Brian Tesler, Thames Television’s Director of Programmes, began his television career as a trainee BBC producer immediately after leaving Oxford. He remained with the BBC for four years and then joined ITV in London, continuing to produce a wide variety of programmes and series until he became Director of Programmes for ABC Television in 1965. He joined the Board of Thames Television on the company’s foundation in 1968.

Recently a leading television critic wrote an article which set out, more fully than before, one of the many current proposals for the re-organisation of British broadcasting. (So many, now, that the question of why such drastic change should be necessary is hardly ever asked.) This particular proposal suggested amalgamating ITV and BBC into a vast State-run broadcasting monopoly with four channels, separate from each other but centrally controlled. I happen to believe that this idea is neither practical nor in the public interest. But what amazed and, frankly, angered me and many of my colleagues was the author’s offhand assumption that ITV’s role in such a partnership was simply ‘to be entertaining and popular’ and to be ‘freed from the obligation to produce programmes against their commercial instincts’.

I can speak only as the Programme Director of one ITV company, Thames Television, which produces about a quarter of ITV’s programmes. But we do not see Thames as a provider of circuses to accompany the BBC’s bread.

In recent weeks our Programme Controllers have been writing about their work in a series of advertisements, of which this is the last. Anyone who has read their varied contributions must surely have recognised three things. First, that here is a group of professional programme makers who are deeply concerned about the service they give to the public. Secondly that, far from being obliged by ‘commercial instincts’ to produce programmes they would not otherwise make, they plan their output on merit alone. And, thirdly, that the range of that output is so wide as to deny in itself that to be ‘entertaining and popular’ is the dominant aim of an ITV company.

Six programme controllers wrote about their work for Thames and of those only Philip Jones – whose Light Entertainment Department is undoubtedly the most successful in Britain – can be said to have dealt largely with popular entertainment. Lloyd Shirley told how his Drama Department has among its forthcoming productions a £1 million series of television films, a cycle of Restoration drama, a life of Napoleon and a de Quincey serialisation. Jeremy Isaacs’ Features Department, producers of This Week, Today, Good Afternoon and Something To Say, are now making ITV’s biggest-ever documentary series, on The Second World War. The Children’s Department under Lewis Rudd, who already produce the leading children’s magazine programme Magpie, are developing a new education and entertainment programme for under-fives.

Guthrie Moir’s team, apart from making award-winning schools programmes, are working on a 13-part series on National Trust houses to follow their British Museum programmes. And Grahame Turner’s Outside Broadcast Department, who could so easily remain recorders of sport, are planning how to bring more of London’s arts and events to Londoners, now that afternoon broadcasting is with us.

Those are only a few of the programmes they mentioned. But implicit in everything they wrote, and indeed in the existence within Thames of six such varied departments of equal importance, is one simple fact: that ITV in general and Thames in particular are achieving the difficult reconciliation between single-channel commercial operation and public service broadcasting.

No-one should doubt that it is difficult. Our challenge is to obtain, with no licence fee or government support, sufficient financial stability to invest in studios and equipment, capitalise new productions, and give security of employment – all without compromising programme quality. We have to do it with only one channel, so we can never give our viewers a simultaneous choice between the product of one programme department and another. We have to share our transmission hours with the other ITV companies, so that less than half the hours are filled by our own productions. And in any case, we have only 4½ days a week in which to broadcast. So the programmes are there, but not always the airtime to transmit them.

My job as Director of Programmes, therefore, is to carry out in those limited hours the policy laid down with my colleagues on the Board: to produce and schedule programmes which range across information, education and entertainment as widely as possible. Our programme controllers have already written about these programmes and their variety. But a range of excellent programmes is not sufficient cause for satisfaction if it is weighted too heavily, as our critic would have it, towards popular entertainment. So I think it worth mentioning that even excluding schools programmes and children’s educational series, four out of every ten Thames productions are in the areas of information, education and current affairs. I might mention too that Thames was the only station to mark this month’s UN Conference on the Human Environment with a special week of programmes on pollution and conservation. They included our own productions and other films from around the world, and they were neither ‘popular’ nor ‘entertaining’. But we felt it important to show them.

