An august bunch they were and the most venerable of them said to me afterwards: “You did it wrongly. You stirred anti-clock-wise. You should always stir clockwise. I was taught that.”

“But why?” I asked. “What happens if you stir anti-clockwise?”

“It curdles.”

If this new series of mine — 13 lessons called “The Grammar of Cookery” — succeeds in releasing the craft of cooking from the bonds of voodoo, mumbo-jumbo, witchcraft and black magic, it will not have been in vain.

In cooking, things happen for the physical reasons that make them happen — and it is those reasons that I am analysing in “The Grammar of Cookery”. That is why we are using such things as microscopes, integral calculus, parabolic graphs and slide rules.

At the same time I hope that no one will get the idea that in order to be a cook you need to be a mathematician or a colloid chemist, nor that in order to make mayonnaise you need a microscope.

No, the whole idea is to show how and why things happen in cookery. It is all basic bed-rock stuff. I wanted it that way and Executive Producer Lloyd Shirley wanted it that way too. A welcome change for me. In the past I have had to fight off attempts to wish on me every conceivable gimmick — practically dancing girls and gypsy violins.

This series will contain no new recipes. To begin with there are no really new recipes. It has all been done before. The Book of Ecclesiastes is right. Actually I think that there are far too many recipes already. Cooking skill is what matters.

Yes cooking skill. And that means love of good food. What becomes of cooking skill when you have the deep-freeze and instant-everything? Isn’t it killed?

Well, has the theatre been killed by television, musicianship by gramophone records, painting by colour printing? Not so as you would notice!

I am not the best cook in the world, not by a long chalk. There are many far better practitioners than me (including you, for all I know). I am just the chap who decided to find out what makes cooking tick and to try and pass on that knowledge.

It is one thing to work out the rules — the “Grammar.” But behind the rules, in every art, there lies the active genius that mocks at rules.

If you are a great cook, madam, you are a singer of songs, a poet, an actress, a painter, a pianist. You are Callas, you are Cilia Black, Vanessa Redgrave, Laura Knight, all rolled into one. And the world is at your feet.

Or it should be.

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Or seeing Henry sheathing his steel after a decisive ploy at Agincourt.

“English cooking,” said Philip Harben, bristling and bustling as he lovingly laid his carving knife away, “is the best in the world. The only problem is convincing the English that it is.”

The tone quite obviously brooked no argument upon the subject. Mr. Harben had no time to spare for anyone who didn’t believe as passionately in English cooking as he did.

He amplified the point in short, sharp bursts of information as he buzzed around his kitchen, cleaning up after the elaborate meal he had just prepared.

“With French cooking, you can get away with so much. It’s complex. But if you stick by the book, you’re pretty safe.

“English cooking has classical simplicity. It calls for perfection of basic materials. And that means that everything you cook must be absolutely right.”

On Sunday afternoon Philip Harben will show us how to improve our cooking in another infectiously enthusiastic edition of ABC’s “The Grammar Of Cookery.”

It’s a crusade that began in the Twenties over the stove of his parents’ home in London.

His mother was Mary Jerrold, a well-known actress. “But she taught me nothing about cooking. I’m afraid,” he said. “She was an abominable cook.

“I remember she used to think she could make bread. It was dreadful. So all that I ever learned about cooking I found out for myself by trial and error.”

The errors?

“I prefer not to remember them,” said Philip.

After leaving school he worked as assistant stage-manager in the theatre, as a cameraman and assistant director in a film studio, and as a commercial photographer. But the call of the kitchen became increasingly irresistible. So in 1938 he took up catering professionally.

Since then he has established himself as one of the country’s most popular television cookery experts. He has made several films.

He has published a number of books on the subject. And he now owns his own industrial catering firm.

But although cooking has proved to be a profitable commercial enterprise, he will always regard the preparation of good food as an art form.

“The French have one great advantage over us in this field.” said Philip. “As a nation they are passionately interested in cooking. And many English people still seem rather to despise it.

“When I go into a restaurant I react to the food I get. If I don’t like it, I say so. If I do like it I send the chef my compliments and invite him to have a glass of wine with me.

“It pays dividends.

“Standards of English restaurants are rising rapidly nowadays. And the standards of French restaurants are falling slightly.

“The day isn’t so far off when Frenchmen will be coming over here and going into ecstasies about the marvellous restaurant they have just discovered in Ashton-under-Lyne.”

Mr. Harben was struck by an afterthought.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I know two marvellous restaurants in Ashton-under-Lyne, already.”

