them happen — and it is those reasons that I am analysing in “The Grammar of Cookery”. That is why we are using such things as microscopes, integral calculus, parabolic graphs and slide rules.

At the same time I hope that no one will get the idea that in order to be a cook you need to be a mathematician or a colloid chemist, nor that in order to make mayonnaise you need a microscope.

No, the whole idea is to show how and why things happen in cookery. It is all basic bed-rock stuff. I wanted it that way and Executive Producer Lloyd Shirley wanted it that way too. A welcome change for me. In the past I have had to fight off attempts to wish on me every conceivable gimmick — practically dancing girls and gypsy violins.

This series will contain no new recipes. To begin with there are no really new recipes. It has all been done before. The Book of Ecclesiastes is right. Actually I think that there are far too many recipes already. Cooking skill is what matters.

Yes cooking skill. And that means love of good food. What becomes of cooking skill when you have the deep-freeze and instant-everything? Isn’t it killed?

Well, has the theatre been killed by television, musicianship by gramophone records, painting by colour printing? Not so as you would notice!

I am not the best cook in the world, not by a long chalk. There are many far better practitioners than me (including you, for all I know). I am just the chap who decided to find out what makes cooking tick and to try and pass on that knowledge.

It is one thing to work out the rules — the “Grammar.” But behind the rules, in every art, there lies the active genius that mocks at rules.

If you are a great cook, madam, you are a singer of songs, a poet, an actress, a painter, a pianist. You are Callas, you are Cilia Black, Vanessa Redgrave, Laura Knight, all rolled into one. And the world is at your feet.

Or it should be.

The post All for the love of good food appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Or seeing Henry sheathing his steel after a decisive ploy at Agincourt.

“English cooking,” said Philip Harben, bristling and bustling as he lovingly laid his carving knife away, “is the best in the world. The only problem is convincing the English that it is.”

The tone quite obviously brooked no argument upon the subject. Mr. Harben had no time to spare for anyone who didn’t believe as passionately in English cooking as he did.

He amplified the point in short, sharp bursts of information as he buzzed around his kitchen, cleaning up after the elaborate meal he had just prepared.

“With French cooking, you can get away with so much. It’s complex. But if you stick by the book, you’re pretty safe.

“English cooking has classical simplicity. It calls for perfection of basic materials. And that means that everything you cook must be absolutely right.”

On Sunday afternoon Philip Harben will show us how to improve our cooking in another infectiously enthusiastic edition of ABC’s “The Grammar Of Cookery.”

It’s a crusade that began in the Twenties over the stove of his parents’ home in London.

His mother was Mary Jerrold, a well-known actress. “But she taught me nothing about cooking. I’m afraid,” he said. “She was an abominable cook.

“I remember she used to think she could make bread. It was dreadful. So all that I ever learned about cooking I found out for myself by trial and error.”

The errors?

“I prefer not to remember them,” said Philip.

After leaving school he worked as assistant stage-manager in the theatre, as a cameraman and assistant director in a film studio, and as a commercial photographer. But the call of the kitchen became increasingly irresistible. So in 1938 he took up catering professionally.

Since then he has established himself as one of the country’s most popular television cookery experts. He has made several films.

He has published a number of books on the subject. And he now owns his own industrial catering firm.

But although cooking has proved to be a profitable commercial enterprise, he will always regard the preparation of good food as an art form.

“The French have one great advantage over us in this field.” said Philip. “As a nation they are passionately interested in cooking. And many English people still seem rather to despise it.

“When I go into a restaurant I react to the food I get. If I don’t like it, I say so. If I do like it I send the chef my compliments and invite him to have a glass of wine with me.

“It pays dividends.

“Standards of English restaurants are rising rapidly nowadays. And the standards of French restaurants are falling slightly.

“The day isn’t so far off when Frenchmen will be coming over here and going into ecstasies about the marvellous restaurant they have just discovered in Ashton-under-Lyne.”

Mr. Harben was struck by an afterthought.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I know two marvellous restaurants in Ashton-under-Lyne, already.”

The post Call of the kitchen appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

The TVTimes tells us what’s on ABC on Sunday 28 July 1968. Things worth noting include:

• After 640+ weekends, this is ABC’s last day on air.
• Yesterday, all but one programme came from ABC themselves. Today is the exact opposite, being mostly handed over to ATV except for the Weekend Sport, the film and the final ‘goodbye’ programme.
• They come on air an hour earlier than usual, in order to catch Communion from the Lambeth Conference rather than going to a provincial church near to where Saturday’s football match had been played.
• As usual, after the Morning Service ends, the station – and the transmitters – go off air, allowing all involved to nip home (or to the pub) for Sunday lunch.

• We’re back on air for 2.10pm for adult education – barely – before heading off to Weekend Sport. In the winter this programme was called World of Soccer and, unsurprisingly, concentrated on football. There’s no football in July at this point in history, but the programme continues with a different name and different sports.
• Hours of broadcasting were limited by law at this point, but there were a couple of exceptions to this: religion, adult education and outside broadcasts (the latter restricted to 300 hours a year to stop the exception being misused for general entertainment). This means that the clock only starts ticking today at 3.20pm, despite around three hours of programmes already having been broadcast.
• Quite a catch for The Golden Shot to have got Sammy Davis Jr on one of his visits to the UK, helped by his London agents being The Grade Organisation.
• The final religious ‘closed period’ of ITV 1.0 is kicked off at 6.15pm with the Tree House Family. This is the same programme as the Tinga and Tucker Club but with Christianity hammered into it. For viewers in the Midlands, Tinga and Tucker was therefore a six-days-a-week programme for kids with Jean Morton. For viewers outside of ATVLand, the Tree House Family was a once-a-week religious programme for kids with Jean Morton. The result was confusion whenever Midlanders and outsiders talk about the programme.
• A scoop for ATV at 6.35pm as Brian Connell gets to interview Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in amongst the 500 bishops, archbishops and metropolitans (there’s a joke there somewhere) at the Lambeth Conference.
• More from ATV at 8.25pm with the summertime replacement for the Palladium Show. A classic ATV variety bill here: a presenter who is big in the States but almost unknown in the UK introduces a cast of second-string and past-prime European stars singing and dancing on stage for an hour.
• The film at 9.25 and 10.25pm is the classic The Man Who Watched Trains Go By from 1952. Quite why ABC are promoting it as – shock horror – For Adults Only is an open question, as it was rated ‘A’ in 1952 and on its DVD release in 2008 got the modern equivalent rating: PG. The TVTimes says it’s “a nightmare of violence, desire and murder”. Nope, not even in 1952, let alone in 1968 or 2018.

• Braden… on the Box at 11.10 is undersold in the northern editions of the TVTimes. In London, it functions as ATV London’s last programme, a goodbye to weekends in the region that ATV have provided since 24 September 1955 and thus an analysis of the disappearance of ITV 1.0 and the beginning of ITV 2.0. In the north it’s billed merely as a return to TV for Braden that happens to be discussing television, with the only clue that it’s focussed on the changeover being the last sentence, left over in the editing from the London description.
• We close with Goodbye from ABC at 11.55. David Hamilton and Keith Martin are in the continuity studio in Didsbury. Down in Aston, Phillip Elsmore and Sheila Kennedy are reading roughly the same script for Midlands viewers.
• TVTimes gives a big billing to this programme; TVWorld in the Midlands, 50% owned by ABC, doesn’t, giving it all of three lines and leaving the changeover itself largely unremarked across the magazine. In TVTimes regions with contract changes, they had splashed big on the new companies and formats – Granada, Yorkshire and Thames/LWT.
• The programme itself shamelessly wallows in ABC nostalgia, majoring heavily on ABC’s early years. They show clips from many obscure programmes and happily show stills where said programmes have already been lost.
• John Benson is absent from the northern version, despite being chief announcer, as he was already in London assisting Geoffrey Lugg with setting up the new presentation department of Thames.
• Also absent was John Edmunds, who had recently departed to join the BBC, but he was acknowledged as he had been a staff announcer for ABC for almost the whole life of the company.
• The northern edition talked of the Didsbury studios closing; in the Midlands, Alpha Television was continuing until nearer the launch of colour, under ATV management, so Elsmore and Kennedy thank the staff of the jointly owned facilities.
• The programme was prerecorded earlier in the evening on videotape, for the ease of providing the video and film clips and the stills, presumably, coming back live to the respective announcers for them to say a final goodbye at the end.

• Both programmes made a point of mentioning that ABC was becoming Thames and thus wasn’t disappearing completely: the same people would be making similar programmes in future. Two weeks before, John Benson had even popped up in the north to do some in-vision announcing with the new Thames Television backdrop behind him. ABC clearly saw Thames as their continuing presence in ITV!

The post Tonight’s ABC Weekend TV… in 1968 appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

The TVTimes tells us what’s on ABC on Saturday 27 July 1968. Things worth noting include:

• With one exception – Rediffusion’s The Gamblers at 9.05pm – everything today is coming from ABC. No other company gets a look-in except for outside broadcast items in ABC’s own World of Sport.

• ABC opens at 1.15pm for 50 minutes of pretty heavyweight adult education programmes.
  • The last in the series of The Middle Years presented by Ludovic Kennedy. The splendidly named Hilde Himmelweit, the ever brilliant Richard Hoggart and Polly’s father Philip Toynbee discuss how it feels to be middle-aged.
  • Fit for Life at 1.40pm is also sociology on the television – the 1960s being the peak of scientific sociology being seen as a potential cure-all. The GP and the psychiatrist talking to John Pett go unnamed because of the British Medical Association’s then-rule that practicing doctors where not allowed to advertise, and appearing on TV was in itself an advertisement.
• ABC produces the last World of Sport before handing it over to London Weekend from next week. The programme started in January 1965 and was presented by Eamonn Andrews with Richard (Dickie) Davies as his deputy. With Andrews off to Thames to host their daily magazine programme Today, Davies gets a promotion, with LWT promoting Fred Dinenage to the deputy spot.
  • The sports on offer today were diving from ATV, horse racing from ABC, athletics from Harlech, motor racing from ABC and wrestling from ATV, with the whole programme billed as an Independent Television Production. It was made at Teddington.

• The repeat of Life with Cooper marks the end of Tommy’s long association with ABC. However, Tommy and the series moved to Thames and Tuesday nights, renamed Cooper King-Size, as David Hamilton points out on air.

• The TVTimes in the North makes a big deal of Opportunity Knocks! being a special devoted to the closure of ABC at Didsbury – although Yorkshire Television would make some of its programmes there whilst they waited for their own studios in Kirkstall Road to be completed. In other TVTimes regions, the magazine would simply refer to this being a special edition to mark the closure of ITV’s Didsbury studios, with ABC’s name left out of it.
  • This special edition of OpNox! had no new talent in it, instead inviting back former contestants who had gone on to bigger things and showing the television audience around the backstage areas of the studio. The special, like much of OpNox! at ABC and at Thames, was produced by Royston Mayoh.
• The Horne a’Plenty sketch show at 8.35pm was another survivor into the new Thames, lasting one more series before the death of the brilliant Kenneth Horne brought it to a premature close.
• It was not unusual for Granada and Rediffusion programmes to turn up at the weekend – and ABC programmes to pop up on weekdays – across the major contractors as well as the minors. ABC and ATV’s petty bickering over the Sunday schedules had led to ABC pointedly selling The Avengers to Rediffusion and squeezing both ATVs out of one of the most popular programmes on British television. In return, ABC picked up several Rediffusion dramas, amongst them being The Gamblers at 9.05pm, which in turn squeezed blameless Granada out of some big hitters.
  • All this created a bonanza for the schedulers at the minor ITV companies, allowing them to pick and choose which networking of The Avengers and The Gamblers and the like to show according to what they felt their region would prefer rather than just going with the usual flow.

• At 10.15pm, it’s the final ABC Armchair Theatre, it losing the ‘ABC’ in the process of moving to Thames and a less comfortable weekday slot (other regions already didn’t mention the ‘ABC’ bit either). By happy coincidence, this is the 400th edition of the strand – which viewers in London miss, as ATV London dropped the programme in favour of a repeat of Gideon’s Way, which can’t help but feel like a small bit of spite from Sir Lew.
  • In typical Armchair Theatre style, the description of ‘The Ballad of the Artificial Mash’ sounds pretty sexist until the last sentence, which hints at a slightly more feminist outcome to the plot. We may never know, as the episode is missing from the archives.
• Sunday night had no epilogue, allowing the station to make a clean break as they went off air for the last time. So 11.15pm (approximately) sees the last ever religious talk at closedown in the North – Granada had never done them and Yorkshire launched continuing that policy.
  • This epilogue is by ABC’s religious adviser, and although it doesn’t survive in the archives, take my word for it that it was truly surreal. Ian Meckenzie opened with the most bizarre and tortured metaphor in the history of late night sermons, solemnly telling viewers that “Jesus was like the Independent Television Authority” and going on to note that the “disciples are like the [ITV] contractors”. It was ludicrous.

