Police Surgeon, a new half-hour TV series starting Saturday, starring Ian Hendry as Dr Geoffrey Brent, will lift the curtain.

Julian Bond, who wrote several of the Probation Officer scripts, is writing most of the episodes for the new series, in collaboration with J. J. Bernard, the pseudonym of a London police surgeon who suggested that the work would be an ideal theme for a TV series.

The young, idealistic Dr Brent cannot resist taking a personal interest in the cases to which he is called, for at heart he is a philosopher.

First of the 13 stories, many based on fact, is titled “Easy Money.” In it Dr Brent deals with a young thief, played by 18-year-old Michael Crawford. The second episode, “Under the Influence,” deals with a motorist, played by Bernard Archard, accused of drunken driving.

Other early episodes star Harry H. Corbett as a man who beats up a club hostess in “Lag on the Run” and Jean Anderson in “Sunday Morning Story,” which deals with a refugee girl’s suicide.

Appearing in several episodes with Ian Hendry is John Warwick, playing Inspector Landon, of the Bayswater area police station, to which Dr Brent is attached. Another artist who will be seen in several episodes is Ingrid Hafner, the surgeon’s receptionist.

The theme music has the appropriate title ‘The Big Knife.” The first four episodes of Police Surgeon are being produced by Julian Bond and the rest by Leonard White. Bond, 29 years old, has been writing for TV since 1957. Before that he was writing and directing documentary films. He is married and has three children.

Ian Hendry is the same age as Bond. He made his TV debut some years ago stooging for the famous clown Coco. The clown tried to persuade Ian to use his talent for knockabout comedy in the circus, but his gift for acting led him to the stage.

Bond chose Ian to star in his new series after watching his progress for three years following an impressive performance in Anouilh’s Dinner with the Family, which brought him to London with the Oxford Playhouse company.

At school at Culford, Suffolk, Ian’s main interest was sport. During National Service with the 32nd Medium Regiment, RA, he paced Chris Chataway and organised his own motor-cycle stunt team.

Ian went from the Central School of Speech and Drama into repertory. About the same time he was cast in Emergency — Ward 10, and established a following as Chris Stone, a polio patient. Film parts followed in Room at the Top, Sink the Bismarck and In the Nick.

Last spring he was back in TV as the young pilot whose error caused the death of a friend in Inside Story, and since then he has had further TV successes in Probation Officer, Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon and Flight from Treason.

To celebrate this series Ian and his wife Jo, who teaches film and television make-up, have moved to a new home aboard a converted naval pinnace on the Thames at Chiswick.

The post Dr Brent – Police Surgeon appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

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.

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

The post Sydney Newman 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

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