Most TV hopefuls want to be an ANNOUNCER.

What is it that makes an announcer’s job look so glamorous. A job which means 100 per cent concentration for 12 hours non-stop each day? Perhaps it’s because the announcer must be a friendly man, acceptable in every one of over two million households.

The announcer is the permanent link between home and studio. Programmes and performers may change by the hour, but the announcer is present the whole time, making anything up to 40 or more appearances every day. These frequent appearances make a firm impact on the mind of the viewer.

The announcer becomes easily recognisable in the the street, on the bus, or in the pub, and he cannot walk across the road without being spotted. Heads will turn and he will overhear the remarks – “Ooh, look, that’s John Edmunds. You know, the announcer on the telly.”

Perhaps it is that little bit of egoism present in every human being that tempts young people to hanker after the announcer’s job.

“For, believe me, life ceases to become normal once you are an announcer,” says John. Sometimes, he has to slip away from a side door in the studio to escape the attentions of fans, some of whom can be quite fanatical, at times.

Not for him the hotel rooms in the city centre – he would be an obvious target for the fans on each week end lie in wait inside Birmingham hotels, hoping to catch a glimpse of their favourites and to get their autographs. John spends his week-ends in very homely and comfortable digs in Erdington, with “the most charming landlady imaginable.”

You see, John is a friendly and sociable chap who likes to meet people away from the glare of the studio lights. He is a homely type – and that is one of the most essential qualities of an announcer. If the station announcer is not a friendly visitor to the viewers’ home, then the station is switched off.

What other qualifications? A pleasant voice? Naturally – but not necessarily a donnish voice, and certainly not an affected one. It must be a voice acceptable to the Black Country, to Shropshire, to the happy, homely Lancastrian and the shrewd and dour Yorkshireman.

What language qualifications are desirable? Well, French is most useful (John Edmunds was a French master before joining ABC Television); Italian is handy, and so is German. If you know a little Greek, Polish, Swahili or Urdu, so much the better.

Does acting experience help? Definitely. Although the announcer must, at all times be of a friendly and happy disposition, there are occasions where acting ability can help him. John Edmunds was recently suffering from extremely painful tooth abcess [sic]. All of the dentists were closed and he faced a ten-hour stint of duty on Sunday. Make-up department, with their pots of magic creams, smoothed out the ‘pain lines’ in his wrinkled forehead, softened down the swelling lump on his face, and brought some colour to his ashen cheeks, but only his acting ability could produce the smiling, happy, trouble free announcer that Sunday.

The announcer must be prepared to speak ad lib at a moment’s notice. There may be a few minutes – or just a few seconds – in hand before the next programme comes on. He must be prepared to speak intelligently and unharried without a script, to millions of viewers, making making up his words as he goes along. His announcement must finish dead on the second, and it must be conclusive.

He cannot break off in the middle of a sentence because the merciless studio clock has beaten him to it. All this he must assess as he goes along – and that’s not easy, particularly when the controller has called him up on the studio ‘talk back’ and told him that he has ‘one minute thirteen seconds to fill, starting in five seconds time!’

Butterflies In The Stomach

What is it like to sit in the announcer’s chair? Very, very lonely. At the other end of that camera facing him are millions of viewers – his friends, but in the studio he is all alone with nobody at his side, not even a cameraman, for the camera is operated by remote control in the adjoining control room.

Once he embarks on his announcements, he is out on his own, speaking in a small studio, with a cluster of monitor sets, clock, cue lights, microphones and cameras just three feet away from him and facing into the glare of the studio lights. And he knows that seven million people are listening, he hopes, to his every word.

“Butterflies?” says John, “my stomach breeds them at the beginning of each working day. But as you go through that day, hour by hour, there comes a time soon when those butterflies have settled down to sleep, and you become completely relaxed. Up to this point you have been acting with all the ability at your command, to appear relaxed, comfortable and easy.”

So there is is. Our announcer must be pleasant looking and have a pleasant speaking voice. He must have a friendly approach to the job. He must be a linguist, and preferably have had acting experience. Oh, and he must be able to control breeding butterflies.

The time – 15.18.09, or nine seconds past eighteen minutes past three. John Edmunds prepares to read an announcement, coming up in 12 seconds time. On the left is the studio monitor which he can switch on to see the actual programme, or himself as the camera sees him. On the front of his desk are his cue lights, red on the left, green on the right. The red light flashing means stand by, and “steady green” means go ahead. The studio clock, known unpopularly [sic] as “That Thing” is surmounted by the small, but all important Announcer’s Camera, which can be moved up and down or sideways by remote control from the COntrol Room, the windows of which can be seen in this picture. On the right of his desk by the arm of his chair can be seen the switch controls for the picture monitor and his microphone, which he switches on and off himself. All this equipment is within three feet of him as he makes his announcements.