By ‘we’ I mean the people behind Thames programmes: people who make This Week and Magpie and The Benny Hill Show and today and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Callan and Sooty and Writer’s Workshop and Father, Dear Father and Treasures of the British Museum and Six Days of Justice and hundreds more programmes of distinctive quality and variety. It is those people who would all be consigned, in that nightmare of a State-controlled television service, to be producers of an endless and mindless flow of mass merry-making. But happily it is only a nightmare. Instead they will go on producing and directing programmes for Thames in an atmosphere where their varied talents and ideas can flourish. Not with enough transmission time, although a second channel would help give them that. Not with enough money, for no producer (and I include myself) was ever satisfied with his budget.

But with enough scope and resources and backing to make, in the words of one of our Controllers earlier in this series, ‘the programmes we want to make and which we think viewers will want to watch’. We hope and expect to be judged by those programmes, now and in the future.

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Lewis Rudd, Controller of Children’s Programmes
Ace of Wands, Children’s Documentaries – My Brother David and Breaking the Silence, Cliff’s Kids, Do Not Adjust Your Set, Elephant’s Eggs in a Rhubarb Tree, Full House, Happy House, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, Larry the Lamb, Magpie (twice weekly). Once Upon a Time, The Paper Bag Players, Pardon My Genie, Rainbow, Sexton Blake, The Sooty Show, Smith, The Tomorrow People, Tottering Towers, Wreckers at Deadeye, Zingalong.

Lewis Rudd, Thames Television’s Controller of Children’s Programmes, came into Independent Television straight from Oxford, where he edited Isis. He began to specialise in children’s programmes in 1966, and in 1968 his production ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set’ was awarded the Prix Jeunesse. Father of two boys and a girl, he is Chairman of the ITV Network Children’s Sub-Committee. (After this was written, ‘My Brother David’ won this year’s Prix Jeunesse UNICEF award.)

Why have a separate children’s department at all? Is it because we treat children as a different race, to be talked to in a special language? After all, our programmes for children include drama, information, comedy: so why not have the programmes produced by Thames’ drama, features and light entertainment departments? One good reason for having a separate department is the sheer volume of children’s programmes we produce. Something like half the children’s programmes made by ITV come from Thames. But it is not the volume of production that is most important.

Making television programmes for children can be pretty awe-inspiring. They are a very perceptive and very enthusiastic audience. And just because of this, television can have an enormous influence on them. Yet although a great deal of research has been done on this influence, nobody quite knows what the effect of any one programme or sequence will be on different individual children. So we feel it helps if there are people responsible for all Thames’ children’s productions, working together on a range of programmes, gaining experience of their effect all the time, and putting this experience to good use.

It isn’t easy to lay down rules about what will be beneficial and what will be harmful to a child, and with a separate department we have less need to do so. All the people in my department are concerned about the effect of the programmes they make, and are constantly aware of the caution with which they have to work. There is sometimes violence, for example, in our drama programmes. But it is not portrayed as the right way to solve problems, and we aim to make it neither terrifying on the one hand nor glamorised on the other. But, without being irresponsible about it, I find that children decide what programmes are suitable for them rather better than their parents. For example my four-year-old son finds our Ace of Wands series, which is exciting and sometimes a little bit scary, far too complicated to follow. So he doesn’t bother to watch, whereas by seven a child can both understand the story and is also old enough to take pleasure in the excitement and scariness.

One important thing we have learned about making programmes appeal to a wide audience of children is that they demand that television is used as a pictorial medium. As most of our programmes are designed for school children who have spent the day studying, it is right that one of our aims is entertainment: through drama series like Wreckers at Deadeye and Ace of Wands, through programmes for younger children like The Sooty Show and Larry the Lamb (which we are transmitting in the Autumn), through quizzes and musical shows and comedy series. In all of these, visual inventiveness is most important. Our current series Pardon My Genie, a sort of modern version of Aladdin, has had its enormous visual comic possibilities realised in full, thanks to the enthusiastic co-operation of our technical staff. It isn’t surprising that more children are watching this programme than any other production on either channel.

Magpie, our informative magazine programme, also calls for a predominantly visual approach. Here, too, we are using pictures to entertain, but also to interest and inform at the same time. Even in something as straightforward as Magpie’s annual Christmas appeal, we try to encourage imaginative activity in the raising of the money and to use the opportunity to create knowledge – not just sympathy. Last Christmas we raised £30,000 for deaf children, not by a heart-rending emotional appeal but by showing children in a simple way what it was really like to be deaf. And it was out of the previous appeal that we evolved the idea of doing a half-hour documentary especially for children, about the difficult subject of mental handicap. The film, My Brother David, which showed a day in the life of a mentally handicapped boy, has been chosen to represent ITV at this year’s Prix Jeunesse in Munich.