The post Tonight’s ABC Weekend TV… in 1968 appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

One of the least-known success stories of television is the constantly-growing interest in ITV’s religious programmes. During the last 12 months the Sunday night programmes between 6.15 and 7.25 have increased their audience by 40 per cent. Now they are regularly watched In 2,500,000 homes. One man who has played a leading part in developing religious television is

PENRY JONES

for six-and-a-half years religious advisor and producer to ABC Television and the creator of The Sunday Break, which returns to your screen on July 5. Another programme he writes about here is About Religion, screened at 7 p.m. on Sunday. Now Religious Programmes Officer of the Independent Television Authority, he writes here about the purpose of religious television—and its future

I KNEW that The Sunday Break had “arrived” the moment I saw the cartoon in a big circulation daily newspaper. It showed a TV repair man looking at a set while the lady of the house said: “There must be something wrong. I keep getting The Sunday Break on Mondays.”

Religious programmes have been going for a long time — About Religion for nearly nine years and The Sunday Break for nearly seven — and this is quite an achievement. Yet you wouldn’t at first sight call them popular programmes — after all they are neither horse operas nor soap operas.

They have included some first-rate — and deservedly popular — items. I shall always remember “Christ In Jeans” and “Image of Majesty” produced by Michael Redington for the About Religion series.

Then there was the award-winning film about the preparation of a nun called “Love’s Calling”.

My own work has been mainly with editions of Sunday Break and Living Your Life, and exciting work it has been.

You may recall earlier The Sunday Break with traditional jazz and discussions. I shall certainly never forget the long arguments before each programme with the crowds of teenagers, or the series on the various churches with Dr. Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster, and the Bishop of Woolwich standing up to tough questions from young agnostics.

Or the superbly moving passion play “A Man Dies” performed by Bristol teenagers.

It is remarkable that as the number of possible viewers has increased, year after year these religious programmes have maintained a sizeable audience. I couldn’t pretend to tell you why.

In one sense I couldn’t care less about the “ratings”. You see, we have never devised religious programmes with the sole object of getting good ratings.

We have never said “Let’s put a little sex in The Sunday Break or a little sadism in About Religion just to get the viewers.” Anyway I hope that by now viewers can distinguish between the honest programme and the programme that is just a botch-up of spicy ingredients designed to entice viewers.

This doesn’t mean that religious TV should be dull. We have tried to be lively and interesting without sacrificing our basic concern with Christianity. In another sense I would be mad to say I didn’t care about the ratings. I’m delighted that more people are watching them. I’d like everyone to watch them — provided we didn’t have to drop the serious purposes.

Religion ought not to be a hole in the corner affair. Some people, including some church people, make it seem like that — as if it were some Sabbattarian segment cut off from the rest of life.

Religion may be like that, but Christianity is about the whole of living. That is why our programmes try to relate to everything in life.

Any man (most children, too) worthy of the name asks himself certain important questions:

“Is there a being or a mind behind things?” “Why and how am I different from an animal?” “Why do I worry about justice (or at least injustice against me)?” “Why is the world a bit of a muck-up?” “Is it worth doing the right thing?” “What is the right thing anyway?” “Do I live on after death?”

Basic questions — the kind the Book of Genesis asks and the Bible sets out to answer. Basic that is, not just to churchgoers but to all men. That is why I am interested in the ratings — if high ratings mean that religious programmes are not just hole-in-the-corner affairs for churchgoers only. I’d be interested to know whether this increase means that many people are helped by the way we discuss these basic questions.

But television does not stand still. It is always in ferment and neither producers nor viewers should get settled down, hardened or congealed into a permanent groove.

The TV producer — religious or otherwise — who does not see the sands of time running out on his favourite format is a dull, safe, unimaginative man indeed. The ratings may be good, but there must be new ways of doing things, of touching men’s minds and hearts.

Religious television must try to do several kinds of jobs. One is to provide quite literally, a service for people who would normally go to church. The regular morning services are not intended as a substitute for going to church, since clearly nothing can replace actually joining in worship with other people.

But there are many people ill in hospital, too old to go out regularly or looking after young children who are prevented from going out. For them the televised church service is a great value.

One of the by-products of church services on television is that people can see Anglican, Free Church and Roman Catholic services, and I believe that this has contributed to a greater tolerance and a more genuine understanding of our different ways of worshipping God.

Other religious programmes should try to state as clearly and lucidly as possible what Christians believe — give a Christian viewpoint on our common life and above all provide for the great debate about the meaning of things.

I would expect some changes therefore — experiments in style — in About Religion and The Sunday Break. I hope they will provide an opportunity for new young writers. It would be good to have a children’s programme on Sundays which adults could also enjoy.

Whatever we do in the future, I hope the rise in ratings means that people have realised that these programmes are not just a kind of religious propaganda — but honest programmes on things that really matter to everyone.

The post Sunday success story appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

THERE are tricks in every trade — and writing is no exception. I have tried to master a few, but there is one I have never licked, and that is to write about something I have already written. As I am trying to do now — to write about this series called Our House.

It’s a problem. If I write a modest bit of self-effacement I’m suspect, because so many people know me as an egoist: if I beat the big drum and confidently forecast weekly nationwide enthusiasm from Sunday onwards, I would (quite rightly) meet resistance from viewers.

The only way out is to tell about the show and its characters as straightforwardly as I can.

Our House is a series of comedy (I think!) plays about nine people who only have one thing in common — and yet have to live together under one roof. They meet by chance in that modern dreamland — an estate agent’s office — all looking urgently for somewhere to live. Individually, they pale and tremble at the prices asked: collectively, in a sudden flash of optimism, they realise that together, pooling their resources, they can solve the housing problem — by purchasing one big house between them.

The idea is sound common-sense. But people are people, and when they are ill-assorted people, necessity is the mother of their mortgage. I took it from there, and have some hundreds of pages of script and a dustbinful of dog-ends to prove it.

These are the folk I hope you’ll get to know — and like:

GEORGINA RUDDY (Hattie Jacques): Works in a public library, but hates quiet! Has just got to have a place of her own because, noisy at home, she’s running out of bed sitting-rooms to be slung out of.

SIMON WILLOW (Charles Hawtrey): A pillar of the local council’s rating department. Blithe, friendly, but lonely — another victim of bed-sitter life; and nursing a secret ambition far removed from matters municipal.

DAISY BURKE (Joan Sims): A trial to the labour exchange. Will she never settle in one job for more than a week?

CAPTAIN and MRS ILIFFE (Frank Pettingell and Ina de la Haye): A Yorkshireman, former merchant navy captain, and a retired French violinist; a healthy and explosive marital mixture.

STEPHEN and MARCIA HATTON (Trader Faulkner and Leigh Madison): Newlyweds. He’s a freelance artist, and insists on fighting the world; but she’s always in his corner.

GORDON BRENT (Norman Rossington): A law student who hasn’t yet learned one law of life — that a man should do what he wants to do, not what his father thinks he ought to do. Our House helps him to learn this lesson.

HERBERT KEENE (Frederick Peisley): Bank clerk, bachelor to an extreme, meek, easy meat for landladies, a great organiser.

I can’t explain how the characters suggested themselves, I only know that, once they did, they were real to me

The post Fool House! appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

From Television Stars 1966, published by Purnell

Like many young men of school-leaving age, John did not have the slightest idea what he wanted to do for a living. Then one day, this son of a lorry-driver took a job as a porter at a fruit-market on the suggestion of a friend.

“For three months,” he said, “I slogged away between four in the morning and two in the afternoon doing jobs like piling sacks of potatoes one on top of another.”

After getting rather bored and tired doing this sort of thing, he decided to become a baker’s apprentice. He stayed at this job for two months before making up his mind that he would like to become an actor.

Having an intense and keen interest in dramatics, he was encouraged by the elocution teachers with whom he was studying to further his drama work at a local youth club in Burnage, Manchester.

The next giant step he took was the trip to London and to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He confesses that his first term there was somewhat of a disaster in that he found it difficult to grasp the things that were being taught. He says he flopped in the end of term exams, and went home to Burnage feeling very unhappy. But the next term at RADA was more successful. He went on to give a prize-winning repertory season at Liverpool between July, 1960, and January, 1961.

The next step was television, when he was invited to appear in a season of Granada’s “Younger Generation” series, and in an exciting role in the TV version of “Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance”. From then on the acting career of John Thaw was never in doubt. One role followed another. He appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in “The Fire Raisers”, in the film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which starred Tom Courtenay, a former flat mate of his, at the Arts Theatre in “Women, Beware Women”, and so on.

He was chosen to understudy Sir Laurence Olivier in the West End production of “Semi-Detached”. He also played the part. Working alongside Olivier, proved an invaluable experience for him.

After this came four appearances in “Z Cars”, which was then followed by three months repertory work in Dundee, and by roles in TV plays, including one in “The Avengers”.

“It was through that role in ‘The Avengers’ — the former series, with Cathy Gale, who was involved in a plot to put her on the throne of Britain — that I was noticed by ABC, who were looking for an actor to play Sergeant Mann in ‘Redcap’.”

Just before he started work on the series John, who had married actress Sally Alexander, spent a one-week honeymoon in Corsica. After this he got down to the part which has made him popular throughout the country.

He says his greatest weakness is that he worries about everything. But one thing he need have no worries about — is his future in television.

The post John Thaw appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

With MIKE and BERNIE WINTERS once again in the hosting spot, this sixty-minute production produced by PHILIP JONES will draw its talent from the great names of the entertainment world including those who are headlining the North’s big summer shows. Already booked to appear are: THE BEATLES, FRANK IFIELD, THE BACHELORS, SOPHIE TUCKER, DIANA DORS, THE SEARCHERS and CILLA BLACK.

Other regular Blackpool Night Outers include LIONEL BLAIR and His Dancers and the ABC TELEVISION SHOW-BAND, under the baton of Musical Director BOB SHARPLES.

While BLACKPOOL NIGHT OUT has provided one of the biggest OB sound problems for the technical boys, it means the summer months by the sea for Producer PHILIP JONES and Designer BRIAN EATWELL and their families.

Others taking up residence in or around Blackpool for the run of the show include PA JEAN FENTON, Choreographer LIONEL BLAIR, dancers PATSY SPENCER and GILLIAN BOWDEN and, of course, MIKE and BERNIE WINTERS, their wives and children… Mike’s wife Cassie having successfully found a house for them all while the rest of the family worked on the last BIG NIGHT OUT series at Teddington. (Bernie’s wife SIGGI HEINE was one of the original dancers.)

Meanwhile Philip, Jean and Brian have secured office premises for the season above a cafe just across the road from the theatre – ever known a Production team not to find a built-in tea trolley?

After months of planning, technicians are now capable of running up the largest number of microphones ever – no less than 31. Under the supervision of Assistant Technical Manager, KEN PIKE, who was responsible for much of the original television installation at the theatre, a truck has been specially fitted out as a sound control room, camera platforms constructed specially for the job with built-in cabling, and talk-back systems devised whereby almost everybody can talk to everyone else.

Easing this great challenge to the Mobile Operation, of course, are the seven camera point boxes and thousands of feet of cable originally built into the theatre – 1,250 ft plus 1,050 ft vision, 6,150 ft micro and 2,700 ft of talk-back cable.

The new ABC Blackpool stands on a site associated with show business for more than sixty nine years.

The new theatre – which justifiably claims to be Europe’s most luxurious showplace – has been erected at a cost of more than £300,000, embodying all the latest facets of contemporary design with emphasis placed throughout on good taste and comfort… plus the fact that it has been wired to cater for today’s ever-increasing television audience, enabling programmes to be swiftly and easily screened direct from the North where the biggest stars are performing in their fabulous Summer Shows.

The post Blackpool Night Out appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

However, that’s beside the point. Kind people have said to me “How do you always manage to appear to have control over everything? It looks as though everything has been laid on specially for you.”

Of course that’s not all quite true. A lot goes on behind the scenes long before the interview takes place. To illustrate what I mean let’s take a typical example.

A film star is due at London Airport at, say, two o’clock in the afternoon. Let’s assume she’s coming from Paris (on the plane with a chicken and champagne lunch thrown in with the price of the ticket !)

With a team of five

First I have to go to the production manager and request a sound camera and my usual team to leave Wardour Street by noon. We shall lunch at the airport, and I use the shooting brake, the Mitchell sound camera, and a silent camera to cover “cut-ins” and lens changes. All those technicalities are taken care of, the men (five of them) are briefed, and we’re ready to go.

Well, sometimes it’s about a quarter-past twelve before we’re on our way — there’s often a little hitch for which one makes allowances when fixing a starting time anyway! Twelve-fifteen is quite good enough time, but we say “twelve” so that people will start trundling in by that time. Everything aboard? Off we go; out through the traffic to the Great West Road, and on to London Airport.

Arriving there I decide, with the cameramen, the best place to do the interview, bearing in mind the direction of the sun, the background we want, and the noise. The background noise mustn’t be too great for the sound people.