Commentary

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One such person was John Ranson, so much so that he kept many mementos of his years at ABC in Didsbury.

Amongst them is this ABC Television transmission schedule for Sunday 28 July 1968, ABC’s last day on air in the north and midlands before management upped-sticks and moved to London to become the dominant half of Thames Television on 30 July.

With a system as complicated as ITV, where there were over a dozen companies serving around 20 distinct advertising areas, swapping some programmes, timeshifting others, networking still more, there was a lot of admin work. The key to the administration of ITV was the use of transmission schedules, detailing down to the second what each company would be doing when. 18 seconds for an announcement here, 28 seconds of commercials there, programmes coming in from one company, programmes going out to another… the transmission schedule governed them all.

For ABC’s last day, John made sure to get a copy of the schedule to keep – he worked in the lines department, supervising the feeds coming in and going out along General Post Office co-axial links as well as ITA microwave connections, so he was entitled to have one. More than that, he popped round and asked staff on duty to sign it, turning it from a memento for him into an important historical document for us 50 years later.

The end of ABC meant upheaval for all staff, even those who would still be doing the same jobs in at the same desks in Teddington as the hours of broadcasting changed. This disruption would lead to strikes and lockouts taking the entire ITV network down in August, but for now it was time to say goodbye.

For administrators Pat and Deirdre, charged with collating this document, typing it up and producing Gestetner cyclographs for everybody who needed one – across the entire network – saying goodbye was done on the last page, with a jaunty drawing of Rediffusion and ABC saying goodbye while Thames emerges beneath.

From memento to historical document to a thing of beauty across 21 pages and 50 years, it’s worth reading in full just to see how complicated and planned television was and is, and how the people behind television usually are the people who love television most.

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Associated-Rediffusion on weekdays in London was stiff and formal. ATV London on weekends was bright and friendly. The difference between the two was clear.

Granada on weekdays in the North was austere and gaunt. ABC on weekends was cosmopolitan and laid back. The difference, again, was clear.

But what to do in the Midlands? ATV’s weekday bright and friendly is not an antonym for cosmopolitan and laid back. Defining the difference between the two was much harder.

ABC Midlands worked hard on this, using different camera angles and studio layouts to that of ATV Midlands for presentation – despite the two both coming from the same room and using the same facilities at the Alpha studios in Aston.

ATV favoured putting the announcer in a fairly tight close-up, little more than head and shoulders, against a plain background with a fixed camera.

ABC had to try to be different. The presentation studio at Alpha was unusually large – not huge by any means, but bigger than the average. That allowed for some freedom for Geoffrey Lugg and the others in ABC’s presentation department. They added a full set – on casters so it could be installed on Saturday mornings and easily removed on Sunday nights – and moved the camera back to present more of the announcer’s body. A low, comfortable chair encouraged the announcer to relax and lean back into the continuity set, compared to the close-up over a desk format of ATV that forced announcers to lean forwards.

This style of presentation was sufficiently different from that of ATV Midlands to stand out – although ABC’s Howard Thomas remained frustrated that he couldn’t compete on image with his weekday rivals in Birmingham – and also different enough to be used in the north during the day until about 1960 (and on Sunday mornings until 1964) for cheaper joint continuity, without diluting the difference between Granada and ABC.

The set itself was flexible, thanks to dotting the shelves with ornaments. Seasonal differences were easy to introduce – fresh flowers in a vase in the spring, more books and fewer knick-knacks in the autumn – and easy to decorate for Christmas and other special occasions.

Of note was the unusual use of the colour version of the ABC triangle logo on the wall – ABC was gone 18 months before colour came to ITV – and, in this picture, a copy of TVWorld, the ABC-ATV jointly owned listings magazine, waiting for the announcer to use to improvise to fill time between programmes.

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Three clocks, in fact. Geoffrey describes the clock face, telling us about the hands, the numerals and the mechanism – but he mentions no logo on the clock. From his description, this is the clock in question.

That clock coincides with Kif and Alan’s memories of the clock itself, with the proviso that neither of them can remember if the grey was at the top or the bottom – Geoffrey doesn’t specify. But what Kif and Alan both remember is the ABC shield to one side of the clock face. This isn’t described by Geoffrey, but then he’s answering a question (“will you describe the first ABC clock?”) literally: it didn’t occur to us to ask if he could describe the frame the clock was set in!