Productions like these can be expensive, and I hope they give the lie to a criticism I sometimes hear that companies are unwilling to spend money on children’s programmes. The fact is that to tell your stories in pictures rather than words costs more. You can make a satisfying adult drama with one set, two good actors and a good script. But for children you are going to need more actors, more sets, location film to add action and pace. I was in the Ace of Wands studio the other day, and the sets compared in every way with the finest sets for adult drama which have been used in our Thames studios – and that is saying a great deal. Backing long-running successes with the right sort of money is one aspect of finance, but the Thames Board have also been willing to back our new ideas and experiments. Since the company began in 1968 we have introduced new children’s series every year; some of them, like Magpie and Ace of Wands, earning themselves a regular place in ITV’s national schedules. Others have been conceived as single series. In 1969, for instance, we produced an adaptation of Leon Garfield’s award-winning children’s book smith; in 1970 we filmed another period subject, Wreckers at Deadeye; in 1971 we introduced children to a world of comic writing ranging from Edward Lear to Spike Milligan in Elephant’s Eggs in a Rhubarb Tree. This year, in addition to Pardon My Genie, we are planning Thames’ first science fiction programme for children, The Tomorrow People.

But I have to admit that the most important development in children’s programmes in the last couple of years did not take place at Thames. It happened at the Children’s Television Workshop in New York with the production of ‘Sesame Street’. I don’t want to enter here into the argument about the programme’s educational standards. But Sesame Street did show how entertaining a programme whose objectives are primarily informative can be, given the right amounts of money and talent.

Any future programme in this field of entertainment-cum-education for pre-school children is certain to be compared with Sesame Street. The production team of our own new programme rainbow, which will be transmitted in the Autumn, have learned a lot from it – both from its successes and its failings. I think we will stand up to the inevitable comparisons pretty well.

Rainbow will be seen regularly all over Britain, and Magpie is already shown nationally twice a week. So our responsibility as providers of ITV information programmes for children is greater than ever. Our most important priority at the moment is to make these two programmes as effective as we possibly can. Because, as I said at the beginning, everyone is aware that television can have an enormous influence on children. And Magpie has proved – as we believe Rainbow will also – that in the right hands it can be an enormous influence for good.

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Grahame Turner, Controller of Outside Broadcasts
Sport – including International, European, Association and League Football, Racing, the Olympics, Boxing, Golf, Tennis, World and European Ice Skating, Professional Wrestling, etc., Drive-In, The British Screen Awards, Danny la Rue at the Palace, Festival Hall Carol Concert, Royal Film Performance, Michael Bentine at the Albert Hall, Mary Chipperfield Circus, State Occasions – including the funeral of HRH the Duke of Windsor, Outside Broadcast contributions to all Thames programme departments.

Grahame Turner, Thames Television’s Controller of Outside Broadcasts, was a cameraman with both BBC and ITV before becoming a producer and director specialising in outside broadcasts. He has played a leading part in ITV’s coverage of the Tokyo and Mexico Olympics, the 1966 and 1970 World Cups, and many other State and sporting occasions.

To me, the outside broadcast is the most exciting thing in television, because it’s real, it’s alive. Who could forget Geoff Hurst’s winning World Cup hat trick, Jim Peters’ exhaustion in the Commonwealth Games, the first pictures of the astronauts transmitted direct from the Moon? These massive, live, emotional moments are the real essence of television, and it’s hardly surprising that of the ten highest-rating programmes of all time, nine have been outside broadcasts.

Most people associate outside broadcasts only with sport which, of course, is true to a very large extent. But at Thames, particularly since we are a weekday company, we think it’s important to provide wide coverage of non-sporting events too, and we have the biggest OB department in ITV to help us do it. Our experience involves us with all Thames’ other programme-making departments. We contribute to the current affairs output nationally in this week and locally in today; and to light entertainment on shows like Danny la Rue at the Palace and Michael Bentine at the Albert Hall, both soon to be seen on ITV. In drama we’re often called in to help with exterior scenes. And our coverage ranges from great State occasions to events like the Royal Film Performance, Miss Great Britain and the Society of Film and Television Arts’ Awards, a marathon of a show produced and directed this year by Steve Minchin.