Fencing with the opposition

I leave them to it, and they set up, and “stand by” as they say. Because quite often, although we go down to meet someone at, say, two o’clock, frequently we’ve found that at, say, half past one, or a quarter to two, another celebrity is coming in unexpectedly, and we can often get “two for the price of one,” which is exciting, being able to go back with two stories when we set out only to get one.

Then I go to the Press Room where we exchange news and find out the latest information on the expected arrival, whether the plane is on time, if it will be coming in to such-and-such a bay on the tarmac, and where the passengers will be coming through — say “Channel 9” from the customs hall.

Then I have to think in terms of possible opposition. Opposition is always friendly but firm, for we ourselves are always opposition to others also covering the story!

So when we meet we “fence,” and by that I mean we pass on to each other just enough information to keep each other friendly, then we privately jockey round looking for possibilities of getting a slight “beat” on the other chap. It’s just the way it works.

We know we can’t get “exclusives” all the time, but we can often develop perhaps just that slight edge on the situation which enables us to take the initiative.

When the plane comes in, one cameraman with the silent camera goes on to the tarmac, and stands by waiting for the star to get off the plane. We can’t all go out there — we used to be able to, but now, the Ministry of Civil Aviation has forbidden it, so we can no longer interview on the tarmac.

I think they’re probably right because there’s so much traffic at London Airport there is the danger that someone may walk backwards into a prop and be killed.

So we “go along” with the Ministry,

Reflecting for a moment, when I say we “go along” with people, it means just that. Diplomacy is a very important part of this job, because if we tried to bulldoze a situation in our enthusiasm, tried to “ride roughshod” over people in authority, we would really be asking for trouble and they’d do nothing for us at all.

We have to gain people’s confidence, let them see that we are sincere in our consideration of their requirements as well as our own and that we are prepared to give as well as take. Those in authority and the “friendly” opposition get to know that we can be relied on, and that is the vital part of the set-up of the interviewer and his team. He himself must be known as a reliable person of integrity.

If we started any “funny business” or tried to get “beats” where it’s a general call, that is to say where everyone is entitled to a fair crack of the whip, we would really be asking for trouble.

I am ready and waiting

Well, that’s that! Now here comes our celebrity! The star gets off the plane and is photographed by the Press and filmed by our silent cameraman. Then he or she goes into the customs hall, and we wait to pounce on our victim.

Generally I park myself at the customs door, and make quite certain that I am there ready and waiting. I try to look as though I belong to everything one should belong to in authority! As the star sweeps in full glory through the customs I go forward, shake her by the hand, smile and beam all over! I become the absolute paragon of charm and well-being.

She walks along with me while our camera is busily filming what goes on. The silent camera can thus build-up that introductory story on the arrival, and then we walk out to the sound camera and I conduct the interview. Of course our good friends the “still-boys” have their session first, as their motor cycle couriers are waiting to rush the pictures to Fleet-street.

Questions to fall back on

Now the important thing about the interview is that always I go prepared with a thorough knowledge of the star’s background, why she’s come, what she’s doing here, and so on. I memorise three or four key questions which I can fall back on. If the star flags or “dries up” (a rare thing) I can rapidly bring in one of the reserve “key” questions and so the interview goes along quite smoothly.

After finishing the interview, I thank the celebrity very prettily, and away we go.

I said a lot went on behind the scenes before the interview took place. A lot goes on after it, too… processing the film, looking at it, cutting and editing it, and fitting in a commentary, to get the finished product you see on the screen.

The post Interviewing the stars appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

The man behind the
TV legend – by
MOLLY SEYMOUR

You know Eamonn Andrews as a star of the television screen… the man with the well-known face and voice. But Eamonn has other loves beside audiences.

Those other loves are called Grainne and Emma — his wife and daughter.

On your television screen, he is very much in control. Smoothly efficient and never the man to get flustered. Off screen, he likes to relax in his home — for he believes a home should look lived-in.

Eamonn was born in Synge Street, the same Dublin street which bred George Bernard Shaw. He was the eldest of five sons in a desperately poor family.

He knew the difficulties of shrinking housekeeping money, of parents who were often in fear of running into debt and he ran errands and bought what bits he could to help his mother out.

One day, he used to tell himself, I shall have a home of my own. He has it now. It stands at Chiswick, and the Thames flows past the bottom of the garden. Grainne planned all the decorations, a white home, with pale yellow shutters buttoned back from windows draped with fragile curtains.

Inside, there are close-fitting saxe-blue carpets everywhere, and rose-red chairs. The lamps — empire pattern and gilded — have the same rose-red shades and there is the warmth of real friendliness about the place. There are enchanting mirror-lined niches in which the most fascinating indoor plants stand.

They both adore flowers and their garden is a picture. Grainne confesses that she used to paint flowers, and will again when she has the time. You can see, as soon as you step inside, that this house is the home of lovers.

Eamonn met Grainne at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. It was, he says, love at first sight, though it took him two years to pop tne question.

Theirs was a dream wedding, with a glorious procession of bridesmaids carrying enormous sprays of carnations — the happiest day of his life, Eamonn says.

But bad luck turns up in strange ways. Grainne was struck down with a tubercular hip, and spent nine months in hospital. For a long time no one was sure whether she would lose her leg, or spend the rest of her life on crutches, perhaps permanently lame.

Luck, and first-class medical attention were with her, and she recovered.

Because they had no child, Grainne suggested they should adopt one. Eamonn was all for it, and they set about the search.

This was perhaps the happiest time of all for them and they were so delighted with the idea that they didn’t worry whether their adopted child would be a boy or girl.

Eamonn was at work on a television show when a message came from Grainne. She simply must speak to him, she said. She had heard from the home that a baby girl was available might she fetch the little thing? The answer was: “Of course.”

This was one of the moments when Eamonn would most liked to have been with her. But duty was duty, and he had to stay. The moment the show was over. Eamonn shot down to Chiswick in his car — and has never done the trip so fast since.

Grainne must have heard him coming, for she opened the door to him, the baby in her arms. Perhaps that was one of the supreme moments in their lives.

They called her Emma. Today she is between two and three years old, a gay, fat little girl with roguish, laughing eyes. She is devoted to Quiz, the grey poodle, and he to her.

Eamonn Andrews, they say, was bom with a silver spoon in his mouth. But he has worked hard to make good.

He loves his home. He adores his friends. In an emergency he can get a meal, clean up, mind the baby — which he does remarkably well —and all this with a smile… for he is that sort of man.

RUPERT BUTLER
takes a look at the
new Sunday series

It could become the most talked about TV show of all. It is 40 minutes each Sunday of sheer unpredictability. To attempt to forecast what might happen is as pointless as trying to say when the world will end.

The central figure is Eamonn Andrews, for so long a stalwart of the BBC that one is mildly surprised he’s not still producing so-and-so’s aunt, cousin, husband, school-friend or shipmate on This Is Your Life.

Just what is The Eamonn Andrews Show? Well, here is what it is not. It is not preplanned, not pre-rehearsed, and not (except in skeleton form) pre-scripted.

For the next 26 weeks, personalities in the public eye will be brought to Teddington Studios, Middlesex and confronted by Eamonn.

He will talk to them, listen to them and maybe hear them sing, play and entertain. It all depends on who they are and just why they are on the show.

Let’s repeat — nothing is planned, nothing is rehearsed, if, for example, the show features a man who has hit the headlines by flying around the world in a flying saucer, he will meet Eamonn as a stranger and talk to him informally and “off the cuff.”

Of course, Eamonn will have done some homework on his guest — provided there was time. He will have studied a biography and looked through newspaper cuttings. But there will be no prior contact.

“Instead,” I was told, “the guest will sit outside the set sipping a drink until he’s called. He’ll be wondering what is in store for him — and so will Eamonn.”

The show will be transmitted “live.” Right up to the moment it goes on the air, there’s room to bring along topically offbeat people.

When one celebrity has been interviewed, he will remain on the set and meet the next guest whom he will be able to question or chat with.

“By the end of the show,” says Eamonn, “I could be talking about anything and everything to some six well-known people at the same time.”

Don’t get the idea, though, that The Eamonn Andrews Show is all chat. If a pop singer has made his mark, he’ll be on the scene, too. There will be a glittering late night sophistication about the whole proceedings.

Eamonn Andrews hopes to remain in control of things, but his guests will be allowed to pull any amount of tricks on him. It’s all part of the fun, all part of a desire to make The Eamonn Andrews Show a segment of late night viewing that no one will want to miss.

A programme spokesman said: “We are avoiding like the plague the ‘all pals together’ party where everyone laughs at private jokes and there’s general bonhomie.

“That sort of show looks phoney and sounds phoney. We wouldn’t hesitate to put two people on the screen who positively loathe each other. To us, controversy isn’t a dirty word.”

As far as is possible, guest celebrities for the following week will be announced by Eamonn after each show and he will invite viewers to submit questions they would like answered by the people concerned.

The post Eamonn Andrews calling… appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Alfred Burke, the 46-year-old actor who plays Marker, is a tall sinewy man, with a hollow face and small hard eyes which peer suspiciously at a hostile world.

There is a villainous look about him. And for the best part of his career, Burke has been cast as the third bandit from the right in countless productions.

“The reason Alfie was chosen for the part,” said Roger Marshall, the main writer on the series, “is that he doesn’t look like a private detective.

“If you saw him in a pub or a supermarket, you wouldn’t single him out for attention. He’s just another face in the crowd.”

Marker isn’t rich — or particularly handsome. His wardrobe is strictly functional. One pair of shoes and if they don’t get to the mender on time, he avoids puddles. A dirty white mac; a couple of pairs of slacks; an old sports jacket.

His favourite tie’s got an egg stain on it. And his main worry is not where to park his Aston Martin, but whether he is able to meet his income tax demands. He is a loser.

If there’s a fight — Marker’s the man who collects the punch. A syndicate turns nasty — Marker’s the first one to back down.

As a hero, he’s disappointing. But in the brutal knife and knuckle-duster world of London’s back streets, Frank Marker survives.

He sees his clients in a pokey attic office above Clapham Junction. Millionaires and taxi-drivers. Bankers and bookies. All different, but with a common bond. Trouble. They need Marker.

But he has no friends. Nobody thanks him for solving their problems; nobody sends him flowers for finding the truth. They pay him… and turn their backs.

But a man like Marker, operating in the precarious no-man’s-land between the underworld and the arm of the law, must cover his tracks. For if the thugs don’t get him, the police are sure to.

Though after six years, they haven’t yet. And they won’t — as long as he stays fast on his feet.

Marker … anonymous in a grubby mac trudging a suburban street.

Marker … alone, in an all-night do-it-yourself laundry, washing his shirts. Marker .. sitting next to you on a bus. Marker … everywhere.

Next time you hear footsteps on a dark night don’t look round. He’s right behind you.

… and a back-to-earth girl

She made her name on television travelling through time in the Dr. Who series. But it’s back to earth with a bump for 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford. In Saturday’s Public Eye she plays a missing girl in the clutches of a vice ring. “It couldn’t possibly be more different,” she said. Down-at-heel private detective, Frank Marker (Alfred Burke}, is commissioned to find the girl, who unaccountably has left her Yorkshire home and gone to live in London

The post Private detective in the Public Eye appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Most people associated with farming know farmers like to look over the fence to see what is happening on a neighbour’s farm. This is not idle curiosity. They look to learn.

Many progressive methods have been followed by farmers recently because, by looking over the fence, they have seen that they are an improvement on their own.

This has been strikingly demonstrated in the Penrith district of Cumberland. There, a young Agricultural Officer, E. J. Smith, found that he could not get advice to as many farmers as he knew could use it. So he enlisted the help of 12 farmers willing to use modern techniques provided they could be convinced of their effectiveness.

For two winters these farmers, known as Local Leaders, were given intensified training in farm management and grassland husbandry. They then began to introduce new systems on their farms — in every case most successfully.

Neighbouring farmers looked over the fence to see for themselves — and quickly adopted the ideas.

But the Cumberland experiment was confined to a small area: a neighbours fence miles away may be well worth looking over. And this is where Farming Television comes in, for it brings a farm 100 miles or more away, right into the home.

Northern and Midlands farmers are to have a series of agricultural programmes televised at an ideal time for the farmer — 3pm Sunday — one of the few times at which he usually has a little leisure and a chance to see what is happening on an other farm.

The programmes will come from farms in Cheshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire and North Wales, and will cover most aspects of farming, from dairying and beef to arable cropping and hill sheep

But this is not going to be a strictly farmers’ programme. Nor is it intended to show examples of outstanding technical achievement. The idea is to present the other man’s farm (“live” as far as possible) without any frills.

Wisely, the promoters of this series are aiming at a wider public than farmers. The housewife and her husband will see for themselves the major role farming plays in their lives.