Combining Geoffrey’s clock face with Kif and Alan’s logo recollection produces this clock.

But here Alan has a conflicting memory: he is sure he saw the same clock but without the words “ABC Television” written in the shield device. Kif also has a vague memory of this. What they couldn’t explain was why this would happen, and both therefore doubted the result. Here’s that clock.

Transdiffusion has done further research into this to try to track down why two clocks would exist with such a strange difference. The answer turns out to be “Clock Spots”.

Advertising on early ITV was expensive: there was little room for it – six minutes in each hour, with a mere 7 hours on air each day – creating a supply and demand imbalance. The Independent Television Authority (ITA) and the government, via the General Post Office, were keen that local businesses, regional brands (very common at the time) and medium-sized companies should get access to the airwaves at a price they could afford.

One solution was “admags”, regular 15 minute programmes with a presenter looking at products and services available in the region, sometimes chatting with the manufacturer or shopkeeper themselves, which cut the expense of producing an advertisement to almost nothing and allowed local companies in.

But what about the regional brands and medium-sized businesses? They could afford an advert but not a slot to show it; or the slot but not the advert. Their products and services were often hard to advertise in an admag, with little to be said other than to show the thing to the camera and be done with it.

These potential advertisers were covered by “Clock Spots” – seven seconds of advertising slotted into the presentation of the station, treated as a separate item rather than a full advert. The station could cut to the clock – important in the days before it was common to have an accurate timepiece in most homes – at around 20 seconds to the hour, let the clock tick for 5 seconds, then cut to a 7 second advert (or spend 7 seconds with the announcer reading the copy over the clock ticking). Coming back from the advert left 8 seconds – enough for a namecheck for the station and an announcement into the next programme. This was a television version of what Radio Eirann and Radio Luxembourg did with their timechecks – Luxembourg’s “The time now by my H Samuel Everite watch is… [jingle]…you’re right on time with Everite!” becoming famous in its own right.

But this presented the ITA with a problem: these “Clock Spots” looked like the product in question was sponsoring the station as a whole, or perhaps the next programme. This practice was illegal under the Television Act 1954 that set up ITV, and while it wasn’t happening, that it looked like it might be was damning in the ITA’s eyes.

The fix to this problem was to debrand the clock before the “Clock Spot” – that way, the clock was being sponsored, not the station. This may seem like a strange set of hoops to jump through, but Independent Television was new and unsure of its feet; opposition from the Labour party to the entire concept of commercial television, which would persist into the 1960s, threatened the abolition of ITV should Labour come to power in any forthcoming election – antagonising opposition backbenchers by even seeming to break the spirit of the Act could be the ITA signing its own death warrant.

“Clock Spots” did not last long, with the ITA and the programme companies finding they broke the flow of presentation and damaged what we would now call the “branding” of the station; additionally, the price of “Clock Spots” rose as demand grew, until they were close to the cost of a 7-second ‘voice to slide’ advert (nicknamed “chipshop corner”) in an ordinary break anyway. Admags would disappear in 1963, abolished on the orders of the Postmaster General at the time of the Pilkington Report.

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⬆︎ ABC’s clock from 1956… probably. See our article on how we recreated this lost clock from three different descriptions.

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How was ABC to respond, in such a way as to make its presence felt? How to find a way not to be overwhelmed by the Granada or ATV identity?

The answer was to be as different as possible from their opposite numbers. With Granada being Northern, dour and serious, ABC always felt lighter, with a more cosmopolitan touch. Against ATV in the Midlands, itself a lighter station, ABC went in the opposite direction, and became more heavyweight, emphasising its Adult Education and Sunday Arts programmes in extensive trailers.

This odd dichotomy of identity worked well in both cases, though seemed slightly more successful in the North. The Midland output suffered from sharing studios with ATV, and having to work hard to look different. In the North, separate studios seemed to facilitate a quite different weekend ‘feel’ to the station. This policy was successful with advertisers and ABC was always fully booked, and its rate card was more expensive than the Granada or ATV equivalents.

How did this affect the viewer?

As an ABC viewer in the early sixties, I was always impressed by the ‘balanced weekend package’ that ABC worked to provide. There was something for everyone – arts, variety, music, nostalgia, drama, ABPC’s films, children’s programmes, news and adult education, not to mention those weekend staples of sport, religion, and the Avengers.