One regular series we produce both outside and in the studio is Drive-in, our family motoring programme. We make the series as an OB production, so the same camera team that road-tests cars and samples cross-Channel ferries handles all the studio items as well. This format has been so successful, largely through the enthusiasm of producer Jim Pople and his team, that we’re now planning to develop the series further when it returns later this year. We would like to be able to do more outside broadcast series, but because airtime is always so scarce there are always more good ideas than one can turn into programmes. So I would naturally welcome the opportunity to broadcast on a second ITV channel.

Meanwhile, daytime television is certainly going to be a boon. There’s so much happening in and around London that we simply haven’t had time to cover in the past: theatre matinees, exhibitions, distinguished visitors, local affairs and so on. Now we’re working on a whole range of new ideas for the autumn. One of the results could be a live one-hour programme featuring a number of different events going on in the Thames area each day. Gardening and fishing are two subjects we are studying very closely at the moment, not only because they interest a vast number of people, but also because they are both subjects which could be demonstrated really well with full outside broadcast facilities. We are also planning to extend our coverage of sport, starting with golf and tennis.

Today, people accept television broadcasts as the normal way of watching big events they might otherwise never see. Our responsibility is to present to them the reality of what is happening, without coming between the viewer and the event, and without hindering the people who have actually come along to watch. The Derby is a good and topical example. It’s the greatest race in the world. There are half a million people there and you’ve got a mile and a half of beautiful grass and that’s your stage. You’ve got to close in on that stage and make the viewer feel as if he’s there. It’s a real challenge. It takes a dozen or more cameras and five commentary points to do it well. And because it’s live you can’t afford to make mistakes. You can’t shout ‘Cut’ and ask them to re-run the Derby.

We cover the Derby meeting exclusively for television audiences around the world. But one of the main criticisms levelled at us is over the number of large sporting events duplicated by ITV and BBC. I share the views of our critics on this, and hope that one day the BBC will agree to our suggestion that they alternate with us on such events. Until then, we feel we must continue to provide the high standard of presentation that leads millions of people to choose ITV.

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Philip Jones, Controller of Light Entertainment
Alcock and Gander, And Mother Makes Three, The Benny Hill Show, Big Bad Mouse, Bless This House, The Bob Monkhouse Comedy Hour, Cribbins, The David Nixon Show, The Edward Woodward Hour, Father, Dear Father, For the Love of Ada, The Frankie Howerd Show, Love Thy Neighbour, Max at the Royalty, Mike & Bernie, Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width, Opportunity Knocks, Patrick, Dear Patrick, This is Your Life, Tony Bennett at the Talk of the Town.

Philip Jones, Thames Television’s Controller of Light Entertainment, began his broadcasting career in radio in 1948 and joined ITV in the North of England soon after it began. Always specialising in light entertainment and musical shows, in the last ten years he has been responsible for directing or producing many of Britain’s most popular programmes and for a string of export successes. Among his department’s latest productions are Love Thy Neighbour, Bless This House and – not yet transmitted – Tony Bennett at the Talk of the Town.

It has always struck me, talking to our audience after a show, that however much they may admire and praise a comedian they seldom appreciate how tough his job is. In the whole entertainment business laughter is the hardest thing to achieve, and television has made it even harder. The British television viewer, if he wanted to watch it all, could see 20 hours of light entertainment every week. We use more jokes in a week than George Robey used in a lifetime. (Yes, we still use some of his material: people don’t know it all yet!) But there’s nothing so dead as a gag you’ve heard before. And with at least a quarter of the population watching every programme we make, novelty isn’t easy. So I have the greatest admiration and respect for our comedians and comedy actors and equally for the writers and producers. The last twelve months have been very successful for my department, only because all these people work so hard and so professionally at the serious business of making people laugh – and at giving them something new to laugh at.

The problem is that with such a tremendous output we exhaust ideas, and people, very quickly. There is only a handful of entertainers who can consistently win a big audience, and even they have to limit their appearances. With the benny hill show, which is one of the very top comedy programmes in Britain at the moment, we make only 4 or 5 a year. Our Max Bygraves and Frankie Howerd shows are limited too. And although the clubs have partly replaced the music halls, there isn’t the constant replenishment of talent that there once was. We’re always looking for it. Our Opportunity Knocks with Hughie Green is still the only regular showcase on television for new professional talent, and several well-known names have been launched that way. But public demand is greater than supply.

