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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To do it ABC will use all the many resources of this young but go-ahead company, as well as those of the powerful organisations with which it is associated.

The four-man committee responsible for this ambitious training scheme consists of ABC managing director Howard Thomas, his second-in-command Ron Rowson, senior producer S. E. Reynolds and drama supervisor Dennis Vance.

So far they have three pupils. Top of the form is a girl who has made a big name for herself since she joined ABC — Joan Edwards.

She first said “Hello” to viewers in Number Please, then created for herself a growing audience in that breakfast-time programme, Housewives Call the Tune, in which she performed such homely chores as washing dishes and darning socks between playing gramophone requests.

Next she proved how well she could sing and dance in the Joe Loss Show, and this summer she is showing another aspect of her versatility by her breezy interviews in Holiday Town.

Pupil Number Two is Bob Hatch, who got his big break in show business after thousands of viewers throughout the North and Midlands had voted him winner of the long-running Bid For Fame contest.

But even if he had not pulled off the top prize, Bob would still have been invited to join ABC’s exclusive training school.

His earlier appearances in Bid For Fame were seen by company executives who earmarked him as a boy who, given a helping hand, would go places.

Both Joan Edwards and Bob Hatch have already proved that the confidence ABC are placing in them is justified. Producer Reynolds — he has been in TV since its opening day in 1936 — told me:

“To get two artists like Joan Edwards and Bob Hatch in one year is out of all proportion.

“I have been watching Joan develop since she came into this company, and there is no greater joy for me than seeing her holding her own with more experienced artists.”

Baby of the class is 20-year-old Julie Stevens. She is another pupil who caught the eye of Howard Thomas while appearing in Bid For Fame.

“I decided to give her an audition,” he told me. “Dennis Vance and I tried everything on her. It was formidable, but she came out smiling.”

Explained Julie: “I was interviewed in front of the camera. Then they gave me a piece to announce without letting me see it first. And afterwards I was told to pretend I was telling my boss I was giving up my job — and make it sound funny.”

“The result,” said Howard Thomas, “was that we gave this unknown girl a contract. Now, to get her used to cameras, we are putting her in everywhere. She doesn’t always get a credit, but she comes bobbing up in one programme after another.”

Julie’s future is still undecided. “So far, we don’t know what she is going to do,” Mr. Thomas said, “but we believe she has the sparkle of a true TV personality. How do we make her into a personality? Well, first she has to be trained the hard way.”

To learn all she can about TV production and technique, Julie has been helping in many different programmes. She has been behind the scenes in Holiday Town, making brief appearances in crowd scenes or demonstrating in advertising magazines. One day I saw her with make-up only on her hands and arms. “That,” she said, “is all viewers will see of me today.” She was off to hold a booklet in front of a camera.

Said Reynolds: “From now on, we shall be studying Julie, Joan and Bob to see which way they ought to go, as it might take two or three years to get them on the right lines and doing the job for which they are best suited.”

The ABC training school is going to be no immediate stepping stone to fame and fortune. “As far as we are concerned,” said Reynolds, “there is going to be no star overnight business.”

But while ABC is determined to give Joan Edwards, Julie Stevens and Bob Hatch the best opportunities ever offered up-and-coming artists, they, on their part, know they will have to put in plenty of hard work to make this unique training scheme a success.

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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)

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