When the lights go out for the last time at Didsbury studios, there’ll be a lot of us who will go all sentimental like dear old Bernie Winters and hum a chorus of “Bye Bye Didsbury”!

And why shouldn’t we be sentimental about the studio which saw the birth of Armchair Theatre, of Boy Meets Girl, of Big Night Out, Just Jimmy, Opportunity Knocks and so many other ABC shows?

My first contact with Didsbury was for Happily Ever After starring Dora Bryan in 1961. Actually, it wasn’t; my very first contact with Didsbury was in 1956 (or was it ’57?) when ABC and Granada got together for a social evening! If that’s a digression, it’s one which still surely invokes a few memories with the “founder” members — of whom there remain so many at Didsbury.

Back to Happily Ever After. Opposite Dora Bryan as her doctor husband was Peter Murray. In those days comedy shows were played the more logical, but certainly less effective, way round. That is, the audience was in the circle and the performers were a mile away on the floor! A lot of the action was ‘blind’ to the audience and reaction was consequently weak. Later, in an effort to improve atmosphere, seats for an extra audience were added on the floor and finally the studio was turned round to the present shape.

Pre-1961 I can only speak of Didsbury-based shows as a (then local) viewer. I remember Joan Edwards dusting away each Saturday morning to the strains of Poor People of Paris, Cherry Pink and Que Sera Sera – all 1956 vintage pre-rock stuff when pops still came from Tin Pan Alley.

Then, of course, there was Home Town Saturday Night, Top Numbers and Billie Whitelaw’s Time Out for Peggy. In 1959 rock arrived at Parrswood Road in Boy Meets Girl [sic: Girls — Ed] and Wham! Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, The Vernons Girls, Joe Brown and so many now forgotten rock stars of the fifties must certainly keep happy and affectionate memories of those days and those ever-helpful people at the Capitol.

I can speak personally in this — and I know that Roy, Peter, Milo, Pat and Ronnie will echo my own feelings. There was nothing quite like the Didsbury welcome; nothing quite like Frank’s greeting at the steps to make you feel wanted and important! The crew have handled just about every big artiste and every type of big show from Drama to Spectaculars yet one always sensed and appreciated their excitement with each new series.

Melody and evergreen tunes for a while replaced rock ‘n’ roll in Buckaroo. Looking back on it (impartially — I wasn’t producing!) what a super set it was, and what a happy show. And the music tapes still sound good today, don’t they fellers? And, of course, Jimmy Clitheroe. For three years Just Jimmy has been one of the big rating-pullers in our own regions and is now at last being seen in London. The appearance of the show in the Tam Top 20 is a feather in Jimmy’s schoolboy cap – and another for Didsbury.

Mike and Bernie Winters arrived with Big Night Out in 1963 and this was one of the first shows to feature regularly the ABC Television Showband – a group of Manchester-based musicians got together by Bob Sharples. The combination of Mike and Bernie with Lionel Blair paved the way for Blackpool Night Out in 1964. Although not strictly Didsbury in origin, the Blackpool shows were very much the responsibility of Didsbury studio and technical personnel.

I know that David Nixon has attempted and succeeded with tricks at Didsbury which he would hesitate to perform elsewhere.

Without giving away those professional magicians’ secrets (in fact, I couldn’t — I usually wonder how they’re done myself!) I cannot help recalling that complicated system of runners between the studio and the bar of the Parrswood opposite. Not, I hasten to add, for liquor, but in some mysterious way connected with David’s “subject” isolated in the bar. David must have lost count of the programmes he has appeared in at Didsbury – Comedy Bandbox, Candid Camera, the David Nixon Show and very many guest spots.

And if Mike and Bernie, David Nixon and all of us in Light Entertainment will miss Didsbury, so too will Hughie Green. Opportunity Knocks now approaches the end of its fifth series and Hughie’s frequent praise of the crew is some measure of his respect for this soon-to-be-darkened studio.

And where else could Ken Dodd watch a playback in the small hours of the morning – he would certainly want to add his discomknockerating thanks!

