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!

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Future trends must be considered together with present requirements in the planning of any production line. Plant has a limited life; there must be room to grow; the quick reorganisation of equipment, demanded by new, more advanced methods of manufacture, must be easy. Truisms all, but particularly pertinent to television; a virile young industry, learning fast, changing with the pattern of public demand, and growing at the accelerated pace of all development in electronic processes.

As a company ABC TV has always been very awake to this changing face. While establishing its resources, it has also been especially busy anticipating the demands of promising and probable developments. A switching of line standards was something to expect. The arrival of colour television was another. Decisions have now been taken on the standards, but in 1959-when the new technical block was being planned for Teddington – the question was still wide open, and suggested the adoption of equipment that would work equally well on 405, 525 or 625. Fortunately manufacturers, too, were then beginning to recognise this need and cameras and monitors designed for quick switching between standards were on the way.

But as very little had been done to produce equipment for signal switching and distribution in a multi-standard form, ABC engineers started development along these lines themselves. And with the obvious advantages then being offered by transistorisation they naturally concentrated on designing equipment that employed this new technique to the full. The result has been a complete range of modular devices for the routing of signals, and with a performance capable of handling colour-another facet of the future that ABC had been investigating in the most practical way possible, through experimentation.

As the BBC were already putting a great deal of effort and brainpower into their design for British colour television, based on the American NTSC system, ABC decided that any experimental and development work they did would be of more value if directed at the embryo SECAM system. Out of this pioneering work, done with the co-operation of GEC, has come some very worthwhile equipment refinements, real flexibility and a lot of novel advantages in the arrangement and design of their technical facilities, and a valuable familiarity with the problems that colour television will bring. And, most practical of all, it has now led to the SECAM system being given high-power transmission trials.

One of the best examples of the Company’s foresight is embodied in the very skeleton of the new Teddington block. With the future promising an influx of new equipment, and new applications of technical space calling for massive reshuffling of facilities, ABC introduced a unique element into the design of the block. The entire floor of the technical area is a pre-cast concrete network of one-foot square holes, supported over a void that can be pressurised with fresh air during operation and is deep enough to crawl in.

Above the ceiling is a similar void that can be exhausted. As a result, equipment can be placed wherever it is needed, and supplied with cooling air and cables simply by cutting corresponding holes in the tiles covering the floor and ceiling grills. Other examples of their eye to the future can be found in the equipment they have chosen; telecine and VTR machines that are instantly switchable between line standards, easily and quickly adaptable for colour; lighting installations with sufficient reserve capacity for colour productions. Or in the arrangement of their facilities; the interlocking of production areas and routing of signals through one, central apparatus area; the special VTR suite equipped for electronic editing.

Perhaps the best composite example of ABC’s planning is Teddington as a whole. It is one of the most modern studio centres in Europe. But the drive towards tomorrow is the same throughout the Company.

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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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