They will see — that is the operative word — that grass is something much more than the green stuff that grows in fields. Possibly they will be surprised to learn that upon the quality of the grass grown, and the efficiency of its harvesting and conservation for winter fodder, much of their own well-being depends, for grass is transformed by the cow and the sheep into the meat we eat, the milk we drink and the wool we put on our backs.

To a large extent the housewife dictates farm policy, for it is her preference for the small, lean joint, the creamy milk, or bacon with minimum fat, that causes trends in farming practice. The farmer has to sell his produce to the consumer — and consumer demand has now become a taskmaster.

A final word to the housewife: the cameras are going to look into one or two farm kitchens. This will be really worth watching. The farm kitchen is a joy, for it is a combination of working kitchen, with modern amenities, and a social meeting place where neighbours gather to talk things over. Looking in, and listening in, to these kitchens, will bring the breath of the countryside, its vitality and its true character, to the heart of industrial areas.

This should have been done long ago. I am glad ABC are doing it now.

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They are, in fact, the offices of freelance journalists Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley, co-editors of tonight’s (Saturday) late-night current affairs programme, ABC at Large. And crusades are their business.

It might be the plight of old people living alone in Birmingham. Or an over-populated dogs’ home in Sheffield. Or a vice problem in Liverpool. Their campaigns make themselves felt everywhere — even in Westminster. “But they don’t always make us popular,” said Bottomley.

When an ABC at Large programme showed the results of a week’s probe into Liverpool’s vice problem, there were strong reactions in the city. But the file they had assembled was gratefully accepted by Mr. Anthony Greenwood, M.P. for Rossendale, Lancs., who was taking part in a national inquiry into the problem of vice.

“After the Street Offences Bill was passed in Parliament, it was felt that an investigation should be made through-out the country to find out just what effects the new Bill was having,” said Mr. Greenwood.

“This was where the Liverpool file came in useful. It gave a helpful picture of the situation in an industrial city.”

Another M.P., Mr. Ellis Smith of Stoke-on-Trent, was campaigning for years about old mill lodges, flooded pits and quarries, which were claiming young lives every year throughout the country.

So ABC at Large went into the matter — and Mr. Smith is hoping that the publicity, coupled with the questions he is putting down about it in the House of Commons, will result in official action being taken to fill in the death traps.

“The investigation by ABC at Large stimulated a lot of interest,” said Mr. Smith. “The programme is doing a good job in bringing matters of this nature to the notice of the public.”

Congratulatory correspondence always follows a campaign.

When the team used a story about two old people found dead in their home, there was a veritable snowstorm of letters.

A studio demonstration of the dangers of driving under the influence of drink — in which a human “guinea pig” drank six double whiskies and then used a reaction tester to illustrate its effect on his “driving” — produced a commendation from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

A programme about the dangers of poisons in the home brought in scores of letters demanding that the antidotes of all poisons should be included on the bottle labels — and ABC forwarded the suggestions to manufacturers.

“Reactions like these make you feel the job is really worth while,” said Brennand. “And yet, so often, it’s the little things that make the most profound impression on you.”

Little things, for instance, like the response from pensioners recently, when Tim Brinton was taken ill shortly after spending a week trying to live on an old-age pension.

“We got dozens of letters from grateful old people,” said Brennand, “thanking him for what he’d done, and offering best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

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Foo Foo, the central character in this new weekly cartoon series for ABC, is the creation of Hungarian-born John Halas who, at 48, is one of Britain’s most prolific cartoon animators.

“The idea of the series arose because I had always wished to create a typically English character like Foo Foo,” he says. “And also because I felt that the best medium would be television rather than the cinema.

“So the idea was put up to Howard Thomas, Managing Director of ABC TV, and, after a lot of investigation and soul-searching into the nature and type of the character we should use, we decided to go ahead.”

Foo Foo, however, was not an overnight creation. First, Halas and his team devoted themselves to devising a new method of cartooning that would suit the requirements of television.

The technique they have created, after much trial and error, is much simpler than that used in the cinema yet retains all the qualities of full animation. One big difference is that it requires only eight stages of production instead of the 20 or 22 needed in the production of cinema cartoons.

“It is also a far more personal way of making cartoons,” says Halas. ‘The animator is doing practically the whole job himself instead of dividing the work between different departments.”

When the first of the new cartoons was completed, it was shown to Howard Thomas and other ABC TV executives. Their reaction was so favourable that a further six were made. One of them “The Cultured Ape,” won first prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

I asked Halas how he would describe Foo Foo.

“As a little man with a Chapiinesque exterior and a slightly Chaplinesque interior,” he said. “But as this is 1960 and not 1915 — when a little man could really protest against social injustice — our character is a little more benevolent and tolerant than Chaplin’s and not such a critic of society. You might say that we have retained a little of the Chaplin touch but given him a great deal more playfulness.”

The counterpart to Foo Foo is the villainous Gogo. And then there is the feminine interest, a middle-aged lady called Mimi. Halas explains: “She is a motherly feminine rather than a glamorous feminine. We hope she will be nearer to the British conception of a female—warm and more appealing to the family.” Halas calls the new Saturday afternoon programmes the largest series of British cartoons ever made for a British audience. And he adds: “We have tried to invent what I can call restrained British humour instead of the American type of humour usual in cartoons.”

A collection of Halas and Batchelor cartoons is available on Blu-ray from Network Distribution, via Amazon and other retailers.

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Police Surgeon, a new half-hour TV series starting Saturday, starring Ian Hendry as Dr Geoffrey Brent, will lift the curtain.

Julian Bond, who wrote several of the Probation Officer scripts, is writing most of the episodes for the new series, in collaboration with J. J. Bernard, the pseudonym of a London police surgeon who suggested that the work would be an ideal theme for a TV series.

The young, idealistic Dr Brent cannot resist taking a personal interest in the cases to which he is called, for at heart he is a philosopher.

First of the 13 stories, many based on fact, is titled “Easy Money.” In it Dr Brent deals with a young thief, played by 18-year-old Michael Crawford. The second episode, “Under the Influence,” deals with a motorist, played by Bernard Archard, accused of drunken driving.

Other early episodes star Harry H. Corbett as a man who beats up a club hostess in “Lag on the Run” and Jean Anderson in “Sunday Morning Story,” which deals with a refugee girl’s suicide.

Appearing in several episodes with Ian Hendry is John Warwick, playing Inspector Landon, of the Bayswater area police station, to which Dr Brent is attached. Another artist who will be seen in several episodes is Ingrid Hafner, the surgeon’s receptionist.

The theme music has the appropriate title ‘The Big Knife.” The first four episodes of Police Surgeon are being produced by Julian Bond and the rest by Leonard White. Bond, 29 years old, has been writing for TV since 1957. Before that he was writing and directing documentary films. He is married and has three children.

Ian Hendry is the same age as Bond. He made his TV debut some years ago stooging for the famous clown Coco. The clown tried to persuade Ian to use his talent for knockabout comedy in the circus, but his gift for acting led him to the stage.

Bond chose Ian to star in his new series after watching his progress for three years following an impressive performance in Anouilh’s Dinner with the Family, which brought him to London with the Oxford Playhouse company.

At school at Culford, Suffolk, Ian’s main interest was sport. During National Service with the 32nd Medium Regiment, RA, he paced Chris Chataway and organised his own motor-cycle stunt team.

Ian went from the Central School of Speech and Drama into repertory. About the same time he was cast in Emergency — Ward 10, and established a following as Chris Stone, a polio patient. Film parts followed in Room at the Top, Sink the Bismarck and In the Nick.

Last spring he was back in TV as the young pilot whose error caused the death of a friend in Inside Story, and since then he has had further TV successes in Probation Officer, Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon and Flight from Treason.

To celebrate this series Ian and his wife Jo, who teaches film and television make-up, have moved to a new home aboard a converted naval pinnace on the Thames at Chiswick.

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“And all in all, I suppose. I’m tolerant of their ways. One has to be, with these two.”

“These two” are Ian Hendry and Patrick Macnee, stars of The Avengers.

Hendry plays Dr. David Keel, the tough but kindly character who uses his medical knowledge to fight crime.

He is aided by the cynical under-cover man John Steed, played by Macnee — a character with a stately home background and a taste for good living.

Keeping the balance between them is Dr. Keel’s glamorous nurse-receptionist Carol Wilson, played by Ingrid.

I asked Ingrid at her London flat what she really thought about her two leading men.

Do they resemble the characters they play?

“The answer is no,” said Ingrid “In real life, in fact, their roles are somewhat reversed.

“Take Ian first. He is intelligent and hard-working—and easily upset when things go wrong.

“But on the surface he’s a great clown, not a bit like Keel. He loves practical jokes — which is not surprising.

“You see he started in show business in a circus — as private secretary and stooge to Coco the clown.

“I don’t think he has ever forgotten Coco’s advice to take up clowning.”

Ingrid recalled Hendry’s antics one day during rehearsals.

“Things were held up for something or other,” she said. “The set was an old furniture shop and the place was cluttered up with great pieces of ancient furniture.

“Suddenly, there was a great rumpus among the props. And there was Ian crashing through a huge picture frame with a ridiculous Victorian fireman’s helmet on his head, and a false moustache.

“Another time, we had a hairdressing salon set and there he was mincing around in a filthy old overall brandishing a pair of scissors and a comb.”

Ingrid added: “Practical jokers, men especially, can be a bit wearing. But really you have to laugh with this character. He’s a harmless soul, bless him.”

She huddled closer to the fire. She had just returned from a visit to Ireland, she explained, and the flat had been unheated for a few days.

“Every time I come back from Ireland I talk with an Irish accent,” said Ingrid.

“This amuses Pat Macnee, since I’m actually half Scots.

“Pat is a more mature person than Ian in many ways. Unlike Steed, Pat has a quiet personality. He is controlled, modest and easy going.

“He adopts an amusing fatherly attitude towards his co-star. In the middle of some crazy interlude he’ll say, ‘Now come along Hendry, that’s enough for one day.

“‘Get your script like a good boy and let’s get a move on. I’m getting hungry’.”

Pat and Ian don’t, as it happens, snipe at each other as they often do in the series.

“I’m grateful for that,” said Ingrid. “I couldn’t bear that.

“Pat is a bit of a dreamer. He’ll tell you this himself. I think he secretly wishes he was a character like Steed.

“At rehearsals if he’s not busy poring over his script or holding incredibly intense conversations with the director, he will be tucked away in a remote comer of the room reading masses of magazines.” Ingrid gazed at the ceiling. “You get to know people pretty well, working with them every day, don’t you?

“My leading men are not without faults. But, to be honest, they’re two of the sweetest men I know.”

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Andrew stretched himself into an easy chair in his Mayfair flat and stroked his generous brown beard.

“It was touch and go with the beard at one stage. There was the feeling that it didn’t fit into the picture of a ‘goodie’ in London’s underworld,” he said.

“Now Ian Souter, of the firm of Souter and Shoesmith Ltd., Specialists in Security, is firmly bearded.”

The Souter outfit operates from a mahogany-respectable office in Marylebone. It is a high-powered unit geared to fight crooks and prevent crime in the twilight borderland between the underworld and the policeman’s beat.

Heather Keys (Ann Morrish) is receptionist-secretary-confidante. She’s worked for a firm of art auctioneers and has a quick eye for art fakes and forgeries.

Souter contributes all-round know-how, gleaned from seven years experience investigating for a firm of Loss Adjusters, and a strong sense of moral justice.

“I shall enjoy playing the part,” said Andrew. “There’s plenty of fighting. I don’t think there’s any danger of getting ‘typed’ — I’m not typically anything.”

Andrew grew his beard four years ago to take the part of a general in the film “Antony and Cleopatra.” Since then he has appeared in The Verdict is Yours, and played in Armchair Theatre’s The Higher they Fly and Realm of Error.

He made his name originally with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon Avon, where he played for three seasons, the last one in 1956.

Andrew mixes his acting with a political career. He is the adopted Labour candidate for Stratford-upon-Avon. Between acting engagements he lives in a Regency house at Stratford with his red haired wife Bunty and their 17-year-old daughter Susanne. She is a student at the Central School of Dramatic Art.

“She’s probably imbibing political ideas all the time. I was politically conscious long before I took up acting,” said Andrew.

“As a child of 13, I went to live, while my parents were abroad, with the Rev. Doctor Hector MacPherson, a wonderful old man, in Edinburgh.

“He was musician, clergyman. astronomer, philosopher, historian. Each morning at breakfast I would listen to him talk. He expounded politics with passionate interests—and exploded violently about the antics of an obscure little man in Germany called Hitler. That was in 1935.

“No one could have remained uninspired. At the age of 14, I even attempted a biography of Gladstone.”

Talking about his political ambitions Andrew said: “I know people seem to regard it as fantastic that an actor should entertain the notion of being a politician. In the past, I think, the public has been suspicious of actors. They regarded them as layabouts. I suppose. But an actor is as likely to be politically minded as anyone else.”

Andrew is 41 this month. His parents were Scottish missionaries, and he was born in Tanganyika.

