The Press Conference was arranged by Mr. Arthur Jones, Yorkshire Press Executive, and Mr. Barry Wynne, Head of Press and Publicity.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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He joined BBC Television as a trainee Light Entertainment producer in 1952 and was put in charge of the Department’s output of panel games, both finding and producing them, which he proceeded to do by introducing Guess My Story, Find the Link, The Tall Story Club and The Name’s the Same. With fellow ex-trainee Ernest Maxin he co-produced and directed the first television comedy series by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, And So to Bentley, starring Dick Bentley, Peter Sellers and Bill Fraser. He went on to produce series with Bob Monkhouse, Petula Clark, Billy Cotton, whose Band Show Wakey! Wakey! he devised, Ask Pickles, British television’s first request series, which he also devised, and Bathnight with Braden, starring Bernard Braden and written by Muir and Norden, which was BBC Television’s first weekly comedy series, such shows until then only being broadcast fortnightly.

At ATV from 1957 to 1960 he took over Sunday Night at the London Palladium, produced specials built round such international artistes as Rosemary Clooney and Johnnie Ray, devised and produced series of Val Parnell’s Saturday Spectaculars with Max Bygraves, Dickie Henderson, Arthur Askey, Harry Secombe and Dave King, and devised and produced New Look, a revue with a team of new performers including Bruce Forsyth and Roy Castle, whose television careers the series kick-started. In 1957 he won BAFTA’s first award for Light Entertainment Production when the Academy was still the Society of Film and Television Arts. His last production was Sammy Davis Jr’s first show for British TV in 1960.

As Director of Programmes at ABC TV and Thames TV during the 1960s and 1970s, he oversaw the first British television shows of Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny, Peggy Lee and Bing Crosby. He introduced ITV’s first weekly series dedicated to the arts with Tempo; British television’s first late night chat show with Eamonn Andrews’ Live from London and its first hidden camera show Candid Camera with Bob Monkhouse. Programmes he commissioned included Thank Your Lucky Stars, Callan, The Benny Hill Show, Public Eye and The World at War.

He was a founder-director of both Thames Television and Channel Four; managing director and then chairman and managing director of London Weekend Television; and the founder-chairman of ITV’s first venture into satellite broadcasting with SuperChannel. During his career, he worked for four legendary broadcasting bosses: Ronnie Waldman, Lew Grade, Howard Thomas and John Freeman; and when he became a broadcasting boss himself he appointed four future legends: Jeremy Isaacs as his Controller of Features at Thames; Michael Grade, John Birt and Greg Dyke successively as his Directors of Programmes at LWT.

He retired in 1994.

Article source: Wikipedia | Contributors | CC-BY-SA 3.0

The post Brian Tesler appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

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

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

‘Thirty,’ he replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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