Specialist programming abounded in the daytime slots, weekend programming generally starting before lunchtime, while weekday programmes started at teatime. Typically, in the early sixties daytimes, ABC had cookery, music, gardening, farming, and a highbrow cultural programme early on Sundays, with a magazine programme at teatime. These quality programmes balanced the more glitzy evening fare of films, drama and variety.

The weekday programming, hemmed in as it was between fixed points like news, Coronation Street and regional programming, was hard to vary and became predictable. With ABC at weekends, there was always something different, something special, or something unexpected. It could be “Teach Yourself Russian” from Tyne Tees on Saturday lunchtimes, “The Grammar of Cookery” on Sunday mornings or a joint production of “The Struggle for Peace”, with America’s Westinghouse for US education stations, on Sunday afternoons.

ABC offered a package of delights that made the weekend distinctive, and the weekdays with Granada or ATV predictable.

With a team of regular and friendly ‘in vision’ announcers, known on air as ‘station hosts’, and led by John Benson, John Edmunds, David Hamilton and Sheila Kennedy, ABC were never patronising, and always interesting. The contrast with the weekday companies was stark and very evident.

ABC succeeded in presenting a station personality that was quite unique in the television of the fifties and sixties.

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He had also begun corresponding with the then Transdiffusion Children, dropping heavy hints as to what the new station’s identity would be. After the launch of Thames, he was able to explain the processes involved in creating a new identity for one of the first ITV companies.

Changes this large were decided at board level, with senior staff asked to comment and add their own ideas into the melting pot. The new company started life with the working title of ‘Associated-British Rediffusion’, a name that neither pleased nor fooled anyone involved.

For the decision on the final trading name, the board and senior officers became split. From the beginning, there were three leading choices – ‘Capital’, the name ABC had planned to use upon winning London weekends, ‘Tower’, a suggestion that appears to have originated in the Rediffusion camp, and ‘Thames’, a compromise suggestion not well-liked but too good to discard.

Capital Television, Capital Network, Capital London – Geoffrey felt that these names tripped off the tongue well and suited the planned identity of the station. There was debate over ‘Capital’ or ‘Capitol’ – the latter not then considered an Americanism as it is now.

The problem with the name, though, was a perceived lack of ‘zing’ – it was simply the obvious choice and therefore had no life of its own. Although supported by senior staff who had worked on the identity in the run up to the 1967 contract awards, support at board level died away and the name began to fall behind ‘Tower’ as a choice.

The problem with ‘Tower’ stemmed not just from its supposed Rediffusion roots. Although the name suggested many things – the Tower of London, the Post Office Tower, the towering heights of St Paul’s, Tower Bridge – it was flat. Even more so that ‘Capital’ the name was boring.

The London Television Consortium had taken an option on the name ‘Thames’ very early on. Also considered was ‘Thames Weekend Television’. However, the art-driven people behind the new weekend broadcaster felt that a ‘contrived’ name like ‘Thames’ was ‘uncool’, according to Geoffrey. Instead, they decided that they should be called what they were – London Weekend Television.

This left the new ABC-Rediffusion station with a name available that would suit its purpose and set it apart from the rival London broadcaster. While ‘London Weekend’ was identifying only with the metropolis, ‘Thames’ could identify with its viewers in the home counties and beyond – the VHF signals reaching almost to Brighton in the south. Combined with a new local news service for the area, Rediffusion having never really bothered, Thames would be the local station for everyone near to the river and its tributaries.

With the name decided, the identity of the station progressed with a pace. Despite being on the ‘losing side’ over Capital, Geoffrey helped develop the new station’s identity through its graphics.

Many early attempts were made to continue with the ABC triangle. Simply replacing the letters ‘ABC’ with ‘Thames’ was considered and almost adopted when the idea of a stylised skyline of London was proposed. The artwork proved very popular, but attempts were made to incorporate the ABC triangle even here – soon abandoned as the ident simply didn’t work.

The finalised versions of the ident were a complete break with the past, with the skyline version, without triangle, being used by Teddington and a plain ‘From Thames’ caption being used by Television House. Geoffrey insisted it was not a policy of the new company to differentiate between ex-ABC and ex-Rediffusion, but the effect was to do just that.

With everything set to roll – a new name, an impressive ident, a definite style for the station – Geoffrey got a shock on seeing the new Harlech ident. Embracing electronic music and featuring a futuristic formup, he was left feeling that Harlech had developed the classic ident while the new Thames was old-fashioned and plain.

He was wrong.

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