I am grateful to Joan Davy, who has edited our House Magazine for all these years, for the opportunity to thank everyone at Didsbury from all of us in Light Entertainment. Each of us must have his own collection of Didsbury memories and those which stick with me include seeing Emperor Jones as a live Armchair Theatre; Bernie Winters being “blown up” each week in Big Night Out; Hughie Green introducing Tony Holland (can’t hear “Wheels” without thinking of the Muscle Man, can you?); Peter’s editing sessions — “It fills a ninety minute tape – how the hell can I get it down to thirty-seven-thirty?”; Ronnie Baxter’s warm-ups (how could they not be a good audience when he’s so nice to them); Pat Johns, the flying ace of Blackpool; and Milo and Roy and their audition marathons – how many times must they have heard Granada?

But the fact is that they’re all happy memories. And, in return for them may I wish all the Diddlesbury boys and girls, as Hughie would say, who are shortly crossing the Pennines, the very best of luck in your new jobs and in your new homes. If it’s any consolation, Drury Lane will have nothing on the old Capitol for ghosts!

The post Farewell Didsbury 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.”

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Or else they frankly disbelieved it — like the assistant who was fitting him for a hired morning suit. When the customer’s name had to be written in a limited space on the hire form, Voytek slowly spelt out the improbable collection of letters until there was no more room on the form. The assistant looked up, pained: “Really, sir, this is no time for joking.”

After that he became just Voytek, which is the nearest phonetic spelling of his first name.

Born in 1925, Voytek spent his teens in Warsaw. He had always drawn well and been interested in art, but under German rule he had to go to an agricultural school.

He studied architecture secretly at the “underground university.”

Small groups of students met their tutors in private houses. Says Voytek: “It was dangerous, but everyone accepted it as a calculated risk — like crossing a busy street.”

As a member of a Resistance sabotage group, Voytek drew sketches and plans of places to be destroyed when the time came to rise against the Germans. It came in the autumn of 1944 In the confused street fighting, Voytek was wounded. When he recovered he hitch-hiked south to join the Polish forces in Italy. There he took part in camp theatricals.

He recalled: “We used to make scenery out of paper, but it stretched when wet, so I used to rub dry colour powder on with my hands.”

And so to Britain and post-war resettlement. After a year spent studying art and learning English, Voytek was interviewed for the Old Vic School of Design.

“I did not appreciate I was joining one of Britain’s principal theatrical institutions,” he told me.

“The Old Vic was still bomb-damaged and I saw the director in a back room. I was quite off-hand about it. I even asked to know the result of the interview the next day, although it usually took about a fortnight.

“If I had been less ignorant I would have been overawed. But they accepted me.”

Since then, by way of repertory theatre, the Arts Theatre and, for the past two years, on TV, Voytek has been earning a reputation for distinctive and sometimes brilliant stage designs.

For ABC he is the designer of Boy Meets Girls, Counter-Attack and many “Armchair Theatre” productions.

He is happiest when he can interpret a script in an impressionist style. Then, he thinks, a designer comes into his own in creating a mood which is right for the play without being realistic. A good example is a set he designed for J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose at Nottingham Playhouse – a misshapen door and alcove to represent the distorted lives of the characters and set the mood.

Says Voytek: “I believe the Theatre is the essence of reality rather than a mediocre copy of our environment. ‘Props’ do not have to be realistic provided you get the right style for the play.

“I have used a few woven rustic screens and pieces of wood with chicken wire stapled over the top to represent trees. If you catch the right atmosphere with a design, the imagination of both actors and audience is stimulated.”

Voytek uses his hands expressively as he speaks. He has come a long way since winging his way through an entrance examination for Dundee Art School in 1946 – a first step towards the Old Vic.

To design a television play Voytek prepares “almost a comic strip” of the various shots and scenes throughout the production. From these lightning sketches emerge the more detailed “props.”

In the “Armchair Theatre” production of Boy With a Meat Axe, the script simply set the scene in “a street.” Voytek made it a street with lots of brickwork and heavy shoring timbers propping up a high wall.