“Those African children made a tremendous impression on me,” he said. “They were running around naked, diseased and blighted. I was plump, well clothed and healthy — except when I was bitten by a snake at the age of four.

“An African medicine man, believe it or not, cured me by chewing up a root and spitting the pulp on my head.”

Andrew’s interest in acting began at a Stirling High School performance of “HMS Pinafore,” in which he played Dick Deadeye. There followed parts in undergraduate productions at Glasgow University. Then in 1946, Shakespeare at Stratford.

Since then, filming has taken him to Kenya, Libya, Singapore, Canary Islands, Spain, Italy, Paris and Hollywood.

“I see no reason why I shouldn’t successfully combine the roles of actor and politician,” he said. “I believe, as Renaissance man did, that people do not tackle enough jobs. We can all do more than we think we can.”

Though his weekends are taken up with political work. Andrew still has time for hobbies. He collects English medieval and Tudor pottery, political mugs and busts of English politicians.

“I’ve got about 30 mugs now — including a couple of Joseph Chamberlain, one Disraeli and a Stanley Baldwin,” he said. “The busts I look for are the ones that give a popular image of the politician – nothing particularly artistic.”

Ian Souter, private investigator, has all the energy of the actor-politician. He comes from somewhere north of Stirlingshire, went to school at Gordonstoun and in the latter part of World War II, was commissioned into the Black Watch.

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Once was in the film “The Seventh Veil” (where he sorted out the mixed emotions of Ann Todd enabling her to live happily ever after with James Mason), and the other was in the TV series The Human Jungle. Both times with great success.

“The Seventh Veil” was one of the best films of the postwar years. While The Human Jungle, where Herbert played the part of Dr. Roger Corder, brought him in a fan mail of 2,000 letters a week — mainly from women who saw him as the small screen’s answer to their human problems.

His success can be measured by the fact that Lom has played every part from the heaviest of villains (he’s just finished Simon Legree in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) to the lightest of comedians (with Peter Sellers in “A Shot In The Dark”).

Mr. Lom has carved a definite niche for himself in screen history. His versatile talent shines through whatever the role he’s playing.

Sometimes he’s the kind-hearted friend of the heroine, providing a clean white handkerchief and a sturdy shoulder for her to cry on. But seldom, if ever, does he get the girl.

Mr. Lom is no swashbuckler. He doesn’t look dashing or even romantic. But he does look intelligent. And the appeal he undoubtedly has for women has little to do with sex-appeal.

Herbert Lom’s attraction is definitely of the mind—intellectual and not physical.

If the Lom charm is based on brain-power rather than looks, it has certainly served to his advantage. He came to this country as a drama student from Prague 25 years ago and his services as an actor are still very much in demand.

He can talk of many things — the arts, the sciences, politics, history, travel, philosophy. But as we sat in his London home — a Victorian villa in Kensington in which, nevertheless, he houses his collection of madly modern paintings — we talked about Christmas trees.

Mr. Lom has two away-from-it-all pursuits. He paints, and he grows Christmas trees on his farm in Kent. “When I was looking for a farm some years ago, I couldn’t see myself breeding animals, and the Christmas trees which came with the farm seemed a nice idea.

“I make a little money out of them and I’m very interested in forestry as a result. I am inclined to get involved in whatever I’m doing because an actor just can’t help doing so. Surely, the whole business of acting is to get behind the character you’re playing, so that for a time you become that person.

“When I played Napoleon I read everything I could lay my hands on about him and his campaigns.”

“And when you play a psychiatrist?” I asked.

“Ah yes. When I played my first psychiatrist I happened to be deeply interested in the subject of psycho-analysis because I had a friend who had recently taken such treatment, and I really wanted to be able to be of some help. Besides which. I’ve always had a latent feeling for the mysteries of the subconscious.

“I even got a doctor friend to teach me how to hypnotise myself — all medical-students are taught hypnosis, you know. I had the rather selfish notion that by self-hypnosis I could cut down the time I usually took to learn a part from two to three weeks to two to three days.

“And for quite a few of the parts I played I did use hypnosis. So perhaps I do understand Dr. Corder’s motives a little more than I might be expected to. “Not that I would attempt – even if I had the time — to try to solve the problems of the women who write to me. I send them a sympathetic letter pointing out that I am an actor, not a qualified doctor and suggest that they seek professional advice. I can only hope that, in such cases, every little word of understanding helps.”

There was one other thing. In his middle years, after nearly 20 years of marriage and two growing sons, did he think — this most understanding of men – that his wife understood him?

“About half of the time, I would say,” he said. “Of course, the other half, I don’t want to be understood!”

A galaxy of guest stars

Dr. Roger Corder, the sympathetic psychiatrist with the mischievous teenage daughter, is back. He returns this week in a new 13-part series, exploring The Human Jungle.

Herbert Lom (Corder) and Sally Smith (Jennifer) resume their father-daughter relationship; Michael Johnson (Dr. Jimmy Davis) is again Corder’s assistant. Mary Yeomans (Nancy Hamilton) is his secretary.

A galaxy of film and theatre stars will make guest appearances.

Joan Collins, Sylvia Syms, Margaret Lock-wood, Flora Robson, Richard Johnson, Rita Tushingham, Peggy Cummins, Sonia Dresdel… are some of them.

Corder is faced with a wide variety of strange human jig-saw puzzles during the series. Among them are:

Why should an ageing, lonely schoolmistress receive menacing blackmail threats? … what is the story behind the long list of street accidents that keep happening to a young girl? … who is responsible for the mysterious fire in the home of a wealthy young couple? All the stories originate from real-life cases. To ensure accuracy a 35-year-old psychiatrist from Manchester has watched the series being made. He told me: “It has been my job to ensure that the stories have not been ‘over-dramatised’.”

The first episode in the new series, “Struggle for a Mind,” has Joan Collins as guest star, with Margaret Whiting, Kay Walsh and Clifford Evans in support.

Joan Collins (in her first acting appearance on British TV) plays a young woman who tries to commit suicide.

Corder’s plan to lead her back to sanity conflicts with the ideas of Dr. Tate, who is in charge of the case. But both have reckoned without the girl’s warped and hostile family.

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11.55pm on 28 July 1968: Goodbye from ABC. After twelve years as the Weekend Independent Television Programme Company in the North ABC Television is closing down tonight for good. David Hamilton and Keith Martin who, as station hosts, are the personalities most often seen by our viewers over these years, look back at past programmes and personal memories from our studios in Manchester, switch off the Didsbury lights and put out the studio cat for the very last time.

Produced by the Presentation Department, ABC Television.

(Editor’s note: a Midlands version of this programme, with substantially the same script, was aired at the same time from the Alpha Studios in Aston, Birmingham, presented by Sheila Kennedy and Philip Elsmore)

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The ITA did not specify the same level of local news coverage for ABC as for Granada and ATV Midlands. But this was more due to the UK broadcasting tradition, dating back to the pre-war BBC Regional Service on the radio. The tradition had it that there was no local news at weekends other than sports. It was assumed that a good Friday evening local bulletin would take care of the subject until the Monday.

Late afternoon in the newsroom of ABC At Large, ABC’s weekly round-up of the region’s news and affairs. The news staff are preparing bulletins for the evening’s programme while David Mahlowe, who introduces it, rehearses in front of the cameras.

The newsroom at ABC’s Manchester Studios is the nerve centre of this programme. Into it are fed pictures from the studio, film from telecine or live outside broadcast coverage of stories in the North and Midlands.

ABC At Large has been the first to highlight many problems in these areas, and has won a large audience for its liveliness and integrity.

The weekend ITV companies, ABC and ATV London could easily cover sports results, weather and traffic information as part of their continuity effort. This was okay as far as it went, but ABC in particular did not want to be seen as “less substantial” than ATV Midlands or Granada. ABC, of its own accord, chose to produce a level of regional news coverage in excess of the ITA’s weekend requirements.

Another choice was the type of regional ‘news’ that would be covered by ABC. It would not be local in the sense that we use today, but would look at issues of concern to the region as a whole. It had a proto-northern and -midland ‘cultural’ slant, in a time before devolution was thought of. It was more ‘middle class’ in tone than Granada ever managed – the sort of local news provided by Granada, with warehouses on fire in Salford, was not of interest to ABC.

It would not be economical to set up an ABC northern or midland newsroom, just to duplicate Granada’s five-day effort for ABC’s two days. Taking news from an “off the air” Granada or ATV Midlands, like LWT with Thames in the 1980s, or even paying their rival newsrooms to provide copy at weekends was unthinkable. ABC took the decision to go for stories on ‘northern and midland life’ in terms of lifestyle, music, culture, ‘events’ and sports. This had the effect of showcasing the north and midlands for their ‘non-London’ strengths.

With programmes at best two days a week, a review format was the obvious choice and making use of ABC’s luxurious outside broadcast fleet, the largest in the network, was a must. Apart from a Saturday evening roundup of sports results, and coverage of any major regional stories, ABC would concentrate on ‘looking over their area’ at the end of the week.

An early programmes developed for this purpose was ABC at Large, the programme title after which this website is named. The weekly show, initially late on Saturday evenings, though later moved to Sunday afternoons, had filmed reports as a staple. The programme was introduced for several years by David Mahlowe, who was later to become one of the ‘stalwart’ voices reading the clips on Granada’s What the Papers Say. He was also known for presenting ABC’s upmarket arts magazine Tempo, which was the South Bank Show of its time. Tim Brinton, and the young and relatively unknown Desmond Wilcox, ably assisted him.

The show would open with a roundup of local news, read by one of the continuity announcers brought specially to a main studio in Didsbury. It was a joint programme for north and midlands, although it came from Manchester, and no attempt was ever made at separate editions for ABC’s two regions.

What this meant in effect was that for the weekend only, these two Independent Television regions became one, and a tall map on the wall behind the ‘newsreader’ showed the ABC ‘region’ as white within a shaded England, the north and midlands ‘as one’. This gave the surreal impression that the part of the country that mattered was that part north of Watford, and south of that point was some rather parochial place called ‘London’ that “need not concern us at ABC”.

This extraordinary state of affairs struck one as surreal, even as a child. After a few minutes of carefully selected regional stories (upbeat, cultural, pan regional and never a warehouse fire in sight) the announcer would hand back to the main presenter, who would introduce a series of filmed features, usually prepared earlier in the week about aspects of northern and midland life.

If anything the show was a topical magazine, with a strong regional perspective, rather than a news bulletin. The programme won awards, including one for an edition in which Tim Brinton lived with a pensioner, on that pensioner’s normal budget, for a week – a new idea then. Desmond Wilcox got his first taste for social issues on the show. ABC at Large was seasonal, and ran from March to October each year from the late fifties to the mid-sixties. By then the formula required refreshing, and in 1964 ABC at Large was supplemented by ABC Weekend, taking over the vacated Saturday night slot.

This programme was more discussion orientated, but specialised in ‘provocative’ studio debate, reports and occasional controversies. In an era before ‘vox pops’, it was the journalists participating who said the provocative things to each other, then a new idea. The programme was introduced by Barry Westwood, Gillian Reynolds and Mary Griffiths, but as before the show opened with a regional news round-up, usually read by John Benson or John Edmunds in front of the surreal map of an alternative England without the south-east.

Desmond Wilcox was in evidence again, and interviewed Harold Wilson at some length on the show in 1966, with Wilson appearing in his alternative capacity as a ‘northern constituency MP’ rather than Prime Minister. Again the show was seasonal and typically ran for six or seven months of the year, though the winter months as opposed to ABC at Large in the summer. ABC Weekend ran from 1964 to 1968, but was dropped about six months before ABC closed, the team going off to London to adapt the poor Rediffusion local output into the exemplary Thames Today.

Another controversial series, The National Stakes, ran late at nights for several years in the mid-sixties. Again it specialised in strong debate, and tackled subjects then in the news and thought to be controversial, like divorce, abortion and capital punishment. It is remarkable how ABC at Large, ABC Weekend, The National Stakes and Fighting Talk are forgotten today when they were popular and award winning in their time. They were seen as topical magazines dealing in ‘issues’ rather than parochial incidents and were the direct ancestors of the ‘issue’ shows that make up much of Channel Four’s topical output today.

One early edition of ABC at Large was censured by the ITA for ‘a reckless lack of restraint’ on a social campaigning issue of the time. Howard Thomas, the MD of ABC was said to be delighted. It showed that ABC was lively, attention seeking, and dynamic – as always, a trailblazer. It was always company policy to stand out from the dour Granada or the lighter ATV Midlands. “Be as daring as you wish,” he told the producers, “it all gets us noticed.”

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Archive source: theavengers.org.uk

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Even though it had originally been planned that Hendry’s Police Surgeon character should continue into The Avengers, there appears to have been a general undertaking that he should step back from his direct association with the authorities. To facilitate this, Brent would fall back on his ‘day job’ as a general practitioner, ceasing his work with the Metropolitan Police. It was felt that the central character’s close working relationship with the police had shackled Police Surgeon to the mundane, and the intention was to make The Avengers much more dynamic and far less predictable.