There is more scope for innovation in ‘situation comedy’. In this field, the dramatised comic situations like Bless this House or and Mother Makes Three, it’s always tempting to take a successful programme and keep it running for ever. But there are very few series which stand exposure year after year. We have just stopped Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width, for example, although it was highly popular and I get lots of letters asking for more. But we want to offer something new, and so do our writers – even though we know that at first the audience is likely to be smaller, For the Love of Ada, which we have also just finished after quite a short life, was a case in point. Vince Powell and Harry Driver’s idea of a romance between two old-age pensioners was unusual, and the series took a while to establish itself. But it soon justified the experiment by becoming extremely popular both with viewers and critics.

I make no apology, incidentally, for separating them in that way, because critics don’t always reflect the feelings of our audience. We’ve just produced a programme called Love thy Neighbour, another innovation because it was the first comedy series about the problems of a black and a white couple living next door to each other. It’s simple straightforward comedy, always with this underlying serious theme, and it began by being poorly reviewed. I remember that one critic, whom I respect highly, attacked it from all angles. By coincidence someone else on his paper had talked to ordinary black and white families about the programme, and in the very same issue they gave their verdicts. They said not only that it was very funny but that they thought it was of positive value for good race relations. On their evidence the programme was successful at precisely the level we intended.

Now that doesn’t make the critics wrong. But there are times when their criteria don’t relate to what ordinary people want from their entertainment, which is what we try to provide. Through the people who write to us, and through talking to our studio audiences after every show, I think we have a very good knowledge of what they want (and what they object to) and of how we can best make a more seriously based comedy understood. So we are producing a second series of Love Thy Neighbour, not just because it is now one of the country’s favourite programmes – it topped the JICTAR Top Twenty last week – but because we think its message is getting across to our viewers.

We’ve also just begun a new comedy with Beryl Reid; we’re in production with new series for Max Bygraves, Patrick Cargill, Wendy Craig, Sid James and Harry Worth; and we are trying out four more new comedy programmes in the next quarter. We hope to turn the best of them into series, but that will take nine months or a year. We simply haven’t the airtime now to screen all the new things we would like to make, and of course we do want to carry on our existing successes for a certain period. Even our longest-running series, Father Dear Father, is comparatively new. Thames has only been making programmes for four years, and all our other comedy series have been introduced in the last eighteen months. We do have two series which are more than four years old: Opportunity Knocks and This is Your Life. But they are both what I would describe as self-rejuvenating programmes. This is Your Life in particular has never been more popular.

Once again, there will be people who criticise me for continuing with it and not ‘doing something new’. As it happens I believe that This is Your Life is one of the classic formulæ of television light entertainment, the equivalent of first class popular journalism. But even if that were not so, the real point is that you can’t replace an idea with an ideal. A brilliant new comedian or a marvellous new script can’t be wished into existence. I think it’s fair to say that Thames has produced more successful new comedy series in the last four years than any other company, including the BBC. But none of these series was introduced just because it was different. They all had to promise to entertain as wide a range of people as the shows they replaced.

Of course, it’s fashionable to despise such a simple yardstick as popularity. But in my area of television programmes I regard it as an important measurement. If, with only one channel, we can experiment as we did with Cribbins, then we do so. If we can introduce more serious themes in comedy, as we did with Never Mind the Quality and Love Thy Neighbour, then we do so. If we think a new series is worth the risk of a smaller audience at first, then we make it.

But popularity must always be part of my definition of programme quality. George Robey’s best jokes were the ones that made most people laugh.

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Guthrie Moir, Controller of Educational and Religious Programmes
A Place in The Country, Ballet For All, Cooking Price-Wise, Cooking Without Tears, The Craftsmen, The Garden Indoors, Living Architects, Living Writers, Looking At Antiques, Treasures of the British Museum, Last Programme, Challenge, Evidence, Finding Out, Images, Le Butin de Colombert, Let’s Go Out, Seeing and Doing, Song and Story, This is Life, The World Around Us, Writer’s Workshop, You and the World, Drama including Macbeth.