The post Call of the kitchen appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

The TVTimes tells us what’s on ABC on Sunday 28 July 1968. Things worth noting include:

• After 640+ weekends, this is ABC’s last day on air.
• Yesterday, all but one programme came from ABC themselves. Today is the exact opposite, being mostly handed over to ATV except for the Weekend Sport, the film and the final ‘goodbye’ programme.
• They come on air an hour earlier than usual, in order to catch Communion from the Lambeth Conference rather than going to a provincial church near to where Saturday’s football match had been played.
• As usual, after the Morning Service ends, the station – and the transmitters – go off air, allowing all involved to nip home (or to the pub) for Sunday lunch.

• We’re back on air for 2.10pm for adult education – barely – before heading off to Weekend Sport. In the winter this programme was called World of Soccer and, unsurprisingly, concentrated on football. There’s no football in July at this point in history, but the programme continues with a different name and different sports.
• Hours of broadcasting were limited by law at this point, but there were a couple of exceptions to this: religion, adult education and outside broadcasts (the latter restricted to 300 hours a year to stop the exception being misused for general entertainment). This means that the clock only starts ticking today at 3.20pm, despite around three hours of programmes already having been broadcast.
• Quite a catch for The Golden Shot to have got Sammy Davis Jr on one of his visits to the UK, helped by his London agents being The Grade Organisation.
• The final religious ‘closed period’ of ITV 1.0 is kicked off at 6.15pm with the Tree House Family. This is the same programme as the Tinga and Tucker Club but with Christianity hammered into it. For viewers in the Midlands, Tinga and Tucker was therefore a six-days-a-week programme for kids with Jean Morton. For viewers outside of ATVLand, the Tree House Family was a once-a-week religious programme for kids with Jean Morton. The result was confusion whenever Midlanders and outsiders talk about the programme.
• A scoop for ATV at 6.35pm as Brian Connell gets to interview Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in amongst the 500 bishops, archbishops and metropolitans (there’s a joke there somewhere) at the Lambeth Conference.
• More from ATV at 8.25pm with the summertime replacement for the Palladium Show. A classic ATV variety bill here: a presenter who is big in the States but almost unknown in the UK introduces a cast of second-string and past-prime European stars singing and dancing on stage for an hour.
• The film at 9.25 and 10.25pm is the classic The Man Who Watched Trains Go By from 1952. Quite why ABC are promoting it as – shock horror – For Adults Only is an open question, as it was rated ‘A’ in 1952 and on its DVD release in 2008 got the modern equivalent rating: PG. The TVTimes says it’s “a nightmare of violence, desire and murder”. Nope, not even in 1952, let alone in 1968 or 2018.

• Braden… on the Box at 11.10 is undersold in the northern editions of the TVTimes. In London, it functions as ATV London’s last programme, a goodbye to weekends in the region that ATV have provided since 24 September 1955 and thus an analysis of the disappearance of ITV 1.0 and the beginning of ITV 2.0. In the north it’s billed merely as a return to TV for Braden that happens to be discussing television, with the only clue that it’s focussed on the changeover being the last sentence, left over in the editing from the London description.
• We close with Goodbye from ABC at 11.55. David Hamilton and Keith Martin are in the continuity studio in Didsbury. Down in Aston, Phillip Elsmore and Sheila Kennedy are reading roughly the same script for Midlands viewers.
• TVTimes gives a big billing to this programme; TVWorld in the Midlands, 50% owned by ABC, doesn’t, giving it all of three lines and leaving the changeover itself largely unremarked across the magazine. In TVTimes regions with contract changes, they had splashed big on the new companies and formats – Granada, Yorkshire and Thames/LWT.
• The programme itself shamelessly wallows in ABC nostalgia, majoring heavily on ABC’s early years. They show clips from many obscure programmes and happily show stills where said programmes have already been lost.
• John Benson is absent from the northern version, despite being chief announcer, as he was already in London assisting Geoffrey Lugg with setting up the new presentation department of Thames.
• Also absent was John Edmunds, who had recently departed to join the BBC, but he was acknowledged as he had been a staff announcer for ABC for almost the whole life of the company.
• The northern edition talked of the Didsbury studios closing; in the Midlands, Alpha Television was continuing until nearer the launch of colour, under ATV management, so Elsmore and Kennedy thank the staff of the jointly owned facilities.
• The programme was prerecorded earlier in the evening on videotape, for the ease of providing the video and film clips and the stills, presumably, coming back live to the respective announcers for them to say a final goodbye at the end.

• Both programmes made a point of mentioning that ABC was becoming Thames and thus wasn’t disappearing completely: the same people would be making similar programmes in future. Two weeks before, John Benson had even popped up in the north to do some in-vision announcing with the new Thames Television backdrop behind him. ABC clearly saw Thames as their continuing presence in ITV!