Once it had been decided not to retain the link to Police Surgeon, Hendry’s character was renamed Dr David Dent, and it is this name that appears in the earliest draft script of ‘Hot Snow’. This was, however, changed at the insistence of Ian Hendry, who felt that audiences would confuse the new character with Dr Brent, the old. The name that was finally settled on was Dr David Keel. By this time, it had also been determined that Keel would experience a cathartic event early in the first episode: he would witness the brutal murder of his fiancée, Peggy. This tragedy would prove to be the catalyst for him becoming involved in crime-fighting.

Character outlines written prior to the series’ first transmission appear not to have survived, but one issued by Leonard White on 31st October 1961 as a reminder to writers reveals the following about Dr David Keel:

Keel, being a doctor, is the ‘amateur’. This does not mean that he is less good at the ‘job’, but simply that his motives for concerning himself with a mission are quite different from Steed’s. Without being at all ‘goody-goody’, he will, usually, be fired by a sense of public service, kindled by his humanitarian instincts. He is an excellent doctor and this proficiency is a specific help in the joint missions.

Women find him very attractive. Usually, however, he will keep them at a distance. His sincerity does not allow him to flirt and he still has deep feelings for the fiancée he lost.

Despite the obvious parallels existing between doctors Brent and Keel, Ian Hendry was very positive about the role when he spoke about it in December 1960: “Keel is a most attractive character,” he said. “He combines just the right amount of toughness and compassion. Keel will be a kind of extended version of the police surgeon, because he will be more directly involved with fighting crime. And as he tangles with the villains himself, he will have more action. Frankly, I thought twice when I was asked to start out on another series as a doctor, but as I know that the accent in the scripts is on authenticity, I think it will do me a lot of good. And I know it will be a lot of fun.” (TV Times No. 270, 30th December 1960)

Leonard White’s character description for Keel echoes the themes of toughness, action and humour:

He is tough, but not hard. Can be very gentle: loves children. Likes sport (would be a keen rugby player if he had the time). Product of a ‘red-brick’ university. A wry sense of humour. Quite serious normally, but when he smiles – it’s wonderful. Being a doctor, he is well trained to think out a problem and resolve it by positive action.

Meanwhile, the character of John Steed, Keel’s enigmatic, persuasive and often difficult liaison with the authorities, is described thus in Leonard White’s document of 31st October 1961:

Steed is the professional undercover man. He is suave, debonair, ‘man-about-town’. A sophisticate, but not lacking in virility. His ‘sports’ are probably horse racing, dog racing, beauty competitions, etc. He has an eye for the beautiful and unusual – be it objets d’art or women. He will never be serious with one woman, however. He is very experienced.

The document goes on to detail his proficiency in armed and unarmed combat and notes the fundamental difference between the professional Steed and his amateur and unofficial partner, Dr Keel.

His motives are not necessarily as ‘moral’ as Keel’s. To him, the success of the mission is the only important thing and therefore his means may sometimes be questionable. The success of the mission is, however, a wrong put right, and therefore sometimes necessitates these means being used to this end.

To all intents and purposes, when on a mission, Steed is his own man. He is highly paid to do his job, and is expected to produce results, independently and discreetly. He answers to an organisational contact, such as One-Ten, from whom Steed often receives briefings on missions and pertinent information.

Once on an assignment, however, Steed (and Keel) are essentially relied upon to work out their own salvation.

Keel and Steed are essentially undercover. They are not private or public detectives, and any story which follows the usual ‘private eye’ pattern is not right for us.

When asked about the character of John Steed in December 1960, Patrick Macnee responded: “The undercover man I play is a wolf with the women and revels in trouble. He doesn’t think so much about saving hoodlums as just getting them out of the way. By the same token, he doesn’t follow the Queensberry rules, and although he works indirectly with the police, he is not too popular with them.” (TV Times No. 270, 30th December 1960) Macnee’s description of Steed’s ruthlessness and womanising demonstrate that, although the surviving Series 1 guidelines hail from 31st October 1961, these characteristics had been established at a very early stage.

Even so, Macnee initially struggled to get a proper handle on the character. Early in pre-production on Hot Snow, director Don Leaver presented the actor with a copy of Ian Fleming’s debut James Bond novel Casino Royale, suggesting that Macnee would do well to draw inspiration from Fleming’s secret service agent. However, the novel was not to Macnee’s tastes, and was, he felt, “the opposite of what I was interested in. Bond used women like battering rams and seemed intent on drinking and smoking himself to death.” (The Avengers and Me, Dave Rogers / Titan Books, 1997)

Consequently, Macnee decided to take a different path with the character, as he explained in 1995: “I took the veneer of Bond for Steed, without using the core. What I left out were the words ‘licence to kill’. Steed had no licence to kill. All I really had as Steed was this iron will to bring the enemy to book.” (The Ultimate Avengers, Dave Rogers / Boxtree, 1995)

In ‘Hot Snow’, Steed is depicted with a deliberate ambiguity, the intention being that neither Keel nor the audience would know whether this man could be trusted. There is even the suggestion that he may be working for the Big Man and is manipulating Keel in order to tie up loose ends for the gang leader. “At first, you never quite knew if he was good or evil,” Macnee recalled. “He was a shadowy sort of character who emerged through windows with a pistol and impeccable brolly.” (The Ultimate Avengers, Dave Rogers / Boxtree, 1995)

In ‘Brought to Book’, Steed is somewhat closer to the character with which audiences would become familiar, cracking jokes and flirting with women – but according to Macnee himself, there was still something missing: “I hadn’t actually thought about Steed in any great detail until, after about two or three episodes, Sydney Newman called me into his office and forced me to take stock of my position.” Newman suggested that the part as Macnee was playing it was just not working; Steed lacked personality, and neither the character nor his costume was interesting enough. He asked if the actor could spend some time thinking how the character and his apparel might be revitalised. “I was terribly downtrodden to hear this – I thought that I was doing rather well – and got very angry and stormed out of his office. Depressed, I went home to my flat and thought of how I could improve the character, rationalise it, make it work.” (The Avengers and Me, Dave Rogers / Titan Books, 1997)

“What the devil did he mean?” Macnee wondered. “John Steed was more than a part of me, he was an extension of myself. And that ‘self’ had been shaped by 18th- and 19th-century influences.” The film director Michael Powell had described the actor as “an 18th-century man”, much to Macnee’s delight. “My clothes were elegant but in such a conventional way as to make them thoroughly uninteresting. Steed’s daring conduct had to be complemented by his clothes.” (Blind in One Ear, Patrick Macnee and Marie Cameron / Harrap, 1988)

For his inspiration, Macnee looked first towards his father, Daniel, the racehorse trainer: “He was a real dandy. He used to lean over the paddock gate, always with a beautiful carnation in his buttonhole. He’d wear a cravat with a pure pearl in it, and wore a lovely brocade waistcoat… Then I ‘pinched’ a bit from Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, one of the great British heroes. It seemed to me that if Steed was this shadowy person who was helping to rescue other people, he was something like the Pimpernel – somebody extremely well-dressed who gave the impression of being a fop, so nobody felt that he was a threat.” (The Avengers and Me, Dave Rogers / Titan Books, 1997)

Another source of inspiration was the 1939 film Q Planes (released in the United States under the title Clouds Over Europe), and specifically the role played in it by Ralph Richardson, one of the great talents of the era. His character, Major Hammond, a British spymaster seeking to discover the truth about warplanes that had gone missing on test flights, conceals a keen intellect behind the façade of a buffoon, wears a homburg hat and carries a furled umbrella – the parallels with Steed are plain. Macnee has also often credited Bussy Carr, his commanding officer in the Royal Navy, as a further influence on his thinking when defining the characteristics of Steed, someone who was, like Macnee’s father, a dandy, and yet courageous.

The likes of Beau Brummell also sprang to mind. “I thought of the Regency days – the most flamboyant, sartorially, for men – and I imagined Steed in waisted jackets and embroidered waistcoats. Steed I was stuck with as a name, and it stayed. Underneath he was steel. Outwardly he was charming and vain and representative, I suppose, of the kind of Englishman who is more valued abroad. The point about Steed was that he led a fantasy life – a hero dressed like a junior cabinet minister. An Old Etonian whose most lethal weapon was the hallmark of the English gentleman – a furled umbrella.” (The Ultimate Avengers, Dave Rogers / Boxtree, 1995)

Due to the paucity of surviving images from the earliest Avengers episodes, it is impossible to know for sure when Steed’s new look was introduced, though even as early as the third episode, ‘Square Root of Evil’, there is evidence of the agent’s emerging sartorial elegance. The character of Jackie Warren (Vic Wise) mentions Steed’s “clobber”, and says that, “I heard you was something of a dresser.” However, he could be referring to Timothy James Riordan, the forger who Steed is impersonating.

Certainly by the 15th episode, ‘The Frighteners’, the earliest surviving appearance by Macnee as Steed, the agent has started wearing the famous bowler hat and carnation, and is carrying his distinctive whangee-handle umbrella, though these are not regular accoutrements at this point in the series. In fact, judging by the way in which his scene with the Flower Seller (Eleanor Darling) is performed, it is possible that she decorates Steed’s buttonhole for the very first time! It is less likely that this episode marks the first appearance of Steed’s bowler, since his wearing of it passes without comment. Earlier episodes provided the character with arguably more logical reasons for adopting the guise of a city gent – specifically when he poses as an insurance company representative in ‘Ashes of Roses’ and as a cipher clerk in ‘Please Don’t Feed the Animals’. On the other hand, perhaps the production team deliberately allowed the hat to be introduced without explanation in ‘The Frighteners’, simply to be zany. It is worth noting that another character, the villainous Benson (Peter Madden), wears a bowler hat two episodes earlier, in ‘One for the Mortuary’, so it could be that the inspiration came from there.

By June 1961, Macnee was describing Steed to the press as rather more of a fantasy figure than he had been before: “Like Steed, I live by my own rules. I always have. At Eton College I was a gambler, a successful one because I got tips straight from the ‘horse’s mouth’ – my father, then very active in the racing business. I had £200 in the kitty when the authorities caught me. I was nearly expelled. Let’s say Steed is a slightly exaggerated form of myself. Somebody once said to me: ‘you should have lived in the 18th century’. I agree. Like Steed, I’m a great pretender. Anybody who loves the good life, as I do, has to be a pretender.” (TV Times No. 296, 30th June 1961)

Some years later, Ian Hendry summed up his take on the characters that he and Macnee had evolved: “I do think we managed, in those early days, to develop a new style. I was supposed to be phlegmatic, and when I got too boring, Steed was there to send me up and tell me not to be so serious. And when Steed got too outrageous, I was there to say: ‘Oh come on, don’t overdo it.’ ” (TV Times Souvenir Extra – The New Avengers, 1976)

With Umbrella, Scotch and Cigarettes – An Unauthorised Guide to the Avengers Series 1 by Richard McGinlay and Alan Hayes is available from Amazon.co.uk and direct from Lulu – use promo code FWD15 to save 15% on your Lulu order.

The text in this article is © 2014 Richard McGinlay and Alan Hayes and is not included in Transdiffusion’s usual Creative Commons licence.

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The ITA did not specify the same level of local news coverage for ABC as for Granada and ATV Midlands. But this was more due to the UK broadcasting tradition, dating back to the pre-war BBC Regional Service on the radio. The tradition had it that there was no local news at weekends other than sports. It was assumed that a good Friday evening local bulletin would take care of the subject until the Monday.

Late afternoon in the newsroom of ABC At Large, ABC’s weekly round-up of the region’s news and affairs. The news staff are preparing bulletins for the evening’s programme while David Mahlowe, who introduces it, rehearses in front of the cameras.

The newsroom at ABC’s Manchester Studios is the nerve centre of this programme. Into it are fed pictures from the studio, film from telecine or live outside broadcast coverage of stories in the North and Midlands.

ABC At Large has been the first to highlight many problems in these areas, and has won a large audience for its liveliness and integrity.

The weekend ITV companies, ABC and ATV London could easily cover sports results, weather and traffic information as part of their continuity effort. This was okay as far as it went, but ABC in particular did not want to be seen as “less substantial” than ATV Midlands or Granada. ABC, of its own accord, chose to produce a level of regional news coverage in excess of the ITA’s weekend requirements.

Another choice was the type of regional ‘news’ that would be covered by ABC. It would not be local in the sense that we use today, but would look at issues of concern to the region as a whole. It had a proto-northern and -midland ‘cultural’ slant, in a time before devolution was thought of. It was more ‘middle class’ in tone than Granada ever managed – the sort of local news provided by Granada, with warehouses on fire in Salford, was not of interest to ABC.

It would not be economical to set up an ABC northern or midland newsroom, just to duplicate Granada’s five-day effort for ABC’s two days. Taking news from an “off the air” Granada or ATV Midlands, like LWT with Thames in the 1980s, or even paying their rival newsrooms to provide copy at weekends was unthinkable. ABC took the decision to go for stories on ‘northern and midland life’ in terms of lifestyle, music, culture, ‘events’ and sports. This had the effect of showcasing the north and midlands for their ‘non-London’ strengths.