“The timbers became an integral part of the fight scene, breaking up the action and providing a series of dramatic shots, visually exciting,” he told me.

“In television we usually work in a naturalistic style that is closer to film than the stage. It seems to be thought that while people will accept abstract design in the theatre, on television they will only accept it in advertising.”

Sometimes, with a few brush strokes, a designer can create a character visually. Voytek’s quick sketch of a jealous husband for the comedy Italian Straw Hat, produced at Nottingham, shows how a designer may not only create the clothing but suggest the complete character.

It was at Nottingham in 1955 that Voytek met his wife, actress Renate Brent. They were married the following year and now live near ABC’s Teddington studios with their children, two-and-a-half-year-old Stefan, and Julie, aged nine months.

Voytek used to “run away from the theatre” ever so often and do something else. He once went to Wales and painted pictures for a few months. Another time he became a decorator in a Mayfair hotel – and painted walls.

He is less Bohemian now. He no longer “runs away.” Instead, with a wife who has an interest in his work, the distinction of a single name may become his signature instead of a necessity.

• Wojciech Roman Pawel Jerzy Szendzikowski, MC (1925-2014) continued to work in theatre and television into the 1990s. His marriage to Renee produced a further child, Joe, but ended in divorce in 1971. His second marriage, to Fionnuala Kenny, also ended in divorce. They had one child, Taya. At the time of his death he had six grandchildren.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An excerpt from ABC TV in Focus, a book given to potential advertisers in February 1963.

Every production needs light. Multi-set programmes like The Avengers and fast-moving shows like Thank Your Lucky Stars need a lot of it. Other, more static sequences, like the studio linking shots for Candid Camera, need less. But every studio programme must have it; under exact control, and in the right place at the right time.

The ‘right place’ means a system designed for speed of setting; a method that will allow a lighting engineer to place the lamp of his choice, at the point in space where he needs it most – with the least amount of effort. Basically two systems are in general use. Motorised barrel suspension and a point telescope system. In planning for the future, ABC decided that the flexibility of the telescope was the most practical, and a grid consisting of parallel slots, formed by steel rails and separated by light-weight metal decking, was installed. The lamps are suspended from this on individual telescopes hanging through the slots and attached to carriages rolling on the steel rails. Maximum manoeuvrability – the quick transference of lamps from one part of the studio to another – is attained by using a suspended trolley to carry complete lamp-telescope-carriage combinations along the lighting gallery, from the open mouth of one slot to either end of another.

The lamps themselves are raised and lowered by compressed-air driven winches built into the telescope carriages; leaving final direction of the light to be manipulated by pole from the studio floor. The result? Whereas it takes two or three days to rig lighting on a film set, it takes only two or three hours to rig the complete lighting for a major ABC television production. The slotted grid system is also ideal for carrying monitors, scenery, microphones and speakers, and microphone boom cables.

Power for the lighting, which in a production like the average Armchair Theatre play would keep a television receiver going for four years, is supplied by power points evenly spaced above the grid, and distributed around the studio. For ‘exact control at the right time’, each is connected to a switch on the lighting console and a dimmer on an adjacent control bank. Complete lighting sequences can be set on these and transferred to a lighting ‘memory’ that can hold up to twenty lighting combinations; to be called upon at the press of a button during the run of a production.

As the intensity of light in any sequence or set must be matched to the lighting in subsequent sequences and on adjacent sets, and plays an important part in the picture seen by the camera and demanded by the camera setting, the lighting and vision controllers share the same area and monitors in ABC studios – and work very closely together. They must devise lighting and camera alignments as a team, and this calls for an exact working knowledge of each other’s equipment. As a result, picture technique at ABC is evolving to a point where one man could finally have control of both facets of the end product.

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An excerpt from ABC TV in Focus, a book given to potential advertisers in February 1963.

Three arrowheads; three chords; a familiar triangle symbol – and another ABC programme is announced.

