SIR PHILIP WARTER, chairman of ABPC [Associated British Picture Corporation], announced last week plans and policy for the corporation’s commercial television subsidiary company which will operate as programme contractors for week-end programmes from the Midlands and North.

The capital is increased to £500,000 [£10.5m today, allowing for inflation – Ed] and the ITA has been told that ABPC is prepared to put in further loan capital of the same amount from its own resources. Allowance has been made for up to 10 per cent. of the first half-million to be put up by leading provincial newspapers.

“We do not believe that TV is in any way going to replace the kinema,” said Sir Philip. “We are entering the television field because we believe that 28 years of catering for the public fit us for fulfilling the function of programme contractors in the new medium.”

He added that the corporation regarded the television venture as a regional and not a London operation. It was not concerned, he said, with making a profit in the first year, but was concerned that the prestige won as the result of 28 years of presenting entertainment to the public should be continued in its television programmes.

“The whole of our kinema operation is based on family business, and TV is essentially a form of family entertainment,” he said.

‘No Feature Film’

Sir Philip said he would encourage programmes of the “Current Release” type run by the BBC. There was not, however, any thought of televising feature pictures. The arrangements would not affect those the corporation has with CEA [Cinema Exhibitors’ Association].

When dealing with films programmes as contractors, said Sir Philip, ABPC films would not be favoured. Playing time would be open to all the film industry.

As reported in Kine, last week, Mr. Howard Thomas was named as managing director of the new television company. His colleagues on the board are the same directors as those of ABPC.

Mr. Thomas said operations would begin from Pathé House, and the London Pathé studios would be used for programmes which would have to originate in London.

Although no staff had yet been signed up, the plan would be to draw the best available men from journalism, advertising and other professions – but there would be no poaching from the BBC.

The company’s first programmes will be early next year from the Lichfield transmitter. The Manchester station is expected to open in summer, and Yorkshire at the end of the year.

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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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked Halas how he would describe Foo Foo.

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

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

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

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He began his career typing invoices for a firm of wire-drawers in Manchester. While doing that job, he taught himself to write newspaper articles and short plays. When some of these articles were published, he managed to get a job in the firm’s advertising department. That job enabled Thomas to mix with advertising agents and through networking he obtained a position with F John Roe, one of Manchester’s advertising agencies.

He moved to the London agency FC Prichard Wood and Partners, and he continued to write articles, having a London entertainment column in the Manchester Evening Chronicle. This column was spotted by the London Press Exchange and he was hired by them as a copywriter.

At London Press Exchange, Thomas worked in the commercial radio section, at first writing, then producing commercial packages for companies including Cadbury’s. These packages, usually of music or variety acts interspersed with subtle commercials for the sponsor, were then placed on Radio Luxembourg and similar longwave broadcasters who could be heard in the UK.

The BBC

In this position he came to the attention of the BBC, and he began to submit scripts and programme ideas to them while continuing to work for the international commercial broadcasters. However, at the outbreak of World War II, the commercial broadcasters closed and the advertising market contracted. Thomas kept his post at London Press Exchange, but effectively had no work to do. He attempted to fill time by writing books about the blackout and writing more articles for newspapers, and also worked for Publicity Films Limited producing public information films.

On the outbreak of war, the BBC had closed its existing two Regional Programme and National Programme stations and replaced them with a single national station, the Home Service (now BBC Radio 4).

This move was criticised as it led to boredom amongst the listeners during the Phony War, who were also faced with cinemas and sporting events being closed “for the duration” and the loss of the competition to the BBC.

As the Phony War ended, the BBC decided to introduce an entertainment-based national radio station, primarily for the men under arms. The new service, the Forces Programme hired many new producers from the former commercial agencies, including Howard Thomas.

Ack Ack Beer Beer

Thomas’s first assignment was to produce the programme Ack Ack Beer Beer, an entertainment and variety programme for anti-aircraft and barrage balloon emplacements. Both jobs featured very little action and therefore the BBC felt that ‘lively’ entertainment had to be provided for the crews.

Under Thomas, the programme developed into a miscellany of variety, talk, music and comedy, using whatever talent was available near the evacuated Variety Department’s studios in Bristol. On occasion this was no talent at all, and Thomas later told of an edition made up of him and his co-producer playing “Shove ha’penny”, which had the side effect of reintroducing the game to the population.