With programmes at best two days a week, a review format was the obvious choice and making use of ABC’s luxurious outside broadcast fleet, the largest in the network, was a must. Apart from a Saturday evening roundup of sports results, and coverage of any major regional stories, ABC would concentrate on ‘looking over their area’ at the end of the week.

The first of the programmes developed for this purpose was “ABC at Large”, the programme title after which this website is named. The weekly show, initially late on Saturday evenings, though later moved to Sunday afternoons, had filmed reports as a staple. The programme was introduced for several years by David Mahlowe, who was later to become one of the ‘stalwart’ voices reading the clips on Granada’s “What the Papers Say”. He was also known for presenting ABC’s upmarket arts magazine “Tempo”, which was the ‘South Bank Show’ of its time. Tim Brinton, and the young and relatively unknown Desmond Wilcox, ably assisted him.

The show would open with a roundup of local news, read by one of the continuity announcers brought specially to a main studio in Didsbury. It was a joint programme for north and midlands, although it came from Manchester, and no attempt was ever made at separate editions for ABC’s two regions.

What this meant in effect was that for the weekend only, these two Independent Television regions became one, and a tall map on the wall behind the ‘newsreader’ showed the ABC ‘region’ as white within a shaded England, the north and midlands ‘as one’. This gave the surreal impression that the part of the country that mattered was that part north of Watford, and south of that point was some rather parochial place called ‘London’ that “need not concern us at ABC”.

This extraordinary state of affairs struck one as surreal, even as a child. After a few minutes of carefully selected regional stories (upbeat, cultural, pan regional and never a warehouse fire in sight) the announcer would hand back to the main presenter, who would introduce a series of filmed features, usually prepared earlier in the week about aspects of northern and midland life.

If anything the show was a topical magazine, with a strong regional perspective, rather than a news bulletin. The programme won awards, including one for an edition in which Tim Brinton lived with a pensioner, on that pensioner’s normal budget, for a week – a new idea then. Desmond Wilcox got his first taste for social issues on the show. “ABC at Large” was seasonal, and ran from March to October each year from the late fifties to the mid-sixties. By then the formula required refreshing, and in 1964 “ABC at Large” was supplemented by “ABC Weekend”, taking over the vacated Saturday night slot.

This programme was more discussion orientated, but specialised in ‘provocative’ studio debate, reports and occasional controversies. In an era before ‘vox pops’, it was the journalists participating who said the provocative things to each other, then a new idea. The programme was introduced by Barry Westwood, Gillian Reynolds and Mary Griffiths, but as before the show opened with a regional news round-up, usually read by John Benson or John Edmunds in front of the surreal map of an alternative England without the south-east.

Desmond Wilcox was in evidence again, and interviewed Harold Wilson at some length on the show in 1966, with Wilson appearing in his alternative capacity as a ‘northern constituency MP’ rather than Prime Minister. Again the show was seasonal and typically ran for six or seven months of the year, though the winter months as opposed to “ABC at Large” in the summer. “ABC Weekend” ran from 1964 to 1968, but was dropped about six months before ABC closed, the team going off to London to adapt the poor Rediffusion local output into the exemplary “Thames Today”.

Another controversial series, “The National Stakes” ran late at nights for several years in the mid-sixties. Again it specialised in strong debate, and tackled subjects then in the news and thought to be controversial, like divorce, abortion and capital punishment. It is remarkable how “ABC at Large”, “ABC Weekend”, “The National Stakes” and “Fighting Talk” are forgotten today when they were popular and award winning in their time. They were seen as topical magazines dealing in ‘issues’ rather than parochial incidents and were the direct ancestors of the ‘issue’ shows that make up much of Channel Four’s topical output today.

One early edition of “ABC at Large” was censured by the ITA for ‘a reckless lack of restraint’ on a social campaigning issue of the time. Howard Thomas, the MD of ABC was said to be delighted. It showed that ABC was lively, attention seeking, and dynamic – as always, a trailblazer. It was always company policy to stand out from the dour Granada or the lighter ATV Midlands. “Be as daring as you wish,” he told the producers, “it all gets us noticed.”

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The first season started out with two main characters, Patrick MacNee as John Steed and Ian Hendry as Dr David Keel. Johnny Dankworth, who would later write the music for Tomorrow’s World as well as much else, was commissioned to write the theme, and the music he wrote symbolized the more serious nature of the plots of the original few series.

The opening titles were striking – a series of clear black and white cards, sometimes mixed over the stage where the opening scene would take place. Ian Hendry was given top billing in the first season and the series firmly revolved around him ‘avenging’ the murder of his practice nurse girlfriend. Hendry had previously starred in a short series called “Police Surgeon” for ABC in 1959 and was playing a very similar character in the new series. The first two episodes, which served as a pilot, were filmed on videotape, while the next seven were transmitted live. The rest of the season was recorded on videotape.

After 26 episodes had been produced, a strike by British Actors Equity halted production temporarily. Still at the start of his career, Ian Hendry took the opportunity to leave the series to pursue film work. When production restarted, producers hired Honor Blackman to partner Steed in the role of Cathy Gale. This was reflected in the still-serious and stark title sequence.

Cathy Gale didn’t appear in every season 2 episode, with either Venus Smith (Julie Stevens) or Dr. Martin King (Jon Rollason) partnering John Steed to fill the gaps. The opening titles in these circumstances would just credit Macnee. The Dankworth theme music remained in place but the plots slowly started to develop towards the quirkiness that was to set the series apart.

By season three, the bit players had been removed and Cathy was the full-time partner. Importantly for ABC, the show was now being exported worldwide – except to the United States, where 405-line monochrome standard videotape had become unpopular with the networks as they moved to 525-line colour. ABC did export season three, but the US ABC network as buyers demanded in return that the next season was recorded on film, and that the show would become colour. But season four was to see the loss of the second lead actor: Honor Blackman had secured the role of Pussy Galore in the next James Bond film, Goldfinger and departed to begin filming at Pinewood.

ABC began searching for someone to take her place. The character was re-written in anticipation of a new actress, and even Howard Thomas, MD at ABC, was engaged in the casting process. A name was chosen on the basis of what they were looking for in the new character and the new actress: she must have Man Appeal – ‘M’ Appeal – Emma Peel. The ‘M’ appeal was found in actress Diana Rigg, and the show was on its way from being a success to being a classic.

Season four marked a relaunch for the series. The Dankworth theme no longer suited the mood of the stories, which were quirkier than ever before, and Laurie Johnson was commissioned to compose a new theme. The opening titles also changed to a series of still pictures of the two stars, Macnee & Rigg, in typical Avengers-like poses. Whilst season four was in black and white, the next season would see the programme being filmed in colour, despite ABC Weekend and the rest of ITV still being in monochrome themselves.

Season five also saw another change in the opening titles, with a filmed sequence involving the two stars. During the season, the ABC endcap was significantly different. It would start “ABC Production” minus the famous triangle logo and end showing that ABC stood for Associated British Corporation – a name invented by ABPC to fill the letters and avoid confusion with US ABC.

Diana Rigg decided to leave the show at the end of the penultimate season and producers brought in Linda Thorson to play the role of trainee Tara King, a character she created and named herself. But NBC scheduled the popular ‘Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In’ against the new series on ABC-US and the ratings went into freefall.

The production team was replaced and the character of Tara King was toughened up but that didn’t help ABC-US’s ratings and the show was cancelled in 1969.

ABC Weekend had also moved on to become Thames Television, and the show was no longer networked in the UK, ABC’s parent company having chosen to hold on to the rights rather than deed them to the part-owned Thames.

Since coming to an end, the show has received many plays in syndication worldwide including showings in the UK on Channel 4 and Granada Plus. The show can be found playing in its Blackman, Rigg and Thorson variants in all Francophone countries where it has become a popular cult hit. The series has been released several times on sell-through video and is known for being the height of British style and eccentricity throughout the world and in its home country. The Avengers has become a continuing legacy of ABC and all it stood for.

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You know, I probably spent loads of time in front of the telly as a child, as some of you did too. As a sickly child (asthma), I relied upon the TV set to provide undemanding entertainment, yet I only watched Granada when the “Pruitts of Southampton” or “The Beverley Hillbillies” were shown. Granada depressed me as a child. I know now what it was I felt: the Granada output, firmly rooted in the North of dark satanic mills, while extremely solid and gutsy, sometimes lacked a little of that showbiz glitter. On the other hand, ABC came across as a friendly, relaxed company with sparkle, and my recollections of ABC are, as such, more lucid and coherent, even though I was only seven when the company took its final bow.

So what memories do I have? Imagine that you’re just about at school age, and the only thing to do on Saturday mornings is to listen to the Light Programme, as my family often did, to “Junior Choice” and then “Saturday Club”. I loved those shows, and the atmosphere they created was magical.

I used to wish ABC was on immediately afterwards (12 noon) but it never was: it used to start with adult education programmes until “World of Sport”. But when teatime came, there were a succession of excellent things to enjoy, like “Just Jimmy” and “Batman”. Of the former, I really believed, as a child, that Jimmy Clitheroe was about 10 or 11 – it was a shock to hear that he was 51 when he died in 1973. “Batman” caused more accidents in my home than you could wag a stick at. After each week’s amazing story, my older brothers used to pretend that they were Batman and Robin, or I was Robin (it varied) and Mum’s best tea towels ended up as superhero capes. My eldest brother always wanted to be the supervillain, so he may have used Mum’s coat to be the Penguin, or Dad’s jacket to be the Riddler or the Joker. Leaping three stairs in a single bound, inevitably one – or all of us – ended up with some degree of minor injury, crying as Mum applied Witch Hazel for the umpteenth time to a cranial lump the size of a dinosaur egg. All this pain, despite David Hamilton warning us not to try to fly like Batman! Kids! Ha!

Recently, I found a copy of a Tommy Cooper video in my local megastore. I saw that the copyright was given to ABC. Hmm, I thought. I wonder if this was what I watched as a five-year old? And it was “Cooperama”, which I thought was absolutely the funniest thing I’d seen, which still, as a video, retained something of the original sparkle I referred to earlier. All these years later, Tommy Cooper still makes me laugh.

I always remember the “Blackpool Show”, because we used to watch it on Sunday evenings before school holidays. According to all accounts, Tony Hancock was the MC, but I only recall Bruce Forsyth for some reason. These shows were class, no more, no less. Admittedly, looking at the TV Times listings, they were, in retrospect, very middle-of-the-road fare, but it’s easy to forget that the inclusion of more up-to-date music or comedy was sparse across all TV output. Mind you, entertainment was entertainment in those days.

My parents sometimes let me stay up late when I was unwell, and I was able to see “The Magic Box” with Kenneth Robinson. What I remember of it is this: titles similar to “Picture Box”, a signature tune that sticks in the mind, and a succession of guests, all placing their favourite object or moment in the magic box. The antithesis of this would be “Room 101”!

“Time to Remember” was one of a number of series dedicated to history, and it always seemed to be on at odd times and days. The ticking of the grandfather clock always seemed to soothe me, and made me attentive for the whole of the half-hour. A lot of famous actors narrated those films, like Sir Ralph Richardson.

After enjoying all of these ABC moments and more, the final weekend rolled around. David Hamilton reminded us to make sure that we got the correct TV Times for our area, some shows ended up shoe-horned into the schedule (“Sgt Cork” on Sunday afternoon) and the final programme, “Goodbye From ABC” was trailed as being on at 11.55pm. Unfortunately for me, I had to go to bed, so I never saw that programme. I heard it though, from the comfort of my pillow, with tears in my eyes.

To this day, I can recall those weekends with warmth and affection, where television, although becoming increasingly sophisticated and constantly developing, retained something of its magic.

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Jack Hedley and Billie Whitelaw in the award-winning Armchair Theatre production.

Police Surgeon

Ian Hendry as Dr Geoffrey Brent attending to the wounded in the cop drama.

Our House

Hattie Jaques and Charles Hawtrey in Norman Hudis’s comedy about surreal boarding house residents.

The Human Jungle

Herbert Lom as the psychiatrist who can’t stay professionally detached from those he hopes to help.

Glamour all the way

Acceptable then, cringe-worthy now, the first Miss TVTimes contest is judged by Patrick Macnee and Adam Faith and won by Valerie Martin.

Redcap

John Thaw fights crime in the army as a member of the Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch.

World of Sport

Saturday afternoons mean sport – and owning ITV’s largest Outside Broadcast fleet means ABC brings you the programme, fronted by Eamonn Andrews.

Public Eye

Alfred Burke as the private eye with no gun and no mobsters lurking.

Intrigue

Edward Judd fights industrial espionage.

The Phantom Lover

David Buck appears in a supernatural drama series Mystery and Imagination, in this story opposite Virginia McKenna.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

CS Lewis’s timeless classic, adored by children and adults alike.