Guthrie Moir, Thames Television’s Controller of Educational and Religious Programmes, has been an ITV producer in these fields since 1958. A former President of the World Assembly of Youth, he is a member of the Council of Reading University and of the General Synod of the Church of England.

I always think I’m very lucky to be in Thames’ department of educational and religious programmes, because more often than not I find I’m working on things in which I and my colleagues have a particular interest. This is not to say that we tackle only subjects which appeal to us, but being a relatively small department in a big television company we do tend to be rather more specialised than others.

However we try to be as comprehensive as possible, and this is certainly true of our weekday schools programmes which cover the whole range of pupils. But this unique weekday aspect of our contract sometimes restricts my other two sections, adult education and religion. The weekend is the time when all ITV Network programmes in these two fields go on the air, and we alone can never produce an adult education or religious series and be sure of simultaneous national transmission. We had the rather absurd business just recently of Thames having produced a major series, treasures of the british museum, which although it was eventually taken by all the ITV companies had no guarantee of this at the outset. This is a great drawback, of course, because it means that the Board has to be ready to back any of the series I choose to put on with absolutely no certainty that the other companies will buy them. Each time Thames finances a project like the Museum programmes or our new series on National Trust houses, a place in the country, it is a great act of faith on their part. For this reason I am even more anxious than the most fervent of my colleagues to have a second channel in which to expand and experiment more widely.

But we already do far more than we are obliged to by the terms of our contract. As one example, Thames produces well over an hour of religious programmes a week when there is no obligation to produce any at all. I think the company can honestly be proud that in the London region at least there is a daily permanent place in the schedule for religion. It is often said, of course, that these programmes are too short and too late at night to be really meaningful. But on a good night our last programme will be seen by at least as many people as will go to church in the whole of the Thames area on Sunday, so it is not an entirely negligible congregation.

This is also reflected in the volume of correspondence that the programmes draw. I am much too exhausted myself at that time of night to feel like writing letters to a producer, whether his programme excites or infuriates me. But people do have the energy to write in and make positive suggestions, and we do our best to put their ideas into practice. One of the results of this has been the disappearance of the sermonette late at night, which probably did more harm than good to the churches. This sort of preaching at people has, I am glad to say, been replaced by the easy give and take of discussions and a variety of formats embracing all the arts.

We are fortunate not only in this direct contact with our viewers but also in our professional advisers. We are very much indebted both to our religious advisory panel of the Reverend Austen Williams, Father Michael Hollings and Dr. Kenneth Greet, and to our educational advisory council under the chairmanship of Lord Evans of Hungershall, whose advice in schools series is invaluable.

The schools section is the largest part of my department, and Thames has inherited the structure and some of the people who actually started schools television on a national scale in 1957 – a term before the BBC, in fact. We set out to provide more than just a support for the teacher, but to make demands on both him and his pupils. In Charles Warren I have an executive producer whose contribution in this field has been outstanding. And each series has a fully qualified education officer attached to it who works alongside the director, helps prepare the programmes and visits schools to see how they are being received. He spends almost as much time in the classroom or at teachers’ meetings as he does in the studios.

We see ourselves as an important part of the educational effort in this country. We produce more schools series than any other ITV company, and they are seen in 25,000 schools. They range from the regular infant series like seeing and doing and finding out to social studies for teenagers such as evidence and you and the world. We also make a great deal of drama for schools: classical and modem plays, dramatised history, even a thriller in French. And one programme we are particularly proud of is writer’s workshop, which has been highly praised and which has stimulated creative writing in a remarkable way. All these are made to the same standards, and with the same resources, as Thames’ other programmes.

The same applies to adult education, where my executive producer Marjory Ruse and I are trying to give London ITV viewers as wide a variety as possible. In addition to the arts programmes, living writers, the craftsman, ballet for all, treasures of the british museum, there are innumerable popular practical series on domestic subjects like cooking, indoor gardening, inexpensive collecting and interior decoration.

Above all we feel that our series must be regarded in the context of other broadcasting, and must stand up to the same criteria. They must aim to be as interesting and entertaining as other programmes. We don’t want to produce programmes for a tiny in-group minority. We want them to compel the attention of the viewer, at home or at school, and to be informative without being boring. From the welter of ideas that pour into my office daily from my team, from viewers’ letters, from advisers, and from conversations in trains and buses and tubes and lifts, we hope we pick out the ones that will attract and help the broadest cross-section of our fellow citizens from the very young to the very old. Every idea put up to us is carefully considered. But we are always conscious that in these areas of science and educational and religious searching, demand seems perpetually to exceed the possibilities of supply.