It could be Thank Your Lucky Stars, The Sunday Break, ABC At Large, or one of many well known weekend programmes. At 9.35 on Sunday, 17 February, it was Armchair Theatre presenting ‘The Paradise Suite’ another play specially written for ABC and scheduled for screening across the ITV Network; another full scale-television production…

It started with an idea by author Robert Muller. It was acted out-against a set imagined by award-winning designer Voytek – on the floor of Studio 1 at Teddington. It was directed by Philip Saville. And it was the product of a system, a highly refined process, a time-tied progression of skilled technical events; the product of many uncredited experts, and a great deal of modern equipment.

This is an outline of that process, of the technical demands made by every television production, and the specialised way in which they are met by ABC TV.

The point of main activity is the Control Suite. Here, in a fluorescent cockpit of intense concentration, soundproofed against the world outside and set ideally with an eagle’s-nest view of the studio, the centre point is the Director. In front of him is a bank of monitor screens showing every picture source available for his selection. Flanking him him are some of the assistants and controls he will rely upon to link and blend all the elements that make a programme. Each assistant is an expert, in control of equipment

that is the latest the industry has to offer, as advanced as ABC’s development engineers can make it. And each is an integral part of a close-locked team that must do more than co-operate; must think in every dimension and, under the Director, hold the overall effect paramount. To achieve this in the new Teddington block, the operators and equipment have been grouped in the most practical way possible.

Three soundproofed compartments, viewed left to right from the studio, handle Vision, Production and Sound. The first is concerned with lighting and cameras, the second is manned by the Production Assistant, Director, Vision Mixer and Technical Supervisor, and the third by a Sound Mixer and Grams Operator. On ‘transmission’ – the final run-through of a programme for recording or ‘live’ (immediate) transmission – each is responsible for supplying the Director with a set sequence

of elements. These are demanded by the production, or issue from the Director’s interpretation, and are arranged, refined and fixed upon during rehearsal.

Most of these elements originate on the studio floor, through action controlled by the Director via the Floor Manager, and cameras and microphones directed by means of an elaborate intercom or ‘talk-back’ system. Other elements can be woven in from a variety of sources; from film,

tape recordings (video and sound), outside broadcast feeds, gramophone records and other studios. But whatever the source, final control of use must be the Director’s. And in working to achieve this in its simplest form, ABC engineers are pace-setters. Wherever possible, they have designed or adapted picture and sound source equipment for pre-setting, and made selection and operation available by the press of a button in the Control Suite.

This then is the place where programmes are put together; where the Director is king-pin. But between him and the finished product leaving the Control Suite, for recording or transmission, stands the final check of the Technical Supervisor. He has the last adjustment of sound and picture. Like a checker on a factory floor, only his acceptance passes the product as Well Made.

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During his time in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, he worked first with ABC before moving across to the BBC in 1962, holding the role of Head of Drama with both organisations. During this phase of his career, he was responsible for initiating two hugely popular television programmes, the spy-fi series The Avengers and the science-fiction series Doctor Who, as well as overseeing the production of groundbreaking social realist drama series such as Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications describes Newman as “the most significant agent in the development of British television drama.” His obituary in The Guardian declared that “For ten brief but glorious years, Sydney Newman … was the most important impresario in Britain … His death marks not just the end of an era but the laying to rest of a whole philosophy of popular art.”

Early life

Born in Toronto, Newman was the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant father who ran a shoe shop. After studying at Ogden Public School, which he left at the age of thirteen, he later enrolled in the Central Technical School, studying art and design subjects. He initially attempted to follow a career as a stills photographer and an artist, specialising in drawing film posters. However, he found it so difficult to earn enough money to make a living from this profession that instead, he switched to working in the film industry itself. In 1938, he travelled to Hollywood, where he was offered a role with the Walt Disney Company on the strength of his graphic design work. However, he was unable to take the job due to a failure to secure a work permit. Returning to his native country, in 1941, he gained a job as a film editor at the National Film Board of Canada. He was eventually to work on over 350 films while an editor for the NFB.