The post Tonight’s ABC Weekend TV… in 1968 appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

The TVTimes tells us what’s on ABC on Saturday 27 July 1968. Things worth noting include:

• With one exception – Rediffusion’s The Gamblers at 9.05pm – everything today is coming from ABC. No other company gets a look-in except for outside broadcast items in ABC’s own World of Sport.

• ABC opens at 1.15pm for 50 minutes of pretty heavyweight adult education programmes.
  • The last in the series of The Middle Years presented by Ludovic Kennedy. The splendidly named Hilde Himmelweit, the ever brilliant Richard Hoggart and Polly’s father Philip Toynbee discuss how it feels to be middle-aged.
  • Fit for Life at 1.40pm is also sociology on the television – the 1960s being the peak of scientific sociology being seen as a potential cure-all. The GP and the psychiatrist talking to John Pett go unnamed because of the British Medical Association’s then-rule that practicing doctors where not allowed to advertise, and appearing on TV was in itself an advertisement.
• ABC produces the last World of Sport before handing it over to London Weekend from next week. The programme started in January 1965 and was presented by Eamonn Andrews with Richard (Dickie) Davies as his deputy. With Andrews off to Thames to host their daily magazine programme Today, Davies gets a promotion, with LWT promoting Fred Dinenage to the deputy spot.
  • The sports on offer today were diving from ATV, horse racing from ABC, athletics from Harlech, motor racing from ABC and wrestling from ATV, with the whole programme billed as an Independent Television Production. It was made at Teddington.

• The repeat of Life with Cooper marks the end of Tommy’s long association with ABC. However, Tommy and the series moved to Thames and Tuesday nights, renamed Cooper King-Size, as David Hamilton points out on air.

• The TVTimes in the North makes a big deal of Opportunity Knocks! being a special devoted to the closure of ABC at Didsbury – although Yorkshire Television would make some of its programmes there whilst they waited for their own studios in Kirkstall Road to be completed. In other TVTimes regions, the magazine would simply refer to this being a special edition to mark the closure of ITV’s Didsbury studios, with ABC’s name left out of it.
  • This special edition of OpNox! had no new talent in it, instead inviting back former contestants who had gone on to bigger things and showing the television audience around the backstage areas of the studio. The special, like much of OpNox! at ABC and at Thames, was produced by Royston Mayoh.
• The Horne a’Plenty sketch show at 8.35pm was another survivor into the new Thames, lasting one more series before the death of the brilliant Kenneth Horne brought it to a premature close.
• It was not unusual for Granada and Rediffusion programmes to turn up at the weekend – and ABC programmes to pop up on weekdays – across the major contractors as well as the minors. ABC and ATV’s petty bickering over the Sunday schedules had led to ABC pointedly selling The Avengers to Rediffusion and squeezing both ATVs out of one of the most popular programmes on British television. In return, ABC picked up several Rediffusion dramas, amongst them being The Gamblers at 9.05pm, which in turn squeezed blameless Granada out of some big hitters.
  • All this created a bonanza for the schedulers at the minor ITV companies, allowing them to pick and choose which networking of The Avengers and The Gamblers and the like to show according to what they felt their region would prefer rather than just going with the usual flow.

• At 10.15pm, it’s the final ABC Armchair Theatre, it losing the ‘ABC’ in the process of moving to Thames and a less comfortable weekday slot (other regions already didn’t mention the ‘ABC’ bit either). By happy coincidence, this is the 400th edition of the strand – which viewers in London miss, as ATV London dropped the programme in favour of a repeat of Gideon’s Way, which can’t help but feel like a small bit of spite from Sir Lew.
  • In typical Armchair Theatre style, the description of ‘The Ballad of the Artificial Mash’ sounds pretty sexist until the last sentence, which hints at a slightly more feminist outcome to the plot. We may never know, as the episode is missing from the archives.
• Sunday night had no epilogue, allowing the station to make a clean break as they went off air for the last time. So 11.15pm (approximately) sees the last ever religious talk at closedown in the North – Granada had never done them and Yorkshire launched continuing that policy.
  • This epilogue is by ABC’s religious adviser, and although it doesn’t survive in the archives, take my word for it that it was truly surreal. Ian Meckenzie opened with the most bizarre and tortured metaphor in the history of late night sermons, solemnly telling viewers that “Jesus was like the Independent Television Authority” and going on to note that the “disciples are like the [ITV] contractors”. It was ludicrous.

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And it’s not surprising, really, when you recall that for the past 15 years or so Hughie has devoted most of his time to giving Britain’s youngsters the sort of chance they’ve dreamed of.

He is, in fact, rather like a one-man Arts Council in the field of light entertainment.

“It incenses me,” he said — and he meant it — “to see enormous amounts of money being spent promoting all this ‘long haired’ stuff which has virtually no public appeal, and nothing being done for music, theatre and music hall.