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Jeremy Isaacs, Controller of Features
Today, Good Afternoon, This Week, Something to Say, Documentaries – including And on the Eighth Day, Black Man’s Burden, The Day Before Yesterday, Dowager in Hot Pants, Dickens: The Hero of My Life, A Far Better Place, The First Casualty, Hard Times, The Hardest Way Up, Harry’s Out!, The Making of a Saint, Munich: The Road of Excess, Queen of Hearts, Till I End My Song, The Second World War, We Was All One, A World of Their Own.

Jeremy Isaacs, Thames Television’s Controller of Feature Programmes, was this year awarded the Society of Film and Television Arts’ Desmond Davis Award for his “outstanding creative contribution to television”. A former President of the Oxford Union, his senior programme appointments in ITV and BBC have included the editorship of Panorama and production of This Week. He joined Thames on its formation in 1968.

When I was asked to write for a series of advertisements on Thames Television’s programme departments I didn’t want to do it. I gave three reasons: the only good advertisements for television programmes are the programmes themselves; most campaigns advertising television companies are designed not to draw attention to their good stuff but to distract it from the rest; and all advertisements like this are sitting targets for the satirist.

On the other hand, I recognise that many of the people most interested in the future of television see very little of it. If advertisements succeed in telling them about the programmes we make, there is something to be said for them. So here goes.

What I want to do most is give people the information they need about what is going on in this country and the world. I aim at a mass audience, but a far more sophisticated audience than we used to think. So we make a wide range of programmes and Thames has the biggest current affairs department in ITV.

This Week, reporting national and international affairs, looks like having (crossing my fingers hard) one of its best years yet under John Edwards. The Timothy Davey interview, for example, was a remarkable news scoop, Today, our daily London local programme, had a rougher than usual start when we began it. But now it’s seen in more homes than both London evening newspapers put together. It tries to combine hard reporting of London’s problems with live discussions of national issues. And it makes people laugh too. Good Afternoon, which used to be called Tea Break, is still a beginner: a magazine for people at home during the day, not aimed at women as a weird separate species, even though it’s presented by women and produced by one. We’re still working to get it right, and we welcome suggestions.

With total derestriction of broadcasting hours we shall be offering some new programmes, most of them fairly modest ones. Television from lunchtime onwards calls for a leisurely style, not the breakneck pace we too often have to affect in our limited evening hours. Our share of ITV time is limited too. For example we can do only one major documentary a month. Because we care about what’s wrong with this society and the world we used to concentrate them – perhaps a bit gloomily – on social issues. We still choose to be serious, but now we aim at more variety of subject matter and treatment. For example John Morgan and Jolyon Wimhurst have just made a quite extraordinary film about the cultural and political history of Munich, the Munich that the Games tourists will only glimpse. And we’ve nearly finished Queen of Hearts, the story of Eva Peron. Our series on the Second World War is taking shape, but it is too early to say much about it. It’s our biggest project yet, and we’re not halfway. Finis coronat opus.

The new programme I am particularly pleased, with is Something to Say. So often in television I have been responsible for discussions cut off just when they became interesting, and angry with myself afterwards. What I have always wanted to do was a programme in which just two people debated one subject for as long as they liked. Now we have it.

For me, Thames Features Department is a worthwhile place to be. Provided we get on with the job, no-one bothers us. The Board doesn’t enthuse about every programme we make, but no-one is leaning hard on us to aim for high ratings. Not that we don’t try to attract audiences – that is one of the things television is about. But programme quality comes first. (Admittedly, the pressures are eased by the huge success of our colleagues in Light Entertainment and Drama in attracting audiences.)

In ITV the programme maker’s fear is that when times are hard budgets are cut, but when revenue booms the Board of Directors naturally want to take it all as profit. The encouraging thing about Thames is that the risks we run in Features are cheered on by the Sales Department and even by the Finance Director, and not taken over their dead bodies. We now have the budgets and the staff and the resources to make the programmes we want to make and which we think viewers will want to watch. There’s no reason I can see why that should not continue. If it does, I could be persuaded to write this sort of advertisement again…

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Lloyd Shirley, Controller of Drama
Armchair Cinema, Armchair Theatre, Callan, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Man at the Top, The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder, Napoleon, Public Eye, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Six Days of Justice, Special Branch, Van der Valk, The Way of the World.