Sincerely Yours, Vera Lynn

With Bristol now a victim of the Blitz, the Variety Department moved to Bangor in north Wales. However, feeling that opportunities for variety would be limited there, Thomas engineered a move back to London.

In London he spotted singer Vera Lynn in a stage show. He created a radio programme for her called Sincerely Yours, Vera Lynn where she sang popular tunes of the time, read out letters from servicemen and introduced entertainers.

The show was a hit, both with the forces and the country at large, although the senior officers of both the British Army and the Royal Navy strongly objected to the sentimental and “soppy” music and presentation. Nevertheless, the show helped turn the song “We’ll Meet Again” into one of the best selling pieces of music throughout the war. The show also cemented Vera Lynn’s title of “forces’ sweetheart” and ensured that she would remain, as of 2006, something akin to a national treasure in the UK.

To assuage critics of Sincerely Yours, Thomas introduced the programme I Am John Bull, featuring military marches and “strong” music. The programme was not successful.

Shipmates Ashore

The BBC Forces Programme provided distinct programming for each of the armed services. However, the Merchant Navy, not being classed as an armed service and under the patronage of the Ministry of Labour, was not included.

Howard Thomas began a programme named Shipmates Ashore aimed at this audience. The programme was set in a Merchant Navy club and quickly became an effectively real club, with free beer and “companionship” for visiting merchant seamen. The show featured a mixture of music, singing, comedy and information (in the form of a “ship’s newspaper”) as well as providing a platform for discussion of issues of interest to the sailors. The programme was presented by Doris Hare.

The Brain’s Trust

As conceived by Howard Thomas and Douglas Cleverdon, The Brains Trust was a simple mixture of light panel game entertainment and heavier discussion of items of scientific, legal, medical and social importance. At that time, there was much discussion in the UK about the shape of the world and the country after the war, which reached its peak with the Beveridge Report and the 1945 landslide election of Attlee’s Labour government.

The programme featured Professor Cyril E. M. Joad, previously rejected for radio for his strange speaking voice; the writer and zoologist Julian Huxley; and the loud and entertaining Archibald Bruce Campbell. The programme first aired under the title Any Questions? and drew a small audience and few questions. However, within a few weeks it had caught the zeitgeist of the nation, gaining an audience of 11½million. The series was extended from a run of 12 episodes into an open-ended series that ran into the 1950s.

However, the popularity of the programme, dealing as it did with matters of controversy and politics, caused complaints of left-wing bias from within the BBC and from commentators outside. The BBC attempted to modify the format of the programme to avoid this but also sought to avoid damaging the shows popularity. With military criticism of Sincerely Yours, general complaints about the bawdy humour in Shipmates Ashore and political criticism of The Brains Trust, the BBC sought a scapegoat and pressured Howard Thomas to leave. In 1944, he resigned.

British Pathé

On leaving the BBC, Howard Thomas joined the Associated British Picture Corporation as head of British Pathé, the newsreel and film company.

Thomas relaunched the ailing Pathé Gazette as Pathé News, began hiring new camera operators and pioneered the switch to colour film. He also arranged for the Pathé archives, then of little or no intrinsic value to the company, to be indexed and properly preserved for future use.

ABC

By the 1950s, it was becoming clear that television was eroding the size of cinema audiences. Frustrated at his inability to convince the Associated British Picture Corporation that it should either expand into production of popular feature films or bid for one of the new commercial broadcasting licences offered under the Television Act 1954 by the Independent Television Authority (ITA), Howard Thomas began to look for roles in the new ITV companies that were being started.

He was offered the job of General Manager of Kemsley-Winnick Television, the new weekend contractor for the midlands and north of England. However, before he could take up the job, Lord Kemsley pulled out of the company and the contract lapsed.

The ITA made a last-ditch attempt to get the Associated British Picture Corporation involved in commercial television as a replacement for Kemsley-Winnick. The board of the company was finally convinced to try, and signed a contract with the ITA on 21 September 1955 to form Associated British Cinemas (Television) Limited to take over the contract.

Howard Thomas was appointed as managing director of the company and hired Sydney Newman and Brian Tesler as his controllers of drama and light entertainment respectively.

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

Images source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas, published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1977

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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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