Photographs: TVTimes/ABC/ITA

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In week ending 2 October 1966, ATV had the number one slot with, inevitably, ‘The London Palladium Show’. The first BBC programme – ‘Till Death us do Part’ appears at position nine. ABC’s only networked entry is at number seventeen, with ‘The Eamonn Andrews Show’. This attracted 5.65 million homes to view, according to TAM, ITV’s ratings monitor.

For week ending 8 November 1964, ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’ with Jim Dale was ABC’s only entry into the network top twenty, at position 16 with 5.944 million homes.

So, does that mean that ABC’s programming was unpopular? Far from it. But ABC had to fight to get its programmes networked. Why? Because of ATV London.

ATV London’s relentless diet of peaktime entertainment, comedy and variety was very attractive to the regional companies. Cheap and popular, it guaranteed high ratings on a Saturday and Sunday night. Most companies (especially Tyne Tees, who could be depended on to show light entertainment at the drop of a hat) simply couldn’t afford to miss out on ATV’s offerings.

ATV ensured a take-it-or-leave-it approach by the simple mechanism of making the programmes live: there would be no second chance to get a feed of the show.

ABC, meanwhile, was turning out hour upon hour of nationally-shown material on videotape and film. The programmes were not only popular, but phenomenally popular and of a noted high quality. But they didn’t end up networked. Instead, they were shown as ‘ABC Television Network’ productions rather than ‘ABC Weekend’ productions during the week by the other companies.

If this system was bad for ABC, it was worse for Sir Lew. His ITC programmes were also sold individually and not networked, meaning popular ITC programming, including the Gerry Anderson supermarionette series, also failed to show up in the top tens.

Perhaps the system could have been made better by aggregating the showings of ABC, and ITC’s, output. But such a system would have been almost impossible to work, and would have a bad side effect. If an aggregated rating system had been used, ATV/ITC and ABC would have been neck-and-neck in the ratings. But this would have been to the detriment of the slow-and-steady ratings-earners like Granada and Rediffusion.

The American system of audience measurement – based on demographics and market shares – may have benefited ABC more than it does with the smaller stations in the US. But the process is slow and expensive, and as far as ATV, Rediffusion and Granada were concerned, it wasn’t broke so there was no point fixing it.

ABC still made a huge profit every year, so were probably not that concerned themselves.

July 1967 – Largest Television Audiences

ITV was in the midst of its ‘Golden Era’ in the middle sixties – a situation that would be dramatically reversed in the early seventies due to the costs of colour and the recession that swept in with Ted Heath’s new Government.

To illustrate who was watching what in July 1967, the ITA published the following lists of popular programmes for the month in the 1968 yearbook. The graphs show how close-fought the race for popular approval was – and how ITV held the trump cards.

Variety

Most popular: ABC Weekend’s “Blackpool Show” with 6.8million homes, followed at 5.1million homes by ABC Weekend’s “Opportunity Knocks” which was not networked in 1967. ATV’s “Palladium” was not running.

Children

Southern leads the way with “Danger Island” watched in 3.05million homes. ABC is next with the much-loved “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” with 3m homes. The BBC’s “Doctor Who”, “Junior Points of View” and “Boss (aka Top) Cat” finish the top 5.

Drama

The most fought-over sector is lead – inevitably – by Granada with “Coronation Street” on Mondays with 7.75m homes and Wednesdays with 7.15m. The BBC offers imported drama in the form of “Perry Mason” with 6.15m and “The Man from UNCLE” with 4.45m. ABC’s offering is “Callan” at 4.3m, matched by Rediffusion’s “Sanctuary”. The BBC takes the next 3 places with “The Girl from UNCLE”, “Iron Horse” and “Daktari”, while Granada rounds off the top 10 with “The Fellows” – something gritty and northern, no doubt.

Plays

Showing that the size of the audience is not related to the resources of the production company, Anglia walks away with 7.6m homes for “The Sleeping Partner”, part of their Summer Playhouse. ATV’s Love Story series wins 6.1m for the episode “Cinema Verité”, while Rediffusion’s non-networked Half Hour Story takes 5.7m for the episode “Dead Certainty”.

ABC comes fourth with an episode from the long-running Armchair Theatre entitled “Another Branch of the Family” with 5.55m homes. The BBC take 2.75m for their unusually entitled Wednesday Play “The Lump”.

Religion

Often the stronghold of the smaller ITV regions – the only opportunity for Border and Westward to get access to the network in some years – ATV takes the prize this time with 2.5m homes watching “Tree House Family”. ABC’s “The Song Break” makes a strong showing for this genre with 2.25m, followed by Southern’s “God’s Trombone” with 2.05m and the BBC’s “Songs of Praise” with 2m.

Scottish puts in an appearance with “The Wallace Collection” at 1.90, joint 5th with Anglia’s “Rejoice”.

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It is the most expensive game of chess ever played, a matching of wits between a handful of men with millions to spend. And the prize? You – and your viewing habits and buying habits. For this is the Battle of British Television, the tussle for supremacy, the struggle for the flick of your channel switch.

Up to September 1955 the BBC had a clear run. Unopposed, they put on what they liked; in fact, sometimes it was said that BBC Television was more concerned with pleasing itself than pleasing its audience. But the opposition opened up two years ago, with the first rounds fired by Associated-Rediffusion and Associated TeleVision (ATV) from London. Five months later the Midlands came on the air and ATV spread northward and were reinforced by ABC Television. Three more months went by and Lancashire went on the air, ABC spreading to the North and being joined by Granada Television, both companies expanding into Yorkshire in November. From 250,000 London homes capable of receiving the ITA service in September 1955 to 5,000,000 homes in Britain by Christmas 1957!

The key question was whether Britain would accept the “commercials.” They were not only accepted but enjoyed, and the jingles and cartoons especially are as entertaining as many of the programmes.

ITA went all out to be a light alternative to the BBC, but at the beginning the BBC did little to change its course, and made few concessions. The result – a predominance of 3 to 1 for ITA over BBC in every home where receivers permitted a choice – was revealed by the research figures of both parties. The ITA’s TAM figures and the BBC’s Audience Research figures, checked by door-to-door sample calls, were closely comparable.

Late in the day, perhaps after too long a delay, the BBC began to fight back. They brought in new blood, lured back some of the bright boys who had left them for richer pastures, and sent programme scouts with dollar cheques to the United States. American filmed series had helped the ITA, so the BBC bought American series, and at the time this article was being written the BBC was offering up to three hours of American film on Saturday nights. The battle has been joined. Strength for strength, money and resources, skill, showmanship and experience; everything is now thrown into the struggle.

The BBC had the initial advantages of television experience, trained staff, studios and equipment, and a huge revenue, with a gross income of £20,000,000 from licences only, as well as useful extras like the £l,000,000 profit from the Radio Times.

The commercial contractors lacked television experience, but during those first two gruelling years they learned, painfully and expensively. Yet all the contractors had rich experience of showmanship and public tastes in other fields. Associated-Rediffusion coupled overseas commercial-radio knowledge with the might of the Daily Mail. Associated TeleVision had Val Parnell and Prince Littler, with their life-long experience of the theatre, and in time added the Daily Mirror’s power to their Board. Granada brought the showmanship gained in operating some of the best-run cinemas in Britain. ABC had this, too, plus all the skill of making films like The Dam Busters at Elstree, and news and documentary films at Pathé.

Yet all the contractors had to build or acquire studios, persuade manufacturers to allocate equipment earmarked for export. Then they had to recruit staff, some from the BBC, some from films, some from Fleet Street, and electronic engineers from industry. And there was no income, apart from the capital the contractors raised to go into business. Facing the contractors was an essential order of events. First they had to spend at least as much as the BBC to provide programmes more attractive than the BBC; then they had to encourage viewers by the million either to convert their receivers and aerials to receive the ITA or buy new receivers; and finally, having won this audience, they had to “sell” the audience to advertisers in sufficient numbers to justify manufacturers spending money to reach this public.

All this was done. As soon as a large enough audience was “exposed” to TV advertising there was a resulting impact on sales, and commercial television was established as a worthwhile advertising medium.

So the revenue began to flow into the ITA companies, until today they have as much to spend on programmes as the BBC. The disparity remains in resources; for the BBC, with its dozens of studios and outside-broadcast units, its regional offices and its 13,000 staff (this total includes 8,000 working in sound radio. The radio staff can be regarded as a resource for BBC Television, since it will in time be absorbed by the TV service to a large extent), is still better equipped than the ITA contractors with their two sets of studios in London, one in Birmingham, and two in Manchester, and a combined staff strength of 3,000. But by economical use of all their resources the ITA companies’ comparative smallness in relation to the BBC is not noticeable on the viewer’s screen.

By mighty effort the BBC has managed to make a tiny reduction in the ITA’s 3:1 domination of the wavebands; but every month, as the ITA’s 5,000,000 viewing homes creeps towards the BBC’s 7,000,000 (including areas beyond reach of ITA transmitters), the BBC’s nightly audience grows less.

The importance to the ITA contractors of an increasing audience must be obvious. The more people reached, the more attractive television becomes to advertisers. But why should the BBC worry? They get the licence revenue, and the ITA gets none. It does not affect BBC revenue if the ITA audience is ten times as great, or if the BBC audience dwindles to nothing. The ITA charges to advertisers are based on a scientific calculation as to the actual audience reached at any given hour. Such considerations do not affect the BBC. Why then the consternation at Broadcasting House and Lime Grove?

Every ten years the BBC’s charter comes up in Parliament for renewal. Suppose there is a proved public preference for ITA, then why should all viewers’ licence money be paid over to the BBC? Or, more practically, why not reduce the licence fee? This is the real threat to the BBC – that ITA may reduce them to a minor position in television, and the Government might decide the BBC should have a lesser income, to match.

So the battle goes on. With their sheets of daily programmes marked out hour by hour, BBC programme planners try to fight the ATV/ABC Sunday-night combination of London Palladium and Armchair Theatre, by lightening the BBC play and placing it earlier. ABC and ATV throw in The 64,000 Question and Hour of Mystery against the BBC’s Saturday-night comedy hour. BBC buys America’s Wells Fargo to pit against an ITA Western.

The men in Broadcasting House and Lime Grove, headed by Gerald Beadle, Cecil McGivern and Kenneth Adam, match wits in this expensive game against Associated-Rediffusion’s Paul Adorian and John McMillan, ATV’s Val Parnell and Lew Grade, Granada’s Sidney and Cecil Bernstein, and my own ABC executives. This is no battle of pounds and shillings. Between them, BBC and ITA companies are spending £80,000 to £100,000 a day on programmes. Perhaps £2,000 to £4,000 per hour is spent on artists, writers and musicians. Who can spend most effectively, which are the real stars, the best combinations, the presentation methods that you will prefer?

All this is for you, bringing you a choice, and offering more carefully planned programmes than when television was a monopoly. And your tastes are ever changing. Today’s favourite is tomorrow’s bore. Where is the exact point at which a popular programme begins to pall? The programme planners’ job is to anticipate your change of taste months before you do, and then take the programme off the air before you will not want it.

Trends have to be watched. The sharp and sudden fluctuations of star values are reflected in sales of records, theatre appearances, mail requests. Cinema receipts show variations in audience preference, especially the rapid decline and fall of fads like “rock ‘n’ roll.” The American market is often a useful indication of what Britain will like, and song sales, box-office figures, etc are carefully studied here. Even so, American crazes, like calypso singing, sometimes fall flat in Britain, and success in the United States is no guarantee of a hit over here.

In some ways it is a gamble, but a calculated gamble, to assess public taste. I do not think any of us deliberately try to play down to the lowest common denominator. The fascination of the “game” is in the prospect of being able to guide public taste and to try to give people something better than they think they want. The trouble for all of us in this intricate business of catering for your whims is that the public never knows what it wants – until it gets it.

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Lew Grade’s reaction is not on record, but the pleasure of Rediffusion in landing yet another series of ABC’s The Avengers can only be imagined.

It was company policy that the weekends should be balanced and contain something for “each member of the family”. Adult education on Saturday mornings, highbrow arts for late Sunday lunch, family programmes for Sunday tea-time and even a concession to ATV’s priorities with ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. Educate, inform, and entertain was an axiom that could have been applied to ABC as much as the BBC.

In a political move curious by today’s standards, ABC pressed the Authority to allow them to extend broadcasting hours for the sole purpose of creating more adult education material. At a time when the Open University was no more than a twinkle in Harold Wilson’s eye, ABC, in association with ATV, chose to spend more on programmes where no advertising was permitted.

Though the costs were partly softened by the permitted extra averaging of peak advertising time, it is doubtful whether ABC, or indeed ATV, ever made money on these programmes. The dividend was, however, the ethos of public service bestowed on the company by the ITA’s evident pleasure at these developments.

ABC did for adult education what Associated-Rediffusion did for schools programmes – to establish the network firmly in the public service ethos.

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