Lloyd Shirley, Thames Television’s Controller of Drama programmes, began his broadcasting career with TV in his home province of Ontario and came into British television in 1956. In ITV’s early years his productions ranged across the whole output from arts programmes and documentaries to World of Sport, but he later began to specialise in drama with such successes as Armchair Theatre, Public Eye, Frontier, Callan and lately The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

The title Controller of Drama is, to say the least, an odd one. You cannot legislate drama into existence any more than you can dictate any creative process successfully from the outside. All you can do – at least, all I feel I can do in my department -is bring together a group of professionals who write and produce and direct drama, and give them the facilities to do it in a certain way. A way that will both satisfy them as programme makers and also please our audience as consistently as possible. For me that is as far as you can go towards ‘controlling’ drama. But what you can do from outside is to finance it, and how you do that is important to results.

The Board of Thames Television has just allocated my department’s programme expenditure for the next two years: £5½ million. That is a great deal of money but no blank cheque, because programme production is very expensive. Yet there are two vital things about the allocation. First it gives us the chance to plan well ahead, which helps us to vary our output properly. Secondly, it comes without strings. It is financial backing for the programmes we would like to make and which we hope viewers will enjoy.

Our most striking new venture is, I suppose, Armchair Cinema. We shall go on making Armchair Theatre (including a new Terence Rattigan play, incidentally) but Armchair Cinema will be a £1 million series of films made especially for British television. There will be new thrillers – indeed the whole concept began when our films rumour and suspect were so successful – and there will also be comedy and romance and domestic drama. There has been no other project like it in Britain, and if it sounds hackneyed to describe it as a challenge I can only say that is exactly how we see it.

Another departure for us is a cycle of Restoration comedy, a series of linked adaptations which Peter Hammond will produce. We are calling it The Way of the World, borrowing Congreve’s title because it exemplifies the way we intend to present the plays: not as a quaint period revival but as a living revelation of wit, manner and morals which is relevant to the present. George Markstein’s adaptation of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater will again be a portrayal of an earlier period, but all too clearly relating to our own society. And for a present-day message actually written in this century, we are negotiating with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s representatives to serialise one of his works. I hope to announce the details soon. None of these will be in the studio for several months, though they are all in active preparation. One which will appear rather sooner is the new eight-part series on Napoleon which Philip Mackie has conceived and is writing.

In naming those particular series I do not mean to imply that we have lost interest in popular contemporary story-telling. The role of television as a presenter of popular fiction seems to me an important one. But we are more interested in a series that reveals some human truths than we are, say, in just a good detective story. Frank Marker in Public Eye is a detective, but the series concentrates on him and his cases as human problems, Callan is a sensitive character with believable emotions. In another genre, Joe Lampton of Man at the Top is a complicated and interesting human being. In all of those it was the characters that attracted us first, the stories second. The same is true of Nicholas Freeling’s Dutch detective Van der Valk, which is a series going into production shortly.

If there is any theme in our work, I hope it is this sense of humanity and of relevance to ordinary life. We do not, in the main, create escapist fantasy. That is not to say that Callan and Public Eye are heavy with social undertone. But neither are they a couple of handsome heroes who solve every problem with a bullet, Six Days of Justice illustrates the point very well. Courtroom drama is hardly new. But we took an ordinary magistrates’ court and tried to present, exactly as they would happen, the cases which represent day-to-day British justice. Cases about ordinary people that take place by the hundred for every one dramatic trial at the Old Bailey.

We had a great deal of praise from the critics for it, but many of them said in effect that it was too authentic to be entertaining. That, as one of them put it, it would never reach the Top Twenty. In fact, each programme has been watched by around thirteen million people and it was in the Top Twenty every time. Now that is very gratifying, because with only one channel it is part of our responsibility to make our work appeal to a large proportion of our audience. We want, if you like, to fill our theatre and not have half the seats empty. But much more rewarding than that is the knowledge, from letters and calls and comments, that people were excited by the very lack of traditional dramatic ingredients in Six Days of Justice. Because the professionals who work for my department learned long ago that dramatic power doesn’t lie in the barrel of a gun. And we never tire of proving that the audience knows it too.

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