“For, let’s be honest, music hall is the very backbone of this nation. It has produced some of the greatest entertainers of all time.”

What I particularly wanted to know when I met Hughie during rehearsals for one of the Saturday Opportunity Knocks! shows, was how he had come to be Britain’s top amateur talent seeker.

A mischievous smile appeared, he settled back in his chair and said: “For the answer to that, we have to go back a long way.

“Before the war we did a show called ‘Hughie Green and His Gang.’

“That was a talent show really because we used kids in it, and we were always on the lookout for those with talent which was a bit out of the ordinary.

“After that, I had the good fortune to go to America and work in a show called ‘Meet the People.’ It was a sort of Theatre Workshop.

“We all got paid 40 dollars a week and there were no stars. But there was certainly no shortage of talent.

“In fact, the whole idea was to get hold of people who had talent but no real stage presence or ability, and knock them into shape. It was a first-class training ground. Everybody criticised everybody else.

“It was terrific. I did an act on my own, danced in the chorus and took part in the sketches.”

Afterwards, Hughie spent five years with the Royal Canadian Air Force, did some more work in the United States, and finally returned to this country in 1948.

But let him continue the story in his own words: “One day I ran across radio producer Harry Pepper. Would I, he wanted to know, be willing to put on an amateur talent show called “Opportunity Knocks!”

“I jumped at it. You see, it meant that once again I would be in a position to give genuine talent the chance it deserved. And that was something I wanted to do more than anything else.

“That show began on radio in the summer of 1949 and went on until the spring of 1950. And, since then, it has had eight years on commercial radio and, in 1956, made its first appearance on ITV.”

In the current series, Hughie has introduced what one might call a new look—repeated appearances instead of a final prize. What had he to say about this?

“1 think it’s far better. It allows one week’s winner to compete the following week and, if successful in that programme, go forward again — and so on.”

Why? Because I’m convinced that repeated appearances in front of the public do far more good for an up-and-coming young artist with real talent than any major prize.”

And then, to allay any suspicions that this might be a way of doing the show on the cheap, he added: “Nobody, by the way, appears ‘for free.’ Everyone gets paid either the Equity or Musicians’ Union rate.”

If Hughie needs any encouragement in his never-ending search — though I should imagine that’s most unlikely — two things surely provide it.

The first is that his “spotting” has produced artists of the calibre of David Whitfield; the second, that the best of his current discoveries are to be auditioned for the famous Ed Sullivan Show, in America.

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Alfred Burke, the 46-year-old actor who plays Marker, is a tall sinewy man, with a hollow face and small hard eyes which peer suspiciously at a hostile world.

There is a villainous look about him. And for the best part of his career, Burke has been cast as the third bandit from the right in countless productions.

“The reason Alfie was chosen for the part,” said Roger Marshall, the main writer on the series, “is that he doesn’t look like a private detective.

“If you saw him in a pub or a supermarket, you wouldn’t single him out for attention. He’s just another face in the crowd.”

Marker isn’t rich — or particularly handsome. His wardrobe is strictly functional. One pair of shoes and if they don’t get to the mender on time, he avoids puddles. A dirty white mac; a couple of pairs of slacks; an old sports jacket.

His favourite tie’s got an egg stain on it. And his main worry is not where to park his Aston Martin, but whether he is able to meet his income tax demands. He is a loser.

If there’s a fight — Marker’s the man who collects the punch. A syndicate turns nasty — Marker’s the first one to back down.

As a hero, he’s disappointing. But in the brutal knife and knuckle-duster world of London’s back streets, Frank Marker survives.

He sees his clients in a pokey attic office above Clapham Junction. Millionaires and taxi-drivers. Bankers and bookies. All different, but with a common bond. Trouble. They need Marker.

But he has no friends. Nobody thanks him for solving their problems; nobody sends him flowers for finding the truth. They pay him… and turn their backs.

But a man like Marker, operating in the precarious no-man’s-land between the underworld and the arm of the law, must cover his tracks. For if the thugs don’t get him, the police are sure to.

Though after six years, they haven’t yet. And they won’t — as long as he stays fast on his feet.

Marker … anonymous in a grubby mac trudging a suburban street.

Marker … alone, in an all-night do-it-yourself laundry, washing his shirts. Marker .. sitting next to you on a bus. Marker … everywhere.

Next time you hear footsteps on a dark night don’t look round. He’s right behind you.

… and a back-to-earth girl

She made her name on television travelling through time in the Dr. Who series. But it’s back to earth with a bump for 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford. In Saturday’s Public Eye she plays a missing girl in the clutches of a vice ring. “It couldn’t possibly be more different,” she said. Down-at-heel private detective, Frank Marker (Alfred Burke}, is commissioned to find the girl, who unaccountably has left her Yorkshire home and gone to live in London

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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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