During the Second World War the head of the NFB, John Grierson, promoted Newman to film producer, working on documentaries and propaganda films, including Fighting Norway, which he directed. In 1944 he was made executive producer of Canada Carries On, a long-running series of such films. In 1949 Grierson again assisted Newman’s career, entering him into television, then a new industry, on a one-year attachment to NBC in New York City. His assignment there was to compile reports for the Canadian government on American television techniques, focusing on dramas, documentaries and outside broadcasts.

The CBC

One of Newman’s reports on outside broadcasting was seen and admired by executives at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and in 1952 he joined the Corporation as their Supervising Director of Features, Documentaries and Outside Broadcasts. There he was involved in producing not only some of the earliest television editions of Hockey Night in Canada, but also the first Canadian Football League game to be shown on television. After his experience of seeing the production of television plays in New York, he was eager to work in drama despite, by his own admission, “knowing nothing about drama.” He was nonetheless able to persuade his superiors at CBC to make him Supervisor of Drama Production in 1954. In this position he encouraged a new wave of young writers and directors, including Ted Kotcheff and Arthur Hailey, and oversaw shows such as the popular General Motors Theatre.

Writing in 1990, the journalist Paul Rutherford felt that during his time at the CBC in the 1950s, Newman had been a “great champion of both realistic and Canadian drama.” He felt that Newman “came to fulfil the role of the drama impresario with the vision to push people to develop a high-quality and popular style of drama.”

Several of the General Motors Theatre plays, including Hailey’s Flight into Danger, were purchased for screening by the BBC in the United Kingdom. The productions impressed Howard Thomas, who was the managing director of ABC, the franchise holder for the rival ITV network in the English Midlands and the North at weekends. Thomas offered Newman a job with ABC as a producer of his own Saturday night thriller series, which Newman accepted, moving to Britain in 1958. In 1975 the Head of Drama at the CBC, John Hirsch, noted that the tendency of so many writers and directors having followed Newman to the UK in the 1950s and never having returned to work in Canada had a detrimental impact on the standard of subsequent Canadian television drama.

ABC

Soon after Newman arrived in the UK, ABC’s Head of Drama Dennis Vance was moved into a more senior position with the company, and Thomas offered Newman his position, which the Canadian quickly accepted. He was, however, somewhat disparaging of the state in which he found British television drama. “At that time, I found this country to be somewhat class-ridden,” he reminisced to interviewers in 1988. “The only legitimate theatre was of the ‘anyone for tennis’ variety, which on the whole gave a condescending view of working-class people. Television dramas were usually adaptations of stage plays and invariably about the upper classes. I said, ‘Damn the upper classes: they don’t even own televisions!'”

Newman’s principal tool for shaking up this established order was a programme which had been initiated before he had arrived at ABC, Armchair Theatre. This anthology series was networked nationally across the ITV regions on Sunday evenings, and in 1959 was in the top ten of the ratings for 32 out of the 37 weeks it was broadcast, with audiences of over 12 million viewers. Newman used the strand to present plays by writers such as Alun Owen, Harold Pinter and Clive Exton, also bringing over associates from Canada such as Charles Jarrott and Ted Kotcheff. Writing in 2000, the television historian John Caughie stated that “Newman’s insistence that the series would use only original material written for television made Armchair Theatre a decisive moment in the history of British television drama.”

In 1960 Newman devised a thriller series for ABC called Police Surgeon, starring Ian Hendry. Although Police Surgeon was not a success and was cancelled after only a short run, Newman took Hendry as the star, and some of the ethos of the programme, to create a new series (not a direct sequel as is sometimes claimed) called The Avengers. Debuting in January 1961, The Avengers became an international success, although in later years its premise differed somewhat from Newman’s initial set-up, veering into more humorous territory rather than remaining a gritty thriller.

Newman’s great success at ABC had been noted by the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose executives were keen to revive their own drama department’s fortunes in the face of fierce competition from ITV. In 1961 the BBC’s Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, met with Newman and offered him the position of Head of Drama at the BBC. He accepted the position, eager for a new challenge, although he was forced by ABC to remain with them until the expiration of his contract in December 1962, after which he immediately began work with the BBC.

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The post Sydney Newman appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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